Missionary Stew

Chapter 19

At 7:45 that night the two men who sometimes called themselves Yarn and Tighe parked their Oldsmobile 88 behind the Mercedes sedan in Gladys Citron’s driveway. John D. Yarn was behind the wheel, Richard Tighe beside him. They examined the house briefly. A light was on in the living room. The porch light had also been turned on.

Without speaking, they got out of the car and walked through the iron gate and up the curving cement walk to the front door. Tighe rang the bell. The door was opened almost immediately by Gladys Citron. Nothing was said. The two men went inside, through the small foyer, and into the living room. Gladys Citron followed them.

Tighe headed for the tray that held the bottles and glasses. He spoke over his shoulder to Yarn. “What d’you want, Scotch?”

“Scotch.”

“Gladys?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Tighe mixed the two drinks, turned, and handed one to Yarn. Gladys Citron crossed to the wing-back chairs, hesitated, then sat down in the one where Drew Meade had died. She was wearing a long-dressy robe of dark-blue silk. It went nicely with her hair. She leaned her head back against the chair, closed her eyes, and said, “Well?”

Tighe sat down in the chair opposite her and took a swallow of his drink. Yarn continued to stand, sipped some of his Scotch, and said, “I like that, Gladys. The way you plopped down in old Drew’s chair.”

“It’s my chair,” she said, her eyes still closed. “He merely died in it.”

“Well, it went about like we thought it would,” Tighe said. “They dumped him over in Culver City.”

“And?”

“They found the card.”

“You’re sure?” she said.

“It was gone, anyway.”

“I wonder which one,” Tighe said.

Yarn looked at him. “Which one what?”

“Found it.”

“Haere. I’d say Haere.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Yarn said. “Maybe just because he’s foxier.”

Gladys Citron opened her eyes. “I won’t have him hurt.”

Tighe smiled at her. “You should’ve thought of that before, Gladys.”

“He’s still my son. They won’t have to hurt him.”

“We’ll tell them that, won’t we?” Tighe said to Yarn.

Yarn grinned and nodded. “Maybe we can hang a sign around his neck. ‘Handle with Care.’ Something like that.”

Gladys Citron leaned forward in her chair. When she spoke, her tone was surprisingly soft, but her stare was hard and unwavering. “I must not be making myself clear.”

Tighe finished his drink. “Sure you are, Gladys. You’re playing Mommy — maybe forty years late, but you’re playing it pretty well. You have to understand something, though. If it comes to choosing between your son and us, and I’m talking about all of us, then a hard choice will have to be made. I mean, if it comes to us or him, who do we choose?”

Gladys Citron leaned back in the chair and again closed her eyes. “I’ve got a migraine,” she said. “Why don’t you two run out and play somewhere.”

“Who, Gladys?” Yarn said.

“It needn’t come to that,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“But if it does?”

She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. “He was a very pretty baby. One of the prettiest I’ve ever seen. But then I was never really very much of a mother.”

“He was never much of a son either, was he?” Yarn said.

It was several moments before Gladys Citron answered, her gaze still fixed on the ceiling. “No,” she said, “not much.”

They drove to the restaurant in Santa Monica in Velveeta Keats’s dusty yellow Porsche, a 911 model that had been given to her on her thirtieth birthday.

“I just went out to get the mail that day,” she told Morgan Citron, “and there the keys were with a little note in the mail-box that said, ‘Happy Birthday, honey — Love, Mama,’ but of course it was Papa that went out and bought it and all.”

She was not a good driver. At the corner of the Pacific Coast Highway and Topanga Canyon she ran through a red light and just missed a pickup truck that had two large brown dogs in its bed. The dogs barked at her as she barely scraped by on the right. Citron closed his eyes automatically and opened them only when he was sure the danger had passed. “When was this?” he said.

“My birthday? Last August. August ninth. I turned thirty. How’d you feel when you turned thirty?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think it was just another day.”

“How about forty?”

“Forty. Well, forty wasn’t so hot.”

“Where were you?”

“In jail. In Africa.”

“What’d you do?”

“On my fortieth birthday?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think I cried,” he said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Did you do that much? Cry, I mean.”

“No,” Citron said. “Only that once.”

They drove in silence for nearly a minute until she broke it with a question. “Did he say anything about me?”

“Your father?”

Velveeta Keats nodded as she stared straight ahead, her jaw clenched, her hands wrapped tightly around the wheel. Her sudden tension was almost palpable, and Citron at first thought it might be because she feared the car, but then he realized she wasn’t a good enough driver to be afraid of the car. His answer was really what she feared. He answered carefully.

“We talked about you quite a lot, your father and I.”

“He tell you I made all that up about me and Cash, you know, going to bed together?”

“He said your brother died when you were seven and he was, I think, nine.”

“My old man,” she said slowly, choosing each word with care, “is a fucking liar.”

“I see.”

“Jimmy — I told you about him — he was my husband?”

“Right. Maneras, wasn’t it? Jaime Maneras, the one whose family used to own all the milk in Cuba.”

Nodding again, she said, “Well, it was just like I told you. Jimmy caught us in bed and shot Cash dead. With a pistol. Then Papa killed Jimmy, or had him killed, I reckon, and they shipped me off out here to be a widow woman.”

“When was all this?” Citron said. “I don’t think you said.”

“Last spring. June. The first part of June.”

“Did you ever know anyone else called Maneras whose first name started with an R?”

She gave her head a small hard shake. “The only other Maneras I ever knew was Jimmy’s brother, Bobby.”

“Roberto, maybe?”

She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Yeah, that would be his real name, wouldn’t it? But nobody I ever knew called him that. Everybody always calls him Bobby.”

“What did Bobby do?”

“He did coke with Jimmy and Papa. I told you about all that, didn’t I?”

“Not about Bobby.”

“He’s older’n Jimmy was. Five, maybe six years older.”

“Where is he now?”

“In Miami, I reckon. At least, he was the last I heard. Why?”

“Somebody mentioned his name to me.”

“Papa?”

“No, not him.”

“Did he, Papa, I mean, did he, well, say anything else about me — anything at all?”

“He said for me to tell you hello,” Citron paused only briefly before deciding to embellish the father’s sketchy greeting to his exiled daughter. “And to give you his love.”

Again, Velveeta turned to stare at him, disbelief on her face and in her tone. “He really say that?”

“Watch the road,” Citron said, and added, “He really did.”

They had dinner in the front parlor at Vickie’s, which was the name of an expensive restaurant on the south edge of Santa Monica. The menu claimed, in a small italic note, that Vickie’s was named for the Victorian mansion in which it was housed, a sixteen-room structure built in 1910 and painstakingly moved in 1977 from Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles to its present location, where it had been, according to the note, “lovingly restored.”

Velveeta Keats read all this to Citron as they waited for the waiter to return and take their order.

“If it was built in nineteen-ten,” she said, “then it really couldn’t be Victorian, could it? She died before that, didn’t she? Queen Victoria, I mean.”

“Nineteen-oh-one, I think.”

“Then it’s Edwardian, isn’t it? And instead of Vickie’s they oughta be calling it Eddie’s.”

Velveeta Keats’s small attempt at humor, the first that Citron could recall, transformed her. She smiled broadly and her eyes half closed into arcs through which something merry slyly peeped. She even laughed, although it was really no more than a chuckle that sounded seldom used, but not at all rusty. Gone was the somber poor-thing look, as Citron thought of it, and in its place appeared a look of near radiance that was not too far from beauty.

Still smiling, she looked at him and said, “You know what I used to do a lot? I used to giggle a lot.”

He smiled back. “You should take it up again.”

Her smile went away, but slowly, as she picked up the menu again and studied it. “Maybe I will,” she said, looked up, smiled again, and asked, “Would it be okay if I had the sole?”

The sole proved to be excellent, as did Citron’s steak, and between them they finished off a bottle and a half of wine. When the coffee came, she declined a brandy and, bare tanned elbows on the table, leaned toward Citron. The wine, or perhaps the evening, had given her face a higher color that was more glow than flush. Her eyes also shined with something, either pleasure or excitement or possibly anticipation. Citron felt it might even be all three.

“Can I talk to you about something?” she said. “Something I maybe should’ve talked to you about before?”

“Sure.”

“It’s about last night when you came with the flowers and those two men were there.” She paused. “Can I talk to you about that?”

“I don’t see why not — if you want to.”

“Well, they came up over the balcony from the beach and in through the sliding doors. They had those wet suits on and their masks and they had the gun, of course. Well, they didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Not to me — not a word. One of them just pointed the gun at me and the other one, he just kept looking at his watch like, well, you know, like he was waiting for somebody.”

“Then I knocked.”

She nodded. “Then you knocked and came in and threw the flowers at them. They could’ve shot you.”

“I know.”

“But they didn’t. All they did was leave. Then I got real scared and you were so great and everything, and I just never said anything about them just — you know — waiting for you. I reckon I should’ve, shouldn’t I — said something?”

Citron smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. But then again, maybe not.”

“Well, I’ve said something now. Does that make it all right?”

“That makes it perfect,” Citron lied, trying to determine what it was that caused the cold prickling on the back of his neck. Apprehension? he wondered. Dread? And then he realized it was neither. It was something far simpler, far more elemental, and so familiar that Citron almost said hello. It was fear.