And then, Koko, when I see them cut your body down, I’m going to go out and get drunk for a week in celebration.
On sake.
I will make a special occasion of it and drink your rotten warm Japanese rice wine and let you know just what I think of you. So how do you like them pomegranates?
What the hell is she doing in Emporium anyway? If I read that one Hucko Hangleglider has died of sexual exhaustion in Emporium, she is in deep and rich trouble.
Well, who cares? To hell with her.
And while I’m at it, to hell with Louise Gillette. There are two tapes in the master file. There will not be any more tapes in the master file.
But I did my master’s bidding. I came to Belton, PA, to talk to Louise and convince her to take a million dollars.
Kwash will ask me. The head of the claims department will say to me, what kind of person is she, Digger, and I will say, Kwash, the lights are on but nobody is home. This woman is bat shit. She plays with trains. Not just trains but the New York subway system, complete with muggings and fire bombings.
But I think I impressed her. At least she said I was better than the last insipid cretin Old Benevolent and Saintly sent to see her. I think that’s a compliment. She offered me a drink and I took it. I like taking drinks. This is because there has been so much pain in my life.
She doesn’t believe her husband could have died in an electrical accident. What was it she said? She carefully picked a man who was perfectly formed. It sounds like she bought him at a livestock auction. Anyway, she doesn’t want her daughter to think her father was a fool. If it were me and I had children who were not Cro-Magnon, I would rather that they thought I left them a millionaire. I mean, how many fools leave their kids a million bucks?
Anyway, we blahed and blahed and she agreed to sign a document freeing the company from liability. She told the other cretin that too. The one with the teeth.
Ardath, the daughter, is another case. She is brilliant even if she does read mysteries. She says her father was murdered. I know where she got that idea from.
And that brings us to Tape Number Two.
This tape was recorded in Eddie’s Roadside Sandwich Heaven between me and a Cody Lord who said he was Vernon Gillette’s friend and who followed me from the Gillette house. Very clumsily.
He thinks Gillette was murdered too because a bed was slept in. This is where Ardath got her stupid idea from. Cody Lord was up there at the cabin with Gillette but went home for undisclosed personal reasons. I know that today’s rejection by Koko has aged me but I am not yet senile. When Cody Lord told Gillette that he wouldn’t be spending Saturday night at the cabin, Gillette arranged for somebody, presumably of the female persuasion, to sleep over. That seems reasonable and likely.
But I would still like to know why Cody Lord went home. And, come to think of it, I’d like to know how Cody Lord knew so much about my talk with Louise Gillette. First of all, how’d he get into the house and know I was there? That brass door knocker sounds like an ax smashing against the door. I guess so that Louise can hear it over the huffa-huffa-puffa of the subway system.
But I didn’t hear anybody knock on the door when I was there. Does Cody Lord just walk into the Gillette house unannounced? Or does he sneak in the back?
I don’t know. I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll ask Ardath.
I also met Dolly today. Usually I censor these tapes so that Koko doesn’t hear any of my worst moments, but this one I won’t. I hope you hear this, you treacherous Nipponese. Dolly has a wonderful large set of pneumatics and she is available for the rolling-around-on. You hear that, Fanucci? She also acts like somebody without brain one, but the operative word there is "act." I suspect she sees what’s going on and knows this town pretty well and if I had any intention at all of hanging around here, I could do a lot worse than talk to her and find out what is really going on in Belton. I’m sure that woman knows, and it would be pure research, chargeable to the company and about which you couldn’t bitch.
Hah. Her bitch? While she’s up there rutting with Hackney Hamburglar? Fat chance.
I may just hang out here another day. Not because of Koko, mind you, but because two people, at least one of them sane, have told me they think Gillette was murdered. Maybe I owe Frank Stevens a fast pass at that theory. Maybe I'll run into Dolly again. Maybe I’ll have somebody take a picture of her and me dancing at the Saturday night stomping grounds and I’ll have it blown up to wall-size and show it to Koko. I’ll hang it over our bed in Las Vegas. That’ll fix her rickshaw.
Time out. Expenses. Yesterday. Lunch on the road to Belton, nine dollars. Tips to waitresses and bellboys at Gus’s LaGrande Inn—it’s a fabulous place, Kwash, with a big staff—fifteen dollars. Dinner, twenty-one dollars including tip, and thirty-one dollars at the bar, interviewing town residents. Total, seventy-six dollars.
Today. Breakfast. Four dollars. Money to pump Cody Lord with booze, twenty-five dollars. He drinks like a fish. I’m going to eat dinner soon and I’ll keep it under twenty dollars. So call it twenty dollars. Then I’m going to interview more townsfolk. I know more of them today than I did yesterday, so it’ll cost more. Say forty dollars. Total, eighty-nine dollars. Two-day total, one hundred and sixty-five dollars.
I’m making this one sixty-six, Kwash, rounding it off to the next highest dollar because I’m tired of eating all the change.
Room, car rental and gas by credit card.
Chapter Five
Digger had once taken Koko and her mother to a fancy Italian restaurant just off the Las Vegas strip. The main dining room was coliseum-sized; there were a full dozen waiters and another dozen busboys hovering about; a piano-violin duo played softly, and the three of them were the only customers in the entire place.
Mrs. Fanucci had observed this silently, enjoyed her dinner, then leaned over to Digger and said, "This place doing no business."
"No, it isn’t," he had agreed.
"Must be is a Mafia dry cleaner."
"What?"
"Must be is a Mafia dry cleaner," she repeated word for word.
Digger had looked to Koko in bewilderment.
"She means it’s a Mafia laundry. Where they wash dirty money," Koko explained.
"Exactly," Mrs. Fanucci said. "Is washing money."
She then turned to Koko and said "Tamiko" and followed it with a soft babble of Japanese.
"What’d she say?" Digger asked.
"She wanted to know why anybody wanted to wash money."
"Tell her that’s why they call it filthy lucre," Digger had said.
He had occasion to think about that as he sat alone in the barroom of Gus’s LaGrande Inn. All those dining rooms, all the bar space, all the acreage. What paid for it? Not one solitary drinker, even if he was of Digger’s world-class category. Not eight guest rooms at thirty-five dollars a night. Not even a reasonably good lunch and dinner trade. Digger suspected that young Gus LaGrande’s books might not bear too much inspection.
It was eleven o’clock and Digger had been drinking for almost two hours. Gus had mixed up a few rounds of drinks for his late-dinner trade, but since that time had spent most of his time going through stacks of bills. He seemed to break the large stack into smaller stacks, then go through the smaller stacks to make substacks. And when he was done, and the large pile of bills was in twelve different little piles, he put them all together again and started over.
A young woman wearing a loose fluffy sweater came into the bar and sat across from Digger. In the dim light, Digger could see little more than the woman’s wavy brown hair and her smooth unlined face. It was a pretty, warm face.
Gus stopped in front of the woman. Digger heard them mumble, then watched Gus mix her a Scotch and soda. Gus walked up to Digger.
"Lady says she’d like to buy you a drink. Says she knows you."
Digger looked past him at the woman, who met his eyes briefly, then glanced down at her drink.
"I think she’s mistaken," Dig
ger said aloud. "I never forget a beautiful woman and I don’t know her. But I’ll drink. Move me around the bar."
Digger sat on the stool next to the woman, who still did not look up from her drink. Gus put his vodka glass in front of him.
"Cheers," Digger said, holding his glass up to click with the woman’s. "Where do we know each other from?"
The woman looked up and smiled at him. "Why how quickly you forget, Mr. Barff. With two f’s. As in fellatio."
Digger looked at her carefully, then smiled back.
"All right, Dolly," he said. "You win. You had me going. I didn’t recognize you without that haymow on your head."
"Don’t forget the beauty mark on my lip. That’s gone too," she said.
"The mark’s gone. The beauty stays," Digger said.
"How gallant."
"I haven’t even started yet. Now I know why you were wearing that sweater. In something tight, I’d know you anywhere."
"Something like that," she agreed.
"I’m glad you found me. I might have spent the whole night driving the streets of Belton, looking for a house with a platinum wig drying in the window."
"That’s nice," she said, "but somehow I get the idea that you probably would have just spent the rest of the night sitting here getting ripped."
"Only problem drinkers prefer to drink alone," Digger said.
"You’re not a problem drinker?"
"It’s never given me any problem," Digger said. "Well, sometimes it does. Like I used to drink Russian vodka and then I got to hate the Russians, so I stopped drinking their vodka. That was a problem. It would have been a bigger problem if only the French made vodka besides the Russians, ’cause I hate the French too. Fortunately, though, everybody makes vodka. I drink vodka from Finland. But the Japanese make vodka and so do the Red Chinese. I haven’t forgiven them for Laos and Cambodia yet, though, so I won’t drink their vodka either. Polish vodka either."
"You’re rapidly running out of world," she said.
"Don’t worry. The Third World’s going to start making vodka soon. They’re going to make it out of crocodile sweat. That’ll give me another thirty countries to hate."
"You’re a very complicated man."
"You’re the second beautiful female to tell me that today."
"Oh?"
"The other one was eight years old."
"Is that what you’re doing up here? Visiting family? It’s Julian, isn’t it?"
"Julian Burroughs. But everybody calls me Digger. You can call me Dig. That’s special, for good friends."
"Thank you," she said. "You were telling me what you were doing up here?"
"No, actually I wasn’t, or at least I hadn’t started to yet, and I was making up my mind whether to tell you the truth or to lie."
"Why would you lie?" she asked.
"The truth is a dull and colorless thing. And I’m a very imaginative liar."
"Try the truth for size," she said. "Dig," she added.
Digger noticed that Gus LaGrande was back at the end of the bar, repiling his bills. One thing had to be said about the man—he didn’t intrude on customers’ musings or conversations.
"All right. I work for an insurance company. I came to town to try to talk some woman into taking some of our money."
"Were you successful?"
"No. She turned me down cold."
"Obviously, you were talking to the wrong woman," Dolly said. "If you wanted me to take some of your company’s money, I’d be glad to."
"I wish I had known that before I got my company committed to this other woman," Digger said.
"Why won’t she take your money? That doesn’t make any sense. Did she have a death in the family?"
"Yes. And we think it’s an accident and want to pay her double indemnity and she says it wasn’t an accident and won’t take the extra money."
"Is it a lot of money?" she asked.
"The difference between six digits and seven digits," Digger said.
"Well, obviously she’s crazy," Dolly said with disgust as she swallowed a large portion of her drink.
"Oh, you’ve met Louise Gillette," Digger said. He put his hand on Dolly’s shoulder.
"Gillette, Gillette…I don’t think so," Dolly said. "Who died?"
"Her husband in some kind of accident."
"You say," Dolly said.
Digger removed his hand. "Right. He died in some hunting cabin the Belton people own—electrocuted or something."
"Wait. Was that last fall?"
"Yes," Digger said.
"I remember reading about it," Dolly said. "And then there was a lot of talk."
"What kind of talk?"
"People around town. They were saying that what’s-his-name, Gillette, he was going to be the next president of Belton and Sons, that’s why I remember it."
"You never met Gillette though," Digger said.
She shook her head. "I don’t think so."
Digger patted her free hand on the bar. "Too bad," he said. "From what I’ve heard so far, he was Jack Armstrong and Superman rolled up into one."
She shrugged. Digger squeezed her wrist gently, then released it.
"Is that what you do?" Dolly asked. "Go around, convincing people to take money? I shouldn’t think that would be a very hard job under most circumstances."
"No, it wouldn’t, but that’s not what I do. Actually, I’m an investigator but because they think I’m a little crazy, they give me all the crazies to deal with."
"That man you sent the drink out to today? Was he another one of the crazies?"
"A friend of the family." Digger nodded. "Another crazy. Who owns you?"
"I beg your pardon," Dolly said.
"Today, you said that Eddie, your boss, didn’t own you but a lot of people did. Who are the lot of people?" He put his hand on her back, just below the neck.
"You have a good memory, don’t you?"
"Yes. And the truth. We’re doing truth tonight," Digger said.
"Okay," she said. She paused and took a deep breath as if to enable herself to tell it all at once. "Three years ago, I was doing the housewife number down in Bavington. That’s a little town near Pittsburgh. My husband was a plumber. Two kids. House. All very middle America."
"Sounds nice," Digger said. His right index finger touched her fine silky hair.
She nodded. "Yes, it was. My husband was a wonderful man. Kind and thoughtful and…well, he’d do anything for our two kids and me." She paused and looked at her glass before drinking off some of the amber liquid. "Except stop riding his motorcycle. Three years ago, he went over the line and wound up under a truck."
"I’m sorry," Digger said. He opened his hand fully and placed it on the middle of her back.
"You’re sorry because you think he died," she said in a flat voice. "I’d be happy if he died. But he didn’t. He lived. In a way. Dig, my husband’s a vegetable. He can’t move. He can’t talk. All he can do is sit or lie down. Nothing else. He has to be fed like a baby. He has to be cleaned like a baby."
There was nothing Digger could say so he looked across the room.
"He had no insurance and no pension money. I tried to work, but we lost the house because we couldn’t keep up payments. The medical bills were killing me. I had to sell everything. Even my wedding ring. I had to come back here to live with my mother, with him and my two sons. That’s who owns me, Digger. My husband, my two boys, my mother, my obligations. Any more questions?"
"I’m sorry, little girl," Digger said. He squeezed her shoulder warmly. "But why the wig? Why the floozy impersonation?"
"When I got here I looked for work. There weren’t many jobs then, and those that there were didn’t pay enough to eat. I thought about waitressing ’cause I used to do that once, but even those jobs were hard to come by. I even tried up here at this place. An older fellow owned it then. No luck. Then one day, just on an impulse, I bought that wig and did the chorus girl-makeup number and the swishy walk and the pus
h-up bra and I went around applying for jobs. I had to sort out the offers. Eddie’s was the best. He gets a lot of driving-through truckers and they tip big for a big-titted smile. And the regulars like to ogle me and make dirty jokes behind my back, and I play stupid and make believe I don’t understand. The tips are worth it, so I put up with it. A lot of them don’t even know what I really look like or where I live. And I’m careful not to get involved. Telling lies about me is one thing; telling the truth about me would be something else."
"All right. Enough," Digger said. "I’m sorry I brought it up. Let’s change the subject. Tell me about Belton."
"Not much to tell. It’s a company store. Lucius Belton owns the factories and the plants and the movie theaters and the groceries and the banks, and if you tried to breathe while you’re outside, even the air."
"What kind of man is he?" Digger asked.
"I don’t know. We don’t exactly travel in the same social circles. I saw him once riding in the back of a limousine in a parade. He’s as old as death. But I guess he’s got something going for him ’cause he’s got a young wife and they have a new baby. Can you imagine that? He gave the company a day off when the baby was born. It was like the whole town was closed down. People wandered around the streets and didn’t know what to do."
"As long as they didn’t try breathing," Digger said. "Did you ever hear anything else about Vernon Gillette?"
"Who?"
"The guy who died in the cabin. The accident," Digger said.
"Hey, you’re an investigator. You’re not investigating this like it’s a murder or something, are you?"
"No, I don’t do that kind of work," Digger said. "You never heard anything else about Gillette?"
"No."
They drank together for another hour when Dolly looked at her wristwatch and said, "That’s enough drinking. It’s getting late."
"You have to go?" Digger asked.
"No," she said.
In his room, Dolly sat almost nervously on the sofa and when Digger sat next to her, she said, "I don’t want you to get the wrong idea why I’m here."
Lucifer's Weekend (Digger) Page 6