Mojo (13 page)

Another topic Linda hadn’t told us to avoid with our customers, or whatever you call them, was the Ashton Browning thing. As we went from house to house, I always mentioned how we were filling in for Ashton and followed that up with a couple of questions about what they thought of her. Surprisingly enough, many of them didn’t know she was missing. Either they didn’t pay attention to the news or they never knew her whole name and couldn’t see well enough to identify her picture on TV. But one thing was for sure—they all loved her.

“She had a real good sense of humor,” said one old-timer who came to the door in his bathrobe. “I’m a pretty good one with a joke myself, but she always came right back with one of her own.”

An old lady with lavender hair told us, “She was the only person who ever came up these front steps that my Mikey wouldn’t bark at.” Mikey was the homely dachshund who’d gone crazy barking at us when we knocked on the door.

“She used to go get my pills for me,” said another lady. “One time she even ran down to the store to get me some toilet paper, and believe you me, I needed it.”

I didn’t follow up with any more questions about that.

A couple of old ladies got to know Ashton especially well. Apparently, they didn’t like to go outside, not even onto the front porch. The first old lady, Miss Ockle, only cracked the front door to see who we were, but she was friendly enough and asked us to come in, unlike most of the others, who just grabbed their dinners and said goodbye before we could get much info.

“Yes, come on in, come on in,” said Miss Ockle. “If you’re friends of Ashton’s, I know my mother would love to see you.”

Her mother? This was a surprise since Miss Ockle appeared to be about a hundred years old herself. Her hair was dyed a faded gold, and her eyebrows were penciled on. She wore a shin-length flowered dress that could have doubled as a curtain. All in all, she looked like something from two universes away.

She led us into the cramped living room, where her mother sat hunched in an overstuffed chair, one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs standing next to it. Her eyebrows matched her daughter’s, but she’d given up the dye job in favor of a natural yellowish-white color and wore an old nightgown
instead of a dress. She had tubes leading from an oxygen tank stuffed into her nostrils. Obviously, she had trouble breathing, but that didn’t stop her from puffing on a cigarette.

After several tries, each louder than the one before, Miss Ockle got the idea across to Mrs. Ockle that we were friends of Ashton’s. A little smile bloomed beneath the nose tubes. Although Mrs. Ockle was only about the size of an adult pelican, her voice was a deep nicotine croak. “Ashton made better sandwiches than my own mother,” she said.

For a second, I feared that Mrs. Ockle’s mother—Miss Ockle’s grandmother—might be waiting somewhere in an even smaller room, but I remembered we only had two sandwiches for the household.

The subject of sandwiches propelled Mrs. Ockle into a story about peanut butter and jelly from her childhood, which threatened to throw us completely off schedule, so I cut in with a question about whether Ashton had ever talked about having any enemies.

“That girl?” Miss Ockle said. “Impossible.”

“Who?” croaked Mrs. Ockle.

“Ashton, Mama. Ashton. The sandwich girl.”

“That girl could sure make sandwiches.”

“Well,” I interrupted before the peanut-butter-and-jelly story cranked up again. “How about her brother? Did he have any enemies?”

Neither of the Ockle ladies seemed to know what I was talking about, so I explained that her brother had been the one helping her on her delivery route.

“Oh no,” said Miss Ockle. “That wasn’t her brother. He was her boyfriend.”

“Who?” asked Mrs. Ockle.

“Ashton’s boyfriend, Mama.” Then louder: “Ashton’s boyfriend.”

“So handsome,” Mrs. Ockle said dreamily. “He lived right next door.”

“No, Mama. He didn’t live next door. He just knew the people who lived next door.”

“He didn’t know the people who lived next door,” Mrs. Ockle argued. “Ashton knew the people who lived next door.”

“Oh, Mama. First you say her boyfriend lived next door, and then you say Ashton knew them. Make up your mind.”

“Who?”

Miss Ockle turned to us. “I do know one thing—the children on the street loved Ashton. I used to peek out the window and watch them run up to her, grinning like she was the Holy Mother herself come back to earth.”

By now it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to get a whole lot more useful information from the Ockle ladies, so I made an excuse to get out of there. Miss Ockle saw us to the door, but before we left, she touched my arm and peered into my eyes. “He really was her boyfriend,” she said. “I can tell those things. Just like I can tell that red-haired girl is your girlfriend.”

“Uh, enjoy your meal,” I said. That was all I could think of.

On the front porch of the Ockle house, Trix burst out laughing. “I love those old ladies,” she said. “I want to be just like that when I’m a hundred.”

“I’ll turn your oxygen on for you,” Audrey said, and Trix was like, “Awesome.”

And that’s when I heard the kids laughing in the backyard next door.

“Listen,” I said. “Hear that? We should go back there and check it out.”

“What for?” Audrey asked.

“You heard what Miss Ockle said. The neighbor kids loved Ashton. Maybe we can find out something about this boyfriend of hers.”

Trix laughed. “
Boyfriend?
You really think those old ladies knew what they were talking about?”

“Yeah,” Audrey added. “I’ll bet it was Ashton’s brother all along.”

And I’m like, “Maybe, but the Ockles seemed pretty certain. Besides, Mrs. Ockle said the guy with Ashton was handsome, and you have to admit that doesn’t exactly fit Tres Browning.”

“No,” Trix said. “But when a woman gets to be Mrs. Ockle’s age, she probably thinks every teenage boy is handsome.”

Still, I didn’t think it would hurt to go back and ask a couple of questions.

“Okay,” Audrey said. “We’ll wait in the car. Just make it quick. We still have dinners to deliver.”

The house was on the corner, so I walked around the far side to talk to the kids over the chain-link fence. There were eight or nine of them, ranging in ages from around two to twelve, laughing and shouting as they played some kind of chaotic game, possibly tag except a ball was involved.

“Hey,” I called to the oldest, a pretty Hispanic girl with long black hair parted on the side. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

She froze and stared at me for a moment but didn’t answer.

“Tú y yo habla, por favor?”
I asked, trying to piece together the little bit of Spanish I remembered from middle school. She backed away.

I pointed to my chest.
“Amigo del Ashton.”

That didn’t help. I wouldn’t say she ran onto the porch and into the house, but she wasn’t loafing around about it either.
Crap
, I thought,
now she thinks I’m some kind of skeevy child molester
.

“You’re funny,” said a boy of about nine, who was closer to the fence than the others. “You don’t talk right.”

“You got me there,” I admitted. “But I’m just delivering meals to people around the area and thought it would be a good idea to get to know the neighbors.”

The boy walked closer. “You deliver meals to the crazy ladies next door?”

“The Ockles? They’re not crazy. They’re just a little different. Actually, they’re nice once you get to know them.”

Then a brick hit me on the back of the head. Well, okay, it wasn’t actually a brick—it was a fist—but it felt like a brick. My glasses flew off and my knees buckled a little, but I didn’t fall down. “Holy crap,” I said. I picked up my glasses and turned around to see this huge Hispanic dude standing there. He had a deep blue maze-like tattoo on his shaved head and a gold tooth that was about two shades warmer than Miss Ockle’s dye job. And twice as shiny.

“Whatchoo doing back here, sick puppy?” he asked, both fists balled at his sides. He didn’t look angry so much as happy to get the chance to beat someone to death.

“Dude, I’m just trying to be friendly. I’m in the neighborhood delivering meals to people.”

“We don’t need none of your meals here,” he said.

“I know, but I was next door at the Ockles’ and I just thought—”

He stepped closer. “That’s your problem. You shouldn’t go around thinking.”

At this point, I was like,
This is it. My life’s over. This is what it must be like for a pilot the split second before his plane crashes into the side of a mountain
.

But I never hit the mountain, and it never hit me. Just then another guy came striding up from behind Tattoo Head. “Hold on,” he said. “Back off, Oscar. Dylan’s all right.”

And Oscar’s like, “You know this
pendejo
, Beto?”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy. He came to Hector’s funeral.”

Sure enough, that’s who it was—Beto Hernandez, Hector Maldonado’s cousin, only he’d traded in the black suit and hat he wore at the funeral for jeans, a black-and-white sport shirt, and a straw porkpie that put mine to shame.

He stepped over and shook my hand. “Good to see you,” he said. “What brings you over to this neighborhood?”

I explained I was just doing some volunteer work, filling in for Ashton Browning after she went missing. “Ashton who?” Beto said.

“Ashton Browning. She’s been on the news. She disappeared from the nature park up on the North Side.”

“Did you hear anything about that?” he asked Oscar.

Oscar shook his head. “I don’t pay attention to what goes down on the North Side,” he said.

“She used to deliver meals next door,” I explained.

“To the crazy ladies?” Beto said. “Yeah, I think I do remember seeing a pretty blond girl over there sometimes.”

“She was probably with her brother, a skinny little dude with brown hair and a pale turtle face?”

“Her brother? Do you remember seeing her brother, Oscar?”

“I don’t remember nothing.”

“Or it could’ve been a boyfriend. Miss Ockle said she thought it was her boyfriend.”

Beto smiled. “Oh, them ladies is crazy. I never saw no boyfriend.”

“We don’t mess around with no blond girls,” Oscar added.

“Besides, we don’t live here. This is our grandmother’s place. We just come by to check on her. She takes care of everybody’s kids. You never seen anyone like my
abuelita
. She’s a saint.”

“A saint,” Oscar confirmed.

“Well,” I said. “I was just wondering about Ashton, that’s all.”

“Whatchoo care about some rich girl, anyway?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She seems like a good person. It’s weird a girl like that would just disappear into thin air.”

“That is weird,” Beto agreed. “But not as weird as what happened to Hector, and it don’t seem like anyone’s interested in finding out about that too much. I went down to the police
station myself and talked to this fool detective who had so much gel in his hair he looked like he mopped up an oil leak with it, and he started acting like I had something to do with selling them drugs to Hector. They don’t care what really happened to him.”

I could definitely sympathize with him about that. “I wish I could’ve done more about Hector,” I said. “But I told that same stupid detective everything I know, which isn’t anything, really.”

“Cops,” Oscar said, practically spitting the word. “They don’t care about nobody around here.”

“That’s okay, Dylan,” Beto told me. “You did your best.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew about the North Side Monarchs, but I didn’t know how to bring it up without breaking my promise to Nash to keep mum on the Gangland deal. Besides, I was ready to get out of there before I said something that might spark another punch in the head from Oscar.

“Yeah, I did my best,” I agreed, feeling a twinge of guilt. “Well, I guess I’d better take off. I have more food to deliver.”

“Good to see you, man.” Beto shook my hand again, but I couldn’t walk away without at least some hope of getting more info from him later.

“Um, you know what?” I said, standing at a safe distance from Oscar. “Why don’t I give you my phone number just in case you happen to see any rich blond girls hanging around the neighborhood?”

He grinned. “Sure, that’s a good idea. Just tell it to me. I’ll remember it.”

I rattled off the number, and he nodded. “See you later,
amigo
.”

Back in the car, I told Audrey and Trix what’d happened.

From where they were parked, they couldn’t see how I almost got massacred.

“Wow,” Trix said. “What are you, like a bizarre trouble magnet or something? You’re always running into dead guys or missing girls’ running shoes or dead guys’ cousins.”

“It is an odd coincidence,” Audrey added.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s not such a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?” Audrey asked.

I looked out the window at the run-down houses as we drove past. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure Ashton and Hector are tied together. I’m thinking he might’ve even been the mysterious boyfriend.”

“And someone didn’t like it,” Trix added, a gleam in her eye.

“Oh God,” Audrey said. “Now he has you playing
Andromeda Man
too.”

I felt creepy calling Linda at FOKC to tell her we had to quit, but what could I do? We couldn’t keep delivering meals three times a week just so they wouldn’t suspect we were investigating the Ashton Browning deal. Linda sounded bummed but guaranteed we could always come back if we could find the time. That’d be great, I told her, but I doubted it would happen. Here I was—a big fat quitter all over again.

For my next newspaper article, I wrote about Ashton’s FOKC connection and what the clientele had to say about her. So, yes, I’ll admit it was a bit of a love letter again. How could it not be? The more I learned about her, the greater she sounded. Smart, funny, independent, socially conscious. The perfect match for an investigative reporter.

However, the part about Beto and Oscar didn’t end up in the article. For one thing, admitting I got punched in the back of the head wasn’t likely to charge up my mojo level, but more than that, I didn’t want to go into the Hector Maldonado connection until I knew if there really was one.