Dark vacant lot
Autumn leaves prance and spin
under a street light—Debisu
A chill gust sweeps across the Canterbury’s self-parking lot and stirs the dead leaves. With a stick of turbocharged weed clamped between my fingers I search my pockets for a light. The steerer waits patiently. He’s seen me put away four doubles at Knockers; he must not have high expectations of me.
I don’t find a lighter but I do find Overshort’s cast-off cigarettes. “Would you believe I don’t have a light?” I tell him.
While he searches his own pockets, I fumble a Verve from the pack and swap it for the Nearvana-spiked smoke.
The steerer gets my cigarette lit, then watches while I inhale deeply. “This is funny. I ain’t never watched a cop get high before.”
Yes, the long-denied nicotine is almost that good. Much as I would be happy to stand here and suck the cigarette down to my fingertips, there’s something I’ve got to find out. “I got to get some more of this Nearvana stuff,” I tell him. He won’t have any, but his connection will. His connection might be my connection to Hector.
“Yeah, well, like I said, I ain’t got no more,” the steerer replies. “I might know where you can get some. It’ll cost you.”
A twenty buys me an address on South Hope Street not far from a railroad spur. I know the area: machine shops and small fabricators punctuated by grinder takeouts and stuffy taverns. Heavy industry and heavier drinking. Fights that start soon after the five o’clock whistle and continue past last call keep the evening tour lively. At this hour the bars will be long closed, the area relatively quiet.
‘Lotta Cars for Less takes up half a block. The sales lot isn’t fenced, but it is roped off with a bulky chain to keep browsers from taking unauthorized test drives. Old iron horses sit forlornly in the lot, their bumpers dull pewter.
I’m familiar with this place, and its owner: Carlotta Trephino. We have long suspected she’s up to something. She makes entirely too much money selling lemons. We’ve never caught her at anything big and haven’t been able to make the small stuff stick. She buys high-priced representation and she gets her money’s worth.
There’s no showroom, just an office in a trailer planted in the far corner. The iron grates over the windows detract from the trailer’s gingerbreading. When I’m within two feet of the trailer, an overhead spotlight comes on. Motion detector. The light temporarily blinds me.
The steel door looks more solid than the body. The mail slot is roughly at eye level. From the bottom of the steps, I reach up and knock on the door. It resounds with a clang. There is no response. After a moment, I try again. Still no response, and I’m starting to think I got burned for my twenty. I try one more time. “Hey, Hector sent me,” I holler.
“Hector, huh?” asks someone from inside and the door opens a crack. I wait. A dark-skinned man puts first his head, then his body through the opening. He greets me with a Ruger 9mm reception stick in his fist.
“Hey, what gives?” I ask with the nonchalance of someone too drunk to be afraid. Four doubles admirably buffer me from a PTSD fugue.
The sentry is six-eight and two thirty at least, much of it packed into in his shoulders, arms, and chest. With a physique like that he could play basketball, and he does, or did, before he got sidelined by a drug problem he’s supposed to be in rehab for. It’s Airol Jones, star center for the Rebels, namesake of pricey athletic shoes. Airol Jones! Rebels tickets have always been out of my reach so the closest I’ve ever gotten to him has been the small screen. Yet here he is in a used car lot trailer in Paradise City. My lucky day!
Three battered and scarred work desks with chairs cram the thinly carpeted space just inside the door. Airol Jones doesn’t give me time to snoop around but nudges me down the short corridor to my left. At its end, a door bears an oak sign with the name “Carlotta” and an ivy-and-flower border burned into it. Airol Jones opens the door and ushers me inside with the Ruger.
It’s like passing through Alice’s looking glass. A fog envelops me, one that smells pleasantly of tobacco and cognac. Cigars. I blink against the smoke. Furry yellow light glows from a single source in the center of the room at about table height.
I draw closer to the light, a desk lamp. Wearing a trim dark suit, Carlotta Trephino sits in a leather side chair in front of a long desk. Her face in the lamp’s shadow is recognizable from night-owl TV when she stars in her own commercials. Fifty-ish, she is so attractive it doesn’t matter that her face has that taut look of aggressive cosmetic surgery. The white blaze that accents her carefully styled gunpowder black hair has earned her the nickname “Skunk” from those she has wronged.
She holds a shot glass in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. Cigars. My brain is trying to tell me something about cigars that I can’t put my finger on.
“And who might you be, good lookin’?” Carlotta asks.
I briefly consider giving a moniker. But Carlotta Trephino can’t hide, and neither can Airol Jones so I answer, “Will Mansion. I’m a friend of Hector Waltann’s.”
“No you’re not, honey,” she says.
Uh oh, busted! My back breaks out in goose bumps. It’s a relief to hear her say, “Hector didn’t have friends. Toys, maybe, not friends.” She pats a second side chair next to her. “But you can be my friend, honey. Sit down. Or am I too old for you?”
“A beautiful woman is ageless,” I answer with glibness I’d never attempt sober.
“And a powerful one, immortal,” she replies, just as glib, or drunk.
The chair’s leather creaks as I take my seat.
“Have a drink?” She hoists the shot glass. “We have nothing but the best.”
Indeed they do. The desk lamp shines on a humidor, a marble box, a crystal ashtray, and several bottles. One holds wormwood, purely illegal. Another contains something clear. Tequila, maybe–-the label pictures a spiky cactus plant.
Carlotta says, “Airol, be an angel and pour the man something good.”
Jones gives her the menacing scowl that always intimidated on the court. “Woman, I ain’t here to be your Step’n Fetchit,” he says. Nevertheless, he goes behind the desk for another shot glass that he fills with the colorless liquid. I knock it back in one bullet-to-the brain gulp. It’s tequila all right but from the taste of it, not the kind that has to be chased with lime and salt. It slides down like satin, puts the Seagrams to shame.
“Easy, honey, that’s blue agave,” Carlotta says. “It should be savored, not chugged.”
No kidding. Distilled from a rare Central American plant, the liquor is more expensive than the best single malt and I could probably buy two weeks’ worth of food with what one shot goes for. I’ve often wondered if it could possibly be as good as advertised. It is.
Carlotta pours us more. “So how is Hector?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t seen him. Kinda thought I’d find him here.” Hector was into cigars. He had a humidor in the condo.
“He hasn’t made this scene in about six weeks,” Jones says.
My glass is full again. Am I due for another already? Must be.
Airol Jones picks up the humidor and holds it out to me. “Go ahead. That’s what you here for, ain’t it?”
Damned if I know. I lift the lid.
The cigars nestle snugly against rose-colored satin. The warm aroma has me salivating. I haven’t had a cigar since the chief’s assistant had her baby and brought some to the office, a cardboard boxful of cellophane-wrapped stubby stogies. Each of us had one and some got sick on them. Something tells me these are not likely to produce the same watery eyes, hacking coughs, and burning-rags smell.
“Cohibas,” Airol says. “Fidel’s favorite.”
Real Havana cigars. Not made of domestic tobacco grown from Cuban seed, but the genuine article, smuggled in. At the moment, though, I’m not thinking about unlawful importation. I’m thinking, how can I get one of those cigars? Because what I want now, what I crave with every fiber of my trembling being, is a smoke. The cigarette I had behind Knockers only whetted my appetite.
With deliberate movements reminiscent of Japanese tea ceremonies, Carlotta takes a cigar from the box and slices off its tip with a cutter whose blades gleam gold. She gently tamps the cigar in a crystal dish powdered with a thin layer of white ash and hands it to me. The cigar’s outer wrapper is soft ocher, velvety, as tender to the touch as an old woman’s hand. Carlotta takes a match from the marble box. No butane lighters here; the fluid’s fumes would sully the earthy scent of the carefully tended tobacco. She strikes the match and the head ignites with a lightning crackle. I take two tentative puffs, then fill my lungs.
Airol Jones blows a smoke ring and says, “Rolled against the inner thighs of young virgins.”
I laugh away the cliché but not before picturing a clutch of young women sitting on a wooden bench, sarongs parted over firm flesh, and taste the salt of their sweat.
“Ah, but this is better. How’s the phrase go?” I ask. “‘A girl is just a girl, but a good cigar is a smoke’?”
Carlotta chuckles. “That’s ‘woman,’ not ‘girl.’” She lays a hand high up on my leg. “What’s the matter, Will? Don’t you like women?”
Jones snorts. “Get real, Carlotta. With his looks, he probably gets all the cooz he wants. No, I’m betting it takes something a little stronger to get our boy Will going.” He settles back in Carlotta’s desk chair with a drink and a cigar. Carlotta strokes my thigh.