by Joe Gores
“Plenty of room up here, baby.”
“Bus depot,” she said, getting in the back.
He slammed the cab into gear, left rubber pulling away from the curb. He found her face in the rearview mirror. She had her head back against the seat with her eyes closed, Jimmy dead in their bathtub vivid against her eyelids.
“Stuck-up bitch,” the cabbie muttered to himself.
The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands. Heavy boots grated on bare plank floor. Silver ring glinted on a finger. One, sunglasses, curly hair. The other, ski mask.
“Doesn’t it bother you… that we might be killed?”
Vangie went back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motionswirl…
A fist pounded on the door. Coming up out of nightmare, he thought, Vangie?
Zimmer’s tub was only half-filled with pink water because his corpse had been removed and laid beside it. Inverness crouched beside him, jerked back the wet-grayed sheet to let Dain, crowded into the doorway behind him, see the face.
“The murderer, confronted with evidence of his crimes, broke down and confessed,” said Dain in a toneless voice.
“No, nothing like that,” protested Inverness.
“I never saw the gentleman before, dead or alive.”
“I never said you did. It looks like suicide, but a couple of things bother us, that’s all.”
In the bedroom, they stood facing the window so their voices could not be heard by the busy crime-scene team; fingerprint powder covered most surfaces. Outside, the porn-house lights winked on and off in sequence.
“No note, no hesitation marks,” said Inverness. “Usually a suicide with a razor, you’ll have a couple of dozen nicks where he’s making up his mind.”
“Make up your mind. Was it suicide or not?”
“He killed himself, close as we can tell. He was shacking with a topless dancer name of Evangeline Broussard. Loud argument earlier in the evening, Broussard ran from the room just before the body was discovered. She has a juvenile package here in New Orleans. Kid stuff. She’s Cajun, from the bayou country—St. Martin’s Parish a few miles out of Breaux Bridge.”
“Why couldn’t this Broussard woman have killed him?”
Inverness gave him a quick slanting look, then looked away.
“If he’d been unconscious when he went in the tub, maybe. But he wasn’t. With him awake, no woman could have held him down while she slashed both his wrists. Damn few men could do it.”
“If it wasn’t murder, what am I doing here?”
Inverness was looking out the window again. He seemed to address the glass pane. “Chicago labels in their clothes.”
Dain cast a quick glance around the room. The aged bellboy was sitting in one of the room’s two straight-backed chairs, talking with a plainclothesman, his bony shoulder slumped, his gnarled hands clasped between his thighs.
“That’s supposed to mean something to me?” asked Dain.
Inverness nodded, moved fractionally closer to Dain. “I think it does. I think you were looking for him for a client from Chicago.”
Did Inverness know Maxton was his client and was just baiting him? That thing about Chicago labels in their clothes… But what did it matter? As organized-crime liaison, Inverness certainly would hear all the rumors flying around.
“I told you why I was here—”
“Yeah, yeah, the heart and soul of New Orleans. Get serious.”
“Okay, if I had been looking for Zimmer, his suicide would have ended any interest I might have had in either him or Broussard. If I had a client, I would not have reported to him that I was coming to New Orleans and I would not have reported to him since coming to New Orleans. That serious enough?”
“You haven’t really told me anything,” Inverness objected.
The bellhop was on his feet, about to head for the door.
“You really didn’t expect me to,” said Dain. “I’ll be in San Francisco if you have any more bright ideas about confronting me with evidence of my crimes.”
He nodded and walked out, inevitable leather-bound book under his arm. Inverness stared after him, frowning.
* * *
Through the thin walls of the bus depot ladies’ room came the echoing voice of a dispatcher calling a destination in what might as well have been Swahili. At this time of night the place was empty except for Vangie, in front of the vanity table mirror breaking the dark lenses out of a pair of cheap rhinestone-rimmed slanty sunglasses to leave just the rims. Next, from her aspirin tin she took a long-shanked locker key. Finally, she opened her wig box and reached inside.
The bellhop went arthritically down the hall. Mortality had come calling; finding the body had aged him. Dain caught up with him just after a turn in the corridor hid them from the eyes of the police guard on the door of Zimmer’s room.
“The lieutenant said you might be able to tell me where St. Martin’s Parish and a town called Breaux Bridge might be.”
The old man’s good eye gleamed at him shrewdly. “Now why would a city feller like you want to be going to a damn fool place like that?”
“Damned if I know,” admitted Dain.
Trask was lounging against a pillar a short distance from the coin lockers in the walkway to the bus loading area. He was trying unsuccessfully to look like a bored husband.
In the waiting room, a fat black woman with two kids was just stepping away from the ticket window, to be replaced by a gum-chewing hip-swinging floozie with slanty rhinestone-rimmed glasses. Straw-blonde hair was piled high on her head. She set a hatbox on the floor by her feet.
“Ah want a ticket to Lafayette? One way?”
She had a rather hoarse voice with a backcountry accent unremarkable in any southern bus depot. The clerk took her money, gave her a ticket and some change.
“Just made it,” he said. “That bus is loading in three minutes at Gate Three.”
“Ah need someone paged, too?” The blonde Vangie set the empty wig box on the counter. “She’s supposed to pick up this here hatbox? Evangeline Broussard.”
“Will do,” said the clerk.
The peroxide blonde started down the walkway to the buses, chewing her gum and swinging her hips, then sat down on a bench opposite the bank of coin lockers and directly across from Trask. She sprawled so her legs would catch his eye, then crossed them first one way and then the other, each time giving him just a tantalizing glimpse of the shadowed delights between then. Trask actually licked his lips.
The loudspeaker boomed, “Will Evangeline Broussard report to the ticket window? Ms. Evangeline Brdussard to the ticket window, please. We are holding a package for you…”
Trask, electrified, forgot the peroxide blonde’s sexual endowments, lumbered some ten feet up the walkway to scan the waiting room. Vangie ran quickly and silently across the deserted walkway. In her terror she fumbled her long-shanked key, dropped it, caught it before it could hit the vinyl floor, shoved it into the correct lock with shaking hands.
Trask started to turn back toward her, but the loudspeaker boomed again.
“Ms. Evangeline Broussard to the ticket window, please.”
This swung Trask away again. Vangie jerked Zimmer’s attaché case out of the locker, eased the door shut, turned quickly away. Trask, with a snort of disgust, wheeled from the waiting room to look at the lockers he was there to guard.
The floozie blonde who’d tried to show him her snatch was walking down the sloping walkway toward the bus loading area; no one else was around. He turned regretfully away, dropping her from his mind as he leaned against his pillar again.
Dain pushed a wedge of hallway light ahead of him into his darkened hotel room, went between the beds to switch on the lamp. As he began to strip off his clothes, the balcony door opened and Maxton came through it just as Nicky, who’d been hiding in the bathroom, came around the p
artition beside the bed with a gun in his hand. Dain sat down on the edge of his bed.
“Terrific,” he said in a disgusted voice. “You rented the room next door just so you could get in through the balcony and wave guns around at three in the morning. Just brilliant.”
Maxton demanded, “Where is the little bitch?”
“On the run, I suppose. Zimmer killed himself tonight. She’d know that would bring you to town, so she’d run.”
“Where are the bonds?”
“Last I heard, in a bus depot coin locker.”
“I have a man at the bus depot.”
Dain gave a short, harsh laugh. “He won’t stop her.” Sudden anger entered his eyes. “A man at the bus depot, huh? You killed Zimmer, made it look like a suicide!” He stood up so abruptly that Nicky’s arm jerked up the gun. “You asshole! You had to come sucking around. Who tipped you off anyway? I’d have had your goddam bonds for you this afternoon, with nobody dead.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Maxton. “Zimmer told me that you and Vangie—”
Dain scooped up the leather-covered Tibetan Book of the Dead from the bedside table and tossed it at Maxton. Maxton caught it, leafed through it, nonplussed.
“There’s nothing in here. What—”
“Exactly.”
Dain was throwing back the covers to show the empty bed. He lifted the mattress to show nothing was under it. Jerked the slips off the pillows to show only pillows were inside. Ran his fingers around the pillow stitching to show they were untouched. Maxton was spluttering.
“What are you…”
But Dain was undressing with the same maniacal speed, throwing each item of clothing in the direction of Nicky. When he was nude, he jumped into the bed and pulled up the sheet.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “You do what you want.”
Maxton’s face had suffused with rage. There was also anticipation in his gaze. “Nicky, teach him some manners.”
Dain sat up abruptly under the sheet when Nicky started forward. Dain’s eyes were very cold and very steady.
“Not unless you want one of us dead.”
Their eyes locked, Maxton suddenly realized that Dain’s bone-deep despair was more dangerous than any bluster by men trying to mask their fears. He spoke in a strangled voice.
“That’s all right, Nicky. Just search the room.”
Dain lay back down, turned his back, pulled up the sheet. Maxton moved up between the beds and sat down heavily on the one still made. He had already realized the search was going to turn up nothing.
“You should have told me you were so close.”
“I knew if I did, you’d come busting down and fuck it up. Which you did anyway. How did you know where they were?”
The second bug on Farnsworth’s phone? Dain wanted to lay that question to rest. But Maxton ignored it again.
“My goddamned wife isn’t going to wait much longer, you know!” he said aggrievedly.
“Kill her, you’re good at that.”
“She left a letter with her lawyer.”
A half hour after Maxton had departed, empty-handed, Dain sat up again.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed aloud.
Vangie was in trouble. He was leaving her hanging out there, slowing twisting in the wind. If Maxton found her, he’d kill her. Kill her because nobody stole from Theodore Maxton, by God, and got away with it. And after doing Jimmy earlier tonight, it would be easier for him to kill again.
Or to have his goons do it, same thing.
Marie was dead because he’d been a fool, and now Vangie was popping up in Marie’s place in Dain’s nightmares. If he deliberately walked away from her, and she was killed…
He was scared, he realized. Hadn’t been when Maxton and Nicky had been in the room, but he was scared of them now, sort of in retrospect. A week ago he would have said he didn’t care if he lived or died. Now…
Maybe he still didn’t, but something was changing in him. He was involved in life somehow. Maybe just in Vangie’s life? Maybe he just wanted to see what was going to happen next? No, it was stronger than that. If only he was the man they thought he was, the stainless-steel image he projected, it would all be a hell of a lot easier.
Maybe he would have to be that image somehow.
He sighed, and got out of bed, and started to get dressed.
IV
MR. DEATH
Cajun Country
THE DAWNING OF THE PEACEFUL DEITIES
O nobly-born, thou hast been in a swoon during the last three and one-half days. As soon as thou art recovered from this swoon, thou wilt see the radiances and deities. The whole heavens will appear deep blue.
THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
20
The darkness was beginning to lighten, dawn would soon be staining the sky to the east. In deserted Chartres Street, Dain tossed his bag into his rental car, drove to Canal and Interstate 10 that would take him west toward the vast Atchafalaya Swamp that was Cajun country.
On the system of raised interchanges by which traffic avoided Baton Rouge, Dain stayed on the I-10 freeway west. The sun, rising behind the car, made incredible colors and shapes of the massed horizon clouds. Industrial smoke rising from the plants lining the Mississippi had taken on dawn tints also.
Why was he here? What did he think he was doing? He should be on his way to San Francisco; it was not his fault Maxton had showed up to vitiate his bargain with Vangie. Vangie, who had taken Marie’s place in his recurring nightmare—and from what bizarre corner of his subconscious had that image come?
Who had told Maxton where Dain was? Or, perhaps, where Vangie was? Or Zimmer? Whose bug had been on Farnsworth’s phone? Who had put Inverness on Dain’s trail?
Dain kept telling himself he was looking for strands that somehow stretched back to the Point Reyes cabin five years earlier, but he knew in his secret heart that the idea was nonsense. This morning he had faced the fact that he had to come here because he otherwise would feel guilty about Vangie’s very real danger: because whoever had led Maxton to Vangie in New Orleans might now lead him to Vangie in Cajun country.
The phone rang. Maxton was sitting on the edge of his bed in robe and slippers, yawning, but he made no move to pick it up. When it kept on ringing, a cheap busty blonde wearing a very sheer expensive lace negligee came out of the bathroom. The fresh bruises on her full, soft breasts and rounded belly looked a soft gray through the sheer material. She picked up the phone. There was another bruise on her cheek, ugly and dark.
“This is Mr. Maxton’s room,” she said in a soft southern voice with a secretarial inflection. She listened, handed the phone to him.
“Yes, this is Maxton…” He suddenly leaned forward tensely on the bed. His face, voice, eyes were very hard, his jaw set. “What the fuck do you mean, Dain and the girl together? That isn’t possible. He’s right in the next…” He broke off, said, “Hang on a second…”
Maxton dropped the receiver on the floor and erupted through the balcony door to the terrace. He threw the door to the next room wide. It was empty, Dain’s suitcase was gone. Maxton whirled away, stormed back to his own room and the phone.
“You’re right. He’s gone. Do you know where…” He listened. “Vangie’s parents, huh? Yeah. Give me a second.”
He snapped his fingers, the blonde opened the drawer of the bedside table, gave him ballpoint pen and paper. He sat down on the bed to write the directions.
“Lafayette… Breaux Bridge… Henderson… Follow the levee to…” The blonde was on her knees in front of him, busy fingers undoing the sash of his robe. “Right turn or… I see. Over the pontoon bridge. Gravel road… mmm-hmm… All right… crossroads store. Road ends. Yes, I’ve got all that.”
He broke the connection, dialed three digits. The blonde’s hands were inside his pajama pants, stroking him erect. He said to the phone, “Trask? We’re going after that bitch, you and Nicky be ready to roll in ten minutes…” Trask must have said something, be
cause he listened for a moment, then snapped, “No, I want to be there to watch her die. Before she does, I’m going to…” He caught his breath and his threats against Vangie died as the blonde took him in her mouth. He told the phone, “Make that twenty minutes,” and tossed it aside.
The Lafayette bus ran west along the I-10 causeway on trestles high in the air. The causeway had been built about twenty years before on a Southern Pacific Railroad bed laid in 1908. Even now it was the only road that cut across the vast Atchafalaya Swamp. On the empty seat beside Vangie was the attache case; her arm lay protectively over it like the arm of a mother cradling her infant. Her face, reflected in the window, seemed superimposed on the wetlands below the causeway.
She wanted to cry. Poor scared Jimmy, she’d talked him into stealing the bonds to get back at Maxton for what he’d made her do, and they’d grabbed the money and run. And now Jimmy was dead. She was alone with the bonds and she would be too afraid to ever do anything with them.
Because of Dain. Treacherous, betraying Dain had made her believe he was giving her time to work on Jimmy, then… She’d be more afraid of Dain than of Maxton, because Dain could find her again, except by now he’d be flying off with his blood money in hand…
Dain had pulled off to the side of that same causeway and was out of his car to lean on the steel railing and stare. The Atchafalaya had struck him like a blow, as if somehow here was his destiny, as if here he would find all his answers. He found it fitting that the eye of devastating Hurricane Andrew had come ashore in this area in 1992.
Now he faced his own devastation here in this breathtaking 2,500 square miles of bayous and lakes and waterways and swamps. Forests of cypress and tupelo and ash and willow and live oak—some flooded, some not. Every kind of game from bear to wild pig. Crabs and crawfish and bass and catfish. Cottonmouths and gators and snapping turtles to take off your fingers while the mosquitoes flayed you alive.
How Marie would have loved to be standing here with him right now on the edge of this unknown, hot, wet, tropical world! Probably Vangie, who’d been born here, was feeling that same lift of delight right now…