Blizzard Ball (8 page)

“Don’t know. I’ll introduce you to Lasiandra. She’s the teller supervisor.”

“So you’re a cop?” Lasiandra said as Kirchner squeezed into her partitioned cubicle. “Could tell straightaway from those scars on your noggin and lordy those shoes.” Her laugh shook her generous proportions. “Hey, can you fix a parking ticket? ’Cause, honey, I got a back seat full of ’em. Someone had the bright idea of creating permit parking in my neighborhood. I got two cars and one permit. My old man always gets to the permit spot first. I know you see the problem. Can you help a lady out?”

“Depends. What can you tell me about Jamal Madhta from the Cash and Dash who’s been cashing big checks and walking out with boxes of money?”

“I hear he’s dead.”

“About his banking business,” Kirchner said patiently.

“Suspect he was running a game like most fools in this neighborhood. What it was, I can’t say. I only approve the checks and make sure the cash count is correct. Alita’s the teller he did business with. They were always chatting it up.”

“Which one’s Alita?” Kirchner looked toward the counter.

“She’s not here, gone for a few days. Left, not feeling well, and hasn’t been back.”

Kirchner made a note on a small spiral-bound pad. “Is this Alita in contact with you?”

“If she wants to keep her job, she is.”

“Call me when you hear from her.” Kirchner dropped his card on her desk.

“Sounds like you’re asking me for a favor. Could that be worth some help with the parking tickets?”

Alita stepped onto the wraparound porch of the Eastside AA Clubhouse and wiggled her way past the smokers huddled over Styrofoam coffee cups in subfreezing temperatures. She paid little attention to them as she headed towards the Spanish-speaking meeting. Inside the tired old mansion, she stomped her feet and held her hands over a hissing radiator. Volunteers were busy staging folding chairs in loose circles throughout the house, as if the attendees would be swapping stories around a campfire. Meetings went on from early morning until late evening. Sessions were open to anyone and tended to fill in by natural selection— first-step, substance addiction, Spanish-speaking, old drunks, young drunks, friends and victims of drunks.

Alita had stopped drinking three years earlier in the wake of her failed college experience. After graduating from high school, she had received a partial scholarship from the Centro Campesino Agency and attended Southwest Minnesota State College in Marshall. Hoping to fit in and prove she belonged, she drank hard and partied hearty, as they say. She got pregnant the beginning of her sophomore year and kept it a secret until she couldn’t. The shame of squandering precious resources and the disgrace of failing sank her ship in an abyss of alcohol and drugs.

Growing up in the migrant community, Alita had experienced the zeal of religious missionaries who were as ever-present as horse flies. Church buses with painted slogans—“Christians are square with God.” “If your life is rusty, your Bible’s dusty”— rolled into the fields prowling for converts. Wide-eyed poverty voyeurs brought gifts of date-expired hygiene products and used clothes. Alita remembered receiving a pink T-shirt that read, “Buy ’em a shot, they’re tying the knot, Hammer & Katie, June 13, 2008.” The trade-off for their largesse was an opportunity to claim your soul. The migrant families sat their haunches dutifully on wooden orchard crates, swatting fruit flies with the fresh Bibles and catechisms as the do-gooders pitched their exclusive road to glory. The Catholics were particularly adept at defining guilt-ridden sin—the pathway to eternal damnation. The only escape was sacramental absolution.

The Catholics no longer held sway over Alita, but the need to confess and be forgiven, or at least not judged, was indelibly ingrained. The convenience store robbery, the death of the Irishman, and her cousins’ plight as rudderless fugitives weighed heavily on her. She wasn’t sure what she would say tonight, if anything. Just hanging out with people who felt remorse for their past transgressions was some measure of comfort and kept her sober.

“What’s your poison?” a first-stepper asked Alita as she stood in the hallway warming up and waiting for her meeting to begin. “I love Scotch,” the man said, pressing in on her. “And not the cheap shit, either. Single malts. Got a three-hundred-dollar bottle staring me in the face. My attorney said these bitch-and-moan meetings will help me plead out my DUI.” He threw his hand up on the wall over Alita’s head. “Name’s Lucky,” he said, his breath buffeting her face. Even in the dim hallway she could see red and blue capillaries bursting on his cheeks and nose. “I’m forty-six, but I got the energy of a horse, if you get my drift. Just because we’re dry-docked don’t mean we can’t have some fun.”

Lucky’s hand slid off the wall and stroked the side of Alita’s cheek, still rosy from the cold.

Few people at the AA Eastside Clubhouse knew Kirchner was a cop. He preferred to keep it that way. The AA house was only five minutes from the BCA’s headquarters. His wife had died seven years ago, but he could barely remember the first two years after her passing. He’d lost her face, couldn’t picture her. But as he bit back on the bitter truth, it was clear he’d abandoned his wife, put his job before the marriage, certain she’d always be there.

A story had circulated that the last thing he said to his wife was “I love you.” A lie. On their last rocky encounter, a Saturday morning, his wife had wanted him to stay in bed, hit the pause button on the job, make love. “Later,” he’d said, convinced that he was working for their future and the bad guys couldn’t wait. She became angry, bolted out of bed, told him to “get his fucking head on straight,” and locked herself in the bathroom.

The loss and the guilt without recourse sucked him into a hopeless dark place. It had taken two tours in alcoholic treatment to lay the self-loathing to rest. Tonight, with a four-year chip in his pocket, Kirchner had been asked to introduce the First Step to new AA attendees and those who had fallen off the wagon. Rebounders.

Kirchner heard someone say, “Trouble,” and he headed in the direction of the commotion where a circle of attendees were watching a man bent over, head low and holding his crotch.

“Christ, just making conversation,” the stooped man coughed out. “What’s wrong with that woman?” he asked, pointing at Alita.

Kirchner steered the hunched-over injured man toward the First Step meeting room and watched him waddle off, hoping he had learned AA etiquette.

The petite woman was being given a wide berth by milling attendees. She stood by herself and appeared shaken and vulnerable. Yet, just moments ago, she had dispatched a man almost twice her size to his knees. Kirchner knew from police domestic calls the lashing fury of a Latina’s anger. In their macho culture, they learned early to push back, often violently, to keep from being dominated.

He wasn’t sure if he had previously encountered this woman with midnight black hair, cinnamon colored skin, and full eyebrows that crowned her dark eyes. “First-stepper,” he said apologetically. “I should have collared that guy the minute he walked in the door. Teach him some manners. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Sorry,” she said, her defenses down. “I’m on overload.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Kirchner asked. He felt an uncharacteristic urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulder. But he let the gesture pass, aware of the boundaries. “If you need anything, let me know. My name is Kirchner.” The words felt awkward. He had not extended himself to a woman since before the death of his wife.

The woman looked at him curiously. As a rule people in AA did not use last names.

Kirchner met her eyes and felt something familiar. Suddenly, self conscious, he heard the clacking of the mint rolling around in his mouth. Reaching into his pocket he produced a handful of individually wrapped hard candies, “Peppermint?”

The woman hesitated. Then with a shrug snatched a piece out his hand like a bird pecking seed. “Thanks,” she said, and moved onto her meeting without returning the introduction.

Kirchner watched her trail off, bit down on the mint and heard a nerve-jolting crack. “Sonofabitch,” he said, as he tongued the fractured tooth.

The Russian professor arrived in Vancouver, and Gisele met him at the airport. Although jet-lagged from the fifteen-hour flight from St. Petersburg, he would not be put off. He demanded confirmation and collection on his winning lottery tickets. Roddy, Lotto2Win’s owner, agreed to meet the professor alone, over the objections of Gisele, at the HM Club, a strip joint located in Vancouver’s Gastown district. The area had been transformed from dilapidated red-brick warehouses into trendy offices and retail and entertainment spots. Roddy had a financial interest in the club and considered it the perfect venue to mix business and pleasure.

Roddy nodded to a black-suited bouncer with a square head and ship-beam shoulders and proceeded to the club’s VIP mezzanine level. From this elevated perch, he took in the mixed crowd of pumped-up studs in too-tight Tshirts, the business set in two-thousand-dollar suits, and the working girls. The cacophony of clacking billiard balls, shouts for drinks at the bar, and the lusty clamor of patrons tethered to the rim of the stage rose in chorus with the cash register’s tone. Ka-ching. Roddy snorted two squiggly lines of coke from the mirror-topped cocktail table through a rolled hundred-dollar bill.

Professor Sergei Petrov seemed energized by HM’s atmosphere. He rubber-necked the dancers as a host steered him up the half-flight of stairs to meet Roddy.

“Pleased to meet you, ah …” Roddy said haltingly.

“Let’s make it easy. Just call me Professor, everyone does,” the professor said, his attention fixed on the dance stage. “I must admit this is not what I was expecting. But life is full of nice surprises these days, yes?”

“Surprise is a strange word coming from someone with an expertise in connecting the dots of random events.” Roddy pointed the professor to a chair and signaled a waitress to bring a couple of Stolis.

“So, you’re familiar with hypergeometric distribution?” the professor said with an air of professorial condescension. “Perhaps, you would like me to explain how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil will set off a tornado in Texas, yes?”

“Not necessary.” Roddy raised his chin toward an acrobatic stripper on the brass pole. “If I understand the concept, the heat coming off that dancer could burn down the rain forest, eh.”

“Indeed.” The professor’s Adam’s apple bobbled below his neatly trimmed beard. Caught off guard by Roddy’s foray into his academic territory, he attempted a return service. “I would wager HM stands for something pedestrian like Hit Man, High Maintenance, His Majesty, or Huge Mammary. Am I close?”

The waitress dropped the drinks on the table.

“Stick with the math, professor. I’ll give you a clue.” Roddy pointed a swizzle stick toward a framed poster hanging on the wall over the bar. The illustration featured the naked backside of a woman with the words “Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller” scripted over her rear. “We would still be laboring under the heavy skirts of the Puritans if Henry had not rolled back the covers.”

“No skirts here, and very abreast of the times,” the professor said, his knees bouncing and his focus zeroed in upon the stage.

Roddy could practically hear the carefully crafted framework of the professor’s academic persona implode as two leggy dancers appeared on the stage in stiletto heels and hockey jerseys. The taller of the two girls, a big-busted blonde, wore a blue Vancouver Canuck #33 jersey with the name “Sedin” lettered on the back. She was an immediate crowd favorite. The other girl, a brunette, wore a black Anaheim Ducks #37 featuring Ruutu and was booed. Both girls donned hockey gloves. They pranced around the stage, hip-checked and bumped at each other. Suddenly, tempers flared, the gloves dropped to the cheers of the patrons, and the cat fight was on. In the struggle, the jerseys were pulled overhead, breasts swung freely, and the Canuck took the Duck to the floor. They fought for position, with the Canuck getting at the backside of the Duck, who was on all fours. The home-town favorite pulled back on the Duck’s mane like a bareback rider, slapped her on the ass, and humped her hard. The customers pounded the tables and howled with laughter.

“Maybe, with your lottery winnings, you’ll buy a hockey team, eh?” Roddy soft-elbowed the professor.

“I was wondering when the elephant in the room would be acknowledged,” the professor said, his attention riveted on the dancers. “Although I must say the cheetahs have been an interesting diversion.”

“We’re not very practiced in receiving winners. Most transactions are handled long distance, electronically. We, of course, welcome your visit; it is all together understandable, given the magnitude of the prize.”

“I’m associated with a very aggressive investment group. I felt it prudent to deal with the prize claim at once.”

“You’re splitting the money, eh?”

“More than I’d like, given the analytics and progression was all my work. Now, about the prize claim?”

“We have an agent in the U.S. who will present the winning lottery ticket, take the cash option, pay the taxes, and transfer the funds to Lotto2Win. It will then be wired directly to your

bank of preference.”

“Yes, yes. How long to do this?”

“The claim process is a bit delicate, as you can appreciate. The resale of lottery tickets outside of the U.S. is not looked on favorably, and the winner must hold up to some scrutiny. Given all the attention and press, it will take a little longer than normal. In the meantime, please enjoy Vancouver.”

Roddy raised his arm. The Rolex on his wrist caught the light and strobed the stage. The hooligan hockey dancers retreated from the fawning patrons fingering twenty-dollar bills into their garters and proceeded to the mezzanine. Roddy pressed a thousand-dollar wad of bills into the professor’s hand and exited, leaving him with the girls in the VIP section. On the way out of the club, Roddy hesitated at the bar and straightened the Tropic of Capricorn poster.