Back in the truck, all bloody because Buddy's nose hadn't stopped bleeding yet--godddamned nose--and Buddy was riding in the truck with me, but in the back, where nobody would see him, I drove toward the Pedrosa Stables. Buddy was giving me directions, though I had some trouble understanding him because he was holding the wad of ripped t-shirt packing to his nose, so that his hand covered his mouth.
When we were back on Hill Road, he was quiet for a while. Then he said, "When you get there, you know the drill?"
His slangy way of talking annoyed me, and I irritably replied, "The 'drill'?"
Cockily, he said, "Yeah, the drill."
I guess his nose wasn't hurting so bad anymore. I liked him better when he was submissive and half naked. I briefly considered stopping the truck and smashing his nose again, to help bring out his better, more cooperative, side. Instead, I just answered, "No, I do not know the drill. That's why I brought you with me, instead of leaving you in that filthy bathroom without any clothes."
"There'll be a service entrance," he said. "Most of them places is pretty strict about who comes and goes. They'll probably turn you away, since they don't got no delivery scheduled from us today. You'll have to insist that you have a delivery. Who was it you wanted to talk to there anyway?"
I said, "Leave that part to me," which was pretty funny since he had never implied that he intended to do otherwise, and also because I had no fucking idea who I wanted to speak with.
When we arrived at the Pedrosa Stables, I discovered that Buddy had been quite right: the guy at the gate didn't want to let me in. While looking at a clipboard, which he held in his right hand, he said, "I don't have any delivery down from you guys today." Then, looking up from his clipboard, he said, "Where's Buddy?"
"He's on vacation. I'm the substitute driver. That's how come the deliveries are out of order. I'm doing the best I can. Look, could you just cut me a break and let me make my delivery today, so I don't have to come back tomorrow?"
He looked down at his clipboard again. "What did you say your name was?"
I gave him some fake name--I can't even remember which.
Again he looked at me, a little suspiciously this time. He said, "Aren't you a little old to be delivering tack?"
I resisted my strong desire to say that I wasn't any too old to beat his goddamned face in. Instead I meekly said, "I'm not too old. I'm down on my luck is all. I'm taking whatever job I can get and I'm just doing the best I can to keep it."
Real friendly now, he said, a little apologetically even, "Oh sure, I understand. Sorry about that. I didn't mean anything. I just got to be careful, that's all. I didn't mean anything."
"That's okay. I understand. You got your job to worry about too."
"That's right," he said. "That's all I was trying to do. Okay, you can make your delivery. Take your truck to the end of this drive, and then turn left. Stop at the first building on your left--that's the office. Present your bill of lading there. Just tell them I said it was okay on account of you're substituting for Buddy. After you've finished the paperwork, they'll show you where to take the delivery."
When I got to the office, I drove right by. Nobody came chasing after me. I passed a couple of barns--all closed--until I reached one that was open. Inside, three Puerto Ricans were bailing hay. I assume they were Puerto Ricans. They could have been Mexicans. How am I supposed to know? Anyway, I thought they might know something, and decided to see what I could get out of them. I parked the truck and walked toward the barn.
As I approached the barn, a beautiful young girl, who was standing outside the entrance, and who I hadn't even noticed, said, "Excuse me. Sorry to bother you." She sounded as if she wasn't the least bit sorry to bother me. "You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette would you?"
I stopped and stared at her. I know it's rude to stare, but she was a vision of loveliness. She wore a cream colored, flounced skirt cut just above the knees, and a black, scoop-neck tank top. Her dark hair was knotted back behind her head, but her bangs were low, hanging just above her eyes like fringe. Everything about her looked like nothing that ever stepped foot in a town like Tiskilwa before: expensive, haughty, and proud to be unaccomplished at everything other than simply being gorgeous. I guessed that, underneath the eyeliner, mascara, eye shadow, and lipstick, was an insecure teenager trying to act at least five years older than her actual age. Her strappy high heels were especially out-of-place in the dusty dirt yard surrounding the barn. I kept expecting the thin heels to sink into the ground. It was difficult to believe a girl like this would be hanging around a horse barn.
She sighed, "God, I'm so bored; I'd kill for a cigarette. I'm practically a prisoner here."
I actually did have a cigarette, but not in the pockets of the uniform I was wearing, Buddy's uniform. She watched me, a little suspiciously I imagine, as I walked to the truck for my pack of cigarettes. But she didn't seem to care; she didn't seem to care about anything but her boredom. This aloofness, though obviously a pose, made a strong impression on me. I remember thinking it odd that aloofness could make a strong impression; it was contradictory. I do not like contradictions; they destabilize the order of things.
I returned from the truck with my pack of cigarettes and handed one to her. Or rather, I extended it to her, because she hesitantly approached, and reached for the cigarette, as if she was afraid she might be contaminated by any direct contact with me. When she had taken the cigarette and put it in her mouth, she leaned back against the barn with an impatient expression, as if to say, "Well--?"
I realized she was waiting for me to light her cigarette. Distracted by watching her, I must have put the lighter in my pocket. The pockets on Buddy's pants were sewn onto the side seam, and I was accustomed to slash pockets. I fumbled trying to find the pocket, but finally produced a Zippo lighter. Again she approached, only this time she had to come much closer, leaning in, with obvious reluctance and distaste. When she had lit her cigarette, she again leaned back against the barn. She took a long drag off the cigarette, and then exhaled. She suddenly seemed a lot happier, and she even said, "Thanks." She then added, disdainfully, "We're not allowed to smoke here. You could probably get fired if they found out you gave me a cigarette." She stared at me, challengingly, silently daring me to make her put out the cigarette. However I chose to respond, she was sure to regard me as a coward: either I demanded she put out the cigarette for fear of losing my job, or else I didn't, for fear of displeasing her. Nonchalantly she said, "You don't mind, do you?"
Ignoring her question--I was already getting a little tired of her posing and posturing, and it was clear she didn't give a damn whether I minded or not--I asked, "What's your name?"
Her languid eyes shot wide open, as if I had shocked her with an impertinent question. Finally, cautiously, she answered, "Leona."
"Leona," I said, conjuring in my mind the image of Leona Pecorelli, the psychopath who ran the La Salle sanitarium, or whatever it was called. "You know, I only met one other Leona in my whole life."
Without interest, she said, "Is that so?"
I stood there a few moments longer, and then realized I wasn't going to get any information out of her. I decided to try the Puerto Ricans who were bailing hay, and began to enter the barn, but she apparently didn't want to end the conversation, only to continue knocking me around some more, like a housecat playing with a mouse.
She said, abruptly, earnestly, as if to forestall my departure, "So who was the other?"
I had already forgotten the forgettable small talk about her name, and asked, "The other what?"
"The other Leona, the only other Leona you met in your whole life. Who was she?"
"Oh. Her. She's a. . .hospital administrator, I guess. Down in La Salle, if you've ever heard of it. It's on the Illinois River. Her name was Leona Pecorelli."
She raised her eyebrows, and said, matter-of-factly, "So you know the bitch?"
Blindsided by this response, I said, "Yes, I guess. Why, do you?"
She rolled her eyes. "Oh, I highly doubt you guess. She's not one to leave people in any doubt whether they know her." Then she laughed derisively, and said, "So now she's keeping company with delivery drivers. How rich. It really is amazing what people will do when they're allowed to find their own level. Why don't you call me 'Lennie' instead."
"I don't understand. You know her too?"
"I'm her daughter, supposedly. You mean she never mentioned me to you?" It was uncanny, the way she asked that question, with the same disappointment that her mother had shown when she realized that Durney had never told me about her. "She named me after herself, which, if you know her, you won't find difficult to believe. Everybody who knows her calls me 'Lennie', so you might as well too."
Although I was curious to learn more about this intriguing coincidence, I didn't want to put the girl off by seeming too interested, so I asked, "Why aren't you allowed to smoke here?"
"We aren't even allowed to carry pencils."
"How old are you?"
"Old enough not to give a damn." Which, I thought, was proof of just how young she really was. Only a comfortably settled teenager--I'd say, 15, 16, or 17--ever thinks there will be a time when she is old enough not to give a damn.
She kept changing the subject, or rather, with her, there was no subject. She liked asking questions--I guess she thought that was pretty damn sexy, coyly asking questions with a kind of phony innocence. And actually, I have to admit, it was quite sexy. The funny thing about it was that she didn't really seem to care about the answers to the questions she asked. Usually, when people ask me a question, they're very much interested in the answer, and are prepared to prove it, to prove it right down to the bone. It was an interesting feeling, being asked a lot of questions by somebody who didn't even seem to care how you answered; it was like watching a child blowing soap bubbles. I'd say it was like flirting, except that it required zero effort on my part. I'm not sure I've ever actually flirted with anybody, so I wouldn't really know, but I've been given to understand that flirting requires almost heroic efforts from both parties, no matter how mindless the conversation might sound to a third.
She said, "Do you ever get the feeling you're being followed? That somebody's following you, tracking you, like a dog does a deer?"
I shook my head no.
"I had the feeling somebody was following you. I wonder why?" Did she mean she wondered why somebody would be following me, or that she wondered why she had the feeling somebody was following me?
The blood on Buddy's uniform was beginning to dry, to crust, making the uniform a little bit stiff. I wondered how many girls Buddy had laid in this uniform, in the back of his delivery truck or maybe in closets or locked stable offices. I wondered if he had laid Lennie. Would she do it, with a delivery truck driver, in the back of his truck? I thought she would. I looked down at his uniform shirt to see if his name was sewn onto it, but it wasn't. She hadn't asked about Buddy, the way the guy at the gate had, but that didn't mean anything. Even if she had laid Buddy, she probably wouldn't want anybody to think she cared the least bit about him. Would that be because of her snobbishness, or because she was really in love with somebody else, and wanted to keep her indiscretion a secret? Could a girl like Lennie ever love anybody but herself? Could she even love herself? I doubted it, but I also doubted whether she was vulnerable to carnal temptations, and I liked that about her. It was part of what made her seem so clean and expensive. She would use sex to obtain power over men, but I doubted she ever experienced any real physical pleasure from the act. It was possible she got off on the power she had over men, that the knowledge of this power was so intense, she experienced it physically, but it would be the opposite of normal sex, that's for sure. This theory was not inconsistent with her behavior, the only actual evidence I had to go on, which was her coy little sex-pot routine. God knows, the movies and the t.v. shows and the popular magazines are all essentially pornographic enough that a girl of even minimal intelligence would have little difficulty learning how to behave if she wanted men to desire her sexually. It simply is not true that men are turned off by sluttiness. A man finds the spectacle of a woman rendered helpless by her desperate desire for him--a man will almost never fail to be turned on by that. He regards it as evidence of his own irresistible physical appeal, and that's what really turns a man on, the belief in, the certainty of, his own physical attractiveness and sexual potency.
Trying to circle the conversation back onto who she was, and her connection with Leona Pecorelli, I asked, "Do you know the people who own this stable?"
"Why else do you think I'm here? My father boards me with them, when he's away on business. If it's good enough for his horses, it's good enough for me."
"You must know Fernando then."
Impassive, she just stared at me and smoked her cigarette.
"Fernando Pedrosa," I said.
Still no response. Then, she said, "You're awfully familiar, aren't you, for a delivery driver? Don't think that just because you know my mother you can come here and get cozy with me, even if I did let you call me 'Lennie'."
I shrugged my shoulders. "If you don't know him, that's no big deal. I just had the impression you knew the Pedrosas pretty well--"
"Well enough to call them 'aunt' and 'uncle', if you have to know."
"But not," I pressed, "well enough to know Fernando." Once you got used to her temper, and her petty vanities, and the rhythm of her little tantrums, she was almost too easy to manipulate. I thought, no matter how much she might despise her mother, her mother was ten times the woman she would ever be.
Defensively, she said, "Oh for Christ's sake, of course I know Fernando." In her anger at having her status within the family challenged, she must have reached down deep for whatever piece of information could prove to me just how wrong I was, and, sadly, all she was able to produce was, "He got me pregnant once. Nobody knew about it but us. We'll probably get married when I'm a little older. He'd marry me now, but I don't want to rush into anything." That last statement really killed me. Looking around at the Pedrosa's magnificent mansion, I imagined there were few things Lennie would more willingly rush into than a marriage with Fernando, who, in addition to being very rich, apparently, was also, according to Blondie, handsome as hell.
"Oh," I said, "Then you must know where he is."
"What do you mean? Of course I know where he is. Did my mother send you here or something?"
There was a quality in her response, a tone, that made me believe she didn't know where he was. After years working as Durney's strong arm, it wasn't difficult to recognize the expression of somebody taken off guard by a question, especially a question to which she doesn't know the answer. And this girl wasn't half as good at faking her answers as she believed. For one thing, she had lost her self-possession, her cool, cultivated aloofness. I said, "Really? Then where is he?"
"Why should I tell you, a sloppy, low-class deliveryman? Why should I even be talking to you? I wish I had never taken your damn cigarette," and she childishly threw the cigarette onto the ground. "I ought to report you to the stable manager."
I couldn't believe my good luck. I really had her on the ropes now. "That's fine. And anyway, there's no reason why you should tell me where he is. I already know."
I could tell she was interested in this new revelation, but also that she was uncertain how to proceed. She tried the obvious pitch, "Alright, if you know, then why don't you tell me: where is he?"
"No need. We both know." Now, improvising still more, pressing my luck a little further, I said, "It's funny, though: he seemed to think that you wouldn't know how to find him, that you didn't know where he was, and that you would want to know."
"What do you mean?"
"Just what I said. I was with him a week ago. He sent me here. He really believed you would be wanting to find him."
"You saw him a week ago?"
"Sure. Why not? You must be in contact with him too." Then, a little cruelly, I added, "After all, you're engaged to be married. I guess he just forgot."
She said nothing.
"Look, little girl, do I really have to spell this whole thing out: he sent me here to get you."
"I don't believe you. My mother's behind this whole. . .whole. . .this whole thing. I don't how or why, but I don't trust you more than an inch. Why didn't you mention any of this five minutes ago?"
"That's fine. I'm not going to stand here all day trying to persuade you," and I turned to leave.
"Wait a minute," she cried. "Just wait a minute, will you. Give me another cigarette. I just need a second to think."
I handed her another cigarette, and lit it. She wasn't nearly so particular this time--thinking through her silly thoughts apparently required all the concentration she could summon.
She said, "Why didn't he call me himself? He knows how to reach me."
"He can't. Not right now. He's hiding out. He got messed up in some bad business down in central Illinois. Your phones could be tapped."
That he might be mixed up in crooked business didn't seem to surprise or even shock her. She merely said, "But the police haven't been here?"
"And have his parents called the police?"
"I don't know. Probably not."
"Don't you think the police probably find that a little strange? It would be a cinch for them to get a wire tap warrant on this house, and every other place he's known to call. Why would the police want to show their cards by coming around asking questions? Everybody'd clam up real quick if they thought the cops were listening."
She seemed to accept this entirely fictitious--preposterous, even--story. "So," I said, "Do you want to go to him or not?" If I could lure her away from there, get far away from Glenview, I could make her talk. The thought of having to do so reminded me of the night Durney died, the night we abducted that girl from Kasbeer. That girl's name was Ellen West, but everybody called her the Blonde Bombshell. Durney made me get answers out of her. Torturing pretty young girls--you don't feel very good about yourself after torturing a pretty young girl, but I was prepared to do it again if it was the only way to get the information I needed out of Lennie. And even if she didn't have the information, there'd be people who would want her back, and, I thought, those people almost certainly did have the information; they'd be willing to talk terms if I had Lennie as my bargaining chip. It had become obvious to me that girl's father, her mother, the Pedrosas, they were all connected to big time racketeers. How big I didn't know, and scarcely dared contemplate. But I knew as sure as I knew anything to be true that this girl was the key to uncovering the identity of Mr. X, and Mr. X must lead straight to Bruce.
The weakness in my plan was that I doubted Lennie would welcome the idea of joining Fernando in a life on the lam. I didn't think she could possibly love him that much; I didn't believe she could love anybody that much. But it was my only chance, and I was betting the farm on it: "So? I don't have all day. You in or you out?"
"I would, but he has to come back here."
"I already told you he can't."
"But something's changed. He has to trust me; he has to come back here."
"Nothing doing."
"Goddammit," she exclaimed. "I knew something like this would happen. It's that man he worked for. I never trusted that man. My father never did either. Nobody did but the Pedrosas. The fools! You have to tell him, he has to come back. My father can fix everything for him, but he has to come back. It might take a little time, but it's worth it. Tell him Delaney is dead, and he left him money. Lots of money. We can finally get married and go to California or New York City or someplace exciting. Mexico, anywhere. But he has to come back here first. He can't receive the money without coming back."
"He'll want to see a copy of the will."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise he'll think maybe it's a trap."
"He knows I wouldn't double cross him, not ever."
"But you're not coming with me. You said so yourself. How will he know I actually spoke with you? Or even if I did, how will he know that I'm not the one double crossing him? I have to be able to show him a copy of that will."
"I don't think I can get you one. His parents have it, or their attorney does, but I couldn't get my hands on it."
"You don't have to. I just need to know if it's being probated, and if so, in what county. Do you think you can find that out?"
"I can find that out."
"I also need the dead man's name."
"Delaney Demmering. I don't know his middle name."
"That's fine."
"You swear my mother didn't send you here?"
"I never even knew she was your mother. If she had sent me here, would I have told you that I know her? Think about it. Doesn't make any sense."
She said, "Okay. I'll call you tonight. There's a pay phone, at a gas station near here. The place is called the Golden Horseshoe--"
"I know the place."
"Be at that payphone tonight at ten o'clock. I'll call you there."
I left her, standing hopefully outside the barn, and she was as good as her word: at ten o'clock the payphone at the Golden Horseshoe rang; I picked it up and said "hello."
Without greeting me, she whispered, "It's being probated in Cook County," and then she hung up.
For the first time all day, I felt good. When I placed the telephone receiver back on its hook, it felt good, like sliding a fully-loaded magazine into the handle of a semiautomatic.
The magazine holds the clip, you know, if there is a clip. I hate it when people use the two words interchangeably.