The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read online

  Tiny had been furious. He had slapped Cherie so hard that she fell to her knees in the parking lot outside the city jail. Seese had tried to stop him by telling him not to worry, the half was safe. But Tiny had spun around, fast for a fat man, and the murder in his eye told Seese it was about sex with the black narcs, not the half ounce of coke. Tiny had not even thought of the half ounce yet. Cherie had, though. She started crying while she was still on the ground, promising to make it all up to him, promising to borrow the money and pay it back right away. Tiny had kicked Cherie in the ribs, and only Seese, pointing out a patrol car approaching on Stone Avenue, had stopped Tiny from really hurting Cherie.

  Cherie had curled up in the backseat of Tiny’s big Buick and sobbed and moaned about broken ribs. All Tiny kept saying was, “Bitch! Dumb cunt bitch!” He had repeated it again and again. He told her he should kill her for it. He told her anyone else in his place would. He told her that she owed Seese, not him. She owed Seese because the half ounce was safe. If the half ounce had been lost, Tiny told Cherie he would have killed her.

  • • •

  Cherie comes off the platform breathing hard. She wraps a red-flowered cotton kimono around herself tightly. At the table she takes both her husband’s hands in hers and squeezes them while she kisses him so that all the others can see them. The last girl has Pink Floyd on the jukebox, and they watch her adjust the crotch of her leotard as she comes onstage. The husband relaxes and pushes his glass of beer across the table to Cherie. She is still breathing fast and the hair around her face is dark with perspiration. “Pretty good for an old lady,” Cherie says to Seese, and they both laugh. Tiny would have beaten Cherie bad, but probably not have killed her. Not in those days. They had all been much younger. Actually all Cherie owed Seese was for stashing the cocaine in the milk carton. Seese had started to say she didn’t like to have to ask favors when Cherie finished her husband’s beer and said, “Look. I think you can find them on the south side—South Park Avenue. Almost to the airport. Look for a real old house trailer with a wrecked motorcycle outside.” Seese finished the whiskey. She gave Cherie a hug and smiled at the husband, who turned away rudely. The bartender had already yelled “Last call!” Seese told Cherie to take it easy, she’d be in touch, and they would have to get together for a beer sometime. But Cherie had glanced nervously in the direction of the blond cowboy, then back at Seese. They both knew they probably would not see each other again for a long time.

  Tiny had watched Seese from the doorway of his office but she had pretended that she was too drunk to notice. The whole taxi ride back to the motel she was glad she hadn’t had to ask Tiny for help. Tiny calculated the loss of her baby as the price she had paid for fucking with David and Beaufrey. Tiny was right of course. But Seese didn’t have to give him any more satisfaction than he’d already got.

  BOOK THREE

  SOUTHWEST

  FAMOUS CRIMINALS

  FERRO HANDED the truck keys to Seese with a sullen expression. He had already lectured them about doing Lecha’s errands and then coming back. He kept asking Seese why Sterling had to go, and Seese kept telling him that she’d need help with the lifting.

  “Lies, lies, lies,” Seese said, laughing as they zoomed down the drive, past the toolshed and corrals, past the kennels where the night dogs slept in the shade of the big paloverde tree. Sterling was concerned about getting into trouble with Ferro or Paulie or the boss woman. Seese shook her head. Lecha wants all this weird stuff—a wing back chair with peacocks on it, a typewriter table, even the typewriter!

  Sterling nodded. He decided he would let Seese take over. “Relax,” she told him. “We are on important business. No one is going to bother us.”

  Sterling thought she took the dirt road a little too fast because the rear wheels slid a little on the curves. A roadrunner had to take to the air to avoid being run over. So he made a joke hoping Seese might slow down. He said he thought she’d make a good driver for a getaway car. But instead of laughing, Seese nodded seriously and said she had actually done that once.

  “In my other life,” Seese said, making Sterling feel a lot better. “It wasn’t a bank or 7-Eleven holdup at least. It was a rip-off. Drug deal. You know.”

  Sterling nodded, although he did not know. He had read a great deal in his magazines about the drug tsars and huge drug deals worth hundreds of millions. “It would make me too nervous,” Sterling said as they sailed onto the paved road, and he glanced behind them at the dust cloud the truck had kicked up, a dust cloud the size of a tornado. Sterling was thinking probably Ferro was watching them in the telescope he kept in the front driveway.

  “I was too young and too high to be scared,” Seese said; she was driving slower now and watched for cops in the rearview mirror. She felt happy and confident taking Sterling on errands. While she and Cherie still worked for Tiny, she had always joked that she’d be lost if she had to go out in Tucson during the daylight because they slept most of the day and usually went out only at night. Then she had left with David after only six months. Still, she felt as if she knew the town enough to get them to a shopping mall.

  The plan was to do the errands and eat and then drive around. Sterling was glad to have a chance to see some points of interest in Tucson. Of course they were only places that had been mentioned in the “Yesteryear” articles of the Police Gazette—the Congress Hotel downtown where the Dillinger gang had been staying, the bungalow not far from University Street where Dillinger himself and his girlfriend had been captured. Just in case, Sterling had brought along copies of the magazine with two of his favorite “Yesteryear” articles: the John Dillinger and Geronimo profiles. Of course, when Sterling really thought about it, he had other favorites too, but these were the articles in which Tucson played an important role.

  Sterling wandered behind Seese in the department stores. They had already bought the typewriter and typing table. They were searching for the wing back chair with peacocks on it. Sterling had realized these stores were full of furniture, but it wasn’t until they started looking for this certain chair that he understood just how many sofas, end tables, and armchairs there were. Seese reached deep into the big purse hanging from her shoulder and paid cash for everything. Sterling had had a little trouble getting used to all those hundred-dollar bills. But after a few hours of going up and down escalators, wandering through mazes of sofas and beds and still no lunch, Sterling had adjusted to the fistfuls of hundreds. Sterling decided it wasn’t nearly the shock that Geronimo must have had when they loaded him and the rest of the Apache prisoners on the train to send them to the prison camp in Florida. At least Sterling had spent time in Barstow, California, and some weeks outside of Bakersfield repairing the track torn up by a hundred-car freight train derailment. He had also vacationed at Long Beach and had ridden the big roller coaster that swooped and swerved above the ocean.

  What a shock it must have been. Geronimo would have come from riding with his warriors, sleeping on the bare ground, and eating bits of a venison jerky and parched corn. Then suddenly all the Apaches, including the women and kids, had been loaded on a train. Most of them had probably never been inside a train and never seen such things as train seats or train toilets. Sterling had been wondering how the soldiers guarding the Apaches had taught them to use train toilets when he saw the chair they had been looking for. Seese had somehow overlooked it because she was poking and pressing sofa pillows. The chair was high backed and “winged,” and it was even blue. “Blue is her favorite color,” Seese said while they were eating tacos. The back of the pickup was too full of purchases to leave unattended. Sterling secretly preferred drive-ins because he had not been sure of the proper clothes for indoor restaurants since the time, years ago, in Long Beach he had been turned away from a place called the Surf Cafe. He had been wearing his black-and-white-plaid sport coat and new tennis shoes. It might have been a case of racial discrimination, but Sterling was not sure. A sullen man with a stack of menus had told him he must wea
r a tie. Sterling had been so horrified to be turned away that minutes passed before it occurred to him that the sullen man himself wore no tie, only a sport coat and slacks.

  Seese had not felt so happy or chatty for a long time. It was this funny old guy Sterling who put her in such a good mood. He always kept his eyes open for funny things and tried to make jokes. And he had found the peacock chair, which she might never have seen. Seese wanted to get every item on Lecha’s list to prove she was organized and responsible. Seese knew, however, that it was the last purchase that concerned Lecha most. Lecha might have hired any number of competent people to buy what was in the boxes and bundles in the back of the truck. On the other hand, only a few people knew how to conduct the transaction planned for after lunch.

  Seese announced they had an hour to kill. Sterling said that would be fine because all of the places on their tour were near downtown. He asked Seese again if she was sure she really wanted to go see these places. “They might not even be there. Or they might be sort of boring,” Sterling said hesitantly, “like the Congress Hotel.”

  “I told you—I really want to. You have to tell me all about what happened at these places—all the history and stuff.”

  “I guess we might start at the Congress Hotel.” Seese wheeled the heavily loaded pickup through downtown. Tucson’s downtown had been stunned by shopping malls, so it seemed sort of deserted. It was easy to park across the street so she could look and concentrate on the old building while Sterling talked.

  “You can’t even tell there was a fire,” Sterling commented. “It was the fire, see. It was an accident they ever caught Dillinger. Because he was a lot smarter than they were. But the weak link was the rest of the gang. See, Dillinger sent the others ahead to Tucson. He had this girlfriend. She was part Indian, part Canadian Indian. She was real pretty. They were visiting his relatives in Florida. So Clark and Makely had this woman named Opal Long with them. There might have been a couple of other guys, but they had just tagged along with Makely and Clark. Which wasn’t a good idea and was part of how they got caught.”

  Sterling was pleased to see Seese smiling and listening so closely to his story. It was easy to imagine all the things happening when you were parked right there on the actual site.

  For a moment he considered simply reading a paragraph or two out of the magazine. But Sterling had visualized it so many times in the years since he had first read the article that he thought he would tell Seese just the way he pictured the demise of the Dillinger gang:

  Clark had been tall and thin with dark hair stuck close to his head. His eyes didn’t seem to match. Makely was short with sandy-brown hair. Sometimes he wore a mustache, imitating his boss, John Dillinger. Sterling imagined Opal Long looked a little like Greta Garbo. It was January when they got to Tucson. They rented rooms in the Congress Hotel. And then this is where accident and luck sort of come in. One night not long after Makely and Clark and Long had moved in there, the Congress Hotel had caught fire.

  Sterling paused for emphasis and to look again at the three stories of windows, imagining the Tucson fire department’s arrival. “A fire,” Seese said. “Accident and luck. Yeah.” Her face got sad. “I know about those two.” Seese had tried to make the last few words sound like a joke, but Sterling could tell that accident and luck had not dealt any better with Seese than they had with Sterling or with John Dillinger for that matter. She noticed how Sterling had left off the story because of her sudden sadness. So she reached across the pickup seat and patted Sterling on the arm so he would continue.

  The firemen had saved all the gang’s suitcases and things. They had had quite a number of trunks and suitcases. Of course they were full of the cash from their last robberies. And they did have a couple of submachine guns. So after the firemen had brought down all their things—it was quite a lot—Makely pulled out this big roll of bills and gave the firemen $50 for their trouble. The Dillinger gang locked their luggage in the car and went across the street—right here, to the Manhattan Bar—and bought drinks for other guests driven out of the Congress Hotel by the fire. Makely was smooth and a natural show-off, but Clark knew only one way to get people’s attention; that had been the reason Clark had started armed robbery at age sixteen. So, as the evening went on and Makely got so much attention with the roll of bills, Clark cornered a tourist. They were all drunk. He made the tourist step outside with him. He opened the huge trunk of the ’33 Packard touring car and pulled out a big suitcase. Clark had to show the tourist one of their machine guns.

  “Let’s see,” Seese said, smiling, “I think I can guess this one—the firemen couldn’t forget the face of the stranger who gave them such a big tip.”

  “Right!” Sterling answered. They had been reading the Police Gazette at the fire station. The back section featured pictures of the most wanted, and one of the firemen thought he recognized a face. “Pretty dumb to show your machine gun to a stranger,” Seese said as she turned the truck from Stone Avenue to Second Street. Sterling had the exact address, but they still had to creep along to see the house numbers.

  “Oooh!” Sterling said, comparing the fuzzy magazine photo with the house they’d parked in front of. Seese had looked at the photo a moment, then laughed so hard she leaned against the steering wheel and made the horn honk. The bungalow on Second Street looked almost the same, down to the peeling white paint and a battered trash can sitting on the porch by the front door. Even the position of the trash can was identical, down to a vertical dent that ran its length. “It couldn’t be! No!” Seese was laughing. Right then Sterling had noticed a man across the street suspiciously eyeing them in the pickup truck loaded with boxes, bundles, and a blue wing chair. He and the blond woman were making a spectacle of themselves, which was exactly what Dillinger’s gang had done, and look how they had ended up. Sterling cleared his throat. “Maybe we should go ahead and try to find Geronimo’s house.” If they got questioned by the police, Sterling knew that would be the end of both their jobs.

  “I’m sorry,” Seese said, wiping her eyes across the sleeve of her white blouse. “I couldn’t help laughing! It’s the trash can.”

  “Well, I am amazed myself,” Sterling said, carefully closing the page of one Police Gazette before picking up the other issue that had the Geronimo article in it.

  “We can’t go yet. You didn’t tell me what happened here.” Sterling had glanced across the street nervously but the man was gone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, I saw this man looking at us.”

  Seese had laughed again.

  “You’re right,” Sterling said. “I must be getting edgy because we are going to Geronimo’s house next!”

  Sterling joked, but he got on with the Dillinger story quickly. In late January the big red bougainvillea was thick and blossoming all across the front porch and around the sides of the house too. It had been easy for the Tucson police to hide in the backyard. “What a nasty surprise to find in your bougainvillea branches!” Seese had not felt so carefree and silly for a long time. She was beginning to believe a little more in what Lecha had said: that soon many things would be resolved.

  “When Geronimo came by this way, it looked very much different,” Sterling had commented, staring down at a page in the Police Gazette.

  “No kidding,” Seese said, driving down University Boulevard, lined with palm trees. “Geronimo might have been the lucky one,” she said, tilting her head at the yellowish-brown palm fronds the trees were shedding; the piles reminded her of dead locusts, although she could not remember where she might have seen the insects.

  “Well, it was the last time Dillinger and his gang ever saw any of this. They got Dillinger and Billy Frechette, his girlfriend, at the house too. They sat in the backseat of the police car with their legs and hands in shackles. The police were reluctant to let them roll down the windows in the backseat. Dillinger made a joke about it—the end of January and he was sweating. That was the worst of it. All of the Midwestern
states wanted him, and their high temperatures were in the teens. So Dillinger hired this woman lawyer, and just as they were waiving extradition to Indiana or someplace like that, this hotshot DA with plans for higher office flew in. The Tucson police let the DA take Dillinger away in the middle of the night. They drove to Douglas, Arizona, on the border. There was an airstrip there. The DA flew back to Indiana with Dillinger. It was four above zero the day they arraigned Dillinger in Terre Haute. The rest is history.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, you know. Dillinger escapes the Terre Haute jail. But there is the lady in red and the movie in Chicago. The FBI shot him down outside. The extradition from Arizona was illegal.”

  “Well, the lesser of two evils,” Seese says, but she can see that Sterling is troubled by her last remark. She senses that it has to do with whatever has sent him to Tucson.

  “Well,” Sterling begins cautiously, watching Seese’s face for a reaction, “what concerns me is that sometimes judges and courts break their own laws or they decide something completely wrong.” Sterling is thinking about the tribal court judge and the Tribal Council again. He is thinking there are instances when the law has nothing to do with fairness or justice.

  Seese says, “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve spent too many years around scum—people that when they get caught, they deserve everything the judge can give them and then some.”