Houston Noir Read online

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do this one yourself?” said the voice at the other end.

  “No, amor. I’m still tired from Demetria and Bethany.”

  “All right. I’ll call you know when it’s done.”

  Yessenia hung up and put the truck into gear, pulling out of the parking lot, toward the freeway home. Behind her, Roscoe flicked off the store lights.

  THE FALLS OF WESTPARK

  by Pia Pico

  Westpark Corridor

  There must have been an accident. Traffic on Westpark seemed unnaturally thick, even for four thirty p.m. Jules sat idling in her Malibu, studying the view of the Falls of Westpark apartment complex, the Presidium office building, and the brackish ditch that ran between. Today, a Home Depot cart enriched the vista, the telltale orange basket jutting toward the scrubbed aluminum sky. An afternoon breeze kicked up by a hurricane brewing in the gulf whipped a few plastic bags from their sticking places in the weeds. Empty soda bottles littered the tamped-earth trails on either side of the water, which resembled the aguas negras Jules had seen in Mexico as a child. She watched three or four day laborers head toward Windswept Lane, just parallel to Westpark and rife with low-rent apartment buildings, liquor stores, small markets, and casas de belleza that served the Hispanic population in the vicinity around the Houston Flea Market.

  A text popped up on her phone: Glad you wouldn’t give me a ride bitch! Nice traffic. Looks like you’re fuked. This was followed by a smiley-face emoji.

  It was Kelly, whom she’d left at the Triangle Club, after the 2:30 open-discussion meeting. He’d asked her for a ride home, but she’d begged off. She needed to shower and eat before her eight p.m. shift at Kroger, so he’d hoofed it to the Shell station, where his sister would pick him up to drive him back to his halfway house.

  WTF! Jules texted back. I’ve been sitting here for 10 mins. Find out what’s going on and text me back. She eyed the engine temperature gauge on the control panel of her Malibu—the needle edging toward red.

  She rolled about .3 miles over the next fifteen minutes before she saw the text from Kelly drop down over the top of her Instagram feed: Holy shit. Lady’s body found in dumpster outside of Westpark recycling center. K9 having a field day.

  ??!!!

  Turn around and go the other way if I was you, he wrote.

  Good idea. Jules did just that.

  As she got ready for work that evening, Jules listened to an anchorwoman on the local news: “Deputies are unable to identify a woman’s body that was found in a dumpster at the Westpark Consumer Recycling Center in the 5900 block of Westpark. Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest.”

  * * *

  The next day, before the 2:30 meeting, Jules and Kelly sat at the green plastic picnic table on the Triangle Club’s cobblestone patio, smoking. The Triangle Club occupied a dingy office flex space in the Westpark Business & Ed Center, an industrial park built in the 1970s. The club served as a space dedicated to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Kelly had almost six years of sobriety; Jules, six months. Kelly’s style of dress rarely varied: he wore extra-large T-shirts, khaki or camouflage cargo shorts, Teva sandals. A Houston Astros cap often topped his graying pageboy. Despite his yellow-brown teeth and pocked face, Jules liked fellowshipping with him before the meetings, hearing his stories of what it was like before he got sober. He used to be able to drink three beers, he said, no problem, but somewhere between three beers and eleven, he’d find himself at the dope house. He’d gone nine years without drinking or doing drugs, he said—a dry drunk—before prison. Before prison, he’d had a wife, a full-time job at one of them big oil companies—all the things. When he lost his job during the Houston oil bust, when his wife left him, when one night he ran into his old drug dealer in the corner liquor store, then it was back on.

  “I told my old dealer I ain’t got no money,” Kelly said. “That’s all right, said the dealer, I can cover you. He knew that once I started doing that shit again, I’d be selling for him in no time. It got so bad: I was doing meth, cocaine, heroween. I went home to my dad’s house and asked him to lock me up in my old bedroom. He did. He cooked my meals and brought them to me. I was selling drugs through my bedroom window, but he found out and had them deep bars put up over them. But I figured I could get the customers to meet me a few houses away, so I would sneak out. I did that about two times, and when I got back to the house he was standing there on the porch, arms folded. You don’t even want to get well! he said, and kicked me out. Soon after that, I ended up in prison. That’s what it took for me to get sober, and not one or two years. It took four or five years for me to get it.”

  Whenever Kelly acted like he was making some sort of pass at Jules, she reminded him: “Practice the principles. No thirteenth-stepping.” Her sponsor said that to her often. Even still, Kelly didn’t stop staring at her boobs. She figured it was an honest enough exchange: he’d share his stories; she’d let him stare. As long as his advances stayed visual, she could handle them. She was trusting her higher power to keep her safe.

  “I think the killer is Jake,” Jules said. Jake was a guy who recently stopped coming to the 2:30. The word was that he’d relapsed. “Remember he works at Home Depot? He probably carted her body to the recycling center in that Home Depot cart I saw dumped in the ditch yesterday. I pass by that ditch every day and always look at it. That cart wasn’t there before the body was in the dumpster.”

  Kelly laughed hard at her theory, accidentally blowing smoke in her face. “Girl, there’s Home Depot carts in every ditch and bayou in this city! First off, no perp is gonna take that kinda time. Trust me. I know perps. What you got against Jake, anyway? And Christ on a bike! Why you always looking down a ditch?”

  “How do you know he didn’t do it?” Jules asked. “You always tell me to watch out for people with clay feet.”

  “First of all, Jake ain’t got no clay feet, because them’s that do gotta be uppity types—you know, people that looks high but aims low—and Jake ain’t uppity. Second of all, I know Jake; he’s good people.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I just have a feeling about him.”

  “What—he stare at your titties more than the rest of us?”

  * * *

  Dan, the leader of the 2:30 meeting on Wednesdays, arrived in his suit and tie, looking every bit the lawyer. He never said what he did for a living, and neither Jules nor Kelly ever asked. People in AA didn’t ask each other that kind of stuff. Everyone was happy to just show up at the club for another day sober. “Keep coming back,” they said at the end of each meeting, holding hands. “It works if you work it.”

  When Jules wondered aloud why Dan always led the 2:30 in a suit, Kelly answered, “He’s faking it—faking it to make it.”

  Dan stopped by the picnic table on his way into the meeting. He smelled good. Jules recognized the Comme des Garçon Wood-something-or-other her ex used to wear.

  “What are y’all yakking about?” Dan asked.

  Kelly took a drag off his Camel and turned his head to blow the smoke to the side, away from Dan, but he kept his eyes on Jules.

  Jules said, “About the girl’s body they found in the Westpark Recycling dumpster yesterday.”

  “God,” Dan drawled, “that’s a grisly thing, isn’t it? I heard about it on the news last night.”

  “I think the body was dumped outta this Home Depot cart I saw in the ditch yesterday,” Jules said. Kelly kicked her under the table.

  “What does that cart tell you?” Dan asked. He had a knowing tone in his voice.

  “That some homeless dude or some Mexican did it,” Kelly cut in. “Those are the sorts always stealing shopping carts.”

  “Hey,” Jules said, “I know you don’t know this, cabrón, but I’m Mexican.”

  “Ho!” Dan laughed. “Don’t step on the toes of your fellows; they’ll retaliate!”

  “You’re n
ot Mexican,” Kelly said. “What kind of Mexican are you?!”

  “The Mexican kind,” Jules answered. It wasn’t worth going into it with him. Like everyone else, he wasn’t going to believe her—because of her strawberry-blond hair, her blue eyes, her pale skin. Only Mexicans seemed to know that not all Mexicans looked alike; not all of them had brown or black hair, brown or black eyes, and brown skin.

  “Anyways,” Jules continued, “those guys walking back and forth along that ditch? They’re Salvadorans.”

  “Now how would you know that?” Kelly said.

  “Ricas pupusas,” Jules said, referring to the handwritten neon poster she passed every Sunday on her way to the Triangle Club. Families from Windswept ambled along the ditch’s dirt trails to the parking lot of St. Michael’s Academy, where they lined up to buy these homemade savory stuffed-corn tortillas. Jules stubbed out her cigarette and stood. “Salvadoran comfort food,” she said, blowing smoke straight into Kelly’s face.

  She left him sitting by himself and entered the door held by Dan, who’d pulled it open for another woman. Jules had never seen her before, this girl of maybe twenty-two, wearing a spaghetti-strap camisole, jeans ripped at the knees and studded with rhinestone butterflies.

  * * *

  For the past four months, Dan had been leading the Wednesday 2:30 open-discussion meetings. Daily attendance at 2:30 meetings ranged from four to fifteen people. The hotter it was outside, the more people in the small, windowless room. While other meeting leaders read from Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book, or from the daily meditations in Twenty-Four Hours a Day, on Wednesdays with Dan, the topic was always the same: alcoholism.

  Halfway through the meeting, when Dan passed the basket, Jules dropped in her two dollars, then handed it to Kelly, who looked at her, shook his head and grumbled, “You’re not Mexican.”

  “Kelly?” Dan called on him. “You wanna share?”

  “Um, uh,” he passed the basket without putting money in it, “I’m Kelly, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Kelly,” the group chorused.

  “I, uh, I think I’m just gonna listen today.” He folded his hands on top of his belly and grimaced at Jules.

  * * *

  After the meeting, while Kelly was in the restroom, Dan approached Jules.

  “Grab a coffee with me.”

  Shocked, Jules hesitated. She and Dan had never exchanged any type of back-and-forth before. “I’m waiting for Kelly,” she said.

  Dan smirked, laughed. “Oh.” She could tell he had the wrong idea.

  “We’re not together, me and Kelly. I was just gonna say goodbye.”

  “Okay. Meet me at Starbucks on Hillcroft and 59,” he said and walked out the door.

  * * *

  “Come on, come on.” Jules banged on her steering wheel as she waited to turn left onto Westpark. Not far north, Hillcroft turned into Voss, and the dilapidated apartment complexes of Woodlake and Briar Meadow gave way to the seventies single-story mansions of Piney Point. But here, amid the thicket of electrical transmission towers and the sooty skein of overpasses and underpasses, a single-family dwelling would likely incinerate under the scalding sky. The only habitable enclaves in the immediate vicinity were one hundred– to three hundred–unit apartment complexes, one of which was the Falls of Westpark, a phlegmy stucco building that Jules passed each day on her way to the club. The Falls’ walkways faced the road, open to the air but shrouded in shadows. One whole flank of the building rubbed against the cindery bulk of State Highway 59. Jules suspected most of its inhabitants were the day laborers who loitered in the shade of the 59 underpass, waiting for jobs. Every time she drove past the Falls, she stared at its dim walkways and wondered what the people who lived there felt, what they hoped for, how they dealt with all the noise and exhaust from the freeway. She noted a few children’s plastic toys through the grills bordering the walkways. Maybe some of the day laborers had families with them, wives or mothers or sisters who worked as nannies and/or housekeepers for families in Piney Point, Uptown, Hunter’s Creek, River Oaks.

  Since she’d broken up with her ex, Jules was all alone in Texas, family-wise. She’d moved to Houston seven years prior from Seal Beach, California, to attend Rice University on a diversity scholarship. Her plan had been to graduate with an English degree and return to the West Coast for law school, but she’d ended up getting serious with Larry. They’d met when she started working weekends at the Signature Kroger for extra cash; he was her manager. With only six hours left until graduation, she took a break from school and moved in with him. During this time, her drinking progressed to the point of her blacking out nightly and throwing up each morning. Within the year, Kroger had fired Larry, he had kicked Jules out of their shared apartment, and she had become a full-time cashier to pay her own rent. Going back to college, even though she was nearly finished, seemed beyond her physical and emotional capacities.

  While her mom urged her to return to Seal Beach, something about Houston’s hardscrabble, unsentimental landscape appealed to her. Despite the superficial prettiness of Southern California (paradise, some people called it), she’d grown up in an infernal household, her alcoholic father constantly yelling at her and putting her down, her mother enabling all of it, her younger brother addicted to surfing and speedballs to cope with the consequent racket in his brain. After this brother died from a heroin overdose, Jules could no longer bear the sight of the Pacific Ocean. The difference between the external beauty of her homeland and the internal bleakness of her heart was too much for her. Houston fit her; she fit Houston.

  Traffic would not ease up. Four minutes passed as Jules waited for a break in the oncoming cars, although she probably missed a couple opportunities, so flustered she was by Dan’s invitation. Why would he invite her to coffee? Or command her, more like it. He had (he said) twenty-plus years sober; he wouldn’t flirt with a woman in recovery, would he? Especially one as new as Jules? She checked her face in the rearview mirror; the Rum Raisin lipstick feathered out from the smoking lines over her upper lip. She needed to stop smoking, but goddamnit, one thing at a time. She’d given up almost everything.

  When she looked back at the traffic, she saw just enough of a break to swing out left, then turn immediately right onto the road which ran between the Hillcroft Transit Station and a wooden complex that housed businesses such as Jaycee’s Exotic Dancewear, Relief Ambulance Services, Video and Surveillance Equipment Outlet; a church, Iglesia Pentecostes: Camino Al Rey de Gloria; and a Hindu temple, the Sanatan Shiv Shakti Mandir. At the intersection of Harwin and Hillcroft, Jules’s pussy started pulsating and thumping against the seam in the crotch of her jeans. Her heart sped up; her breath grew thin and shallow. “Uh, uh-h-h,” she groaned, shocked by the sudden flush of lust. Waiting for the light to change, she shook her head no, feeling betrayed by her body. Dan must have something of the governor in him—a personality that, like alcohol and drugs, she was powerless against. Although she hadn’t picked up this energy consciously, her body had absorbed it and was making it known now to her mind. But dear god! She was living by the principles now; she needed to place principles above pussy.

  When she arrived at Starbucks, her underwear was so wet she could barely catch her breath. She feared that if she went into the Starbucks, then, true to previous form, she’d be back in the parking lot in less than thirty minutes, straddling Dan in the passenger seat of his S-Class, sliding up and down his lawyer cock while he sucked her tits.

  She found an empty parking spot next to his Benz. She checked his windows: they were duly tinted. As she headed to the entrance, she said a prayer to her higher power that she’d learned from one of the old guys in the meeting: Help me, help me, help me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was her favorite.

  Inside, Dan stood near the front of the line. Jules stopped behind the last person, hoping to calm herself down, but he saw her and waved her toward him.

  “What’ll you have? My treat.” He placed a hand on
her back and moved her in front of him.

  Behind her, Dan was a force, a magnet attracting her hips toward his. She stopped herself from leaning into the almonds, madeleines, and gift cards, afraid she would just succumb and press her ass against his package. “Dark roast, please,” she practically gasped to the barista.

  “After two p.m. we only have Pike’s Place,” the barista replied.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I need to use the restroom,” she murmured to Dan, and sped off before answering the barista’s question: “Room for cream?”

  When she emerged from the bathroom, Dan was sitting at a counter near the front window.

  “Can we sit outside?” Jules asked. She trusted that the gaggle of Bangladeshi men at one of the tables, the roar of the freeway two hundred feet away, and her own hypochondria about breathing in car exhaust would dampen her lust significantly.

  “Just to be clear,” Dan said, when they’d situated themselves at a free table on the patio, “I’m not trying to thirteenth-step you.”

  “You’re not?” Jules replied, both embarrassed and relieved. “I mean, good! I hope you’re not.” She tuned her ears for a moment to the sound of semis trucking north on 59 while Dan removed his suit jacket and tie. Outside, in the afternoon glare, she could see that his eyes were sort of topaz-y, and his cheeks had more color than they did under the fluorescent lights of the Triangle’s windowless rooms.

  “No. I’m not. I wanted to talk to you about Kelly.”

  Jules took a sip of her Pike’s Place through the slit in the plastic top. She adjusted herself in her chair. Her pussy-pounding had ebbed almost completely.

  “I see the two of you together a lot,” he said.

  “We only see each other at the meetings. My sponsor told me to show up twenty minutes early and stay twenty minutes late, for the fellowship. Kelly’s the only one there, usually, until right before the meeting. Sometimes I give him a ride back to his halfway house, but it’s so far away that most of the time I don’t.”