Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [98]
Lewis gave him Red’s number. “Call him,” he said. “Tell him I sent you, and I’ll want a finder’s fee. Just joking—but he’d be lucky to get you.”
Lewis fell asleep instantly, and woke at around three a.m. Lydia, he calculated, was over the north Atlantic, her plane a speck above the turquoise sea. A tightness in his throat and chest made him think he’d been crying for hours, possibly years, without knowing it.
“GUESS who showed up Sunday?” Libby said. She and Billie were eating lox and bagels and fresh peaches in the adobe’s courtyard. Billie had a table set up between beds of flowering ginger; around them, dark, waxy green plants sent out arcs of spattery red and yellow blossoms.
“I don’t know. Joe? Your parents? Red’s parents?”
“Red’s parents are dead. Nope, your favorite: Lewis.”
“Lewis who?” Billie grinned. “I hope you put arsenic in his catfish.”
“He didn’t stay for dinner, thank God. But he’s still sober, and even quit smoking.”
“Is he on the arrogance wagon too?”
“Don’t get all excited now. He’s still a hundred percent Lewis.”
“Maybe he needs another ride in my truck.”
“You may get that chance. Red offered him a job.”
Billie closed her eyes.
“Don’t worry. He wasn’t interested. You think Lewis would move back here from La-la Land? All his friends are movie stars. But he might’ve found us an amazing house manager. A guy who speaks Spanish, sober about a zillion years. Oh, and he actually grew up on the ranch. He wants to come home, reconnect with his past.”
“Yeah? What’s his name?” Billie sounded suspicious, as if such a person couldn’t exist.
“David Ibañez. Distant cousin to Victor. Seems kind of weird that he wants to move back to where he grew up—you couldn’t pay me to move back to Montrose. But this is the most beautiful valley. And you never left.”
“Listen,” Billie said. “I know about him. He’s bad news.”
“Oh, everyone was bad news in this business,” Libby said. “The last house manager was a heroin addict.”
“This guy’s a swindler, a con man, a charlatan.”
“Really? He seems so intelligent.”
“He makes a good first impression, all right. That’s part of it.”
“Even since he got sober?”
“What does sober matter? That whole family is backward: it’s a level of ignorance and dealing with the world that’s not erased in one generation or even two.”
“You like Victor Ibañez,” said Libby.
“Victor’s a joke. And only a distant cousin. David’s family is all black magic and thieving. They sacrifice animals. They won’t see doctors. The kids die from staph infections, the women die in childbirth.”
“But this guy lived all over the world. He’s educated, articu—”
“He’s a pathological liar, Libby. I’d be surprised if he’s been east of Arizona. I know: those big brown Bambi eyes. The great brujo, Shaman of the Week. Try Sleaze King of the Decade. Did he tell you about his clinic in Tijuana, where desperately sick people pay thousands of dollars for coffee colonics?”
“I thought it was a chronic-pain clinic.”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“Uh-oh. Red really fell for him.”
“I love Red,” Billie said, “but Red’s a chump. He’s the only person in town who’d hire that snake.”
RED SHOOK his head. “Listen, I’d take anything Billie said with a grain of salt.”
“But she knows him and we don’t,” Libby said.
“She knows everybody in Rito, and if it’s a man, she’ll have some grudge against him. If I went by Billie’s opinions, I wouldn’t have hired our framer, our electrician, our plaster man. Every man she’s done business with, she bad mouths.”
“Except you,” said Libby.
“She’s had her problems with me, too.”
Red would not be swayed. This was something Libby had come to understand: he had blind spots regarding certain people and championed them to the end, no matter how difficult, irascible, asocial they were, from Frank Jamieson and Lewis, to John the house manager and Ernie Tola.
Libby couldn’t help but consider Lewis the source of this present unpleasantness. Hadn’t he sent David to them? Once more, however subtly and indirectly, Lewis had raised expectations only to dash them.
“LISTEN,” David