Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

Body Shop by Terry Barbieri

Few women in the mystery field write from a male point of view, as Terry Barbieri does. Her P.I. Nick Gallagher is brilliantly realized in this story, despite the gender gap that exists between him and his creator. The author’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in many literary magazines.

It’s still dark outside when I shove the bag of ice against the driver’s door and lay my fractured left arm on top of it. I don’t dare stop at an emergency room here in San Antonio; I don’t know how many more thugs Vance has out looking for me. I shift into reverse, peel out of the Stop-N-Go parking lot, and aim my pickup west towards the Rio Grande.

While early-morning commuters crowd the highway’s in-bound lanes, the outgoing lanes lie empty, except for a couple of eighteen-wheelers. I resist the urge to gun past them. The last thing I need right now is for a cop to pull me over.

As the sun rises in my rearview mirror, melting ice runs down the driver’s door. Outside Uvalde, I pull up in front of a liquor store and cross the dusty yard to a gray trailer. An unshaven man answers the door.

“I know you don’t open till noon...”

He squints into the morning sunlight. “You got cash?”

I pull a couple of twenties from my pocket.

He slides his feet into a pair of leather flip-flops and leads me to the store, where I purchase a bottle of Cuervo Gold. Carrying it outside, I sit down on a bench, grip the bottle between my knees, twist off the top with my one good hand, and take three long swigs. The fire in my throat momentarily blots out the pain in my arm.

I climb back into my truck and hit the open road. As the tequila seeps into my veins, the highway blurs to a gentle ribbon. I follow the dotted white line towards the Mexican border.

Close to noon, I cruise into Del Rio and park outside the emergency room. Inside, brown faces crowd the waiting room: the drawn faces of mothers cradling feverish infants; the jaundiced face of a doubled-over teen; the stone-cold face of a construction worker with a bloody towel wrapped around his hand. I print my name, Nick Gallagher, on the receptionist’s clipboard. Then I roll up an ancient issue of Life, place it over one chair’s steel arm, and rest my arm on it.

Leaning back, I close my eyes and see Jessica as I left her, wearing a Bourbon Street T-shirt with nothing underneath. She said she would give me twelve hours, but she had lied. She must have called her father as soon as I’d left, then e-mailed him the video capturing everything I’d done to her, or rather everything she’d done to me. Only it wouldn’t appear that way. Why else would Vance have sent two heavyweight goons to my San Antonio apartment? I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill them. In broad daylight, with two good arms at my disposal, I can shoot the cap off a Corona bottle at twenty yards. Shooting one-handed in the dark, while ducking the swing of a baseball bat, is a different story.

Vance and I grew up together, two white boys in one of San Antonio’s oldest barrios. We learned Spanglish on the streets, ran with the same gang, and shared Marlboros, six-packs, and the occasional joint. Though we’d led vastly different lives since high school, Vance and his wife Lorraine had me over for dinner several times a year. I often wondered whether it bothered the staunchly Catholic Lorraine that Vance had made his small fortune producing black-market porn.

While Vance earned his living by wronging the rights of the underage girls he featured in his flicks, I became a private investigator and earned mine by righting the wrongs suffered by the wives of unfaithful husbands. Sometimes I thought about starting over in some seaside village, where fish fought over baited hooks and a man could make himself at home in a one-room hut, but I’d never made it past the Texas border.

Last Sunday, as Vance and I shared a pitcher of Scorpion’s Tail at The Brewery, I noticed the gray strands which had begun to take over his full head of hair. Across a plate-size table, Vance told me, “I need your help.”

“What’s up?”

“Jessica’s boss has been sexually harassing her.”

The Scorpion’s Tail had wielded a more powerful sting than I’d realized. I could have sworn Vance had used Jessica’s name and the words sexually harassed in the same sentence. Jessica was a doughy girl with a pug nose and frizzy hair the color of swamp water. The Cro-Magnon ancestress of the girls Vance featured in his films. “What was that?”

“Jessica’s boss at Surplex has been asking her for sexual favors in exchange for a promotion. I want you to get everything you can on the bastard.”

“No problem.” I’d played this gig before, taking a job as a maintenance man to gain access to storage closets and between-floor crawl spaces. When I wasn’t installing phone jacks or unclogging toilets, I’d drill holes in walls and shoot footage through them. “I’d like to speak to Jessica. Where does she work?”

“Surplex’s home office in Houston. She’s in Human Resources.”

“Does she know I’m coming?”

“She asked for you. She says you’re the best.”

I left San Antonio at eight the following morning and pulled up in front of Surplex shortly before noon, its tower of tinted glass reflecting Houston’s skyline. Inside, a tropical atrium flourished beneath soaring skylights. An iguana turned a beady eye as I walked past him towards the elevator.

Stepping out on the seventh floor, I approached a young blonde seated behind a semicircular desk. Her sleeveless dress showed off the tastiest stack I’d seen this side of a Big Boy breakfast platter. Her face looked vaguely familiar.

“Is Jessica Sancetti here?”

She stared at me for a moment before answering. “She’s at lunch. Can I help you?”

“I’m here to apply for a job.”

She handed me an application. After I’d completed it, she looked it over. “We don’t have any openings right now, but I’ll keep this on file.”

“Thanks.”

I had nearly reached the elevator when she called me back. “Mr. Gallagher, I bought an entertainment center last Saturday. I didn’t realize, until they delivered it, that it has to be assembled. Do you think you could put it together for me? I’d pay you.”

“When?”

“Tonight?” She printed her name and address on a Post-it and held it out, nails glistening red as a freshly cut watermelon.

I took the Post-it and read her name. Sara Anderson. “I’ll be there.”

I expected Sara to live in a two-story apartment building surrounded by acres of asphalt. Instead I found myself pulling into the underground garage of a skyrise overlooking Buffalo Bayou. Murky as a day-old cup of coffee in which the milk has gone bad, Buffalo Bayou winds through the heart of Houston. I rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and knocked on her door.

Sara ushered me into a living area larger than the wood-frame house I’d grown up in. A tiled island separated the kitchen from the living area, where a slab of glass balanced atop four concrete balls served as a coffee table. A painting of an all-black jazz band hung over the fireplace. Two ceramic masks, rhinestones swirling around the eyes, hung beside it.

Sara led me to a box leaning against one wall, industrial staples gleaming from an open flap. One of the staples drew blood as I reached in and pulled out a thirty-page instruction booklet. I lifted the sealed end of the box and pieces of wood and bags of screws slid onto the floor.

“Have you eaten?”

“No.” Was that an invitation?

As I got to work, the smell of garlic bread reminded me of the meals I’d eaten at Vance’s home. Lorraine put garlic in everything except her cheesecake.

The clouds had turned purple, giving the sky a bruised look, when Sara called me to the table. Two leafy green salads, topped with tomatoes and pine nuts, and two plates of tortellini dusted with parmesan lured me to sit down. Sara held up a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “If I serve this with dinner, is that thing going to morph into a computer desk?”

I looked over my shoulder at the half-finished entertainment center. “Let’s drink it and find out.”

Ten minutes into our meal, Sara asked how long I’d been out of work.

I tried to remember what I’d written on my application. “Two months.”

“You’re not really a maintenance man, are you, Nick?”

The wine in my mouth turned to vinegar. “Why would you say that?”

“Jessica told me. I wouldn’t have brought it up, but I need help.”

“You’re being harassed, too?”

“I wish it were that simple. Several years ago I was in a car accident that left my face badly deformed. The nurses told me I was lucky to be alive, but I didn’t feel lucky. A week after I got out of the hospital, a child in a grocery store took one look at me and burst into tears. I quit college. I figured no one would ever hire me, just like no man would ever again ask me out.”

As Sara spoke, I studied her face but detected no scars, other than a faint track left by a couple of stitches between her nose and her upper lip.

“A friend of a friend told me about this agency that will send you to a private hospital and spa they call the Body Shop. They do plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, body sculpting, anything you want. Then you work it off afterwards, the way indentured servants used to work off their passage.”

I recalled an older client of mine who’d traveled to Guadalajara for a face-lift and tummy tuck. A plastic surgeon there catered to Americans who couldn’t afford cosmetic surgery back home.

Sara continued, “They’re the ones who got me my job. Last week they ordered me to start gathering information for them about Surplex: its bank routing and account numbers, the names of its creditors...”

“Identity theft.”

“I don’t want to do it, but I don’t know how to get out of it. Someone told me that one girl who threatened to report what was going on was found dead afterwards in a house fire.”

I topped off Sara’s wineglass and mine. “Let me think about it.”

I was still thinking two hours later when I tightened the last screw on the entertainment center. Sara had already changed into a pair of paisley print pajamas and was curled up on the couch watching Letterman.

“Finished.” I tossed the screwdriver into my toolbox.

Sara rose and wrote me a check. “How about a nightcap?”

“Sure.” I took a seat on the couch, while she poured brandy into two snifters. She handed me one, then sat down beside me. The brandy went down smooth as a freshly iced skating rink. “Remy Martin?”

Sara smiled. “I like a man who knows his brandy.”

“What else do you like?”

She drew circles on my shoulder with the tip of her index finger. “Lots of things.”

I gestured towards the entertainment center. “I’m good with my hands.”

“With your tools, too, I bet.”

I took another swallow of brandy and followed her to the bedroom.

Close to midnight, Sara climbed out of bed, pulled on a Bourbon Street T-shirt, and crossed the room to her armoire. By the muted light of a bedside lamp she had draped with a burgundy scarf, I watched her stand on tiptoe, reach up towards a piece of equipment, and press a button. I expected the blues, filtering through the speakers, to go off, but the saxophone continued its throaty lament. Turning away from the armoire, Sara lit a cigarette. Smoke curled out of her mouth as she looked out at the night sky.

A few minutes later, she stubbed out the cigarette and turned to me. “You still don’t recognize me, do you?”

Had we met before? Over a drunken weekend in a drunken town? I shook my head.

“I’m Jessica.”

Vance’s Jessica?

“The new and improved Jessica, as my father sees it. He was always embarrassed by the way I looked. He never said so, but I knew. When I finished college he sent me to a makeover specialist. He said a front-office appearance would help me land the right job. I kept telling him I wanted to start my own business, that I didn’t want to work for someone else, but he wouldn’t listen.”

I sat up, my back supported by the wrought-iron headboard, and studied her face. Her eyes and mouth could be Jessica’s, but I would never have recognized them beneath the silken blond hair, punctuated by a now-perfect nose. The doughy cheeks and the second chin were gone, replaced by clearly defined cheekbones and a tapered neck.

“So there was no Body Shop? No agency turning girls into indentured servants?”

“There was a body shop, all right, a spa in the middle of the Arizona desert with plastic surgeons on staff. You could say I’m indentured to my father.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were Jessica?”

“All through high school, I had this wild crush on you. If you’d known I was Vance Sancetti’s daughter, you’d never have slept with me. I remember, once there was this father-daughter dance at my school. Dad was in Mexico on business and Mom said I should ask you to escort me. You said you had a prior commitment, but I knew the real reason you wouldn’t go was that I wasn’t pretty enough. It’s funny how differently you acted when you saw me at Surplex.”

What had I done? Vance had hired me to protect his daughter from the big bad corporate wolf. Instead I’d huffed and I’d puffed and I’d...

“What about this supervisor who’s been harassing you?”

“An innocent flirtation. I was hoping that if I told my dad I was being mistreated at Surplex, he’d loan me the money I need to start my own business. I want to open an ice-cream parlor in the French Quarter. La Dolce Vita. I’ll serve parfaits layered with syrups made from Kahlua, amaretto, and peach schnapps. But Dad says he’s already invested enough in me, that the time has come for me to pay him back.”

“Pay him back?” Surely Vance would never feature his own daughter in one of his films.

Jessica sat on the edge of the bed and dug her heels into the carpet. “There’s this man, Enrique, who lives in Monterrey. His father is a close friend of my dad’s. They import olive oil into Mexico and Enrique wants to expand into the states. I went out with him a few times, as a favor to my dad. Now he wants to marry me. I don’t believe he’s in love with me, but marrying an American citizen would make it a lot easier for him to live and do business in the U.S.”

“Your father wouldn’t ask you to marry a man you don’t love.”

“Enrique’s father helped my dad get his films distributed in Mexico. Enrique’s hinted to my dad that if I don’t marry him, he’ll report his use of underage, undocumented girls. Dad told me I have a month to accept Enrique’s proposal or he’ll cut off my allowance.”

“Allowance?”

“How else could I afford this place?” She rose and studied herself in the mirror. “Do you know, not a single boy ever asked me out in high school. Now men won’t leave me alone. All you guys care about is how a woman looks.”

“We’re victims of our testosterone.”

“No, Nick, we’re victims of your testosterone.” She turned to face me. “I need your help.”

The urgency in her voice made me uneasy. I fished beneath the sheets for my jockey shorts. “What kind of help?”

“I need you to get some basic information about my father’s company: bank account numbers, tax ID, the names and addresses of his creditors. Then I can apply for a loan under his business name and use the money to open my ice-cream parlor.”

“Jessica, I can’t betray your father.”

“You already have. There’s a camcorder on top of the armoire. It recorded our little scene here and uploaded it to my server. You have twelve hours to decide whether you’re going to help me. If you decide not to, I’ll forward the video to my dad.”

“Let me think about it.” If Vance saw that scene, he might feature me in his first snuff film. I retrieved my jeans and shirt from the floor. “I’ll call you in the morning; we’ll work something out.”

If I were smart, I would have taken my time leaving, kissed her goodbye, given her some sign that I cared. Instead I dressed and left so quickly, Jessica must have realized by the time I reached the elevator that I wouldn’t be calling her.

I sped back to my motel, threw my clothes into my bag, tucked my forty-five into my boot, and hit the road.

An hour west of Houston, the floodlit shopping centers thinned out and disappeared. On either side of the interstate, ranchland melted into the blackened horizon. Not a single light shone in a single farmhouse window.

Shortly after four, I pulled into San Antonio’s downtown maze of one-way streets. The city’s familiar smell greeted me as I parked outside my second-floor office. San Antonio smelled like the homes of my boyhood friends, the morning after their grandmothers had made tamales. Steamed cornhusks. Charred chili peppers. Lard.

I unlocked the street door and hurried up the termite-riddled stairs to my office. By the light of the bail-bond sign outside my window, I dumped the contents of my desk and my clients’ files into cardboard boxes, emptied my safe, and carted everything down to my truck.

It was still dark when I pulled up in front of my apartment. Insects swarmed the outside lamps with all the enthusiasm of college students swarming a keg of beer.

I let myself in without turning on the lights and was halfway across the room before I smelled his aftershave. I turned towards the hulking silhouette of a man and ducked as he raised a baseball bat and swung it at my head. My hair rose as the bat passed over it. The intruder spun full circle and struck my left arm with a loud crack.

As I yanked my pistol from my boot, a second man lunged out of the shadows. My left arm refused to bend at the elbow. My right hand alone clutched my forty-five, my wrist taking the full force of the recoil as I fired the entire round. Bullets traced molten streaks through the air.

I shoved the gun into my pocket and, supporting my left arm with my right, stumbled down the stairs, climbed into my pickup, and tore out of the parking lot.

“Nick Gallagher.” An aide takes me down the hall for X-rays, then leads me to an examining room. The blue paper lining the examining table crackles as I sit down. Several minutes later, a nurse appears with a cup of water and an even smaller cup containing a single white pill. “We’ll give the Demerol a few minutes to take effect. Then the doctor will give you a local and set your arm.”

I wash down the pill. As the pain in my arm recedes, I drowsily recall drinking iced tea in my sister Paula’s kitchen. Outside the window, two of my nephews picked up sticks and started beating the shirts on the clothesline.

Paula frowned. “Boys are worse than girls, but I’d take a bad boy over a bad girl any day.”

“Why’s that?”

“A boy will be bad right in front of you: kicking his brother, hanging from the ceiling fan, tossing your cell phone in the toilet to see if it will float. But bad girls are devious. Sneaky. They do things when you aren’t looking and they cover their tracks. There’s this girl down the street I won’t even let in the house anymore.”

“Is her name Jessica?” I mumble as the nurse and the doctor file into the room.

The doctor studies my X-rays, then examines my arm. “How’d you break it?”

“I tripped over a Tonka truck someone left on the stairs.”

“Anything else hurt?”

“No.”

The clear fluid the doctor injects into the crook of my elbow burns a path through my veins before my arm goes numb.

An hour later, I leave the emergency room wearing a fresh cast. Ignoring the doctor’s instructions not to drive for four hours, I climb into my car and head south to the International Bridge.

As soon as I’ve crossed the Rio Grande, I buy a map and mark the best route to Guadalajara. Once I get there, I’ll have a barber cut my hair short and tint it a salt-and-pepper gray. Then I’ll find one of those plastic surgeons who caters to Americans and check into his clinic, or body shop, as Jessica would call it. I’ll order wider eyes, a cleft chin, a Roman nose.

Afterwards, recuperating in some hidden courtyard, I’ll have plenty of time to come up with a new name, a new birthday, a new life. The Outer Banks. Key West. Baja.

After all, I have nothing left to lose.

Copyright © 2006 Terry Barbieri