Tasha DuShay showed off her curves and sang the blues every Friday and Saturday night at The Powder Room. She was known for covering Sinatra tunes, and finished every show with an encore of You Made Me Love You and a strip routine that left no doubt she was a he. She was perfect for the role of LaMonte. No bank teller would pay attention to the signature on the withdrawal card, but somebody might look closer.
“I’ve got the dame if you’ve got the name,” Draper said as he handed over the grand. It was nine o’clock and Nick needed a shower. “She’s in the hallway.”
“Let me piss and wash up.” He stumbled to the bathroom, wiped his pits, rinsed his face, and brushed his teeth. One look in the mirror at his three-day stubble and he knew this was not going to go well. One look at Tasha and he knew Draper was going to blow it. “You ever talk to LaMonte or see her up close?” he said when it was Tasha’s turn to tinkle.
“No. But, what the hell?”
“She had class. DuShay looks like a stripper.”
“She is a stripper.”
“Let’s hope she can forge a signature.” Nick opened LaMonte’s file and showed Draper a name written with a feminine flourish. “LaMonte was lean and lovely with creamy, dreamy skin. The kind you want to touch. And her voice was melodious.”
“Tasha’s a singer.”
“Sure. Get her in costume and have her practice signing. Meet me here in an hour and we’ll all go to the bank. Don’t think about cheatin’ me, Draper, or you and your friend’ll wind up in jail.” He went to the YMCA on Broadway for a shower, and was back in his office in half an hour. Marelli was waiting for him with a lean and lovely search warrant. “I told you, I don’t know a thing about Carmen LaMonte. Go ahead, search all you want.”
“What about Sean Logan?”
“Who?”
“A.k.a. Tasha Dushay?”
“Nope. You’re wearing your somebody’s been whacked look. Is she alright?”
“Only if you think dead is alright. You know anything about this?” Marelli showed him a wrinkled piece of paper in a plastic cover: a bank withdrawal slip.
“I know I need a lawyer.” He called Que, who told him to dummy up pronto.
In Marelli’s office they sat eyeballing each other as they waited for Que. “Okay, if you won’t talk, maybe you’ll listen. Whoever got Sean Logan-Dushay to pose as LaMonte probably offed ‘em both. He’s got half a mil in his pocket but that don’t mean he ain’t comin’ after whoever can ID him.” Marelli tossed an envelope his way, and it held the grand Nick got from Draper-Sanchez. “Broke as you are, I figure somebody paid you for work you ain’t ‘sposed to be doing.” Nick folded his hands in his lap and sighed. Marelli sighed louder and longer. “Get the hell outta here, Cavanaugh. And good luck stayin’ alive.”
****
Verde’s welcome to Los Alamos consisted of a long lecture on security protocols as he was issued his ID card, a meeting with Lab Director Norris Bradbury, and a guided tour of the third floor by a white-coated lab tech. “This is your office. This is your lab. This is the rest room. The cafeteria’s down stairs.” As part of a three-man team assigned to making tactical nuclear weapons ‘soldier safe’ he expected more.
“You settled in yet?” Bob Powers said as they sipped rot-gut coffee from an ancient urn in the office corner.
“The government’s not exactly generous —does everybody live in war-time barracks?”
“Only until it approves of the house you’re gonna buy. Eventually. I warn you, check for bugs.”
“As if anything else but bugs could live in a desolate place like this.”
“Not the bugs that crawl, the ones that listen. I’d think anyone who worked for the Nazis would know the spy game.” Bob was at the window looking out at the cottonwood trees that gave Los Alamos its name.
“I’m a scientist, not a spy,” Verde shot back.
“A damn good one too, I hear. You ended up on the right side after all.”
So, that was the game. He’d been hired to work. He’d traded a prison cell in tropical Brazil for one in a desert hell.
Bob handed him a notebook. “This‘ll bring you up to speed on the project. Chuck’ll be here in the morning and we’ll answer any questions.” Bob led him to a room adjacent to the office that held three cots and three desks. “We call this our cavern. You can think undisturbed here.”
****
“We gave you up for dead when we heard The Sea Dream sank,” Chuck Sizemore said. “Thank God for Mexican fishermen.”
“Yeah, New Mexico via a donkey. If my Spanish had been better, I would’ve gotten here sooner,” Verde said.
“A little dinero would’ve helped too. Nothing greases wheels like good ‘ol American green.”
“You got that right,” Verde said. “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
Both men seemed genuinely glad to have him aboard. “We’ve reached an impasse. Maybe a new pair of eyes will give us a new perspective,” Chuck said as they ate lunch.
Bob had brought soup and sandwiches from the cafeteria —grub, he called it and said, “I wish it was steak”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” Verde said, and Bob and Chuck nodded in agreement with mouths full of baloney and cheese.
Earth people seemed a goodhearted lot. He didn’t understand why people from Israel were looking for people who’d served in a war in Germany, or why they paid money to Carmen LaMonte to tell them where the “collaborators” were. He didn’t know why the United States wanted a man named Verde so badly, or why they wanted to pay so much money for Verde to work at Los Alamos on projects he would have completed when he was three-years-old. Everyone seemed to love green paper more than loved each other —except for Leona. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her. She didn’t care if his name was Cavanaugh, Draper, Sanchez, or Verde. She’d follow him through hell.
Los Alamos certainly fit the description. When Leona ‘got her affairs in order’ with the money he’d gotten from the bank, they’d married and headed South —two hundred and twenty-seven miles south to Roswell where he’d first met up with Gregorio Verde and Velma Green after a rough and unexpected landing, where he’d hitched a ride in their ’41 Chevy and first heard their mind-story of The Sea Dream saga, of a widow and a sympathetic comforter who fell in love. It was Roswell where he’d first tasted human tar-tare and found it excellent. You are what you eat, he’d read in the Health Magazine while the attendant filled the tank with fossil fuel.
After a stronger battle than he’d ever encountered, his new ex-Marine gas station attendant body was tough and cold, and he could lie like a sober bishop. Lie almost as good as a woman.
***
Bernie’s was closed November 23, 1963 because Bernie was in church praying for the Kennedy family like he was one of them. “I thought Bernie was Jewish,” Que said, as he and Nick slid into the booths at Tops Drive-In.
“He’s a Democrat.” Nick had spoken nothing but cynical sentences since Leona left Que for the Purple-heart Marine vet she met as a gas station in New Mexico. He’d run a profile on the guy as soon as Manelli released his license. The guy’s name was Sidney Sorensen, his medal-qualifying wound was an amputated right half-foot that was squished by a U.S. tank in the Battle of Bulge. Fought for three weeks with that squished foot. Que said they should have enlisted.
“There’s conflicting reports about the assassination. Some say Oswald was a lone shooter, some say there were two. But, if there was more than one guy, he disappeared into thin air. Phht! Gone. In fifty-years there’ll be one hell’uva unsolved mystery floating around.” Que had changed in the last six years. He’d gotten pudgy. His fingers were nicotine stained. He complained of having to pee every half hour.
“Yeah, unsolved mysteries like what really happened at Roswell. What happened to that nuke scientist who went for a walk in the desert and was never seen again. Or that guy who worked at the gas station and phtted! too.”
“Do you think the stories of alien abductions are true, Nick?”
“Who knows? The world's a dark and unusual place now, Que. Lots of dangerous weirdos out there who’ll eat you alive if you’re not careful.”