After getting to bed late the night before, I was hoping that the next morning I’d be able to catch up on the sleep I’d missed out on during the shipment recovery. But Rayo pretty well sabotaged the effort by doing a lot of wriggling against me, pretending to be half asleep and simply making herself more comfortable and not really trying to get me worked up, which she managed to do deep in the night and then again shortly after daybreak. The girl’s unreal. I finally gave up the try for more sleep, and we went to the Doghouse for a brunch of egg-bacon-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. Frank was already there and had called up a girlfriend named Marisa to see if she wanted to come out and join us for a lazy day of pitchers, a bite to eat, a bit of eight-ball, a lot of dancing. She did. Turned out she had the next day off, so we stayed up pretty late again, and it was close to noon today when the four of us got together for breakfast at the Doghouse. Frank and I told Charlie about the splendid huevos rancheros we’d had in Nuevo Laredo, so he worked up four plates of his own recipe, then waited with hands on hips for us to make the taste test. Marisa said, “Wow,” and Rayo blew him a kiss. Frank smiled and nodded, and I gave Charlie the “okay” sign. He grinned and shook his joined hands over his head like an old-time boxing champ.
Now it’s half past four and we’re playing Wild Wolfe draw poker—two-bit ante, dollar-limit bets, deuces and jokers wild—and telling stories about some of the more memorable residents of the Landing who are no longer with us. Big Joe’s tending the bar and looking on from behind the counter.
Charlie’s cell sounds the opening notes of “Tuxedo Junction.” He takes it from his shirt pocket, glances at the screen, puts it to his ear, and says, “Yessir?” I figure it’s his daddy on the horn, since Charlie rarely says “yessir” to anyone else. Like the rest of us, he refers to his father as Harry Mack, but he never addresses him directly as anything other than “sir.” If he’s ever called him “Dad” or “Father” or any such thing, nobody I know has ever heard it. He looks over at us and says, “Yessir, they are.” He listens, then says, “I’ll tell them . . . Yessir, you, too.”
“You’ll tell who what?” I ask him when he puts up the phone.
“I’ll tell you boys that the uncounted wonder of the world, the antediluvian silver Cat herself, wants you to go see her. She said right now would be fine, so perhaps you best not dawdle.”
“What is it this time?” Frank says. “Toilet stopped up? Oven on the blink? Water heater?”
“Harry Mack didn’t say, but I can hardly wait for you to get back and tell me.”
Because Catalina never permits strangers to enter her home, any household problems that crop up—plumbing, electrical, whatever—can be attended to only by somebody in the family. Most often that’s me and Frank. The last time we were in her place was a few months ago, when we picked up a new refrigerator she’d ordered and then installed it for her. Jessie and Eddie and Rayo visit her at home a lot more often than we do, but she’s never asked any of them to do a repair more challenging than a leaky faucet Rayo once fixed. And though Charlie’s as much a handyman as Frank and I, she’d never ask him for help. The whole family’s aware of their reciprocally irritant relationship. He has a tendency to get sardonic with her, which she deems impertinent, and he doesn’t care for her “royal-ass manner,” as he calls it.
She lives on Levee Street in a small, well-kept two-bedroom house. Built in the early twentieth century, it has withstood every hurricane since then with no more damage than a cracked window or two and a few blown roof tiles. The place is as hardy as she is.
We park next to the fence gate and let ourselves in and wave at Señora Villareal next door, who smiles and waves back from her porch rocker. Aunt Catalina detests door knocking of any kind as well as the sound of most doorbells, and to announce ourselves we jiggle a little door-side chain that sounds a small set of chimes inside. Anna, the younger of the two live-in maids, admits us into the living room, where Catalina is seated on the sofa, a long coffee table before her. On the other side of the table and facing her are two armchairs. She smiles at the sight of us.
“Francis. Rudolf.” She leans forward, and we each in turn bend down to kiss her on the cheek. She extends a hand toward the chairs. “Please, nephews, be seated. Would you care for something to eat? Anna makes wonderful sandwiches.”
We assure her we’re not hungry
Just the beer, Anna, she says. The girl says, Yes, madam, and vanishes into the kitchen.
“I’m grateful to you for coming,” Catalina says. “I know how busy you are.”
When we come on a repair job, she usually speaks Spanish. That she’s addressing us in English is a clear indication she doesn’t want the maids to comprehend anything they might overhear. She has never hired a maid who knows English, and she has ways of determining during an interview how much of the language, if any, a prospective employee understands. The armchairs are positioned close to each other so that she can study both of us with only slight shifts of her eyes. Knows a lot of tricks, the old Cat. I’m watching her as closely as I can without being obvious, but there’s nothing about her that suggests disquiet.
Anna returns with a tray holding three bottles of Dos Equis and sets it on the low table. Aunt Catalina tells her that will be all and the girl goes.
“I have taken up your preference for drinking from the bottle rather than a glass,” she says. “Let it be a lesson to you. You’re never too old to acquire unrefined habits.” She smiles as she says it, and we smile at her jest. The thing is, she doesn’t really drink, but she’s a decorous hostess and always goes through the motions of joining her guests in a libation, though never actually taking but a few wee sips of beer or wine.
She raises her beer to us and we clink our bottles against hers, then pull deep swallows as she takes a tiny taste.
“Now,” she says, setting her beer aside. “You’re wondering why I have asked to see you.” She opens the wide, shallow drawer beneath the tabletop and withdraws a manila envelope. “As you know, I once had a brother and a sister, Eduardo and Sandra, but they were lost to me a very long time ago.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank says.
The whole family knows the story, but as commonly happens with a story that is told and retold through generations, it has been modified into slightly differing versions. What is known for certain is that in the spring of 1911, during the first year of the uprising against the regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Catalina was sixteen years old and rebel troops were closing in on the Little family’s ranch, Patria Chica, her great-grandfather Edward Little put her and her sister and their older brother on a train to the border and the safety of their Wolfe relations in Texas. But the train was derailed en route by bandits, Eduardo was killed and Sandra kidnapped. According to one account, Catalina was raped, but nobody of the living family has ever claimed to have heard her say so and no one has ever had the nerve to ask her if it’s true. Nor has anyone ever asked her if, as some versions attest, she killed one of the bandits. Whatever the full details, Catalina was the only survivor of the attack, and when the bandits left she set out to follow the train tracks the rest of the way to the border, which was still almost two hundred miles away over rugged open country. She would never have made it if a detachment of Pancho Villa’s men hadn’t come upon her and taken her the remaining distance to Matamoros, just across the river from Brownsville. The Villistas’ rescue of her was an ironic turn, given that such men were the danger from which Edward Little had wanted to distance the children. On arriving among her Wolfe kin, Catalina told them about the train attack, but who knows how much she withheld? If she’s ever told the full truth about the incident to anyone, it would be Jessie, who has faithfully held to her promise not to disclose any details of her book as long as the Cat’s still alive. In any event, when word of what happened got back to Edward Little, he dispatched search parties and private investigators all over northern Mexico and all along the border in quest of Sandra or information about her. But none of them would ever uncover anything of promise, and the family at length had to accept the hard fact that, dead or alive, she was lost to them forever. A few weeks after the train incident, the revolutionary forces triumphed and Porfirio Díaz went into exile in Paris. And not two weeks after that, Edward Little was killed in the Mexico City earthquake that preceded by only a few hours the rebels’ victorious entrance into the capital.
What any of that might have to do with us being here I can’t begin to guess.
She takes a black-and-white photograph out of the envelope, places it on the table, and rotates it so we can see it right-side up. It’s of two girls in a stock tank. Aunt Catalina puts a finger to one of them and says, “That is Sandi at age sixteen. The other is me.”
It’s a stunner of a moment to see Catalina as she looked a hundred years ago. Then my gaze shifts back to Sandra. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. Frank’s staring at the picture like he might be sensing the same thing.
Catalina takes a larger black-and-white photo from the envelope and lays it beside the first.
“That is Sandra almost a year earlier.”
It’s a studio close-up, and it doesn’t take five seconds for me to realize she’s the spitting image of one of the girls in the sex video we watched in the Doghouse the other night. Frank and I cut a look at each other.
“Ah,” the Cat says. “She reminds you of someone, yes?”
Oh, man. You can’t tell your great-great-grandaunt her sister looks like somebody you just saw in a porn movie.
“Well, señora,” Frank says, “I have to confess that, for a second there, I thought she looked a lot like a girl I once knew, but . . . naw.”
“I know the one you mean, though, Frankie,” I say. “You dated her in high school. Aleana or Elena, something like that.”
“Oh, stop it, both of you,” she says. “If that’s the best you can lie, it’s a miracle you have survived for as long as you have.”
She takes another photo from the envelope and sets it down beside the studio shot. The pictures are the same size and this one, too, is a black-and-white close-up, but even so, there’s no doubt whatever it’s the black-haired girl in The Love Tutors.
“Where did that come from?” Frank says.
She ignores the question and says, “Her dubious name, as you may recall, is Kitty Quick. Look at her and Sandra. Just look at them. Have you ever seen two people who looked more alike?”
I shake my head. Franks mumbles, “No, ma’am, can’t say I have.”
“And her voice. It is identical to Sandra’s.”
“Her voice?” I say. “But, señora, how can you possibly know that?” And hastily add, “With all due respect.”
She reaches into the drawer again and this time takes out a DVD of The Love Tutors and sets it beside the pictures. “Please return that to Charles at your convenience.”
“Charlie gave you that?” Frank says.
“He did. At my request.”
“Señora,” I say, “why . . . how do you even know about this thing? This movie?”
“How do you suppose?”
“How else?” Frank says. “Jessie or Rayo or both of them, right? They thought it’d be real funny to tell you about busting in on us at the Doghouse when we were watching a . . . an adult movie. But why would they would want you to see it?”
“I know why,” I say. “I’ll lay odds Jessie has seen pictures of your sister. When she was writing her book about you. Right? I’ll bet anything you showed her pictures of Sandra Little.”
“Very good, Rudolf,” she says. “Yes, she has seen pictures of Sandra.”
“Of course!” Frank says. “Then Jessie sees the movie and the girl’s resemblance to Sandra and she wants you to see it, too. And then you want to see . . . no, then you want to hear the girl, and so you get Charlie to hand over the movie.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the Cat says, raising her hands shoulder-high as if in surrender. “It is such a joy to observe clever minds at work. You have surmised it all correctly.”
“What about the prints?” I ask Frank. “Where’d they come from? How’d Jessie—” I fake a dummy slap at my forehead. “Well, who’s got the video? Charlie. Had to be he made them for her. So now the question is did Jessie tell him why she wanted them? Because if she did—”
“She did not,” the Cat says. “She has always had a way with Charles, as you know. Without revealing her purpose she was able to persuade him to make the pictures for her. But enough! You are . . . what is the word? . . . masterminds. You understand everything. The only point of importance now is that this girl and my sister are mirror reflections of each other. You can both see that. You have admitted it. And if you had ever heard Sandi speak, you would not be able to distinguish between their voices, believe me. There are millions of twins in the world who are less alike than these two.”
She raises her beer to her lips, and Frank and I jump at the chance to take a pull off our bottles, swapping a look as we do. She catches the exchange and says, “My dear nephews, I know that their similarity of appearance and voice is likely no more than an incredible coincidence. But will you grant me that it is also possible, possible and nothing more, that this girl is a descendant of my sister?”
I now know where this is heading and I can tell Frank does, too.
“Well, ma’am, as you know, possible covers an awful lot of ground,” Frank says. “There are countless things that might be possible but are not at all probable.”
“Are you saying you do not believe there is any possibility, none at all, that the girl is related to Sandra?”
“Well, ma’am, I can’t say there’s no possibility at all. But I don’t think it’s probable.”
“I see. You don’t believe it’s probable but you think it might be possible?”
“Ma’am, there’s no way of knowing—”
“Forgive me for interrupting, Francis, but a simple yes or no will suffice. Do you think it might . . . might be possible they are related?”
Frank lets out a long breath and half raises his hands in surrender. “Yes, ma’am, it might be.”
“And you, Rudolf?”
“I have to agree with Frank, señora.”
“What exactly is it you agree with?”
She holds her stare on me, waiting for me to say it.
“I think it might be possible.”
She smiles at each of us. “Excellent. So then, because all three of us believe it might be possible that this girl is descended from my sister, I want to see her with my own eyes. If that can be made to happen, if I can simply see her before me and hear her voice, I’ll know if she is or is not descended of Sandi. I’ll know it in my bones. And this is something I must know.”
There it is.
She affects a sip from her bottle, allowing us the opportunity to finish off ours.
“Would you care for another?” she says.
“No, thank you, señora,” I say. “I’m good.”
“Me, too, ma’am,” Frank says.
“Very well then,” she says. “I want you to bring this girl to me. Nothing very difficult, you see? I have already asked Harry McElroy if I could borrow the two of you to locate someone for me and he said yes. He of course asked whom I wanted found and said that Charles would also want to know because he is your operations chief. I said I would not reveal that information to anyone except the two of you, and he did not ask me again, nor will he. He also granted my request that you be permitted to borrow one of his airplanes and a pilot to take you wherever you may need to go. He asks only that you call the airfield this evening and tell them your destination and what time you wish to leave so that they can make a . . . what-do-you-call-it.”
“Flight plan,” Frank says.
“Yes. Now then, I don’t believe you will have any trouble finding her, but I told him the search might take ten days or so, perhaps two weeks, and that if he thought it necessary he could inform Charles that you might be gone that long. Do you agree that two weeks should be far more than enough time for you to find the girl and bring her here?”
“Well, ma’am, that’s just really hard to say,” Frank says.
“Not only that,” I say, “but suppose we do find her and—”
“Suppose?” she says. “What is there to suppose? Finding people is your principal proficiency. Of course you will find her. After all, she is not even in hiding, is she? Why would she be? She has committed no crime.”
“Well, ma’am, what I mean is suppose that when we find her she doesn’t want to come with us? That could present a problem.”
“That could present a lot of problems,” Frank says.
“If she’s not of a mind to accompany you, then you will have to change her mind. She cannot be more than sixteen years old. A child. Are you no match for a child? And do not forget for a minute that for someone so young to be exploited for such purpose as this degrading sort of . . . entertainment is a criminal offense. Whatever else she is, she is a victim. She requires rescue from such mistreatment and you will provide it. Tell her whatever you must to make her come back with you. Give her money.”
I can’t help thinking that the kid sure didn’t look like she required rescue. She looked like she was having a damn good time.
Catalina suddenly sits back and smiles shyly, a most unusual expression for her. “I cannot believe I am instructing you in your own profession. How terribly presumptuous of me.”
“No, ma’am, not at all,” Frank says. “You’re speaking frankly, making suggestions. Nothing presumptuous about that.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” she says. “Because I would not like to seem presumptuous in suggesting that Rayo Luna go with you. She has better comprehension of a young girl’s mind and emotions than either of you and is better suited to persuade her to accompany you. Do you for any reason object to having her go with you?”
“Not me,” I say, and look at Frank.
“Me neither,” he says.
“Good. Harry McElroy has said I may send her with you.”
We can’t hold back smiling side glances at how far ahead of us the old girl is.
“One thing more. Harry McElroy has probably already informed Charles that I am sending the three of you to seek someone for me. In spite of his insolent manner, Charles is not a stupid man, and because of my request of the video from him after he made the Kitty girl’s pictures for Jessica, I suspect that he has already guessed whom I want you to find. He is certain to ask you if he is correct, but you are not to confirm it for him. You are not to tell him any details of your task. The more he finds out about it, the more likely he will want to be involved in it and probably even try to assume control of it on the basis of being your chief. But I do not want his assistance and you do not need it. The only ones to know the specifics of what you are doing are we three and Rayo Luna. And Jessica, of course. As soon as we complete our business here, I will inform both of them of the situation. I have told Harry McElroy that Jessica is also involved in this matter, even though she will not be going with you, and that I do not want Charles to harass her about it in any way. I will instruct Jessica that if he should try to bully information from her, she is to come and live with me until your return. So. Only the five of us are to know what you are doing. No one else. Am I understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank says.
She looks at me.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” She picks up the DVD and hands it to me. “Do not neglect to return that to Charles. Now go and get her. Tell her what you must. Do what you must. But bring her back here and directly to me so I can see her in the flesh. That is the only way . . . Oh, dear.” She puts a hand to her mouth, then removes it from her small smile and points at the DVD. “Please believe me, I did not intend to make a joke at the girl’s expense.”
Frank and I grin anyway. Because in a manner of speaking, all of us have already seen Kitty Quick very much in the flesh.
We stop at a diner that knows us well and we’re given the private corner table we request. We order filets and a pitcher of Negra Modelo, and while we wait for the steaks we start on the beer and begin forming a game plan.
“I’ll have Rayo dig up whatever online information she can on anybody connected to the tutors video,” I say. “I’ve got a hunch there won’t be a website for the company. If there was, the DVD case cover information would likely have included it. There might not be much for her to find. If so, then what? Tucson?”
“No other selection,” Frank says. “The PO box is all we got. And yeah, sure, there are legal ways to get such confidential information as the name of a box holder, but most of them take a while, and we don’t wanna sit around twiddling our thumbs all that time. We go to Tucson and either keep watch on the box till a key holder shows up and we front him, or we find out who the key holder is and where he lives and we pay him a visit. I’m for choice number two.”
“So am I. We need somebody with an inside line who can get us the box holder’s name pronto.”
“Mateo,” Frank says.
“Who else? As close to the border as Tucson is, the Jaguaro network probably has a contact of some kind who can come up with the name.”
“Right. But first call Spur and get us a flight to the García ranch tomorrow morning. Then call Félix and tell him what time we’ll be there and that we’ll be needing a vehicle to go to Tucson. A proper one.”
Félix García is the present patriarch of our kin in El Paso. The Garcías have been linked to our family by marriage since the early 1920s. They’re good people and we’ve done each other plenty of favors over the years. As for a “proper vehicle,” that’s our phrase for one that’s almost totally bulletproof, except that its ballistic glass is resistant only one way. Its outer side resists a bullet’s entry, but a round fired from inside the vehicle easily passes through the glass, even the windshield. Another marvel of modern engineering. I don’t have to ask why he wants such a vehicle. We’re only slightly acquainted with that stretch of the border, and it’s one of our basic rules that whenever you enter unfamiliar territory it’s best to be prepared for all possibilities.
I call Rayo and get a recording and tell her to call back as soon as she hears this. Then I ring up the operations manager at the airfield and tell him there are three of us who need to go to El Paso tomorrow, more specifically to the Half-Moon Ranch and its private airstrip just north of the city. He puts me on hold for a moment, then comes back and asks how a nine fifteen takeoff sounds. We’d arrive at the Half-Moon sometime around noon, depending on the in-flight weather. I say that’s fine and he says we’re on.
I next connect with Félix. I hasten through the amenities and then tell him we’re flying up to his place tomorrow morning and give him our ETA. Our pilot will radio the ranch landing field when we’re a half hour from arrival. When I tell him we need a proper vehicle for a trip to Tucson, he says that’s fine, we’ll have it.
I’m about to phone Charlie when Rayo gets back to me and says she’s just talked to Catalina, who told her what was happening and that she would be going with us. She’s being cool about it, but I’m pretty good at reading her tones and can tell she’s excited by the assignment. I tell her our takeoff time in the morning, then instruct her to search the net for anything she can find on Kitty Quick, the other actors in The Love Tutors, the director Dick Stone, and Mount of Venus Productions.
“I’m on it,” she says.
My call to Mateo catches him having supper at a restaurant, too. Like ours, his phone—and every other shade trade and Jaguaro phone—has an encryption-plus security system second to none. I give him the Mount of Venus PO box information and tell him what we want. He says the Jaguaro intelligence web has a station in Nogales—the Mexican Nogales, a far more populous town than the neighboring Nogales on the U.S. side—and it’s got all sorts of law enforcement contacts in Arizona. He’s pretty sure they can come up with something as simple as the name of whoever’s renting a particular PO box in Tucson. “Might take a while, though,” he adds. “Maybe till tomorrow afternoon.”
I smile at his notion of “a while” and I tell him that by tomorrow afternoon would be real good. “We’ll be getting into Tucson around five.”
“Oh, hell, you’ll have it by then. One of my guys will call you with the info. Take care, cuz.”
“Always do, primo. Thanks.”
I’m just about to call Charlie when the phone buzzes in my hand, and it’s him, saying he’s been trying to get me for the past ten minutes. His father’s told him about Aunt Catalina borrowing us and Rayo Luna for a week or two to go find somebody for her, and Charlie is majorly irate that she wouldn’t tell Harry Mack who we’re looking for. It pisses him off even more that we won’t tell, either.
“Can’t, man, we promised her,” I say.
“Tell you what I think,” he says. “I think you’re going to look for the Kitty Quick girl from the sex movie. First, Jessie wants me to make prints of her. Then the old Cat wants to see the flick. Then you guys are going to try to find somebody for her. Doesn’t take a genius to put it together. Tell me I’m wrong. Or better still, tell me what the Cat woman wants with her. The Spur guys informed me Harry Mack’s let you have a plane to El Paso. That where she is?”
“Come on, man. This is how the Cat wants it. One thing I can tell you is this job’s no big deal, take my word for it.”
“That so?” he says. “Well, if it’s no big deal, what’s the big fucking secret?” We both go silent for a few seconds before he says, “Stop by on your way out in the morning. I’ll have breakfast bagged and ready.” He cuts off before I can thank him.
“No big deal, eh?” Frank says. “Try telling that to the Cat.”
“You know what? We’d be a hell of a lot better off if Charlie was in on this. He’s got contacts everywhere and I bet some of them have ties to the skin flick business and could get some inside info on this girl.”
“Could be, little brother. But you know what?”
“Yeah. Try telling that to the Cat.”
“Even if we tried to use Charlie’s help on the sly, she’d find out. You know she would. We would then be on her shit list for the rest of her life.”
“Oh, man, we don’t want that,” I say. “That would mean for the rest of our lives.”
We bust out laughing. And chuck the notion of asking for Charlie’s covert assistance.
It’s full night by the time we arrive at the Landing. Rayo’s truck is parked next to the stairway to my house, and by the glow of light from the front window we can see her sitting in a deck chair on the veranda. She and Frank wave to each other as he heads up the stairs of his place. She’s in jeans and a black T-shirt and custom-made running shoes that have metal toes and heels stitched into them. Frank and I will be wearing the same kind of shoes tomorrow. There’s a travel bag at her feet, and I know it contains almost the same things as Frank’s and mine—the Glock 17 she prefers to our Berettas, a Quickster suppressor, a shoulder holster, three extra fully loaded magazines, a few flex-cuffs, and very little in the way of clothes other than underwear, T-shirts, and a light windbreaker or something of the sort that can be tightly rolled and easily packed and whose chief purpose is to hide our shoulder holsters when we carry in public. Any other clothing we might require we’ll buy as need arises. She, too, has a Mexican license and passport, a carry permit, and a Toltec Seguridad ID. The bag also makes clear that she has come to spend the night.
“Since we’re leaving early,” she says, “I thought I might as well sleep here rather than have to drive over from the beach in the morning.”
We go in the house and she tosses her bag on the sofa. I get two bottles of Carta Blanca from the fridge, uncap them, and give her one, and we go back out on the veranda.
She tells me she made a net search for Kitty Quick and found out there are scores of porn actresses named Kitty something-or-other, but “Kitty Quick” came up only in reference to The Love Tutors. The movie itself came up only on sites that review porn films but offer little information on them beyond a cursory summation, an overall rating, and the names of the production company, director, and lead actors. It’s been in release about three months. It has an excellent rating on every site, and the Kitty girl has reaped praise in all reviews.
“Got nothing but the same sites in my searches for Sunny Diamond, Ginger Snapper, Dick Stone, and the male actors,” she says. “Either The Love Tutors is the only movie any of them have ever been involved in, or they’ve been in others but, for whatever reason, used other names in them, even the director.”
A breeze has kicked up off the Gulf and carries the wonderful smell of an imminent storm. It rains a lot in the summer around here, and the night storms are my favorite. The clouds are deepening the darkness. We finish our beers and go inside.
“Listen,” I say, “I still haven’t caught up on the sleep I lost out on in Mexico, and there’s no telling how much sleep this gig is gonna cost us. I need all the snooze I can get tonight, but the only way that’s gonna happen is if we crash in separate rooms.” Even as I’m saying this, I have to work hard at not picturing her with her clothes off and losing my resolve. I really do need the sleep.
She tilts her head sideways and gives me a look, as I open up the futon on the other side of the coffee table fronting the sofa and toss one of the sofa pillows on it. “Take the bedroom,” I tell her. “I’ll crash out here.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying that my, ah . . . unbridled passions, my . . . animalistic cravings have been depriving you of your proper rest these past few days?”
“I would’ve phrased it less poetically, but yeah. Only because I was already so ragged out when I got back.”
She issues a theatrical sigh. “Come to bed, buster. I promise not to take advantage of you.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes. I’ll stick with the futon.”
“Bucka-bucka-bucka,” she says, flapping her outthrust elbows like chicken wings, then picks up her bag and moseys off to the bedroom, putting a little extra swish in her butt.
I waken to the blasting thunder of the storm. The rain’s drilling hard against the roof and windows, and every lightning flash illuminates the room with a shaky pale glow. The air’s heavy with the smells of mud and ozone.
Then I comprehend that what actually woke me was the feel of Rayo’s hands slipping under the waistband of my shorts. I’m lying on my side and she’s on her knees behind me, and as I roll toward her, saying, “For Christ’s sake, girl—” she whisks the shorts down and off my legs as dexterously as one of those guys who can snatch a tablecloth from under a setting of dishware without upsetting so much as a teacup. Then her hand is on me and achieving its familiar and swift effect, and I can’t keep from laughing as she says in a deep, old-time horror-movie intonation, “I am the succubus Rayora, come to put you in my power and deplete you of your masculine vigor!” Then she’s astraddle of me and her hips are in action and that’s it, she’s depleting my manly vigor, all right. I’m done before she is, and then her back arches like she’s been punched in the spine and she gives a little quiver and slowly folds down onto my chest and laughs softly against my neck.
“I oughta press rape charges,” I say.
“Oh, no, sir, no. What you should do is thank me most earnestly. Because now you’ll really sleep well, and your welfare is my utmost concern. My own base needs are of no matter whatever.”
“Medical studies have shown that excessive and inexpert sarcasm can wither a tongue.”
“Oh, dear God, what a deprivation to you if I lost my tongue.” She gives me a peck on the forehead. “And by the way, sailor, you’re welcome.”
She detaches from me and sashays off to the bedroom.
She’s pretty good at getting her way when she sets her mind to it. A lot like Aunt Catalina in that respect.
At dawn the storm has passed. The Landing smells fresh and cool and holds a thin layer of ground fog. I’m glad Rayo doesn’t ask if I slept well after her nocturnal sortie on the futon, because in fact I slept like the proverbial log and I really don’t want to hear her crow about it.
When we come down the stairs with our travel bags slung on our shoulders, Frank’s already waiting in the Mustang, sipping from a plastic mug of coffee and reading a magazine. Like us, he’s wearing a baggy, untucked chambray shirt over jeans—the easier to conceal a pistol in our waistband should we need to—and steel-toed and -heeled running shoes. Frank and I both have white name tags stitched in red over the left pockets of our shirts, Frank’s reading JAKE, mine NICK. We’ve made use of these shirts many times before. I tell him of Charles’s takeaway breakfast offer, so we swing over to the Doghouse and they wait in the car while I go in, holding The Love Tutors down against my leg. Only the usual early birds are there, having breakfast at the counter. Charlie’s working the grill and sees me and brings over a pair of carryout orders in plastic bags.
“Egg-sausage-cheese burritos in one,” he says. “Coffee and cuernos in the other.” A typical cuerno is a croissant-shaped pastry lightly coated with a sugar crust, but his cuernos include a cream filling. He knows I love them.
“Thanks, cuz,” I say. I slide the DVD across the counter.
He picks it up, gives me a two-finger “Up yours,” and says, “I hope the cuernos rot your teeth out.”
I show a pained smile and head for the door.
When we get to the airfield the runway’s still hazed with a residual mist. Our plane is the same one that took us to Monterrey, and Jimmy Ray Matson is once again our pilot. We take off on schedule, and as we climb to cruising altitude, Jimmy Ray says, “I gotta tell you folks we might have to deal with a touch of headwinds for some of the trip. A little mild turbulence is all, nothing to be scared of and won’t slow us but about fifteen minutes. Now, I don’t mean to scare nobody, but I have to tell yall that a twin-engine plane runs double the possibility of engine failure, that’s the plain and simple truth of it. I mean, two engines, double the chance, right? But the good news is, if one of the engines does quit, the other one is still totally and fully capable, all on its own, of getting the plane all the way, and I mean all the way . . . to the crash site.” He guffaws without giving us a glance, and I strongly suspect this isn’t the first time he’s entertained himself with that one.
“Thank you for that comforting information,” Rayo says. Jimmy Ray laughs louder.
We open the breakfast sacks and extract the food and coffee.
“Why’s Charlie being so nice, giving us breakfast?” Rayo says. “I thought he was mad at us.”
“He is,” Frank says. “But why be a dick about it?”
“No thanks, I done ate,” Jimmy Ray says, though nobody offered. “But I gotta say, that coffee smells good.”
“Got a cup?” I ask him.
He stretches an arm into the cabin to hand me a white plastic mug emblazoned with a Jolly Roger. We each pour some of our coffee into it—mine and Frank’s black, Rayo’s with cream and sugar, making the mix in Jimmy’s cup the color of weak mud—and I hand it back to him. He makes a face at the look of it but says, “Much obliged.”
I tell him we have to talk business back here and would he mind giving us some privacy.
“Oh, yeah, sure thing. Got me a mix of my boys Kris, Willie, Waylon, and Johnny right here.” He takes off his hat and switches to a different set of headphones and starts moving his head in time to the music. He’s got it turned up high enough that I faintly hear the strains of “The Highwayman.”
The Garcías’ ranch is just north of El Paso and about a dozen miles shy of the New Mexico line. We begin our approach toward its rudimentary runway alongside a range of pale gray mountains. Frank and I have been to El Paso a few times before, but this is Rayo’s first visit to any desert region, and she’s hunched up against her window, gawking down at the craggy panorama of the Franklin range.
“It’s so desolate it’s beautiful,” she says. “Most of the mountains around Mexico City are way bigger, but these look a little spookier somehow. All those dark canyons.”
Jimmy Ray touches us down as lightly as a leaf and taxis toward the far end of the strip, where two large black SUVs and an aviation fuel truck are parked. We stop a short way from the SUVs, and a pair of men emerge from one of them as Jimmy cuts the engines. The truck then drives up close enough to the plane to access the fuel ports.
Jimmy’s informed us the El Paso temperature stands at 100.6, and I feel every gradation of it as we alight.
“Good lord!” Rayo says as she steps off the plane. Having grown up in Mexico City’s generally cool climate, she’d had to get used to Miami’s heat and humidity during her college years, and when she moved to Brownsville she found its summers of clammy swelter little different from Florida’s. But desert heat is something else. The air can get so drily hot it’ll cause your nose to bleed spontaneously. It can evaporate sweat almost as fast as you exude any, a phenomenon that fools some people into thinking they’re not really that hot. Then suddenly everything’s looking a little pink around the edges and, next thing they know, they’re flat on their back.
The two men coming toward us are our cousins Félix García and his youngest son, Cayetano. Félix is in his sixties and is an underboss for an organization that specializes in smuggling wetbacks over to this side and American motor vehicles into Mexico. Cayetano’s in his early twenties, a fast learner and reliable as they come. They greet me and Frank with hugs. When we introduce them to Rayo Luna, Félix looks her up and down and says to Frank, “I’ve never understood why your family has all the best-looking women.”
Rayo smiles and says, “Well, it’s easy to see your family has the best-looking men.” She hugs and cheek-kisses Cayetano, who responds with a blush. When she hugs Félix, he pulls her tighter against him and runs his hand over her butt. She draws her head back and grins. “Well, now I guess we know who the real wolf in this family is.”
He releases her and gives her a crooked smile. “I beg your pardon, señorita. I’m just an old fool who doesn’t get many chances anymore to hold a beautiful woman. My hand could not control itself.”
“No offense taken,” she says—and kisses her forefinger and taps it on his lips. His grin looks like it might break his face.
“Let’s get going,” Frank says to me, starting off toward the SUVs, “before these two run off and get a room.”
Both vehicles are Grand Cherokees, both with armored bodies and ballistic dark glass. Félix says the brakes felt a little spongy on the one he drove out here and we should take the other. “Keys are in it, maps in the console,” Cayetano says. He tells us the Chihuahua license plates and the registration paper in the glove box are in the name of José García, probably the most common name in Mexico as well as that of a recently deceased uncle. A cardboard box in the back seat contains three burner phones he bought in Juárez, should we for some reason need to get rid of our own cells. There are also two pairs of high-power binoculars, bottles of water, sunglasses, and adjustable-headband baseball caps of different colors. Under the rug in the cargo space there are three sets of stick-on business signs, each of them two and a half by three feet. They go on the front doors, easy stick-on, easy peel-off. A plumbing business, a carpet business, a cabinet business—the kinds of companies people are used to seeing in residential neighborhoods. No addresses on the signs, just fake phone numbers except for the Tucson area code. “I thought the signs might be good to have,” Cayetano says. “Never know when they might come in handy, you know?”
“Good thinking,” Frank says, and pats the kid on the shoulder. Cayetano grins proudly.
Again there are hugs all around. This time when Félix hugs her, keeping his hands off her ass, Rayo gives him a deep kiss on the mouth and pulls away with a laugh, then jogs off to the Cherokee and hops into the back seat.
“Jesucristo,” he says, staring after her. “What a woman!”
Frank pats him on the back and says, “See you when we see you.”
“Vayan con dios,” Cayetano says.
“You drive,” Frank tells me, and goes around to the passenger side.
We put our pistols under the seats.
In just a few minutes we’re on I-10 and crossing the New Mexico border. At Las Cruces the interstate cuts west, and a few miles outside of town we turn off into a Border Patrol checkpoint to get a quick inspection from an agent before we’re permitted to proceed. From there it’s smooth sailing. We’ve reckoned we’ll get to Tucson right around sundown if we hold to the speed limits and allow for stops to get fuel and a bite to eat. Rayo remains captivated by the desert, remarking on the bare mountains and mesas and buttes, the scrubby hills and sandy flatlands, the pale immensity of the sky.
We pass a road sign advising that DUST STORMS MAY EXIST.
“Now there’s a pronouncement whose logic cannot possibly be refuted,” Frank says. In a bad imitation of Aunt Catalina, he intones, “Would you grant me that, Francis? That dust storms may exist?” and gets a laugh out of us.
We’re closing on the Arizona line when my phone buzzes. I look at the screen and hand the phone to Frank, who says, “Yeah,” into it, then turns to Rayo and mimes a writing motion. She’s had a pen and small notebook close to hand in readiness for this call. “Go ahead, I’ll repeat it to my partner,” he says to the caller.
“Richard Moss. Lives alone,” he says, and in the rearview I see her write in the notebook. He says, “Residence,” and repeats an address, then “Phone,” and repeats a number. Then “Tortuga Station Post Office,” and gives her another address.
“Get it all?” he asks her. She gives him a thumbs-up and starts tapping keys on her phone.
“Okay, man, many thanks,” Frank says to the caller, then deletes the call from his log.
“Here he is,” Rayo says, and passes her phone to Frank. I glance over and see a street map with a highlighted route on it.
“Our exit’s on a main avenue at the southeast end of town, and it runs straight north to his neighborhood,” Frank says. “Two turns off it and we’re on his street. Piece of cake.”
Rayo unfolds a street map on her lap and runs a finger over it. “The Tortuga post office is only two blocks north of him,” she says. “It’s a small neighborhood. Nothing much east of it but open desert.”
Frank widens the scope of the map on her phone and says, “Yeah. You can’t live much closer to wilderness and still be in a town.”
At Lordsburg we stop for fuel and burgers and sodas, then get rolling again.
It’s after six when we exit into Tucson and head for Moss’s house. The sun’s still above the western mountains, and looming over the north side of the city directly ahead are the imposing Santa Catalinas. Saguaro cactus, tall and stately with its multiple upraised arms, is everywhere, the first saguaro Rayo’s seen outside western movies.
I pull into a minimart gas station at a commercial intersection and fill the tank, then Frank has me wheel into the shopping plaza just across the intersection, where he’s spotted an office supply store that’s given him an idea. We park at the far end of the lot, where we can attach business signs to the Cherokee’s doors without attracting much attention. Frank chooses B&R CARPETING, and I place them on the doors while he goes over to the office supply place. Before long he comes back with his purchases—a clipboard and a small ream of all-purpose requisition forms—and Rayo and I commend him for his cleverness. Together with the door signs, the clipboard should satisfy the curiosity of any neighbors who may take notice of us when we arrive at Moss’s house.
He binds several of the forms to the clipboard, prints “B&R Carpeting” in large letters in the blank block at the head of the top form, enters Richard Moss’s name and address and phone number in the pertinent lines just below that, and then on some of the lower lines scribbles a few illegible words and some numbers with “sq. ft.” after them.
The house shadows are almost to the street when we roll into Moss’s neighborhood. It’s clearly a new tract of houses whose most salient features are the largeness of the homes and the smallness of their lots—the tiny yards covered with gravel rather than grass—and a dearth of trees except for a few bony mesquites and a green-bark kind that Rayo identifies for us as paloverde. There’s not a person in view, not another moving vehicle on the street, as we go down his block. Every garage door is closed, only a few cars parked on driveways. The drapes or blinds are drawn in most of the windows.
Moss’s house is at the end of the street, his driveway bare, the garage door down. No telling if he’s home. I park in the driveway, and Frank and I put on black Arizona Diamondback caps, get the Berettas from under the seats and the suppressors from the travel bags and attach them. We jack a round in the chamber, snick the safety on, stick the pistols in our waistbands and cover them with our shirts. Frank hands me the clipboard, and we get out. Rayo squirms over the console and slides into the driver’s seat. She’s attached a Quickster to her Glock and sets the pistol in the console, then covers it with a half-open map. She’ll give us a horn toot if she spots any sign of possible trouble. If we hear the horn we’ll zip out the back and come around the side of the house. Even for unlikely contingencies, it’s best to have a plan.
We go up to the door and Frank presses the bell. I casually look down the street to see if anybody’s checking us out, but there’s nobody outside or at a door or window. He’s about to ring the bell again when the door’s opened by a lean but potbellied man who looks to be in his forties. Close-cut brown hair, Denver Broncos T-shirt, tan cargo shorts over very pale legs, tennis shoes but no socks.
“Yes?” he says, his watery brown eyes curious and wary.
“Mr Moss?” Frank asks him.
“Yes? Who are you?”
“My name is Jake Barnes, sir. This is my assistant, Nick. I apologize for being so terribly late. You’re our last call and I know we were due more than an hour ago, but it’s been one glitch after another today. Then to top it off, my phone went on the fritz and I couldn’t call you about the delay. I’m really sorry about all that and I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you too much. It won’t take but a few minutes to get the floor measurements and come up with the estimate.”
“Estimate?” Moss says. “Who are you?”
“B&R Carpeting, sir. We had an appointment.”
He looks past us at the Cherokee. “You’ve made a mistake. I don’t need carpeting.”
“You don’t? Well now, that’s odd. We have an order form.” Frank turns to me and I hold the clipboard so that he and Moss can both see the name and address on the top lines. “If that new secretary fouled things up again,” Frank says to me, “I’m really going to let her have it.”
“Well, somebody goofed,” Moss says. “I hope you straighten it out.”
He steps back and starts to close the door, but Frank moves up onto the threshold and offers him his hand. “Our mistake, Mr Moss, and again, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.”
The man gives him a puzzled look but mechanically accepts the handshake—and Frank clamps his other hand on Moss’s upper arm and pushes him backward into the living room, Moss blurting out, “Hey! What . . . hey!”
I go in right behind them, my hand on the pistol under my shirt, and shut the door gently and stay beside it, scanning all around, seeing no one else.
“This is housebreaking!” Moss says. “Assault! I’ll call the police!”
In one quick move, Frank shifts his grip to both of Moss’s elbows and presses his thumbs into the crooks. Moss yelps and his knees buckle, but Frank holds him up by one arm and gives him a quick one-hand frisk, then steers him to the sofa and shoves him down on it. Moss massages his elbow tendons and stares up at Frank in wet-eyed terror. On each of the end tables is a lighted lamp, and the lit doorway on my right reveals the kitchen.
“Is there anyone else in the house?” Frank asks him.
Moss shakes his head. “No. What . . . who are you? What do you want? . . . You gonna rob me? I don’t have—”
“Easy does it, Mr Moss,” Frank says. “Take a minute, catch your breath.” He gives me a hand sign to search the house, and I put down the clipboard and go to the main hallway, waiting until my back is to Moss before I draw the Beretta, not wanting to scare him any worse than we already have.
Tapping light switches on and off as I go, I make a quick check of the bedrooms, closets, bathrooms—keeps a tidy abode, the man does—then go into the kitchen and, by way of its door, into the garage. It holds a compact dark-green Toyota SUV. I take a peek to make sure nobody’s in it, then put the pistol back under my shirt and return to the living room, show Frank a fist, retrieve the clipboard, and resume my post by the front door. He’s pulled an easy chair over to the sofa and sits facing Moss, their knees almost touching. The guy’s breathing a little better but is still very obviously scared.
“All right, Mr Moss,” Frank says. “We’re not here to harm you or rob you or anything of the sort. All we want is some information. You give it to us and whoosh, we’re gone.”
“Information? About what?”
“Mount of Venus Productions.”
Moss looks from Frank to me and back at Frank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?”
“We’re a couple of guys who would like to complete our interaction with you as agreeably and quickly as possible,” Frank says. “But that can’t happen if you lie to us. Look, Mr Moss . . . Richard . . . we know the mailing address for Mount of Venus is a post office box just a couple of blocks from here. A box that’s rented in your name. Of course you know what we’re talking about. So cut the shit.”
“The post office doesn’t give out . . . whoa, are you the police? Well, hey now, hey . . . there’s nothing illegal about those movies and . . . anyway, you can’t just break—”
“Stop, Richard,” Frank says. “We’re not cops and we don’t give a rat’s ass you’re in the porn business. All we want is to find a certain actress who’s appeared in a particular Mount of Venus production. Which is all you need to know about us. Tell us where she is and we’re done here. But jack us around and we’ll cause you pain you will not believe. But believe this—if you lie to me I’ll know it.”
Frank has a talent for articulating such dire threats as convincingly as the kind of guys who genuinely enjoy dispensing pain. His stone-eye technique, I call it. I can’t do it as well, which is why he usually conducts the critical interrogations.
Moss’s cheeks are bright with tears. “I can’t tell you! Because I don’t know. I’m not jacking you around, I’m not. I don’t know the names of most of the actors and I don’t know where any of them live. I don’t have anything to do with making the movies and videos. I’m just the mail guy. I pick up the mail at the post office every day and take it to Lance in the evening. That’s all I do, I swear to God.”
“Who’s Lance?”
Moss wipes at his eyes. “My brother-in-law. Ex-brother-in-law.”
“And he works for Mount of Venus, too.”
“Yeah, he . . . well, he owns it, runs it, the whole thing. Knows everything about the business. Never any trouble with the law. It’s not illegal, you know, the kinda movies he makes. But all I do is take the mail to him. I’m not lying, I’m not.”
“Good. How long you been the mail guy?”
“Ah, jeez . . . around two years, I guess. The guy who had the job had to quit and Lance asked me did I want it. Said it’s easy and doesn’t take much time, and it pays pretty good for just a little work, so I said sure, yeah. But that’s it. I deliver the mail. That’s all, I swear.”
“Easy, Richard, I believe you. Tell me, you ever watch any of Lance’s movies?”
“Yeah, now and then . . . I mean, it’s not like I watch that kind of thing all the time or anything. I can take it or leave it. It’s only, ah, some nights there’s nothing good on TV and so—”
“I understand. You ever seen a movie with an actress named Kitty Quick?”
Even from where I’m standing I can tell by Moss’s face he knows the name. “Listen, mister,” he says, “if Lance finds out I been running my mouth about his business, Christ, he’ll be really pissed.”
“At this moment, Richard,” Frank says, “Lance is a problem somewhere else and for a later time, but I’m a problem right here and now. Tell me everything you know about Kitty Quick or I’m going to use a hammer on your hands and feet.”
“No, Jesus, no, don’t!” The tears gush again and he brushes at them with the heels of his hands. “I’ve seen her in only one movie. I don’t remember what it was called. It had to do with nurses . . . yeah, she played a nurse. But that’s it, I mean it, that’s all I know about her. I’m not lying.”
“And you have no idea where we might find her?”
“No, I swear to God I don’t! If I knew where she was I’d tell you, believe me. All I know about her is the one movie.”
“Would Lance know where she is?”
“Yeah, I suppose. Maybe.”
“You picked up today’s mail?”
“I already put the sack in the car. Not very much today.”
“You take it to him at a certain time?”
“Usually around eight, little after.”
Frank and I check our watches. Seven ten.
“Where’s the company?”
“Up in the hills. Not too far but it’s slow going.”
“What is it? Warehouse, office complex?”
“No, there’s only houses up there. The company works in Lance’s house.”
“Describe it.”
“Oh, jeez. It’s a big place. Two-story, lot of rooms. Five bedrooms, I think, plus a little guesthouse around back. Great big front porch, sundecks on the sides and rear. Hot tubs. Big swimming pool. Christ, I can’t imagine what it cost him to put in a pool up there. But, hell, all the houses up there are pretty ritzy, and the area where Lance lives—Raven Heights—it’s about the ritziest. He’s got something like fifteen acres near the top of a hill and his house is on a flat cut into the slope. He makes all his movies and videos there, but you’d never know any two of them were made in the same place, there’s so many different kinds of rooms and patios and all. Privacy’s a big thing with the people up there, so all the properties are big and far apart. All got big iron fences. Lance says they were all built between big curves and behind ridges so that none of them have a clear view of any of the others.”
“What security he have other than the fence?”
“There’s a guard company that’s under contract to most of the residents up there. It patrols the hills all night, keeps an eye on things.”
“What’s the drill when you get there? How do you get in?”
“When I stop at the gate, a detector somewhere in the driveway signals Judson’s phone, which connects to a gate camera and intercom. There’s a floodlight comes on automatically after dark. He sees it’s me and he opens up.”
“Who’s Judson?”
“Lance’s bodyguard, I guess you’d call him.”
“He big? Carry a gun?”
“Yeah. Big. Has a gun.”
“Are there other guards on the place?”
“No. Only him.”
“Who else lives there?”
“Just Josefina the cook. Mexican. The maids and the gardeners are day help. When Lance is doing a project that takes more than a day to make, he has the cast and crew stay at the house till it’s done.”
“Any movie people there now?”
“No, uh-uh. He just finished a movie last week.”
“Once you go through the gate, what then?”
“I drive up to the house and park. Go up to the front door, ring the bell, and Judson lets me in.” He cuts another look from Frank to me and back. “You fellas are gonna go there, huh? Oh, man, he’s gonna know you found him through me.”
“For sure, since you’re gonna take us. Where are your car keys?”
“Bedroom,” Richard says gloomily.
Frank stands up and says, “Let’s go get them.” He looks at me and juts his chin at the door, and I head out to the Cherokee.
Rayo has the radio tuned to a rock station, the volume low, but she switches it off as I get in and toss the clipboard in back, then give her the rundown on things. I get a couple of ball gags out of my bag and hook them on my belt.
The garage door rolls up and the Toyota backs out onto the driveway and stops, Moss driving, Frank beside him. The door comes down again, and Moss backs into the street and gets going and we pull out and follow. We trail them onto the main avenue that brought us to this neighborhood and head north. A short way up the road we turn off at a large minimart, where we park the Cherokee in a far, dark corner of the lot. We quickly remove the signs from the doors and stuff them and the other business signs into a nearby dumpster, then lock the vehicle up tight. I open the Toyota’s hatchback, and we huddle into the cramped space behind the rear seat, pushing aside the baggy sack of mail Moss loaded earlier, and I shut the hatch.
“Roll it, Richard,” Frank says.
The avenue ends at a T-junction with a two-lane road branching up into the hills in both directions. Moss turns west on it. The road climbs the hillside in loops large and small, our headlights slowly sweeping past rocky outcrops and creosote shrubs and eerily lofty saguaros. Moss was right about the properties up here being sizable and the residences few and far between. All of them stand well back from the twisting lane and are connected to it by long driveways, and all of them are enclosed by a high railed fence with a lighted front gate. The city below is a carpet of sparkling lights.
After a while, we come out of another bend in the road and Moss points off to the right. “That’s it there. His fence. Can’t see the house from here, though.” He turns off onto a driveway that runs about fifty yards to the gate, which is lighted by a pair of small flood lamps. He’s advised us that the camera-intercom combination is attached to the stone gatepost on the driver’s side and several feet higher than the Toyota, the better to see into the open beds of incoming trucks. As we close in on the gate, Frank and Rayo and I hunker down and press ourselves close against the right side of the vehicle, out of the camera’s line of vision.
We halt at the gate, in the full glow of its light. Moss lowers his window and juts his face out of it so the camera can get a good look at him.
The seconds drag by and then the intercom crackles lightly and a hoarse voice says, “Running a little bit behind tonight, Richie.”
“Yeah, I know,” Moss says. “I got caught up with—” But the intercom clicks off.
We hear an electric hum and the gate slides open with a low rattle. Moss puts his window up and drives us onto the property and out of range of the gate light, and we sit up for a look around. The driveway weaves a mostly uphill route through the scrub-and-stone landscape and ends at a paved parking lot abutting a two-story stone-and-tile house in front of the hillside. Directly ahead of us and past the house is an open carport that looks long enough to shelter a half dozen vehicles side by side but at the moment is housing only two, a large SUV and a small sports car. A railed porch runs the front length of the house. A recessed entryway casts a soft yellow light, and as we ease past it we see the set-back front door and the light just above it. Frank has Moss park well away from the porch steps and out of the door’s sight line. When Moss cuts the engine, Frank pockets the keys and we get out and pull our pistols and I hand Moss the slack bag of mail. From around the side of the house comes the hum of a big AC unit.
Holding Moss by the back of his collar, Frank has him lead the way to the steps and onto the porch. The recessed entryway restricts the width of the cast of light from above the front door and leaves the walls to either side of the entry in deep shadow. Frank directs me and Rayo to positions on one side of the entrance, and he pulls Moss into the shadows on the other side. He whispers something to him, their figures vague, and then they come out into the light, Moss still holding the mailbag. He stands at the recessed threshold as Frank moves out near the porch steps, holding his pistol down against his leg, and faces the entrance. He nods at Moss, who goes into the recess and out of my view for a few seconds and then hurries back out to Frank, who pats him on the shoulder and then retreats into the darkness. I catch on that he had Moss ring the doorbell. Moss sets down the mail and faces the door and stands slightly hunched with one hand atop the other at his chest.
Nothing happens for about a half minute before I hear the door open and then a shaft of bright indoor light more starkly exposes Moss in his awkward stance, his face contorted.
“What the hell, Richie?” says a gravelly voice I recognize as Judson’s. “What’re you . . . what’s the matter?”
“Got a pain just all of a sudden. Hurts to breathe.”
“Having a heart attack or what?” Judson says, coming out toward him. Like Moss said, he’s big. Heavy work boots, jeans, dark oversized T-shirt. But he’s no seasoned pro, stepping out like this, empty-handed and without a look to left or right. Frank glides out of the darkness and puts the suppressor muzzle to the back of Judson’s head. “Stand fast and hands up!”
Judson halts, hands half raised in front of him. With his free hand, Frank pats all around Judson’s torso and waist, finds a cell phone, drops it on the floor, and crunches it under his heel, then kicks it off the porch. “Where’s your piece?”
“Rec room.”
“Good place for it. Put your hands in your back pockets and keep them there. Show a hand, I’ll shoot it.”
Judson stuffs his hands into the pockets and cuts a look at Moss, who’s gaping at him in fear and says, “They made me bring them.”
“Shut up, both you,” Frank says. He looks my way and I go to them.
“This a robbery or what?” Judson says.
Frank jabs him hard in the back of the head with the pistol muzzle and says, “I said shut up.”
Frank draws him over to a darker spot on the porch and makes him sit down with his back against the rail, and I cuff his hands behind him and around one of the posts. Rayo’s still hanging back in the shadows and keeping an eye on the entrance.
Frank squats down beside Judson and says, “All right, we’re gonna have a quick Q&A, you and I. And you have to understand two things—I don’t have time to fuck around and I always know when someone’s lying to me.” He takes out his buck knife and opens the blade. “The first time you lie, I’m going to cut open your knee joints, plus cut your hamstrings and heel tendons. No matter what the surgeons do, walking without crutches will be nothing but a memory for the rest of your life. After that, every lie will make me do something really bad to you. And I’m not lying. We clear?”
“Fuck yeah, man, yeah.”
Frank works the interrogation swiftly and Judson affirms that he and Lance and Josefina the cook are the only ones in the house. Judson was in the rec room having a beer and watching a ball game on TV when the doorbell rang. Lance is working in the editing room, on the upper floor and in a rear corner of the house, and he would not have heard the bell, the room being soundproofed because he doesn’t like to be distracted while he’s working. The cook’s only concern is the kitchen. She never pays heed to the doorbell or anything else. She’s finished her duties for the night and retired to her room. There’s no landline in the house, and the only cell phones are his and Lance’s. “Well, only Lance’s now,” he corrects himself, giving Frank a look. The only room in the house with a door that locks is Lance’s bedroom. If he has guns anywhere in the house, Judson doesn’t know of them.
Frank asks Moss if he knows where the editing room is and Moss says he does. “Then we’re set,” Frank says, and gives me a nod.
I take a ball gag off my belt and fit it into Judson’s mouth and secure it behind his head. It’s a scary gag and clearly a novel sensation for him, and his eyes enlarge in alarm. He tries to speak but manages only a grunt, and I tell him that trying to talk will make the ball feel bigger and probably make him feel like he’s choking, and what he definitely does not want to do is freak out and throw up and drown on his own puke. I tell him he’ll be able to breathe well enough if he just stays calm. Even if his nose stops up, there’s sufficient leeway around the ball for him to breathe through his mouth as long as he doesn’t panic. I ask if he can keep cool till we get back, and he nods jerkily, his eyes bulging.
“Good,” I say. “Just relax and breathe easy, Judsie, and you’ll be fine. We’ll take it off on our way out.”
Frank again grips Moss by the collar, then beckons Rayo out of the darkness and we enter the house, pistols in hand.
The big living room has been done in Old West decor. Lots of dark wood and leather, Indian blankets and rugs, some Remington sculptures and paintings that could pass for originals and maybe are. Moss leads us to a wide stairway and up to the second floor, then down a long hallway and around a corner into a shorter one, before he stops in front of a closed door and nods at it. The editing room. Not a sound seeps from within.
Frank draws Moss away from the door and pushes him toward Rayo. She grips him by the collar the same way Frank did and backs up to the wall, holding Moss in front of her and the Glock barrel alongside his head. He looks like he’s just been told he has cancer. Because the door opens inward and to our left, we stand on that side of it, me up against the jamb, Frank a little farther back and aiming his pistol at the door. I gingerly try the knob. It turns with ease and I slowly push the door forward, gradually revealing a large room, softly lighted, the walls lined with shelves holding a variety of photographic and sound equipment. The door’s half open before we can see the blond man sitting at a table on the other side of the room with his back to us. Wearing headphones and dressed all in denim, sleeves rolled to the elbows, he’s intent on a movie on the wall screen before him in which three naked young persons, a guy and two women, are cavorting on a bed. On the table is a bulky electronic instrument of some kind with a broad panel of levers and slides and connected to a computer equipped with an extra-large keyboard. At one end of the table are a big plastic ice chest and a large, lid-covered food tray, a short stack of paper plates and one of paper napkins. He’s engrossed in the scene and working with the panel controls, bringing the action into close-up and then drawing back again into a wide shot of the trio in their writhing. The players are linked to each other in a configuration commonly called a daisy chain. He works a slide that softens the lighting of the scene just a touch.
Frank juts his chin forward and I advance into the room until I’m ten feet from Lance, who remains absorbed in his work. Frank comes up beside me, digs a quarter out of his pocket and lobs it toward the table in a high arc. It thunks next to Lance’s hand and bounces high, and he recoils sharply—snatching off the headphones with one hand and flicking a switch with the other in what seems an instinctive move that freezes the screen action—and swivels halfway around to gape at us with our pistols pointed at him. He’s bewildered, but I wouldn’t call him terrified. Got a measure of cool. Judging by his incipient crow’s-feet and the few tinges of gray in his hair, I’d say he’s early fifties.
Frank tells him to toss the headphones, then put his hands on top of his head and stand up. Lance mutely complies. Taking care not to block my line of fire, Frank goes to him and pats him down with one hand, then tells him to sit again.
“Can I put my hands down?”
“Stick them in your front pockets and don’t take them out again unless I say so. There any guns in the room?”
“No, hell no. Look, fellas, I don’t keep a lot of cash in the house. I think there’s around fourteen, fifteen grand. It’s yours. If you’re after drugs, there aren’t any. I don’t allow them on the place. There’s some jewelry, not much, but—”
“What is it about us,” Frank says, cutting him off and looking at me, “makes everybody so damn quick to think we’re robbers?”
“Beats me,” I say. “Makes me feel kinda lowdown.”
“What?” Lance says. “If you’re not robbers, who the hell are you and what do you want? How’d you get past the gate, anyway? By Judson? And—”
“First things first,” Frank says. “Are you Lance?”
“Yeah. How you know that?”
Frank moves aside so Lance can see into the hall, where Moss is held by Rayo from behind, her gun muzzle pressed up under his chin.
“Ah, Christ,” Lance says, eyeing Moss. “He in this with you?”
“Does it look like he’s in with us?” Frank says. “We ran him down through your PO box. And if you’re wondering, Judson’s all right, too, but for now he’s restricted to the front porch.”
Frank nods at Rayo and she pushes Moss ahead of her into the room. Frank tells him to go sit down with his back against the near wall and his hands under his butt, then tells Rayo to cuff Lance’s left hand to the back of the chair.
As she turns to hand me the Glock and takes a pair of flex cuffs from her belt, I see Lance getting his first good look at her and admiring what he sees. She goes over to him and he gives her his hand, saying, “Hey, girl, you’re really something.”
She laughs lightly and says, “Really?” and slips the cuff onto his wrist. “The kinda something that could make a go of it in your, ah . . . art form?”
“A go of it?” Lance says. “Honey, you’ve got it all in spades—body, moves, everything.”
Frank gives me a look of “Do you believe this?”
Lance cranes his head around to try to keep his eyes on her as she positions his arm behind the chair and crouches down to cuff it to the back brace.
“I’m a great judge of women’s bodies, even with their clothes on,” he says, “and unless you’re covered with burn scars or something, yours is five-star stuff. Besides, I saw the way you looked at the screen when you came in. You like my art form. You should give it a try, make a picture with me. You could be a star, I mean it.”
She lets out another small laugh and checks the fit on his wrist and the tautness of the cuff’s pull, making sure it won’t cut off the circulation in his hand, then stands up. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do that,” he says. “I’ll give you my number. There’s paper and pen right there.”
“Don’t need it,” she says. “I’ll write you at the Venus PO address.”
She waggles her brow at me as I hand back her pistol, then returns to her post by the door, Lance watching her all the way.
Frank sidles over to block his view. “If you’re done promoting employment opportunity to my associate,” he says, “I’ll address your question of what we want. But first, I have to ask if you’ve ever heard of a man named Bad Eddie Roget.”
I have to fight down a smile. Bad Eddie is a persona Frank created when we were in college. We came home to our apartment complex one afternoon and found an unfamiliar car parked in our assigned space in the residents’ lot. We assumed it belonged to some visitor who didn’t feel like walking any farther than necessary and so parked in the nearest spot he could find. On a whim, Frank wrote a note I liked so much I can still recall it almost verbatim. “My name is Bad Eddie. I’m called that because I do very bad things. You have parked in a space assigned to my friend. Should you do so again, you will soon afterward make my acquaintance and regret it evermore. I’ve made note of your license plate and can easily find you. Yours very truly, B.E.” He folded the note and put it under the driver-side windshield wiper. The car was gone a few hours later, and if its owner ever made a return visit to the complex, he didn’t park anywhere near our spot again. In the years since, we’ve made referential use of Bad Eddie on various occasions.
Lance says he’s never heard of him. “Name like that, what’s he, like some kinda criminal?”
“You need only know,” Frank says, “that as his forenames imply, Mr Roget is not a man of meek nature or one to trifle with, and I advise you not to do so. Like you, he’s an entrepreneur, and like you he prefers to conduct his operations with discretion and a minimum of disharmony. We’re here because he wants us to locate a young woman who, under the name of Kitty Quick, appeared in a film of yours, The Love Tutors. Where can we find her?”
“That’s what this is about? You’re looking for Kitty? Why the hell not just say so? There’s no call for guns, handcuffs, all this badass bullshit.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Frank says. “Tell us where she is and our business here is concluded. However, if what you tell us turns out to be incorrect, you can count on seeing us again. And on that occasion we’ll begin by breaking bones. So. Where is she?”
“Los Angeles, at least that’s where she said she was going, last time I saw her, back to LA,” Lance says, his speech a little faster, most likely because of the mention of bones being broken. “She’d come to me from there, you see. I wanted her to do another movie with me, but no dice. About two weeks after she split I called her to see if I could change her mind, but the mobile number she’d been using was no longer in service. I mean, she really cut the tie.”
“How long ago she leave?”
“Uh . . . three months, give or take a day or two.”
“Give it from the top. From the time you met her.”
He tells us she came to him around four months ago by way of Ben Steiner, a film agent pal of his in LA who specializes in great-looking young girls who want to be in the movies but don’t have any experience beyond a high school play, if that much. Steiner’s able to persuade many of them that the quickest way of getting professional experience and building a portfolio and earning good money all at the same time is in sex videos and film, and if they’re willing to give it a go, he’s willing to help them. Lance is just one of many adult-film producers in the western United States who have an arrangement with Steiner to refer aspiring actresses to them. His service doesn’t come cheap but it’s worth it because the girls are all truly good-looking and he guarantees that they have been medically examined and found to be free of STDs and drug use. Through police pals, he also makes certain that a girl he refers is not a law enforcement agent and is free of criminal convictions or pending warrants. The only things Steiner can’t vouch for are a girl’s true name and age. His producer clients are on their own in dealing with those aspects. So Steiner sent him this girl who said she was Katie Moore from Fresno and swore she was eighteen years old, but she had no official ID to verify any of it. Lance knew she was lying about both her name and her age and guessed her to be sixteen or seventeen. But she had a great face and body and such sassy confidence that he went ahead and gave her a test anyway. Turned out she could follow direction to a T, and the camera loved her and she had a gift for playing to it. “One of those born naturals,” he said. He offered her a part in The Love Tutors and she grabbed it. To guard against the risk of a child-porn problem, he had his half sister, who works for the DMV in Sun City, issue her a legit license in the name of Katherine Moore with a date of birth that made her eighteen. He photocopied it for his records in readiness against some agent of the law showing up and demanding proof she wasn’t a minor. Whatever her actual age, she was one of the best newbies he’d ever worked with. She asked if she could be called Kitty Quick, and he liked the name and said why not. He put her in with two seasoned actresses and she stole the show, as most of the reviewers agreed.
“So many wannabes,” he tells us, “think that taking their clothes off and having sex in front of a camera is all there is to being a porn actress. But there’s a big difference between just having sex and performing sex. What so many of them don’t seem to know is that the biggest sexual turn-on for most guys is enthusiasm. Am I right or am I right? Nothing stokes a guy more than a woman taking obvious pleasure in sex, whether it’s a woman he’s having sex with or one he’s just watching have sex. And yeah, sure, a really good actress can fake that kind of, ah . . . gusto pretty good. But the real thing is unmistakable and better than any acting, and this kid you’re looking for, her enthusiasm’s the real thing. It comes across on the screen like gangbusters. I can understand why your Mr Roget wants to meet her.”
“I didn’t say he wants to meet her,” Frank says. “I said he wants us to locate her. You were saying?”
“Yeah, well, she told me she was going back to LA, and maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but that’s what she told me she was gonna do. She lived here with me and the other actors and the crew while we made the tutor thing. When the shoot was done, I threw a two-day party like I always do when we wrap, and she hung around for that, then off she went. With a copy of the flick as per the actors’ contracts.”
“So she was here maybe a month?”
“Yeah, about a month. I’d planned on a much shorter shooting schedule, but there were all kinds of glitches and . . . well, hell, it took a month to do it. When we finally wrapped, Kitty was ready to book. She’d had enough of Arizona and figured she could make more money back in LA. For sure they pay better out there, but the competition’s cutthroat. Two dozen grade-A girls for every part that comes along. But like I told you, there’s something really special about Kitty. And now she’s been in a good feature she can show to producers, let them see how talented she is, what she can do. All things considered, I expect she’s making out all right.”
“She from LA?” Frank says. “She grow up there? Go to school there? Ever mention friends or family there?”
“She never said anything about any of that, not to me or to anybody else on the set. I know, because I asked them all the same questions when I was trying to run her down. Could be she was from LA, could be she was from East Bumfuck. Listen, most of the girls in this business leave home because they don’t like any part of it. Where they’re from is the last thing they want to talk about. I’ve worked with more girls than I can count and never knew where half of them came from or even their real names. Same goes for Kitty.”
“The LA guy who sent her to you . . . Steiner,” Frank says. “You think she’ll go see him? See if he can find her something? Wouldn’t that be her best shot?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it would. And you want me to call him, right? Find out if he’s seen her, knows where she is, who she’s working with, whatever.”
“Very astute. Do it now.”
“And if he asks why I want to know?”
“Good question . . . Let’s see . . . There’s an entertainment company in Texas. New outfit called, ah . . . the Texas Starlight Group. Hasn’t got much publicity so far, but it’s loaded with investment capital, and its biggest ambition is in adult-film production. A couple of its people saw Kitty in The Love Tutors and think she’d be perfect for a major part in a production they’re putting together . . . an adult sword-and-sorcery thing. They’re making it in partnership with a cable company that’s heavy into pay-per-view, video on demand, hotel TV, et cetera. If she’s interested, they’re prepared to make her a very attractive offer. Her agent would be in for a nice piece of change.”
Lance grins big as he finishes up scribbling notes on a pad. “Not bad for bullshit on demand. Some guys have a gift for it. No offense, it’s a compliment. Phone’s in that drawer.” He points and Frank goes over and takes it out and gives it to him, then releases his left hand from the cuff. Lance shakes and flexes the freed hand a few times, then makes the call, listens, then quickly taps the speaker button and holds out the phone so we can hear the recording saying to leave a message, name, and number and “I’ll get back to you.” Then he says into the phone, “Bennie. Lance Furman. Give me a call ASAP. Got somebody here interested in an actress you might still be handling. It’s a sweet deal. Be waiting to hear from you.”
He ends the call and says, “He’s pretty good about getting back when I say it’s important, but if he’s talking business with somebody it might be a while.”
“Whatever it takes,” Frank says.
Lance flaps a hand at the covered tray and the ice chest. “Meanwhile, if anybody wants a beer or something to eat, just help yourself. Josefina always prepares a heap of chow for me when I expect to work late. Usually beef sandwiches and fried chicken, because that’s what I like best, but she always makes way more than I can ever eat by myself. I know she overdoes it just so she can give the leftovers to the garden guys the next day. Thinks I don’t know she’s sweet on one of them.”
“Well, I, for one, am famished,” Rayo says. She goes to the table and takes the lid off the big tray, chooses a chicken breast, and puts it on a paper plate, then digs a bottle of Negra Modelo out of the ice-packed cooler and uncaps it. She looks over at Moss, still sitting on the floor, and says to him, “Come have something to eat.” He looks at Frank, who tells him to go ahead. Moss shifts from one side of his ass to the other to free his hands, then works some feeling into them and struggles to his feet and joins Rayo at the table. Then we’re all seated and Moss is noshing on chicken, too, while Frank and I and Lance dig into excellent roast beef sandwiches.
Almost an hour later, while we’re all playing quarter-limit stud with a shabby deck Lance fished out of a drawer and I’m starting to wonder if the Steiner guy will call back anytime tonight, Lance’s phone chirps. He picks it up and checks the screen and says, “Our man.” He swipes it with a finger. “Bennie, thanks for getting back.” With his notes at hand, he gives Steiner the story Frank laid out about the Texas Starlight Group and its interest in talking to an actress named Kitty Quick.
“Yeah, Katie Moore,” he says. “That’s the one. You still rep her?”
He listens and gives us a smiling nod.
“Because they figured she might still be working for Mount of Venus,” he says. “So they nosed around in the right places and came up with my name and office number. This afternoon they gave me a call, said they were in town and had to be in Vegas day after tomorrow and wondered if we could meet this evening to talk about Kitty. I was curious so we got together at this club I know, and I tell you, they’re burning for the kid! Talking nice figures. Your end would be juicy, and they’ve agreed to lay a finder’s fee on me just for helping out. I mean, is this a great business or what? Give me a number and address on her and I’ll pass it on to them.” He listens again, says, “Ramhorn?”—and now looks a little agitated. He asks if she’s still under contract to “him,” whoever that is, and he stares at the floor as he listens. “Christ’s sake, Bennie, all they want to do is talk to her, see if she’s interested. If she is, then they can go to him.” He listens, not looking at any of us. Then brightens and says, “Oh, hell yeah! Hey, if Kitty says yes to their prop, I guaranfuckingtee you they’ll go for that.” He gives us a wink. “Will you? That’d be great, Bennie, because that’s all they want, the chance to pitch it to her. . . . Hell, yeah. . . . Okay, I’ll be right here, man. Do it.”
He cuts off the phone and grins at us.
“I’m not the only one in the room who can come up with bullshit on demand,” Frank says.
Lance points at himself and makes a face like, “Who, me?” Then tells us Kitty did go to see Bennie, who took a look at The Love Tutors and was so impressed with her work that he got her a contract with an old pal named Nolan Dolan. Dolan started out in porn production way back when and is now head man at Ramhorn Associates, an immensely successful Southern Cal consortium of film and video companies whose most gainful product is adult entertainment. In her first two months back in LA she was in two features made by Ramhorn affiliates and did both of them under the name Kitty Belle. The contract commits her to Ramhorn for one more movie, which was scheduled to start shooting two weeks ago but hasn’t gotten under way yet. Steiner doesn’t know why not, but whatever’s holding it up could be something that might make Dolan willing to release her from the project outright or at least let us buy out the contract.
“Ben’s calling him right now,” Lance says. “Hell, man, even if Dolan doesn’t cut her loose but says you can buy the contract, he’s gotta let you go talk to her, right? See if she’s interested in what you got? You’ve found her, man, you’re gonna see her, and then . . . what? You say your guy Roget doesn’t want to hurt her, and I hope to hell you’re not lying. I mean, I like the kid, I like her a lot, and I don’t like Dolan worth a shit. I could tell you stories but . . . ah, what the hell. Doesn’t matter. I just don’t like the idea of her working for him is all.”
“As I’ve told you, you can rest easy about Mr Roget,” Frank says.
“Good, that’s good,” says Lance. “But let me tell you, you can’t rest easy with Dolan. Listen, this kind of business involves a lot of companies working under so many different corporate partnerships that it’s not real hard for a smart accountant to, ah, obscure a company’s financial standing, know what I mean? The business lends itself to a kind of bookkeeping that’s very attractive to certain sorts of cash investors.”
“You’re telling us the porn biz is a good money laundry,” I say. “Not exactly a profound revelation.”
“All right, no big news to you guys,” Lance says. “But the word is that Ramhorn’s one of the biggest such laundries in the business. And that one of its chief investors is an outfit down Mexico way. One of the big-time drug outfits, to be exact. Now, I’m not saying it’s true, you understand, it’s just the word. But I thought you should know that about him. He might be connected to some badass people.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Frank says.
Steiner calls back.
“Yo, Bennie,” Lance says. He listens for a while and what he hears makes him smile. “All right, amigo! Nice going,” he says, then listens again. “Well hell, Bernardo, that’s just great. I’ll give them a call and they’ll take it from there. Thanks a ton, buddy. Yeah, you, too, my man. Take care.”
“You’re on,” he tells us. “He talked to Dolan and told him about Texas Starlight’s interest in getting Kitty for some project and how you’d like to talk to her and, if she’s interested, possibly work out a deal to buy out her contract from him before you go back to Texas. Dolan had him hold awhile as he ran it past one of his guys, then said he can meet with you at nine tomorrow morning but has to leave for the airport at nine thirty to catch a flight. He’ll be in South America for the next few weeks, so unless you want to wait till he gets back, a half hour is all he can give you. But so what, right? All you want to know is where she is, and you won’t need ten minutes to find out. Could be tough getting any kinda charter flight at this hour but . . .” He checks his watch. “To hell with a charter,” he says. “You get going right now, and even with fuel and piss stops, you can drive it and be there under the wire with only minor risk of a speeding ticket.”
He tells us Arizona doesn’t do daylight saving, so right now we’re on the same clock as California. He works his phone, scrolls the screen, writes a few things on a note sheet, then tears the sheet off the pad and hands it to Frank. “Ramhorn’s address. Super easy to find. Follow those simple directions and you can’t miss it.” He opens a table drawer and gets out a remote control for the gate and puts it on the table. “You’ll need this.” I tell him we’ll leave it under the driver’s seat of Moss’s vehicle, together with its keys, at the minimart just south of the foothills avenue. Lance says he knows the place. Frank tells him to wait a couple of minutes for us to clear the grounds before going down to uncuff Judson, who’s sure to be in ill temper and might be inclined to take a shot or two at us if he’s got a weapon in some hidey-hole out there.
As we start out, Lance says, “Say, beauty, what’s your name?”
Rayo turns to him, walking backward. “Cleo.”
“I doubt that, but it’s a good name. And your last name should be . . . Shade. Cleo Shade. Nice, huh?”
She laughs and pirouettes back around and follows us out.
We scoot downstairs and out to the porch, where Judson is snorting and gagging, snot and drool webbing from his chin, the veins standing out on his forehead. We shouldn’t have left him ball-gagged for so long. I remove the gag and fling it away and wipe my fingers on his shirt. He’s gasping like he’s just been pulled up from underwater, then throws up on himself, and we realize how close he’d come to drowning in the way I’d warned him about. I tell him Lance will be down in a minute to remove the cuffs, but he doesn’t look up at us, doesn’t say anything, just sits there gasping like there’s not enough air in the world. One of those hard guys who’s never before been so badly scared, never before faced a moment when he was certain he was about to die. I’d say his bodyguard days are done.
Lance called our travel time almost exactly right and his directions to the Ramhorn building are faultless. With only a few brief stops for gas and a last stop to wash up and change into fresh shirts—though Frank and I forwent the shaves we could use—we enter LA’s river of morning traffic with the sun blazing in our mirrors. When I find a spot in a parking lot almost directly across from Ramhorn, we’ve got more than fifteen minutes to spare, and Frank tells Rayo she’s not going in. If she did, we’d have to explain her—who she is, why she’s with us, and so on—which would only enlarge the pretense we’d have to hold together and increase the odds of a slip-up. I agree. The smaller the lie, the easier to support it.
She’s irked but knows this isn’t a time to argue. We get out and put on the windbreakers but leave our weapons in the vehicle. There’s a café next to the parking lot, and I tell Rayo she can watch the front door from there.
“Watch for what?” she says.
“For anybody who looks like a porn producer ready to jump at the chance to sign a sizzling prospect like Cleo Shade. Leave us a note if you decide to run off to a new career.”
She smiles flatly and gives me the finger.
We present ourselves to the lobby receptionist and she phones someone to report that the “Texas people” have arrived. An attractive blonde appears and introduces herself as Miss Nelson, Mr Dolan’s assistant. She gives us a brisk appraising look and says she hopes our long drive wasn’t too tiring, then escorts us into the elevator. We exit at the top floor and follow her to a door near the end of the hall. She raps it twice and conducts us into a spacious office of paneled wood walls and black leather furniture. “Your nine o’clock, Mr Dolan,” she says.
“Gentlemen,” he says, coming around from behind a massive desk positioned catty-corner to large, abutting windows that offer a grand view of the city. He’s tall and lanky, dressed in brown tweed, and has the ruddy complexion of a sportsman. Lance had said he was in his early seventies but looked vigorous for his age, and despite the white hair and baggy eyes I have to agree.
He dismisses Miss Nelson and extends his hand to us. “Nolan Dolan. Pleasure to meet you boys.” His voice has the deep resonance of the late John Huston’s, and it occurs to me that he looks a good deal like the famous moviemaker and even emulates his tight ironic smiles and narrow-eyed looks of cagey assessment. We shake his hand, Frank first, introducing himself as Thomas Hudson and me as his partner, Alex McPope, of the Texas Starlight Group.
“Yes, of course. Shall we sit?” Dolan nods at a conference table on which are set a large pot of coffee, cups and saucers, creamers and spoons, napkins in ornate holders. He sits across from us and says to help ourselves to the coffee. We both decline. Frank tells him we’re still fairly wired on all the coffee we drank on the drive from Tucson and apologizes for our casual dress and somewhat bleary aspects. “When we got to Tucson yesterday evening, we had no idea we’d be driving all night to meet with you this morning.”
“No apology necessary,” Dolan says. “I admire both your zeal and your stamina. I suggest, however, we not waste any time. Ben Steiner tells me you’re interested in an actress under contract to me.”
“Yes, sir,” Frank says. “Kitty Belle. According to Mr Steiner she’s contractually obligated to do one more picture for you but it hasn’t yet begun production.”
“That is correct on both counts.”
“Well, sir, we chose to drive here straightaway rather than wait for your return from South America precisely because of our zeal—as you so aptly termed it—to gain her participation in one of our upcoming cable films. We’d hate for her to begin work on another project before we can at least present ours to her.”
“Why Kitty? There are any number of actresses with much more experience. She’s only made three pictures.”
“And we’ve seen only one. But it was enough to convince us she has exactly the right blend of sexiness and audacity we want in the character she’d play. It’s the lead role and we think she’s ideal for it. If we could meet with her to discuss the project, and should she wish to be part of it, we’re sure we could all—she, we, and you—arrive at some satisfactory contractual arrangement.”
“I see.” He smiles his tight smile. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m sure of. I’m sure you’re lying through your teeth. During my phone talk with Steiner I had him stand by on a pretext while I inquired about your company. I know people who know everything about such matters, you see, and it didn’t take five minutes for me to know that the Texas Starlight Group is a total fiction. It’s not in any of the registries, and none of the cable outfits have heard of it, never mind contracted with it for a production. What say you cut the horseshit and tell me who you really are and why you’re looking for Kitty.”
“What about your flight?” Frank asks.
“What flight?” Dolan says with a smile.
“I see,” Frank says. He turns to me and raises his brow. I hold his look for a three-second count, then nod. It’s a ploy we sometimes use to give a questioner the impression we’ve agreed between ourselves to be forthcoming with him.
“We should’ve known a man of your experience could easily find us out,” Frank says. “The truth is we’re private investigators from Dallas under contract to locate the girl.”
“So why the artifice?”
“It’s our experience that people in the adult entertainment field are usually disinclined to answer questions about the business, especially from investigators.”
“That’s generally true, yes,” Dolan says. “Dallas, you say. Is that where she’s from?”
“It’s where her family lives.”
“Who hired you? Her father, husband, fiancé? Her pimp? There’s always some man trying to track down some girl who ran away to join the porn circus.”
“We’ve been retained by a legal firm that’s handling a substantial estate she and her brother recently acquired in consequence of their father’s death,” Frank says. “The mother passed away some years ago, and Kitty and her brother are the family’s sole survivors. The brother has been notified of the inheritance, but in accordance with the terms of the will it can’t be claimed by either sibling except in equal division with the other, or unless the other signs a verified quitclaim to his or her share, or unless it can be proved the other is dead. The firm somehow learned she’d been in The Love Tutors, under the name Kitty Quick, and we took it from there. Our charge is simply to find her and inform her of the circumstance so that she can respond to it as she chooses.”
Lance was dead right about Frank’s gift for extemporaneous invention. Actually, just about everyone in the family can lie with expert facility. It’s in our bones. But only Frank and Catalina also possess the equally valuable talent to know a lie when they hear one.
“I see,” Dolan says. “And her real name is . . . ?”
“I’m sorry, sir, we’re not at liberty to say. Nor to divulge any details beyond those I’ve already given. Legal restrictions.”
“Well, she’s not the first rich girl who’s ever ventured into the wide, wide world of fuck films,” Dolan says. “The richies all tend to do it for much the same reason. The outlaw adventure of it, I suppose we could call it. The thrill of wagging their ass at the world they grew up in. I can usually spot them at a glance, but Kitty’s never showed any sign of privileged upbringing. If she comes from money, it’s not old money.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir,” Frank says. “Where can we find her?”
He looks at me. “Do you ever speak, Mr . . . McPope?”
“When occasion necessitates.”
He chuckles and nods. “All right then, fellas. Now I’ll come clean with you. When I learned your company was a phony, I pegged you for hired trackers of some kind or other, and I thought we might be able to work a deal. I’ll tell you where I think she is if, should you find her, you’ll bring her to me before you take her to Texas or cut her loose. There’s something I need to discuss with her, and a short meet is all that’s required. After that, she can return to Dallas or whatever else she might choose. I’ll pay you off the books. Name your price.”
“What if she doesn’t want to see you?”
“I would expect you to bring her to me anyway. Which is why you can name your price.”
Frank gives me the raised brow again as if asking if we should agree to the offer. I nod. He takes a little notebook from his pocket and writes in it, tears out the sheet, puts it facedown on the table, and pushes it across to Dolan. “That’s our off-the-books fee for the sort of service you’re requesting,” he says. “It’s payable in cash when we turn her over to you at this office and it buys you exactly half an hour with her. Alex and I will wait in the hallway and time you.”
Dolan picks up the paper, considers it, and puts it in his coat pocket. “Agreed.”
He tells us she’s in Mexico. She went there with a man he describes as “a top executive of a Mexican business organization heavily invested in Ramhorn.” She met him at a party Dolan hosted for him four weeks ago at his Hidden Hills home. Every three months he throws a party for this man and around a dozen or so of his associates, and to ensure there are plenty of girls to go around, he also invites more than a dozen Ramhorn actresses. In addition to a fairly lavish buffet, Dolan tells us, his parties always include an open bar, a dance floor, and a live band. The party in question was the first one since Kitty had come to work for him, and he invited her to attend as his personal guest and seated her next to him at the head table, a detail I’m sure piques Frank’s curiosity as much as it does mine. In the course of that evening, the Mexican executive and his translator—the man doesn’t speak English and Dolan knows no Spanish—came over to Dolan’s table and introduced himself to Kitty and asked if he might have the honor of a dance. When she answered in Spanish, the man grinned and said something more to her, at which she laughed and in turn said something that made him laugh. Dolan hadn’t had any idea Kitty could speak Spanish and was impressed by her obvious fluency. She and the executive went off to have their dance, then had several more in succession. Then the next time Dolan looked, they were no longer on the floor or anywhere else in the room. The executive’s translator was dancing at that moment, so Dolan went to the executive’s table with a Ramhorn actress proficient in Spanish and asked the man’s friends if they knew where the couple had gone. The men all grinned, and one of them said they’d gone to have a drink. Dolan asked where, and the man said Mexico and winked at the actress, and the men all laughed.
“I haven’t received a word from her since that night,” Dolan says. “Her landlord says he hasn’t, either. Nor have any of her friends, not that she had many. Her phone doesn’t answer.” He looks off for a moment, then back at us. “I really must speak with her. I’m depending on you boys to make that possible.”
“Where in Mexico are they?” Frank says.
“I’m not sure. I asked his pals at the party, but they all shrugged and yukked it up some more. But the fella himself once told me he has a seaside place in Ensenada. Invited me to visit him there sometime and we’d go marlin fishing on his boat. I have a hunch it’s not his only residence, but as it’s the only one I know of, I’d say it’s the place to start your search.”
“I suppose so,” Frank says. “But now I’m curious about something, Mr Dolan. I’ve never been in Baja, but I’ve looked at a few maps, and if memory serves, Ensenada’s what . . . only sixty or seventy miles below the border? A couple of hundred miles from where we’re sitting? So I have to wonder why you haven’t hired somebody to go check out the guy’s place down there, see if she’s with him. LA’s got loads of top-flight private investigation companies and it’s hardly more than a one-day job. Of course, no legit company is going to kidnap her and risk the legal shit storm that could bring on them, but they could probably find out easily enough if she’s there. If she is, you could whiz on down and have your talk with her.”
Dolan nods. “As a matter of fact, I’ve spoken to a number of local agencies, all deemed among the best in town. But, you see, I don’t know the fella’s Ensenada address, and in order to find the residence, the investigators would need the name of its owner. Being the sort of close-to-the-vest fella he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought it under an alias, but what choice did I have but to give them his real name in the hope it’s on the deed so they could find the house? However, as soon as they heard the name, well, that was it. They got their hats. All of them.”
“Really? What’s his name?”
“Jaime Montón.”
Frank leans toward him over the table. “The Jaime Montón? Better known to the news media as El Chubasco?”
“The very same. But you boys don’t strike me as the sort to be as easily intimidated as the people I’ve tried to engage. I wouldn’t expect you to bow out of our agreement simply because—”
“We are bowing out,” Frank says, and stands up. I do, too. “Neither our Dallas contract nor our deal with you obligates us to risk our asses by possibly antagonizing the likes of Chubasco. We’re going back to Dallas to report our findings, Mr Dolan. For what it’s worth, we’ll leave your name out of it. Could be her family’s lawyers will want to hire a Mexican investigation team to look for her in Ensenada, who knows? That’s their business. But we are withdrawing from the matter altogether.”
“Now hold on, fellas. Let’s talk about this. If it’s a matter of more money—”
“Good day, sir,” Frank says, and heads for the door.
If I didn’t know him better he’d have me convinced we were quitting the hunt. But I know he’s just grabbing the opportunity to break us clear of Dolan. We’re halfway across the room when Frank stops and looks back at him, saying, “Almost forgot to mention. We have a certified birth certificate. She’s very much underage. What you California fellas refer to as San Quentin quail. Maybe you already knew that about her, maybe you didn’t, but if the law should somehow get wind of the kind of work she’s done with you, there’s no way you’ll dodge a child-porn conviction. I strongly advise that you destroy her contract and every video and movie you’ve made with her. Hell, if I were in your shoes, I’d clear my records of all traces of her. Every photo, every form she’s ever signed under any name. Any document that makes mention of her in any way. Just a suggestion.”
Dolan nods dolefully.
At the door, I cut a look back at him. He’s staring down at his folded hands on the table, his face showing every day of his age.
As the elevator doors begin to close, I ask Frank how much of a fee he’d presented to Dolan on the notepaper.
“Fifty grand. Expected him to laugh and haggle it down, but he didn’t bat an eye.”
“I know why he didn’t.”
“Me, too. He’s in love with the kid.”
“Exactly. That important talk he wants to have with her? Bet you the ranch he wants to ask her to marry him. Or maybe just ‘come live with me and be my love and I will give you plenty.’”
“Poor old bastard.”
“Got that right. To be in love with somebody more than fifty years younger than you is about as poor old bastard as a man can get. But the hell with him. How about this kid? This no-big-deal assignment, bro, is no big deal no longer.”
“Said a mouthful. Chubasco, for Christ’s sake.”
“You know, Frankie, we could tell the Cat we couldn’t find her. ‘We’re truly sorry, señora. We traced her as far as LA and hit a dead end. Makes us ashamed because we pride ourselves on our expertise, but even more because you were counting on us and we let you down. But still, she’s vanished. . . . We could tell her that. I mean, hell, man, it’s almost the truth. Be done with this fool’s errand.”
“Or,” Frank says, “we could call Mateo and see what the Jaguaros can give us on Chubasco’s whereabouts. And if we get a lead on that, try to find out if she’s still with him. And if she is, try to figure out how to detach her from him.”
“Or we could do that, yeah.”