Mariachi Meddler Page 4

  “He forgot to take his cell phone along, Liliana. But I wouldn’t worry about him. He probably had trouble with the transfer case.”

  “The what?”

  “An engine part. Something to do with the gears. He said it was rattling.”

  “But his car is almost new!”

  Rolando had a reliable Toyota he’d bought two years earlier, but I didn’t know if he could get parts for it in Mexico. “The traffic around here is hard on any car because we spend all our time stopping and starting.”

  “We are so worried!” continued Liliana. “Tomorrow I’m throwing a big party for him, and the baptism is the day after!” “I’m sure he’ll arrive in time.”

  “May I speak with Yiolanda? Perhaps my brother explained his plans to her.”

  “She’s not in yet.” I didn’t want to burden her with Yiolanda’s disappearance, so I assured Liliana that her brother would probably turn up that evening and made an excuse to get off the phone.

  Rolando’s road trip was the least of my problems. Noche Azul was the only mariachi restaurant in Squid Bay. The next closest was in Long Beach, where Las Cometas performed. Restaurants went belly up all the time, and though we had a good reputation, we also knew to protect it. “One bad meal spirals into hundreds of dollars of lost business,” Rolando told us any time things went wrong. “Word of mouth is more powerful than anything else. Never serve old food. Throw away wilting lettuce and five-day-old meat. And you,” he said, pointing to the musicians, “find substitutes to play if you can’t show up for work. We’re a mariachi restaurant. Even if the food gets cold, the music has to be top-rate.”

  Below I heard strains of El gusto, a lively song we often used during our first set. Since the others had started without me, I could afford to steal a few more free minutes. I dialed my brother’s house, catching him mid-dinner.

  “Would you mind playing for me at Noche Azul tomorrow night?” I waited while he swallowed.

  “If you’re planning a hot date with Stefani because you’ve decided to make up, I’ll owe my wife twenty dollars. I bet against it.”

  “It’s more desperate than that.” I explained about the money and Yiolanda’s sudden trip to provide filial care.

  “Don’t you remember Yiolanda’s mother from the wedding?” Joey asked me. “That woman is as strong as a safe. She’s too irritable to have health problems.”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation for why Yiolanda would dash out of town,” I said.

  “With Rolando out of the country, she probably went to Vegas for a few days to pal around with her friends.”

  “You’ve never liked her.”

  “She’s a flirt, but we both know that. Why do you need me to cover for you?”

  “I was thinking of buzzing up to Vegas.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “To see what Yiolanda’s up to. Rolando told me to keep an eye on her.”

  “You know damned well that’s not what he meant.”

  “Noche Azul is my life, Joey. If she’s trying to sabotage the restaurant, I have to know enough to stop her.”

  “We’ve been over this before. There are other restaurants.”

  “I’m happy with my life the way it is. I don’t want anything to change.”

  This too we’d been over. Sergio was moody, but customers liked him because he flirted indiscriminately with all of the women. Pablo was a buddy from high school who needed a way to get away from his accounting job, nagging wife, and two screaming kids. Hernando was an older player who couldn’t read music but knew almost all the songs. My mariachi band was as close to perfect as a bunch of musicians gets.

  Joey hesitated. “If you want me to play for you, I don’t mind, but don’t kid yourself into thinking Yiolanda cares about what happens to the restaurant one way or the other. And don’t be so worried about it. Rolando always lands on his feet.”

  I sat back and put my feet up on Rolando’s desk. “Maybe Yiolanda is in trouble. Maybe she got connected to Gutiérrez’ murder through no fault of her own, and now she needs help getting out of it.”

  Joey whistled. “Well, I guess we know who’s got her claws into you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Go do your good deed, or whatever it is. But keep in mind that Yiolanda merely told you guys she was going to Vegas. It’s anybody’s guess where she really went.”

  ***

  After work I drove to the Díaz condo. I rang the bell so many times that had Yiolanda been there, she would have opened the door to strangle me. Instead there was no response.

  I let myself into the foyer and took the elevator to Rolando’s floor. The corridor was empty. Cautiously I let myself into 62D. I’d been inside for parties, but now the space was dark and lonely. A light shone in the hall over four pairs of men’s shoes that were lined up like soldiers. No women’s shoes were in sight.

  Yiolanda had given the condo a modern look by choosing simply designed furniture with rounded lines. The living room was dominated by a TV set inside a metal entertainment center. A brown leather love seat and matching easy chairs surrounded it. Yiolanda’s housekeeping—no doubt she had help—was precise but cold. A newspaper, neatly folded, lay on an end table between the chairs.

  The computer had been awarded a corner of the room where it wouldn’t be too obtrusive. I assumed Rolando would have used the same password he did at the restaurant, “nazul,” and I was right. But I couldn’t find any information about Yiolanda’s trip, and I couldn’t find anything directly related to Yiolanda. The closest I could come was the list of websites last visited. Expedia was at the top.

  I continued to the kitchen, where a strong cleansing agent lingered in the air. I started my investigation with the refrigerator. The Swiss cheese, which I sampled, was fresh. There wasn’t much to go with it: mineral water, half a bottle of wine, a head of cabbage, and half a lemon. The Díaz refrigerator contained as little as mine did. I was glad I wasn’t hungry.

  The spare bedroom housed a single twin bed covered by a plaid bedspread and a small desk. I tried to open the top drawer, but a piece of junk mail, piled high atop its buddies, had wedged the drawer shut. Instead of wrestling with a piece of paper, I let it go.

  I paused by the door of the master bedroom aware I was intruding. There were no signs of recent packing or anything else. The marital bedroom contained the expected double bed and dual clothes closets. A hairbrush lay on a chair. Across from the window, a full-length mirror collected dust.

  Four strides took me to the bathroom, where a white marble counter complemented black walls. The floor was gray tile, but a chalky shag rug covered most of it. The counter displayed make-up compacts, tubes of lipstick, and an array of French perfumes in gold bottles. I picked one up. “Fragonard,” read the black letters. Underneath it said “Grasse,” and underneath that, “Arielle.” I uncapped the bottle and sniffed. With my eyes closed, I imagined Yiolanda.

  I returned to the bedroom, unsure what I hoped to find. When I sat on the bed that was too hard to be comfortable, I imagined Rolando and his wife lying side by side, sweating and not touching, breathing uneasily in the dark, hoping the other would fall asleep first.

  Nightstands graced either side of the bed. Rolando’s contained a shoehorn, some math figures for a proposed expansion of the restaurant’s kitchen, a box of tissues, and a couple of newspaper clippings from Mexico’s last performance in the World Cup.

  Yiolanda’s nightstand contained a variety of perfume bottles, mostly empty, several fancy lighters, and a dozen silk scarves. Sticking out from under the scarves was a birthday card postdated by the Las Vegas post office a few months earlier. A pink rose curled around the words “Dear Daughter.” Inside the message read: “Hope your 35th is fabulous.” Firm feminine handwriting had added another one: “Do try to visit this year.” The return address had been written by the same hand, 648 Sycamore Street, or maybe the “4” was a “9.”

  I kept d
igging. At the bottom of the drawer were four mariachi cassettes by an artist named Carlos Santiago. I examined each carefully. They’d been self-produced in Las Vegas. The photo of a proud ranchero adorned one of the covers. The man had the typical sombrero, mariachi traje, and big smile with huge white teeth. Another cassette pictured the same man on horseback. The third and fourth had no photos and were more crudely done. The song titles were standards, probably recorded cheaply with musipistas, pre-recorded music tracks. I couldn’t find a date, but I assumed the songs had been recorded at least a decade earlier.

  I’d never heard of Carlos Santiago and suspected that not many other people had either. He was probably another hopeful singer convinced that his angelic voice would be enough to wow the competition and win him a slot at a recording company. It happened over and over. Would-be stars gathered enough money to produce their own recordings, no matter how unprofessional, and went around trying to convince people to sign recording contracts. That wasn’t how it worked. You had to have backing from the start, and even then you had to have good luck and better timing. I’d been hired to play for a number of such recordings myself. The musicians and the engineers made good money, but the singers were always left with boxes of CDs they couldn’t sell and stalled careers.

  The man was handsome though, and I could easily picture Yiolanda cuddling up to him. She probably didn’t hate mariachi music. She hated a single mariachi musician because no matter what her own expectations for a relationship might have been, his dedication to ranchera music won out. Yiolanda wouldn’t have been able to get over the fact that anyone could give her up for the prospects of developing an artistic career.

  I was on my way out of the bedroom when I noticed a small wastepaper basket lined with a plastic bag. The bag had been emptied, but a Post-It stuck to the side. In small letters, Yiolanda had recorded flight numbers and flight times. I visited Expedia myself, and in a short time I found out what I most needed to know: California Air had a flight 67 that made a daily run to Vegas from John Wayne Airport.

  I wanted to call my brother immediately to tell him that my thoughts about Yiolanda were vindicated, that she really had gone to the gambling capital to visit her sick mother, but I knew he’d already be in his second REM cycle. I poked my way into a few more drawers, but I couldn’t find anything else important.

  For a while I sat in the empty living room trying to think where else to look for information. Then I remembered a trick Stefani had shown me. I picked up the phone and dialed *69 to trace the last call. I didn’t recognize the number, but I wrote it down. I took special note of the prefix. 702. Nevada.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Strip unfolded beside me as the plane touched down. The city was a diamond in the rough: gorgeous hotels roped together by jealousies and rivalries and the illusion of the rich versus the reality of the working class.

  I knew that gap because I’d lived in it. My first music job had been a summer’s internship fiddling in the country band at White Flowers. The job was so easy it was boring. Every night we played the same songs for fake giants who crooned through favorite tunes. The pay was embarrassingly low, but at the time I took the job, I wanted to get away from home, and the experience gave me the confidence I needed to sneak my way into Rolando’s group. I remembered the city fondly; tourists afraid to approach pseudo-stars were happy enough to spend after-hours with musicians. I left at the end of the summer only because Joey and I had agreed to start college at the same time. I’d been back to Vegas infrequently over the years, but the city hadn’t changed enough in spirit for me to feel I’d lost contact with it.

  From the airport I rented a car and drove downtown. I turned east on Bonanza and proceeded to a small hotel named Maypole. The proprietor and his wife were thrilled to see their old tenant, greeting me with the usual “Why haven’t you been back?” and “It’s so nice to see you” routines. I appreciated their attention as well as the offer of a cheap room. It was with great difficulty that I persuaded them that instead of joining them for lunch, I was in Vegas on business and needed to make the most of my time.

  After asking repeated instructions and heading in the wrong direction twice, I located 648 Sycamore Street, which was past Angel Park on the far west side of town. The red-tiled roof and white walls suggested the Mediterranean. The recent coat of paint and clean welcome mat said the house was well kept, and its location in a cozy part of town granted the owner the right to feel smug about it. I knew Yiolanda had family money. I didn’t know how much.

  As I approached, a teenage girl arrived at the door ahead of me. Worn clothes said she wasn’t one of the family. “Excuse me, do you work for Mrs. Contreras?”

  She nodded as if I’d asked her to divulge an embarrassing secret. “Is she feeling any better?”

  The girl looked at me as if I weren’t quite right. I repeated more slowly, assuming she was from another country and hadn’t yet learned English

  “Mrs. Contreras is never sick.” The accent suggested Eastern Europe. “She’ll be home from her walk by now. If you’d like to talk to her, I’ll take you in.”

  “Thanks.” I consulted my watch as an escape artist for whom seconds meant life or death. “I better hurry to my next appointment, but I’ll come back later.”

  “All right.”

  “Has Yiolanda gotten back to town yet?” The girl stared blankly.

  “Have you met Mrs. Contreras’s daughter?”

  “She has a daughter?”

  “Thanks.” I turned and walked away.

  The girl seemed too ingenuous to be concealing anything, so I was back to square one. Yiolanda was in the city, but I had no way to find her. I walked around the block checking out the richly watered, environmentally unfriendly lawns, trying to think of a reasonable pretense for speaking with Mrs. Contreras. I could say I was a friend of Yiolanda’s and that she’d asked me to stop and greet her mother, or I could pretend I was an old friend who had lost track of Yiolanda and wondered if I might leave a message. Neither option felt right.

  ***

  In the early evening I picked up a newspaper and strolled through The Venetian, the hotel that was the social hub of the faux-European jet set. I stopped at one of the cafés. A few of the wrought-iron tables were full, but it was too soon after lunch for fashionable visitors to have coffee and too early for famous people-spotting; in other words, it was a perfect time of day.

  Frustrated by the morning’s dead end, I opened the paper to distract myself. Record highs were expected for the week. The university students were angry over tuition hikes. The city council’s deliberations on widening the freeway were inconclusive. Boring.

  Page three. “A man was found dead last night behind Bell School Park.” I knew national murder rates were down from previous years, but the same rates skyrocketed over the summers. When a city steamed for days on end, and in Vegas such stretches were expected, people got restless in funny ways.

  The photo showed a body lying on the pavement with a chorus of sleepy neighbors peering over it. The shot was taken around dawn, and the people surrounding the body were voyeurs, wondering what had happened across the street from their perfect suburban houses without their knowing it.

  One of the female bystanders was obscured by a man who towered over everyone else in the picture. On first glance, I told myself I was crazy. After another I was convinced: the proud sliver of cheek, frightened eye, and strands of wavy hair were Yiolanda’s.

  I slapped the paper shut as if a busybody behind me were reading over my shoulder. Cautiously, hoping the images might change, I re-opened it and read: Chester Mathews suffered a single bullet through the chest this morning sometime between two and five a.m. The male dancer employed at Dazzle! Dazzle! was known to have lots of acquaintances, but so far authorities have no satisfactory explanations for his untimely demise. There were no eyewitnesses.

  The time of the murder was perfect—too late for night owls, too extreme for early-risers.

 
I knocked over my glass with my elbow, and the remains of my frappé dripped off the table and onto the tile. Before I could find a napkin, the waiter came over with a rag. In practiced movements he dabbed the table and erased the puddle at my feet.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem.” He nodded politely and started to walk off.

  “Say, did you read about that murder over by Bell School Park?”

  The waiter returned. “Sure. It’s the same damned thing as happened the night before.”

  “Oh?”

  “The article didn’t mention about that. Maybe they want us to forget already, but it happened not ten minutes from here over near Plaza Mall.” The waiter pointed, trying to remember which direction east was.

  “Two in two days?”

  “Do you want to see the article? Maybe we didn’t throw it away.” The waiter, who introduced himself as Phil, brought the news clipping. We poured over it together. The profile was similar: another man found near dawn with a bullet in his chest. The police had identified him as Stephen Leonard, a resident of Henderson, twenty miles down the road. He was survived by a wife and a ten-year-old son. He and his brother owned Hotel Farfalla, a small venue in downtown Las Vegas. A head shot such as the kind used for official documents accompanied the article.

  The only other customers were deep in conversation, so Phil accepted my invitation to sit down.

  “You know what I think?” he asked. “Every day it gets a little worse. My son is seven years old. By the time he finishes middle school—who knows! As it is, I should carry a knife so that I can get through the parking lot after my shift. Maybe I’ll ask to work mornings.” He pointed to the photo. “Mathews was a dancer. I guess he didn’t have angel wings to go along with prancing feet.”

  “The police didn’t find any connections between these two men?”

  “Maybe they were lovers. And you know how it is these days. People swap around without thinking about it.”