"They don't want you putting on any weight, honey."
Now, lying on her back, looking at the mirrored ceiling, Marisol heard voices in the corridor. Laughing men, voices fueled by liquor. Giggling women, teasing talk. Grunts and yells through the wall next to her bed. A man brayed like a goat. A woman fired off words like bullets from a machine gun."?Si!?Si!?Si! No! No! No! Don't stop!"
Marisol wondered if that room was like her own. Dim lights. Mirrors. No telephone. A television that played only filthy movies. A tiny bathroom with a shower and toilet and a dozen hand towels.
She heard a key turn the lock, and the door opened. A heavy-bosomed American woman with teased platinum hair came in, carrying a satchel. The woman's translucent skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones, but her neck crinkled with turkey wattles. She was either forty or sixty, no way to tell. The woman opened the satchel.
"For you, dearie."
Out came lingerie, black as midnight, glittering with sequins. A leather bustier with tie strings. Leopard-spotted bras and panties. A satin slip with garters and stockings. Items she'd never seen except in the movies, the American woman calling them teddies and baby dolls, camisoles and peek-a-boos. Giving her shoes with velvety skin and heels longer than a sixteen-penny nail.
"I do not belong here," Marisol said.
A shrug. "Who does?"
The woman showed her how to apply layers of makeup and hauled out small bottles of lotions and tubes of lubricants. Plus lipstick a whorish red.
When tears filled Marisol's eyes, the woman said, "Honey, I can share a few tricks that'll make it a bit easier for you. Let me show you how to make a John think he's getting a blow job when you're really just jerking him off."
A man appeared in the open doorway. "Helen, get out of here and take that shit with you."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Zaga." The woman gathered up her satchel and left the room.
The man was as old as El Patron. But smaller. Hispanic features. Grayish hair falling nearly to his shoulders, a Western shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Arms corded with thick veins.
Marisol tensed as he approached. If he grabbed her, she would fight.
"Relax, chica. I'm here to talk, not fuck. Back home, did you read newspapers?"
It was such an odd question Marisol had no answer.
"You understand English?"
"Yes. I read newspapers. Books, too."
"What's your favorite book?"
"Why do you ask such a thing?"
"Just answer me."
"El Amor en los Tiempos del Colera."
"You read it in English or Spanish?"
"English. My father insisted. Why do you care?"
Appearing unhappy, the man mumbled to himself, "What the hell are we gonna do with you?"
"I do not understand."
"Rutledge has a soft spot for your type. Those damn gypsy eyes."
Marisol felt dazed, the dizziness returning. "And he cares if I read books?"
"He don't care if you can count to ten. But it's my job to protect him from himself. You're not some illiterate campesina. We let you go, you could cause the boss some real problems."
"No. I would never-"
"Five, ten years ago, it might have been different. But it's too hot out there. Too many people want the boss's scalp."
"I swear I will not make trouble."
"Damn right you won't."
He turned and left the room, locking the door from the outside.
SIXTY-FOUR
"You like horses?" Simeon Rutledge asked.
"Not the ones that rob me blind at Santa Anita," Payne answered. It was ten o'clock in the morning of his third day in Kings County. Payne had no idea why Rutledge had asked him to come to the ranch, but his own mission was clear.
Why the runaround at your office? What are you hiding? Where the hell is Marisol Perez?
Tino had pleaded to come along. Jimmy told him he wasn't invited, then dropped him off at a video arcade. Tino asked for fifty dollars, Jimmy offered twenty, and they settled on thirty-five.
Now Payne leaned on a fence post of a corral, the dirt as finely groomed as a sand trap at Riviera Country Club. A stable hand tightened the cinch of a saddle on an Appaloosa speckled like a Dalmatian. Rutledge saddled his own horse, a midnight black stallion with angry eyes. He wore weathered chaps and a black felt Stetson with a flat brim.
"We'll ride a bit, then have lunch," Rutledge said.
It didn't sound like a question or even an invitation, so Payne didn't answer.
The midday sun poured down, a ball of orange fire. They mounted up, and Rutledge gestured toward a long building of yellow pine with a steeply pitched roof. "Knocked off my first piece of ass in those stables."
Payne decided not to say "congratulations." Instead, he tried to keep his horse from sidestepping and crushing him against the corral rail.
"Maria something-or-other," Rutledge reminisced. "Grape picker. Hands stained like she worked an old printing press. Went on for a month before my daddy caught us. I was afraid he'd beat me, maybe send the girl back to Mexico. But he hauled out a bottle of Old Grand-dad and told us to do it again. He wanted to watch. Then he had his way with her."
Sick fuck, Payne thought. "Nothing like fathers and sons sharing quality time."
"My point is, we're all a product of our upbringing."
"Why not just cut the bullshit and tell me what's happened to Marisol Perez?"
Rutledge gave him a look as hard as polished oak. "There's a time I would have horsewhipped a man who spoke to me that way."
"All I'm saying, how tough can it be to check who started work the last few days?"
"We're looking into it. Now, let's ride." Rutledge cluck ed in the stallion's ear and tugged on the reins to turn the big animal. Payne followed, bouncing in the saddle.
The path took them past two workmen polishing a pickup truck, an ancient short-bed Ford with a gleaming finish the color of freshly washed spinach. Rutledge noticed Payne admiring the truck.
"A 1951 F-100. My daddy's. Do you know why I keep it?"
"Tradition, I guess. Another link to your past."
"You got it, Payne." Nodding with approval. "Your father hand anything down to you?"
"Only a bowling ball he forgot to take with him."
Rutledge grunted, nudged his stallion, and they headed toward the fields at a steady trot. The horses clop ped along a path of brick-colored dirt. After a few moments, Rutledge said, "Attorney Payne, I admire what you did in that trailer-truck case."
"Forty-eight hours in an air-conditioned cell. Nothing compared to what the migrants went through."
"Point is, you risked your career for a cause you believed in."
"Wasn't that hot a career."
"Still deserves respect. Damn few men of principle left. Much less men of action."
A realization came to Payne.
He's complimenting himself. Simeon Rutledge considers himself a man of principles and action. But what principles? And what actions?
They came to a barren stretch of black earth. Two dozen workers chopped at dirt clumps with hoes, smoothing out the soil.
"Notice anything about those hoes?" Rutledge asked him.
"Not really."
"The handles are five feet long. Lets the worker stand straight. Used to be, all the growers insisted on el cortito, the short-handled hoe. The closer to the dirt, the better the weeding. But the poor sumbitches had to work all hunched over, ten hours at a time. It was inhumane, and everybody knew it. But I couldn't find any long-handled hoes on the market, so we started milling the wood ourselves. I had my workers weed the strawberry fields standing up. Proved to everyone it could be done."
"That's a good deed. A very good deed." Payne meant it. Rutledge was damn complicated. But then, who wasn't?