13 Under the Wire Page 3

  The faithful looked at one another and nodded.

  Even as the weather grew cooler with the fall, the warble flies still came out from the shed and got at the stock, laying their eggs under the skin of the cattle. But Hibram had to put up with it. He didn’t want Fausto to put a curse on him, turn him into a chicken.

  Nobody knew where Fausto had recruited Raúl dos Santos. The man resembled a fairy-tale giant hammered into an oversize human frame. He had a fringe of black hair that made him look like a monk. After Raúl became Fausto’s slave, the guy went totally over the top. He said he wanted to change his last name from dos Santos to dos Diablos. Fausto told him that such a move would dishonor Raúl’s own mother, a dos Santos from Ensenada.

  The dwarf warlock had decided that a certain Thursday would be good for the ceremony. The faithful assembled, all men, a half dozen of the ranch hands and then a full dozen of Fausto’s people, big city cabrones who hung around the ranch and didn’t do anything except scare the stock with endless rounds of target practice. They filed into the shed and gathered around the sacred central altar, la nganga, the big cast-iron witch’s cauldron that was crammed full of wooden Palo Mayombe stakes, chicken bones, chains, padlocks and clumps of dried blood.

  Fausto had taken to slipping something else into the iron pot, too. Somewhere he had gotten his hands on some blades made of surgical steel. The knives resembled straight razors or scalpels, except they didn’t have tangs or handles. Each blade had a groove down the center that worked to drain off liquid. They were tricky to manage, since both edges were sharp as fuck.

  Fausto called them las aspas, which made for a nice double meaning on “cross” and “blade.” He used them on chickens, mostly, afterward propping up the bloody tools amid the muck and sticks and bones of the cauldron, which looked as if it had sprouted steel spikes around its rim.

  Raúl dos Santos entered the shed. Fausto had dressed him all in white, like a pilgrim. The buzz of a million flies greeted him, merging into an irritating hum. The combined insect drone came off as religious, like a Gregorian chant, or something you’d hear on a horror-movie soundtrack.

  Raúl was clearly high. He sweated like a field worker. His skin was bone-white. Something was wrong with his face. He kept blinking, but his eyeballs had gotten stuck in place, like those of a cheap children’s doll.

  The faithful weren’t feeling too sorry for him. Fausto had described the ceremony as an honor. He said it would render Raúl totally invisible to the police. From a dark corner of the shed, a steady drumbeat began. No one could see who was there, or if there was anyone there at all. The faithful took up the beat themselves, stamping on the dirt floor in rhythm, sending up dusty footfalls, or else pounding their fists on the blood-splattered wooden pillars of the shed.

  “Raúl Emilio dos Santos Huaveria!” Fausto called out in a commanding voice. He was at least a couple of feet smaller than anyone else in the shed, yet he managed to project authority. “Do you wish to live beyond the eyes of all police?”

  “Sí,” said Raúl softly. No one could hear for the pounding drumbeat and the flies.

  “Do you wish to become dead but not dead?”

  “Sí.”

  A gleam of excitement came into the eyes of the circle of men watching. Fausto reached up to seize Raúl by the neck. He slowly bent him over, lowering the man’s head until the nape rested in the filth of the cauldron, as if this were some satanic hair salon and Raúl would be washed in the blood of sacrifice. Raúl’s eyes looked past the child-size warlock to stare upward at the ceiling of the shed. It seemed to him that devils pranced among the rafters.

  “Es la hora,” Fausto intoned. It is the hour. He withdrew one of the blood-encrusted blades from the mess in the cast-iron nganga. He was somehow able to handle the sharp razor without a single nick to himself.

  Hah, hah, hah, hah, the faithful chanted in time with the drumbeat. Their exhalations sounded not like laughter but like the grunting sounds made during sex.

  Raúl stared, lost in another world. In this one, Fausto laid the sharp, glittering aspa into the hollow of Raúl’s left eye socket, right above the tear duct. Such was the chemically dulled state of the poor man’s mind that he did not blink or shrink away when this was done.

  Hah, hah, hah, hah—the chant got quicker. Even the flies seemed to buzz louder. The spectators wet their lips. They crossed themselves.

  Fausto tilted the blade at a slight upright angle—then slid it cleanly into the frontal lobes of Raúl’s brain. If the shed hadn’t been so noisy, a thick, viscous click would have been heard. As it was, the loud, extended haaaaahhhh from the faithful drowned out all other sound.

  With a quick left-right flicking motion, Fausto withdrew the blade. He pulled Raúl to his feet. The man looked stunned. The wound alongside his eye bled, but not much. A clear liquid seeped from the cut.

  The little warlock put his face alongside his new creation’s chest, gazing up at him with a proud smile. Out of the dwarf’s mouth poured whispered commands, exhortations, benedictions and curses. Fausto snapped his fingers and made a chrome-plated pistol materialize. He placed the gun in Raúl’s hand. Then he stepped back.

  “Caminar pesado” was the slang phrase for being armed. Walking heavy. Raúl walked heavy indeed. Whereas before the ceremony he had a solid enough step, now he moved forward with a sluggish, Frankenstein thud.

  The faithful spilled out of his way.

  Raúl fixed on one of their number, a gangly Chihuahuan nicknamed La Mata, “the tuft,” for his rooster-comb haircut. A look of fear came into La Mata’s eyes as he stumbled backward.

  “Soplón,” Fausto said, thrusting an accusatory finger at the man. “Snitch.”

  Raising the handgun, Raúl blasted away at La Mata, missing the first time, when the informer dodged, but hitting him with the next five shots.

  Chapter 3

  Remington pulled her Honda into the small parking space behind the Loushane family’s beach house. The square of red asphalt was dusted with yellow sand. Taking up the property’s other spot was an open Jeep, a “Go Topless and Get Dirty” sticker on its bumper. From the looks of the half-flat tires and cracked vinyl seats, the vehicle hadn’t been moved for a while.

  Zuma Beach, Malibu. A fence of varnished wood cut the parking spaces off from the house. Running along the back of the lot, the fence featured a locked security gate. Remington punched in the key code that Brock Loushane had given her. The latch hummed and clicked. She pushed the gate open and proceeded up the bougainvillea-lined walkway.

  Remington had visited the beach house in her wayward youth, maybe a half-dozen times before, usually for parties. By the end of high school, the Loushane place at Zuma Beach had gained a reputation. Simon had pretty much taken over the house from the rest of the family, living there full time.

  Everything remained the same. She remembered the hot honeysuckle scent of the purple bougainvillea blooms. She climbed the stairs to the deck. The Zuma Beach lifeguard tower was right there, visible through another screen of flowers, jacarandas this time. The Point Dume cliffs loomed above her, and the perfect waves off the break still curled, folded and collapsed. God-like sunlight granted its customary blessing.

  But it was all for nothing. The removal from life of its most recent resident deflated the beach house somehow, softening its splendor. Without Simon, Malibu itself seemed sadder, less grand.

  “You don’t have to pay me, sir,” Remington had told Victor Loushane, back during the awkward interview in the study at Wildermanse. “I’m happy to do a favor for the family.”

  “I can’t bear even to go out there,” Brockton had said of the beach house. “And I sure don’t want my father to have to do it.”

  Victor Loushane remained seated behind the big partner’s desk, his expression unreadable. Remington had suddenly realized that the Loushanes wanted her to do some housecleaning.

  “I understand,” she had said. “It’s not necessary to explain. What do you
need?”

  “Pack it up,” Brock had responded. “Clean it out. Box up anything personal, all of it. For Chrissakes, de-Simonize the place, you know?”

  “When I walk through that door again—if I ever walk through the door again,” Victor Loushane said, “I don’t want to see anything that’s a reminder of my son.”

  “We’ll ship it to a storage locker and go through it all later,” Brock added.

  Who was Remington to second-guess anyone’s approach to grief? There had been some more back-and-forth about money, Remington refusing and Brock making a show of insisting. He gave her the keys and the key code and the number of the movers to call when she had everything packed.

  “Hello?” Remington unlocked the door off the deck and stepped inside. She wondered why people did that, call out to an empty house. Satisfying themselves that the place was indeed uninhabited? Or notifying the invisible spirits residing there that they had a visitor?

  She wandered through the silent, melancholy rooms. The house was gorgeous, multiple decks, twenty-foot ceilings and a fireplace in the main living room, walnut floors throughout. But it had been crusted over by the residence of a teenager. The usual clutter. Takeout food cartons, beer bottles. Simon had believed that hallways might be a good place to store surfboards.

  Remington waded through the castaway life of the dead boy. Untidiness everywhere, a pair of ghostly swim trunks discarded where they had been shucked off, a guitar facedown on the couch (did Simon play?), a strew of dishes and a bong and wireless speakers and random papers and a set of what looked like lawn darts, the whole mess spilling off the living room’s coffee table.

  Boy, interrupted.

  As she climbed the stairs off the living room, Layla didn’t know where to start. Mounds of assorted documents, newspaper clippings and xeroxed photographs lined the upstairs hall. Simon had been a big 9/11 conspiracist, and many of the documents had to do with the Saudis and the Jews and the CIA. Lots of stuff about Area 51 and interplanetary life-forms, also. The boy’s confused beliefs, Remington decided, were the intellectual equivalent of halitosis.

  What the architect had no doubt planned as the home’s master-bedroom suite was given over to a makeshift home-theater arrangement. As she passed by another of the bedrooms, Remington counted three empty pizza boxes, those reliable markers of an improvised existence. She remembered that Simon liked the Hawaiian pie from Johnnie’s New York, a pizza parlor just down the way off the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Simon was always the younger one, the feckless one, the child without a care in the world. His daddy kept all the Loushane children on a very tight financial leash. The others griped incessantly about it, but Simon simply sidestepped, taking up weed-dealing for spending money. He wasn’t very skilled at it, but his suppliers took pity on him and he never got home-invaded or pistol-whipped for his stash.

  Yes, well. Enough moping over the dead. Remington got to work. A collection of U-Haul boxes had already been delivered. She did as she was told, not sorting, not throwing much of anything away, just dumping the contents of room after room into the cardboard cartons. Every time she caught herself meditating on the weighty subject of the Stuff We Leave Behind, she switched rooms.

  She worked all day, mostly upstairs, and barely made a dent. She decided to sleep over. The cable hadn’t been shut off. She should tell Brock that he might want to see about that. Crawling into one of the unmade beds, she drifted off to a Bette Davis movie on TCM.

  She woke during the night convinced that someone was rooting around in the house.

  The TV was still on, the sound down low. Remington was a good Boy Scout, a “be prepared” kind of girl. She had a pistol in her backpack. But her pack was…downstairs. She got up, turned off the television and listened. Nothing. Her mind was deceiving her. Wearing sweats and a T-shirt, she ventured out into the upstairs hallway. It had arched portals that gave a view downstairs to the high-ceilinged living room.

  “Is someone there?” Her voice came out with a quaver. Maybe Brock had come, violating his own resolve not to visit while his brother’s possessions were still spread about.

  No answer. The steady pulse of surf came from the beach. Footfalls? Gathering her courage, Remington walked quickly and quietly down the stairs. She crossed to her backpack and retrieved the pistol, a Baby Browning automatic that her father had presented to her on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. The little pistol steadied her nerves considerably.

  Nothing. No one. But…The whoosh of a sliding door at the back of the house? Or was that the waves? She went around and turned on all the house lights, then checked the doors to all the decks. All locked. Except one, in the far northwest corner off of the laundry room, leading to a set of steps going down to an outside walkway. It was cracked a little. She had used it earlier in the day. She must have forgotten to lock it. Remington slid the door open and stepped out into the warm Malibu night.

  She heard footsteps fading along Westward Beach Road. Either that or she was imagining things. It was so late that the traffic on the PCH had stilled. She decided the whole intruder business had been nothing. There was pretty much zero crime in Malibu. Private security patrolled the community constantly. Even so, she rechecked all the doors and left the lights on when she went back upstairs.

  The next morning kicked off crunch day. She had to finish because she had classes at the police academy coming up, course work to do, her own life to lead. She packed nonstop through the morning and into the afternoon. She was a robot. She did not moon over this memento or that. She got the job done.

  Exhausted, sweaty, trying not to resent the Loushanes for laying this task on her, she retreated to the kitchen. In the Sub-Zero, she had left a couple of things for last. A half-full liter of the Absolut vodka that Simon loved. And…a bottle of retsina, the pine-flavored Greek wine.

  The first sip hit Remington hard. It had been their drink, a fad among a certain crowd at Zuma, a cheap and ugly wine, definitely not to most people’s taste. Caroline Loushane had picked up on retsina during a summer tramp through the Aegean. The ancient Greeks originally masked the foulness of lousy wine with pine tar. Then they developed a taste for the gunk they had put in.

  Remington took a glass and the bottle out to the front deck. A well-tanned black-haired guy wearing Wayfarer sunglasses was playing Frisbee with himself on the sand. He was shirtless and barefoot and looked to be in his early twenties. The dude knew his flying disks. He played off the onshore wind, flinging the Frisbee fifty yards into the air, effortlessly catching it as it came back to him. Toss after parabolic toss, and he barely had to move a step.

  Over the hours that Remington had worked at packing, the truth had sunk in. From the moment she had left the interview at Wildermanse, she wondered why the Loushanes had chosen her. She was a young family friend who was close, but not too close. At first she considered that they might have the deluded idea that she was somehow a law-enforcement officer.

  Now she thought she understood. A few years before, in a dimly illuminated Argentinean steak house off Melrose, Remington had blundered into something she wasn’t meant to witness. Brockton Loushane sat at a back table in the restaurant, his hands and lips all over a young Hispanic guy. Remington had seen them, and Brock had seen her seeing them.

  Later, she hadn’t gossiped about Brock to anyone in the family, not to Caroline or Ellis or Simon, and certainly not to their father. At that point in time, Victor Loushane was among those leading the Republican Party’s charge against gay rights. It might have been a big deal if his oldest son and aide-de-camp was caught “fagging it out,” as Daddy would have phrased it.

  Remington encountered Brock once or twice afterward. They exchanged pleasantries. Neither of them spoke of the incident. But the oldest Loushane child took away the obvious conclusion. Remington had seen something, and she hadn’t said anything. She could be trusted to be discreet.

  “One more thing,” Brock Loushane had said when giving Remington he
r housecleaning marching orders at Wildermanse. “We would prefer you not talk about this with other members of the family. You might encounter some unusual material while packing up Simon’s possessions. Anything out of the way, anything”—he had searched for the word—“anything untoward, you be sure to tell us about, okay?”

  “All right,” Remington had said. Drugs, she thought. Evidence of criminality. They didn’t make her sign a confidentiality agreement, exactly, but that was the substance of the deal struck between them. Remington was to serve as a spy for Daddy and Big Brother.

  She sipped the ice-cold pine wine and watched the guy on the beach with the Frisbee. The wine was pretty bad, but the Frisbee player was really very good. He saw her watching him and waved. She gave him an uncertain wave back.

  Remington had indeed discovered something “untoward” among the clutter of Simon’s possessions. She didn’t know exactly what it meant. Fishing in a mess of surfing magazines and takeout menus beside a futon on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms, she plucked out a single sheet of paper.

  A bill or an invoice of some sort. “Investigaciones Especiales, Ltd.,” read the letterhead, with the motto “Seguridad, Protección, Investigaciones.” A handwritten notation in English: “Re: Investigation of E.D.L.” The company listed someone named César Montenegro Sepúlveda as its director, with an address in Tijuana. Farther down was Simon’s name and his address at the beach house, and a line in Spanish (“Para los servicios prestados”) helpfully translated (“For services rendered”), then the amount billed, $5,000.

  E.D.L. Remington had to ponder the initials before it came to her. That would be Evelyn DeYoung Loushane, Victor Loushane’s first wife.

  Why had Simon hired a Mexican private eye to look into his mother’s death?

  Five years before, on New Year’s Eve of the millennium, Evelyn Loushane died at Wildermanse. It was an accident. There were eyewitnesses to that fact. The police investigated. The death of such a prominent figure was a big deal in the media at the time.