The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Vic Primeval by T. Jefferson Parker

FROM San Diego Noir

“YOU KNOW HOW these things get started, Robbie. You see her for the first time. Your heart skips and your fingers buzz. Can’t take your eyes off her. And when you look at her she knows. No way to hide it. So you don’t look. Use all your strength to not look. But she still knows. And anybody else around does, too.”

“I’ve had that feeling, Vic,” I said.

We walked down the Embarcadero where the cruise ships come and go. It was what passes for winter here in San Diego, cool and crisp, and there was a hard clarity to the sunlight. Once a week I met Vic at Higher Grounds coffee and we’d get expensive drinks and walk around the city. He was a huge guy, a former professional wrestler. Vic Primeval was his show name until they took his WWF license away for getting too physical in his matches. He hurt some people. I spend a few minutes a week with Vic because he thinks he owes me his life. And because he’s alone in the world and possibly insane.

“Anyway,” said Vic, “her name is Farrel White and I want you to meet her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m proud to have you as a friend. You’re pretty much all I got in that department.”

“Are you showing us off, Vic? Our freak-show past?”

He blushed. “No. But you do make me look good.”

Vic was bouncing at Skin, an exotic dance club-strippers, weak drinks, no cover with military ID. “I don’t love that place,” I said.

“Robbie, what don’t you like about pretty women dancing almost naked?”

“The creeps who go there.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky. You’re lucky with the ladies.”

“What do you know about my luck with ladies, Vic?”

“Come on, man. You’ve got luck. Whole world knows that.”

More luck than I deserve, but is it good or bad? For instance, seven years ago Vic threw me out the window of the sixth floor of a hotel he’d set on fire-the Las Palmas in downtown San Diego. I was trying to save some lives and Vic was distraught at having had his World Wrestling Federation license revoked. This incident could be reasonably called bad luck.

You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semifamous-the Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.

“Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight, too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”

We stood in the rear employees-only lot in the winter dark. I watched the cars rushing down Highway 163. The music thumped away inside the club, and when someone came through the employee door the music got louder and I saw colored shapes hovering in the air about midway between the door and me.

I’ve been seeing these colored objects since Vic threw me to that sidewalk. They’re geometric, of varying colors, between one and four inches in length, width, depth. They float and bob. I can move them with a finger. Or with a strong exhalation, like blowing out birthday cake candles. They often accompany music, but sometimes they appear when someone is talking to me. The stronger the person’s emotion, the larger and more vivid the objects are. They linger briefly, then vanish.

In the months after my fall I came to understand that these shapes derived not so much from the words spoken but from the emotion behind them. Each shape and color denotes a different emotion. To me, the shapes are visual reminders of the fact that people don’t always mean what they say. My condition is called synesthesia, from the Greek, and loosely translated it means “mixing of the senses.” I belong to the San Diego Synesthesia Society and we meet once a month at the Seven Seas on Hotel Circle.

Farrel had a round, pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair cut in bangs, and one dimple when she smiled. Her lips were small and red. Her handshake was soft. She was short even in high-heeled boots. She wore a long coat against the damp winter chill.

“Vic tells me you’re a policeman. My daddy was a policeman. Center Springs, Arkansas. It’s not on most maps.”

“How long have you been here in San Diego?” I asked.

“Almost a year. I was waitressing, but now I’m doing this. Better pay.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four years old.” She had a way of holding your eyes with her own, a direct but uncritical stare. “Vic told me all about what happened. It’s good that you’ve become a friend of his. We all of us need at least one good friend… Well, guys, I should be going. I’d ask you in and buy you a drink, but it’s supposed to work the other way around.”

I glanced at Vic and saw the adoration in his eyes. It lit up his face, made it smarter and softer and better. Farrel smiled at him and put her hand on his sleeve.

“It’s okay, Vic.”

“Just so good to see you, Farrel.”

“Vic walks me in and out, every night. And any other of the dancers who want him to. You’re a cop, so you know there’s always someone coming around places like this, making trouble for the girls. But not when Vic Primeval is in the barnyard.”

“I don’t really like that name,” said Vic.

“I mean it in a good way.”

“It means primitive.”

“It’s only a show name, Vic. Like, well, like for a dancer it would be Chastity or Desire.”

I watched the inner conflict ruffle Vic’s expression. Then his mind made some kind of override and the light came back to his eyes. He smiled and peered down at the ground.

A hard look came over Farrel’s face as a black BMW 750i bounced through the open exit gate and into the employees-only lot. It rolled to a stop beside us. The driver’s window went down.

“Yo. Sweetie. I been looking for you.” He was thirty, maybe, and tricked out in style-sharp haircut, pricey-looking shirt and jacket. Slender face, a Jersey voice and delivery. He looked from Farrel to Vic, then at me. “What’s your problem, fuckface?”

I swung open my jacket to give him a look at my.45.

He held up his hands like I should cuff him. “Christ. Farrel? You want I should run these meatballs off? They’re nothing to do with me and you, baby.”

“I want them to run you off. I told you, Sal. There isn’t a you and me. No more. It’s over. I’m gone.”

“But you’re not gone, baby. You’re right here. So get in. Whatever you’ll make in a month in there, I’ll pay you that right out of my pocket. Right here and now.”

“Get off this property,” said Vic. “Or I’ll drag you out of your cute little car and throw you over that fence.”

Vic glanced at me and winced right after he said this. When he gets mad at things, he throws them far. People, too.

Sal clucked his tongue like a hayseed, then smiled at Vic as if he were an amusing moron.

“No more us, Sal,” said Farrel. “We’re over.”

“You still owe me eight thousand dollars, girl. Nothing’s over till I get that back.”

I saw black rhombuses wobbling in the air between us. Black rhombuses mean anger.

“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You think I’m dancing in a place like this just for the fun of it all?”

“Move out of here,” I said. “Do it now.”

“Or you’ll arrest me.”

“Quickly. It’ll cost you forty-eight long cheap hours or two expensive short ones. Your pick.”

“I want what’s mine,” Sal said to Farrel. “I want what I paid for.”

“Them’s two different things.”

“Maybe it is in that redneck slop hole you come from.”

The window went up and the car swung around and out of the lot, the big tires leaving a rubbery low-speed squeal on the asphalt.

“I’m coming in for a while,” I said.

I had a beer and watched Farrel and the other dancers do their shows. They were uninhibited and rhythmic, to say the least. Some were pretty and some were plain. Some acted flirtatious and others lustful and others aloof. Farrel seemed almost shy, and she never once looked at either me or Vic from what I could tell. She had a small attractive body. Vic stood in the back of the room, lost in the lush plum-colored curtains, his feet spread wide and arms crossed, stone still.

After an hour passed and Sal had not come back, I nodded a goodnight to Vic and went home.

Two days later Vic left a message for me and I met him outside the Convention Center. There was a reptile show in progress, and many of the people were entering and leaving the building with constrictors around their necks and leashed iguanas in their arms and stacks of clear plastic food containers filled with brightly colored juvenile snakes.

“Look at this thing,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his aloha shirt and pulled out a huge black scorpion. “They don’t sting.”

Vic Malic had enormous hands, but that scorpion stretched from his thumb tip to the nail on his little finger. It looked like it could drill that stinger a half-inch into you anytime it wanted. In his other hand was a clear plastic bag filled with crickets. They were white with dust of some kind. They hopped around, as crickets do.

“Scorpion food?” I asked.

“Yeah. And they dust them with vitamins for thirty cents.”

He looked down at the creature, then slid it back into his shirt pocket. “That son of a bitch Sal is stalking Farrel. That was the third time I’ve seen him. He shows up everywhere she goes.”

“Tell her to come fill out a report. We can’t do anything until she does that.”

“Doesn’t trust cops.”

“She seemed proud of her dad.”

“I’m only telling you what she told me. Sal loaned her ten grand because she totaled her car with no insurance, and her baby had to have chemotherapy. Darling little baby. I saw it. Just darling but with cancer.”

“That is a shame.”

“Yeah, and he was all charm at first, Sal was. She kind of liked him. Started paying with favors, you know, but the way he had it figured was he’d get anything he wanted for two years and she’d still owe him half. Plus he likes it rough and he hit her. Then he said he’s got friends. He can introduce her to them, you know-they’d really like her. He’s a Jersey wise guy, all connected up. Says he is. You heard him. He said he wants what’s his and what he paid for.”

I know who the mobbed-up locals are here in America’s Finest City. Sal wasn’t one of them. We’ve had our wise guys for decades, mostly connected to the L.A. outfits. There’s a restaurant they go to. You get to know who they are. I wondered if Sal was just a visiting relative, getting some R &R in Southern California. Or maybe a new guy they brought in. Or if he was a made guy trying to muscle into new territory. If that was true there would be some kind of trouble.

I watched the scorpion wriggle around in the shirt pocket. The pocket had a hula girl and it looked like the pincers were growing out of her head.

“I’m gonna get that eight grand for her,” said Vic.

“Where?”

“I got a start with the book sales.”

Vic has been hand-selling copies of Fall to Your Life!, which he wrote and published himself. It’s about how “the Robbie Brownlaw event” seven years ago at the Las Palmas Hotel changed his life for the better. He does pretty well with it, mostly to tourists. I see him sometimes, down by the Star of India, or Horton Plaza, or there at the Amtrak station, looming over his little table with copies of the book and a change box. He wears his old Vic Primeval wrestling costume of faux animal skins-not fur, but the skins sewed together into a kind of bodysuit. It’s terrifically ugly, but the customers are drawn to it. To attract buyers, he also sets up an aging poster of me falling through the sky. He used to charge five bucks a copy for the book, but a year ago it went up to ten. Once a month he still gives me a cut from each sale, which is 25 percent. I accept the money because it makes Vic feel virtuous, then turn it over to the downtown food pantry and ASPCA and various charities.

I did some quick calcs based on what Vic paid me in royalties for July-traditionally his best month due to tourists. My take was $500, which meant that Vic pocketed $1500 plus change for himself.

“It’ll take you at least six months to get eight grand,” I said. “Plus winter is coming on and you’ve got your own expenses to pay.”

Vic brooded.

“Do you have any money saved up, Vic?”

“I can get the money.”

“So she can give it to him? Don’t give her anything. Have her file a complaint with us if he’s such a badass. She can get a restraining order. You don’t know her and you don’t know him. Stay away, Vic. That’s the best advice you’ll get on this.”

“What do you mean?”

“What about this doesn’t scream setup?”

“A setup? Why set up a guy who doesn’t have any money? She hasn’t asked me for one nickel. She’s the real thing, Robbie. That little baby. I don’t have a world-class brain, but my heart always sees true. Farrel passes the Vic Malic heart test.”

“The best thing you can do is have her file a complaint.”

“She won’t. I already told her to. She said the cops can’t do anything until they catch him doing something. What she’s afraid is, it’s gonna be too late when that happens.”

Which is often true.

“But Robbie, what if you tell her? Coming from you, it would mean a lot more than from me.”

The San Diego mob guys own and frequent a downtown restaurant called Napoli. It’s an unflashy two-story brick affair not far at all from police headquarters. They have controlling interests in a couple of much swankier eateries here, but they do their hanging out at Napoli.

“Hey, it’s Robbie Brownlaw,” said Dom, the owner.

“Dom, I need a word.”

“Then you get a word, Robbie. Come on back. How’s San Diego’s famous detective?”

He’s a round-faced, chipper fellow, early sixties, grandson of one of San Diego’s more vivid mob figures, Leo the Lion Gagnas. Leo and his L.A. partners ran this city’s gambling and loansharking. Back in 1950, two men out of Youngstown tried to get in on the Gagnas rackets, and they both washed up in Glorietta Bay one morning with bullets in their heads. Leo and company opened Napoli back in ’53. He was tight with Bebe Rebozo, who was a big Nixon fundraiser. Beginning in 1966 Leo did two years for tax evasion and that was it. He never saw the inside of a prison before or after.

We sat in his dark little office. There were no windows and it smelled heavily of cigar smoke and cologne. The bookshelves were stuffed with well-read paperback crime novels-plenty of Whit Masterson and Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane. A floor safe sat in one corner and the walls were covered with framed photographs of Dom’s ancestors and the people they entertained at Napoli-Sinatra, Joey Bishop, John Wayne, Nixon, Ted Williams.

I looked at the pictures. “Where’s the new celebrities, Dom?”

He looked at the pictures, too. “They don’t come around here so much anymore. A time for everything, you know? It’s good. Business is good. What do you need, Robbie?”

I told him about Sal-his alleged New Jersey outfit ties, his bad attitude and slick black Beamer, his fix on a young dancer at Skin named Farrel.

Dom nodded. “Yeah. I heard. My nephew, he’s a manager at Skin. I got some friends checking this guy out.”

“Ever had any trouble out of Jersey?”

“Never. Not any trouble at all, Robbie. Those days are long gone. You know that.”

“What if he’s what he says he is, trying to move in?”

“In on what?”

“On business, Dom.”

“I don’t know what you mean, business. But somebody blows into town and starts popping off about he’s a made guy and he’s mobbed up in Jersey and all that, well, there’s fools and then there’s fools, Robbie. Nobody I know talks like that. Know what I mean?”

“I wonder if he’s got help.”

“He better have help if he wants to shoot off his mouth. I’ll let you know what I find out. And Robbie, you see this guy, tell him he’s not making any friends around here. If he’s what he says he is, then that’s one thing. If he’s not, then he’s just pissing everybody off. Some doors you don’t want to open. Tell him that. You might save him a little inconvenience. How’s that pretty redhead wife of yours? Gina.”

“We divorced seven years ago.”

“I got divorced once. No, it was three times. You know why it’s so expensive, don’t you?”

“Because it’s worth it.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve told me that one before, Dom.”

“And I was right, wasn’t I?”

I met Farrel at Skin that night before she was set to perform. We sat at the bar and got good treatment from the bartenders. Dom’s nephew, a spidery young man named Joey Morra, came by, said hello, told Farrel the customers were liking her. I took down Farrel’s numbers and address and the name of her daughter and hometown and parents. And I also got everything she could tell me about Sal Tessola-where he lived and how they met, what he’d done for her and to her, the whole story. I told her she’d need all these things in order to write a good convincing complaint. We talked for a solid hour before she checked her watch.

“You going to stay and see me perform?”

“Not tonight.”

“Didn’t like it much, then?”

“You were good, Farrel.”

She eyed me. “I don’t want Vic trying to get me the money. I didn’t ask him to. I asked him not to. He’s not the brightest guy, Robbie. But he might be one of the most stubborn.”

“You’ve got a point.”

“How come you’re not married? You must be about legal age.”

“I was once.”

“I’d a found a way to keep you.”

“You’re flattering me now.”

“Why don’t you flatter me back?”

“Center Springs took a loss when you packed it in.”

She peered at me in that forthright and noncommittal way. “It sure did. And there’s no power in heaven or earth strong enough to drag me back there.”

I saw the black triangles of dread and the yellow triangles of fear hovering in the air between us.

I followed her from Skin. I’m not suspicious by nature, but it helps me do my job. The night was close and damp and I stayed well behind. She drove an early-’90s Dodge that was slow and slumped to starboard and easy to follow.

She drove to a small tract home out in La Mesa east of downtown. I slowed and watched her pull into the driveway. I went past, circled the block, then came back and parked across the street, one house down.

The house was vintage ’50s, one of hundreds built in La Mesa not long after World War II. Many of those navy men and women who’d served and seen San Diego came back looking for a place to live in this sunny and unhurried city.

A living room light was on and the drapes were drawn casually, with a good gap in the middle and another at one end. Someone moved across the living room, then lamplight came from the back of the house through a bedroom window on the side I could see. A few minutes went by and I figured she was showering, so I got out and strolled down the sidewalk. Then I doubled back and cut across the little yard and stood under the canopy of a coral tree. I stepped up close to the living room window and looked through the middle gap.

The room was sparsely furnished in what looked like thrift-shop eclectic-a braided rug over the darkly stained wood floor, an American colonial coffee table, an orange-yellow-black plaid sofa with thin padding. There was a stack of black three-ring binders on the coffee table. Right in front of me was the back end of a TV, not a flat screen but one of the old ones with the big butts and masses of cords and coax cable sprouting everywhere.

I moved along the perimeter of the house and let myself through a creaking gate, but no dogs barked and I soon came to a dark side window. The blinds were drawn, but they were old and some were broken and several were bent. Through a hole I could make out a small bedroom. All it had was a chest of drawers and a stroller with a baby asleep in it, and I didn’t have to look at that baby very long before I realized it was a doll.

Farrel walked past the room in what looked like a long white bathrobe and something on her head. I waited awhile, then backed out across the neighbor’s yard and walked to my car. I settled in behind the wheel and used the binoculars and I could see Farrel on the plaid sofa, hair up in a towel, both hands on a sixteen-ounce can of beer seated between her legs. She leaned forward and picked up one of the black binders, looked at it like she’d seen it a hundred times before, then set it down beside her. She seemed tired but peaceful with the TV light playing off her face.

Twenty minutes later a battered Mustang roared up and parked behind the Dodge and Sal got out. Gone were the sharp clothes and in their place were jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket and a pair of shineless harness boots that clomped and slouched as he keyed open the front door and went through.

I glassed the gap in the living room curtains and Farrel’s face rushed at me. She said something without looking at Sal. He stood before her, his back to me, and shrugged. He snatched the beer can from her and held it up for a long drink, then pushed it back between her legs and whipped off his coat. He wore a blue shirt with a local pizza parlor logo on it. This he pulled off as he walked into the back rooms.

He came out a few minutes later wearing jeans and a singlet, his hair wet and combed back. He was a lean young man, broad-shouldered, tall. For the first time I realized he was handsome. He walked past Farrel into the kitchen and came back with a can of beer and sat down on the couch not too near and not too far from her. He squeezed her robe once where her knee would be, then let his hand fall to the sofa.

They talked without looking at each other, but I can’t read lips. It looked like a “and how was your day” kind of conversation, or maybe something about the TV show that was on, which threw blue light upon them like fish underwater.

After a while they stopped talking, and a few minutes later Farrel lifted the remote and the blue light was gone and she had picked up one of the black binders from the pile at her end of the couch.

She opened it and read out loud. There was no writing or label or title on the cover.

She waved the binder at him and pointed at a page and read a line to him.

He repeated it. I was pretty sure.

She read it again and he repeated it. I was pretty sure again.

They both laughed.

Then another line. They each said it, whatever it was. Sal stood over her then and aimed a finger at her face and said the line again. She stood and stripped the towel off her head and said something and they both laughed again.

He got up and brought two more big cans of beer from the kitchen, and he opened one for her and took her empty. He tossed the towel onto her lap and sat down close to her, put his bare feet up on the coffee table by the binders, and scrunched down so his head was level with hers. She clicked the TV back on.

I waited for an hour. Another beer each. Not much talk. They both fell asleep sitting up, heads back on the sofa.

It was almost three-thirty in the morning when Farrel stood, rubbed the back of her neck, then tightened the robe sash. She walked deeper into the house and out of my sight.

A few minutes later Sal rose and hit the lights. In the TV glow I could see him stretch out full length on the couch and set one arm over his eyes and take a deep breath and let it slowly out.

Two mornings later, at about the same dark hour, I was at headquarters writing a crime scene report. I’m an occasional insomniac and I choose to get paperwork done during those long, haunted times. Of course I listen to our dispatch radio, keeping half an ear on the hundreds of calls that come in every shift.

So when I heard the possible 187 at Skin nightclub I was out the door fast.

Two squad cars were already there and two more screamed into the parking lot as I got out of my car.

“The janitor called 911,” said one of the uniforms. “I was first on scene and he let me in. There’s a dead man back in the kitchen. I think it’s one of the managers. I tried to check his pulse but couldn’t reach that far. You’ll see.”

I asked the patrolmen to seal both the back and front entrances and start a sign-in log, always a good idea if you don’t want your crime scene to spiral into chaos. You’d be surprised how many people will trample through and wreck evidence, many of them cops.

I walked in, past the bar and the tables and the stage, then into a small, poorly lit, grease-darkened kitchen. Another uniform stood near a walk-in freezer, talking with a young man wearing a light blue shirt with a name patch on it.

I saw the autoloader lying on the floor in front of me. Then the cop looked up and I followed his line of sight to the exposed ceiling. Overhead were big commercial blowers and vents and ducting and electrical conduit and hanging fluorescent tube light fixtures. A body hung jackknifed at the hips over a steel crossbeam. His arms dangled over one side and his legs over the other. If he’d landed just one inch higher or lower, he’d have simply slid off the beam to the floor. I walked around the gun and got directly under him and stared up into the face of Joey. It was an urgent shade of purple and his eyes were open.

“The safe in the office,” said the uniform, pointing to the far back side of the kitchen.

The office door was open and I stepped in. There was a desk and a black leather couch and a small fridge and microwave, pictures of near-naked dancers on the walls, along with a Chargers calendar and Padres pennants.

There was also a big floor safe that was open but not empty. I squatted in front of it and saw the stacks of cash and some envelopes.

The officer and janitor stood in the office doorway.

“Why kill a man for his money, then not take it?” asked the uniform. His name plate said Peabody.

“Maybe he freaked and ran,” said the janitor, whose name patch said Carlos.

“Okay,” said Peabody. “Then tell me how Joey got ten feet up in the air and hung over a beam. And don’t tell me he did it to himself.”

Carlos looked up at the body and shrugged, but I had an opinion about that.

“What time do you start work?” I asked him.

“Two. That’s when they close.”

“Is Joey usually here?”

“One of the managers is always here. They count the money every third night. Then they take it to the bank.”

“So tonight was bank night?”

“Was supposed to be.”

I drove fast to Vic’s hotel room downtown, but he didn’t answer the door. Back downstairs the night manager, speaking from behind a mesh-reinforced window, told me that Vic had left around eight-thirty-seven hours ago-and had not returned.

I made Farrel’s place eleven minutes later. There were no cars in the driveway but lights inside were on. I rang the bell and knocked, then tried the door, which was unlocked. So I opened it and stepped in.

The living room looked exactly as it had two nights ago, except that the beer cans were gone and the pile of black binders had been reduced to just one. In the small back bedroom the stroller was still in place and the plastic doll was snugged down under the blanket just as it had been. I went into the master bedroom. The mattress was bare and the chest of drawers stood open and nearly empty. It looked like Farrel had stripped the bed and packed her clothes in a hurry. The bathroom was stripped, too: no towels, nothing in the shower or the medicine chest or on the sink counter. The refrigerator had milk and pickles and that was all. The wastebasket under the sink had empty beer cans, an empty pretzel bag, various fast-food remnants swathed in ketchup, a receipt from a supermarket, and a wadded-up agreement from Rent-a-Dream car rentals down by the airport. Black Beamer 750i, of course.

Back in the living room I took the black binder from the coffee table and opened it to the first page:

THE SOPRANOS

Season Four/Episode Three

I flipped through the pages. Dialogue and brief descriptions. Four episodes in all.

Getting Sal’s lines right, I thought.

Vic didn’t show up for work for three straight nights. I stopped by Skin a couple of times a night, just in case he showed, and I knocked on his hotel room door twice a day or so. The manager hadn’t seen him in four days. He told me Vic’s rent was due on the first.

Of course Farrel had vanished, too. I cruised her place in La Mesa, but something about it just said she wasn’t coming back, and she didn’t.

On the fourth afternoon after the murder of Joey Morra, Vic called me on my cell phone. “Can you feed my scorpion? Give him six crickets. They’re under the bathroom sink. The manager’ll give you the key.”

“Sure. But we need to talk, Vic-face-to-face.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Who else could throw Joey up there like that?”

Vic didn’t answer.

“Dom and his people are looking for you, Vic. You won’t get a trial with them. You’ll just get your sentence, and it won’t be lenient.”

“I only took what she needed.”

“And killed Joey.”

“He pulled a gun, Robbie. I couldn’t think a what else to do. I bear-hugged and shook him. Like a reflex. Like when I threw you.”

“I’ll see you outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

“She met me at Rainwater’s, Robbie. I walked into Rainwater’s and there she was-that beautiful young woman, waiting there for me. You should have seen her face light up when I gave her the money. Out in the parking lot, I mean.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “Meet me outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

“Naw. I got a good safe place here. I’m going to just enjoy myself for a couple more days, knowing I did a good thing for a good woman. My scorpion, I named him Rudy. Oh. Oh shit, Robbie.”

Even coming from a satellite orbiting the earth in space, and through the miles of ether it took to travel to my ear, the sound of the shotgun blast was unmistakable. So was the second blast, and the third.

A few days later I flew to Little Rock and rented a car, then made the drive north and west to Center Springs. Farrel was right: it wasn’t on the rental-car company driving map, but it made the navigation unit that came in the vehicle.

The Ozarks were steep and thickly forested and the Arkansas River looked unhurried. I could see thin wisps of wood-stove fires burning in cabins down in the hollows and there was a smoky cast to the sky.

The gas station clerk said I’d find Farrel White’s dad’s place down the road a mile, just before Persimmon Holler. He said there was a batch of trailers up on the hillside and I’d see them from the road if I didn’t drive too fast. Billy White had the wooden one with all the satellite dishes on top.

The road leading in was dirt and heavily rutted from last season’s rain. I drove past travel trailers set up on cinder blocks. They were slouched and sun-dulled and some had decks and others just had more cinder blocks as steps. Dogs eyed me without bothering to sit up. There were cats and litter and a pile of engine blocks outside, looked like they’d been cast there by some huge child.

Billy answered my knock with a sudden yank on the door, then studied me through the screen. He was midfifties and heavy, didn’t look at all like his daughter. He wore a green-and-black plaid jacket buttoned all the way to the top.

“I’m a San Diego cop looking for your daughter. I thought she might have come home.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Come home to this from San Diego?”

“Well.”

“She okay?”

“I think so.”

“Come in.”

The trailer was small and cramped and packed with old, overstuffed furniture.

“She in trouble?”

“Farrel and her boyfriend hustled a guy out of some money. But he had to take the money from someone else.”

Billy handed me a beer and plopped into a vinyl recliner across from me. He had a round, impish face and a twinkle in his eyes. “That ain’t her boyfriend. It’s her brother.”

“That never crossed my mind.”

“Don’t look nothing alike. But they’ve always been close. Folks liked to think too close, but it wasn’t ever that way. Just close. They understood each other. They’re both good kids. Their whole point in life was to get outta Center Springs and they done did it. I’m proud of them.”

“What’s his name?”

“Preston.”

“Did they grow up in this trailer?”

“Hell no. We had a home over to Persimmon but it got sold off in the divorce. Hazel went to Little Rock with a tobacco products salesman. The whole story is every bit as dreary as it sounds.”

“When did Farrel and Preston leave?”

“Couple of months ago. The plan was San Diego, then Hollywood. Pretty people with culture and money to spend. They were going to study TV, maybe go start up a show. San Diego was to practice up.”

“The scripts.”

“Got them from the library up at Fayetteville. Made copies of the ones they wanted. Over and over again. Memorizing those scripts and all them words. They went to the Salvation Army stores and bought up lots of old-time kinda clothes. They both did some stage plays at the junior college, but they didn’t much care for them. They liked the other kind of stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Crime stories. Bad guys. Mafia. That was mainly Preston. Farrel, she can act like anything from the queen of England to a weather girl and you can’t tell she’s acting.”

“Have they called lately?”

“Been over a week.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“Well, Center Springs is the only place I know they ain’t. I don’t expect to ever see them out this way.”

I did the simple math and the not-so-simple math. Eight grand for two months of work. Farrel dancing for tips. Preston delivering pizza and working his end of the Vic hustle. Vic caught between Farrel’s good acting and his own eager heart. And of course betrayed, finally and fatally, by his own bad temper.

I finished the beer and stood. “Two men died because of them. Eight thousand bucks is what they died for. So the next time you talk to Farrel and Preston, you tell them there’s real blood on their hands. It’s not make-believe blood. You tell her Vic was murdered for taking that eight thousand.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“I can come up with a couple a hundred. It’s not much, but…”

I saw the orange triangles bouncing in the air between us. I thought about those triangles as I drove away. Orange triangles denote pity and sometimes even empathy. All this for Vic Primeval, as offered by a man he’d never met, from his vinyl chair in his slouching home in the Ozarks. Sometimes you find a little speck of good where you least expect it. A rough diamond down deep. And you realize that the blackness can’t own you for more than one night at a time.