“Henry and Reyes are gone. They’ve been gone for a week. I know they’re in trouble.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. They were supposed to do this job for this rich man. This guy Henry used to play baseball with fixed it up. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was dangerous. I told Henry that, but he wouldn’t believe me. He wanted the stuff too bad.”
“What stuff?”
“You know. Stuff. Smack. This rich guy was going to give Henry a lifetime supply. Because the job was dangerous.”
“Was Henry a dealer?”
“What do you mean ‘was’? Is Henry all right? Tell me!”
I hesitated.
“He’s all right as far as I know. Is he strung out?”
“Yeah. Bad.”
“Was this guy Henry used to play baseball with named Richard Ralston?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of job was he supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Look, what’s your name?”
“Dorcas. I mean Dori. Dorcas is a shitty name. It sounds like dork, so I use Dori.”
“Dori, I know Reyes Sandoval is a burglar, and you tell me Henry is strung out. I don’t care. I don’t want to bust anyone. This case I’m involved in is too complicated to explain to you. I need the man who hired Henry to do this job. Then maybe I can find out if Henry is all right. We both know that this man wanted Henry to kill somebody, right? That’s the only thing it could be.”
Dori collapsed in sobs, her body quaking. “I know, I know, I know! Now this guy Ralston is after me. He says Henry is gone, Reyes is gone, and the dope is gone. He thinks I know where Henry is. I told him I know where the dope is — he can have it back — but Henry is gone and Reyes is gone and I just know they’re dead!”
“Sssh. Maybe they’re not. Ralston wouldn’t be bothering you if he knew they were dead, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Better than maybe. Probably. Can you tell me who hired Henry and Reyes to do this job?”
“I don’t know his name. Ralston set it up. He’s a rich American, I know that. He’s got a huge house down the coast. Henry told me about it, and I remembered passing by there once.”
“Can you take me there?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Has Ralston been hassling Sandoval’s wife? I know you know her. I followed you there.”
“Yes. Tina’s scared, too. She sent her kids to T.J. to live with her parents.”
“I think you and Tina should lay low for a while. I’ll make you a deal. Show me this rich guy’s place tonight, and I’ll give you and Tina Sandoval some money to hide out on. I’ll even drive you to the border.”
“How much money?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“Really?” Dori smiled for the first time.
“Really. I’ve got it right here.” I patted my wallet.
“What about my things?”
“Forget them. You’re probably in danger. Forget your job, too. You can always come back to it. If you can take me to this place, then I’ll drop you with the Sandoval woman. We’ll ditch Mexico tomorrow.
“But Tina’s Mexican. She don’t have a green card.”
“Let me worry about that. Now pack a bag so we can split.”
She went into the adjoining room and I surveyed the apartment: it was cheap plush, an unschooled person’s idea of high class. Dori came back, suitcase in hand, surprisingly fast. She was pulling together nicely. The hardness I had discerned in her at the cannery was real. “One thing before we leave,” I said, “where’s this supply of dope Henry received?”
She nodded toward the bedroom. We walked in. She opened up a dresser. Hidden underneath some men’s shirts were six plastic baggies of white powder. A fortune in heroin if the stuff was pure. I opened a baggie and tasted: the blood rushed to my head and my body shook for a brief instant. It was very pure. If I hadn’t killed Henry Cruz he would have died of an overdose before too long. I looked at Dori.
“It’s good stuff, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Extremely,” I said. “Stuff like this doesn’t deserve to live. We’re going to hold a funeral service for it.”
“But it’s worth a lot of money.”
“The money you’d get from selling it wouldn’t deserve to live, either. Where’s the bathroom?” It was adjacent to the kitchen. I carried the baggies in, and emptied them, one by one, into the toilet. It made me feel pure and very moral. When I flushed, it was almost like an act of penance for my old sins. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
We drove south in my car and we talked, or mostly Dori did. She was nervous, worried, but excited over the prospect of my thousand dollars. She had had a long, hard relationship with Henry Cruz. She was an L.A. girl, and Cruz had taken her virginity when she was fifteen. They had been together ever since. He had turned her on to sex, which she loved, and to the L.A. doper ripoff underworld, whose intrigue she found fascinating, and to drugs, which she hated and never used more than nominally, to placate Henry.
They had had their ups and downs. Henry had gone to jail and she had hustled to keep him on dope while he was inside. He had made her pose for specially photographed “Deluxe Collectors Item” pornography books that he had given his friends. He had fixed her up with the owner of the cannery, where she worked as a combination typist/party girl. The cannery mogul paid for her apartment and gave her a grand a month in exchange for frequent nighttime visits.
Henry was a rat, she admitted, but she loved him, and that was that. To my dismay, she was turning me on. My mind was reverberating away from the case toward various sleazy ploys to bed her. Her sexual power was overwhelming. To keep it at bay, I opened up a new line of questioning. “Tell me about Richard Ralston.”
“What about him?”
“Everything. Think about it for a minute.” While Dori thought, I concentrated on my driving. The terrain was unspectacular at night, dark hills on my left and the dark Pacific on my right. I was concerned about Dori’s reliability. Would she be able to find the place?
She read my mind: “Don’t worry, I’m not conning you,” she said. “Henry showed me the place. He was in fucking awe of it. It’s some crib.”
“You’re a mind-reader, Dori. Tell me about Ralston.”
“Ralston is kind of a low-level manipulator. A ladies’ man, too. He’s known as ‘Hot Rod’ because he’s hung like a barracuda. I know, because Henry made me fuck him once. He and Henry used to play baseball together, minor league. Back in the fifties. He’s into a lot of shit, gambling, bookmaking, all that. He’s got this golf course job that’s really a front, and he’s got this hotel and bar that he owns. Really a sleazo racket. He’s got all these poor old guys on pensions and Welfare living there, all boozehounds. They live in his fleabag hotel and drink in his bar. It’s their whole fucking life. Hot Rod collects their checks each month, subtracts their bar tab and rent, sells them cigarettes that he gets from a fence dirt cheap, and gives them a few bucks spending money. No shit! He told me about it once. Most of the old fuckers at the hotel are caddies too old to carry bags. Hot Rod says he’s keeping them alive, if you can call it living. Personally, he’s got a lot of style; you know, he’s sexy and charming and all that. But basically he’s a shit. That’s okay, though. I like shits. I relate to them. Henry’s a shit and we’ve been together a long time. You’re a kind of a shit, too. I can tell.”
“Thanks.”
“No, really. I meant it as a compliment.”
“Thanks.”
We drove in silence, I was keyed up. My case was moving upward, in power, property and prestige from the depths of caddy despair to the seaside casas of the rich, and I was furiously anxious to unravel it, conclude it, mete out whatever justice I could, and return to Jane and Walter and some kind of peace. I checked my watch. We had been driving for fifty minutes. Dori started getting nervous, muttering to herself.