IQ(85)

It was late afternoon. Oil and rust were cooking in the heat, the glare off the windshields like six hundred suns. Isaiah and TK were dismantling an Audi that had rear-ended an eighteen-wheeler. Isaiah had always liked Audis and this one was an S4. A pocket rocket in sheep’s clothing.

“You heard this one?” TK said. “Good-lookin’ woman’s walking down the street and her blouse is all open in the front and one of her titties is hanging out. Well, a cop comes along and says, ‘Lady, did you know your titty is hanging out? I could arrest you for indecent exposure.’ And the lady says, ‘Shit, I musta left my baby on the bus.’”

Isaiah laughed and got inside the Audi to remove the seats. They were undamaged and so was the rest of the interior except for the dash. It occurred to him: If he could take a car apart why couldn’t he put one back together?


“I want to buy this car,” Isaiah said.

“This car?” TK said. “This car needs a bumper assembly, radiator, wheels, struts, shocks, front cross-member, the engine’s messed up, and who knows what else.”

“The engine can be repaired and the drive train is okay. The back of the car is like new.”

“The parts for this thing cost an arm and two legs and we don’t get a lot of Audis coming through here, you know.”

“This one did.”

“This ain’t some old Chevy. These German cars are a nightmare to fix.”

“Then you’ll help me.”


Isaiah was nineteen years old and adrift. He worked at the wrecking yard, visited Flaco, and occasionally hung out with the guys at the gym. The few girls he’d slept with were only around for a week or two. They thought he was strange, this quiet insomniac who was really smart but had a menial job, never did anything fun, and spent all his free time with a crippled boy.

Other than Flaco and Marcus’s constant rebukes, what concerned Isaiah most was the state of his brain. He could feel it getting rusty, the neurons granulating and hardening into a crust. He thought about going back to school but he was a high school dropout. He’d have to get his GED and slog through years of undergrad courses before it got interesting. There were other jobs to be had but they’d be entry-level and climbing the corporate ladder had no appeal. He might have gone on that way indefinitely if he hadn’t caught that first case.


It was laundry day. Isaiah gathered up his dirty clothes and took them down to the laundry room. An elderly woman was there, her face creased and dark as a dug-up baseball mitt from the forties. She was wearing a flowered muumuu, her copper-colored wig styled in an unlikely pageboy. She looked frustrated and in pain, one hand on the small of her back.

“Excuse me, young man,” she said, “but would you mind helping me get my clothes out of the dryer? My lumbago is giving me fits.”

Isaiah piled her still-warm clothes on the table. Her entire wardrobe seemed to consist of muumuus, gym socks, and white panties big as parachutes. Isaiah folded the towels.

“I’m Myra Jenkins,” she said, “but everybody calls me Miss Myra. You’re Isaiah, aren’t you? I’ve seen you around. You’re a very nice young man, always neat and polite, none of that rough talk. You’re a little young for my Brenda but I wish she’d met you before she got involved with Bernard. I knew that man was a no-good bum the moment I laid eyes on him but Brenda married him anyway, not that she had a lot of choices, being on the homely side. They got married over the weekend and Brenda was as beautiful as she was ever going to be. The ceremony went fine and the reception did too except they delivered the wrong cake. A sorry little coconut thing that said ‘Happy Birthday Sheldon’ on it.”

“That’s too bad,” Isaiah said. He wanted to get out of there and do his laundry later but it was too late now.

“Of course, Brenda being Brenda there had to be a major tragedy,” Miss Myra said. “The wedding presents were stolen. Must have been thirty or forty of them, all wrapped nice and everything. Poor Brenda. She cried her eyes out.”

Isaiah stopped folding. “What happened?” he said.

“Oh, the hotel didn’t have the reception room ready and we didn’t want folks with presents in their laps while Bernard was fumbling with his vows so we put them in a room we rented. You know, for Brenda to get made up and such. Well, after the ceremony we came up to get them and they were gone. It was such a shame. Poor Brenda. I say that every day.”

“What did the hotel security people say?”

“The security man said the hotel wasn’t liable. What else would he say?”

Isaiah thought for a moment and said, “What’s the name of the hotel?”


The Blue Waves Resort and Spa had seen better days. A plastic sailfish hung crookedly over a table full of brochures. The blue carpet with gold crests on it was worn in places, the blond wood furniture spotted with watermarks and cigarette burns. Isaiah smelled lemon Pledge, vacuum exhaust, coffee, and mop water.

Isaiah and Miss Myra took the squeaking, clanking elevator up to the sixth floor. “That’s our room, 604,” Miss Myra said, nodding at the door and sounding puzzled. “Is this what you wanted to see?”

When they got back to the lobby they were met by a young Asian woman in brown slacks and a bright yellow blazer. She had a wide face and small eyes, her limp hair parted in the middle, her complexion as pebbly as the surface of a basketball. She looked at them like they were the line in front of her at the DMV. “Can I help you?” she said.