Chapter Three
Someone banged on the door, disturbing his nap. He woke up, bathing in a puddle of his own sweat. Durrutti frowned, etching a single line at a ninety degree angle in his brow. He bawled, “Who’s there?”
A reedy soprano answered him. “It’s me ... Arlo. With Jackie and shit.”
“What do you want?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to sleep, damn it!”
“In the middle of the day?”
Durrutti pouted. “It ain’t against the law, is it?”
Arlo and Jackie were a dope dealing team of queens that had resided at the El Capitán for years. Arlo was a drop-dead gorgeous twenty-five year old pre-op tranny with silky long black hair from Chicago’s southside. She was always talking about wanting a baby, a child of her own. Jackie was ten years her senior, a six-foot-tall former Marine born in Guam who’d gotten drummed out of the Corps for breaking her commanding officer’s jaw. An unflattering wasteland of knife scars crisscrossed her high-cheeked face and she was as restless and angry as Arlo was bubbly and cheerful.
“C’mon, baby girl,” Arlo crooned, sounding blissed out. She ran her fingernails across the door. “I was hoping you had some cigarettes. We ran out and we ain’t got no money.”
Dope fiends were more persistent than the police when it came to getting what they wanted. More demanding than the Internal Revenue Service. If you had something, anything, they never left you alone. Not while you were alive. Thinking the twosome might help him find Jimmy Ramirez, Durrutti rolled out of bed and opened the door and herded Arlo and Jackie into the room.
The couple promenaded into his boudoir nursing a pair of visible hangovers. Jackie was barefoot and nude under her honey-cream silk dressing gown. Arlo had on a red mini-dress, black stockings and orange suede fuck-me pumps with six inch stiletto heels. Durrutti settled them down on the bed—there was nowhere else to sit—and handed out Marlboro cigarettes like a proper host. Then he related the predicament he was in, not mentioning Jimmy Ramirez, the missing gun or Paul Stevens.
Jackie’s pimply skin was grayed with exhaustion. She flicked a hank of hair off her scaly forehead by jerking her chin. Her button-hard eyes lasered a hole in Durrutti while he told his story. She snickered at him in hostile flirtation when he was finished. “What a pisser. A dead cop and the Feds are asking you about it. Some guys have all the luck. You know who snuffed that pig, don’t you?”
Durrutti was wary, yet eager to draw her out. He stifled the excitement in his voice. The effort made his sphincter itch. “No, I don’t. Do you?”
The former jarhead knew something—you could see the heat in her crumpled face, how she flushed, her blood jogged hot with the thought of a cop’s death. Jackie moved her lips, delicate compared to the rest of her. She offered a brutally false smile as she finished the Marlboro and ground the butt under her naked foot into the green shag carpeting. “If I do, I ain’t saying. Talking about it is foolish. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”
The torrid Mission Street sun suddenly hit the El Capitán with a ferocity that cremated Durrutti’s eyes in their sockets—the temperature in his room felt well over a hundred degrees. His tongue was a corpse rotting in his mouth and he could think of nothing else to say.
Arlo saw he was slipping into a funk and came to his rescue. She said to Jackie, half scolding her, “Tell Ricky what you know, you evil thing. Give the girlfriend a fucking break. The bitch needs your help.”
The teasing in Arlo’s husky voice worked on Jackie like a charm. Ever the good husband, she lived to satisfy her wife’s wishes. She drew her gown tightly around her and said solemnly, speaking like a priest giving a catechism lesson, “Okay ... you know the Mara Salvatrucha?”
Equivocating because he had nothing to gain by making an admittance, Durrutti replied, “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about them.”
“You don’t?”
Durrutti faked exasperation. “No. If I say I don’t, I don’t.”
The Salvadorean gang was fighting the other major clicas, the Sureños and the Norteños, for territory in the north Mission. The intersection of Nineteenth and Mission Streets by the check cashing store and the Sunrest Bar had been a war zone for two years. Placas were spray painted on every wall at the corner. Durrutti was semi-friendly with one of the Mara Salvatrucha soldados, a youth in his early twenties called Lonely Boy.
“Well, word is,” Jackie said, “them dudes done it.”
Durrutti let the news seep in. If the Mara Salvatrucha were shooting cops, he was in for a miserable future. Mission Street would become a tunnel of hate with no exit. The police would make him regret being alive. The three of them were quiet as the flies in the room swarmed around their heads. Arlo studied her lacquered fingernails while Jackie fiddled with her belt. Changing the subject, Durrutti said to Arlo, “You seen Jimmy Ramirez around?”
“No. He a friend of yours?”
“A friend? No, but I know he’s this skinny Mexican dude that hangs out at Hunt’s Donuts.”
“Damn right I know him. We front him dope. Helps him to make some money. What do you want with him?”
Arlo’s sharp wolfish face and her bright feral eyes blackened with mascara exhibited an overweening curiosity she couldn’t quite control—she was a virulent gossipmonger. So Durrutti smothered his own fervor in nonchalance: “Ah, nothing much.”
Jackie snorted two blasts of derision through her mucus-ringed nostrils. “You’re a goddamn liar.”
Making personality assessments wasn’t Jackie’s metier. Her emphatic tone sparked Durrutti’s inquisitiveness. Keeping his voice flat and saturated with boredom, he asked, “Why do you say that?”
The ex-marine’s vocal cords imitated a car engine in need of a quart of oil. “You should see the look on your face. But what the fuck do you care?” The pay phone in the hall began to ring, reverberating through the room’s paper-thin walls. The ringing agitated Jackie and she got huffy. “I’m gonna tear that goddamn thing off the wall, it keeps making that noise.”
The hotel desk clerk on the second floor took the call, then yelled out Durrutti’s name. His cry bulleted down the hallway, shaking the cobwebs on the wallpaper and stirring the dust on the floor. Durrutti told Jackie and Arlo to sit tight, that he’d be back in a minute.
To his delight, Jimmy Ramirez’s syrupy codeine drenched voice, smooth enough to melt the barbed wire off a prison fence, splashed into his ear when he picked up the receiver. The homeboy’s accented English deconstructed his name. “Ricky Durrutti?”
“Is this Jimmy?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Me.”
“And who are you?”
“It’s me, Ricky.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Que pasa?”
“Funny you ask. I’ve been looking for you. I need to talk with you, man. Real badly.”
Jimmy was immediately paranoid. “What do you mean?”
The intensity of his fear was like electricity, with all its energy directed at Durrutti. The voltage made his head hurt. He tried to deflect it by saying, “I just need to see you, that’s all.”
Jimmy Ramirez lapsed into a more characteristic laid-back attitude and waxed ambiguous. “Yeah, well, not right now. I’ve got shit to do. You wanna see me, you gotta make an appointment with my ass.”
“It’s important.”
“How important?”
“Like serious. I can’t say anything about it on the telephone.”
“Yeah?”
Durrutti attempted to remain stoic and failed. “Uh, listen ... you know anything about the cop that got popped?”
A full minute went by before Jimmy said anything. Sixty seconds of malignant silence that had Durrutti questioning his own sanity. Jimmy replied, prevaricating through his teeth, “You shouldn’t be asking me shit like that. Maybe I do. And maybe I don’t. Who wants to know?”
“Me and everyone else in this goddamn neighborhood.”
“The cops asking?”
“Yeah.”
“They pull you in?”
Durrutti knew he shouldn’t talk about it. He knew it the minute he gave way to the impulse. “Yup.”
“You tell them anything?” Jimmy demanded.
“No.”
“I hope you didn’t because I’d hate to have to kick your ass for you. Did I tell you they talked to me, too?”
Durrutti’s pulse did a mambo. “No shit? What did you say to them? That’s what I have to talk to you about. They said you told them Paul Stevens—”
“I ain’t saying what I told them. And I don’t want to hear no more about it from you either. You got that?”
The threat charmed Durrutti and he laughed it off with a dose of unfelt bravado. “Right. Have you seen Lonely Boy?”
“Who’s that? The vato who runs with the Mara Salvatrucha? The pinche loco that belongs in jail? He’s got some cousins on Treat Street? That him?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know him, but I know who he is and I ain’t seen him since the day he got into a fight with this vato over by the McDonald’s. The fool was messing around with the homeboy’s ruca. Mira, huero, what do you want to find him for?”
“To ask him about that cop.”
“Leave that shit alone. That’s all I got to say. And if you want to talk to me, I’ll see you later. Maybe at Hunt’s.”
“When?”
“I just told you. Later.”
Jimmy Ramirez hung up the phone, leaving him alone in the hallway.
Durrutti retraced his steps across the carpet to his room and found it had been vacated—Arlo and Jackie had departed, leaving a trace of Arlo’s bootleg Revlon perfume in the stale air. A tiny brown mouse peeked at him from under the bed, twitching its whiskers. He sat down on the sagging mattress, suddenly exhausted. A wintery chill went right into his bone marrow, like he was dying. The sunshine in the window colored the room burgundy red; the curtains rustled with the fog. The clock on the nightstand ticktocked loudly. He ran his tongue around the rim of his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a meal. The thing of it was, he wasn’t hungry. He went back out in the hall to place a collect person-to-person telephone call to Maimonides to ask for his help.