Lucky Stiff Page 12

  In the car lot I became acquainted with the sun's custom of turning every automobile into an individual heat bomb. It took the air-conditioning in our silver Mercedes ten minutes to cool the car to the temperature outside, then another five to cool down to something approaching life-sustaining. Having offered to drive, I got practically second-degree burns on my hands just dealing with the controls to try to get the air-conditioning going in the first place.

  Thinking about it, I realized that those who don't make good in Las Vegas must feel they have to stay there year-round, and forever. Because leaving equals defeat. What better city is there in the whole world for opportunity? Not only did Las Vegas as a municipality keep having growth spurt after money boom, with all the chances spurts and booms offer, it's always been the place where just pure luck could reach out any second and transform you. You go from school bus driver or wallpaper sales representative to person who gives away Cadillacs as room service tips and flies to Vienna in a jet-copter for dinner. It's really true, a streak of luck in Las Vegas can take you from shit to shine, just like that. No, once here, you can't leave.

  And of course the tourists don't stop coming, they never stop coming.

  Consulting my map and notes, I drove north away from the airport, then headed west across town on one of the commercial main drags that serve the many subdivisions. There I found a particular strip plaza and parked.

  "Can't I come in?" Duane begged.

  "No. I want you to get the full effect."

  I headed into a shop while Duane lit a cigarette and walked into a cool mist from an apparatus that was set up beneath the awning of a coffee shop next door.

  My errand didn't take long. I came out. Duane looked and said, "Dear God."

  "Ya think?"

  "Dear God. Did you do something to your chest too?"

  "Very astute, Cub Scout."

  "You look utterly…un-Lillian-like."

  I turned and inspected my new look in the coffee shop's glass window.

  My wig was eye-catching in hue, rather a cross between daffodil and aluminum foil, and it was short and spiky and really happenin'. Plus it was reasonable, only $22.95.

  In the restroom of the shop I had artfully stuffed two handfuls of tissue into my bra, to give myself that slut-that's-got-it-all look. My chest now strained the fabric of my neon-blue leotard top, which I'd dug out of my dresser that morning. I'd hoped my tightest and rattiest jeans would work, and now, looking into the glass, I saw that they did.

  My face felt all right. My stomach was awfully sore, but as I hadn't died yet, I concluded I'd been right to skip medical attention. What really bothered me was my knee where I'd hit it on Bob Hawley's crotch cup. The whole knee was black-and-blue, stiff too. The son of a bitch.

  "I wish," I said, "that I had some very snappy red boots."

  "Yeah," said Duane, "that'd be a good touch. Those penny loafers are incredibly lame."

  I looked down at my tattered Bass Weejuns. "Oh, well."

  "You're limping."

  "No, I'm not."

  "Think I need anything?" he said.

  I had instructed him to ditch the Cole Porter gestalt in favor of a crasser look. He'd selected this day a pair of black jeans with leather insets over the pockets, a slipover rayon shirt with speedboats printed on it, and sharp-toed lizard-skin boots. No underwear.

  "You're perfect. Did you bring a jacket, though?"

  "No."

  "No kind of a jacket? You need one. Because a guy in a jacket could be carrying a gun. A big-ass gun."

  "Lillian, I'm not going to threaten anyb—"

  "Goddamn it! Relax! I told you. We want to look tough, but all we're going to be is nice. I told you."

  "All right, yeah."

  "And I'm telling you, in that shirt and those disco pants, your shoulders and your ass look good, but you look too unarmed." I ducked back into the wig shop.

  "My boyfriend needs a sport coat, know where we can get a good one for cheap?"

  The proprietress, a chatty hillbilly with nails like scalpels, gestured down the street. "Next mall over, they got a House of ManWear."

  "Great, thanks."

  There Duane picked out a shiny black job, an Armani knockoff that fit him nicely. With his sunglasses and black leather cap pulled low, he looked thrillingly menacing when he remembered not to smile.

  I got behind the wheel again. "OK, let's go." I liked driving a Mercedes. I liked the way the seat pressed against my lower back when I gave it the gas. The engine was amazingly quiet.

  We found the return address Trix had used, no trouble. It was in a mobile-home court that once, long ago, had surely been photographed for a social studies chapter on the booming, affordable real estate projects in the American West. I pictured dads with pipes leaning on their push mowers, kids on nice bikes zooming around, moms leaning out from kitchen windows calling gaily to their loved ones.

  Now, though, the place featured trashed cars and sagging awnings, busted foundations, and wary old people spitting into the gravel.

  "Why did it have to be a trailer court?" Duane muttered. "This is so trite."

  I sniffed one of the characteristic smells of suburban poverty: old motor oil, spilled, leaked, congealing and sending fumes up from every paved surface. You know that hot, fucked-up smell?

  We parked in front of the number, got out, and knocked. This trailer was a venerable single-wide, its aluminum skin pitted and gouged. A kitchen chair with torn vinyl sat on the gravel next to the door. Surrounding the chair were hundreds of filter cigarette butts. A new VW Beetle was parked on the slab.

  There was something surreal about the trailer court, something weird, something I couldn't put my finger on at first. Something beyond the look and feel and smell of the place, this hard inland sea of burning-hot metal and concrete.

  "Remember, don't talk," I said.

  "Mmph," said Duane.

  A female circus ringmaster came to the door; at least that's what she appeared to be. Little spangly tuxedo top, painted-on pants, full makeup job, big-top hair. I had resolved not to be unnerved by anything.

  I let her get a good load of us.

  "Hi," I said, trying to convey a respectful type of friendliness, like detectives do. "Trix Robertson?"

  The ringmaster shook her head.

  "She live here?"

  "Not anymore. What do you guys want?"

  "I'm Steffi Cordova. This is Chino. I'm actually lookin' for somebody else. I was told Trix might be able to help me."

  "Yeah? Who?"

  "Do you know where she lives now?"

  The ringmaster hesitated. Her outfit baffled the hell out of me until I realized she was dressed for work in Las Vegas. The outfit, while ridiculous with its gold braid and satin trim, appeared to be of good quality. Such costumes would be worn by dealers or cocktail waitresses at one of the better hotels, I guessed. Or maybe she was in a show.

  Subtly, I rubbed my finger and thumb near my ear. I said, "I'd be very appreciative."

  "Well, is she in trouble?"

  "Let me put it this way. By helping us, she could get out of some trouble she don't even know she's in."

  "You guys bail enforcers?"

  "We work for a guy."

  "Yeah? Who?"

  I pulled a fresh $100 bill from my back pocket. "The same guy you work for." I held up the portrait. "You know this guy, don't you?"

  She was fascinated by my cryptic nonsense.

  I said, "My other boss is named Chip."

  She got that one. "Ha," she said. She looked at her watch. "I gotta go to work." She pressed her lips together.

  "So you gonna help me?"

  She plucked the money from my fingers. "Next door," she said, pushing past me. She turned and locked her front door, then headed for the VW Beetle. She stopped and turned back to me. In answer to my surprised expression she said, "We used to share this place until I threw her out. She can't keep a job. Can't keep straight either. I tried to help her. You know?"


  "I see."

  "When I threw her out, she didn't go far."

  "She live there with somebody?"

  "No. She was, but he left. She's runnin' a business outta there now."

  "Yeah?"

  "Get what I mean?"

  "Oh. Yeah."

  The ringmaster laughed bitterly. "She's actually found a way to pay the rent at last!"

  As if on cue, the flimsy door of the next trailer popped open and a man stumped out, leaning heavily on an aluminum cane. He was a young guy: weathered face, stained T-shirt, straggly greasy hair—all of a sudden I guessed disability checks—and he was swinging his free arm and singing.

  "…She made an angel out of me…I never knew I'd be so free—"

  "Now that's what I call a walking advertisement," I murmured.

  "H'h," said the ringmaster.

  Right then I realized what was striking me as so surreal about the place, so strange and somehow ominous: the sound. A low hum pervaded this place, but with an annoying uneven high-pitched buzz over the top. As if the place were engulfed by invisible locusts.

  It was the air conditioning. All those trailers so close together, all of them with air conditioners hanging on them like cubic tumors, every single air conditioner running for all it was worth, beating back the tremendous desert heat on behalf of their human masters.

  The man gave us all a fishy look, then slung himself into a decaying Buick Riviera circa 1988 and pulled out. Gravel squirted from the tires.

  The ringmaster took off too.

  Looking over to Trix's trailer—down one more notch on the scale of decrepitude from her neighbor's—I saw a blind flick inside.

  I ascended the metal steps to the door.

  Chapter 15

  I rapped on the door, which hadn't shut tight behind the last customer. It flipped back and forth on its hinges.

  It was pulled open wide and Trix stood before me.

  I don't know why—I'm just stupid sometimes, sadly stupid—but the instant I saw her I realized I was hoping for her to look good. I was hoping for her to appear to be in good health, and to be pretty—the way I'd remembered her from so long ago. I was hoping for her to be young. Isn't that ridiculous?

  Time had not been good to Trix.

  Of course, she was older by decades. The hair was thinner and was no longer dyed brown as Duane had described it; it was back to deep red—auburn, more accurately, and from a bottle now. Those roots would be gray. Graying, anyway. Prettily done, though; she'd spent some time on the hair. Her posture was just this side of stooped. That wouldn't be far away. Her face had held up relatively well. The flesh appeared firm, the jawline still there, still plenty defined, some of the usual creases—corners of the mouth, a few under the eyes—yet no deep seams.

  The eyes themselves, though, were the disaster of Trix. It almost hurt to look into them. You know how some people carry around so much despair that no matter what type of expression they try to put on, you can still see it in their eyes? With Trix that despair was so there, so hard upon her, that her trying to pretend it didn't exist made it nothing but worse.

  She wore a crotch-length dress in dreadful stretch tiger-print, nylons, no shoes. One long dangling feather earring swung against her neck in the breeze of the outrushing conditioned air. She was way too skinny. She held a mixed drink and an unlighted cigarette in one hand.

  "Hi, Trix," I said with a warm smile. "I'm Steffi Cordova, and this here's Chino. I'm looking for somebody, and I think you might be able to help me."

  She looked keenly at us, and I swallowed and tried to maintain pleasant eye contact.

  "In return," I said, "I'd like to help you."

  I saw her mind running through her catalogue of johns, thinking quickly over them. She peeked over at our Mercedes.

  Suddenly I felt we shouldn't have come to her home. She was apprehensive, I could see it; she was reluctant. It would've been better to approach her in a public place, maybe. I don't know. Well, I thought, you can't necessarily work out everything in advance. Can't foresee every goddamn thing.

  "We're not cops," I said. "You can search us if you want." A small inspiration came to me. "Chino's gonna wait outside. This is just girl talk."

  She relaxed a fraction. That was all it took.

  "Well, OK," she said, stepping back from the door.

  I felt I was taking a risk not wearing sunglasses, just in case she could still see little Lillian in my eyes. But shades are too off-putting to wear in front of someone you're trying to get information from. Duane, we'd agreed, had no choice. Trix had known the postpuberty Duane fairly well, and thus would be much more likely to recognize him, his face as well as his voice.

  "Thank you so much."

  Duane at this point did a good job. Although I knew he was surprised to be left outside, he didn't try to catch my eye; he just folded his arms, turned his back, and stepped slowly away from the door.

  Trix had used a certain amount of creativity in doing up her sex pad. She'd put up twinkle lights and soft lamp shades, laid down one of those shoddy rugs with a Garden of Eden scene woven into it. The furniture was definitely sub-Joshua Doore, more like rent-to-own, more like ghetto thrift shop. Nothing was clean. The place needed a good vacuuming and some swiping up with disinfectant, to deal with the sex smell.

  "Uh, want a drink?" said Trix.

  "Sure, thank you. Whatever you're havin'."

  She fixed me a whiskey and ginger ale, the whiskey a brand I'd never seen before, Potter's Crown. Handing me the drink, she stepped around the coffee table to take up a lounging posture on the couch. Actually, she stretched herself into an imitation of a lounging posture. Her shoulders were high and tight, and she jiggled one foot so fast it was a blur. She was tweaky all right.

  I seated myself in a barrel chair with smelly cushions.

  "Let me tell you what I'm about here." I tried to give myself a touch of a New York accent, Brooklynish, not over-the-top. Just a suggestion of dirty bite. "Lemme tell ya what I'm about here."

  I took a sip of my highball, and Trix said, "I know it's shitty whiskey."

  It certainly was; it was bottom-shelf swill that needed every bit of the sweet ginger ale to ameliorate it.

  "Mm, good drink. My first of the day," I laughed. After a pause I said, "I work for a guy on the East Coast. I tried somethin' stupid with him. Maybe after another couple a drinks I tell you the details."

  I saw, aside from the despair in Trix's eyes, a kind of greedy passion. It was a type of gullibility, actually. It was that she saw me as a scummy person, and she was eager to believe that I was a scummier person than she was. I watched her look closely at my face.

  I went on, "He caught me out. My ass is in I-can't-tell-you how deep of a shitpot. I begged him, 'Let me do something for you. Something to make up for how much of a stupid, selfish cunt I was.' He says 'All right.' So I'm looking for somebody he wants to get in touch with."

  "But it's not me," said Trix.

  "Right, it ain't you, sweetheart. I got Chino helping me. This guy that I'm looking for, I know him a little. And the bottom line of it is he owes my boss some money. What else, right? It's an old debt. A real old debt. I haven't seen the guy in years. A little bug told me you might have some information on him. He's supposed to be here in Vegas."

  "Well, who is it?"

  "Guy from Miami named Bill Sechrist."

  The name visibly punched her in the lungs. Her mouth fell open and she looked away to the shaded window, to the afternoon sunlight pouring down beyond it.

  I waited, sipping my drink. Fortunately she'd poured me a light one. I'd deliberately built up my spiel to give the name maximum punch. And punch it did, oh yeah.

  "Bill Sechrist," I repeated. "Goddamn that sonuvabitch. He was smooth, ya know?"

  I watched Trix some more. Through whatever semi-stoned fog she was in, she was thinking hard, real hard and fast.

  I said, "You know the guy."

  Trix suddenly refocuse
d. She scanned the coffee table. There was a pack of Newports on it, which she reached for until she realized she still had an unlit one between her fingers. She leaned forward and picked up a plastic lighter. Chk! She inhaled deeply from the cigarette, exhaled in a long stream upward, past the tip of her nose.

  "Want one?" she said, gesturing toward the pack.

  "No, thank you." Newports are terrible.

  Slowly, she said, "I don't know where he is right this second. But…"

  I waited.

  She said, "You said you could maybe help me if I helped you."

  I smiled and leaned forward. "Yeah, definitely. Here's the deal. Bill owes my boss $38,000."

  "Yeah?" Her eyes got a little sharper.

  "An' like I said, it's from a long time ago. Bill thinks the debt's been forgiven because of a job he did one time for my guy. But my boss decided it wasn't. It's still a debt. If I collect it, I'm off the hook, see? I get no cut of that money, so I can't share it around. But I'm willing to give two thousand to whoever leads me to Bill Sechrist. Because I got two grand, but I don't got thirty-eight grand. And hearing that Bill's supposed to be in Las Vegas, I figured, well, maybe Vegas is the place where I can turn two grand into thirty-eight." I sipped my highball. "When I knew Bill Sechrist, and that was, God, a hundred years ago, he was doing all right. This was in Miami."

  "You knew him in Miami?"

  "Yeah, he bragged that he pulled off all sorts a shit for big money. And he threw it around too."

  "He did?" These exclamations popped out of her like gumballs.

  "Yeah, oh yeah. I was a stupid kid, didn't know any better than to let him buy me junk jewelry, cheap steak dinners, that kinda shit. I would've been his child bride except for—well, never mind. Yeah, especially he bragged about this arson job he claimed to've done in Chicago, I think he said, this bar that a buddy of his owned, and—"

  "It was Detroit. Hah! He pulled that off, all right! He pulled that job all the way down the crapper, is where he pulled it." Her voice became throatier. "That son of a bitch couldn't pour piss out of a boot. So he was boffing you in Miami too."

  I fought to keep my composure. I was right. I was fucking right. Blood rose behind my eyeballs. Oh, how I wanted to know more. Don't blow it. Be patient. Be patient.