Elia pleaded to have first shot.
“Not this time,” he said. Mandrake had a gut instinct about this one. He was going to change the course of history. It was why he won his Pulitzer. And he badly wanted another one to prove he hadn’t lost his magic just because he had sold out to television.
8
“ANOTHER MARGARITA,” MANDRAKE winked to the bartender for the third time, “and another Wild Turkey for my friend. How ’bout a double this time, eh?” The wink was a coded conspiracy against Mike’s drinking pal, a signal he’d agreed earlier with the barman to hold back the tequila from Mike’s own drinks so he’d stay clear-headed while the former trailer park manager spilled his increasingly well-lubricated guts.
Mike now knew he’d been right to do this prep himself, and alone. Willy Nesbit would be top TV talent. His baggy, crumpled surf shirt was styled—though that wasn’t quite the right word—for someone thirty years younger and twenty pounds heavier. Nesbit had filched it from an unattended pile at the laundromat. Mike sniffed Nesbit out as his program teaser. Willy was one of those tall, scrawny sleazebags whose rust-bucket of a truck would sport a peeling bumper sticker like, You think this pick-up is filthy? Just try a night with the driver. Willy’s head was a total razor job, the shave exposing a macabre tattoo: two rats with their thick pink tails slithering down his neck. Perfect for TV.
Good journalism was in the details, Mike knew that, and at last they were coming to him. Like the “Gappy Hooker”. Mike couldn’t believe his luck when Willy blurted out the pet name he’d given thirty years ago to a woman he knew as Maria Rosa, Isabel’s apparently toothless mother.
“It had its benefits,” Willy smirked, digging an elbow into Mike’s ribs.
When Mike was slow to follow, Willy worked his lips into a big O, bulged his eyes cartoon-style and, placing one hand at the back of his neck right on top of the tattooed rats, and a finger of his other hand near his mouth, he bobbed his head up and down so his mouth slid over his finger. But it was Mandrake who gagged: a performance like that, while the tape was running… could he slide it past the network censors? Willy Nesbit was a repulsive toenail-clipping of a man, but Mike Mandrake was pumped.
Luckily, Willy couldn’t recollect Maria Rosa’s surname or the name of her daughter and Mike didn’t enlighten him, worried that if the creep did remember he would hotfoot it over to another network, get plastered again for free and spurt out everything to the competition.
Willy’s story was gold. Maria Rosa had paid him in kind for her trailer’s rent. It was handy not having to stray from his Cactus Flower Trailer Park to “get done”, he said, even if it had to be during the day. “At least the kid was at school. The ma didn’a want her to know nuthin,” he said, “but she had to know somethin’. She was fucken smart, that kid. Won some prize, I ’member… from the, ah, Rotarians. Made some speech to ’em. Maria Rosa got the spoils after the girl scooted. I ’member it cos there weren’t no monkey business goin’ after that an’ she give me the winnings for the rent. After that, Maria Rosa just shut down shop. With her legs closed, she couldn’a pay rent no more, so’s what could I do? A man’s gotta eat, right? So’s I kicked her out.”
“Why did her daughter leave home?” asked Mike before taking a sip of the drink the bartender had just slid in front of him.
“Was bad, man,” Willy said, doing likewise. “One of Maria Rosa’s boyfriends… she liked callin’ all us regulars her ‘boyfriends’… he did her, you know what I mean?”
“Ah, not really.”
“He fucken did the kid.”
That Isabel had been the victim of a serious assault was well-known, but this…
“He’d been round a couple weeks, Mr Mandrake. I even sorta liked him. But not by the end. There was fucken blood everywhere, man. I had to hose out the fucken trailer after the cops left. He fucken slit her throat ’n all.”
“Her throat!” Mike pictured Isabel with her fabled scar. So she didn’t get it in a mugging. That was the story the public had swallowed, but Isabel had always refused to confirm or deny it, and the media had let up on it as private. Until now.
“The kid was lucky. But fucken ran away from the hospital after’n she got fixed up. Never even brought her sorry butt over to say adios to her lovin’ mami,” Willy said snarling, his lips pulled back over his teeth, revealing Maria Rosa wasn’t the only one to have lost a few. “Broke Maria Rosa’s heart, Mike. Broke her fucken heart.”
“Where’d she go?” asked Mandrake, meaning the mother. His stomach clenched for the answer.
“Don’ fucken know, don’ fucken care. What she did to her bewdiful ma, man… first class fucken A-grade bitch, pardon the French. I loved her ma, Mike. Really loved her.”