The Big Enchilada

with nothing but an education in the way things were in the world and a cold, hard, empty space inside me. They also made sure I’d have a lot of trouble ever getting a job, and so I decided to make use of all the things they had taught me. It had worked out all right, I guess.
    I shook my head. Christ, I thought, being thrown against the wall must have jarred something loose to send me on that trip down memory lane. Fuck it. Whatever the reasons, I knew I couldn’t let the episode in my office pass.
    I thought about it. Domingo meant nothing to me. I kind of had the nagging feeling I had seen the word somewhere recently, but as hard as I tried to place it, it kept eluding me. I knew there was no point in pressing it. If it was there, it would have to surface by itself.
    When Luis brought me another beer, for no particular reason I asked him if he had ever heard of anyone called, Domingo.
    “Domingo? I do not think so, Señor Hunter. The only Domingo I know is Sunday. That is the Spanish word for Sunday.”
    “Yeah, Luis, I know. You’ve never heard of a club or a gang or anything like that called Domingo?”
    Luis screwed up his face as though he was thinking real hard, but I knew that all his brains were in his fat belly. “No, Señor Hunter, I do not know anything like that. All I know is cooking, and I do not get into trouble.”
    “Who said anything about trouble?”
    “I know you, Señor Hunter, and if you are looking for someone, there is trouble.” He picked up the empty bottles and waddled back to his stove.
    I kind of liked Luis. He wasn’t very bright, but he sure could cook. And this time he was right, there was going to be trouble. I just didn’t know who was involved or what it was about. But I began to think it must be pretty important to go to all that trouble to tell me to stay away from something I didn’t even know about. That felt like it meant big money, and that began to look like it might be worth my while.
    The more I thought about it, the stupider this whole thing seemed to be. If that gorilla had not come to warn me off, I would have been on my way to Mexico for a few weeks of fishing and screwing. Now, because of that warning, I was determined to find out what the hell it was all about.
    Of course, that might be the point of it. A setup of some kind. Get me involved in something that’s going to mean trouble for me. Set me up as a fall guy to cover up for someone else or to get revenge for something I had done. It was possible, but I didn’t like it. To set me up this way as a fall guy seemed too uncertain. If someone wanted to do that, there must be a dozen surer ways.
    Revenge was a better possibility. From Viet Nam onwards I had made more than a few enemies. I didn’t keep track, but there were a lot of them. And a lot of them hated me enough to kill me—the ones I had sent to prison, the ones I had smashed up, the ones whose sweet deals I had soured. There were a lot of them, all right, but they’d probably want to get me in a more direct way. A shotgun blast in the stomach, maybe. Or they would have had that ape finish me off. The way things had gone, he could have done it easily, but he obviously had instructions to be gentle. No, it didn’t look like revenge was the reason.
    That meant one thing, though I sure didn’t see what it could be. In something that I was doing I must be getting close to someone or something that was supposed to stay hidden. It had to be something like that, but the cases I was working on seemed to be straightforward.
    Clarissa Acker wanted to find out what was going on with her husband, Simon Acker. She wasn’t exactly sure what use she would make of the information—divorce, blackmail, power, revenge—but she first wanted to satisfy her curiosity. As she had said, “I know that son of a bitch is up to something, and I want to know what.” Obviously, theirs was not a storybook relationship, unless your storybooks are by Strindberg.
    Simon Acker was the president of a small pharmaceutical supply house, and apparently fairly well off. It looked like his wife had a pretty good time of it, with a huge house in Bel Air, servants, exclusive country clubs, and nearly all the money she could spend. Acker made few demands on her, and she could do just about whatever she wanted. To me it didn’t seem like such a bad deal, but after fifteen years of marriage, I guess it didn’t look that way to Clarissa Acker.
    She really didn’t seem to care