“A Mexican girl. What do you care?”
“Because you’re acting rude to her.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. He got up and walked to the bottom of the staircase and yelled upstairs. “Sophia, you want something to eat?” There was no answer. He returned to the table. “You really have spells?” he said. “People say you have a few beers, or something doesn’t go right, and you wander off and do shit you can’t control.”
“Must be somebody else,” I said.
He studied my face, milk and cereal running off his spoon as he put it into his mouth. “My father was putting three hundred grand into a new casino in Vegas. Then he started having reservations about dealing with greaseballs. When you and I got into it, he told the greaseballs they needed to straighten you out and, more important, straighten out Valerie’s old man. He froze the funds, and I got no idea where they are.”
Through the French doors of the breakfast room, I could see the empty swimming pool and the harshness of the light on the concrete patio and the spartan deck furniture and the potted plants that hadn’t been watered and were starting to turn brown.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked.
“Your uncle is mobbed up, a business partner with Frankie Carbo,” he replied.
“My uncle is a prizefight promoter.”
“Do I have to say it again? He knows Frankie Carbo. Do you know how many people Frankie Carbo has killed? I want that money. Frankie Carbo can get it back for me.”
“So your father dumped all this trouble on us so he could work out his situation with the Mafia?”
“That’s the kind of great guy he was. Plus, he didn’t like you getting the best of me.”
“What do I get out of this besides the whereabouts of Miss Cisco?” I asked.
“Your friend Bledsoe is running with some drug dealers. I can have them put out of business.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with your lowlife friends, and I’m not going to approach my uncle for you, either.”
“Suit yourself.”
“How about a phone number for Miss Cisco?”
He wiped at his nose.
“If you think you’re going to melt her heart, forget it. Behind those king-size jugs is an iceberg.”
“I’m doing this for someone else, Grady, not myself.”
He took a pencil and a piece of paper from a drawer and wrote on it and handed it to me. I folded the number and put it into my pocket. I could see the bare feet of the girl in the slip halfway up the stairs. I wanted to have one more try at his conscience, and I wasn’t thinking just about the girl up the staircase but the girl whose neck had been broken two blocks from Loren’s burned car. “Why do you like Mexican girls?”
“Give it a rest, Dr. Freud.”
“I think Wanda Estevan’s death was probably an accident. Why not own up to it and be done?”
He massaged the back of his neck, widening and closing his eyes as though still waking up. He drank a mouthful of coffee straight from the pot, the grinds congealing on his lips. He leaned toward me. “You ask me why I like Mexican girls? They know when to close their mouths and when to open wide. Got it?”
“You’re a special kind of guy, Grady. Keep your seat. I’ll let myself out.”
I didn’t call Cisco Napolitano. I used the crisscross directory at the city library and found her address. She lived in the same apartment building in the Montrose district that Vick Atlas did. But I had spent enough time on other people’s problems for the day. That evening I would be busting out of the chute on top of Original Sin.
THE STANDS WERE packed with people in their best cotton dresses and starched jeans and short-sleeved shirts. The building hummed with a steady drone, like a beehive. I was behind the chutes, with all the riders milling about. It was a brotherhood not quite like any other. Most of them were from Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, or Canada. No matter their origins, they all seemed to have the same adenoidal accents. They looked sculpted from oak. They were also duck-footed, as though unaccustomed to walking on level ground. I wore chaps, like everyone else, except mine had no fringe and were one color, a sun-faded yellowish brown, because they had been worn by my grandfather as an old man. I had one hour to wait before I would be climbing over the top of the chute and easing down onto Original Sin’s back. In the past hour, I had been to the men’s room three times.
Valerie was sitting with some of her 4-H friends on the other side of the arena, but I didn’t see my father. He always sat in the same places when he attended public events. He sat behind first base at baseball games; he sat in the last pew at Mass; he sat in the last seat of the row at the movie theater; he sat by the rail at horse shows; and he sat ten rows behind the chutes at any rodeo I participated in. I looked up into the stands and didn’t see him anywhere. There were only a few empty spaces in the seats, and most were taken by people who had gone to the concessions. I felt my heart go weak, my resolve begin to drain. Then I saw him escorting my mother down the steps toward two empty seats. She was wearing white gloves and a pillbox hat with the veil turned up. I waved at them, but they couldn’t see me inside the shadows.
I also saw Saber and Manny and Cholo. Saber waved at me and I waved back. His two friends were eating barbecue sandwiches, licking the sauce off their fingers. I went to the restroom. In the concourse, a black man had set up a shoeshine stand with elevated chairs, and a bunch of rodeo boys from the little town of Tomball were getting their boots shined, eyeballing the girls, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, while the shine man popped his rag to the R&B coming out of his portable radio. It should have been an idyllic scene, the kind you saw on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It wasn’t.
A group of North Houston hoods, wearing drapes, pointy-toed stomps with taps, and greased duck-ass haircuts, sauntered by in what was called the con walk—the shoulders slouched, the length of the stride exaggerated, arms dead at their sides. I saw Loren Nichols among them, wearing cowboy boots and jeans, although low on the hips and without a belt, greaser-style. Just as they passed the shoeshine stand, one of the boys from Tomball went “Quack, quack.”