Whispers (17 page)

He slid across the seat to the passenger's side and got out that door. When he looked down at the thick red muck oozing between the fingers that were clamped over the worse wound, he felt dizzy, and he looked quickly away. He only had to take three steps to reach the phone, but each of them seemed like a mile.

He could not remember his telephone credit card number, which had been as familiar to him as his birthdate, so he called collect to Napa Valley.

The operator rang it six times.

"Hello?"

"I have a collect call for anyone from Bruno Frye. Will you accept the charges?"

"Go ahead, operator."

There was a soft click as she went off the line.

"I'm hurt real bad. I think ... I'm dying," Frye told the man in Napa County.

"Oh, Jesus, no. No!"

"I'll have to ... call an ambulance," Frye said. "And they ... everyone will know the truth."

They spoke for a minute, both of them frightened and confused.

Suddenly, Frye felt something loosen inside him. Like a spring popping. And a bag of water bursting. He screamed in pain.

The man in Napa County cried out in sympathy, as if he felt the same pain.

"Got to ... get an ambulance," Frye said.

He hung up.

Blood had run all the way down his pants to his shoes, and now it was dribbling onto the pavement.

He lifted the receiver off the hook and put it down on the metal shelf beside the phone box. He picked up a dime from the same shelf, on which he had put his pocket change, but his fingers weren't working properly; he dropped it and looked down stupidly as it rolled across the macadam. Found another dime. Held this one as tightly as he could. He lifted the dime as if it were a lead disc as big as an automobile tire, finally put it in the proper slot. He tried to dial 0. He didn't even have enough energy to perform that small chore. His muscle-packed arms, his big shoulders, his gigantic chest, his powerful back, his hard rippled belly, and his massive thighs all failed him. He couldn't make the call, and he couldn't even stand up any longer. He fell, rolled over once, and lay face-down on the macadam.

He couldn't move.

He couldn't see. He was blind.

It was a very black darkness.

He was scared.

He tried to tell himself that he would come back from the dead as Katherine had done. I'll come back and get her, he thought. I'll come back. But he really didn't believe it.

As he lay there getting increasingly light-headed, he had a surprisingly lucid moment when he wondered if he had been all wrong about Katherine coming back from the dead. Had it been his imagination? Had he just been killing women who resembled her? Innocent women? Was he mad?

A new explosion of pain blew those thoughts away and forced him to consider the smothering darkness in which he lay.

He felt things moving on him.

Things crawling on him.

Things crawling on his arms and legs.

Things crawling on his face.

He tried to scream. Couldn't.

He heard the whispers.

No!

His bowels loosened.

The whispers swelled into a raging sibilant chorus and, like a great dark river, swept him away.

***

Thursday morning, Tony Clemenza and Frank Howard located Jilly Jenkins, an old friend of Bobby "Angel" Valdez. Jilly had seen the baby-faced rapist and killer in July, but not since. At that time, Bobby had just quit a job at Vee Vee Gee Laundry on Olympic Boulevard. That was all Jilly knew.

Vee Vee Gee was a large one-story stucco building dating from the early fifties, when an entire Los Angeles school of benighted architects first thought of crossing ersatz Spanish texture and form with utilitarian factory design. Tony had never been able to understand how even the most insensitive architect could see beauty in such a grotesque crossbreed. The orange-red tile roof was studded with dozens of firebrick chimneys and corrugated metal vents; steam rose from about half of those outlets. The windows were framed with heavy timbers, dark and rustic, as if this were the casa of some great and rich terrateniente; but the ugly factory-window glass was webbed with wire. There were loading docks where the verandas should have been. The walls were straight, the corners sharp, the overall shape boxlike--quite the opposite of the graceful arches and rounded edges of genuine Spanish construction. The place was like an aging whore wearing more refined clothes than was her custom, trying desperately to pass for a lady.

"Why did they do it?" Tony asked as he got out of the unmarked police sedan and closed the door.

"Do what?" Frank asked.

"Why did they put up so many of these offensive places? What was the point of it?"

Frank blinked. "What's so offensive?"

"It doesn't bother you?"

"It's a laundry. Don't we need laundries?"

"Is anybody in your family an architect?"

"Architect? No," Frank said. "Why'd you ask?"

"I just wondered."

"You know, sometimes you don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense."

"So I've been told," Tony said.

In the business office at the front of the building, when they asked to see the owner, Vincent Garamalkis, they were given worse than a cool reception. The secretary was downright hostile. The Vee Vee Gee Laundry had paid four fines in four years for employing undocumented aliens. The secretary was certain that Tony and Frank were agents with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She thawed a bit when she saw their LAPD identification, but she was still not cooperative until Tony convinced her that they hadn't even a smidgen of interest in the nationalities of the people working at Vee Vee Gee. At last, reluctantly, she admitted that Mr. Garamalkis was on the premises. She was about to take them to him when the phone rang, so she gave them hasty directions and asked them to find him on their own.

The enormous main room of the laundry smelled of soap and bleach and steam. It was a damp place, hot and noisy. Industrial washing machines thumped, buzzed, sloshed. Huge driers whirred and rumbled monotonously. The clacking and hissing of automatic folders put Tony's teeth on edge. Most of the workers unloading the laundry carts, and the husky men feeding the machines, and the women tagging linens at a double row of long tables were speaking to one another in loud and rapid Spanish. As Tony and Frank walked from one end of the room to the other, some of the noise abated, for the workers stopped talking and eyed them suspiciously.

Vincent Garamalkis was at a battered desk at the end of the big room. The desk was on a three-foot-high platform that made it possible for the boss to watch over his employees. Garamalkis got up and walked to the edge of the platform when he saw them coming. He was a short stocky man, balding, with hard features and a pair of gentle hazel eyes that didn't match the rest of his face. He stood with his hands on his hips, as if he were defying them to step onto his level.

"Police," Frank said, flashing ID.

"Yeah," Garamalkis said.

"Not Immigration," Tony assured him.

"Why should I be worried about Immigration?" Garamalkis asked defensively.

"Your secretary was," Frank said.

Garamalkis scowled down at them. "I'm clean. I hire nobody but U.S. citizens or documented aliens."

"Oh, sure," Frank said sarcastically. "And bears don't shit in the woods any more."

"Look," Tony said, "we really don't care about where your workers come from."

"So what do you want?"

"We'd like to ask a few questions."

"About what?"

"This man," Frank said, passing up the three mug shots of Bobby Valdez.

Garamalkis glanced at them. "What about him?"

"You know him?" Frank asked.

"Why?"

"We'd like to find him."

"What for?"

"He's a fugitive."

"What'd he do?"

"Listen," Frank said, fed up with the stocky man's sullen responses, "I can make this hard or easy for you. We can do it here or downtown. And if you want to play Mr. Hardass, we can bring the Immigration and Naturalization Service into it. We don't really give a good goddamned whether or not you hire a bunch of Mexes, but if we can't get cooperation from you, we'll see that you get busted every which way but loose. You got me? You hear it?"

Tony said, "Mr. Garamalkis, my father was an emigrant from Italy. He came to this country with his papers in order, and eventually he became a citizen. But one time he had some trouble with agents from the Immigration Service. It was just a mistake in their records, a paperwork foul-up. But they hounded him for more than five weeks. They called him at work and paid surprise visits to our apartment at odd hours. They demanded records and documentation, but when Papa provided those things, they called them forgeries. There were threats. Lots of threats. They even served deportation papers on him before it was all straightened out. He had to hire a lawyer he couldn't afford, and my mother was hysterical most of the time until it was settled. So you see, I don't have any love for the Immigration Service. I wouldn't go one step out of my way to help them pin a rap on you. Not one damn step, Mr. Garamalkis."

The stocky man looked down at Tony for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. "Don't they burn you up? I mean, a year or two ago, when all those Iranian students were making trouble right here in L.A., overturning cars and trying to set houses on fire, did the damn Immigration Service even consider booting their asses out of the country? Hell, no! The agents were too busy harassing my workers. These people I employ don't burn down other people's houses. They don't overturn cars and throw rocks at policemen. They're good hardworking people. They only want to make a living. The kind of living they can't make south of the border. You know why Immigration spends all its time chasing them? I'll tell you. I've got it figured out. It's because these Mexicans don't fight back. They're not political or religious fanatics like a lot of these Iranians. They aren't crazy or dangerous. It's a whole hell of a lot safer and easier for Immigration to come after these people 'cause they generally just go along quietly. Ahh, the whole damned system's a disgrace."

"I can understand your point of view," Tony said. "So if you'd just take a look at these mug shots--"

But Garamalkis was not ready to answer their questions. He still had a few things to get off his chest. Interrupting Tony, he said, "Four years ago, I got fined the first time. The usual things. Some of my Mexican employees didn't have green cards. Some others were working on expired cards. After I settled up in court, I decided to play it straight from then on. I made up my mind to hire only Mexicans with valid work cards. And if I couldn't find enough of those, I was going to hire U.S. citizens. You know what? I was stupid. I was really stupid to think I could stay in business that way. See, I can only afford to pay minimum wage to most of these workers. Even then, I'm stretching myself thin. The problem is Americans won't work for minimum wage. If you're a citizen, you can get more from welfare for not working than you can make at a job that pays minimum wage. And the welfare's tax-free. So I just about went crazy for about two months, trying to find workers, trying to keep the laundry going out on schedule. I nearly had a heart attack. See, my customers are places like hotels, motels, restaurants, barber shops ... and they all need to get their stuff back fast and on a dependable schedule. If I hadn't started hiring Mexicans again, I'd have gone out of business."

Frank didn't want to hear any more. He was about to say something sharp, but Tony put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, urging him to be patient.

"Look," Garamalkis said, "I can understand not giving illegal aliens welfare and free medical care and like that. But I can't see the sense in deporting them when they're only doing jobs that no one else wants to do. It's ridiculous. It's a disgrace." He sighed again, looked at the mug shots of Bobby Valdez that he was holding, and said, "Yeah, I know this guy."

"We heard he used to work here."

"That's right."

"When?"

"Beginning of the summer, I think. May. Part of June."

"After he skipped out on his parole officer," Frank said to Tony.

"I don't know anything about that," Garamalkis said.

"What name did he give you?" Tony asked.

"Juan."

"Last name?"

"I don't remember. He was only here six weeks or so. But it'll still be in the files."

Garamalkis stepped down from the platform and led them back across the big room, through the steam and the smell of detergent and the suspicious glances of the employees. In the front office he asked the secretary to check the files, and she found the right pay record in a minute. Bobby had used the name Juan Mazquezza. He had given an address on La Brea Avenue.

"Did he really live at this apartment?" Frank asked.

Garamalkis shrugged. "It wasn't the sort of important job that required a background credit check."

"Did he say why he was quitting?"

"No."

"Did he tell you where he was going?"

"I'm not his mother."

"I mean, did he mention another job?"

"No. He just cut out."

"If we don't find Mazquezza at this address," Tony said, "we'd like to come back and talk to your employees. Maybe one of them got to know him. Maybe somebody here's still friends with him."

"You can come back if you want," Garamalkis said. "But you'll have some trouble talking to my people."

"Why's that?"

Grinning, he said, "A lot of them don't speak English."

Tony grinned back at him and said, "Yo leo, escribo y hablo español."

"Ah," Garamalkis said, impressed.

The secretary made a copy of the pay record for them, and Tony thanked Garamalkis for his cooperation.

In the car, as Frank pulled into traffic and headed toward La Brea Avenue, he said, "I've got to hand it to you."

Tony said, "What's that?"

"You got more out of him quicker than I could have."

Tony was surprised by the compliment. For the first time in their three-month association, Frank had admitted that his partner's techniques were effective.