At Indio, we pulled into the parking lot of a small strip shopping mall where a Mexican restaurant was tucked between a VCR repair shop and a veterinarian. “I hope you’re hungry,” Dietz said. “I don’t want to stop once we hit the outskirts of Los Angeles. Sunday traffic is the pits.”
“This is fine,” I said. The truth was I felt tense and needed the break. Dietz handled the car well, but he drove aggressively, impatient-every time he found himself behind another vehicle. The highway was only two lanes wide and his passing style had me clinging to the chicken stick. His attention was constantly focused on the road ahead and behind, watching (I surmised) for suspicious vehicles. He kept the radio off and the dead quiet in the car was broken only by the thump of his fingers tapping out a beat on the steering wheel. He had the kind of energy that set me on edge. It might not have been objectionable in the open air, but in the confines of the car, I felt crowded to the point of claustrophobia. The idea of having him at my side twenty-four hours a day for any length of time at all was worrisome. We pushed through glass doors into a long, blank rectangular space that had evidently been designed for retail sales. A clumsy partition separated the kitchen from the dining area where a few tables had been arranged. Through the doorway, I could see a stove and battered refrigerator that might have come from a garage sale. Dietz told me to wait while he strolled through to the rear, where he checked the back door.
The place was chilly and echoed when we scraped back our chairs to sit down. Dietz angled himself so he could keep an eye on the car through the plate-glass windows in the front.
Someone peered out of the kitchen at us with uncertainty. Maybe they thought we were from the health department inspecting for rat turds. There was some sort of whispered consultation and then a waitress appeared. She was short and heavyset, a middle-aged Mexican in a white wraparound apron decorated with stains. Shyly, she tried out her language skills. My Spanish is limited to (approximately) three words, but I could swear she offered to serve us squirrel soup. Dietz kept squinting and shaking his head. Finally, the two of them rattled at each other in Spanish for a while. He didn’t seem fluent, but he managed to make himself understood.
I studied him casually while he fumbled with his vocabulary. He had a battered look, his nose slightly flattened, with a knot at the bridge. Mouth wide and straight, turning lopsided when he smiled. His teeth were good, but my guess was that some of them weren’t his. Looked too even to me and the color was too white. He turned back to me.
“The place just opened yesterday. She recommends the menudo or the combination plate.”
I leaned toward him, avoiding her bright gaze. “I don’t eat menudo. It’s made with tripe. Have you ever seen that stuff? It’s white and spongy-looking … all these perforations and bumps. It’s probably some internal organ human beings don’t even have.”
“She’ll have the combination plate,” he said to her blandly. He held up two fingers, ordering one for himself.
She shuffled away in huaraches that she wore with white socks. She returned moments later with a tray that held glasses, two beers, a small dish of salsa, and a basket of tortilla chips still sizzling with lard.
We snacked on chips and salsa while we waited for our lunch.
“How do you know Lee Galishoff?” I asked. The beer bottle had a little piece of lime resting on the top and I squeezed some in. Both of us ignored the glasses, which were still hot from a recent washing.
Dietz reached for his cigarettes before he remembered that he’d thrown them out. He caught himself and smiled, shaking his head. “I did some work for him, hunting down a witness on one of his first trials. After that, we started playing racquetball and became good friends. What about you?”
I told him briefly the circumstances through which I’d ended up tracking Tyrone Patty for him. “I take it you’ve done security work before.”
He nodded. “It’s a lucrative sideline, especially in this day and age. Tends to limit your personal life, but at least it’s relief from straight private-eye work, which is a yawn, as you know. Last week I sat for six hours looking at microfiche in the tax assessor’s office. I can’t stand that stuff.”
“Lee told me you were feeling burned out.”
“Not burned out. I’m bored. I’ve been doing it for ten years and it’s time to move on.”
“To what?” I asked. The beer was very cold and made a nice contrast to the fiery salsa, which was making my nose run. I kept dabbing surreptitiously with a paper napkin, looking like a junkie in need of a fix.
“Don’t know yet,” he said. “I got into the business in the first place by default. Started out doing repos, serving papers, stuff like that for a guy who eventually took me into his agency. Ray hated doing fieldwork- too rough for his taste-so he did all the paperwork and I dealt with the deadbeats. He was the cerebral type, really had it up here.” He tapped his temple.
“You’re using past tense. What happened to him?”
“He dropped dead of a heart attack ten months ago. The guy jogged, worked out lifting weights. He married this gal, gave up alcohol and cigarettes, gave up dope, gave up staying out all night. Bought a house, had a baby, happy as a pig eating shit, and then he died. Forty-six. A month ago, his widow started talking like she expected me to step in and fill the gap. It’s bullshit. No thanks. I had her cash me out.”
“You’ve lived in California?”
He gestured dismissively. “I’ve lived everywhere. I was born in a van on the outskirts of Detroit. My mother was in labor and the old man didn’t want to stop. I got hauled all over hell and gone as a kid. Pop worked the oil rigs so we spent a lot of tune in L. A. . . . this was in the late forties, early fifties when the big boom was on. Texas, Oklahoma. It was dangerous damn work, but the money was good. Pop was a brawler and a bully, very protective of me as long as I was tough myself. He was the kind of guy who’d get in a bar fight and tear the place apart . . . just for the hell of it. If he had a clash with the boss or decided he didn’t like what was going on, we’d pack up and hit the road.”
“How’d you manage to go to school?”
“I didn’t if I could help it. I hated school. I couldn’t see the point. To me, it all looked like preparation for something I didn’t want to do anyway. I was never going to work in a feed store so why did I have to know how many bushels in a peck? Is that an issue that comes up for you? Two trains leaving different cities at sixty miles an hour? I couldn’t sit still for junk like that. Nowadays they call kids like me hyperactive. All those rules and regulations, just for the sake of it. I couldn’t stand it. I never did graduate. I ended up with an equivalency degree. Took some kind of written test that I aced without ever cracking a book. The system’s not designed for transients. I liked phys ed and shop, woodworking, auto mechanics . . . stuff like that. But nothing academic. Doesn’t make any sense unless you start at the beginning and work straight through. I always showed up in the middle and had to leave before the end. Story of my life.”
Lunch arrived and we paused to study our food, trying to figure out what it was. Rice and a puddle of refrieds, something folded with cheese leaking out, something fiat. I recognized a tamale because it was wrapped in a corn husk. This was real basic fare-no parsley, no orange slice twisted open and resting on the top. My plate was so hot, I could have used it to iron a shirt. The cook appeared from the kitchen shyly bearing a stack of steaming flour tortillas wrapped in a cloth. The two hospital meals had left my taste buds craving astonishment. I wolfed the food, slowing only long enough to suck down another cold beer. Everything was excellent, the sort of flavors that make you whimper. I reached the finish line slightly in advance of Dietz and wiped my mouth on a paper napkin. “What about your mother? Where was she all this time?”