Unwanted Company - Barbara Seranella Read online

  * * *

  Munch, sitting at her small dining-room table, adjusted the radio to an all-news station, picked up the phone, and pushed REDIAL. It was senseless, she knew, to keep trying to call the limo. Still she had to do something.

  The recording came on again, telling her that the mobile-phone customer she was trying to reach was not responding or had left the service provider area. Munch knew the same recording played when the mobile phone wasn't turned on. She also knew there was no way Ellen would know how to use the phone in the car, if she was even aware of its existence. A code had to be entered via the handset before calls could be sent or received. Derek swore he hadn't told her the code. She was too annoyed with him to explain that that would have been the one thing he might have done right even if it was by accident.

  Had Ellen ripped her off? she wondered. She had trouble believing that. Was the limo wrapped around a telephone pole somewhere? Perhaps.

  The gnawing truth was that anything was possible with Ellen. Actually, that was part of her charm. The first time Munch had met Ellen was twelve years ago, when getting high had still been fun. It was at Ellen's coming-out party—Venice Beach style. After serving four months in juvenile Hall, Ellen was a free woman. The celebration was held at a beer bar on Lincoln Boulevard.

  The party had been going for hours when Munch got there. She shared a pitcher of beer with her then-best-friend Deb and then broke away to use the bathroom. While Ellen had been away, Deb had taken up with Ellen's boyfriend. Out of loyalty, Munch was fully prepared to hate the returning bitch. But then she'd opened the toilet-stall door and found Ellen sitting there, tossing reds into the air and catching them in her mouth. Ellen hadn't missed a beat, just invited Munch to join in. The evening had ended with new men for all of them, and fuck any cheating bastard who couldn't take a joke. Ellen was one of a kind, all right, and not without principles. If she had the choice between taking the easy way out or hurting you, she'd do her utmost to look for other options. In the end she might still sleep with your old man, but she damn sure would give him a hickey. And let him try to explain that. You had to love her.

  Even now, when the rules were all different, the thought of Ellen brought a rueful chuckle to her lips. Fucking Ellen. Was it just a coincidence that she had come back and craziness had followed?

  The news came over the radio again, and Munch turned up the volume. Two people reportedly found dead in a Hollywood apartment. The details were few, as was always true with breaking news. The radio announcer did not know the age or sex of the alleged victims, only that the police were investigating, it was a double homicide, and it had probably occurred in the early-morning hours.

  Ellen, she willed, call me. Munch wished the radio would give her more details on the victims. Two people were dead. Was it a man and a woman or the two women? Had they been shot? Were there suspects in custody?

  And where the hell was her limo?

  To be fair, whatever had happened in the apartment in Hollywood, or how it might concern her customers of last evening, had nothing to do with Ellen. Except—someone had called this morning and booked the limo. Someone, accord- ing to Ellen's note, who paid cash and had worked out a special arrangement with Munch. It wasn't as if her client list were so broad or that spur-of-the-moment runs dropped from the heavens every day. That left only Raleigh Ward, the morose drunk from last night. A morose drunk with a gun.

  Munch set down the phone when she heard the chimes that preceded the taped message telling her what she already knew. As soon as she hung up, the phone rang, startling her.

  "Ellen?" she answered.

  "No, it's me again. Mace St. John."

  "Hi."

  "Are you going to be home in the next half hour?"

  "Why?"

  "I wanted to swing by and show you some pictures," he said.

  "Sure, I'll be here."

  "I'd also like to take a look at your limo. The one you took out last night."

  "It's the only one I have," she said.

  "And it's a silver-gray Cadillac with a charcoal gray vinyl roof?"

  "Yes."

  "What's the license plate?"

  She hesitated for only a moment before she gave it to him. She didn't want him thinking she had anything to hide. Perhaps by the time he got there, the situation with Ellen and the missing limo would be resolved. Yeah, and maybe she'd win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. "I'll be here," she said.

  "See you in a bit, then," he said, and hung up.

  Munch cleaned the house nervously while waiting for the phone to ring. She had the same feelings she had felt before when a guy she really liked said that he'd call. She'd spent three insecure hours not daring to tie up the phone in case when he did call, he'd get a busy signal and not try again. Thinking back, she was pretty sure the guy had never remembered his promise.

  Fucking Ellen to bring up all this shit.

  Twenty minutes later Munch pulled the extension by the front door and went to work trimming the hedge under her front window so she could watch for approaching cars. Across the street, Derek was mowing his perfect green patch of lawn in the bright sunshine. Lawn care was his claim to fame. When they had lived together, he had leveled, aerated, weeded, fed, watered, and trimmed hers to perfection. She'd once asked him to promise her that he wouldn't turn into one of those old men who sat by his front window and yelled at the neighborhood kids to keep off his grass.

  A red bandanna tied around his forehead now caught his honest sweat. His shoulders strained with the effort of pushing the mower. Even those movements seemed deliberate to her. Derek had a way of rolling his shoulders forward one at a time as he walked, his smooth muscles rippling like a panther or some other type of sleek night stalker. Derek's dog, Violet, sat on the front porch watching her master work. Violet was another reason Derek needed to stick close to home. The cocker spaniel had abandonment issues. Derek softened the animal's neurosis with overfeeding. When Violet waddled from her bed to her food bowl, her matted chest hair dragged on the ground. Her only real exercise came when Derek let her hump his leg.

  "Why don't you stop her when she does that?" Munch had once asked.

  He'd mumbled something about not breaking the animal's spirit, and she had not pursued the issue.

  The first time she'd ever laid eyes on him, he'd been standing in the parking lot of the Alano Club—an A.A. clubhouse on Washington and Centinela that held three meetings most days and four on weekends. Derek attended all the noontime meetings at the Alano Club. The members of the fellowship who went to the midday meetings considered themselves the core of the Program—the axis around which the universe of sobriety was able to revolve. Some of them were twenty years sober and still making five and six meetings a week, they'd brag. Munch wondered if maybe they'd missed the point along the way.

  "Aren't we all supposed to be rejoining society?" she'd asked her sponsor.

  Ruby had replied, "That's the best some folks can do." The night Munch first spotted Derek, he'd been standing with a small group while the meeting was going on inside. He'd positioned himself against the building with one knee bent, the sole of his tennis shoe resting flat on the wall behind him. He wore faded but clean blue jeans and a short-sleeve sweatshirt. Steam rose from his Styrofoam cup, his mustache just damp as he sipped and watched over the rim with his Robert Redford eyes, waiting for an opening in the conversation. She'd been drawn to his circle, even then wondering if this tall, handsome stranger wasn't the cowboy of her dreams, with his soft Arkansas drawl and easy laugh. It was only later, after he moved in, after they'd done the deed, and Asia got used to seeing him over morning cereal with the woolly buff colored beast clinging to his calf, that certain things began to leak out.

  For one, he was afraid of horses.

  And then there was the work thing. He wanted to get his contractor's license, but to qualify he needed two years of experience in his field, which was glazing. He wasn't supposed to work as a glazier, he explained, unti
l he was licensed. "You don't want me to lie on the contractor's license application he had pointed out, citing the Ten Commandments and the Twelve Steps.

  Munch listened sympathetically for a year. He'd had a bad childhood, after all and he was doing the best he could and he was staying sober and that was the most important thing, wasn't it? Munch finally told him that she, too, had had a bad childhood, but at least hers had ended at some point.

  "How do you know whether you should hang in there or when it's time to give up?" she asked her sponsor in one of their weekly chats.

  "Honey," Ruby said, "I've been married and divorced four times, and I don't regret a one of them."

  Fed up, Munch was determined to split up with Derek on a particularly stormy day in March. Asia was at a friend's, and Munch and Derek had been arguing all morning. Munch finally fled the house in frustration, muttering to herself that she didn't get sober to put up with this kind of shit. She returned midafternoon after doing some serious soul searching and reevaluation, only to find him bent over a cardboard box. He'd found a baby bird that had been blown from its nest. Inside the box he'd fashioned a new nest, put in a tin of water, and was trying to get the bird to eat. That bought him another month.

  She ended up breaking up with him in April when he managed to rack up three speeding tickets in as many weeks and then miss the deadline for traffic school. The insurance company called him a bad risk.

  Munch removed Derek's name from the insurance policy and the mailbox on the same day. That night she requested that he sleep on the couch, but at 3 A.M., he joined her in bed, sobbing.

  "Who will take care of me?" he asked.

  She found herself in the odd position of being the source of his pain and the provider of his comfort. Later she told Ruby of the difficult night.

  "They're always so surprised," Ruby said with uncharacteristic directness, "when you finally wise up."

  Munch's final act of insanity had been to find Derek his job as apartment manager for the building across the street. She was brought back to the moment when she realized that the man getting out of the car that had just pulled into her driveway was Mace St. John.

  "What's so funny? " he asked as he got out of his car.

  "Life," she said. "Long story. How about a cup of coffee?"

  He looked at his watch. "Maybe a quick one. Where do you keep your limo?"

  Munch was framing her reply when Asia burst out the front door, and said, "Mom, I can't find my red shoes."

  Mace turned, and asked, "Mom? You have been busy."

  Munch smiled weakly, feeling the cold hand of fear grip her heart. It was a fear she'd lived with for six years. A fear and a lie. But what did the whole exact truth really matter? How important was it to anybody that she hadn't actually given birth or gone through legal channels to ratify the adoption?

  For all intents, Asia was her daughter.

  Besides, when is it a good time to tell a kid that both her birth parents are dead? At two? When she's stringing together her first sentences?

  Or was the time to deliver the news when Asia was five?

  When her school did the Thanksgiving play and all the parents had come to see it. Asia had been so proud of her "Pilgroom" outfit with the brown-and-white paper collar and matching hat.

  Munch had rehearsed the riff many times about how of all the children in the world, adopted kids were the most special because they were chosen. It was bullshit, but it sounded good. The point was to make the kid feel secure. And she'd always done that. Now Asia was asking questions, starting to figure things out. Munch lived with the fear of what the answers could bring. Always wondering, had Asia said something to a teacher? The crossing guard? Would someone in authority put together the scattered facts and decide the Mancini case should be looked into?

  And then what? An investigation from Child Welfare with applications to fill out and social workers to convince? They'd look at Munch's record. Not the one that mattered. Not how she'd raised a happy, healthy kid who made friends easily and wanted to be a ballerina/animal trainer They'd see a single unmarried woman who worked and wasn't home when school let out. And then they'd dig deeper. Their forms would ask the question, "Have you ever been arrested?" And then they'd give her three lines to explain. As if that would be sufficient to sum up a life story. They'd jump all over the prostitution charges. Like would they be happier if she'd been a thief to support her habit? Would that make her a better parent? It was with that defiant attitude that Munch turned back to Mace St. John, and said, "I've been real busy. Didn't you say something about some pictures you wanted me to look at?"

  "Oh, right." Mace returned to his car. When he ducked through his open window to retrieve a manila envelope, Munch cast one final hopeful look up the street. It was still empty.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ellen and her merry band pulled into Tijuana at three o'clock. Raleigh had her drive up a narrow, partially cobbled road. She found a space large enough to accommodate the limo next to an open-air market.

  "You two do some shopping," Raleigh said. "I need to pick up a few things."

  She followed his gaze to a small whitewashed building. Over the narrow doorway, a sign proclaimed FARMACIA. Obviously he felt he would do fine without her translating skills. Not that she knew more than a few rudimentary commands such as requesting a glass of water, a light, or the lyrical but practical Dame el dinero primero, Give me the money first. Victor grabbed her elbow and steered her toward a vendor selling bullfight posters,

  "Now, this is sport," he said.

  "Getting a poor little old bull mad and then killing it?"

  Ellen asked.

  "It is the ultimate contest," Victor said. "Good versus evil. The bull gives his blood, his life, to satisfy man's needs. "

  "Sometimes the bull wins," Ellen said.

  "Exactly," Victor said, his eyes excited, searing into hers as if she'd said the very thing he'd been waiting to hear. The intensity in his face made her take a step away from him. He leaned toward her as she moved back. A table full of colorful scrapes blocked her escape.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills that was fat enough to make a nun salivate. The shopkeeper had been roaming between the narrow tables that displayed his wares. When Victor's cash appeared, the man hustled to his side.

  "Señor." He tipped his head to Ellen. "Señora. How can I help you?"

  Victor pointed at a poster depicting fighting cocks and peeled a twenty from his roll. "We're looking for some action. Do you know this place where the donkeys and the women . . ."

  He finished the sentence with a pumping motion of his hand. The man rubbed chubby palms together. "Of course."

  Ellen saw Raleigh heading their way. He carried a paper sack by its neck and held it up grinning as he got closer. At least he was smiling now, she thought. He opened the bag and pulled out a bottle of Del Guzano tequila.

  "No trip to TJ is complete," he told Victor as he cracked the bottle open, "without eating the worm."

  The shopkeeper took Victor's money, called out to a barefoot boy of perhaps eight, and gave the boy rapid instructions in Spanish while pointing at Victor. The boy listened without looking at any of them, untied and reknotted his rope belt, scratched his ear, then gestured for the three Americans to follow him.

  "Vámonos in el carro," Ellen said, making an effort to roll the rr carro. Was that even a word? She pointed to the limo, and the boy nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, shit," she said, noticing the naked wheels. The car had been out of her sight for only a few minutes.

  "What happened to the hubcaps?" she asked.

  Raleigh and Victor passed the bottle back and forth and seemed unconcerned at her distress as they sauntered toward the big Cadillac. Ellen walked around to the driver's side and opened her door. A quick glance down the length of the car confirmed her fear that the thieves had made off with the whole damn set. She reached down and flipped the electronic door locks. The boy climbed into the front seat beside her
and pointed off to the right.

  "Alli," he said. There.

  "Ah-yee is right, kid," she said, wondering what was going to happen next. One thing for damn sure, somebody was paying for those hubcaps. Ellen thought back to the wad of bills in Victor's pocket. Three questions instantly came to mind. How big a tipper is this guy? How well does he hold his liquor? And how soundly does he sleep?

  The boy's directions brought them to a street called Avenida Revolucion. Bars of every flavor touted their attractions. The Hula Room offered topless girls. The New York Club bragged of live entertainment. The boy urged them forward until they reached the bottom of the block. A flashing neon sign proclaimed THE BLUE FOX. Two sweating locals passed out flyers to a group of American navy men, easily recognized by their short hair and crisply pressed jeans. Fat working girls in short, tight dresses leaned against the windowless walls and smiled at passing traffic. Smoke and tinny-sounding salsa music oozed from the open doorway.

  "Perfect," Victor said. Raleigh passed him the tequila bottle, and he took a healthy swig. He offered the bottle to Ellen. She declined.

  The Cadillac's thermometer read l00 degrees, and that wasn't even counting the humidity. COLD BEER was painted in white letters above the doorway. Maybe just one, she thought, and only the bottled stuff.

  As the group passed through the flaps of floor-length Naugahyde that served as the doors of the establishment, one of the barkers pushed a flyer into Ellen's hand. The black-and-white photograph was grainy, but she could still make out the heavily made-up fat woman spreading her pussy open and curling her tongue. Large, flabby breasts spilled over the woman's arms.

  "When's the show?" Victor asked.

  "Twenty dollars," the doorman said. "Each."

  Ellen hesitated. "Maybe I'll just wait in the car," she said.

  "It's too hot for that," Raleigh said. "Come on in. Don't worry I won't tell."