Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “He’s a great bartender,” Sughrue answered. “He handled three cocktail waitresses, the bar customers, and me. Without breaking a sweat.” Then Sughrue sighed drunkenly. “And he cut me off. Thank God.”

  “You make a scene?”

  “No, I got drunk. You know that second-day hangover drunk?” he said. I nodded. “Well, when I tried to sing along with the kid playing the piano, Albert suggested that a dozen beers and a dozen shots of tequila were probably just right for a fellow my size. Management policy, he said.”

  “So how should I work him?” I said as Sughrue opened the door.

  “A fucking ball-peen hammer,” he said, then wandered down the hall toward his room.

  —

  At the nearly empty bar, decked out in my best Montana rancher duds, I ordered a single-malt Scotch from Albert, sipped it, and complimented him on the martini he had made for me earlier that afternoon.

  “It ain’t hard,” he said in his squeaky voice. “Sir.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said, but he had already scooped up my C-note and gone to make change.

  Several expensively casual couples leaned against the baby grand piano on the other side of the room. The kid, as Sughrue had called her, turned out to be a tall willow switch of a girl with a husky contralto far too knowing for her years, as was the elegant black sheath that draped a little loosely over her slim hips, as if she had borrowed it from her mother. Her black hair was in a twenties bob, as if she came from a simpler, happier time. Or hoped to go there.

  The couples sitting around her piano bar were tipsy in a rich and controlled manner; the goldfish tip bowl was filled with fives and tens instead of ones. The women’s laughter was high and thin but not in the range of giggles yet. The men could still raise an eyebrow at the kid, but only one at a time, and not always the right one. They all seemed to be having trouble trying to suggest a song title that the young girl hadn’t already played for them. The girl’s smile seemed real, as did her occasional husky laughter, but she looked tired, perhaps bored, her bright eyes shining among black circles.

  I took the fifty out of the change Albert stacked on the bar, then wandered over to the piano, where I stuffed it into the tip bowl, which caused a momentary silence.

  “Play something you really like, ma’am,” I said, then drifted back to the bar.

  “Righto, old chap,” came a voice from the couples. “A delightfully wonderful notion.”

  What the hell was a British accent doing in Kerrville, Texas? I asked myself, thinking I’d probably find out as soon as the camel-hair sport coat made it to the bar.

  Western art, it turned out, as the Englishman told me. The piano player noodled happily, covering some Elvis, a few Beach Boys tunes, a bit of the early Beatles, and some Eagles cuts.

  By this time, I knew about the Englishman’s galleries in Paris, London, Beverly Hills, and Scottsdale, where he lived. I knew his wife; three of his friends, who ran a local gold exchange and jewelry factory; and a big guy who dealt in Mexican art, named Ed Forsyth, who looked a little like Howdy Doody and who told me he was friends with the motel’s owner, which was what I wanted to know, but I didn’t realize it.

  When the piano player wrapped up her evening with a painfully slow and touching version of “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me,” a Zevon tune that Linda Ronstadt had covered, or so she said, the art people drifted away.

  The piano player pulled up a stool just down the bar from me and began to count her money just as Albert offered me, the last customer, the last call. “Thanks,” I said to her, “that was a great set. Can I buy you a cocktail?”

  “Let me have a setup, Al,” she said without looking up from the bills she was counting. Then she raised her shockingly blue eyes, a tilted smile matching her raised eyebrow. “I’m Kate,” she said, “and you’re old enough to be my father.”

  Albert set four fingers of Irish and a pint of Guinness in front of her. Then four fingers of the Macallan in front of me.

  “Grandfather,” I said as I paid.

  Kate laughed that wonderful laugh again. And we finished our drinks in silence. But I knew we’d talk, eventually.

  —

  The next night, after a day of exhausting the usual sources, we still weren’t any closer to Connie Navarro. So I sent Sughrue on a tour of the local night spots, such as they were, then met him in the Cypress Tree just before midnight.

  Kate, who was wearing a long straight blond wig tonight and a high-necked black sheath, which made her look like a surfer chick escaping from a Catholic girl’s school, smiled and nodded when I came into the bar. But she was talking and laughing with Sughrue, who was sipping a tequila and washing it down with Shiner beer. It seemed time to lose our cover. I took my drink over to the piano to sit on a stool next to Sughrue.

  “Hello, Grandpa,” Kate said quietly as I sat down, chuckling deep in the beautiful pale column of her neck. “Good to see you again.”

  “You told her,” I said to Sughrue.

  “I told her nothing,” he said without looking at me. “But if she asked, man, I would tell her everything.”

  “Great,” I said. “And give her my Cadillac, my cash, credit cards, and…”

  “All your cocaine,” Kate whispered breathlessly, then segued from the show tune she was playing into something the Cowboy Junkies might have done to Billie Holiday’s “Cocaine Blues.”

  “And you look like such an innocente, Catrina,” Sughrue said.

  “Substitute teacher by day,” she said, “femme fatale by night.” Then she laughed bitterly. “Honey,” she snapped, “there are neither innocent nor guilty in my life. Just lots of victims and damn few survivors.”

  Sughrue and I looked at each other, considering the bitterness of that remark, while Kate excused herself to slink toward her break.

  Then somebody touched my arm. When I turned, Ed Forsyth stood there grinning at me like a feral pup, sharp teeth shining among that plague of silly freckles. We reintroduced ourselves. As I shook Eddie’s large hand, I realized that I had dismissed him too lightly the night before. His expensively tailored cowboy clothes hid his true nature. Eddie was a big boy, one of those pleasant-faced ugly guys; a goon at first look, but his knuckles were knotted with scar tissue and gristle, his arms were as big as small tree trunks, and his wide, sloping shoulders supported a thick, brutal neck. Eddie had a pair of slick scars, one on the back of his right hand and another on his left wrist, where I suspected that prison tattoos had been removed.

  I introduced him to my partner, nodded to Sughrue so he would take a read on Eddie, who invited us to join his table for a taste or two. He indicated a round table in the corner where the people from the night before had gathered around an old man and his young wife. I promised we’d be there in a New York minute.

  “Waxahachie minute,” Sughrue said as Eddie walked away.

  “What’s that?”

  “Same thing with a Texas twist,” he said. “What’s that jailhouse trash want with you?”

  “Maybe they teach art appreciation at the Big House now,” I said. “Maybe last night I told him about my last hole card, the Charlie Russell pencil sketches sitting in my safety deposit box.”

  “He’s sure to want to fuck you out of them somehow,” Sughrue said. “That boy never did an honest day’s work in his life.”

  “You can bet on that,” I said. “But let’s see where it takes us.”

  “At least he’s got some cocaine,” Sughrue said. “And a postnasal drip the size of Yellowstone Falls.” Then he raised his eyebrow at me. “Worried?”

  “Not yet,” I said, “and it’s been ten years.”

  —

  The older gentleman in the cashmere blazer, whose name, according to his card, was Lyman Gifford Gish, had a thicker and more attractive veneer, which meant, as far as I could tell, that he’d never done time. But I bet that he’d come close during the savings and loan rip-off. The largest and most successful crime ever committed in America. Americ
a, hell; the world. Because L.G. claimed to be a retired banker. Retired, hell. Old whores retire; crooked old bankers just get a change of venue. But since L.G. was married to Consuela Navarro late of Del Rio, I forced myself to be nice to the old man.

  Consuela herself was a piece of work. She had a short-legged, chunky body crammed into a little number right out of the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog and a chubby, mean version of Analise’s face. But she reeked of sexual fire. Hell, even her ostentatious fur stank of animal musk. So much I couldn’t tell if she had heard about her sister’s murder. But as I listened to her telling Sughrue the lie of her life, I decided she hadn’t heard. Nobody’s that tough. Connie came close, though.

  So when the bar closed at midnight, Sughrue and I joined the rich, desperate parade across the river to L.G.’s four-thousand-square-foot stone and glass house on the bluff. It also counted, I suppose, that Kate asked to ride along with us to show us the long winding way across the Guadalupe to perdition.

  Kate admired the Lincoln, claiming she had never been in a nice American car before, as she hunkered on the front seat with her feet beneath her, then lit a joint. “You guys aren’t cops, are you?” she asked through a veil of dope smoke, then extended the number toward me.

  I started to wave it off, then assumed we were looking a long reckless evening dead in the pale, shrunken face, so I took it from her like an old professional hippie, and hit the sucker till I nearly choked. Before I could stop, though, Kate grabbed a little camera out of her purse and snapped a photograph of me. The camera might have been small, but the flashbulb blinded me so badly I thought she had burned my lashes off.

  “Jesus,” I said, stopping in the middle of the road. “You do that a lot?”

  “Only when I do drugs with strangers,” she said, then giggled and handed the joint to Sughrue.

  “That’s fucking dangerous,” I said.

  “Why? You guys gonna shoot me?”

  “If we don’t die in a car wreck first,” I said.

  Then Kate laughed again, and I realized that her charm and grace came from shyness overlaid with drugs. I don’t know how I missed it. I’d been that way often enough myself. Then she fixed our noses with two blasts of coke so pure my face froze. And I didn’t care anymore.

  L.G. had a sleepy white-coated Mexican standing at the apex of the circular driveway. When he opened the door for Kate, she rattled at him in Spanish, then headed for the wide carved front door.

  “What’d she say?” I asked Sughrue as we followed her.

  “She told him to be careful with the car, man,” he answered, “because we’re cops.”

  “You look like cops,” Kate said, leaning against the door. I’d never been much for tall, skinny women, but in the muted light of the entrance, her long, limber body striking exactly the perfect graceful edge of the arc, Kate was truly beautiful. And she leaned into my shoulder, her breath soft on my neck.

  “I’ve seen that look before, Grandpa,” she whispered, “and I’d advise you to keep it to yourself.” Then she laughed and whipped off the long blond wig. Beneath it, her dark hair had been clipped to the skin. She grabbed my hand and rubbed my palm against the stubbled scalp. It was as soft as the bones of her head were hard.

  “Jesus,” Sughrue said. “Give it up, Milo. You look like a man who’s just been gut shot.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew. I just followed her inside when he held the door for us.

  —

  One of the things with which I tried to replace drinking during the dry years was books. I read so many that I couldn’t always keep them straight. And I could never remember endings, either. But images, they stayed with me sometimes. In a novel called Waltz Across Texas, I remembered what I thought the telling image of rich Texans at play. When these old boys in the novel ran out of ice, they cut cubes of frozen steak to cool their bourbon and branch. Not on my worst day. Never.

  But if L. G. Gish had run short of ice, he would have bought an ice house. Sughrue and I had never seen anything like this. And between the two of us, we’d seen some shit. A hog calling, a pig wallow, a Polish wedding, and Saint Paddy’s Day in Butte. But nothing like this.

  Eddie took a framed Russell Chatham landscape print off the den wall—one of the Headwaters of the Missouri series, I thought—set it on a table, then dumped an ounce of sparkling pure coke in the middle. He didn’t cut a line, he cut an endless spiral. Then handed out silver straws. The joints were machine rolled, loaded with slivers of hash, and served on silver salvers. They were also deadly. We tried to limit ourselves to two hits an hour. And had to fight off the two Mexican bartenders who must have been ordered not to let any of the guests see the bottoms of their glasses.

  Oh, and the guests. Turned out we had stumbled into a regular Wednesday night hump-day party. Between one A.M. and four, twenty people must have drifted through. Almost all of them out-of-towners, it seemed. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, and various members of the idle, vacationing rich. Not all of them criminals. But not a single one that I’d let sleep in the chicken house. Sughrue and I took turns mixing and standing on the deck over the river, even though the norther hadn’t completely blown itself out.

  Neither of us had a chance to talk to Connie Navarro. She had jammed herself into another nifty little number, all slits and lace-up strings, fishnet hose, and tiny four-inch heels. In one way or another, she spent the evening attending to L.G. When she wasn’t engaged in dancing displays of her blunt sexuality with various men in front of her smiling husband, she sat on the arm of L.G.’s leather chair, touching him fondly, laughing warmly into his hairy ear.

  Well, hell, even criminals can fall in love. And as far as I could tell, neither of them touched a drug. They barely drank. Kate did some drugs, though, drank champagne from the bottle, and broke some old boys’ hearts. She had changed into cutoffs and a long-sleeved denim shirt tied below her small breasts. She didn’t mix much, though, just hung out in front of the stereo, earphones clamped to her lovely head, dancing with her eyes closed.

  Eddie played host, his goofy grin tightly pasted to his face. He did some cocaine, but never really fired the end of a doobie when he had a hit. He spent some time trying to pump me, but you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. I led him to believe that my family money had been supplemented by the sort of real estate scams and sharp deals only allowed the idle rich. And former deputy sheriffs.

  But when I didn’t have his attention, Sughrue did. They circled each other like a pair of bad roosters. I knew it wouldn’t take much to set them off, so I made Sughrue promise good behavior on Baby Lester’s head.

  Then about four-thirty the party dimmed, and the whole point of it became clear. Connie wandered over to the stereo, slapped in a blues CD, then slipped off Kate’s earphones. They began to slow dance together. L.G.’s eyes brightened and he licked his lips like a lizard. Now I knew which motel he owned. Sughrue and I glanced at each other across the suddenly still room, nodded, then went over to cut in. He took Kate; I gathered the ruthless sex machine of Connie into my arms. I couldn’t tell from the look on her face if she wanted to arm wrestle, leg wrestle, fistfight, or fuck.

  “Down home,” I heard Sughrue explain to Kate, “when women dance together, it means they want a man to ask them.”

  Kate barked once, then giggled, saying, “Where I was raised, when hogs dance, snakes fuck.”

  “You’re not as stupid as you look, Montana,” Connie said. “Are you?” Then she hooked her wrist around my neck and pulled me tightly against her body, which was as hot as a banked fire. She was as strong as a monkey.

  “Connie, I was down in Del Rio a couple of days ago,” I said when I got my breath back, “talking to your daddy.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “My father doesn’t usually talk to gringos.” Even her breath was hot.

  “Well, actually we didn’t talk all that much,” I admitted. “But you and I should have a conversation about…”

  “About what?”


  “Your little sister,” I said.

  “Goddammit,” she said, “fuck.” Just for a beat did she search for a plan. As we whirled, I saw Eddie step toward Sughrue. But Sughrue swung Kate into his arms before he could say anything. Kate shivered as if she’d stepped on a banana slug.

  “Checkout time at the lodge is three,” Connie said. “Complain about your bill. Ask for the manager,” she said. “Now get the fuck out of here before L.G. sics Eddie on you.”

  “Lady,” I said, “Eddie’ll never know what hit him.”

  “Probably your crazy friend,” she murmured, smiling for the first time. “He’s wanted to all night.” Then in a normal voice she added, “Thanks, Montana.” Then chuckled as she walked over to Kate, who was still standing in the circle of Eddie’s arms, a sick look carefully hidden on her still face.

  L.G. heaved a terrific sigh as Sughrue and I thanked him for his hospitality. “Anytime,” he said, but he didn’t mean it.

  “So what happened?” Sughrue said as we waited for the attendant to bring back the car.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted as the Chicano pulled up and held the door open for me. “But either way, we’re out of here tomorrow.”

  “Too bad,” Sughrue said, staring at Eddie standing in the open door and giving us the look. Then Sughrue cocked his finger, pointed it at Eddie, and fired. “Too fucking bad.”

  I slipped behind the wheel, but the Chicano held the door for a moment, talking through his smile as if giving directions. “Watch that one, señor,” he said. “He is a master of the sucker punch.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and handed him a twenty. But he waved it away. “For your children,” I said, and he took it.

  —

  Sughrue wasn’t in his room when I got ready to check out of the lodge the next afternoon, but he’d left a note saying he’d meet me at the car rental place at four. I glanced at my bill, then squawked for the manager. Connie came out of her office, all spiffy in a gray linen suit with matching heels.

  “Come into my office, Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said. “I’m sure we can work this out.”