Baby Brother Blues (Sammy Dick, PI Series: Book 1)

by Trudi Baldwin

  She grabbed at it and stuffed it with some effort in the front pocket of her shorts. “Gracias, gracias. You like? Do it with woman? Grande woman? Donde esta tu coche?”

  “No, no, it’s free money. I searched my mind for some kind of Spanish word that might mean free. Libre! Gratis! Take the day off. Go over to the safe house on 3rd and Adams. Ask for Jeff the Ref. Say Sammy Dick sent you. Jeff’ll help you out.” I pointed back the way I’d just come.

  “Gracias, senorita. Usted todavia cree in las salvacion?”

  I had no idea what she’d said, but I watched her turn and head west. Good! Jeff the Ref might have another convert. Too bad they weren’t playing football and needed a Center.

  As she shuffled down the block, I decided to call out to her. “Senora, er, senorita, Charley Tuna? Aqui?” I pointed to the lime-green house.

  “Si senorita.” Now she turned back abruptly to face me, quite alarmed. “Malo, senorita. El es muy, muy malo!”

  Well, I had enough Spanish to know she meant Charley was very, very something. I couldn’t exactly recall what malo meant, but it didn’t sound particularly good. I had some vague memory from my brief encounter with grade school Spanish that malo might mean bad, or was it evil? Maybe the root of the word was related to something like marshmallow? Perhaps she’d meant Tuna was flexible, very, very flexible, like a softie. I could only hope.

  Before the prostitute turned away in the blinding heat, she made the sign of the cross over me, pointed at the green house, then trundled westward.

  Under these somewhat ominous circumstances, I proceeded to the house and stepped toward the chain link gate that stood in front of the sidewalk to the house. The gate sent a futile message to all who entered, since the entire rest of the chain link fence had somehow disappeared, and the gate stood all alone guarding the entrance to the house.

  Wadded up in the yard to my right was a pair of jeans. No grass grew anywhere in the yard, just dirt and a single patch of spindly weeds. Apparently, even weeds couldn’t thrive in Tuna’s yard. Not far away were some brown-stained jockey shorts, abandoned by someone in the yard and never retrieved.

  The only vehicle was parked beside the house in an aluminum-roofed carport. Its roof had at some point incurred a serious dent in its middle. Parked under the dented roof was a large, fairly new-looking truck. The kind of truck in which you might transport frozen food. The storage section of the truck extended a good twenty feet behind the cab, which was painted white with no signage on it. The thought ran through my head that the newness of the truck was out of place with the rundown, decrepit nature of the house.

  The next thought that ran through my head as I approached the door was that my dad would be mad at me if he knew what I was doing, especially since I had no backup or a gun.

  Oh well, what the hell! I rang the doorbell. Actually knocking on the door wasn’t possible because of the barred security door. I could hear the ringing, ding-dong, ding-dong, chime softly off somewhere inside the tiny house. Nothing happened.

  The heat bore down on me. Even more rivulets, if that were possible, of sweat burst and slithered down my sides, my neck, my face. Still no sound within. Maybe my dad wouldn’t have to be mad at me after all. No one was answering. It was impossible to look through the barred windows to see if anyone was home. Closed curtains blocked all visibility.

  Maybe I should give up? I needed to get farther along in this case, though. I was a woman on a mission. I rang again. Ding-dong, ding-dong. Tuna was probably one of those guys who slept all day and dealt all night. I could hear the swamp cooler kick in on the top of his house.

  Suddenly the door flew open! I nearly jumped out of my skin. A horrible odor accosted my senses like dead fish. A lot of dead fish. Holy moly! I might be standing face to face with the infamous Charley the Tuna.

  “Who are ya?” I could barely make out his face through the security screen.

  In my feeble plan, I hadn’t figured out a name. I burst out with the first thing that popped into my head. Then immediately regretted it. “Toya. My name’s Toya Hilton.”

  It was a ridiculous name, but apparently it worked for this dude, whoever he was. I was rewarded. The lock on the security screen door clicked open and he exposed himself to the light. I wasn’t sure yet if this was Charley, but whoever he was, he reeked, and he was mostly naked. A wrinkled pair of gray boxer shorts drooped on his skinny frame. Nothing else. The shorts hung there so tentatively that I prayed they’d stay up and that the frontal slit would stay closed. If his body was that scrawny and disgusting, I for sure didn’t want to see his dick.

  “Yeah, whaddya want this time uh day?” He was affronted that I’d woken him up at two in the afternoon.

  You mean like in the middle of the afternoon during prime business hours for most normal people? You little drug-dealing asshole! I wanted to say, but I was on a mission, and I had a plan, however feeble. This time, I stuck to the plan. Like a lost rich girl trying to score drugs, I adopted a sweet, plaintive voice, with a spice of ditzy thrown in. “Oh, thank you so much for opening the door! Are you Tuna? Charley the Tuna? I’ve heard so much about you!”

  The man’s head snapped up a little. The fish smell seemed to intensify when he moved. I could see a mix of pride and suspicion creep into his eyes. “Yeah, that’s me. Whaddya want? Who sent ya?”

  Shit if I know. Now was not the time to try and draw a connection to Zaiid or Liang. I thought fast. “It’s just the word around town. You have an awesome reputation.” I crooned in a little girl voice. I wanted to come across like Little Red Riding Hood, but with a wad of cash in my picnic basket.

  “A reputation for what?” he queried, scratching the three or four hairs on his chest.

  “For being the best and biggest and fastest in town.”

  He was waking up now and more fully alert. His caved in chest began to swell slightly outward with some pride. I couldn’t help myself as I peered more closely at his wrinkled boxers. Tiny sharks swam all over them, flaunting their sharp-toothed grins. “I kinda got an idea about how I’m the biggest ‘n best in town, but whaddya mean? Whaddya want this time uh day?”

  “I can explain myself better if you let me in.”

  He looked me up and down admiringly. “Ah, alright, Toya. I guess you’re pretty harmless. Pretty and harmless. Just my type.” He fumbled around with the security door. “Ya don’t have a gun in that big bag of yours, do ya?”

  I wish. “No, no, nothing like that, but I do have a problem that I think you can help me with.” As I said this, he’d swung the security door out my direction and stepped aside to let me enter.

  As I stepped inside the tiny, dark room, the fishy smell almost overpowered me. I thought I might heave right there on his dirty red linoleum floor that stretched all through the house—its faded brick design, much of it worn all the way down to the concrete, made a feeble attempt to simulate a cobblestone floor. Dirt gathered within the edges of the open patches. I peered further into the house and saw a good-sized roach skitter for cover under the counter in the kitchen to avoid the light of day.

  Tuna gestured toward a sunken-in sofa with blonde, plastic arm rests made to look like wood. Faux ridges had been etched into the plastic by the hopeful manufacturer. A raggedy, beige, stinky blanket lay across the couch with a grayish pillow wadded up at the far end. The pillow still looked wet from Tuna’s night sweats, or rather day sweats. Eight empty beer bottles lay in disarray on the scarred coffee table near a full ash tray. As I sat gingerly on the couch, I saw the other four beer bottles empty on the floor. Apparently it took a twelve-pack to get the guy to sleep.

  Clang! Charley shut the door and locked it. Too bad for me. He scuttled back across the floor and settled his scrawny ass, covered in shark’s heads, into a sagging chair across from me. Every time he moved, the air reeked even more. I watched him as he tried to muster up what little attention span he had to focus on me.

  “Ya mind? Can’t think ‘til I get a smoke in me. Usual
ly a beer too, heh, heh, but I’m all out or I’d offer ya one,” he drawled, coughed a phlegmy cough, and dragged his fingers around in the ash tray. This went on for a while until he pulled out a half-smoked butt from the debris and relit it. He sucked in a long lungful of smoke. I thought his beady eyes might cross, he was so intent on inhaling as much as he could suck in. Then he leaned back and sprayed a huge plume skyward like Old Faithful. For once in my life, I was grateful for the smoke because the smell of cigarettes slightly masked the reek of fish.

  Time to get on with it and get the hell out of there. Staying in my lost-little-rich-girl character, I gave him a pleading look while I mentally prepared my story. The whole time I watched him carefully. Charley the Tuna had the seriously sucked in cheek bones and sunken dead eyes of the long-term crack and variety drug user. The tops of his teeth were rimmed in brown, a tell-tale sign of meth, too. Apparently, he’d been there, done that, not just once but many times, with lots of drugs. He fidgeted constantly, his eyes bouncing around the room, unable to stay in one place for any length of time.

  After exhaling the extended plume of smoke into the air and watching it drift upwards, Tuna bounced his head back down and then in a quick, darting movement stuck his tongue out forcefully at me, proceeding to wring it twice, full circle around his lips, eyeing me lasciviously. The tongue, long and unsavory was almost as gray as the soggy-looking pillow I was sitting next to. I wondered why he didn’t sleep in the bedroom. A single, dark bedroom door loomed open behind Tuna’s chair.

  Tuna’s tongue continued to maneuver. It had a life of its own, like a salamander’s tail flicking about. This exercise caused his cracked lips to glisten, all shiny with his own spit. “What can I do fur ya, girl? Or better yet, what can we do fur each other? I feel like a fine, fine fuck this mornin’. Or is it afternoon? No matter. Any time’s the right time fur a fine, fine fuck.” Then his pointy, gray tongue darted out again and started the counter-clockwise revolution ‘round the cracked lips. The effort cost him so much that a small drool slivered down the right side of his mouth and dissipated on his chin.

  It was beginning to dawn on me that my grade school days may have got it right: malo might mean bad. Very, very bad. I was also beginning to suspect that I might be stupid. Very, very stupid, for being here. Hmm. What to do now?

  I ignored his comments and embarked upon my plan. “The word around town is that you are the best there is for scoring some quick coke.”

  On that comment, his tongue snapped back in his mouth and his eyelids opened wide. “Ya ain’t got a wire on ya now, do ya durlin’? Somethin’ about ya jus’ don’t set right, ya know? I need to feel ya. Feel ya fur a wire.”

  The last thing I wanted in the entire world right now were his hands on me feelin’ fur a wire as he so quaintly put it. I moved quickly to regain his confidence. “No, Charley,” I said in my most reassuring voice, “I was referred here by an old friend of yours. Karl, Karl Zaiid.”

  Tuna’s eyes blinked rapidly or as rapidly as Tuna was capable of blinking his eyes, so soon after being awakened. Then a look of fear crept into his little beady browns. “Karl sent ya?”

  Aha! So there was a relationship. Bingo! I was on a roll.

  “Yup, Karl sent me. I need to score enough coke to fuel a big party I’m having on Saturday, and Karl told me you’re the best there is for something like that, especially on short notice.”

  “How do ya know Karl?” Charley’s eyes now squinted at me suspiciously.

  I crossed one of my long, booted legs over the other and plumped up my tricolored hair a bit to further establish my ditzy, rich girl persona, “He comes over to parties at my house. Liang, too. Liang Chen. You know Liang? My dad owns a big house on Mummy Mountain in Paradise Valley. Dad’s gone all the time. International business. Just like this Saturday night he’ll be gone, and then I have big parties.” I smiled happily at Tuna as if I led the most fabulous, vacuous lifestyle on the planet. Then I continued.

  “Karl and Liang showed up one night and they’ve been showing up for my parties ever since. I give great parties, but I’m needing larger and larger amounts of coke ‘cause the parties are getting bigger all the time. As you can imagine, they are very popular parties.”

  This story must have seemed plausible to Tuna. His eyes stopped squinting and grew slack. Then he sucked in another huge lungful from the dying butt, held the smoke inside until his eyes were about to pop out of his head. He must have forgotten and thought he was smoking a joint. Finally, he released the smoke with a big whoosh in my direction.

  I was grateful for it. I tried to inhale as much as possible to dispel the fishy smell, but it was time to learn even more while I had him relaxed. “How do you know Karl and Liang, Charley?”

  Tuna’s eyes squinted again. He looked like he, too, was searching for a plausible story. His eyes searched the corners of the ceiling of the room as if hunting for spider webs. The way his house was kept, I was sure he wouldn’t be disappointed. Then his eyebrows raised in recognition as if a plausible story had finally occurred to him. “Humphead,” he grunted.

  “Humphead? What do you mean by humphead, Charley?” A terrifying vision of Charley jumping on top of me and delivering some kind of “humphead” seared itself into my brain.

  “Humphead wrasse. That’s how I know Zaiid.”

  Oh that clarifies it, Charley. “Okay, you got me. What’s humphead wrasse?”

  “I move the humpheads fur him. Cum ere. I’ll show ya,” Charley dragged his scrawny skeleton up off the worn chair and motioned for me to follow him into the only other room in the small house: the bedroom.

  What to do? I didn’t really trust Charley, especially not in a dark bedroom, but this humphead reference had peaked my interest. Plus, it connected Tuna to Zaiid. I pushed myself up from the sunken couch using the fake wood armrest and followed good ol’ Tuna’s sagging shark-head drawers into the darkened bedroom.

  The room reeked even worse than Charley, if such a thing were possible. In here the linoleum had a sticky feel. A humming sound emanated eerily from the walls. I couldn’t make out much of what was in there, it was so dark. Tuna groped about on the wall until he encountered the light switch and flipped it on. I looked up at the bare light bulb hanging down from a white plastic cord in the middle of the room. The plastic cord snaked across the ceiling and down the wall to an outlet. Makeshift stapling held the cord in place. Staples had been shot into the ceiling and wall about every twelve inches or so to hold the light cord up. Dark maroon paint had been unevenly shellacked on the walls like a 13-year-old had painted it to enhance his black light posters. Gloomy.

  I discerned the source of the humming sound. Hard to miss in the tiny room. Three full-sized, locker-style freezers occupied nearly all of the floor space. They were humming away. It was a strange arrangement, reminding me of white coffins in a mortuary sale.

  “This is where I store my humphead, and this is what makes me the biggest and best and fastest in town,” Charley snorted with some pride, then coughed again. He wiped his arm across his nose and mouth. Then leaned down a little to wipe his wet arm on his boxers. He shuffled his bare feet across the sticky floor, pressed in the lock mechanism on one of the freezers. He slowly raised the lid back to expose the contents inside. I sincerely hoped a bunch of body parts weren’t stuffed in there in frozen disarray, but when the lid was fully open, the contents looked fairly orderly. A bunch of large fish in shrink-wrapped plastic filled the freezer.

  Charley grabbed a package and held it against his chest like a frozen-solid baby. “This here’s how I cun help out yer party.”

  “By delivering fish to it?”

  “Heh, heh, heh,” Charley giggled, then burst into another fit of coughing. This time he didn’t even bother covering his mouth as he shuffled his bare feet back around me holding his frozen baby. “Nep, nep. If ya go back and make yerself comfy on the sofa, I’ll show ya in just a minute.”

  I wandered back into the living room and sa
t down on the miserable couch again. I could hear Charley in the kitchen opening drawers and mumbling, “Yeh, a fine, fine day fur a fuck…” Finally, I heard him open the kitchen refrigerator and then slam it shut.

  Things were starting to look more malo by the minute. Should I leave? I had the connection established between Zaiid and this Tuna dude, and probably even a connection with Liang, since Charley hadn’t denied it when I mentioned him, but it was a harmless fish connection. Big deal! I decided to wait and see how things played out.

  Charley came shuffling back in with his frozen baby snuggled against his chest, a sharp knife that looked like a hunting knife clutched in his other hand.

  Uh, oh. Things had become muy malo.

  “Look,” Charley raised the knife in the air in a swift motion while hugging his frozen baby with the other. I shifted off the sofa to a crouch beside it, assuming one of my defensive karate positions. I was ready to spring.

  Charley didn’t even notice my sudden movement. “I found another cigarette!” he chortled. “This is a fine, fine day!”

  It was then that I spotted the fresh cigarette also clutched in the same hand with the knife. I quietly reseated myself on the sofa. Charley flopped down right next to me. The scent of fish, sweat and body odor permeated the air around me. I started to gag as my hand shot out, scrambled about on the coffee table for his lighter, got it, and lit the newly found cigarette as quickly as I could for him.

  “Well, thanks, durlin. That’s nice uh yer. Now watch while Charley performs his magic. It’s about to become a fine, fine day fur both uh us.” Leaving the cigarette in his mouth, Charley picked up the hunting knife and slit open the shrink wrap on the fish to peel it back. The humphead wrasse was about two feet in length and an iridescent blue. The brow of the fish, if fish can be said to have brows, was swollen way out of proportion to the rest of the humphead’s face. I figured this was how the fish had earned its name. I wasn’t an ace investigator for nothing.