The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

  They had Sam Adams on tap. I ordered a draft. Glancing down at the bar, I saw there seemed to be loose change scattered all over it, but when I tried to nudge a dime with my finger, I realized the coins were polyurethaned into the surface. It made me feel like a dope for falling for it, and it marked me as a stranger in a place where I wanted to be taken for furniture. I nursed my beer and looked around.

  Given that it was a little shy of quitting time for a day job, the Mirror was pretty busy, and most of the people in there were guys. Not many of them were dressed like they’d come from work, either. Nobody in coveralls wearing a hammer holster or spattered with paint, anyway. Everyone seemed to be wearing aggressive casual, doubleknits or Dockers depending on the age bracket.

  I picked up my beer and wandered down the bar toward the bandstand. Tucked around the corner was a pool table, a quarter a game. The guy leaning over the table to break was wearing colors, biker leathers with an elaborate design on the back like an old Grateful Dead album. He broke open the rack but didn’t make any balls, and when he straightened up, I could make out the gang insignia better. It looked like a representation of Leonardo’s Last Supper but with Satan at the head of the table. Hitler, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah were among his guests. Underneath, in Gothic script, was a legend that read the disciples. I turned back to the bar, ordered a second beer, and asked for my change in quarters.

  The girl the biker was playing pool with looked underage, strung-out sixteen, no more than a hundred pounds wringing wet, tie-dyed tank top and jeans she kept tugging up because she didn’t have any hips for them to hang on to. But she had tattoos across her shoulder blades and enough piercings to set off a metal detector —- ear clips and a stud in her lower lip and one at the outer edge of each eyelid, the extreme outer edge where it wouldn’t scratch the sclera of her eyes if she looked sideways. She made five solids without breaking a sweat and then scratched with a cross-corner shot on the seven.

  I stepped over and put my quarter up for the next game.

  Neither one of them seemed to pay any attention to me. The biker was studying the way the table lay. He was shooting stripes, and he had two pockets safed, his balls hanging on the lip, duck shots, but in the way of her making a ball. He took a harder shot, banking one up and back, and made it. She thumped her cue on the floor, acknowledging a good call. He kept moving around the table, sinking his other six balls, and then blew the eight, slamming it too hard so it popped back out of the side pocket. The girl dropped the rest of the solids and sank the eight in a corner. She glanced over at me.

  It was probably then that I made my first mistake. I’d assumed they were a couple, although the biker had a good twenty years on her. He had red hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail, and you could see the streaks of gray in it. And he had kind of a Zapata mustache, drooping past the corners of his mouth. It showed white next to his chin. The mistake was that I spent more time on him than her. Young girl, but skinny as she was, I still should have been looking down the front of her shirt after I put my money in, the balls dropped and I racked, and she bent over the table to break. Anybody else would have.

  Like a dummy I went for the target too quickly. The girl was running the table on me, and I stood back a little, just outside the edge of the light that picked out the balls on the green felt, making the colors pop. She made six balls before I got a shot, and then she left me safed behind one of her own high balls. I called a bank, made it by some miracle, and then blew a much easier shot on the four in the side. I stepped away from the table again, shrugging philosophically, and went to stand next to the redheaded biker. “Need to get my chops up, I guess,” I remarked.

  “Girl plays a mean stick,” he said.

  She took the eight on a long bank, back up in the corner, and he went over to the table to rack. I put another quarter up to play the winner.

  The thing was, their concentration on the game wasn’t fierce at all. The girl played deliberately but not as if anything were at stake. Her pride wasn’t involved, She simply took each shot as it came and seemed to be playing more against herself than the biker. For his part, it didn’t bother him if she had the better eye and control of the cue ball with English that would have made Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie Felton give her a second look. He wasn’t indifferent, or just humoring her, but he wasn’t threatened by it.

  I was watching him bridge to make a shot when I saw the jail-house tattoo on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger: 1 %. It took me a minute to get it. One percent.

  Back when Marion Brando made The Wild One and biker gangs were exotic, some square made the remark that motorcycles were ridden by family men and it was only that one percent that gave bikes a bad name. Now, anybody who’s hung out with bikers knows they can be family men, for openers, but that’s not the point.

  Bikes have never lived down that outlaw image, and of course it’s part of their appeal, especially riding a big Harley instead of a rice-burner, but Red was flaunting it. The colors, the attitude. Maybe he was for real, or maybe it was all show and no go. I had a funny feeling he was profiling, trying it on for size, and trying just a little too hard.

  When he missed a shot and came back to where I was standing, leaving the table to the girl, I made a clumsy remark about speed. I wasn’t trying for subtlety, mind you, but it was all too obvious what I was fishing for.

  “You looking to score some flake?” He sounded almost bored with the transaction.

  “Weight, not just a couple of lines,” I said.

  He nodded, not bothering to look at me, still watching the girl shoot pool. “I think you mistook me for somebody else,” he said without glancing in my direction.

  I shrugged. “I figured to cut out the middleman,” I told him. “McGill steps on his product because he’s trying to make up in volume what he uses himself. I’ve got motivated buyers but they don’t like being cheated, and maybe it’s time you found a new pipeline.”

  “Sing a different song, bro,” he remarked edgily.

  “He’ll bring you all down, you don’t jerk his leash,” I said.

  He looked at me finally, losing patience. “I’m trying to shoot a game here,” he said. “You’re rubbing up too close, and it’s giving me a rash.”

  “You don’t think Chip McGill’s a loose cannon?” I asked. “How come he’s trying to muscle Andy Ravenant, then? Seems like a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

  I had Red’s interest now, but I didn’t think I’d struck a nerve. It was more puzzled curiosity, like how’d I come up with this angle and where the hell was I going with it.

  “I hear Ravenant’s defending a couple of neighborhood kids on a drug fall, but he can’t plead them out unless they agree to burn Chip,” I told him. “Think there’s anything to it?”

  “What in the name of sweet Jesus Christ is your game, pal?” he asked.

  “I travel in a lot of weird company,” I said. “I make connections. That’s my stock in trade, putting things together. I’m what they call a rainmaker, seeding the clouds.”

  “You’re a goddamn parasite,” Red said.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m still in the market.”

  He leaned his cue against the wall. “Let’s go out back for a taste, where we can talk more private,” he said.

  He went through the fire door behind him, and I followed. We were outside by the dumpster behind the building. His bike was on its kickstand there. He opened the saddlebags and felt around inside. It was still light out, the sky pearling toward dusk, the shadows long across parking lot. The girl came out through the fire door.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Red said.

  “Hey yourself,” she said. “I’m starting to flag.”

  “Got what you need,” he said, straightening up with a small Baggie in his hand.

  And that was my second mistake, if anybody’s counting, to be watching him instead of watching my back, figuring her for a crank slut out to score a free pop. She kicked me so ha
rd in the back of the knee that I went cross-eyed from the pain as my leg collapsed, and the two of them were on top of me like a snake on soap. She jerked the .40 Smith out of my waistband at the small of my back and wedged the muzzle into the base of my skull, notching the hammer back. The oily click sounded like a twig breaking. Red pinched the bridge of my nose between his knuckles and forced my head back, the gun digging into my spinal cord. I felt dizzy and ready to throw up. The girl giggled.

  “No cop with any street sense would be that obvious,” Red said, leaning down to stick his face into mine. “You take the cake for stupid, bud.”

  He had that part right. Stupid was my middle name.

  “I ask myself, what’s your stake in it? And what I come up with is, you’re on your own. So what’s this jive you’re giving me about Chip McGill and the lawyer? My guess is you’re running interference for somebody, so who sent you?”

  My mind wasn’t working fast enough to come up with a plausible answer. They say the prospect of an imminent hanging is supposed to sharpen your faculties, but a psychopathic meth groupie holding a gun to my head had filled it with white noise.

  My tank was dry, and I was sucking air.

  “Now, darlin’, you best let me have that thing,” Red said. “I think you’re liable to pop a cap on this old boy afore I even have the chance to loosen his tongue.”

  He might have put his thumb between the hammer and the frame as he slipped the gun away from her, but I wasn’t breathing any easier. She could have shot me by accident, or just to see which way my brains went on the pavement. Red was likely to shoot me on purpose, if I couldn’t talk him out of it.

  “Care to set my mind at rest, bro?” he asked me.

  He’d let go of my nose and the Smith wasn’t cutting into my neck anymore, but I was scared to tell him nothing and just as nervous about saying something dumb.

  “I can’t hear you,” he crooned, leaning close again like a father confessor.

  “Hear this?”another voice inquired, and the next sound was unmistakable, the slide on a pump shotgun being racked.

  Red went absolutely still.

  “We’ll do this by the numbers,” the new guy said. I’d heard his voice before, but I couldn’t place it. “Point the weapon away from your body and safe it.” Red uncocked the Smith. “Good. Now put it down and back away. You too, girlie. I got no compunction about taking you off at the knees.”

  I felt them give me some room. I glanced around.

  “You’re looking a little the worse for wear, Jack,” Max Quinn said to me, grinning. He was holding a Mossberg pump at port arms, relaxed and obviously enjoying himself. “You able to walk?”

  I picked up my gun and got carefully to my feet. I had to favor my left leg to get it to hold my weight.

  “Now, about these two,” Max said. I had some ideas on that score, but what I wanted to do was likely to see me pulling eight to ten at MCI Cedar Junction.

  “No?” Max asked. He shrugged. “Well, in that case, we’ll take our leave of you lovely people,” he said to Red and the girl. “I’d think it right intelligent if you’d just lie down on the pavement until we left.”

  The girl hadn’t even looked at me while this whole business was going on, but Red was watching me with a hostile squint.

  “I meant now, people,” Max said. They got down and assumed the position.

  I limped toward my car, and Max backed away behind me, the shotgun held down next to his leg, where it was less conspicuous.

  The lights were coming on in the parking lot.

  He leaned down to the window when I got behind the wheel. “This probably isn’t the place to talk,” he said.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “No sweat,” he told me.

  I watched him cross the street to where he was parked and put the shotgun in his trunk. He’d probably had me under surveillance from the time I walked into the bar. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it seemed a little too convenient.

  Max gave me a wave as I drove away and climbed into his own car. I went home to pack my sore knee in ice and brood about how big a dope I’d been.

  ~ * ~

  “So you figure the bikers are a red herring?” Tony asked the next morning.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I think Quinn set me up, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dirty.”

  “Quinn just wants to make himself look good?”

  “Pulling my chestnuts out of the fire? That’s one way of looking at it. Or he could be using me as a stalking horse, get them looking in the wrong direction.”

  “Andy Ravenant?”

  “Yeah, something’s hinky,” I said. “But I don’t see how it connects to the Stanley problem.”

  We were driving out to the hospital in Ayer to see Stanley. He’d collapsed the day before while I was busy getting myself washed, dried, and folded. He wasn’t home — he was out cruising junkyards or something, up in apple orchard country — and the paramedics got him to the closest ICU. Once he was stabilized, he’d probably be moved into town to Peter Bent Brigham if things still looked bad.

  “Any other irons in the fire?”

  I shook my head. “I was hoping Stanley might come up with something else I could use,” I said. “Only trouble is, I’ve got nothing to give him in return.”

  The hospital was fairly new, built sometime in the early seventies, I guessed. It was on a rise north of town, set off from neighbors, with a view through the trees to a small pond. A lot of the country villages beyond 495, the outer beltway, have become bedroom communities for the high-tech industries along Route 128, but Ayer is an anomaly. It sits outside the main gates of Ft. Devens, and for a good sixty years or more it’s been a company town supported by the army presence. Now there was talk of closing down the post. There was still a squadron of Ranger choppers based out there, and some logistical and support operations, but there was no longer a captive population of enlisted dependents, and the rental market was going down the tubes. Not a bad thing considering how local landlords had gouged the GIs with inflated rates. And the used-car dealers out on the Shirley road no longer had such easy prey. But the downside was that the bottom had fallen out of the tax base, and maintaining a decent hospital was suddenly a squeeze.

  Tony wasn’t crazy about the hospital scene in any case. He’d spent too much time helpless on his back after he’d gotten creamed on the ice, but he was still game to go in and visit Stanley. I got his wheelchair out of the back seat, unfolded it, and helped him lever himself out of the front seat and into it. I was awkward about it, but Tony had long since gotten over any embarrassment.

  “How’s your leg?” he asked.

  I had an Ace bandage wrapped around my knee, but the tendon was still badly swollen and it felt like I had a lemon wedged behind the joint. I couldn’t bend my leg, and I couldn’t put any weight on it, either. Not that I didn’t feel foolish, since it was my own fault.

  “Shouldn’t have turned your back on a woman,” Tony said.

  “Don’t get me started,” I told him.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Tony said. “It’s not about sex, or gender, or whether she’s a victim herself. I only meant you shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

  The thing about being brothers us that you figure you’re always in competition one way or another, but then they somehow manage to sneak under your radar.

  We made our way through the automatic doors into the lobby.

  Stanley was down the hall in a private room. We startled Maria when we went in. I realized she’d dozed off sitting next to Stanley’s bed, and it took her a moment to gather her wits.

  Tony unbridled the charm. He had a gift for it, an effortless interest, because it was genuine. He rolled his wheelchair over next to Maria, not so close he was crowding her space, but making himself available. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but she smiled bravely and took his hand.

  Stanley seemed to be
just coming to, floating in a sea of painkillers and barely breaking water. I had the feeling he was losing buoyancy. He made an effort to focus.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning in close so he’d recognize me.

  “Jack,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Who’s that with you?”

  “My brother Tony,” I told him.

  He nodded, smiling, his eyes fluttering closed. “Always liked having you two come around,” he murmured. “Liked having kids at the shop. Reminded me of Stosh. Kept me alive during the war, knowing I had a boy I had to come home to.” His concentration was drifting, the drugs in the intravenous drip clouding his thoughts. He’d cut his moorings and was headed out to sea. “The Blue Mirror,” he muttered indistinctly.