Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  “I doubt Nielsen would choose you as a test viewer, Doug.”

  Sherman chuckled and nodded. “Touché” He leaned forward across the table. “But even if by some strange event they should be there, how do you plan to—”

  “She’s too smart to let Jimmy cash any of the bonds this soon, so she’ll be dancing in some topless joint in the Old Quarter to raise them a travel stake.”

  Sherman hesitated, spoke as if with difficulty. “Dain, I have a bad feeling about this one because of that second bug…”

  Dain stood up, scooping up the check and leaving a too-large tip in its place. “And I have a good feeling about it—because of that second bug.” He stuck out his hand; Sherman shook it. “I’ve got Shenzie in the car, I’ve got to drop him off at Randy Solomon’s place before I go to the airport.”

  “I’m surprised you’d leave your cat with that Gestapo thug. Will there by anyplace I can reach you if—”

  “I’ll reach you. If.” He grinned again, pointed at the Walkman with the Farnsworth tape still inside it. “Keep that for me until I get back. Just in case.”

  He left his car in his rented parking place across the Embarcadero from the loft, caught the shuttle bus to the airport, and was in New Orleans in time to watch the sunset.

  16

  Here the Mississippi was the classical Mark Twain river—lazy brown water, green banks, a churning paddle wheeler angled upstream to fight the current. On the landing dock was insomniac Dain, one of the few early passengers waiting to catch the deliberately anachronistic paddle wheeler’s first trip of the day. His only lead was Vangie; he could only look for her at night. So he rode in a clopping horse-drawn carriage through genteel upper-crust neighborhoods, watched the Vieux Carré street life through wrought-iron filigreed balconies, listened to the music starting to strut from some of the clubs.

  Dain went through the open passageway to the hotel court where the fountain burbled and brightly clad tourists sipped tall pastel drinks. From the courtyard, he went along Chartres to Conti, turned left toward the rising sounds of Bourbon Street. Wandered, pausing to look in windows, peering through open club doorways at the entertainment inside. Stood on a corner to watch black boys tap-dance for thrown coins.

  A topless joint, the music not very good, leave without even making it to the bar for a drink. Stand on the sidewalk eating a po’boy and drinking beer from a paper cup. Then plunge back into the night world.

  Better music, the hornman a Muggsy Spanier clone, nurse a beer through a whole round of floor shows, leave the bottle half-full behind him. Just another single male alone on his own in the big city. To bed at dawn, to not sleep worth a damn.

  Another day to kill. He rode a streetcar named Desire out to the end of the line, rode it back in again, spent a half hour admiring the stations of the cross and the stained glass at St. Louis Cathedral, sat in a pew, feet on the kneeler… his eyelids drooped…

  The black hole between Marie’s breasts blossomed red. Her eyes were wild, her hair was wild, from her mouth, strained impossibly wide, came a hoarse masculine SCREAM, quickly muffled

  Dain jerked erect, mouth-breathing, looked around quickly. A nun in a habit was staring at him from across the aisle. A little child was crying, pointing a finger. He almost fled.

  At the oyster bar of Houlihan’s, he watched a man commit murder on fresh dripping bivalves with great skill and a sharp knife. Couldn’t eat, found a karate dojo, exhausted himself with two hours of the basic “forms” of his second-degree black belt—two taikyoku drills, five pinans, and the other “open hand” drills—saifa, kanku, tensho and sanchin.

  Back at his room he lay nude on the bed, tried to justify his life. Whatever he did was meaningless. Lassitude gripped him. He was surprised to realize that he hoped Broussard would outwit him, but he knew she wouldn’t. He was too good at the precise geometry of manhunting, she was a prey animal that

  Between Marie’s beautiful breasts the black hole blossomed red. Her eyes were wild, her hair was wild

  Dain woke with a yell, bathed in sweat. He was falling to pieces. He took another shower, when he emerged, wet hair slicked back, towel around his waist, another night had fallen and the old-fashioned streetlights glowed from their cast-iron poles. Music drifted up from Bourbon Street to his small outside balcony, along with the clip-clop of a horse-drawn buggy in Rue Chartres. He leaned on the filigreed railing. Jasmine and mock orange filled the air with heavy fragrance.

  He had to find her soon or abandon the search.

  Midnight again. Dain leaned in the doorway of yet another exotic dance club on one of the side streets of the Quarter—for the moment he had exhausted Bourbon Street. How many had he hit tonight, how many more would he have to hit before he scored or admitted that his logic had been faulty—or was driven away by his now incessant nightmares?

  Another hour, another joint. Different faces, different voices, different music, all the same. The gyrating woman was past her prime, like pheasant hung so long that the skin had a greenish tinge and when you shook it all the feathers fell out. When he left the mostly empty joint, he set his untouched beer on an empty table in passing. Somebody was gulping it down from the bottle before he cleared the doorway.

  Directly across the narrow street was something called Carnal Knowledge. For some reason it was jumping, blaring, spilling customers out the open doors. Raucous rebel yells, groans, screamed sexual obscenities. If the two scantily clad women sprawled spread-legged in chairs outside the joint were typical, its success was undeserved.

  Dain slid inside. Very good music pounded a wicked beat for the topless girl writhing onstage. Being tall, he could just see her over the silhouetted heads of shouting, arm-waving tourists and drunks. The dancer was Vangie Broussard.

  She was magnificent, of body, face, movement. He felt an irrational flash of sympathy for this bright wood duck among the mud hens as he turned away, edged back out of the crowd again. He felt an equally irrational flash of caution. Why? There was no reason anybody should be tailing him. But what reason had there been for that extra bug on Farnsworth’s phone?

  One of the resting dancers blocked his way with a meaty white thigh. “Don’t like girls, baby? That one’s hot stuff.”

  Dain patted her cheek. “So are you, darlin’, so are you.”

  He went on, feeling the little momentary fierce joy he’d always felt the rare times he’d beaten Marie at chess. Nothing to do with winning: rather with the implacable beauty of

  Marie, her eyes wild, her hair wild as her feet came up off the floor with the force of her death

  Dain growled aloud, thrust the image away. No, goddammit, don’t rob yourself of this triumph, minuscule though it might be. Make it pay off. Then maybe Marie could stop haunting his dreaming and—now—even his waking hours.

  Deserted 2:00 A.M. street, the nightlife behind him, its raucous sounds dim on the air. He’d come this way deliberately, still wary, the same wariness that will make a leopard lay up on its own backtrail to ambush the white hunter he doesn’t even know is tracking him.

  Okay, deserted enough here. Dain took out the little pocket guide to the French Quarter he had gotten at the hotel desk, used it as an excuse to stop abruptly and gawp up at the next pair of street signs. Yes! An echo of sound scraped from the pavement—only it was not an echo because he had stopped moving. He squinted up at the signs, down at the guide, nodded and turned down Ursulines.

  When he was out of sight, a tall spare man in excellent condition, with the coloring and weathered look of the outdoors, cut across Burgundy at an angle toward the corner where Dain had disappeared. His shock of sandy hair had natural curl and was shot with gray, he wore glasses with a half-moon of bifocal on the lower curve of lens. Like Dain, he was sauntering.

  Moving through the bright lights and thinning crowds, Dain got fragmentary images of the tall spare weathered figure before it could slip off the edges of reflecting store windows. So, he’d been picked up on the street sometim
e during the evening. Dain felt totally alive for the first time since his snake dance in the desert. Hunting, he had become prey. Wonderful!

  He turned off on Conti, went in through the archway to the hotel courtyard, in the tiny taproom was served by a black-haired girl in leather shorts and halter who dispensed drinks with a smile and a lot of cleavage. Leather-bound book clipped under one arm, he crossed the courtyard to a small round white wrought-iron table near the splashing fountain. At this time of the morning, he was the only person in the court. A gecko hung in sideways patience against the curved side of the fountain.

  He set down the icy opened imported beer on the table, seated himself with his glass of ice water, the pastel lights from the fountain playing across his face. A chair scraped being drawn out Dain spoke without glancing over.

  “Pauli Girl. I took the chance you were a beer drinker.”

  The stalker tipped the glass to pour beer without getting too much of a head. His hands were big, strong, angular. He had a soft inviting Louisiana accent.

  “You make me feel lacking in southern hospitality, Mr. Dain, buying for me in my own town.”

  Dain looked at him. He was a big man, big as Dain but without Dain’s weight of muscle. His hard-bitten face had an inner calm behind the hardness. Dain matched his courtly tone.

  “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “Keith Inverness.”

  Neither man offered to shake hands. There was not so much antagonism as wariness between them, mutual recognition by hunting animals whose territories happened to overlap.

  “You still have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “Because I know who you are? A man in my line of work hears things from time to time, Mr. Dain.”

  “Your line of work.” Dain made it a statement, not a question. Inverness smiled slightly.

  “I guess you could say it’s the same line of work as yours—except mine has a pension at the end of it.”

  Dain said pleasantly, “What if I told you that my line of work is rare books?”

  “Like this?”

  Unexpectedly, Inverness reached across the table to snatch up Dain’s leather-bound volume. His big hands were remarkably quick. He riffled through it, allowed himself a small smile at its harmlessness as he laid it on the table.

  “The things people keep in cutout books might surprise you, Mr. Dain.”

  “I doubt that.”

  With what seemed like genuine regret, but without any sudden moves, Inverness took a badge in a leather case from his pocket and laid it on the table.

  “I guess you’d better make that Lieutenant of Detectives Inverness, Mr. Dain.” He drank beer, wiped his lips almost daintily with one of the paper napkins on the table. “Like you, I track people down. But inside the law.”

  “That’s okay with me,” said Dain.

  “I’m also New Orleans police liaison with the Louisiana State Commission on Organized Crime.” Dain was silent. “We’d kind of like to know who you’re looking for in New Orleans, and for whom.”

  “Not who—what,” said Dain, suddenly misty-eyed. “And for me. New Orleans jazz. Dixieland. Storyville. The heart—the soul—of the blues. My heart and soul are transported back to those halcyon days when the Nigras all had rhythm and clapped hands and knew their place…”

  Inverness nodded, unhurriedly stood and put his badge away. He said in an almost apologetic voice, “You’re too good at finding people, for all the wrong people. You couldn’t expect to remain anonymous forever. Enjoy your stay in New Orleans.”

  Dain sat unmoving, watching Inverness depart, his left thumb scraping idly down through the label of the empty beer bottle to tear it in half. The dancing colored water jet beyond his head made his profile very sharp and clear.

  To hell with it. He already knew where Vangie worked; just tag her to find out where she lived, make sure she was still with Zimmer, give Maxton the information, fade out…

  But what would happen to Vangie then?

  Goddammit, why should he care what happened to her?

  Also, someone with a lot of clout had gotten the Louisiana Organized Crime Commission to send around a very good man to tell Dain, in essence, to get out of town. It couldn’t be Maxton, checking up on him. Maxton didn’t know he was here…

  Wait a minute. Could Maxton be under investigation? Couldn’t that explain Inverness? Organized-crime people in Chicago had Maxton under surveillance, they identified Dain, tagged him to New Orleans, notified Inverness…

  That didn’t work. Inverness would have known Dain had been hired by Maxton, wouldn’t have asked. All right, what if Dain’s presence was muddying the water so his superiors told Inverness to get Dain out of the picture…

  But then Inverness would have known where he was staying, would have tagged him at his hotel rather than on the street…

  No. Somebody knew he was in New Orleans, knew what he looked like or had pictures to send—Inverness had been able to pick him up cold—but was unable to tell Inverness where he was staying. Jesus, could he actually somehow have crossed the tracks of the killers who

  Marie was smashed back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide… Albie’s legs were blasted back down the hall out of sight…

  The bottle in Dain’s hand exploded. He looked at it in surprise, opened his fingers slowly. It was shattered where he had been gripping it, the bottom and neck were intact. The glass had not cut his callused palm. He shook his head to rid it of the shards.

  Nonsense. But it had decided him. He checked his watch. Three-thirty A.M. He would keep on with Maxton’s investigation, because something connected with it had stirred something up. So just keep going until he found out what and who and why. He’d checked for tails leaving the hotel before, had gotten careless through the long night, but he’d had that flash of apprehension and so had shown no reaction at all when he’d spotted Vangie.

  So Inverness wouldn’t be expecting him to go back out tonight, thus wouldn’t still be tailing him.

  Carnal Knowledge was dark and silent, closed. From down the street came the rattle-clash of garbage pails being put out. The door opened and Vangie and the dancer who had stopped Dain earlier that night emerged.

  She said wearily to Vangie, “Another buck, another fuck. Wanna go get coffee, kiddo, or—”

  “Home and to bed,” said Vangie. “See you tonight, Noreen.”

  Vangie turned and started up the street, her heels loud on the sidewalk. Down the block ahead of her, on the other side of the street, a large muscular drunk shambled from a recessed storefront and staggered in the direction she was going with a too-much-to-drink pace unremarkable in the Vieux Carré at four in the morning.

  17

  It was midafternoon and the pitiless New Orleans sun struck blinding light from the chrome of passing cars, baked the sidewalks, softened the blacktop: a sweltering, shirtsleeves kind of day. A clerk dozed behind the check-in desk at the Delta Hotel. The huge slow floor fan stirred around the heat. The same five old codgers in shirt sleeves were again—or still—sitting around with their faces and bodies slack. A sixth was sprawled with a newspaper over his face, gently snoring.

  Across from the dozing clerk the elevator doors opened. Vangie came out wearing a light summer dress that showed little but suggested much, subtly touching and caressing her body as she crossed the lobby with her long dancer’s stride. Half a minute after she had gone out into the street, the old codger under the newspaper harrumphed and hawked and sat up, crumpling the paper aside. He stood up, rubbing his eyes, and shambled out apparently still unsteady from his nap.

  Vangie went into the cathedral where Dain had wakened screaming in his pew the day before. The old man waited outside on a bench in Jackson Square. Vangie emerged from the cathedral, bought a sandwich and a soft drink from one of the portable wheeled po’boy stands set up to catch the tourist trade. She went down St. Anne past the street artists and hawkers, bought two pralines in opaque paper slips from the store on the co
rner, crossed Decatur with the light, heading for the waterfront.

  On the far side of the walkway across the railroad tracks, Vangie went down rough wooden steps to the brown Mississippi lapping over tumbled black rocks. She sat two steps up from the water, put her pralines and soft drink down beside her, in no hurry to eat. Instead, she watched the river traffic for nearly ten minutes, her unwrapped sandwich open on its waxed paper in her lap. At this hour she was alone on the steps.

  When she finally took a big bite of po’boy, chewing without inhibition, a shadow fell across her. She didn’t look up, not even when a man sat down on the same step five feet away.

  “Think those prayers in the cathedral are going to do the trick?” he asked in a conversational tone.

  She looked over at him hard with cold eyes, but he was not looking at her, was looking instead at a tow of barges being shoved up-current by a river steamer. He looked almost sad. Vangie was suddenly strident around her mouthful of sandwich.

  “Blow it out your flutter-valve, Jack.”

  A big black Labrador that had been lapping water and scaring the fingerling rock bass around the half-submerged stones came up to thrust his dripping muzzle into Dain’s hand. Dain fondled him behind the ears, still not looking at Vangie.

  “Dain. Edgar Dain.” He reached over, broke an edge off one of Vangie’s pralines, told the dog, “No teeth!” as a warning against snapping at it, then offered the morsel to him. The dog wolfed it, ecstatic. Dain said, “Maxton sent me to find you. I’ve found you.”

  The girl gradually stopped chewing, like an engine running down. Suddenly the rich mix of spicy meats and cheeses was cardboard in her mouth. She looked surreptitiously about, fearful of seeing bulky men in Chicago overcoats coming down the steps after her. No one was close to them, no one at all.

  The man who had said his name was Edgar Dain was still watching the water. His face was still sad. His hands had given the rest of her praline to the dog, who lay down at his feet, panting with his tongue out and a silly look on his face.