Marcia Muller: Burn Out

I motioned her in from the cold. “Ramon asked me to drop him off in town, and that he’d call you for a ride home. He had to break the news to Miri.”

“He go to her house?”

“Yes, he had me drive him there, but-”

“She was off someplace, or passed out drunk.”

“That’s what he thought.”

“Well, I’ve tried calling Miri’s. No answer there.”

“Last I saw him, he was going to look for her in the bars.”

“May I use your phone?”

“Sure.” I motioned toward it, went to pour her a cup of coffee.

“Bob?” she said into the phone. “Sara. Did my man come in there last night looking for his miserable sister?… Yeah… Right, about what time?… Thanks, Bob, I appreciate it.”

To me she said, “He went to Zelda’s, Miri hadn’t been in.” Sara dialed again and left a message on a machine. Made another call. “Jenny, it’s Sara. Did Ramon…? Right. She wasn’t… I see… Will you call me if… Thanks.”

She turned to me, took the cup of coffee I held out. “Those’re the only bars in Vernon,” she said, “and the one where I got the machine has eighty-sixed Miri so many times she’d never go there. Ramon was at the other two a little after midnight, asking for her. She hadn’t been in.”

“Maybe he went back to Miri’s and found her there.”

“And now nobody’s answering the phone?”

“That is strange. You should go down there.”

Sara shook her head, her braid switching from side to side. “I can’t. The last time I tried to reach out to Miri, she threatened me with her shotgun, said she’d kill me if I ever came near the place again. Now, with Hayley dead, she’ll be ready to take on the world. Will you go for me?”

No, a thousand times no.

Sara’s dark eyes pleaded with me.

Please don’t suck me into this.. ..

“I don’t have anybody else to ask,” she said. “None of our other friends want anything to do with Miri.”

She looked so alone. If I could bring Ramon back to her…

“I’ll go,” I said, “and call to tell you what I find out.”

Before I left the ranch house, Ted phoned. After he gave me his daily report he asked, “Any idea when you’re coming back to the city?”

“No. Why?”

“We miss you. The place isn’t the same without you.”

And I wasn’t the same without it. But I wasn’t the same when I was there, either.

“Shar?”

“I’m here.”

“Look, we’re doing what we can to hold this agency together, but we need you.”

“The agency seems to be doing fine without me.”

Long pause. “You sound so… cold.”

I supposed I did. A frozen shell around my emotions was the best way to distance myself from the people I’d known and cared for all these years.

“I’m sorry, Ted. I’m… preoccupied this morning, that’s all.”

“Shar, this is me you’re talking to. Ted, from the old days at All Souls.”

The poverty law cooperative where we used to work, he as secretary and me as staff investigator. When I’d first met him he’d been sitting with his bare feet propped on his desk, working a New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. Those had been good years: filled with camaraderie, poker and Monopoly games in the off hours, and long soul-baring discussions late into the night as we sat around the big oak table in the kitchen of All Souls’ Bernal Heights Victorian. Since the co-op had been dissolved and I’d formed my own agency-taking Ted and Mick with me-the camaraderie had continued and enlarged to embrace new people. But these days we were so caught up with a huge caseload and an upscale image-to say nothing of large earning power-that much of the excitement and closeness had bled away.

I said, “I know who I’m talking to, Ted.”

“Then really talk. Tell me what’s going on with you. Maybe I can help.”

Tears stung my eyes, as they had all too often over the past months.

“I can’t do that now,” I said. “There’s someplace I have to be.”

Hy’s comment about it being Halloween had made me wonder how the locals celebrated. As I drove into town I noticed jack-o’-lanterns on nearly every doorstep. Several bales of hay had been trucked into the Food Mart’s parking lot, and beside them stood a scarecrow. Big deal in a small town. The decorations must’ve been there days before, but I hadn’t been attuned to the holiday.

As I hadn’t been attuned to so many things.

I turned onto Miri Perez’s street and drove along, bouncing in and out of potholes, to her small gray house. The yard was fenced with chain link, its browned grass littered with takeout containers, soda and beer bottles; an old rusted bicycle that was missing its front wheel lay on its side under a juniper bush. No vehicles out front or in the driveway. As I went up the walk to the concrete stoop, I heard nothing.

I knocked on the door, waited. Knocked again, called out to Mrs. Perez and Ramon. No response.

The windows to either side of the door had their blinds drawn. I went along the driveway, noting that the windows there were too high to see through without a ladder. The backyard was the same as the front: browned grass, dead plants, more litter. A decrepit swing set sat near the rear fence.

The windows here were also covered by blinds. Another concrete stoop led to a back door. I climbed it, looked through the single pane. Straight ahead were an old refrigerator and a counter, to the right an archway.

I reached for the doorknob, pulled my hand away.

Don’t do it, McCone.

But Ramon and Miri have gone missing, and Sara asked me-

Don’t do it!

Holding fast to my new resolve, I didn’t.

It was noon, time for the watering holes to open their doors. I decided to stop in at the bar on whose answering machine Sara had left a message. Hobo’s was your typical tavern, the kind I’d visited over and over in the course of my investigations. At night it would be dimly lighted and its scars wouldn’t show; by day the shabby booths and chairs and tables and banged-up walls were more obvious. Three old men hunched at the long bar, staring up at a TV that was broadcasting a replay of last weekend’s Forty-Niners game. The bartender-white-haired, with a thick beard and a large gut-was setting out bowls of popcorn.

As I took a stool at the bar, I thought of all the hours I’d wasted seeking information in such establishments.

“Help you, ma’am?”

“Maybe. Sara Perez sent me.”

“Oh, yeah, I haven’t got around to returning her call.” The man picked up a rag and began wiping the surface in front of me.

He added, “Reason I’ve been putting it off is that I had an ugly scene with Miri Perez in here last night, and then this morning I heard the news about Hayley from one of my delivery drivers.”

“Did you know her?”

“Hayley? Not really. She was just one of the kids who would come in to drag their drunken parents home. She ran away before she even finished high school.”

“What kind of ugly scene did you have with Miri?”

He frowned at me. “You a friend of the Perez family?”

“Ramon’s the manager on my husband’s and my ranch.”

“You’re Hy Ripinsky’s wife.”

“Right.”

“Well, then.” He leaned forward on the bar, lowering his voice and glancing at the patrons. They were absorbed in watching a ’Niners pass completion. “Miri came in last night about nine-thirty. I’d permanently eighty-sixed her a year ago, on account of she’s a problem drunk. But she was sober and behaving herself so I let her stay. My mistake.”

“What happened?”

“She was alone when she came in, but Miri’s never alone for long. Not because she’s particularly attractive-not any more, anyway-but because she has this reputation.” He stopped, probably abashed at having said that much to a friend of Ramon and Sara.