by John Shirley
I wasn’t about to use physical threats on the ex pro wrestler.
He frowned over the money, and said, “It was Wax. She was talking to him about client referrals. Him getting kickbacks, stuff like that. About an hour ago in the bar of the Chatterbox. She’s kinda using a booth for an office right now. Probably still there. It’s solid.”
I handed him the other sixty and he tried to warn me about how Wax might be a federal agent, and I pretended to listen as I put my wallet away and got my bearings. So—the Chatterbox Hotel and Lounge. It was down the next side street, just a right and a maybe as many steps as I’d given dollars to Bull Moore.
“Okay, Bull, I’ll keep that in mind . . .”
Then I was striding off toward the Chatterbox.
Clutches of tourists, mostly drunk college students, staggered by me, laughing. A licensed blond prostitute in a hot-pink short-short skirt tried to catch my eye, smiling. I waved back and kept on.
There was the sign for the hotel made out of sequencing, glowing lightbulbs. They’d replaced some bulbs. It actually said Chatterbox now.
I went in and saw her immediately. Hardly anyone in the hotel lounge. She was sitting in the corner back booth of the bar, talking on her smart phone, cupping her hand to shield the phone from the noise of the bar’s slot machines.
I walked directly to her burgundy-leather booth, thinking that everydamnplace had slot machines in Nevada. They were in gas stations, restaurant lobbies, convenience stores—even in the airport. They’d probably put them in nursery schools pretty soon. But wasn’t that what Chuck E. Cheese was, a casino for kids?
“I don’t care, Wax said yes, so we’re going to be busy,” she was saying, as I walked up. Marissa was about thirty, short black hair spiked up, large hazel eyes, dark red lipstick, onyx fingernail polish spangled with silver glitter; she wore a woman’s business suit with a short skirt.
She was nervous, quick in her movements. She looked up at me but kept talking. “Okay. Just make sure you’re careful about who you give your money to.”
“Mind if I sit?” I asked. She didn’t say no, so I sat down.
“Right. Just do it. Call you in ten.” She put the phone down, still looking at its screen for text as she went on, “I’m not working at that anymore but I got two girls who’re not busy.”
After a moment, I realized she was talking to me. “I heard you had four girls. But that’s not what I’m here for, Marissa.”
She glanced up at me. “Don’t I remember that you were a customer?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t something I was proud of. What was that line from Paul Simon? There were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there. “But not tonight. I’m on a job.” I looked around at the lounge. It had mirrored walls decoratively scored with black. Red velvet along the edge of the bar. “You take ten grand off a guy, you take his Rolodex, and four girls, and this is where you hide out?”
“I didn’t put up any signs outside. And I didn’t take his money. I am not saying if I took his client list.” She looked at me like she thought I was a dweeb as she said, “No one uses a Rolodex anymore.”
“You know what I mean. His client list. If you didn’t take his money, who did?”
“Konyo, his security. His security. You know? The Tongan guy. Konyo has the safe combination. Konyo would’ve heard from the girls who stayed that I talked the other girls into going with me.”
“And he figured that’d be cover for him taking the money? If you took the girls he could say you took the money, too?” I thought about it. “You might be right. He seemed like a dirtbag to me.”
“You’re so much better? Working for Wong?”
“Lenny’s not so bad.”
“You think you know him, because you went to high school with him. But you don’t. How much is he paying you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She signaled to the bartender. And I realized she wasn’t signaling for a drink.
Uh-oh. Better wrap this up.
“Okay, if you didn’t take the money, come back with me to Lenny. Tell him you didn’t take it, and maybe make some kinda deal to make up for the Rolo . . . for the client file.”
She shook her head, laughing soundlessly. “You remember Clarice?”
“Black girl with a blond wig? White eyeliner?”
“That’s the girl. She skimmed some money off transactions and she disappeared. Konyo was being all swag about how he took her on a trip to check out the scenic countryside.”
The scenic countryside. Meaning the desert outside Las Vegas, where lots of bodies were buried.
I had to think of something else. “How about if . . .”
A big brown hand clapped down hard on the back of my neck. I could see it in the mirrored wall across from us. I could see whose hand it was. Wax, owner of the hotel. Drug dealer, sideline in hot cars. He was an oversized Latino guy with a big paunch but real muscles to go with his yellow muscle shirt. His hair was cut Pachuco style. Liked to wax his classic cars every day.
“Hi Wax,” I said. “You get that ’sixty-two Corvette?”
“Don’t fucking call me no familiar name like that,” he said. “I don’t know you.”
“We did meet once or twice.”
“I said I don’t know you. Now get the fuck up.”
As it happened, he didn’t wait for me to stand up, he plain dragged me out of my seat by the neck, and bum-rushed me to the back door, where the bartender was waiting with a pool cue. I only got one shot from the pool cue in the gut before the bartender opened the back door and Wax heaved me headfirst into the alley.
I was suddenly intimate with a pile of empty cardboard boxes.
The door slammed behind me. I turned on my back, hoping to get out before someone stomped me.
But they didn’t bother. They just left me there on some flattened boxes, in an alley that smelled like piss.
I was feeling pretty humiliated. Not just because I was ejected from the bar, like a bum. But also because they didn’t bother to kick my ass. They didn’t bother to kill me. They didn’t even take my cell phone.
My cell phone . . .
I got to my feet, sucking air through my teeth with the pain, and dug my cell phone out of my pocket. I called Lenny Wong, as I walked unsteadily down the alley to the street.
Some part of me was saying, Don’t do this. Find a better way.
But I was feeling low. Angry. And I didn’t have a gun. One of the few guys in town without a gun, and me a private eye.
“Yeah, it’s Lenny.”
“Lenny. Nick Fogg. Right now she’s in the Chatterbox lounge just off Fremont.”
“I know the place. She working with Wax?”
“Something like that. I figure you could work things out with her. She’s got a kid. She was just tired of it all. She says she didn’t take your money. Says it was probably Konyo. I believe her.”
“Konyo?” Silence on the other end for six or seven seconds. “Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll look into that. But she took a lot more money when she peeled off four of my girls and took my client list.”
“Don’t go in there half cocked, man.”
“Oh I won’t. She’s probably going to leave the place right now. But I’ve got a guy can watch it for me . . .”
“Lenny, don’t—”
But he hung up. When I called back, there was no answer, and then I got a message that his voice mail was full.
My gut ached. I wondered if I should go to the ER. But instead I went to Jinky Jake’s and got drunk. And about two in the morning, after Jake made me leave, I ran into Lucinda, who was Marissa’s best friend at the “agency” that Lenny ran. She was getting into a cab, outside a casino hotel.
“Lucinda!”
She turned sharply, seeming a bit smashed herself, her red-
blond wig swinging slightly askew with the motion. She wore large white-rimmed sunglasses at two in the morning, but out here under the neon they seemed to belong.
“Lucinda, you seen Marissa?”
“I don’t know, last I knew she was in the motel across from mine. You wanta ride along? If you pay the cab?”
“Yeah.”
Pay the cab. Pay the fee. Pay Bigger.
I had a premonition that I shouldn’t go with her . . .
“Get out of here, now!” Ruby shouted.
She wasn’t shouting at me. But she did wake me up.
I sat up in bed, momentarily disoriented. Las Vegas was gone and I was back in the Ossuary.
I was dead. But I wasn’t. It was the afterworld. I’m dead, but then again I’m not.
“Shut up, bitch!” someone shouted. I thought I recognized that voice.
I got up, a glance at the window telling me it was near dawn. I pulled on my pants and hurried downstairs.
In the lobby of the Ossuary I found Randy and Mohammed in a face-off with Ruby and Bertram. Ruby was wearing a bathrobe, slippers, and had her hair up in curlers. Bertram, standing protectively a little in front of Ruby, had only his pants on—just like me. On his belly he had a tattoo of a poker hand with four aces being flashed by a skeleton that I would probably never have known about if this hadn’t happened. It seemed you bring your tattoos here with you.
I looked at Bertram and Ruby standing together, both half dressed, and realized he’d been shacking up with her, at least tonight.
“Randy, maybe we should fuck off and leave,” Mohammed was saying, in a low voice.
“Now that sombitch there says something sensible at last,” Bertram said, combing his hair back with his fingers and glaring at Randy.
Randy was wobbling, his lips dribbling frip juice. He seemed to have chewed up a lot of the stuff. So it was possible to get really thoroughly intoxicated here, after all. But it seemed you had to work at it.
“I . . . you have lots of people staying here for hardly any Fi’s,” he said. “I just wanta crib to stay in. Sometimes you get people in here and you don’t charge them at all. I just need a . . . but I got no Fee . . . feee . . . feeeee . . . onas . . .”
“Seems he’s got no Fionas,” I said.
“That’s not the damn problem,” Ruby snapped, shooting me a look of irritation. “He jacks folks up for their money and all in front of my inn! I won’t have no one living here behaving like . . .”
She broke off as Randy ducked his head and started to sob. “I don’t care, fine, cool, what I care, whatever, fuck . . .”
He turned and wobbled out the front door.
Mohammed started to follow him, sighing. I grabbed Mohammed’s arm, held him back. “Hey man. He got issues with Ruby? That why you guys hang out in front, here—and why he’s trying to get in here?”
He looked at me in surprise. “How you know that?”
“Just guessing. Way he looked at her.”
Mohammed glanced at the door to see if Randy was listening. Randy was nowhere to be seen. “He’s . . . his moms left him when he was nine and he was raised by a neighbor lady. She was nice to him. Black lady, looked a lot like Ruby.”
I turned to look at Ruby. “Maybe if he had some, uh, oversight or . . .”
She groaned. “Goddammit. I did not know why he was hanging around. And now I’m stuck with him.”
Bertram shook his head. “Oh no, girl, don’t do it.”
Ruby waved at Mohammed impatiently. “Just go get him, bring him back in.”
Mohammed hurried out, calling Randy.
“Oh, Ruby, girl, come on, don’t do it,” Bertram said, grimacing. “Don’t let that Randy in here.”
“I got to. Maybe he’ll settle down if we give him a home . . .”
“We? Lord, woman . . .”
“You do what you want, Bertram. You keep on, you can get your rest on the beach tonight. That what you want?”
“No ma’am, it’s not.” Bertram rolled his eyes at me then went up the stairs, to their room.
It was just me and Ruby. She went around behind the counter and picked out a key from the rack.
Then Mohammed came back in, dragging Randy, who was weaving and rubbing his eyes. Randy had frip juice, brown and green, all down the front of his shirt, and he said, “I didn’t know you could throw up in this dead place, here, but by God you sure as fuck can.”
Ruby snorted in irritation but slid a key across the counter to Mohammed. “Take him up there, to room fourteen. It’s got two beds. You two get some damn rest. He can stay here long as he don’t throw up on anything. Got to modify his behavior, too.”
Mohammed nodded eagerly. “Sure, yeah, that’s . . . fine, thanks, ma’am . . .”
Mohammed pulled Randy to the stairs—but Randy broke loose and staggered back to Ruby. It was her turn to roll her eyes as she let him embrace her. She gave him a hug back.
“I love you, Ruby, you’re the best, you’re the only one who ever . . .”
“Go on, get some rest, kid.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Randy disengaged, and allowed Mohammed to guide him up the stairs.
I turned to Ruby. “Is that you he remembers from the Before?”
“Hell no. ’Course not.”
“What time’s it anyway?”
She considered. “Feels like it’s about right before dawn.”
People here tended to think of time of day in terms of how it felt.
“Café open now?”
“Will be in a minute . . . I’m gonna go try and get a little rest and . . .” She turned away. I didn’t ask what the and represented. I just went up to my room to get dressed.
As it happened, the current shopkeeper of the Avalon Coffee Shop was just opening up, from inside, having put the coffee on and taken the chairs from the tables. She waved me through the door. “Come in if you’re coming, hon.” Dessie was sewed in green on the breast pocket of her white, rather short-cut waitress’s uniform. She was a good-sized, solid woman with large brown eyes, a sweep of chestnut hair, a round but sexy face, powerful-looking thighs. Dessie was the first shopkeeper I ever saw who went barefoot. Her feet seemed almost too small for her body.
“Mornin’,” she said, glancing past me toward the horizon where the sun was edging into view. “Come on in.” She pronounced on like own. I figured her to be from somewhere southern USA. Her lipstick was orange; she had some sort of mascara on. Where do women get that, here?
I took a seat by the steamy window where I could watch the dawn rise.
“Coffee, please,” I said. Enjoying saying it. It was good to be ordering coffee, even after having died.
“You hungry?” she asked, as she brought me a cup of coffee.
“Um . . . got any pie?”
“Silkenberry. Heat it up for you.”
“Sounds good.”
I was thinking, some, about the dream I’d had—or about the memory I’d had, reenacted in a dream. It had been disturbing. Marissa. But I felt, today, that I was having those memories for a reason. It meant something. That helped.
I wondered about my ex, too. Bettie Black. Her real name was Sally something. But she’d been a Vegas performance artist I’d known. Done her Spirit of Bettie Page act in Vegas, Detroit, San Francisco, and Burning Man. For a while, we’d lived in her appropriated house, a suburban squat, with its dry swimming pool and pirated electricity, in East Vegas. There were whole blocks of deserted houses seized by the banks, over there.
She looked almost exactly like Bettie Page but a bit heavier. I was the jealous type, at least with her. Exactly the wrong person to be jealous of . . . since she was into “polyamory.” Good choice in women, Nick.
Probably she was still doing the underground art circuit back in the
Before. Back on the planet Earth.
I drank the coffee black. It tasted almost . . . nearly . . . mostly . . . just like coffee. And it was stimulating. I was conscious of feeling good as I wiped some steam off the window so I could look at people in the square, several men and a woman coming out to gaze rapturously at the morning sun. They were having the other sort of breakfast. I remembered I was to get together with Doyle and his wife this morning. I was truly going to have tea with Arthur Conan Doyle in the afterlife. Death was good. And so was the silkenberry pie. It melted in my mouth. It incorporated the flavor of every berry I’d ever tasted.
Dessie came over to refill my coffee cup. “How’s that pie, darlin’?”
“Just . . . amazing. Where you get the, uh, silkenberries?”
“Where we get the coffee beans. Off to the east, in those warm hills over there.”
“How about that perfume of yours that smells like gardenias?”
“Well aren’t you alert! Make it myself from gardenias that grow in my garden. Show you how sometime. I crush it up real good.”
Brummigen came in then, and I gestured toward the other chair. He sat down with me, rubbing his eyes. “Might be a storm coming.”
“Yeah? Like, a lightning storm?”
“Not exactly. You’ll see.”
“You guys have to be so mysterious all the time?”
“We just let the afterworld do the explaining, when we can.”
I watched Dessie pour him coffee. She went to serve the young woman who’d been wearing a hospital gown the day before. The woman now wore blue jeans and a brown plaid shirt, and she was smiling. She looked more oriented. I waved at her, and she waved cheerily back.
“Brummigen,” I said softly, as Dessie bustled by, “why do people here have, you know, a steady job? Doyle was trying to explain it to me, but . . . I mean, waitress isn’t all that easy a job. Who’d want to do that in the afterlife if they don’t have to? Someone make them?”