by Pat Nolan
Chapter Thirty Six
RESPECT
The bullet had gone through my left shoulder. They said it was just a flesh wound and that I was lucky. All the same, there was an ugly dimple where the bullet had gone in and a purple raisin-like scar where it had come out. On the right side of my face where Rhonda had pistol whipped me, a small tear shaped scar hung just below the cheekbone. My surgeon recommended plastic surgery. I said I’d think about it. I was chipped porcelain. I kind of liked the idea. It took about a month for the pain in my shoulder to cool down enough for me to resume my daily jogs. I was living in a rental in Feather but still running in the old Primrose Lane neighborhood while I had the cabin rebuilt. The insurance would pay for it.
After the cops had tracked Timmy down, he implicated the Montague crew in the arson and extortion of the small wineries in Corkscrew County. He was held responsible for the conflagration that ate up an entire block of greater downtown Timberton. The Antique Store & Motorcycle Repair Shop, and the Grapevine office upstairs, the abandoned gift shop next door to the real estate office, all pretty much gone. Rhonda did not survive the blaze, the shotgun blast having done most of the job. Blackie made it out alive but just barely. Rhonda’s shot had pierced his right lung. That was the least of his problems. The stomping Timmy had given him put him in a wheelchair, maybe for good.
In the days following my release from the hospital, I was the center of a media storm. I’d been there before. This time was different in that it involved arson, extortion, murder, an international sex trafficking ring, and money laundering, not my usual outrageous prima donna shenanigans. I was camera candy on a daily basis for a couple of weeks. It was like the old days in Milan. I couldn’t go anywhere without being accosted by the strobe of camera flashes. Then someone else’s high jinks, this time in DC, took over the headlines.
I learned that State and local authorities had been investigating Tommy Perro’s operation for some time before Fashwalla’s murder. The feds had been brought in once the scope of the operation was realized. The murder in Feather had been the wild card that turned things around. Up until then Ramparts Corp had kept their illegal business within the bounds of criminal decorum that could easily be overlooked by bribing local officials. One of them was the District Attorney, Chandler Wong’s boss, the leering racist letch I’d met in the hallway at the Hall of Justice last winter. Some of the information I gleaned from the Daily Republican, some of it Detective Rick Santos let slip when he visited me in the hospital in the course of his investigation. After he was done asking his questions, he’d given me a wry smile and teased, “What’s it with you and shotguns, Malone?” Chandler Wong provided me with most of the details over dinner one evening not long after I got out of the hospital.
With the first killing, the investigators had realized there were more players than they had originally figured. They never caught on that Rhonda was the controlling hand behind the scene. As an aging porn queen, she had never even come up on their radar. As a result of the police raid at the Winery, Tommy Perro, who survived his heart attack and would be recuperating in a federal penitentiary hospital, was arrested along with Junior and charged on a number of racketeering counts. Timmy was facing murder, manslaughter, and attempted murder raps. I had inquired after Preston Carmichael. Chandler said that when they converged on the warehouse that night they found only the old man, young Tommy, and some of their staff. There were no dead bodies, of either Preston Carmichael or a Doberman pinscher.
I wondered what had become of the women I had seen being auctioned off like livestock. Chandler explained that they found nine young women in a makeshift dorm at the warehouse. Most of them were country girls who had been lured by ads placed in freebie advertisers by phony modeling agencies. Once in the clutches of the white slavers, they were drugged and held virtual prisoners. They’d been released in the care of a halfway house for abused women in Santa Quinta. A few were foreign nationals and would eventually be repatriated. Chandler said that if it hadn’t been for me, they’d probably still be prisoners. The medical emergency had provided the ideal pretext to stage the raid on Montague Winery.
I was also trying to make sense of what had happened at The Mint. The killing of Timmy’s bearded partner, Bruno ‘Bear’ Fitzwaller, in Alice Franklin’s bedroom had investigators scratching their heads. I had told Detective Santos in my original interview that the dead man was one of the men in the gray van. I didn’t know then that he was a thug tied to Timmy Montague and Montague Winery. Once I identified Timmy as the other man in the van, they were able to piece together a plausible scenario. It centered on Ramparts Corp’s voracious appetite for acquiring property as a means to launder their ill-gotten gains.
From the statements Timmy made in his confession, it appeared that Rhonda had been negotiating with Alice Franklin to sell the family resort. Although Alice had agreed to a deal at first, she had a change of heart, claiming she had a nephew who might be interested in keeping the business in the family. Fashwalla and his brother had made a similar mistake in accepting an offer from Ramparts Corp and reneging on the deal. In that instance, Ralph Fashwalla wanted to hold out for more money. He got a shotgun blast in the back for his greed, and his brother, in fear of his own life, cut a deal with the murderers. Faheed Fashwalla confessing to his brother’s murder and later recanting was a ruse dreamed up by Preston Carmichael to throw the investigators off the scent.
In Alice Franklin’s case, an enraged Rhonda had instructed Timmy to do whatever it took to get Alice out of the picture. Ramparts Corp would then grab up the last resort on the Corkscrew River for next to nothing. It was well known that Alice was in financial trouble exacerbated by a drinking problem. She needed money to keep the Mint open, and having fallen in with dubious company in the persons of Timmy and his partner, Bear, she was persuaded that the money they made from a risqué movie would pay off her mounting debts. Timmy denied any involvement in his partner’s death in spite of the fact that his fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. Even more damning was evidence that it was the same shotgun used to kill Fashwalla. The investigators also found a video tape in a search of Timmy’s apartment at Montague Winery. The tape confirmed that Alice and Bear engaged in perfunctory sex play. The video also showed Alice shrinking back with a mixture of surprise and fear as Bear advanced with shotgun in hand. Bear then stopped as if something had distracted him and, with an angry frown, glared off camera. The video stopped at that point indicating the camera had been turned off. Confronted with the evidence on the tape, Timmy admitted that once Bear had his way with Alice, he meant to kill her. The investigation concluded that Alice Franklin had turned the tables on them and acted in self-defense. What or who had distracted the killers and why the filming had stopped was an unresolved detail that would not hinder the DA from adding conspiracy to murder to Timmy’s growing list of criminal charges.
I got a slightly different version of what had gone down from Blackie when I visited him at the rehab facility in Santa Quinta. In the account Blackie had given the cops, he placed himself arriving after the gun had gone off.
He told me how he had walked in on the setup that night. Alice had been a friend of his and Arlene’s since their early days in Corkscrew County, and he had gone by to say hello and thank her for letting him use the dumpster. He’d called out her name walking up the steps to her room, not wanting to take her by surprise. To his own surprise, when he came to the doorway of the bedroom, he spied a naked man and a naked Alice struggling for a shotgun. He yelled something, more to distract the man than anything else. He was about to jump into the fray when Timmy, whom he had not seen at first, shouldered past him and knocked him back out into the hallway. He had first thought to go after Timmy but instantly realized that Alice was in more danger so he went back into the bedroom where the naked pair had now fallen across the bed in their struggle for the shotgun. He planted a boot in the big man’s kidney and it was enough to get him to release his hold on the weapon. Then the gun went off hitting Bear square in the chest. He didn’t think that Alice had intentionally pulled the trigger. Alice, once she saw what she had done, was inconsolable. It had tipped her already fragile mental state into the abyss of psychosis. About then was when I arrived with Rikki and Wallace to find Blackie dialing for help.
I was concerned for Blackie. His business had gone up in flames, and he had been critically injured. His future was uncertain. It must have shown on my face.
“Hey, at least I still got wheels,” he had joked halfheartedly from his wheelchair. I figured that it would be a good idea if I looked in on him every once in a while.
There were still pieces of the puzzle of what had occurred over the last year that I needed to fit together for myself. The dog murders were resolved when it was revealed that Timmy Montague was an animal sadist. He had bragged to a cellmate that he liked to cruise residential neighborhoods and shoot dogs that had the nerve to chase his van.
The mystery of the burnt-out van itself and the charred bodies it contained remained unsolved. My intuition notwithstanding, the autopsy determined that both victims were males and yet to be identified. Timmy and Bear undoubtedly had a hand in the grisly ruse. The investigation, according to the Sheriff’s Office, was ongoing.
The Grapevine, Corkscrew County’s last independent newspaper, was put out of business by the fire. JJ wasn’t too broken up by it, though. She’d met an antique dealer at the fashion show, someone who had gone to high school with her, though she had to admit she didn’t exactly remember him. He’d been in the class ahead of her. Or behind her. Not that it mattered. He lived in Arizona and was quite wealthy.
Meanwhile back at the resort, Rikki and Wallace had come up with the idea of buying The Mint from Alice Franklin. They planned to renovate it, with the help of Nathan Thiele, and make it into an exclusive resort for their same preference friends.
And there was my step-father’s involvement with Rhonda and her money laundering schemes. Just the thought of it gnawed at my gut like a festering ulcer, and I knew I would have to get to the bottom of it, if for no other reason than my own sanity.
What caught my attention was the small tattoo on the inside of her bicep, a V bisected by a line, the Aeolian Greek letter psi. I knew that symbol well. It belonged to SAPHO.
Marty Steele, the little mannequin TV news reporter at KSQU, offered me a job as a news anchor. I told him I’d think about it. I was being deluged with similar offers. News shows and talk shows clamored for my presence on their tiny screens. I felt like telling them I was too big to fit in such a small space, but I kept it to myself. My old agency was desperate to get me back even though they had hung me out to dry in the waning days of my career. I wasn’t all that interested in any of it. I liked who I had become in the anonymity of the tiny river community. I took the calls from my friends who expressed their concerns and envy that even out in the middle of nowhere I still had the ability to draw the world’s attention. My answer to them: “some of us have it and some of us don’t.” I gave a tentative yes to Marilyn Nakamura, an old runway mate who was starting a line of yoga togs and wanted me to model them for her catalog. I’d never been a catalog model before. At one time I might have considered it beneath me. These days it was simply something I could do for an old friend and that was enough. And I patiently fielded the calls from my mother who was beside herself with what she called my reckless lifestyle. They usually came in the evening, around dinner time, like calls from pollsters or aluminum siding salesmen. My patience wore thin after about a week of tipsy dialing. Finally I told her that I was in the driver’s seat of my life and if I took the curves a little fast and tight, that was my worry.
I had one more piece of business to attend to. I wanted to personally thank the woman who had pulled me from the burning building that night. I had come to on a stretcher being loaded into the back of an ambulance to see May Ann Young, the County fire investigator, peering at my face, brow furrowed in distress. Her face smudged with soot, she had put her hand on mine and smiled when she saw that I recognized her. I managed a weak stretch of lips myself.
May Ann retired from her position with the County before I had a chance to properly thank her. If she left a forwarding address, I wasn’t privy to it. I did get the opportunity to view the investigative report she filed in which she admitted that she had mistakenly assumed I had deliberately set fire to my cabin for the purpose of collecting on the insurance. When she reviewed the timeline and the witness statements, Rhonda’s appeared inconsistent. Determining that Rhonda’s story would require further inquiry, she had driven out to the Primrose Lane address just in time to see the old woman put something that looked like a rifle or shotgun in the trunk of her car and speed off followed by a man on a motorcycle. Her suspicions aroused, she set off to follow them but was called away by emergency radio traffic of a vehicle into a power pole. Since she was the closest County unit, she responded. The accident was responsible for knocking out the power to Timberton and the surrounding area. Once the scene was secured, she continued her search for Rhonda, ending up in Timberton just about the time the power came back on. She was on the road out of town when she heard the radio traffic reporting shots fired in the vicinity. By the time she reached the motorcycle repair shop, it was fully engulfed. She called the fire in to dispatch and went to investigate. When she approached the rear of the building she saw two motorcycles and Rhonda’s Coupe Deville. And Timmy running off down the alley. Peering into the smoke choked open doorway, she spotted the bodies and took it upon herself to pull them to safety, first me and then Blackie.
Her uniform shirt sleeve had been ripped up past the elbow, a gauze bandage soaking blood from the wound on her forearm. She had been injured going back into the burning building after Blackie. What caught my attention was the small tattoo on the inside of her bicep, a V bisected by a line, the Aeolian Greek letter psi. I knew that symbol well. It belonged to SAPHO.
I put my right running shoe on the front bumper of my Volvo and tightened the laces and then did the same with my left. I would attend to everything I could all in good time. But first I was itching to run. I inhaled deeply, the cool of early morning autumn air filling my lungs. This was my favorite time of the year, the deciduous trees on the verge of turning to a riot of reds and yellows. With a water bottle strapped to one hip and a tiny cassette player on the other, I ran in place, adjusting the earphones on my head. I pressed play and grinned as Aretha’s voice sang “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. My feet beat the asphalt as I propelled myself down Primrose Lane. Was there ever any doubt? I rock!
Apollinara woke Paulita after midnight. When her husband had not returned by nightfall, her full fear had come to the fore. She could not just sit and do nothing. She set about hitching Old Jupiter to the buckboard. Then, leaving the younger children in the care of their Navajo cook, she and Paulita, wrapped in blankets against the blistering cold of the predawn mesa, set off down into the pitch-black canyon.
It took them hours to finally arrive at Swanson’s in Organ, old Jupe familiarly picking out the trail but slowly against Apollinara’s tight rein. Her eyes had searched the dark for any sign of her husband although she was certain that she would not find him there. She murmured prayers all the while.
The front door opened and Swanson’s wife, Lou, came out onto the porch. “What is it, Polly? I thought he was off the firewater. Don’t tell me he’s on another one of his jags. I don’t envy you, dear. Come on inside, I’m just about to start breakfast.” She helped Apollinara down from the buckboard. “Don’t worry, one of his chums has probably got him over to the boarding house to let him sleep it off.” She put her arm around Apollinara and led her inside.
The old man found the matches inside his hatband. His hand had fished out a fresh cigar from the inside pocket of his coat. The match head flared with the flick of his thumbnail and was quickly brought up to the tube of tobacco. Soon puffs of smoke drifted out from under the brim of his dark sombrero. 
The old man reflected in a cloud of smoke. He had watched the whole affair develop in the pages of the El Paso newspaper, too. He had been living in Uvalde then. Apparently Jennings was in possession of evidence that Curly O’Lea, the Sacramento Mountain rancher, and his Dog Canyon bunch were stealing cattle, and had filed charges against him. But it was all politics. O’Lea had aligned himself with a Democrat, Abe Falk, and by going after O’Lea, Jennings was hoping to embarrass Falk and his Messila Democrats. Ash and he had spent many an hour discussing the moves the politicians were making in their bid for power in the Southwest. Ash had foreseen Jennings’ disappearance. “He who lives by the ballot dies by the bullet,” he had cynicized. One way or the other, they had both agreed, Jennings was up against two formidable opponents. Falk was a brilliant lawyer, and O’Lea, a ruthless cattleman.
He had been an honest man all his life. He had lived by the laws he enforced. That was something he understood and which was understood about him. Given the job, he would execute it with efficiency and integrity. 
“Certainly. I read all about the desperate goings-on that took place there. Cattle rustling, counterfeiting, gunplay, murders, The Lincoln County War, Billy, the Kid.”
—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe 
Deep in the redwood wilds along the Corkscrew River, someone is shooting neighborhood dogs. The year is 1985 and Lee Malone, former fashion model, queen of the runways from Paris to Milan, once dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world, now a part-time reporter for The Corkscrew County Grapevine, is looking for a story to sink her teeth into. When Lee finds the owner of Kelly’s Seaside Resort brutally murdered, it leads her on an adventure that includes a mysterious gray van, another murder, extortion, pornography, sex slavery, and a shadowy organization of militant feminists known as SAPHO. In the process, Lee Malone’s notorious past catches up with her. 
of comrades, we called ourselves the “red kerchief” because that was our uniform, a red kerchief around our necks. When the war came I return to Salonika. My mother was a school teacher and belong to a political party prohibited by the metaxfascist government. The secret police arrest everyone in connection and steal their property. The Black Hand gangsters firebomb our place of worship and kidnap those of our faith for ransom. My mother was torture until death. My father escape to Istanbul on a Black Sea freighter and with help of compatriots come to America. I stay behind to be with my mother and help hide refugees until she is arrested and I hear she is dead. I have to flee because the secret police wishes to arrest me, too. I catch fishing boat across to island of Lesbos, and then to Anatolya where I ride many bus lorry wagon for many days to reach Beirut where after a long wait I am able to catch ship to come to this city and find my father who has joined with Herr Doktor Soloman and his refugee organization and where I can get new papers to say who I am and why we must fight for the revolution and overthrow the oligarchy!”
I stink, I’ve been told that many times, mainly by dames, and for entirely different reasons. This time I was looking at the evidence that I did and trying not to add to it with something coming up my throat. I set the package on the washbasin and slowly ran water over the sticky stinking muck. They were two well-formed specimens. I began separating them with a pencil tip. Most of it washed away as a disgusting brown slurry and I almost lost it down the drain and had to stop up the hole with my thumb while my other hand carefully separated the tiny chunk of gravel to one side of the basin and onto a dry section of the newspaper. I held the pebble under the faucet and let the slow stream wash the dirt away. It still looked a bit of grit but now that I knew what it was it was more than that. Slipping it into my vest pocket, I ran water over my hands washing off the crap and scrubbing my fingers with the bar of lye soap on the shelf next to the can of Drano. No matter how many times I put my nose to them, the stink lingered around my sparkling cuticles. I dumped the newspaper and the remains into the commode and after slipping into my suspenders, strode out into the hallway and back into the tailor’s shop.
“I plan get as far away as possible from the cops and this little beauty is my ticket out of here. I just got a little bit of unfinished business to take care of and I’m gone.”
I just wanted to curl up somewhere warm, soft, safe and quiet. Instead I was on the back of a noisy chopper with a gale force wind blowing through my skimpy blouse and up my long skirt. And I was on the down slide, the price I had to pay for my extraordinary power. I’d been there before, guided through my initiation by Trayann, and allowed to right my tumbled world before the blazing hearth of her stone hut with a bowl of herb tea, listening to the murmured litany that would help ease me out of the depths of my autism.
shotgun. The blast hit Rhonda on the left side just as she got off a round striking Blackie in the back. She was thrown backwards, taking the oil lamp with her. It shattered on the concrete floor sending flaming oil in all directions. Timmy’s legs were pinned under the weight of Blackie’s body.
Men in suits suddenly appeared on the platform with the frantic looks of having just missed the train. From the window I watched them scamper to the brink of the tracks as it accelerated out of the station. The car was empty except for a blind man slumped forward, propped up by his white cane, at the other end by the door leading to the next car. I sat facing Becky on the seat across from me, keeping an eye on the door leading into the rest of the train. It was the downtown local because that was the direction of the one room apartment I hadn’t been back to for over a week. It seemed like the obvious place to head. Except. What if Kovic’s goons or the goons in blue had my place staked out? The Y happened to be downtown, too, and the thought crossed my mind that for two bits a night I could hole up there for a while. But then Rebecca’s old man had his used clothing store practically across the street.
With barely a hint of nonchalance they sauntered down the aisle to where we were sitting. Beanie, flanked by string bean and bowtie, took the toothpick out of his mouth and pointed it at me. “Well if it ain’t grandma and little red riding hood. You’ll never guess who we are.”
Rebecca didn’t have a key. She was going to have to wake up the super. She had me wait in a dark doorway of a shop further down where had anyone seen me in my overcoat and bare legs would have called the cops to report a flasher. When the light inside the shop blink on and off I would know to come to the door and she would let me in.
Apollinara gnawed her lower lip, hands clasped over the small Bible resting on top of the yarn basket in her lap. She stopped rocking and went over the scene of her husband’s departure again.
The old man watched the smoke rise from his cigar. Whenever he thought of Indians, the pile of moccasins he had dumped at Pete Maxwell’s feet came to mind.
Whenever Shelton would take his hat off, his thin red hair stood straight up like the flame on the tip of a Lucifer. 
Skinner was a dirty job by any standards. Thinking back, the kid didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Or had he got the kid into it? 
business. Out on the range it was just you, your knife, and the carcass. The hunters would be scouting the river bottoms and the only way you could keep track of them was to remember the direction of the sound of their rifle fire. The kid hadn’t picked up the skills as quickly as he had anticipated and often times someone from the party would have to go out and find him, lost among the bluffs, wandering in circles. Shelton said he prayed for some Comanche to lift his scalp and put the poor bastard out of his misery.
He had lost just about everything he had ever had. He was tired of losing. This snoozer, this goat-boy, would not prevail, no matter what the court had decided. He would not lose this one.
He coughed a dry cough and it reminded him of Ash. Ash was perhaps his greatest loss. He had grown to depend on Ash’s humor and irascibility to balance the grimness of his own turn of mind. He valued his old friend’s rather exaggerated view of life, how the boring and dull events of every day were the foundations of what he liked to call ‘myth.” He could remember how all his petty little worries would disappear after he and Ash had spent time jawing and sipping, sipping and jawing. He was also reminded of how dimly Polly viewed this pastime, and how Ash, a regular Sunday dinner guest when they lived in Roswell, had to endure her steely glares. “Ash and his ideas,” she would mutter after his friend had fallen asleep in the old wing-backed chair in front of the fireplace. When Ash was dying, though, she had prepared the extra room at the Uvalde ranch for him, and had seen to his every comfort. Ash’s death was a slow one. His liver was going, but despite the pain, he still liked to spin a good yarn.
I had been standing on the balcony off the mezzanine of the faux castle admiring the view and accepting that I would soon be bathed in a chemical stew altering my perception with heightened awareness. Already the edges of the landscape had become noticeably vibrant. The live oaks shimmered with golden intensity as day waned. In the distance I made out a metal sided warehouse encircled by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and, barely visible just above the roofline, the gridded arc of a satellite dish. I had seen a similar one at the Prince’s chateau outside Paris. Again my curiosity led me down the speculative path. Why would a warehouse have a satellite dish and be surrounded by such a barbed wire perimeter? Why were limousines arriving with what appeared to be a scheduled regularity and its occupants ushered, not into the charity event in the castle, but into the warehouse? Why were they all men? I imagined Tommy Perro alias Tommy Montague holding a high stakes poker game to recoup his contribution to charity.
I watched from the wings as old Tommy was positioned in his wheelchair at the foot of the runway. Tommy Junior came up and glowered at me. He yanked the front of my blouse down to expose my breasts. “Let them see what they’re getting for their money.”
Dime Pulp 