Stray Cat Blues

by Robert Bucchianeri

  I then sunk all my striped balls, called the black ball to a corner pocket, and sunk that one, too.

  The second game followed the same pattern, only more directly.

  It didn’t take long for the boys to start grumbling.

  I’d won almost a thousand bucks, and my new friends thought that perhaps they’d been hustled. They were young and fancied themselves wise in the ways of the world.

  “You’re pretty good man,” the Mexican, Marco, said.

  Scooter had been silent throughout and was now standing with his cue held out in front of him, another cigarette dangling from his lips, his dark brown eyes studying me with possible malice aforethought.

  “Just lucky, I guess. Haven’t played for a while,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” Scooter mumbled.

  I nodded. “That’s one way to look at it. You asked me to play.”

  “You stood there waiting for us to ask, man. You set us up,” the lanky boy, Jeff, spat.

  The troops were restless and moving forward around the table. Only one of them hung back. I’d heard somebody call him Vince—another Latino, probably from Central America, who looked nervous and out-of-place. He glanced in the corner toward the two men in the shadows, then looked back to me with a fearful expression on his face.

  I remembered the grocer, Jalil, telling me about Vince, that he was the only good one of the bunch.

  I glanced down at the table and noticed the pile of money sitting on the rail, supposedly a little more than a thousand dollars, but I didn’t bother to count it. I grabbed it, stuffed it in my pocket, and stepped away.

  “Looks like nobody else wants to try their luck,” I said. They looked surprised that I’d dare pocket my winnings.

  “Put the money back, asshole,” Scooter snapped.

  “You’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands,” I tried with a smile on my face.

  “Oh, Plank, please,” Marsh groaned.

  “He’s fuckin’ with you, man. Are you gonna take that disrespect?” The rabble-rouser was a mammoth slab of youthful arrogance. Full of piss and vinegar blended with gaping stupidity. Its name was Frank, and Frank’s eyes were crazy for a fight.

  Scooter squared his shoulders and grabbed his pool cue with both hands. A medieval warrior girding his sword.

  I took another step back and found myself side-by-side with Marsh.

  “I must warn you, gentlemen. My friend here is rather adept in nasty practices that, despite your obvious experience and formidable heft, you may have never before encountered. And, not to boast, but I myself am learned in the pugilistic arts.”

  “Plank,” Marsh repeated, his disappointment intensifying with my every word.

  “Who the hell are you?” Marco said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe we were actually standing there, daring disaster. In that den of wolves.

  Scooter rushed me, his pool cue aiming for my solar plexus. I side-stepped him, pivoted, hooked his left ankle with the toe of my right foot. He fell flat on his face.

  Frank was next and, for his size, surprisingly quick. He was almost upon me when he crumbled to the ground with an agonized cry. He bounced on the floor like a giant Mexican jumping bean, clutching his stomach, growling, inventing a new language, a primitive tongue appropriate to his atavistic state. Marsh stood calmly behind him. I hadn’t seen what he’d thrown at the poor boy.

  Scooter jumped to his feet, holding his bloody nose. He grabbed my arm, threw a punch. I deflected it with my elbow and hit him hard in the gut. He collapsed again.

  As I turned, I noticed Marco moving toward us. He had a thin-handled blade in his hand, waving it back and forth. “You mother—”

  Marsh stopped the expletive in his throat. I can’t say that I saw what really happened. Marsh was in the air, the knife flew across the room, and Marco hit the ground hard. Then Marsh was back beside me, sighing. It happened in the blink of an eye.

  Marco was out cold. He’d been lucky. He’d be hurting when he woke up, but not as much as Frank, who would likely never forget the day he met Marsh.

  Two other men clutched their cue sticks but stayed in place. Vince stood impassively, staring down at the floor.

  “Good game,” I said.

  “What do you want?” The voice was strong, commanding. It belonged to the seated man in the corner.

  “Just want to take my winnings and move on. Thought we were just having a friendly game of eight-ball.”

  In response, the man who had been kneeling next to the speaker’s voice came out of the shadows. He was holding a snub-nosed revolver and keeping a considerable distance between himself and Marsh. Smart boy.

  “Put the money back on the table and get the hell out of here, or Ernie will pry it out of your cold, dead pockets.”

  “Touché,” I said. “Still, I’m surprised. This looks like such a nice establishment, and you look like such fair-minded young men. I won fair and square.”

  “We don’t like outside hustlers coming in here and cheating us.” There was a long pause while he let that settle in. “You’re lucky, Mr. Plank. You deserve worse than just giving up money that isn’t yours. And I’d advise that you and your friend scratch Funky’s off your address lists. Pretend like it doesn’t exist. ‘Cuz for you, it doesn’t.” Another misspent youth learning how to speak from watching Vin Diesel movies.

  But I wondered why he wasn’t pressing his advantage right then. It wasn’t as great as it looked, not with Marsh in the room, but I was pretty sure they didn’t want any violence that might draw the attention of the authorities to their little home away from home. I’d actually counted on that but knew that it wouldn’t provide any absolute guarantee of safety. Ergo, Marsh was with me.

  “Okey-dokey,” I said and reached in my pocket. I noticed Ernie’s finger tighten a little on the trigger. I smiled at him, took out the money, and threw it on the pool table. “Not very sporting, if you ask me.”

  I turned to Marsh and said, “Watson, my friend, it appears our time here is at an end.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Marsh quipped, and we ambled out of that den of miscreants.

  Eighteen

  We’d rattled the hive, and it didn’t take long for the bees to fly away.

  I attributed it to mortification. What Marsh and I had done in there had to be a blow to the collective gang ego. We were two; they were four times that number. We were old; they were young. We were strangers; this was their home field. They had all the advantages, yet they’d gotten their butts kicked, literally, and in their chosen tests of masculinity—eight ball and hand-to-hand combat. They were probably having a hard time playing the macho dudes they fancied themselves to be. Best to go home and have your momma or your woman heal the wounds and reassure that you were still a big, tough boy.

  We took turns on lookout. One of us would stay at the car parked a long block away while the other hung out in a dark alley right across the way from Funky Jack’s.

  Scooter left with Frank in an old Oldsmobile raked and decked out with colossal fins.

  Vince was one of the last to leave. Only Ernie, and the assumed leader, Caballo Negro, and the bartender remained inside.

  He took a sharp left outside the bar and walked quickly down 9th street. He stopped in front of an old blue VW bug and inserted a key in the driver’s side door.

  Before he could lean in, I reached him.

  “Vince,” I whispered in his ear. “Like to talk to you.”

  He flinched, pulled back, his right hand starting toward his pocket. I grabbed his wrist, twisting his palm back to an angle it was never meant to reach. “Not a good idea.”

  He cried out and shot me a panicked look. Words scampered out of his mouth. “I didn’t have nothing to do with what went on in there. You won. I know. Talk to Scooter or Marco or...” His voice trailed off, his mind catching up with the danger of saying too much more. I released his hand.

  “I don’t care about the game or the money. I just have a few questi
ons.”

  “I don’t know anything.” He glanced nervously back toward the club while rubbing his wrist. “Shit, man. That hurt.”

  I nodded, acknowledging his pain. “You and Scooter know Johnnie.”

  He frowned, looked away, held up his hands, palms up. “No. I don’t know nuthin’.”

  “I can go get my friend Marsh. He’s a little pissed off about being cheated out of a thousand bucks we won fair and square. He’s kind of aching to take it out on somebody.”

  “Shit,” he mumbled.

  I walked around to the passenger side of the VW and opened the door. “Get in. Let’s take a little drive, or do you want to stand here and talk? Maybe Caballo Negro will come out, and we can all chat together.”

  “Dammit.” He glanced back again. With a pained look on his face, he said, “Okay. Five minutes. Then I gotta go.” He sat behind the wheel, and I slid in beside him. He started the car and drove around the corner. I had him continue on and make a loop around the block. We ended up parking behind Marsh’s car, a hundred yards from Funky Jack’s.

  After he shut off the engine, I turned to face him.

  He stared straight ahead through the windshield, clutching the steering wheel.

  “I’ve heard some good things about you, Vince, but you’ve got bad taste in friends.”

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  “Met your brother. Is he running the car repair business now?”

  Vince’s head jerked to face me. He grimaced. “Louie?”

  “Yep. He seems an industrious lad.”

  “Why...”

  “Looking for you.”

  “Leave him out of this. He’s got nothing to do with any of this.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “He’s a good kid. I promised our grandma that I’d take care of him...shit.”

  So he did have an ounce of decency left in him, a caring for his own flesh and blood, if not his fellow man.

  But I wasn’t going to allay his fears in any way, at least not until he leveled with me. “Tell me about your business with Johnnie.”

  “I can’t talk about that. You know, I mean Scooter would...I just can’t…."

  “You bought stuff from her, right? Paintings. Statues. Are you one of those closet art lovers? I wouldn’t have guessed, but people can surprise you. Maybe your friends wouldn’t understand your love of fine art so you kept it a secret.”

  He shook his head, closed his eyes. “Caballo doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t care for art?”

  “The bitch set us up.”

  “Explain.”

  Outside the streets were deserted, the night still, save for a homeless guy, tottering on his feet, his hands sunk in a garbage can at the lip of the alley, kitty corner to us.

  I could see Marsh’s head reclining back on the rest, his eyes on the rearview mirror, more than likely listening to some long dead Italian or German composer.

  Vince turned to look at me. “Who you working for?”

  “A friend.”

  “What you wanna know?”

  “Like I said, I want to know about the business between Johnnie and you and Scooter.”

  “What for?”

  “Why you think?”

  “How the damn hell should I know?” He looked back out the front window, keeping his eyes on the front of Funky Jack’s, his thoughts on how he could get away with telling me as little as possible.

  “Cut the bullshit. You know Johnnie disappeared. I know she was pissed as hell at you for trying to rip her off. She came to see you to get the money she was owed, and then she vanished. What did you do to her?”

  He slapped the dashboard hard. “She screwed us, man.”

  “So you killed her,” I said.

  “No! No way.” He scratched the back of his neck, frowned, his facial muscles twitching.

  “I’m getting bored. Maybe I’ll just whisper something to one of my friends, a detective with the police department, about your involvement with the missing girl and let them pick you up. Or—and this is what I’d advise if, God forbid, I was you—tell me your side of the story, and we can avoid all that muss and bother and jail time.”

  He opened his mouth, stopped, clamped his lips shut. I waited for a long time, letting the pressure build.

  He glanced over at me, then looked away when I caught his eye.

  “Are you working for...” He worried his lower lip with his teeth, then managed to get the word out. “Poe?” An agonized look on his face accompanied the word. I was reminded of the fear induced by the name Voldemort in the Harry Potter books.

  I thought about the question. If I were working for Poe and Vince refused my request, it didn’t bode well for his future health, and he and I both knew it.

  “Poe cares about this. Do you want to have a chat with him?”

  “That’s what we were afraid of. That’s why I came with you. That bitch somehow got close to the man.”

  I, too, was afraid of Poe’s involvement with this whole affair. If he was more tied to it than he’d let on, everything was going to be a lot more complicated to unravel and deal with. Not to mention more dangerous to the health and well-being of all concerned, including one Max Plank.

  I let out a long intentionally exasperated and hopefully foreboding breath. “Last chance. My patience is gone. If you don’t want to get a lot more involved with the police and Poe, I suggest you tell me what was going on between you and Johnnie and what happened the last time she came to see you.”

  He mimicked my sigh, but, I felt, with much less dramatic bravado. “Okay. But I don’t know what you’re talking about with that art stuff.”

  “She sold you paintings, sculptures, art, right?”

  “No.” He looked at me with a sincere you-must-be-crazy expression on his face.

  “So you weren’t working some art scam with her?”

  He shook his head and laughed with a grimace. “Course not. What would we do with that stuff?”

  I remembered the wall of art in Frankie’s apartment. The paintings slashed and scattered on the floor, the empty wall with holes and picture hangers, the sculptures and metal figurines broken and twisted. I’d assumed it was stuff Johnnie hadn’t gotten around to selling off.

  “So Johnnie never brought you any artwork to sell for her?”

  “Naw.”

  “Did you know her apartment was full of it?”

  “How would I know, man? I never visited her.” He paused, reflecting. “But I guess I knew she liked it. She mentioned it every once in a while. How she’d bought a painting or statue or something that she really liked. But she never tried to pawn any stuff off on us. If she had, we’d have turned her down flat because we wouldn’t have a clue what it was worth or where to get rid of it.”

  “So what is it that you do, or did, with Johnnie?”

  “You’re no cop, right?”

  I nodded, affecting my best non-cop face.

  “Painkillers. OxyContin. Johnnie had a source. But she didn’t want to sell it on the street. She knew we could get rid of it for her. That’s it. Simple business deal.”

  “What was her source?”

  He shrugged. “She mentioned some doctor, but not a name.” He laughed. It was an off-putting laugh, derisive and singular. I was beginning to think that Jalil’s assessment of his character was overly optimistic.

  “Anyways, I don’t know how she met the guy, but it wasn’t too surprising. She had no problem with men. They had problems with her, though. She’d hook them, one way or the other. She had the looks, and she knew how to use ‘em. I think she got some of them going online. She’d get ‘em sending her money, promising goodies.” He smiled or, more accurately, leered. “Don’t know whether she found this doctor online or if he’s here in the city somewhere. She was an ice princess man. Cold.”

  I assumed little Vince had struck out with her.

  “Did she sell you a lot of OxyContin?”

  “Pretty fair amount. It was regul
ar. Every month.”

  “Was this just you and Scooter handling the trade or were the Blue Notes involved? Was Caballo Negro taking a cut of your action?”

  He frowned, lowered his eyes, tightened his hands on the wheel. “This was our own thing.”

  “And Caballo was cool with that?”

  Vince didn’t answer, just stared out the window. I guessed Caballo would be none too pleased to find out that two of his soldiers were flexing their entrepreneurial muscles.

  “Where’d you sell the Oxy?”

  “Here and there.”

  A picture of Balboa High School in Mission Terrace popped into my mind. Painkillers were all too much the rage among San Francisco’s teenagers. But solving that particular nasty wasn’t on my agenda for today.

  “What about the last time Johnnie came to see you?”

  “What about it?”

  “You cheated her out of some money. She was angry. What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing. She blew off some steam. We had a little disagreement about one particular sale. It was a temporary issue. We weren’t trying to screw her. Scooter had lost money he shouldn’t have playing pool. We told her she’d get paid in a week, soon as we sold some more junk. She wasn’t happy, but what was she gonna do?” He grinned, his mouth a lopsided insult.

  “So she just left you guys, happy as a clam?”

  “She was pissed. Said she’d only accept money in advance from then on. But she was okay with it. Nothing happened. She knew we’d pay up sooner or later.”

  “And that was the last time you saw her?”

  “We didn’t even know she’d disappeared till her little sister showed up and told us.”

  My blood started to heat up a little as I remembered the bruise on Frankie’s arm. “Which one of you roughed her up?”

  “Nobody. I mean, she went a little crazy and charged Scooter, and he grabbed her just so she wouldn’t scratch his eyes out. It was self-defense. He didn’t hurt her, really.” Vince threw up his hands. I mean, whattaya gonna do? A little girl attacks you, all bets are off.

  I examined him for a moment, then looked out the front toward Marsh’s car. I thought Vince was telling me the truth. Mostly.