I stood at a respectful distance. Archie Strait looked to be sixty or sixty-five, movie-star handsome, freshly shaven, with tanned skin and gray, razor-cut hair. He looked ready to throw back the sheets and get out, any second. Archie’s younger face had smiled down on motorists from Better Burger billboards across the Southwest for over three decades. In the billboard shot, Archie Strait wore his killer smile and a red bandana around his neck in the style of John Wayne. These days the signs were sun faded but seemed somehow eternal.
Virgil silently appeared beside Archie, reaching out a hand toward his son. Trailed Archie’s cheek with the backs of his fingers; touched his thick, up-brushed hair; spread open Archie’s eyelids one at a time to reveal the clear gray eyes. The lids stayed parted, as if trained.
“Hmm,” said Virgil. “They say brain damaged since that night. They say he doesn’t feel, think, or know much anymore. Tola’s got him doped up with that stuff of hers. Not the druggy version but the medicinal one. Seems to work. He’s peaceful, and I think his mind is sometimes alert. Chews his food now. Hums, too. Not a tune, just a humming sound. Hard for me to believe, when I look into those eyes, that nobody’s home. I think he’s aware of a lot. Aren’t you, son? I’m no fool, Mr. Ford. And I’m no crackpot. But I do believe in God and I think God is still inside this boy. Do you?”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
He turned and looked at me as if I’d failed an important test. “If you stand in the middle of the road, you will be run over from both directions.”
“Who’s standing in the middle of a road?”
The old man’s look was quick, sharp, and satisfied. “Because of the lipstick on the back of Natalie’s car, we know she’s in serious trouble,” he said.
“Narrow it down.”
“This is about money. Not some rapist who’s seen Natalie on TV.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“The abduction was not impulsive, Mr. Ford. It was done with planning. Daylight. In public. A fit, spirited young woman. They took the extra time and risk of being seen, to get her into another car. To go where? Perverts would have done their deeds and killed her out in Pala. It was perfect — a private place and her own car. If that’s all they wanted, they’d have left her there. No. Dalton will get a ransom demand. They’ll want some kind of cryptocurrency through the Internet and the FBI will have almost nothing to go on.”
“I thought that at first, too. But it’s been five days now.”
Virgil frowned, lowered Archie’s eyelids both at once, with thumb and index finger. Walked slowly away, his body following his straining, tortoise-like head to the window. I got my first full view of him — shorter than I’d expected, thin and leaning as if into some private wind. Thermal long johns, a canvas barn coat, and calf-high shearling boots.
He sat back down. Took off the knit cap, shook it once and rearranged it over his sparse white hair. Then turned to the window, giving me his back.
“Your thoughts,” he said.
“If it’s not sex and it’s not money, then another reason comes to mind,” I said. “Revenge.”
“For what?”
“I was hoping you may have some ideas, Mr. Strait. Now we’re back to the enemies question you didn’t answer.”
He turned. “The Democrats of California hate him. They’re financing that awful woman against him.”
“I doubt that the California Democratic Party had Dalton’s wife kidnapped,” I said.
“Why not? How is my grandson to run a reelection campaign with this hanging over his head?”
“Not to mention hers.”
“Why do you think he’s hired you to find her, instead of trusting the police? Because soon as the media get into this, it will become a circus of fake news and speculation, and he’ll be in the middle of it. His opponents will find a way to use it against him. Isn’t that plain to you?”
The old man had a point but it wasn’t sharp enough. “I mean vengeance for an action taken. Or perceived to have been taken.”
Virgil locked his tiny, shiny eyes on mine. “Enemies. Vengeance. I like the way your mind works.”
“Where were you set to meet Natalie for lunch on Tuesday?” I asked.
“Vintana. It’s above the Lexus dealership near her work.”
Strait told me he had waited there for forty minutes, made three calls to her but got no answer. Tried her boss, who said she still hadn’t showed up for work and hadn’t called. It wasn’t like her. Strait had lunch, two martinis, and drove himself home. Said he met Natalie for lunch twice a year unless there was some special reason they needed to talk.
“Was there some special reason?”
Virgil considered, his eyes hard upon me again. “Yes, there was. Want to see my scorpion collection?”
“Of course.”
Seven
We climbed down the stairs to the basement. Cold rock walls, poor light, and the smell of earth. Virgil pushed through a rusted iron door on squeaking hinges and into a dark room. He flipped a wall switch but no light came. He pulled me in and shut the door. Before us, luminescent blue-green creatures scuttled and stopped, scuttled and stopped.
“They’re most active at night,” said Virgil Strait. “So I keep it dark here during the day, hit them with the UV so I can see them frolicking.”
As my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw the terraria built into the walls and the big desk in the middle of the room, stacked with books and papers, and a high-backed leather chair behind the desk and the two folding chairs opposite. The scorpions surrounded us in their glass cages, heavy armed and high tailed, all sizes, some small as a house key, some half a foot long at least.
“I liked them as a boy and never outgrew the fascination,” said Virgil. “Carried them around in my lunch bucket at school. Used to keep a new specimen or two in my chambers, which had a distracting effect on squabbling lawyers. Scorpion venom is mostly overrated. Still, you don’t want an Arizona bark scorpion or a spitting thick-tailed black to get you.”
“That’s a big one,” I said, nodding to a crawdad-sized scorpion eyeing us from a top-row cage.
“Emperor scorpion from Africa.”
“Why did Natalie want to see you?”
Virgil regarded me in the near dark, though I couldn’t make out his face.
“She wanted to talk about moving her family here. In with me — Dalton, her, and the younger boy.”
“Why?”
“Circle the wagons. Debt. Years of living beyond their means.”
I thought of Dalton’s comments about his assemblyman’s salary of a hundred grand and change, coupled with that of a part-time car salesperson. They were not a money machine, but they made just enough to live a decent, frugal life. You had to factor in a son away at USC — one of the most expensive private colleges in the nation. You had to factor in a forty-grand gambling/shopping loss and the cost of Natalie Strait’s medical care. Which, my research had discovered, was only partly covered by the Straits’ State of California and Natalie’s BMW health plans. You had to factor in Dalton spending more of his own money on reelection than he’d ever spent before. And maybe the fact that he couldn’t even pay my up-front engagement fee.
I watched the blue-green scorpions moving about, determined but defeated by glass. “Have Dalton and Natalie borrowed money from you?”
“Those days are over.”
“Were you going to let them move in?”
“Sure, but it’s a crazy idea. Both boys in college. She works in Escondido and Dalton’s in and out of Lindbergh Field every other week it seems. This place is hours from everywhere they need to be. And look at it. Who’d want to live in this rock pile of hell in the first place?”