two
SOMEONE STUCK THE ELECTRIC SCREWDRIVER INTO my right ear and drilled, the motor pulsing with a strangely familiar, regular rhythm. Pause, buzz, pause. Adrenaline spurted into my veins, making me realize the urgency of needing to do something. What? I asked myself through the fog infiltrating my mind. Get away from the drill, my brilliant self replied.
I nestled deeper into my plush pillow. But the drill didn’t go away. No telling how many times the damned phone rang before I realized it was the phone. As soon as I did, I reached for the handset on the nightstand and collapsed back onto the bed in pain. Someone had taken the drill to my back.
The phone kept ringing.
What kind of person dreams about electric drills? Carpenters? Building contractors? Hard-up women? Hard-up women dreaming about carpenters?
Setting my teeth on my lower lip to offer pain a momentary distraction from my back, I sat up, again reached for the receiver, collared it, and fell back onto the mattress.
“Urgh,” I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut against the crimp in the cramp in my back. “Yul-lo?”
“Reyn,” a masculine voice, made nearly eerie by its soft weakness, breathed in my ear.
“Hello?” I demanded strongly now, ready to call my fictitious husband “Claude” into action. He always seemed to get the cranks off the phone but quick.
“Reyn.” The voice, weaker, rang a few familiar bells in my head this time.
“Ricardo?” I peered at the clock across the bedroom but couldn’t make out the glowing digital numbers. It looked like 33:44:22 to me. I blinked, and it became 234:432. One of the dogs put her forepaws on the bed next to me and licked my face. Oh, great, dog spit would clear things up right away.
“Reyn. I need your help.”
A thread of fear and the whisper of resignation in his voice sent me shooting up in bed despite my back. “My help?” I parroted dumbly. “In the middle of the night?”
“Reyn…”
“Ricardo!” I yelled, waking all the dogs. I could sense their attention in the pitch black. “What do you need help with? Where are you?”
I heard a peculiar sucking sound and wondered if Ricardo were drunk. He certainly didn’t sound like his usual sober, arrogant self. Although I’d never seen him have an alcoholic drink, much less overindulge, I didn’t know him all that well anymore, and I certainly didn’t know what he did with his “valued and loyal” customers, one of whom he’d been meeting last night, tonight, whatever day and time it was. I squinted at the clock again.
“It’s late. Too late.” His voice had dropped to a near whisper. “I just want you to remember what I said today. You get the salons—”
“You win the lottery after all, Ricardo?” Having decided he was indeed high on something, I was waking up to my smart mouth. “Listen Reyn…peligroso…to wonder.” He paused with a tortured groan, and I tried not to think what had caused that. Or who. My hard-up-woman imagination filled in the blanks as he let out another heavy sigh before saying, “Be careful.”
I knew that comment was meant for his companion, who was doing something likely featured on the Playboy Channel, so I didn’t respond. He was quiet for a moment, and I thought he’d hung up or perhaps had been otherwise distracted. Then he whispered, “Take care of what’s mine. The proof…it’s there…in the pudding…”
It wasn’t like Ricardo to use a corny cliché, but I didn’t give it a passing thought. Then.
Suddenly, I was sleepy again, and my back was clutching up. “Ricardo, I appreciate the sentiment, but I have my own business to run. I like my little business. It’s not much, but it’s mine. And there was that ‘black bean’ comment of yours…”
A wheeze interrupted my independent-woman lecture. “Promise…you’ll…” he choked out.
I wondered for the first time if Ricardo were sick. I might as well humor him. He probably wouldn’t remember he’d even called by morning.
“Sure, Ricardo. I’ll take care of everything for you. Now, I’ve gotta go get some beauty sleep. I need a helluva lot more just to look half as good as you do.”
I waited for his reply and got none. Patience isn’t one of my virtues and certainly isn’t a word I even understand in the middle of the night with canine halitosis breathing on me, particularly while talking to a drunk, high, crazy, or horny once-upon-a-time boss, while my back was thrown out.
“Good night, Ricardo. Sleep tight.”
I threw the handset back into its cradle, eased gently back into the bed (this seemed less excruciating than my earlier flop), and pulled the covers up to my chin. By the time I shut my eyelids, I was drifting back to Dreamland, hoping to avoid the tool-wielding Sandman this time, unless he had some X-rated plans for that tool that involved me.
The next time the phone rang, no dreams interfered, and I was able to recognize the ring for what it was. My eyelids wouldn’t peel open, though, and I had to roll over onto my side to do the blind man’s grope for the handset. My back felt pretty darn good, I noted with pleasure. That extra slab of Ben Gay, applied with a back scratcher stabbed into a sponge, must have done the trick.
“Hello,” I answered cheerily.
An unfamiliar baritone rumbled some indistinguishable rush of words into my ear, made more indistinguishable by the fact that Beaujolais was sticking her big dog tongue into my other ear. I swatted her away just as I heard, “And who is this?”
My spirits plummeted. An anonymous crank first thing in the morning. That was worse than being awakened by a familiar one in the middle of the night. I sat up gingerly and called in my invisible reinforcements.
“Claude!” I screeched, half into the handset and half out. Pretty convincing, I thought.
“Please tone it down, ma’am,” warned the caller with a decidedly impolite inflection on the polite term. “Your name’s Claude?”
“No. Claude’s my honey.”
“Can you tell me, was it you or Claude who talked to someone at Ricardo’s Realm on Broadway last night?”
Words caught in my throat for a moment. This was not a voice I recognized as someone who worked for Ricardo—too much bass, if you get my meaning. He never hired anyone who’d compete for the affections of the ladies. Yet there was something professional about his tone.
I’m rarely at a loss for words, so I recovered quickly. “Who wants to know?”
I think my directness set him back for a moment. There was a bit of a pause where I hoped I’d persuaded him to set the receiver back in the cradle. No such luck. “I need to know who called Ricardo last night, ma’am.”
“Who’s ‘I’?” By now I was pissed off, but so was he, even if he was trying to mask it in politeness. I was beginning to get the hint that this was no crank caller. I wondered what he was trying to sell.
He blew a big breath that sounded like a hurricane in my right ear. “Let me talk to Claude. Please, ma’am.”
Oh, a male chauvinist salesman. I’m not sure that was better than a crank caller. “He’s not available at the moment. And if you’re selling something, we’re not interested.”
“The only thing I’m selling you, ma’am”—he nearly choked on that last word—“is a trip to the Bexar County cooler unless you begin to cooperate.”
A trip as in vacation? Something about the place rang a bell. A new resort? One of those chic restaurants over at the trendy Quarry Market shopping complex? But I was digressing. Back to the subject at hand. Who was this guy? And what was this insistent, hard-sell attitude? Where did he think he was calling, the Bronx? This was friendly San Antonio, Texas, mister. Wait—how did he know Ricardo called me, anyway? Had telephone tracing technology become so common that any telemarketer could get hold of it? I felt fresh anger building. There are few things in life I hate more than telemarketers. I looked around for a pen to write down the company name. All I could find were some fingernail clippers and a Q-tip. I poised the little cotton wand like a pen—hoping the pose would make me somehow sound more threatening—and asked, “And with whom am I supposed to be cooperating?”
“Ma’am.” He sighed heavily as if I were the one who woke him up. “I apologize. I identified myself at the beginning of our conversation, but it’s, ah, early. Your ‘whom’ is the police. SAPD. I’m afraid you’re required to cooperate with me.”
Oh, that Bexar County cooler.
Just as my mouth fell open, “I Feel Good” screeched from across the bedroom. James Brown on my customized alarm, designed to shock me out of bed in the right frame of mind every morning.
…you know that I would now…do, do, do-do, dodo-do…
“That Claude now?” he asked.
I ignored his heavy sarcasm, not only because I’d been caught in a lie—by the cops, no less—but because my mind was galloping off in a thousand different directions, and I was trying to keep up with eyelids that still refused to open fully.
…I feel good…
“Sounds like someone had a good night,” he observed. Could you despise someone you didn’t even know? I wondered. Someone with this deep and rich a voice? Even politely pissy, he sounded pretty damned sexy. With a flush that seemed to precede conscious thought, I remembered him blowing into my ear—more accurately, into the phone and into my ear, and, to be fair, it really was a sigh of frustration. But if a pissed-off sigh was that good, just imagine what an amorous sigh would do to me.
“Well, it wasn’t me,” I snapped, suddenly irritated with the implications of my own thoughts as well as those in his tone. He was sneaky, this detective, couching his pointed sarcasm in ma’amy politeness. Plus, I didn’t like the fact that he could evidently read my hormones long-distance. “How do you know I was talking to Ricardo last night?”
“Ma’am, I’m a detective; I’m paid to figure out these things. Plus, when we got here, Ricardo was holding the phone, and your number’s the one it rang on redial.”
“Great investigative work,” I muttered with a frown at the image of Ricardo sitting in his office chair, snoring, holding the phone for hours. Had he been drunk enough to pass out? I hoped he’d gotten dressed after his lady friend left. Maybe he’d called so I could drive him home. What a jerk I was.
How right I was, and I still didn’t know the half of it.
“And why didn’t Ricardo hang up the phone?” I finally asked, hating to hear that my vain friend, so concerned with appearances, would end up with his customers titillated by an embarrassment in the Express-News’s gossip columns.
“Because he’s dead.”
As I punched “end” on the phone, I looked around through the pale yellow morning light streaming through the windows at three pairs of eyes staring at me in questioning sympathy. The dogs always sensed my moods but must have been dumbfounded by the mixture of horror, grief, disbelief, and guilt swimming around in my head, clogging my throat, and congealing in my stomach right then. All they knew was that it was something they’d better pay attention to.
“Girls, Ricardo’s dead.” I winced at the finality of my words.
Beaujolais, recognizing me in a weak moment, snuck a paw onto the bed and licked my hand sympathetically as she inched the rest of her eighty-five-pound body onto the mattress. As if I wouldn’t notice. I noticed, all right, but right then, I didn’t much care.
“What if I had talked to him longer, really tried to understand what he was saying to me? Would he be dead now? Why did he call me? Why didn’t he call 911? Why didn’t I call 911?”
Two blinks and a yawn didn’t qualify as an answer, but somehow it was comforting.
That’s why I had dogs—they were someone to talk to. I have no respect for people who talk to themselves. With a mouth like mine, I had to use it regularly, or I was afraid the words would come out in an indistinguishable rush to the first person I ran across in the morning. I consider my dogs a community service.
The two youngsters, Chardonnay and Cabernet, three-year-old sisters, yellow and black respectively, followed me into the bathroom. Their mother stretched out on my pillows.
I stripped off my oversize Lyle Lovett “Fat Babies Have No Pride” nightshirt and jumped into the shower before the water warmed up. I figured the blast of ice water would serve me right for choosing sleep over sticking on the phone with my friend…former friend…dead friend. I put my face into the stream from the showerhead, letting it take my tears down the drain. I cried through the shampoo and sobbed over my leg shave. I eschewed touching up my bikini line as too dangerous in my current frame of mind. I stepped out of the shower, feeling cleaner on the outside but without managing a Pontius Pilate on the inside.
After toweling off quickly, I pulled on some of my utilitarian cotton panties and unmatching—frayed, faded, toad-green polyester (hey, it was on sale!)—bra. I thought of the times Trudy had berated me for wearing ugly underwear. No one but the dogs see my underwear, I’d argued. She told me it didn’t matter who saw it, you knew what you had on, and it changed your whole attitude on life. Her theory is that women who wear sexy underwear move sexily, thus radiating sensuality. Translated in my case, it meant I clomped around, moving like my plain yet useful panties, radiating—no doubt—pragmatism. I told her they just got covered up with clothes, anyway, so if they did the job, their looks didn’t matter. She told me I was a disgrace to the beauty business, that beauty should come from within. I told her she was right about the latter but that I didn’t consider underwear to be within.
Only half-naked now, I gently tugged open my closet door to consider my footwear. Or, rather, bootwear. I wear nothing but boots—unless I’m out walking the girls, that is. Then nearly three hundred pounds of dog requires some athletic shoe traction. All other times, though, I’m booted. I have forty-seven pairs of boots. My sister Pecan calls me Cowgirl Imelda. She ought to be more understanding, considering it’s partly her fault. As a child, I had to wear all the holey shoes and scuffed-up boots handed down from my four older siblings, two brothers and two sisters. I never owned a new pair of any footwear, which sparked in me a burning desire for a brand-new, shiny pair of boots—a desire that was not fulfilled until I left home at eighteen.
But that one pair was not enough. I’m sure I have an obsession that would qualify some enterprising psychologist for a million-dollar federal grant.
And I don’t care.
I must point out that San Antonio is not really a cowboy-boot-wearing town. Not like Houston and Dallas, that is, where every third person has on a Stetson and Justins or, depending on what part of town you’re in, Luccheses or Dan Posts. It’s not like that here—except in February, rodeo season, when every high-society babe pulls out her alligator pointy-toes—so my year-round boot fashion did sort of stand out.
I considered the carefully arranged (the only part of my life that was organized was my boot collection), custom-made three shelves of leather and various other animal and amphibian skins. What was appropriate for a crime scene? For mourning a friend? Plain, not lace-ups, as they might convey the wrong message. The black lizard pointy-toed gals with the silver trims beckoned, but I surely didn’t want the blowhard cop thinking I’d dressed up for him. Those indigo maroon kangaroo numbers called from the second story, but I ignored them. After all, why was I letting his fantasy-inspiring voice determine my choices when he probably had a doughnut overhang above his belt and considered his gun proof of some deeply hidden masculinity? He had been exceedingly polite when my misunderstanding had tested his patience, but that didn’t win many points with me.
I chose a somber pair of Justin Ropers and yanked them on.
The phone shrilled again. I stared at it; the dogs stared at me. I was expected down at Ricardo’s main salon on Broadway to talk to Officer Charming, “Asap,” he’d instructed into my stunned silence. I hate people who turn acronyms into words, as if I didn’t have enough reasons to dislike this guy, anyway. Calling with the news that Ricardo was dead and waking me up to do it were numbers one and two on the growing list.
Maybe the caller was he, saying I wasn’t required after all. They’d wanted me to arrive to give the positive ID. They knew who he was; Ricardo had been the object of media attention enough over the years for most of the city to know him on sight. But there were “procedures,” the copper had said, brooking no argument. There were a dozen people closer to Ricardo than I was, who saw him on a daily basis, who could give the ID, but that’s not a referral someone would thank me for later. I did have a business to worry about, after all, a business in which appearance and discretion were just about everything.
“Hello.” I picked up after the tenth ring, giving in to curiosity.
“Guess your back’s not any better this morning, huh?” Trudy surmised from my snarly tone.
“It’s not that,” I began as the tears resurfaced, my mood swinging from grumpy to grief-stricken in a second. “It’s that…”
“Now, Reyn, don’t be embarrassed about last night. I won’t tell a soul.”
Sure, I thought, you with the biggest mouth west of the Brazos River. Then I felt immediately guilty that I’d harbor an ill thought about a friend lucky enough to still be living. “No, it’s not the Mario Hair Debacle. It’s something worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse? I spent another hour at home last night getting out all the tangles.”
“Oh, Trudy.” I tempered my tone. Now was not the time to lose my temper. When had getting angry with her ever worked? I considered the most delicate way to tell her. The silence stretched on.
“Spit it out, sister.” Trudy wasn’t big on patience, either.
Okay, she’d asked for it.
“Ricardo’s dead.”
A squeal and a thud were the only responses I got.