Blizzard Ball (10 page)

Gisele extended a leg out of the booth. “Good luck with that.”

Claude reached a hand across the table and blocked her exit. “I wish that was the end of it,” he said. “Roddy wants you to go to Minnesota to assist with the redemption of the jackpot ticket.”

“No goddamn way!” Gisele erupted.

The burly printer who had made a pass earlier shot Claude a threatening stare.

“Ma cherie, please,” Claude pleaded with clasped hands. “I’m just the messenger.”

“Roddy’s totally out of his mind,” Gisele said. “Whatever he’s taking to kick that coke habit isn’t working.” Gisele dug into Claude’s face with scorching eyes. Her mind raced frantically in a search for a way out of this endless loop of madness. “Why me? Why not you? Anybody else?”

“He thinks a couple redeeming the ticket will bring less scrutiny.”

“Forget it.”

Claude laid a cell phone on the table.

“Where did you find this?” Gisele flipped it open. A digital image of her daughter smiled back from the screen saver. “I’ve been looking all over for it.”

Claude lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s come to my attention that this phone,” he said, tapping its face, “made three curious calls the evening the professor died. One to the HM Club at closing time, followed by two calls to the dancer’s apartment where the professor was found dead. Both calls to the dancer were within an hour of the professor’s recorded time of death.”

“Obviously, somebody ripped it off from me and made those calls.” Gisele grabbed the phone and smashed it on the barroom floor.

Claude followed the phone to the floor. “Sorry, accident,” he said, in the general direction of the printers at the bar and hurriedly gathered up the phone parts and reclaimed his seat in the booth. “Tantrums won’t do any good, you know,” he said. “You forget who pays your phone bills.” From his jacket pocket, he produced a phone log with the calls in question circled. Lotto2Win provided and paid for the cell phones of their top telemarketers. “Look, I don’t know truth from fiction. You think you got a line on somebody, but the prospects of pocketing seven hundred fifty million dollars or part thereof can bring out behavior that makes you wonder if you really know ’em at all.”

Gisele looked like a glassy-eyed fighter trying to get up off the canvas. Claude waited as if giving her the ten-count, making sure she could continue before he hit her again. He pointed to the circled phone numbers, his brow furrowed. “Here’s how one could connect the dots.” He pointed out that, through her own admission, the police had already established the existence of a relationship, Internet-based or otherwise, with the professor. The cell phone calls would further suggest collusion with the prostitute involved in the professor’s death. And although the police were not currently aware of the winning lottery ticket, it would be easy to consider $750 million a lot of motive, especially since Gisele potentially had access to the ticket.

“I’m scared. Help me,” Gisele blubbered, rivulets of tears trickling down her cheeks.

“I have one more message to deliver,” Claude said, signaling for the drink check. His heart ached for her. He reached across the table for her hand. “Roddy promised that if you assist in the redemptions, the call records will disappear.”

Alita pulled a rag from the scrub bucket. Her raw, red fingers stung from the friction of scouring the blood-stained carpet. The harsh detergent water irritated her eyes and reminded her of growing up in a twisted hovel with a sagging corrugated roof and a blanket for a door. People foraging among plastic containers, garbage, tires, ragged clothes, broken lawn furniture, diapers, and medical waste. And a little girl playing in the dirt, flies buzzing about her head and smoke from a kettle on an open fire that turned the sky a dusty yellow.

“I am not going back there,” her brain screamed, furious that her whole life had been flattened by pink slips of paper. Overwhelmed by the Irishman’s bloody mess that resisted her cleanup attempt, she flung the brackish water against the living room wall.

The phone rang.

“Don’t hang up, eh.”

It was a voice Alita didn’t recognize and was confused about what “eh” meant.

“Or your greaseball relatives will fry for murder,” the caller threatened. “I know you have my lottery tickets. I’ll arrange a time and place to pick them up within the next forty-eight hours. And don’t even think about doing anything stupid like redeeming them.”

Fear ran through Alita like a freight train. She pressed her fingers deep into the knotted muscles of her neck. What if more crazy people came crashing into her home? She sprang to the door, checked the deadbolt, raced to lock down the windows, and closed the blinds. Breathe slow, breathe slow, she commanded, fighting hyperventilation. Call the police, said a voice of reason, momentarily interrupting the panic attack. No, no! They’ll find the tickets, the blood. Alita’s eyes were drawn to the crucifix above the TV. She pleaded and made the Sign of the Cross: Jesus, help me. She could just drop the lottery tickets off at the police station and run away. But the caller had threatened to identify Rafie and Eduardo. Her thoughts spun around and around like a wobbly top. She slumped to the floor, casting a scornful eye on the boxes of lottery tickets scattered around the apartment. She could burn them; she would, every last one, and maybe the apartment, too.

The dog interpreted Alita’s sprawl as an invitation to play and jumped on her lap. “Off,” she said. “Go lay down. Bad dog.” She swatted at its hindquarters. She hit it harder than she needed to. The dog whimpered. Alita reached out and clutched at it to make amends. “Nice Poochy,” she said. “I’m sorry I hurt you.” She stroked the top of its head. “I’m sorry I opened my big mouth and got Rafie and Eduardo in trouble. I should have helped them. They have no money and no place to go. I’m so scared.” Alita sobbed into the dog’s furry neck. Other than Rafie and Eduardo, she had no close friends in St. Paul, only associates from the bank and polite but distant neighbors. She licked her lips, salty from tears, and the words Albert Lea unexpectedly formed.

Alita’s mother, a migrant worker, with daughter in tow, traveled seventeen hundred miles from California every autumn to work the corn and soybean harvest around Albert Lea, a small agricultural community in southern Minnesota. Alita had friends in Albert Lea she hoped she could count on. “Christ, how am I going to get to Albert Lea when I’m afraid to leave the apartment?” She directed the question at the dog, now perched on the sofa with a paw covering its snout. “You better care, you canine freeloader, because someone out there is waiting to pummel your human for these damn tickets.”

Alita glanced at a Domino’s pizza box. She hadn’t eaten all day—no appetite. Domino’s had been a regular feature in the house with Rafie and Eduardo. At 9:00 p.m. Alita ordered a pizza. Thirty minutes later, she eyed the familiar face of the Domino Pizza delivery guy through the apartment door spyglass. She ushered him in and closed the door.

“Hey, where are the happy amigos?” The pizza man’s metal tongue stud clicked as he spoke.

“They’re not here right now,” Alita said, paying for the pizza. “This is awkward, but … my ex-boyfriend has been stalking me, hanging around the apartment.” She touched the pizza delivery man’s arm. “Could you please check around the apartment building on your way out? If you see anyone that looks out of place, someone driving slowly past the apartment or sitting in a parked car, could you call me? So I can alert the police.”

“If I see that sick sonofabitch,” the pizza man said, “I’ll let you know damn straight.” Alita handed over an extra twenty dollars and her phone number.

She paced the apartment. She realized it had been a measure of insanity to trust her security to a pizza delivery man with fishing tackle in his face. But fifteen minutes after he left the apartment, he called and gave her the all clear. He volunteered that he’d be coming through the neighborhood at least a half a dozen times more and he’d keep his eye open for that “stalking scumbag.”

She waited until 1:00 a.m. and, quiet in her tennis shoes, made her way outside to the back of the apartment building. It was Friday. Trash pickup was on Thursday. She inspected the trash containers lined up against the apartment wall. They were mostly empty. Back in her apartment kitchen, she gathered the FedEx boxes, loose lottery tickets, and a change of clothes into large black plastic bags and deposited them in the containers. From a bedroom window facing the rear of the apartment, she gently bent the blind and kept a nervous vigil on them. At 4:00

a.m. she cautiously approached the containers, hoping it was safe to load the stashed tickets into her car.

The lid on the first container stuck; a hard pull sent it crashing to the concrete sidewalk with a loud report. An apartment light on the second floor snapped on and illuminated Alita. She crouched tight against the building. Her heart hammered and her nose dripped in the subfreezing night. When the apartment light was extinguished, Alita cautiously approached her Camry. She tossed a bag of tickets into the back seat, then quickly retreated, fully expecting to be clubbed by an unseen enemy. To her relief, she was alone; the only sound was a strange ticking noise coming from the dormant engine. She dashed back and forth between the car and the trash containers, loading the bags and, finally, the dog into the back seat.

Watching the streets closely, she drove out of the lower East Side neighborhood until she reached Interstate 94. Five miles down the highway she exited at Snelling Avenue and aimed for Macalester College. The college campus was part of St. Paul’s infamous Tangle-town, named for its disorienting layout of streets that rivaled an English hedge maze. She navigated through the hairpins and twisted ribbon of streets like a Grand Prix driver. Deep into the labyrinth she curbed the car, turned off the lights, and waited.

Once certain she wasn’t being followed, Alita pointed the car in a southerly direction and watched the Twin City lights drop away in her review mirror. There was a hint of morning on the horizon. The dawn was not Alita’s best time of day. It always arrived with the weight of things to come. The interstate would have been a straight shot to Albert Lea, but she opted to drive the minimally enforced two-lane highways. A traffic violation would risk calling attention to the bags of stolen lottery tickets. She locked in the cruise control to just below the posted speed limit. The wintry wind skipped the utility lines like jump ropes. In the headlights the silvery snow darted across the road into the forest.

“Holy shit!” Alita stomped on the brakes. The dog catapulted from its back seat perch and slammed into the dashboard. A plastic bag burst open and exploded lottery tickets in a pink shower like cotton candy through a fan. Alita heard the click of hooves on the pavement just as the Camry clipped the buck’s hindquarters. The deer stumbled, bounded to the side of the road, and lowered its thick rack to a defensive position. It surveyed the threat, then jumped hurriedly over a snow fence and disappeared into a stand of cedar.

“You all right, Poochy?” Alita checked the dog for injuries before stepping out of the car to inventory the damage. The left front headlight hung loosely on the bumper, tethered only by an electrical wire. Alita blew on her hands and watched the first rays of sun pick their way across the wintry fields. Sleepy snow crystals awoke and shimmered like a sequined gown. Preferring the fertility of the growing seasons, she rarely afforded herself the opportunity to take in winter’s stark beauty. “Nice show, now bring the heat,” she mumbled as she stamped the circulation back into her feet.

Alita cautiously resumed the drive, with the broken headlight clanging against the bumper. A loose lottery ticket on the dashboard was reflected in the windshield at eye level. “I really could use a new car,” she said as if speaking to a magic genie. “I’d like to buy Momma a house, new pickup trucks for Eduardo and Rafie, quit the bank job, move to someplace warmer like California, open a health clinic for migrant workers, maybe even get a real dog, just kidding.” She scratched the dog under the chin. What she really wanted was to find a respectable man who wasn’t stuck in the machismo bullcrap and have three kids, two boys and a girl. Alita was surprised how easily the stream of wanting flowed. She felt an inner stir that was at once seductive and terrifying. To her surprise, the lottery ticket had found its way into her clutched fist. Releasing the grip, she found her palm wet, the ticket crunched and damp.

Albert Lea’s Broadway Street was once the bustling center of commerce in support of vibrant agriculture, dairy, and meat-packing industries. Today, the historic main street was a relic of a bygone era. In the center of town sat the once proud, now only historic, Freeborn Bank building. The four-story structure with its jeweled terra-cotta exterior had served as a financial institution, a medical center, apartments, and banquet hall. Today, it sat empty in search of tenants. Although the bank was gone, a scattering of stalwart retailers hung on, fighting to survive the crush of Walmart, located just off the nearby interstate. The town’s two notable celebrities were Eddie Cochran, of the 1958 hit Summertime Blues, and Audra Lynn, the October 2003 Playboy playmate.

Alita angled the Camry into a parking spot in front of the Taco Casa Authentic Mexican Restaurant. She picked up a hint of chili pepper twenty feet from the restaurant door.

Carlos Vargas, the owner, had opened the restaurant after his arm was crushed up to the shoulder in a corn elevator accident. Most considered an ethnic restaurant a long shot in this quintessential Norwegian Lutheran meat-and-potato town, where ketchup was considered a seasoning. Carlos had anticipated patronage from the migrant trade, but to his surprise, the authentic Mexican cooking, the “all you can eat” taco night, and a never-ending smile won over the locals, too.

The restaurant, a former Rexall Drug Store, was crowded with the breakfast regulars. The air was spicy and warm. Lace curtains hung from the large storefront windows. Sombreros, lariats, and local art accessorized the walls. On each table and booth a small, brightly painted earthenware pot was filled with sprigs of Christmas holly.