The Collection Page 8

  He was getting not only frustrated but angry. The intru­sion was bad enough, but these constant references to a re­lationship he was supposed to have with this Libby were really starting to irritate him.

  Ida leaned toward him confidingly. "It wasn't always this way, you know. When she and Edward first got married, they were the happiest couple in the world. Libby adored Edward. He really was her dream husband. She probably told you they honeymooned in Paris. After that, after they returned, they were still blissfully happy, and it was only as time wore on that they began to ... you know."

  "What?"

  "Drift apart, get on each others' nerves, whatever you want to call it. That was when he started mistreating her."

  Shirley shook her head. "I've told her a million times she should leave him, get a divorce. It's not as if they have kids." She looked around the room. "I think we've all told her that." Corroborating nods. "But she just couldn't see it. She was always making excuses for him, pretending like it was her fault, saying that if she hadn't screwed up and made chicken for Sunday dinner instead of turkey, or forgotten to fold his underwear properly, nothing would have hap­pened."

  Brandon couldn't help himself. "What did he do to her? Did he beat her?"

  "You mean she hasn't told you?" Ida clucked disapprov­ingly. "She should have at least mentioned why she wanted you."

  Shirley leaned forward. "I guess you don't like to know too many of the details about it, huh?"

  Elaine seemed outraged. "You mean you don't even ask questions? You just do it for the money? It doesn't matter to you why someone would-" She grimaced distastefully. "- need your services?"

  Ida shushed them. "We're not here to judge you," she told him. "We're here to support Libby."

  "I told you-"

  "Yes, we know. This is all becoming very tiresome."

  "Then maybe you'd better leave."

  "Don't get me wrong," Ida said quickly. "I have nothing but the utmost respect for you. We all do. And I don't think any of us intended to suggest otherwise."

  Elaine remained silent.

  "She needs you. Libby. She really does."

  The other women were nodding.

  "And we're on her side completely. We totally under­stand. We're just concerned, that's all."

  "Edward's a monster," Barbara said.

  Next to her, Alicia nodded. "You can't believe what he does to that poor woman, how much she's had to put up with, and for so long."

  Ida agreed. "Oh, he's horrible to her. He makes her do ... nasty things ... rude things." She waved her hankied hand at him. "You know what I mean."

  He wasn't sure he did, but there were images in his mind of which he was sure these ladies would not approve.

  "He'd be better off dead," Ida said matter-of-factly.

  He suddenly realized what they'd been getting at, what they thought he did, and his mouth went dry. He looked around the room, at each of them in turn. All eyes were fo­cused on him, the gazes of the women flat, unreadable.

  He stood up, shaking his head. "No," he said. And, not knowing what else to say, he repeated it. "No."

  " 'No' what?" Shirley asked.

  He glanced over at the older lady, saw only open curios­ity on her face.

  "It's my fault," Ida said quickly. "I'm the one who wanted to come over and ... check you out. Not that I don't trust Libby's judgment, mind you, but... well, that's just the kind of person I am."

  "He's a monster," Barbara repeated. "I saw the burn marks on her arms one time, when she was wearing a blouse with real floppy sleeves. She thought I didn't see, but I saw."

  "I saw them on her legs," Natalie confided in a whisper. "In the changing room at Mervyns."

  Elaine took a deep breath. "We took my kids to the pool last summer and I saw a bloodstain on the back of her bathing suit bottom. She was bleeding back there. She was wearing purple, and I guess she thought it was dark enough, but I could see the stain. It was leaking through."

  "He is a monster," Ida said.

  "Maybe she should just divorce him," Brandon offered.

  Shirley shook her head. "No, she won't do that."

  "And it's gone far beyond that stage," Elaine said.

  Ida nodded. "She knows what she has to do. She's known it for a while, but she just hasn't wanted to admit it to herself."

  "Remember the blood in her kitchen, when we went over there that time?" Barbara looked around at her friends. "How it was still dripping down her legs and we pretended like we couldn't see it, and she kept wiping up the bloody footprints but every time she'd walk to the sink to rinse out her washcloth she'd make even more?"

  "We remember," Elaine said softly.

  Ida closed her eyes, nodded, then opened them again. "Like I said, she's known what she has to do for a while now. She just hasn't known how to go about it. She realized, of course, that she couldn't do it herself. She wouldn't know how, for one thing. And of course she would immediately be put under a microscope. So it had to be someone else, some­one new, someone entirely unconnected to her, who couldn't be traced back and who could be counted on to keep quiet." She smiled. "I don't know how Libby came up with you, Bob, but I must say I think she made the right choice."

  Brandon sat down, not sure of what to say.

  "I heard her say that next time he's going to cut it out of her." Shirley's voice was hushed.

  "Next time he's going to kill her," Barbara said.

  "Torture her, then kill her," Elaine corrected.

  They were all nodding.

  "There was a lot of blood in that kitchen." Natalie closed her eyes. "Way too much blood."

  "Well, the real reason we came today," Ida said, once again taking control, "is because we couldn't let Libby pay for this herself. She needs all the money she can get, espe­cially afterward, and since we're her friends .. . well, we just didn't think it was right. So we're going to pay for your services, Bob." She glanced at the other women. "Could you leave Bob and me alone for a minute? I'll meet you back out at the van."

  The other women stood, said goodbye, and waved, and he nodded as they passed by him and walked out of the liv­ing room and through the entryway.

  "I didn't want to say anything in front of the girls, be­cause they don't know how much a service like this costs, and some of them are barely making ends meet as it is. So I collected fifty dollars apiece from them and let them think that was enough to cover it. I made up the rest."

  She withdrew from her purse a folded check. He un­folded it and looked at the amount.

  Fifty thousand dollars.

  He tried to press it back into her hand.

  "What's the matter? Not enough?" She looked at him. "Sixty? Seventy-five? A hundred? Name the amount." She reached into her purse.

  "No," he said. "It's ... it's too much."

  She placed a cold hand on his. "It's worth it."

  "I can't-"

  "She'll never be right internally, not after what he did. I mean, last time he put her in the hospital. She was in inten­sive care for two days. I'm afraid that next time he'll do more than that."

  "Ida-"

  "Bob..."

  He looked into Ida's eyes, and he had the feeling that she'd known all along he wasn't who they'd kept insisting he was. He looked back at the check.

  "I... I seem to have misplaced her address," he said.

  "That's all right." Ida reached into her purse, withdrew a folded piece of paper on which she'd already written Libby's name and address.

  He cleared his throat. "And when was it she wanted me to ... do it? I seem to have forgotten that as well."

  "Tomorrow night. After eleven."

  He nodded, found a pen, wrote it down on the paper.

  She stood, closing the clasp on her purse, and he fol­lowed her silently out of the living room. In the entryway, she turned to face him. She stared at him meaningfully. "Thank you, Bob."

  He nodded. "You're welcome," he said.

  She smiled at him, then turned a
nd waved to her friends as she walked down the front walkway toward the blue minivan parked on the street.

  He closed the door behind her.

  Bumblebee

  This was one of my first attempts to write for a "theme" anthology. Generally speaking, I don't like to write stories following specific guidelines. I find it difficult to work within constraints, and invariably the stories turn out to be stilted and inferior. "Bumblebee" came quickly, however, and turned out pretty well.

  Bumblebee, by the way, is a real place, a ghost town off Black Canyon Highway between Phoenix and Prescott. When I was a kid, the buildings still had furniture, but it's been looted over the years and has become something of a tourist spot. There's even a sign for it on the highway. I restored it to its former ghost town glory and moved it to the southwest corner of the state for the purposes of this story.

  Trinidad was still alive when I found him. Barely. Julio had called and told me that he'd seen the redneck's pickup heading through the desert north of Cave Creek, hell-bent for leather on the old dirt road that led to Bloody Basin, and while Julio wasn't exactly the world's most reliable songbird, I believed him this time, and I decided to follow up on it.

  I found Trinidad lying facedown in a low drainage ditch. He was easy to spot. The ditch ran right next to the road, and the coyote's red flannel shirt stood out like a beacon against the pale desert sand. I jumped out of the Jeep without both­ering to turn off the ignition and slid down the side of the ditch. The redneck hadn't made much of an effort to either cover his tracks or hide the body, which made me think he hadn't intended to kill the coyote, only scare him, but Trinidad was still badly hurt. His face was a swollen demon­stration of various bruise types, blood leaked from his nose, mouth, and both ears, and it was clear from the awkward an­gles at which he held his arms and legs that there'd been a lot of bones broken.

  I knelt down next to the coyote. His eyes were closed, and he did not open them even when I called his name. I touched my hand to his bloody cheek, and he moaned, try­ing to pull away. "You okay?" I asked.

  "Bumblebee," he whispered, eyes still closed.

  He was obviously far gone, delirious, and I cursed myself for not having fixed the CB in the Jeep. It was a ten-minute drive back to Cave Creek, and nearly an hour's drive back to the nearest hospital in Scottsdale. Phoenix Memorial had a chopper and theoretically could fly over and pick him up, but there was no way to get ahold of them.

  I was afraid to move Trinidad, but more afraid to leave him, so I quickly ran up the side of the ditch, opened the Jeep's back gate, spread out a blanket, and slid back down to where the coyote lay. Trinidad was heavier than I thought-it's never as easy to carry a man in real life as it seems to be in the movies-but adrenaline strength let me lift him up the incline. Carefully, I placed him down on the blankets, my arms soaked with the warm wetness of his blood. I closed the gate. "Don't worry," I told him. "I'll get you home safely."

  He moaned in agony. "Bumblebee," he repeated.

  By the time we reached Cave Creek he was dead.

  The sun rose precisely at five forty-five. By six thirty, the temperature was already well into the nineties. The television weatherman on the morning news told me while I was drink­ing my wake-up coffee that it was going to be "another gor­geous day," and I flipped him off. To him it might be "another gorgeous day," but to those of us with no air conditioners in our cars, who had to work outside of climate-controlled offices, it was going to be another sentence in hell.

  I finished my coffee and quickly scanned the newspaper to see if Trinidad's death had made the back pages or the obituary column. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I wasn't surprised. Print space in Arizona newspapers was generally reserved for those with Anglo ancestry. Even Latinos who had crossed over into mainstream success got short shrift, and the pass­ing of people like Trinidad, who were successful only in the immigrant underground, weren't acknowledged at all.

  Some days I was ashamed to be white.

  Last night, I'd told everything I knew to the police. They dutifully took it down, but the case against the redneck was weak at best, the evidence based solely on hearsay accounts by notoriously unreliable witnesses, and I knew the investi­gation into Trinidad's death would get the "Phoenix Spe­cial"-a two-day open file with no accompanying legwork, and an UNSOLVED stamp on top of the folder. The situation might have been different if Trinidad had been white, if he'd been respectable, but then again it might not. Heat seemed to make a lot of people lazy, especially cops.

  Bumblebee.

  I'd been puzzling over that all night, unsure if it was supposed to mean something or if it was merely a word dragged I from the depths of Trinidad's dying, hallucinating brain was going to assume that it was meaningful, that the coyote was trying to tell me something. I owed him at least that much. Besides, death lent weight to mysteriously muttered phrases whether they deserved it or not.

  I finished my coffee, finished my paper.

  Just before eight, I called up Hog Santucci, a friend of mine who worked downtown in Records, and ran the name; by him. It didn't seem to ring any bells, but then it had been a shot in the dark anyway. Even if Trinidad had been trying to tell me something, I still didn't know whether "Bumble­bee" was the name of a man, the code word for a booked passage, or the identification of an item or process known only to him.

  I figured I'd check with Julio next, see if he knew what the name meant, see if he knew any more about Trinidad's rendezvous with the redneck at the same time.

  The redneck.

  That son of a bitch was really starting to get to me. Usually, when I take a case or get involved in an investigation, it's easy for me to keep my distance, to maintain my professionalism. I don't make moral judgments, I simply do what I am hired to do, and I only take a job if its parameters are I well within the boundaries of legality. This Raymond Chandler crap about straddling the line, or those Bogart and Mitchum movies where the detective always falls for a pretty face and battles for her honor with the villain, that's all bullshit. Pure fiction. But the redneck really was like one of those movie villains, and I hated the son of a bitch. Espe­cially since I couldn't seem to get a single scrap of evidence on him.

  What made it even worse was that the redneck seemed to be almost a folk hero to some of the pin-striped pinheads who passed for human in the downtown offices of the INS. It was well known in certain circles that he'd had a hand in the fire that had destroyed one of the big Sanctuary safe houses down in Casa Grande, and that he'd had something to do with those fourteen illegals who'd roasted to death in that abandoned semi outside of Tucson. But while the feds and the locals were making a big show out of fighting it out over jurisdictional rights, both were making only token ef­forts to dredge up evidence. As they saw it, the redneck was doing their work for them, in his own crudely violent fash­ion. As a criminal, he was not subject to the same restric­tions they were, and in a warped and twisted way they seemed to admire his racist ingenuity.

  Strangely enough, I'd been hired by Father Lopez, a priest involved in the Sanctuary movement, to look into the matter. Tired of dealing with the intransigence of the blue uniforms, the gray suits, and the red tape, afraid for the safety of the dozen or so Salvadoran refugees he was hiding in the basement of his church, he'd asked me to see if I could dig up anything on the redneck which could put him away for good. Father Lopez had been threatened more than once, and he knew it was only a matter of time before those threats were carried through.

  So far, I'd come up snake eyes, but I was getting close and the redneck knew it. That's why he'd roughed up Trinidad. And that's why the deal had gone wrong. I don't think he'd intended to kill the coyote, but he had. He'd pan­icked, gone too far, and now the noose was starting to tighten. It was only a matter of time before he slipped up, made a mistake, and I pulled that sucker taut. The law might not be willing to work to bring down the redneck, but they couldn't and wouldn't turn him out if he was dropped, case closed, into their fat blue laps.r />
  Julio was gone when I stopped by his apartment, and his old lady didn't seem to know where he'd gone to. Or at least wasn't willing to inform a cowboy-booted gringo of his whereabouts, so I decided to drop by and see Father Lopez.

  At the church it was pandemonium. Father Lopez had made the mistake of telling his guests that Trinidad was walking with God, hoping they'd help him pray for the coy­ote, but the result had been to panic the refugees. Trinidad had brought most of them over, was their sole symbol of strength and stability in this country, and his killing fright­ened them badly. They naturally thought that his murder was the result of a death squad bent on tracking them down. When I arrived, Father Lopez was trying to explain that the coyote had been killed by an American, an American acting on his own and not in the employ of their government, but it was clear even to me that few if any of them were buying it. They seemed to want to leave the church now, strike out on their own, and take their chances scattered on the street.

  "Father," I said. "I need to talk to you for a minute."

  "Hold on." He spoke rapidly in Spanish to the agitated people in the basement, trying to assuage their fears.

  My Spanish was nowhere near fluent, but I moved next to the priest, motioned for him to be quiet, and gave the refugees my own version of the story. Since I was white and obviously American, my words carried a little more weight than those of the priest, though they were spoken haltingly. I guess to them I represented some sort of authority.

  Father Lopez looked at me gratefully, then expanded on what I'd said, speaking quickly and reassuringly. It seemed to work. I went back upstairs to wait.

  After the situation had settled down and Father Lopez had emerged from the basement, I spoke to the priest alone. We were in his office off the vestibule, and I was seated in a low comfortable chair. I leaned forward. "Does the name Bumblebee mean anything to you?" I asked.

  He had been casually reclining in his chair, and suddenly he sat up very straight. His face was pale. "Who told you about Bumblebee?"

  "Trinidad," I said. "Although he didn't really tell me. It was the last thing he said before he died."