The Girls He Adored

44

For once, traveler's luck was with Pender. Not much Saturday traffic from Monterey to San Jose, oldies on the radio, no trouble returning the Toyota at the airport, plenty of seats left on the Southwest flight, plenty of time to fill out the forms required to bring his weapon onboard. And on the connecting flight to Dallas's Love Field, Pender even had room to stretch out for a much-needed nap-he hadn't slept but two or three hours in the last twenty-four-before the plane touched down.

Love Field. Was it possible for a man of Pender's age to hear the name and not think of Jack Kennedy? Pender had been nineteen at the time of the assassination. His first year at college. He was still living at home, still driving the '53 Plymouth his folks had given him as a graduation present (it was the only car they could afford), struggling to cover his expenses by holding down two jobs (washing breakfast dishes at Dan's Deluxe Diner, and pumping gas at the Flying A), chronically short of sleep, time, and money-and yet he found himself looking back on those years with considerable nostalgia. The past was like an old whore, he had read someplace- the farther away you got, the better she looked.

At the Enterprise counter, Pender rented another Corolla- about all that was left on a Saturday evening. He asked the gal if she'd ever heard of the Sleep-Tite Motel. She hadn't, but looked it up for him, then gave him directions reluctantly-apparently it wasn't in the best of neighborhoods.

Pender treated himself to a steak dinner at a restaurant with steer horns mounted over the entrance, and located the Sleep-Tite shortly after nine o'clock. A downwardly mobile strip. Twenty shabby units painted a faded pink, two wings of ten rooms each with the office in the middle. ACANCY ACANCY ACANCY blinked the neon sign, a rusting, smartly raked post-Deco affair that looked as if it should have been holding up the canopy of a drive-in restaurant back in the fifties. OOMS were $26 a night. Hourly rates available, no doubt.

Pender parked the Corolla in front of the office window where the desk clerk would be sure to see it. Thanks to the carjacking epidemic that began in the early nineties, rental cars were no longer marked as such, but anybody who paid attention to that sort of thing would know the provenance of a clean, white, late-model Toyota. Single guy in an airport rent-a-car late at night equals traveling salesman-the very identity Pender planned to assume.

Apparently the corny hat and rumpled plaid jacket didn't hurt the disguise any-the middle-aged Asian man behind the desk greeted Pender without interest or suspicion.

“What c'I do fo you dis e-ven-ing, nice room twenty-six dollah, tv, no cable, local call free.” All in one singsongy breath-sounded like a Chinese accent to Pender.

“Here's the deal, friend,” he said, putting his elbows on the high counter and leaning toward the man confidentially. “I have a buddy back home, told me he got the best blow job he ever got in his life from this Veetnamese gal in the Sleep-Tite Motel in Dallas last June-and believe me, this is a man who knows his blow jobs. So I figured, as long as I'm in town…”

“One year long time. Big turnover. Whassa name?”

“Not sure. He might have used Max or Christopher or-”

“Not his name, man, her name.” The desk clerk rolled his eyes.

“Ann Tran, something like that.”

“Dunno. I'll ask da girls, see wh'I can do. Twenty-six bucks for the room. In a'vance.”

“I'll pay cash-just make sure it's the same girl who did my friend-otherwise you're wasting her time.”

“Yeah sure, same girl,” said the man carelessly. But there was a watchfulness in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

Anh Tranh, five feet two inches tall, eighty-five, ninety pounds tops, heavily made-up and wearing a peach-colored halter top and a short, tight, lime-green, vinyl-looking skirt, came waltzing into room 17 of the Sleep-Tite Motel chattering away like a Saigon street whore.

“Hey, G.I., any frien' your frien', frien' a mine. I give you extra special numbah one suckee suckee, same like him, fitty dollah, long time, hunn'ed dollah boom-boom, whaddaya say, G.I.?”

Pender closed the door behind her, reached for his wallet, flipped down his badge.

“Have a seat,” he said, nodding toward the bed.

“Oh, bite me,” the girl replied, in an unaccented Texas twang. “What's the problem, Wong forget to pay off Vice this month? Or you just lookin' for a freebie?”

“I'm not Vice, I'm FBI, and I need your help.” He had a copy of Casey's mug shot in his wallet; he showed it to her.

“Christy,” she said without hesitation, though she hadn't seen him in over a year. She sat down on the bed. “Wha'd he do, kill somebody?” More intrigued than resentful.

“Lots of somebodys.” It had suddenly become obvious that Anh Tranh was wearing transparent panties under the short skirt. Pender, who hadn't had sex in months, forced his eyes upward, past her bare midriff and tiny haltered breasts to her face, which was sweet and round as a lollipop. Pretty little thing, if you scraped about half that gunk off her face. “What's with the fuckee-suckee talk?”

“Pretty good, hunh? I ain't even 'Mese-I'm Cambodian. But we get a lot of guys your age, you know, 'Nam vets, they eat that shit up, come back for more. It's like, nostalgic. Hey, did you know your head was bleeding?”

Pender reached up-he'd removed his hat upon entering the room-and touched the bandage gingerly. It was wet, and when he looked at his fingertips, there was blood on them. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Did Christy do that to you?”

“With a pair of handcuffs.” Pender mimed a stiff-armed stabbing motion.

“God-dayyum,” said Anh Tranh-she seemed to be impressed.