Authors: Martha Conway
“God doesn’t care about that.”
“Your God might not.”
The light was red and he didn’t mind talking to them a little. One was quite pretty, though a little too old for him—that is, around his age.
“All God is one,” said the other woman, the one who was not so pretty—she had small eyes and lips that stretched unevenly over her teeth.
The light changed to green. He was a block away from Nicola’s office.
“Is that right,” Chorizo said, starting to step away.
“All God is one all-merciful being,” the not-so-pretty one told him.
Chorizo looked back at her for a moment. “No,” he said. “Your God is merciful. My God is just.”
* * *
It took her
a while to find parking, which was always the case around this time of day and made Nicola think again how good it was that she could take the muni to work without changing trains once and how she really wanted to stay in her home. But what would happen now that Robert was dead?
She took the side staircase up to her office, hoping Guy had gone home already, but when she got upstairs she remembered that he and Aria were at a Japanese management retreat for two days. Everyone else seemed to be gone too.
“Hey there,” Audrey said. She was putting a sweater into her backpack. “I thought you were sick.”
“Oops, I forgot,” Nicola said. She smiled.
“They’re all gone anyway. I was just about to leave myself.”
“What’s up? It’s barely five o’clock.”
“When the cat’s away,” Audrey explained.
Nicola went over to the bookcase and took out a couple of software packages. “Listen, could you do me a favor?” she asked. She looked around for a paper bag. “I have a couple of things I’d like you to drop off at my home for me.”
“Sure, but why can’t you do it?”
“That’s a long story,” Nicola said.
* * *
Chorizo heard the
elevator coming down as he climbed the front staircase, holding onto the metal handrail and feeling something—what? Almost like joy. The building was stucco, old-fashioned, and made him think of Los Angeles in the 1940s—an image he had from late-night television. He had never actually been to Los Angeles. So far he had only been to two places in America: San Francisco, and New York. He had made a lot of money in New York but he couldn’t go back there anymore because of the extortion charges and whatever other petty crimes they had on file. It didn’t matter. Of the two, he preferred San Francisco.
The building seemed quiet and he hesitated when he got to the second floor. Which office to try first? He chose the one to his left. A bell sounded as he pushed open the door and crossed the carpeted threshold. A woman sat behind a glass window partition reading a magazine. No one was in the waiting room.
The woman looked up at Chorizo and frowned. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. “Dr. Mursky is just finishing up for the day.”
“Actually, I’m looking for someone, a dental hygienist,” Chorizo said. “And I’m not sure if she works here or not.”
* * *
After Audrey left
Nicola looked up police stations in the blue government pages in the front of the phone book. She was still wearing her coat. As she suspected, there was one right here in West Portal only a few blocks away. Should she call and make an appointment? Do police take appointments?
She decided to check her e-mail first.
* * *
When the woman
told him none of their dental hygienists were named Nicola, Chorizo tried the next office. This one had no piped-in music and inferior wall-to-wall carpet. He could hear the faint sound of drilling from behind the interior door. In the waiting room, two men sat on opposite naugahyde chairs with computers on their laps. One wore a suit.
“Hello,” he said to the receptionist. He looked through the open window and noticed her beautiful nails. “I’m looking for someone who works here,” he said.
* * *
Nicola opened Davette’s
e-mail attachment and when the image came up on her screen she gasped. It was Chorizo’s hand, no doubt about it. By enlarging the picture she could just make out his beautiful nails and a few silver chainlinks from his chainlink bracelet. She could not mistake that bracelet. She enlarged it some more, then fooled around with the contrast a little bit. The colors looked a bit washed out. Also, she wanted to see if she could get more of the hand, a thumbnail, the tip of a finger. Something more distinctive. She thought the image might have been snipped from something—one of the videos? She looked at the file on her desktop again. The icon was blank; the computer couldn’t read what kind of file it was, and Nicola began to think that maybe the file was actually a video file and not a still image. Maybe the file name was deliberately misleading.
I bet this is the last frame of a video, Nicola thought. I need those decompression programs I gave Audrey. Damn.
She began to look around her office to see if any of the computers had one of the decompression programs installed. Audrey: no. Carlos: no. Then she looked at Christian’s huge, souped-up computer.
Ah ha. Here we go.
* * *
Chorizo closed the
dentist office door behind him and stood in the hallway, confused. The receptionist, like the other receptionist, had never heard of a hygienist named Nicola. But he had definitely seen Nicola walk into this building and there were only two dentists here. Wait, though; she had been with that other girl. Perhaps it was the other girl who worked here, not both of them? Perhaps she was just walking her friend back to work? Chorizo felt a tick of annoyance. He had assumed Nicola worked here, which was a mistake. Never assume, he scolded himself. A true warrior doesn’t guess; he seeks the truth.
He pressed the elevator button. He didn’t want to leave, but what could he do? He really needed to find this woman and he felt himself getting upset.
But what was that? Chorizo turned toward the front of the building. Again, for a moment, he thought he heard the wind. Like a woman’s low voice asking why.
Ridiculous.
“Relax, remove,” he told himself. “Distance yourself from the problem.”
He wished he could sit still for a moment, have a minute of yoga. That always cleared his head. Chorizo closed his eyes and let himself run through the options one by one. Should he give up and try again tomorrow? Should he go to the café once more? Should he plant himself somewhere on the street and hope she walks by him on her way home?
How was he going to find her?
The large white downward arrow lit up and the elevator doors opened. Chorizo hesitated. Wait, he thought. What about the other girl—the friend? If Nicola was walking her back here, the friend might be here now. She might be able to help him. There was only one office left in the building, an Internet design firm up on the third floor. It was a long shot, but why not try? Chorizo pressed the up-arrow button this time. As he waited, his cell phone began to ring.
“Yes?” he answered. He listened. The elevator came and he got on. He put his phone to his other ear and frowned as the elevator ascended. When the doors opened onto the third floor he stepped out, but as they started to close behind him Chorizo suddenly turned and reached out to catch them.
“Where are you?” he asked, quickly stepping back inside.
* * *
Nicola heard the
elevator ding and then a man’s voice. After a moment she rolled her office chair back to look out the open doorway but all she saw was a man’s trouser leg as whoever it was went back into the elevator. Probably looking for one of the dentists, she figured. It happened all the time.
She rolled back to Christian’s computer and stared at the screen. The decompression program didn’t have any apparent problem with the file, and the video was now loading all right. Still, she wouldn’t know whether it had actually decompressed correctly until it began to play.
She’d done this before. She’d been burned before. Sometimes everything goes smoothly and you’re so happy until you open the file and what you see is a big blank nothing.
Nicola turned the screen slightly to cut down on glare. The sun was low now, just about to dip under the horizon, and the last of its light streamed through the window. The video stopped loading and started to play, and, oh thank God, it was not blank—she could see the same bed she remembered from the snuff video. A poster on the wall. A metal side table. And then there he was—Chorizo. Not his face, but the side of his body and his hand as he reached up toward the camera. That was it. The video ended abruptly.
Quickly, she searched through the other files Davette had sent. There were ten of them. They were all videos, probably. She knew she shouldn’t take the time to decompress them and then view each one individually—Davette was going to do that—but she couldn’t stop herself. I’ll make a file for the police, she told herself. Something to substantiate this ridiculous story.
An hour later she was almost done. It was after six. Lou called just as she was opening the last video; he had found the articles about the pigeons, and yes they were all killed by large doses of methadone, which the seeds had been coated with.
“He was practicing,” he said. “I bet he has it in pill form. He crushed up the pills and coated the birdseed with it. Then, when he was sure it would work, he gave the girls a couple of pills and told them they were something else, like Ecstasy or something. You can swallow them with water or, if your stomach gets easily upset, with milk. Depending on the dosage and your tolerance for drugs, two can kill you.”
“I didn’t know you could overdose on methadone,” Nicola said.
“If you take enough, sure. It’s like morphine. It’s morphine based. He probably gets it from a junkie who is trying to get clean, but to tell you the truth it’s going out of fashion at detox programs. At least in New York.”
“You’ve been to a detox in New York?”
“I followed around a junkie for a while. Now
that
was an easy job. Anyway, all I’m saying is there might be only one or two detoxes that dish methadone these days.”
“So maybe he couldn’t completely cover his tracks.”
“Unless he got it on the street, third or fourth hand.”
“Right.” Nicola watched the end of the video clip. Again there was the bed, the poster, the girl, but nothing as incriminating as the first clip with the bracelet. “Do you have anything else?” she asked Lou.
“Whoever he gets it from can’t be pregnant or have kidney problems or a biliary tract disease. No one would prescribe it for them. What is a biliary tract disease?”
“A disease in an organ that carries digestive bile,” Nicola said. “Like your liver. What else?”
“Alcohol increases its effect. It’s not all that hard to overdose on if you’ve been drinking too.”
“And Carmen says Robert drinks,” Nicola said. She stopped the video clip and looked at her watch. “Anything else?”
“One last thing, and this is kind of interesting—apparently there’s a very quick and effective antidote if you do overdose,” Lou said. “Of course, you have to get to the emergency room within a couple of hours. It’s called Narcon.”
“Narcon?”
“It reverses the effects.”
“Even for pigeons?”
“I don’t know about pigeons. It’s probably never been tried on pigeons.”
Nicola looked at the computer screen again, then renamed the last video and saved it to her police file. “This is probably enough,” she said.
“What is?”
“I’m going to the police with what I have.” She gave Lou the station address and told him to meet her there.
“And I’ll bring these printouts, too,” he told her.
But almost as soon as she hung up, her cell phone rang again.
“Did you forget the address already?” she said, answering.
“What address?” asked a low voice.
Nicola felt her jaw clench. She recognized that voice.
It was Chorizo.
Twenty
Nicola felt her
heart give a sudden hard beat and she looked back at the computer screen as though she was afraid Chorizo could see through the phone to what she was doing. She carefully extracted the disk from the computer, then wrote on it “Police.”
“I thought this was … was someone else,” Nicola said. She swallowed. It was important to sound normal but at the same time her mind seemed to be casting out in all directions. Why was he calling her? Had she even given him this number?
Chorizo said, “This is Mehmet Pamuk.” It was the name he had used at the café. His real name? “You remember me,” he said.
“Mehmet—but…” Nicola paused. This was awkward. She tried to think what might be the normal thing to say, if she was just that girl from the café who knew nothing more about him than whatever it was she had known then. “How did you get this number?”
“A boy gave it to me. Said his name was Dave.”
“Dave,” Nicola repeated. Her face suddenly felt like wood.
“Yes, a total stranger to me,” he continued in his low silky voice, “who seemed to think I would give him some money in exchange for, I don’t know, information I guess. He wanted to meet me. Turns out he had some interesting … ideas about me.”
Nicola didn’t know what to say. How far had this gone? “All right,” she said.
“He mentioned your name.”
“You met with him?”
Chorizo laughed. “Listen,” he said.
There was a pause then she could hear a couple of short, shallow breaths. “Hey, Nicola,” said another voice.
“Oh my God, Dave.”
“Yeah, WAL, right? I mean me.” His voice sounded a little slurred.
“Dave, sit tight,” Nicola started to say but Chorizo was back on the phone.
“Oh,” he said, “he’s sitting tight. Very tight. Listen, I want you to do something for me. Are you listening? I want you to bring me that disk you have. The copy you made of that video. In fact, bring me the whole laptop.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nicola said. “That’s not going to stop anything. I might have copied the video onto twenty computers by now.”
“Well, actually,” Chorizo said, “it’s you I want.”
* * *