The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (25 page)

LECHA TAKES PRIDE in knowing when to fold her cards. She is no gambler. She only goes for the sure things. The TV talk show circuit had been one of those sure things. But nothing lasts forever; she laughs to herself. The fascination the United States had had for the “other”—the blacks, Asians, Mexicans, and Indians ran in cycles. She had started after word got around Denver about her successes with old lovers. It had been simple. Other women came to her to ask her to take revenge on lovers who had betrayed them or who were not as ardent as they had once been. Lecha had had an apartment right over Larimer Street in the downtown. She had settled in Denver after Tucson had got “too crowded” for her. The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them. People heard about it from one person, and the next thing they were knocking at Lecha’s door.

Lecha traces the beginning to the work she had done for the cable-televison producer’s girlfriend. The producer’s girlfriend had come to Lecha for revenge. Her old boyfriend had been a cinematographer at the big CBS station in Denver. After the woman had asked the boyfriend to move out of her apartment, he had returned to douse it with kerosene and set it on fire. Lecha had tried to determine the extent of what the woman had lost in the fire, but the woman had never been able to get past the part about her cat and two dogs that had been trapped in the fire. The old boyfriend had also made anonymous phone calls to the Internal Revenue Service and to the woman’s employer, a conservative businessman who did not approve of drugs or extramarital sex. Lecha had had a difficult time discussing the course of action the woman wished her to take. At first Lecha had misunderstood the woman’s silences and hesitation as the weakheartedness Lecha often saw in people who came to her seeking revenge only to discover that they still loved the offender too much. Then Lecha had realized the woman’s hatred was so extreme that the woman was unable to speak. Lecha realized that although the woman was at the time without a job, without a possession to her name, the woman wanted to buy from Lecha the most brutal and complete revenge for sale at any price.

Lecha had proceeded with the woman in ways that closely resembled the work of a psychoanalyst or counselor. With the tape recorder running discreetly on the bed, Lecha had asked the woman to tell her as much as she could remember about the cinematographer. Lecha did not focus upon the failed relationship itself. People could never talk coherently about ex-lovers, not for fifty years as far as Lecha was concerned. Lecha wanted to know about the man’s closest family members and relatives. Where were they, what did they do for a living? In all, the work required nearly twenty sessions. Lecha had only required the woman to pay for the newspaper subscriptions to the dailies in the hometown of the cinematographer’s closest relatives. Otherwise, the agreement had been that the fee would depend upon the results obtained and upon the form of payment Lecha determined to be most satisfactory.

This had been Lecha’s first big case, and night after night she had rolled up big, tamale-shaped joints and sat propped up in her bed listening to the interview tapes. As Lecha laughingly said later, she had worked mostly “in the dark” on this first assignment. As she listened to the interviews, she had begun to see patterns in the lives of the cinematographer and his immediate family. Their lives were stories-in-progress, as Lecha saw them, and often in the middle of the night when
she was awakened by drunks pounding on trash cans or sirens, she would realize possible deadly turns the lives of the cinematographer and his close relatives might naturally take. Lecha had merely begun to tell the stories of the ends of their lives. The producer’s girlfriend had been pleased to see results after only two weeks. The cinematographer’s mother had undergone emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage only to learn that snarled threads of cancer held her liver and pancreas in a tumorous web. Lecha had been a little surprised at how quickly the cancer had developed, since she had only just made up the ending to the mother’s story. Beginner’s luck, Lecha had confessed later, but the illness of the mother set off a chain reaction. The cinematographer’s older sister accepted the marriage proposal of a man who came to her house every evening not for her, but for her thirteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters. Both girls would set out to get their future stepfather into their beds before the wedding to prove their mother’s stupidity. After the wedding, their new stepfather took them and their mother to Miami Beach.

Lecha had carefully plotted their final summer together. It all hinged on whether the fifteen-year-old would become jealous of the attention her younger sister was getting. The hot tub thermostat at their rented beach bungalow had been set too high, according to reports in the newspaper. As Lecha had imagined it, the fifteen-year-old had gone into a pout one evening after the stepfather and the thirteen-year-old planned a dinner alone “to talk.” Her little sister and stepfather gone, and her mother drunk, it was a simple matter to get into the bottle of vodka her father kept in the refrigerator freezer compartment. The coroner ruled the death accidental drowning and theorized the girl passed out from the combined effects of the vodka, which had raised her blood alcohol to .02, and to the hot water. The stepfather and sister had returned home from dinner to find her floating facedown in the hot tub on the terrace.

In only a matter of weeks, Lecha realized the younger girl would become pregnant by the stepfather. While this girl would not die, the complications from the abortion would hospitalize her. The mother, now separated from her new husband, and distraught over the loss of a daughter, began to mix triple gin-and-tonics to take with her on evening drives to the hospital to visit her remaining daughter. Hers had not been much different from any other freeway accident. The triple gin had slowed her reaction time.

LECHA SAT WITH the newspapers spread around her on the floor. She was getting to the point she hated the dinky apartment. She watched the woman’s face. She glanced at the producer-boyfriend’s face. The woman’s face was immobile, only her eyes followed the lines on the page of the newspaper. But the producer’s face had lighted up. He was nodding his head and grinning. “This is wonderful!” he began. “This reads like soap opera! How do you do it?” Lecha shook her head and said nothing. The producer babbled on. “This is really something—you know, like in the movies—
Omen
or one of those!” The woman had given her boyfriend a murderous look. “Sidney,” she said, “would you mind waiting down in the car?”

Sidney had left without another word, but later he had returned alone to discuss Lecha’s appearance on daytime television. The producer had tried to bring up his girlfriend’s revenge, but Lecha was reluctant to violate the confidentiality of their professional relationship. The producer wanted to know why, in all the dying, had they not gotten rid of the cinematographer himself? Lecha did not like visitors like this one—full of questions but with no money for her valuable time. “Business first,” Lecha had said. “I want to know how much this TV show will pay me.”

“Well, that depends on a number of factors,” the producer explained. “I’ve talked it over with my boss, and we’re thinking of bringing on a police officer from the missing person detail, and then someone who is actually looking for a lost loved one. A lost child would be optimum. Eighty-five percent of the viewing audience is female.” Lecha shrugged her shoulders. She told him she did not know if she could sit in the TV studio and find a missing person on command. She told him she didn’t work like that. But the producer grinned inanely and insisted it would be no problem, no problem. What he thought would really go over big were stories about people who consulted Lecha to exact revenge on ex-lovers and spouses or family members or business colleagues.

“I want to get out of this dump. I need to have some money for talking today and for preparations, you know, for the show.” Lecha knew he would come back to the question about the cinematographer. Lecha did not tell him until after she had got the $2,000 advance, and the producer had helped her relocate all her suitcases to the Hilton Hotel. “It’s simple,” she began. “I didn’t want to get rid of the old lover too fast. I wanted him to watch the people he loves die first. Your girlfriend’s old lover is forced to watch his mother’s guts split open from tumors. Straight morphine does nothing. The old lover is becoming familiar with the special packages and offers from mortuaries.” Lecha watched the producer’s face and decided he was too stupid to get it. “See?” Lecha concluded. “Killing off that prick would have been too good for him. This is much better. Let him bury them all.”

Lecha spent mornings shopping for the appropriate clothes. She had chosen the Denver Hilton because it was connected to the fancy department stores by a glass tube, so she did not have to step into the ice and cold of the Denver winter. She was not nervous about the first taping session, although the producer had warned her this would be a live audience and the show format called for questions from the audience. Lecha’s mind had been focused on the winter storms and the snow and ice, which she was not accustomed to. She had been strangely aware of the filthy banks of ice and snow pushed between the streets and sidewalks in downtown Denver. She had sat for hours, puffing a joint, gazing out the hotel window at the big mountains to the west barely visible through the brown smog over Denver. Later she remembered the mountain peaks had reminded her of the mounds of new graves covered with snow.

So the day of the videotaping before a studio audience, when the police lieutenant gave the particulars of a missing-person case, Lecha suddenly realized why she had paid so much attention to banks of mounded snow. Lecha looked right into the huge television camera lens and said, “The man is dead. He is buried in a snowbank. The snow is dirty from muddy water cars splash over it.” The studio audience had audibly gasped because Lecha seemed to forget the woman sitting beside the police lieutenant on the gold velvet couch was the dead man’s wife. Lecha had learned from this episode that while audiences and producers wanted a family member of the missing person present, they also wanted Lecha to break the bad news as gently as possible. It was all an act from then on—the way Lecha would lower her voice and say she regretted what she was about to say, then reveal the location of the victim; Lecha
had never been sorry, not at that moment or ever. Lecha knew her abilities had been a gift from old Yoeme.

Lecha had been born for television talk shows. She had learned to read the reactions of talk show hosts and the audiences immediately. Even on that first morning, while the new widow at the end of the gold couch sobbed next to the confused police lieutenant, Lecha had silently burst into tears. Even that day the TV cameras had adored Lecha’s high cheekbones, and the chill of her grisly pronouncement had been lifted.

The talk show host had jumped up from his armchair to comfort the widow on the gold couch. He immediately reminded the widow, and the studio audience, that Lecha’s “vision” was only that. No body had been found, and they should not jump to conclusions. The show had been a producer’s dream—a dramatic announcement, a widow’s grief, and the talk show host thrown into deep water without the teleprompter and gestures he’d rehearsed to keep him afloat.

Lecha had analyzed her talk show appearance carefully. She realized the hostility of the general public toward people with abilities to “see” or “foretell” always lay near the surface. Lecha took a white linen handkerchief from the red leather purse that matched the red high heels of her televison-appearance wardrobe. It didn’t take a psychic to figure out she had a bright future on the daytime television talk show circuit. She wiped the tears from her eyes and primly smoothed the skirt of the simple white linen dress. Earlier in the show, Lecha had answered a query about her age with a plain lie. She had claimed that in the tiny Sonoran seacoast village where she had been born, no records of births or deaths were kept. “I think I must be about forty-five,” she had answered the woman standing at the studio-audience microphone. Lecha and her twin had a birthday approaching on March 1. As far as Lecha could remember, it would be birthday number thirty-five.