Fields Where They Lay

  Books by Timothy Hallinan

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart

  The Fourth Watcher

  Breathing Water

  The Queen of Patpong

  The Fear Artist

  For the Dead

  The Hot Countries

  The Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  Herbie’s Game

  King Maybe

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man With No Time

  The Bone Polisher

  Copyright © 2016 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallinan, Timothy.

  Fields where they lay: a Junior Bender mystery / Timothy Hallinan.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-746-9

  eISBN 978-1-61695-747-6

  I. Title

  PS3558.A3923 F54 2016 813’.54—dc23 2016017076

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the star on top of my personal Christmas tree.

  She knows who she is.

  PART ONE

  SHEPHERDS ABIDING IN THE FIELD

  1

  Two Santas

  The astringent December sunlight looked, as always at this time of year, like it had been ladled into the smog with a teaspoon, like vinegar. The watery light and the goop in the air had softened shadows so that the whole composition seemed as flat as a painting, perhaps titled “Field with Lump and Cars.” The lump, a hulking, windowless, three-story ellipse with a flat roof and stains shaped like dirt icicles running down its outer walls, was in the center of a field where herds of sheep or cattle might once have grazed but which was now covered in flat black asphalt, marked in white diagonal parking lines to create an enormous herringbone pattern.

  The pattern was visible because there weren’t very many cars, and the ones that had arrived were scattered around the lot as though the visitors wanted to avoid each other, perhaps out of embarrassment for being there at all. Later, I would realize that the outlying cars belonged to employees, dutifully obeying a rule that was intended to free up closer spaces for customers who probably weren’t coming.

  A huge electric sign on a concrete pillar that stretched higher than the top of the building was blinking its sales pitch in red and green. It read:

  edgerton mall presents

  two santas!!!!!!

  ho! ho! hooo!

  Two Santas.

  And I was going to be stuck here until Christmas.

  Only one thing came to mind, so I said it. “Bah,” I said. “Humbug.”

  Santa Number One, if you were reading left to right on the top row of security monitors, was a lot thinner than Santa Number Two, with a sharp, bony face and a ropy neck that plunged unconvincingly into his yards of scarlet padding before blossoming into Santa’s expected bulk, something like the way the narrow shaft of an onion flares abruptly into a bulb. His belly may have been bogus but his merriness was almost authentic, at least at times. Santa Number Two had the requisite girth and the rosy cheeks of yore, but his Ho! Ho! Ho! rang hollow, and if his eyes had been the barrels of Star Trek phasers, there would have been a pile of fine ash at the foot of his plush red-and-green throne. Several perceptive kids had gotten a glimpse of those eyes and backed away fast, feeling behind them one-handed for Mom.

  “Two Santas in one mall,” I said. “Says a lot for the critical-thinking skills of American retailers.”

  “You got no idea,” said Wally Durskee. Wally, who was occupying the chair next to mine, was a short, serious security guy in a tight green polo shirt that was stretched over so much muscle he looked almost cubic. His carrot-colored hair was in rapid and premature retreat, and he’d developed a nervous habit of fingering a bit hopefully the newly vacant acreage above his forehead. He had the moist fish-white complexion of someone who never gets outside when the sun is shining; a spatter of freckles as a genetic accessory to the red hair; and small, deep-set black eyes, as reflective as raisins, that tended to jump from place to place, a tic he’d undoubtedly developed from a great many days trying to watch thirty-two surveillance screens all at once, as we were at that moment. The jumpy eyes created an impression of unreliability, although he seemed straight enough. “You shoulda been here four days ago,” he said. “Line out the front door, kids screaming, mothers having anxiety attacks. Cleaning crew swept up a couple handfuls of tranquilizers next morning, and not all legal, neither. They got into a fistfight over them. One-hour, ninety-minute wait to get to Sanny Claus’s damn lap. Kids peeing in line. Some limp washcloth emailed cell phone pitchers to Channel Four and they sent a news crew. On TV it looked like the Syrians trying to get through the checkpoints into Germany.”

  I said something that must have sounded sympathetic, because Wally said, “And the only Sanny we had then was Dwayne down there, and kids’d scream to get up to him, take one look, and then scream to get away from him.”

  “Dwayne is the fat one?”

  “Yeah. Dwayne Wix. Even I can’t stand him, and I like everybody.”

  “Fire him.”

  “Sure, right,” Wally said. He blocked the headline with his hands: “SHOPPING MALL FIRES SANNY CLAUS. Anyway, he’s not our employee. We hire a contractor for all this stuff.”

  “Yeah? What’s it called?”

  “Ho-Ho-Holidays,” he said. “Sounds like a stammer, don’t it?”

  “It do.”

  He lobbed a suspicious glance at me but resumed his narrative anyway. Wally was a guy with a lot of narrative and no one to resume it for. “So the contractor threw in Shlomo there at the other end, half price, because it was their job to make crowd estimates and stuff.”

  I said, “Shlomo?”

  “Shlomo Stempel,” Wally said. “The skinny one. Kids like him. Better than Dwayne anyways.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  “Why, you got a problem?”

  “No, why do you—”

  “What do you think, there’s a tonload of unemployed Sanny Clauses this time of year? You can’t put an ad in the paper says, Christians only.”

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t hear the name Shlomo all that much. You know, it’s not like Aidan or Max or Justin or whatever all the kids are called these days.”

  Wally was regarding me as though he thought I was likely to charge him at any moment. “You think Sanny Claus would object?” It was apparently a serious question.

  “No,” I said. “I think Sanny Claus would be thrilled to be impersonated by Shlomo Stempel.”

  “Great guy, Shlomo,” Wally said. He started to say something else but picked at his eyetooth with a fingernail instead. “So anyways, that’s why there’s two of them.”

  “At opposite ends of the mall.”

  “It’s a long mall,” Wally said. He smoothed the miniature desert on his head, which was already smooth. “Seventh longest mall west of the Mississippi.”

  “Really.”

  “Wouldn’t kid you. Not my style. Long story short, the place is so long there’s probably some kids, they only see one Sanny Cl
aus.” He looked back at the screens, and doubt furrowed his brow. “If they’re really little.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s good. Kids today have enough problems without worrying about whether Santa Claus is a committee.” I stood up. The two of us were occupying creaking wheeled office chairs behind a scratched-up console, sticky with ancient spilled drinks, in a dark, cold, windowless room on the third floor, the low-rent floor, of Edgerton Mall. From time to time Wally toyed with one of the controls in front of him, making one of the cameras in some store somewhere in the mall swoop sickeningly left or right or zoom in and out.

  “Where you going?” Wally said.

  “Just getting up. So, yesterday someone added up the shoplifting reports from all the stores and discovered that it was way out of line.”

  “Fridays,” Wally said. “This is Saturday,” he added, making sure we were on the same page. “Stores submit their weekly reports on Friday and the security company, the guys I work for, plugged them into a spreadsheet overnight, and it spiked like Pike’s Peak. You been to Pike’s Peak?”

  “Yes,” I said, and Wally’s face fell. He undoubtedly had a lot of narrative about Pike’s Peak, all bottled up and ready to pop. “It’s a whole week’s worth of losses, right?”

  “Right.” He made one of the cameras pan and then zoom dramatically but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “How out of line is it?”

  “Like Pike’s Peak. Maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty percent gain. Or loss, I guess. You know, a gain in the loss.” He sketched an acute angle, point up, in the air. “Pike’s frigging Peak.”

  “Does the software break the data out on a day-by-day basis?”

  “No. We get a one-week dump of numbers from each store, and that’s what gets fed in.”

  “Why does it come to you?”

  “Lookit my shirt. What does it say?”

  He was waiting, so I said, “Sec—”

  “Security,” he said over me. “We get the data ’cause it’s our asses when it goes kerflooey like this. Look, I’m not really sure who you are.”

  “And you haven’t seen anything odd from up here.”

  “If I had,” he said in a tone that suggested he’d taken most of the blame that had been ladled out during his lifetime and he was continually on the lookout for more, “you wouldn’t be here, would you? And I’m still not sure who you—”

  “But you were told to help me out, right?”

  He replayed the question mentally, squinting at the wall behind me. When he’d finished combing it for ambiguity and trick clauses and, I don’t know, the Oxford comma, he said, “Right. But who are you?”

  “I’m a theft expert,” I said.

  I could hear him swallow.

  I don’t want to spring this on you too suddenly, but things are not always what they seem. One way we often perceive human artifacts—you know, the world of airplanes and washing machines and books and office buildings and shopping malls and easily available facial quality tissue—is to see them all as different things, things that exist independently of each other, brought into existence by separate processes and for different reasons. And that’s certainly one way to look at it, and if it makes you happy, skip to page eleven.

  But another way to look at the man-made world is to see it as an extension of or even a parallel to the so-called “natural” world, in which thousands of seemingly different plants and animals and rocks and things seem for some reason to cluster thickly in certain places and more sparsely—or not at all—in others. And if you ask yourself why this pattern of uneven distribution arises—what the connective tissue could be—the answer that’s certain to come to you sooner or later is water. Water is, in a sense, the chord, albeit inaudible, that produces and supports all those individual tones: water shapes the landscape; water erodes the rocks and distributes the minerals; water is the vital force behind the oldest redwood, the laciest flower, the man-eating tiger. You’re probably already ahead of me, but I’ll say it anyway: The “water” of the man-made world is money.

  The underground river of money, kept thoughtfully out of sight by those who manipulate it, is the unifying element that ties the man-made world together, that supplies the necessary vitality to produce everything from a fancy doorknob to a five-way traffic light, from a one-room shack to a roadside grapefruit stand to the New York Stock Exchange. Without the flow of money, these artificial landmarks could not spring up to decorate or desecrate the landscape and to impinge on our lives. And with money, as with water, you have no idea where it’s been.

  The clear liquid in the almost comically sanitary bottle of aqua pura you buy at the grocer’s has probably passed through both business ends of multiple living organisms, a couple of sewage plants, and a poisoned river before evaporating to fall as pristine snow mass on some picturesque Colorado mountain and from there to melt into the stream or fill the aquifer tapped by the bottling plant. There’s no way to tell. Just as there’s no way to tell in a glittery mall full of gift wrap, candy canes, bright ribbons, sugar-stimulated children, and the repetitive racket of seasonal music where the money that waters that mall has come from.

  If it’s a big enough project, there’s a pretty good chance—in fact, I’d say it’s just shy of a certainty—that some if not all of that money is dirty. And in the case of the Edgerton Mall—the name of a nonexistent neighborhood chosen to conjure up visions of graceful, trailing willows, kids on bicycles, picket fences, and an overwhelmingly Caucasian population—the money flowing beneath that temple to Mammon, currently in the million-dollar throes of celebrating a millennia-old birth into poverty so abject that the child was delivered in a stable . . . well, the river of money down there was filthy.

  2

  No Vowels

  I couldn’t give Wally much detail about why I was in the Edgerton Mall because I was pretty sure it could have gotten me—or him, or both of us—killed.

  Much earlier that day—just three days before Christmas, as my daughter, Rina, had reminded me in the half-octave-up tone that designated spoken italics—I’d had a wakeup call, literally, from a woman named Trey Annunziato, whose control over an ambitiously brutal San Fernando Valley crime family was increasingly tenuous and who felt I owed her a favor. I disagreed, but I kept my argument to myself, what with discretion being the better part of a possibly violent death—a fate that befell, much more frequently than the statistical norm, those who didn’t do what Trey wanted them to do. Hastily dressed and largely uncombed, I showed up at Trey’s walled-in Chinese fantasy compound down near Northridge at the appointed time. (Trey had once shot someone in the knee for tardiness, which is the kind of thing that sticks in the memory.) A grim thirty minutes later I’d driven back out of the compound with a very bad taste in my mouth.

  I had an hour and some change to spare before I was scheduled to show up for the meeting Trey was sending me to at the cumbersomely named Wrightwood Greens Golf and Country Club. So I called Louie the Lost and asked his voice mail whether he could drop whatever he was doing and meet me at the Du-par’s coffee shop in Studio City he and I occasionally frequented. There was nothing special about the place except that it was convenient to both of us and it was where my mentor, Herbie Mott, had taken me after my first professional burglary at the age of seventeen.

  Du-par’s had a lot of sentimental value.

  As I pulled into the parking lot, my phone rang. Louie.

  “Can’t do it,” he said. “I got no wheels. Tell you what. Get me two pieces of cherry pie—no, one cherry and one apple—and come down Ventura a mile, mile and a half to Pete’s Putt-Putt Hut. You know it?”

  “Sure,” I said. Pete was a so-so mechanic whose lack of skill was offset by a profound lack of interest in who actually owned the cars he worked on.

  Louie said, “Think they got punkin?”

  “It’s after Thanksgiving and before Christm
as,” I said. “Any coffee shop that doesn’t have pumpkin loses its pie license.”

  “You think? Huh. Okay, then. Punkin.”

  “Instead of what?”

  “Why you gotta confuse everything? Gimme some punkin and one of them other ones.”

  “Fine.” I hung up and went in and got what was certain to be the wrong pie.

  Sure enough, about six minutes later Louie said, “No apple?”

  I opened the back door of my white Toyota and took out a piece of apple.

  “Kid’s learning, Pete,” Louie called to a pair of shoes protruding from beneath a car. The shoes contributed a grunt of nonlinguistic agreement. The car Pete was buried under was a black Lincoln Town Car, Louie’s favorite personal ride and also his go-to when someone needed a legitimate-looking limo. I’d driven it myself not so long ago. It brought back some really rotten memories, so I said, “Can we go in the office or something?”

  “Sure. You remember the coffee?”

  “You didn’t ask for coffee.”

  “Do I gotta do everything?” he said. “Okay, but that means the pie’s on you.”

  “You have coffee, Pete?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to drink it,” the shoes said.

  I followed Louie into an office that looked like it had recently been waxed with used motor oil and then buffed with a uniform coat of grease until everything was a restful, if shiny, sort of Confederate grey. Many large glossy calendars with pictures of tires on them had been hung randomly on the walls. “Jesus,” I said as my feet almost slipped out from under me. “Should have brought my ice skates.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So? What’s the emergency?” Louie swept aside some sparkly Christmas cards, heavily accented with black fingerprints, to make room on Pete’s desk for the pumpkin pie. One of the cards fell over and emitted a few tremulous notes of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” before lapsing into an embarrassed silence, like the kid in a choir who accidentally sings out on the upbeat.