“Miss Chavez?” Stallings said, knowing it wasn’t.
“Whaddya want?”
“You are Miss Chavez?”
“No, I’m Helen from next door. Rosa’s still all shook up.”
“Poor Carlos,” Stallings said with a doleful headshake. “Poor Miss Chavez. We’re all so very, very sorry.”
“Who’s we?”
“The ILOA.”
“What’s that?”
“The Independent Limousine Operators Association.”
Helen from next door turned her head to call, “Rosa. Some guy’s here from the limo drivers.” She turned back to Stallings and said,
“You better come on in.”
Stallings went in and found himself back in the early 1960s. On the floor was a Stonehenge cotton shag rug in shades of white, red, brown and black that was a duplicate of one Stallings and his late wife had bought in 1961 at the Hecht Company in Washington, D.C.
There was also a tweedy couch on chrome legs and a wing-back chair upholstered in a nubby green fabric. The coffee table was of oiled teak and its smaller cousin, a side table, was placed next to the green chair. Scandinavian modern thirty years later, Stallings thought as he sat down uninvited in the wingback chair.
The young woman on the tweedy couch wore a plain black T-shirt and black jeans. She sat, her knees pressed together and clutching a balled-up handkerchief. She had a pretty oval face despite her swollen eyes, a too-pink nose and no makeup of any kind. Stallings guessed she was 23 or 24. She stared at him, sniffed and asked, “You knew Carlos?”
Stallings handed her a business card. She read it carefully, then looked at him and said, “He didn’t tell me he’d joined anything.”
“He only joined last month, around the first of the year.”
“And you came by to say you’re sorry he’s dead. That’s nice. I thank you.”
“I also came to tell you about the death benefits,” Stallings said and shot a go-away look at the still-hovering Helen from next door.
Helen said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, hon.”
After she left, Stallings took out the certified check, rose and presented it with some formality to Rosa Alicia Chavez.
“Two thousand?” she said with disbelief.
Stallings shook his head regretfully, sat back down and said, “I’m sorry it’s so little, but he was a member for such a short time.”
“So much,” she said.
“I know this is difficult, Miss Chavez, but one of the main reasons for the limo drivers association is to look after each other and stop terrible things like this from happening.”
She nodded, again studying the check. “You wanta ask me some questions, right?”
“If it won’t upset you too much.”
She looked up. “I can tell you what I already told the cops.”
“That’d be fine.”
Rosa Alicia Chavez talked for nearly five minutes about the Lincoln Town Car she had seen speeding away from Carlos’s house. She gave its year of manufacture, its color, its probable Blue Book value and its license number. She then talked about the man she called “el chino grande,” and also the other one, who she said was real tall and dark and mean-looking. She described how they had rushed out of Carlos’s house, sped off in the Lincoln and what she would like to do to them—
especially el chino grande. Stallings took notes.
After she finally ran down, he said, “Did Carlos recendy mention any strange or difficult clients?”
She shook her head. “Just the ingleses.”
“The English?”
She nodded with an expression that was a curious mixture of revulsion and fascination. “A man and a woman who tell Carlos they are Mr. and Mrs. But he tells me they look like twins.”
“You mean brother and sister?”
“Yes, brother and sister,” she said, shuddering slightly.
“Did he mention their names?”
“No, he just says he drives them to a place in Topanga Canyon and then goes back and gets them maybe a week later and drives ‘em someplace else.”
“He say where?”
