Fifty Grand

10 THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI

A bus stop. Mountains to the west and east. A spear of cloud in a cobalt sky. The road a straight line running through woods on either side of a broad valley. The outskirts of Fairview to the south, nothing but forest to the north. Forest all the way to Canada.

The sound of a chain saw.

I have changed again. This time black jeans, a white blouse, and a blazer that Angela left behind. I have combed my hair and taken the slump from my body language.

Like Jack, I too will be performing.

From the direction of Fairview the bus comes.

It stops but the driver doesn’t open the door. He points at his watch and mouths the word early.

Sí, amigo, and if I were one of those tall trophy wives on Pearl Street-

Not that they’d ever ride the bus.

A sound behind me. A Mexican laborer carrying sticks. He puts them down, walks a little into the forest, and relieves himself against a fir tree.

“Come on,” I mouth to the driver but he shakes his head.

Oh, America, you’re making it too easy for me.

Seconds go by. The cool sun. The idling bus. The sound of streaming piss.

When it’s exactly five minutes past, the driver pushes a button and a compressor releases its hold on the door.

A hiss of air. The smell of AC, coffee, people.

The laborer catches my eye. An older man. Not his first time over the border. I suddenly see his whole trajectory: a crossing in Juárez, a night journey through west Texas; a lecture in vulgar street Spanish from Esteban or a punk overseer just in from East L.A.; and then work all day until the sun goes down. Sleep in the Wetback Motel or some dive in Denver, up and work again.

A look passes between us.

A look of recognition.

Life is hard.

No fucking kidding.

The man nods. I nod back.

“Gittin’ in, miss?” the driver asks impatiently. I step onto the bus and leave five quarters. Exact change. I don’t wait for the ticket. I walk to the last row and take a seat. Six or seven passengers. I see them but I don’t see them. They don’t see me, either. Who does ride the bus in this town? Kids, DUI repeat offenders, foreigners. The door closes, the clutch slips, we shudder forward.

Ten minutes pass. Houses appearing through gaps in the trees.

I look for numbers on mailboxes. I spot 229 almost immediately and hunt for a way to stop the vehicle. I see a cable that runs along the window. I pull it and a bell rings and the bus comes to a halt at the next stop, a full kilometer up the road.

I stand, walk to the front.

“Thank you,” I say to the driver.

“Uh-huh,” he replies.

I exit. The bus moves away.

Back to 229. A two-story with four or five bedrooms, set off the road. Wooden deck running all the way around it, rusting iron sculptures littering a small garden. The trees big and oppressively close.

The path. The porch. Neat piles of raked golden leaves. A knocker shaped like a border collie’s head. I rap it. Clunk of boots. Door opens. Young man, twenty-five, jeans, black sweater, pale Asiatic features, a suspicious look. Huge. What do they put in the water out here?

“We never contribute to solicitors,” he says.

“I’m from Great Northern Insurance, I’m here to talk to Mrs. Cooper, if I may,” I state quickly.

The man frowns, hesitates, opens the door wider. “Is this about the accident?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You better come in.”

The house is dark, cool, and smells of vinegar. Mahogany paneling, stone tiled floors, a few more of the ugly metal sculptures. I follow the man into a small cluttered living room. Hummel figurines, crystal animals, Indian tapestries, a beautiful worn rug hanging over the brickwork at the chimney, Chinese-style screen prints on the other walls. An oval ball in the middle of the mantel.

“My mother,” the man whispers, obviously referring to a white-haired woman sitting in front of a very large TV. A quiz show is on, people jumping up and down.

“I’m Jimmy,” he says.

“Inez Martinez,” I say, offering him my hand.

He shakes it firmly and quickly lets go.

“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you about the accident,” the son says. He repeats the statement but the woman is rapt in the show. This happens two more times and finally Jimmy resorts to turning off the set with a remote control.

Mrs. Cooper looks in my direction. She’s a seventy-year-old Chinese woman in a beautiful blue floral dress. Trim, neat, tiny. She has an ethereal quality about her that sometimes you find in the dying or in junkies.

“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you,” Jimmy says.

“I was watching that,” Mrs. Cooper protests.

Jimmy shrugs and rolls his eyes at me.

Over to you, Mercado.

Gentle voice. Fake smile. “Mrs. Cooper, I’m Inez Martinez from Great Northern Insurance,” I say, enunciating the words the way they taught us in English elocution class-our goal seemingly to sound like American actresses from the 1930s.

“Yes?” Mrs. Cooper says, looking at Jimmy as if she’s being sold down the river or carted off to that nursing home her son is always going on about.

“I’m eighty-one and I’ve never had an accident,” Mrs. Cooper says.

“Eighty-one? I thought you were in your early seventies,” I tell her, truthfully. With Americans, I realized, it was very hard to tell.

Mrs. Cooper smiles.

“Would you like anything to drink, Miss Inez?” Jimmy asks.

I can’t resist. “Do you have any orange juice?”

American orange juice is light-years from the ersatz stuff they pedal in Havana.

“We’ve got some fresh-squeezed,” Jimmy says. “Is that ok?”

Fresh-squeezed orange? It’s like breakfast with one of Ricky’s high-powered friends.

“That would be perfect,” I reply.

Jimmy smiles. “I got this new machine for squeezing juice.”

“Very nice.”

“A present. Little bonus we all got. I work for Pixar.”

Obviously Jimmy is trying to impress me, but I don’t know what Pixar is.

“Pixar, very impressive,” I tell him.

“We’re setting up a studio in Denver at the old Gates Plant. Us and Redford. You know, Sundance. I’m not one of the creative ones, but, you know, we all do our thing-”

“What is this all about?” Mrs. Cooper wonders, looking at me sharply.

“Madam, I represent your former insurance company-Great Northern Insurance, I’m a claims investigator. We’re looking into an accident that you had on May twenty-sixth of this year,” I say.

“I’ll get that orange juice,” Jimmy says and slips out.

“What accident?” Mrs. Cooper wonders.

“The accident that occurred on May twenty-sixth, when you were driving your Mercedes,” I say with a mild panic-I couldn’t have screwed up the names, could I?

Mrs. Cooper shakes her head. “I wouldn’t call that an accident,” she says.

“Is there anything wrong?” Jimmy asks, coming back with a glass of orange juice.

“Nothing wrong at all, this is just routine,” I say with a reassuring smile.

“Mother admitted fault and they told us that it wouldn’t be a problem,” Jimmy continues.

“Oh no, it’s nothing to worry about, I’m only here to get the details of the accident, this doesn’t affect the claim in any way. In fact, confidentially, I can tell you that the check has already been cut. But for anything over ten thousand dollars we need to interview the claimant in person, it’s just our policy.”

Jimmy nods. It sounds plausible, and once you tell people that money is on the way that’s generally all they can subsequently think about.

“Mrs. Cooper, if I could bring you back to the afternoon or evening of May twenty-sixth, 2007.”

Mrs. Cooper still isn’t sure, though, and looks at her son for a prompt.

“Go on, Mother, tell her about it,” Jimmy says. “It’s all right.”

“Well, now that I think about it I do remember a little. There was still snow on the ground. It was a terrible winter, did they tell you that? We had a terrible winter up here, seven storms in seven weeks. One of the worst ones I can remember and I’ve been here for fifteen years,” Mrs. Cooper says with a soft and not unpleasant Chinese accent. The Chinese apparatchiks I knew in Cuba all spoke in harsh, clipped, imperative tones.

“Can you understand her, Miss Inez? Mother’s from Shanghai. Dad met her just after the war, he was an airman, the Flying Tigers. English isn’t her first language.”

“I can understand her perfectly,” I say with another reassuring smile. I give him a little nod as if to say, And aren’t you great, Jimmy, looking after your widowed mother-the things you must have had to put up with all these years. A lot to convey in a nod, but I do my best.

Jimmy returns the smile, completely warmed to me now. He walks to the mantel, picks up the oval ball, and begins tossing it from hand to hand.

“Go on, Mom, tell her,” Jimmy says. “Spill the beans.”

“I was coming back from the market in Vail,” Mrs. Cooper continues.

“You drove all the way to Vail to do your shopping?” Jimmy interrupts, shocked.

“No, no, of course not, but they don’t have a Chinese market in Fairview. Where else am I going to go, Denver?”

“You can get everything at the deli on Pearl Street. Mr. Wozeck-” Jimmy begins.

“Mr. Wozeck is a robber baron who charges an arm and a leg for-”

A brief conversation ensues in Mandarin before Jimmy turns to me and makes a slight solicitous bow. “Miss Inez, excuse us.”

“Not at all.”

“You don’t know, Fairview has really changed in the last few years,” Jimmy says.

Mrs. Cooper takes up the theme. “Oh yes, the prices in those stores on Pearl Street and Camberwick Street are preposterous. And they never have anything I want. Expensive delicatessens. Import stores. No, no. There is the 7-Eleven, but that’s in Brown Town. I wouldn’t go there. Old woman like me. No. You see the movie stars…”

I can see that I’m going to have to bring her back to business. “Now, Mrs. Cooper, this is important. At the time of the accident can you remember what road you were on?” I ask.

“What road I was on?”

Mrs. Cooper had not filed a police report and she hadn’t told the garage where the accident had taken place. This, therefore, was the key question. From this answer all things would flow. “If you could try to recall where the accident happened, I’ll be able to put it in our report and get the claim resolved as quickly as possible.”

Mrs. Cooper thinks.

Time slows.

The angel holds his breath. He knows. He can see the half dozen lifelines beating in the air above her head.

“I think it was on Ashleigh Street,” she says.

I write that down in the notebook. “Ashleigh Street?” I ask for confirmation and show her my spelling, which she corrects.

“Yes, that tree on the bend there, where the old liquor store used to be, just after the turn,” Mrs. Cooper says and looks at her son. “It wasn’t my fault, dear, there was ice on the road, I know it was May but you have no idea what it’s been like up here.”

Ashleigh Street. A tree at a bend in front of a former liquor store. Might be possible to check. Paint scrape, glass, a million things.

I nod and smile. “At any point during that day, Mrs. Cooper, did you happen to drive on the Old Boulder Road?”

“The what?”

“The Old Boulder Road,” I repeat.

“The Old Boulder Road? Never heard of it,” she says gruffly, not too gruffly but enough to raise my interest.

Hmmmm. Maybe Ricky’s hunch was wrong. Could this be our girl? And what the hell would I do if she was? Probably nothing. Probably I’d get the two o’clock bus to Denver and the first night bus to El Paso. Slip over the border. The plane from Juárez to Mexico City and an earlier flight back to Havana.

No one would be the wiser.

Hector would breathe a huge sigh of relief. Ricky wouldn’t care. Better for everyone.

“The Old Boulder Road is the road that goes from Main Street to what they call Malibu Mountain,” Jimmy says.

Mrs. Cooper nods to herself. “I know what you are talking about. Yes, that was the Old Boulder Road before they built the Eisenhower Tunnel. That was a long time ago. It is a freak-show road nowadays. Those movie-star types. Their helicopters. They’re all in that cult, they can control things with their minds. Jane Adams’s son, Jeff, he’s in with them. She cries every night. He never calls her, they do not allow him.”

Bring her back. “Mrs. Cooper, did you have any occasion to be on the Old Boulder Road on the twenty-seventh or even the twenty-eighth of May?”

The old lady shrugs. “I don’t think so. I don’t know, but I don’t think so. My thing wasn’t there though.”

“Your accident wasn’t there?”

“No. I just said. That’s completely out of my way. Haven’t been there for a long time. Not this year.”

“Can you take me through the accident in detail?”

“I don’t know about detail, but I remember it ok. I was driving on Ashleigh and I had on NPR, it was Colorado Matters. I hate that show ever since Dan Drayer left, he was good. Anyway, I slipped on the road and hit the tree and then, when I was pulling out, I don’t know, I was all shaken up, I turned the car and I hit the stop sign at the corner of Ashleigh and Rochdale Road. Knocked it clean over. That’s why we had all those dents on the hood.”

“You knocked over a stop sign?” her son interjects, looking at me nervously.

“I did. They have it planted right in the road with a couple of whatchama-call-’em orange lines painted in front of it. How are you supposed to see those?”

“Mother, did you report the fact that you knocked over the stop sign?”

“Well, not exactly. I didn’t tell the other woman.”

“What other woman?” Jimmy asks.

“From the insurance company,” Mrs. Cooper says.

Two women from the insurance company? Jimmy gives me a suspicious look.

“What was the name of this other woman?” I ask.

Mrs. Cooper fishes around in a giant glass bowl on the phone table. It takes forever but finally she passes me the card. “Sally Wren. Great Northern Insurance Claims Adjuster,” I read out loud and pass the card to the son. “Miss Wren is no longer with the company,” I say with mild disdain, and lowering my voice, I add, “That explains the delay. I’ll make sure I expedite this very quickly.”

Jimmy looks at the card and frowns at Miss Wren’s imaginary crimes. He turns to me. “Is Mom going to get in trouble for the stop sign?”

I shake my head. “It is not my job to give information to the police, in fact it would be illegal for me to do so. If you or your mother want to report it, that’s fine, but it is nothing to do with me,” I bluff, assuming this to be the case from all those Yuma lawyer movies. I don’t really know, though, and of course in Cuba anyone who fails to report a crime can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison under the general category “Enemy of the Revolution.”

Relief courses over Jimmy’s face. “You’re a good person, Miss Inez. Tancredo’s wrong about M-about immigrants.”

But I’m hardly paying attention. The accident did not take place on the Old Boulder Road. She hasn’t been on the Old Boulder Road at all this year.

Satisfied, I get up and Jimmy shows me to the door. He thanks me.

“Thank you, Mr. Cooper,” I tell him and then, remembering my American TV, I add, “Have a nice day.”

“I will, thank you. And when will that check be coming?”

“Oh, very soon,” I say.

“Excellent. Thank you. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” I walk to the path and before the door closes I look at Jimmy. “Uh, you weren’t driving the car anytime around the twenty-seventh, were you?”

“Me? No. I was in San Francisco,” he says flatly.

“Ok, thank you.”

When I’m out of sight of the house I let the air out of my lungs.

“Closer,” I tell myself.

Now what?

Walk back. Process it.

Only a couple of kilometers to Fairview and another half a klick to Wetback Mountain.

Yeah, walk back, let it bubble like rum in the kettle.

The road, the trees, the endless mountains.

Beautiful, really.

No wonder you hid here, Dad.

The afternoon gone mad with migrating geese, volery after volery. Thousands of them. Where are you going? Mexico? Farther south? I wish you could appreciate what I can see. The cobalt sky, the light bending over the mountains, the vapor trails.

That why you came here, Pop? A landscape that is in every way the opposite of Havana? Or was there another reason?

I make it to the outskirts of Fairview, take out my map, and find Ashleigh Street. I go along about a kilometer before I find a burned-out liquor store. Sure enough, the stop sign on Rochdale Road has recently been replaced. I walk back a few meters and examine the trees. One of them looks bruised, bent, like it may have been hit fairly recently by a vehicle. I look close and change my angle to get the sunlight. Tiny fragments of gray paint on the trunk. I dab my finger on my tongue and raise one of them from the tree. I hold it in the palm of my hand.

The garage report said she drove a cream Mercedes-Benz.

Six months later cream and white probably weather to just about the same shade of gray.

I sit down on a nearby tree trunk.

The sky changes color as the sun sinks behind the Front Range.

Get up. Start back.

The road begins a long, slow incline toward town, and I find myself thinking about what Esteban told me. Not too long ago this road and the Malecón in Havana were both Spain.

Spain. Hard to believe it. Of course, they have long since parted and they don’t remember that they were kin. Here, unlike the Malecón, no one walks. Cars slow, people stare. Who is that person on foot? What can they be about? No good, I’ll be-

“María! María, is that you?”

I look up. A Toyota pickup with half a dozen Mexicans crammed in the back.

“How do you know-”

“It’s me,” Paco says from under a disguise of grime.

He helps me into the truck.

Handshakes. Hellos.

The boys pass me a Corona. I drink it. They tell me they’ve come from a garbage dump on the far side of the mountain, where they threw out perfectly good refrigerators, radiators, air-conditioning units, and other obsolescences that they’ve taken from the building they’re remodeling on Pearl Street. The boys are mostly from Mexico City or Chiapas. None of them is over twenty-five. Paco seems happy to be with them. Sitting there with the others, drinking beer, telling jokes. He’s a different person among these guys, more himself, funnier, younger. I’m a weight. A drag. “We shouldn’t be sharing a room anymore, Paco, you should be with your friends,” I tell him.

“No, no, I like staying with you,” he insists.

“I’m a cramp on your style,” I say.

“Never.”

He grins, finishes another Corona, shakes his head. Someone passes me a bottle of tequila but I decline and the bottle moves on.

“Did you have a good day?” Paco asks.

A good day? Yes. A productive day. Unless she’s got an Oscar stashed away, Mrs. Cooper was not the person who hit my father and left him to die in a ditch. Only one name left on Ricky’s garage list. The perfect suspect. Arrogant, rich, careless. He clearly takes meth, pot, alcohol. Gotta be him.

In fact, he’s almost too perfect, and if I were in Havana and investigating this case for Hector I’d at least look at a DGI angle-the prime suspect being set up as cover for a Party man. But this isn’t Cuba. This is a simpler country.

And Esteban and his deer? A deeper look to take care of that. Maybe also see about that Scientology golf cart. Just to be on the safe side.

We bump along the road. Paco, utterly wiped, lies against me. His eyes are dark and weary. He’s definitely not used to manual labor, no matter what he said before.

“Lie on my lap, little Francisco,” I tell him.

“I’m dirty,” he says.

“Lie down, close your eyes,” I tell him.

He smiles and lies down. Some of the other men give him an obscene roar but he tells them to fuck off. I stroke his hair and his smile widens.

“Keep a look out for the motel,” he says. “When you see it, tell Hernando to bang on the roof. They won’t stop. Angelo’s crew are all going to Denver.”

More bumps. More beer. “Plenty of food, plenty of beer, plenty of fun, that’s America,” he mutters. America. Yes. In Cuba it’s different. In Cuba you think only with your belly. And at the end of the month when the ration book is running thin, your belly tells you what to do.

“What are you thinking about?” Paco asks dreamily.

“My belly,” I tell him, and he laughs and laughs.

“You don’t even have one,” he says finally.

I do, Paco. I have a cop gut and it tells me that Mrs. Cooper is innocent and time is running out and the real killer’s days to walk this Earth are few.