by G. M. Ford
"Maybe I'm losing my touch."
"What you must be losing is your voice."
"What?"
"Nobody down in the square remembers one damn thing about you trying to turn up any woman named Selena Dun lap. Not one. Not a bartender. Not a regular. Nobody. I sent George and Ralph down there today, and you know--they came up just drier than hell." He looked to his left at George, who met his gaze and then reached around him for the schnapps.
"So what?"
"So, just this week, some guy nobody ever saw before, some gorilla, managed to damn near find old Selena in one day's time. Kicked up her flop. Smacked a couple of her friends around. What do you make of that?"
He turned back my way. "What are you, the better business bureau? So what if I took the kid's money? Maybe I didn't hoof it all over. What business is that of yours?''
"I'm making it my business, Charlie. I'm making it my business to find out what you spent your time doing when you were supposed to be out looking for the kid's mother, and I'm not going away until I'm satisfied. If that fucks up your present gig, so be it. The way I see it, that kind of depends on you."
I could almost see the gears turning in his head. "Why you all over my ass?" he demanded. "What have I ever done to you?"
"Because, sometime about when you were supposed to be looking for the kid's mother, somebody got nervous enough about something to slip Lukkas Terry enough heroin to kill a cow. And I think whatever in hell it was you were doing is what set it off."
He showed me a palm. "I don't know nothing about no death. You got that? Nothin'." He took a deep breath.
"I never said you did."
He wiped his hands down over his face and walked out into the seating area. "Okay," he said. "So I didn't look for the woman. Maybe I'm not Sam Spade. So what?"
"What happened?"
"Well, you know, like I told you, the kid didn't have a goddamn dime. Took me over to his agent's place. Had this big old party going on." He stopped. Considering his options. "So we just get there, all these fucked-up people milling around, and the kid gets lost. Leaves me standing around with my thumb up my ass. Turns out later he's downstairs fucking around in this recording studio they got right there in the house. I mean, you oughta see this place. Christ. I'm wandering around checking out the sights when this Conover guy takes me into his office. I figure he's either gonna write me a check or throw me out, right? But instead he up and asks me what I know about the kid, and I tell him I know nothing. Like I'm just being hired to do a job."
He stopped. Another deep breath. Charlie sat down backward on one of the black chairs, leaning his forearms on its rounded back.
"So?" I pushed.
"So the guy goes into this big song and dance. Tells me this sob story about the kid. About this really weird life he's had. All alone in the world. How he's more like a father to the kid than a manager. How the kid is wired real tight, and how concerned about it he is and how he, first off, don't think the kid really saw his mother and how, second off, he don't think the kid's any way capable of handling anything as traumatic as finding out his mother is a bag lady."
"How much?" I asked quickly.
He almost smiled. "You got a nasty mind."
"How much?" I persisted.
He flashed a certain pride. "Twenty-five hundred."
"Not to look."
He nodded. "Just keep the kid happy and get lost."
"Then what?"
"There's no then what," he said. "That was it. I took the money and ran." He pushed a finger in my direction. "And I don't care what you say. You would have taken it too." I didn't argue with him.
A silence, punctuated by the clink of glass on glass, settled in.
"You remember my aunt Karen?" I said finally.
He knit his brow. "Which one?"
"The one just a little older than me. Used to be married to Bert."
"The one with the ?" He used his hands.
"Yeah, that one."
"What about her?"
"You remember what she does for a living?"
"Sure as hell must be something for the city," he quipped. "Everybody in your family's out there on the city dole somewhere. Your old man saw to that."
"Licenses, building permits. Business licenses, shit like that. That's what she does." I reached into my inside pocket and pulled out a wad of paper, which I smoothed on the bar in front of me. I looked over at Charlie Boxer. He looked old. "Before we go through this," I said, "I want to say again that I'm not the law. Whatever I might personally think of what you did, it's not my place to be cleaning up after the cops."
"I told you what I did."
"And you know, Charlie, if it wasn't for this stuff" I tapped the pile of paper "I probably would have just let it go at that."
He didn't say anything, so I asked the question for him.
"It's the liquor license for this place."
His face turned the color of old custard. He gripped the chair back with both hands. I went on. "It's weird too, Charlie. Because if some woman hadn't gotten me thinking about building permits and my aunt Karen, I would probably never have thought to look it up. Strange how life works, isn't it?"
I thumbed through the pile. "Tell me how I should interpret this, Charlie, and if it's good, I'll just go away. How's that?" Stony silence.
"Beginning about three years ago, the city licensing bureau and the county health department started trying to get the Red and Black Lounge and its registered owner one Helen Cleveland to clean up a number of serious health and safety violations." I wet a finger and worked down through the pile. "They've cited the place here no less than thirteen times. Bad ventilation. No handicapped access. Sanitation concerns about the bathrooms." I flipped || through the citations.
I pulled a piece of violet notepaper from amid the pile. It was covered with a fine and quite precise handwriting. "All this time Helen has been claiming that the bar barely supports itself, that she is crippled and has to hire help, and there is no way she could possibly get the place up to code. Asked the city to work with her."
I pulled out a piece of city stationery. I waved it at the inert Charlie Boxer. "And, believe it or not, the city actually tried to help. They came up with a bare-bones renovation plan. They estimated it would come to about fifteen thou to get the place up to snuff and made some suggestions as to contractors. Pretty nice of them, I thought."
I looked over at Charlie. He didn't seem to agree. He was doing uninterested. I fanned the pile of paper. "To make a long story short, about three months ago, the city, as cities will do, finally lost its patience and gave your Miss Cleveland ninety days to get up to code or get out of business. Guess what?"
Apparently, Charlie wasn't in the mood to guess, so I helped him out. "On March fourth, a mere twenty-five days before the place is going to be padlocked, out of the blue, like a gift from the heavens, Helen Cleveland suddenly finds the cash to get the place fixed up. She beats the deadline. Spends twenty-five grand on repairs. The place looks great. The city's happy. She's happy, and" I let it hang "your name suddenly appears on the license as half owner. Wadda you think of that?"
"A major step up,'' said George.
"A dream come true," agreed Ralph.
"Must be his animal magnetism," suggested Judy.
"Isn't it weird how all this stuff Lukkas Terry's death, the remodeling of the bar, all this shit coming down at the same time?"
"Get the fuck out of here," Charlie said, rising to his feet. "I don't have to talk to you. Get out of here."
I stayed where I was. "Call the cops," I suggested. "So, what did you think when the kid turned up dead?"
"Go on, get out of here."
"You gonna try and tell me it didn't cross your mind?"
"I'm not telling you anything."
"I know, Charlie, and the bad news for you and your little love nest here is that I'm not leaving until you do."
For a brief second I thought the little guy was going to rush me, b
ut the moment of anger washed completely through him, leaving only resignation behind.
He wandered about. There were tears in his eyes. He held out his arms. "I can't lose this, man. This is all I got. My whole future."
"You didn't believe a word Conover told you, did you?"
His anger came flooding back. "He was full of shit. Twenty-five hundred not to work. Just 'cause he was such a nice guy. Who the fuck was he kidding, anyway? Thought he could con a Conner."
"What did you do?"
"I started to look anyway. That's when Frank and Judy saw me. At first I thought I'd see if maybe I couldn't turn the woman. You know, see what it was was making him go jumpy about turning her up."
"And then?"
"Then I had a better idea. I figured, what the hell, I'd been paid, I might as well put in a little time, so I camped out up the street from that mansion of his and followed him around."
"The whole week?"
"Yeah. The whole week."
"Don't make me pull this out of you, Charlie. Let's get this thing over with as quickly as possible."
He seemed to be ready for it to end. The last of it came out of him in a rush. "Auburn. The Muckelshoot Casino. Every day around three. Stays till around eight and then back home."
"Gambling?"
"With some folks, it's a gamble, but not with him; with him it's a sure thing. All that son of a bitch does is lose. He couldn't pick a winner in a one-horse race."
"You saw this yourself?"
He moved to the back of the room now, leaning against the wall between the rest rooms. "I followed him in. Watched from the bar. He plays that James Bond game. The one where you try to make eight."
"Baccarat?"
"Yeah, that's it. I got friendly with a couple of waitresses who work the tables. Fucker's famous down there. He's the biggest loser any of them have ever seen. Said it was nothing for him to lose thirty grand in a weekend. Ten, twelve, easy, four or five days a week. None of them could even begin to guess the total. Hundreds of thousands, anyway. That's what they said."
"So you put two and two together, didn't you?"
"Didn't take no genius. We got this high roller, with expenses through the roof, with a gambling jones that's pissing away money hand over fist down in Auburn, and he's managing this golden goose who don't give one flying hit for his money." He shrugged. "So why does Conover give a shit whether the kid finds his mother or not? Unless of course he's so deep into the kid's pockets that he can't afford any change at all in the status quo."
"So you shook him down."
"He didn't take much shaking," Charlie Boxer said quickly. "He's a smart boy, that one. I knew what I needed. I didn't get greedy. 1 kept my end reasonable. He could see right away that if he paid me off, I was going to be in no position to come back at him. I'd probably have done more time for the extortion end than he ever did for skimming the kid. Just good business, really," he said finally.
"And when Lukkas Terry turned up dead? What, it never crossed your mind? You gonna try to run that shit by me?"
"What crossed my mind's none of your damn business."
"Sure turned out to be Lukkas Terry's business."
"The kid was crazy as a shithouse rat, Leo. Had whole talks with himself. Just sittin' there. No telling what mighta actually happened. What is it you want from me anyway, huh?"
It was my Catholic upbringing. I wanted contrition. Instead, I bit my tongue. I want to tell the old man that he may as well have just shot the kid himself. That just walking up and blowing Lukkas Terry's brains all over the wall might have been kinder and gentler. But I didn't. Instead I said, "Hope this works out for you, Charlie."
28
It looked like a time warp. As if some ancient wandering band of Goths had suddenly stumbled into a modern dining room, found the fare to their liking, and begun setting up their hide tents.
We'd had to put both extra leaves in the table, which now spread out before us like the banquet plank of some medieval keep. The five chairs on the left side were occupied by George, Harold, Big Frank, Judy, and at the far end, Normal, towering up into the morning light as if he were sitting in a booster chair. At the foot of the table, Ralph shoveled scrambled eggs into his yawning mouth. The better part of an egg and a half adorned his faded shirtfront. As a fellow spiller, I knew in my heart he'd get to it later.
Selena sat next to Ralph and across from Judy. Way up at this end, Beth Goza sat directly across from George. She and Selena had been allotted the extra bedrooms. Everybody else had bunked in the basement, whose palatial appointments had been the major topic of breakfast conversation prior to the arrival of food.
Duvall had elbowed me awake a bit after seven. "This is your party, Sherlock. I suggest you beat feet to the store."
I'd begun to protest. "There's some eggs and stuff, isn't there?"
"There's no nothing." She kneed me in the back. "I've never seen anything like it. They're like locusts. They got the last of the rice and canned peaches at two." Another knee. "Norman used my pottery project for dip. It was hideous." She elbowed me again. This time harder. "Go to the store."
I went. But not before I called Jed. My turn to wake his ass..?
"Jed James," he said crisply.
Damn. He was up. "Top of the mornin' to ya," I said.
"And to you, my good man."
"Can you come over to Rebecca's?"
"Now?"
"Yeah."
Before he could ask, I filled him in. Mrs. Jolley. The Goza girl. Selena. Charlie Boxer. The whole thing. I heard him sigh.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he said when I'd finished.
"You know me, Jed. I'm universally renowned for my keen perception of the obvious. You show me you had motive, means, and opportunity, throw in millions of bucks, and I'm just dumb enough to figure it was you."
"Give me half an hour," he said.
I went to the store.
Now Jed came bustling back into the dining room, holding several more pounds of crisp bacon on a blue platter. "Right now, as we speak, in a little cemetery on Long Island, my mother is turning over in her grave," he announced. "To my knowledge, no member of my family has ever been so exposed to bacon."
He divvied the slices between the greasy plates at each end of the table. The crew dove in and made it disappear in a heartbeat.
I was ahead on the eggs and toast, leaning against the wall watching Beth Goza, who looked as if she had awakened to find herself locked inside the gorilla cage at the zoo. She took minuscule bites from an onion bagel with no-fat cream cheese and watched, wide-eyed, the carnage going on about her. Duvall stood back to the window, taking pictures of the assembled multitude with her Pentax. For insurance purposes, she'd said.
Norman strode over to the Igloo cooler in the comer and, with one massive hand, fished out three fresh beers. His other hand was clasped across his middle. "You okay, Normal?" I asked.
"Musta ate somethin' a little heavy last night," he growled. "Just gotta wash it down."
Duvall lowered the camera and bent an eyebrow my way. I peered out over the length of the table, pretending not to notice her.
From the far end of the table, Selena picked up the thread of the conversation. "Much as it pains me," she said between bites, "I agree with old bird dog on this one. Catchin' him for stealin' somehow just ain't enough. If he done what Leo says he done, then he's gotta pay."
Jed repeated himself. "I'm telling you, Selena, unless somebody turns up who was in that room when Lukkas got that shot, no DA is going to be willing to try it, because no jury is going to convict. It's not even circumstantial; it's inferential."
"Ain't right," she insisted before wedging another piece of toast into her mouth.
"I refuse to believe it," Goza said for the umpteenth time. "Greg loved Lukkas. It's not possible "
Jed interrupted her. "I know it's difficult for you, Miss Goza "
"Ms." she corrected. I could hear his teeth grinding.
&
nbsp; "Try going slower," I suggested.
"Ms. Goza. I understand that he's been quite good to you. For that matter, he's been quite good to a number of people." He took a deep breath. "And don't for a minute think I enjoy making accusations against a cultural icon like Mr. Conover. Among other things, he's something of a hero of mine." Goza started to speak, but Jed carried on. "But but Leo's scenario as to what happened is not only the obvious answer, it's the only explanation that makes any sense at all." He used his fingers to count. "This all starts when Lukkas sees Selena in the alley behind the Moore and hires this Charlie Boxer to look for her."
"Strike one for the kid," said George. "Conover really don't need no extra cards in the deck. He's into the kid's poke in a big way."
"Then he really screwed up," I said, "when he tried to run a number on old Charlie. He'd have been much better off if he'd just sent Charlie off to look for Selena. If he finds her, he finds her. So what? Anything would have been better than trying to con Charlie. All he managed to do was get Charlie's attention. That's when the shit really hit the fan."
"So Charlie made Conover for his gambling jones," Big Frank rumbled. "And shook him down for the twenty-five to fix up the bar."
"For at least twenty-five," I said. "Knowing Charlie as I do " I let it hang. At last we had consensus.
"Strike two for the kid," said George. "By now, Conover's gotta be crappin' bricks. The kid is looking for his mama, which has got serious fly-in-the-ointment possibilities. He's moved out on his own. He's fixin' to move his girlfriend in. The boy's gettin' more independent by the day. On top of that, Conover's been shook down by Charlie for God knows how much. He's gotta be sure he's lookin' at the end of the world."
I jumped in. * 'And, I think maybe worst of all, the kid is in no hurry to release the album. As a matter of fact, he's telling anybody who'll listen that he's gonna scrap everything and start over. The minute anybody asks for an accounting, Conover is screwed. He's so far into Lukkas Terry's pockets, only his feet are sticking out. What he needs more than anything is for that new CD to hit the stores."