D is for DEADBEAT

by Sue Grafton

  The trailer was disordered – newspapers, magazines, dinner dishes for two still out on the table, the counters covered with canned goods, cracker boxes, bags of flour, sugar, and corn meal. There wasn’t a clear surface anywhere and no place to sit. The air was dense, smelling faintly of fresh cigarette smoke.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” I said. He looked like he’d been screwing his brains out and I wondered who was in the bedroom. “You have company?”

  He glanced toward the rear, his dimples surfacing. “No, I don’t. Why, are you interested?”

  I smiled and shook my head, at the same time caught up in a flash fantasy of me and Billy Polo tangled up in sheets that smelled like him, musky and warm. His skin exuded a masculine perfume that conjured up images of all the trashy things we might do if the barriers went down. I kept my expression neutral, but I could feel my face tint with pink. “I have some questions I was hoping Coral might help me with.”

  “So you said. Try the Hub. She’ll be there till closing time.”

  I laid the skirt and shoes across the television set, which was the only bare surface I could find. “Do you know if these are hers?”

  He glanced at the items, too canny to bite. “Where’d you get ‘em?”

  “A friend of a friend. I thought you might know whose they were.”

  “I thought this was supposed to be about Friday night.”

  “It is. I talked to a cabbie who picked Daggett up at the Hub Friday night and dropped him off down near the wharf.”

  “I’ll bite. So what?”

  “A blonde was with him. The cabbie took them both. I figure she met him at the Hub, so I thought Coral might have had a look at her.”

  Billy knew something. I could see it in his face. He was processing the information, trying to decide what it meant.

  I was getting impatient. “Goddamn it, Billy, level with me!”

  “I am!”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve been lying to me since the first time you ever opened your mouth.”

  “I have not,” he said hotly. “Name one thing.”

  “Let’s start with Doug Polokowski. What’s your relation to him? Brother?”

  He was silent. I stared at him, waiting him out.

  “Half-brother,” he said grudgingly.

  “Go on.”

  His tone of voice dropped, apparently with embarrassment. “My mom and dad split up, but they were still legally married when she got pregnant by somebody else. I was ten and I hated the whole idea. I started gettin’ in trouble right about then so I spent half my time in Juvenile Hall anyway, which suited me just fine. She finally had me declared a whaddyou call ‘em…”

  “An out-of-control minor?”

  “Yeah, one of them. Big deal. I didn’t give a fat rat’s ass. Let her dump us. Let her have a bunch more kids. She didn’t have any more sense than that, then to hell with her.”

  “So you and Doug were never close?”

  “Hardly. I used to see him now and then when I’d come home but we didn’t have much of a relationship.”

  “What about you and your mother?”

  “We’re okay. I got over it some. After Doug got killed, we did better. Sometimes it happens that way.”

  “But you must have known Daggett was responsible.”

  “Sure I knew. Of course I did. Mom wrote and told me he was bein’ sent up to San Luis. At first, I thought I’d get even with him. For her sake, if nothin’ else. But it didn’t work out like that. He was too pathetic. Know what I mean? Hell, I ended up almost feeling sorry for him. I despised him for the whiny little fucker that he was, but I couldn’t leave him alone. It’s like I had to torment him. I liked to watch him squirm, which maybe makes me weird but it don’t make me a killer. I never murdered anybody in my life.”

  “What about Coral? Where was she in all this?”

  “Hey, you ask her.”

  “Could she have been the one with Daggett that night? It sounds like Lovella to me, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Why ask me? I wasn’t there.”

  “Did Coral mention it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said, irritably.

  “Come on. You talked to Daggett Thursday night. Did he mention this woman?”

  “We didn’t talk about women,” Billy said. He began to snap the fingers of his right hand against his left palm, making a soft, hollow pop. I could feel myself going into a terrier pup mode, worrying the issue like a rawhide bone, knotted on both ends.

  “He must have known who she was,” I said. “She didn’t just materialize out of the blue. She set him up. She knew what she was doing. It must have been a very carefully thought-out plan.”

  The popping sound stopped and Billy’s tone took on a crafty note. “Maybe she was connected to the guys who wanted their money back,” he said.

  I looked at him with interest. That really hadn’t occurred to me, but it didn’t sound bad. “Did you tip them off?”

  “Listen, babe, I’m not a killer and I’m not a snitch. If Daggett had a beef with somebody, that was his lookout, you know?”

  “Then what’s the debate? I don’t understand what you’re holding back.”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Lay off, okay? I don’t know nothin’ else so just leave it alone.”

  “Come on, Billy. What’s the rest of it?” I snapped.

  “Oh, shit. It wasn’t Thursday,” he blurted out. “I met Daggett Tuesday night and that’s when he asked me to help him out.”

  “So he could hide from the guys at San Luis,” I said, making sure I was following.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, they’d called him Monday morning and that’s why he’d hightailed it up here. We talked on the phone late Monday. He was drunk. I didn’t feel like putting myself out. I’d just got home and I was bushed so I said I’d meet him the next night.”

  “At the Hub?”

  “Right.”

  “Which is what you did,” I said, easing him along.

  “Sure, we met and talked some. He was already in a panic so I kind of fanned the flames, just twitting him. There’s no harm in that.”

  “Why lie about it? Why didn’t you tell me this to begin with?” I was crowding him, but I thought it was time to persist.

  “It didn’t look right somehow. I didn’t want my name tied to his. Thursday night sounded better. Like I wasn’t all that hot to talk to him. You know, like I didn’t rush right out. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  It was just lame enough to make sense to me. I said, “All right. I’ll buy it for now. Then what?”

  “That’s all it was. That’s the last I saw of him. He came in again Friday night and Coral spotted him, so she called me, but by the time I got there, he’d left.”

  “With the woman?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “So Coral did see her.”

  “Sure, but she didn’t know who she was. She thought it was some babe hittin’ on him, like a whore, something like that. The chick was buyin’ him all these drinks and Daggett was lappin’ ‘em up. Coral got kind of worried. Not that either of us really gave a shit, but you know how it is. You don’t want to see a guy get taken, even if you don’t like him much.”

  “Especially if you’ve heard he’s got thirty thousand dollars on him, right?” I said.

  “It wasn’t thirty. You said so yourself. It was twenty-five.” Billy was apparently feeling churlish now that he’d opened up. “Anyway, what are you goin’ on and on about? I told you everything I know.”

  “What about Coral? If you lied, maybe she’s been lying too.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “What’d she say when you got there?”

  The look on Billy’s face altered slightly and I thought I’d hit on something. I just didn’t know what. My mind leapt ahead. “Did Coral follow them?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “What’d she say then?”

  �
��Coral wasn’t feeling so hot,” he replied, uneasily.

  “So she’d what, gone home?”

  “Not really. She was coming down with this cold and she’d taken a cold cap. She was feeling zonked so she went back in the office and lay down on the couch. The bartender thought she’d left. I get there and I’m pissed because I can’t find her, I can’t find Daggett. I don’t know what’s goin’ on. I hang around for a while and then I come back here, thinking she’s home. Only she’s not. It was a fuck-up, that’s all. She was at the Hub the whole time.”

  “What time did she get home?”

  “I don’t know. Late. Three o’clock. She had to wait till the owner closed out the register and then he gave her a lift partway so she had to walk six blocks in the rain. She’s been sick as a dog ever since.”

  I stared at him, blinking, while the wheels went round and round. I was picturing her at the wharf with Daggett and the fit was nice.

  “Why look at me like that?” he said.

  “Let me say this. I’m just thinking out loud,” I said. “It could have been Coral, couldn’t it? The blonde who left the Hub with him? That’s what’s been worrying you all this time.”

  “No, uh-uh. No way,” he said. His eyes had settled on me with fascination. He didn’t like the line I was taking, but he’d probably thought about it himself.

  “You only have her word for the fact that this other woman even exists,” I said.

  “The cabbie saw her.”

  “But it could have been Coral. She might have been the one buying Daggett all those drinks. He knew who she was and he trusted her too, because of you. She could have called the cab and then left with him. Maybe the reason the bartender thought she was gone was because he saw her leave.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Billy whispered.

  His face had darkened and I saw his muscles tense. I’d been so caught up in my own speculation I hadn’t been paying attention to the effect on him. I picked up the skirt and shoes, keeping an eye on him while I edged toward the door. He leaned over and opened it for me abruptly.

  I had barely cleared the steps when the door slammed behind me hard. He shoved the curtain aside, staring at me belligerently as I backed out of the carport. The minute the curtain dropped, I cut around to the trailer window where I’d spied on him before. The louvers were closed, but the curtain on that side gaped open enough to allow me a truncated view.

  Billy had sunk down on the couch with his head in his hands. He looked up. The woman who’d been in the back bedroom had now emerged and she leaned against the wall while she lit another cigarette. I could see a portion of her heavy thighs and the hem of a shortie nightgown in pale yellow nylon. Like a drowning man, Billy reached for her and pulled her close, burying his face between her breasts. Lovella. He began to nuzzle at her nipples through the nylon top, making wet spots. She stared down at him with that look new mothers have when they suckle an infant in public. Lazily, she leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette on a dinner plate, then wound her fingers into his hair. He grabbed her at the knees and lowered her to the floor, pushing her gown up around her waist. Down, down, down, he went. I headed over to the Hub.

  Chapter 20

  *

  It looked like another slow night at the Hub. The rain had picked up again and business was off. The roof was leaking in two places and someone had put out galvanized pails to catch the drips… one on the bar, one by the ladies’ room. The place, at its best, was populated by neighborhood drinkers – old women with fat ankles in heavy sweaters who started at 2:00 in the afternoon and consumed beer steadily until closing time, men with nasal voices and grating laughs whose noses were bulbous and sunburned from alcohol. The pool players were usually young Mexicans who smoked until their teeth turned yellow and squabbled among themselves like pups. That night the pool room was deserted and the green felt table tops seemed to glow as though lighted from within. I counted four customers in all and one was asleep with his head on his arms. The jukebox was suffering from some mechanical quirk that gave the music a warbling, underwater quality.

  I approached the bar, where Coral was perched on a high-backed stool with a Naugahyde top. She was wearing a Western-cut shirt with a silver thread running through the brown plaid, tight jeans rolled up at the ankles, and heels with short white socks. She must have recognized me from the funeral because when I asked if I could talk to her, she hopped down without a word and went around to the other side of the bar.

  “You want something to drink?”

  “A wine spritzer. Thanks,” I said.

  She poured a spritzer for me and pulled a draft beer for herself. We took a booth at the back so she could keep her eye on the clientele in case someone needed service. Up close, her hair looked so bushy and dry I worried about spontaneous combustion. Her makeup was too harsh for her fair coloring and her front teeth were decayed around the edges, as if she’d been eating Oreo cookies. Her cold must have been at its worst. Her forehead was lined and her eyes half squinted, like a magazine ad for sinus medication. Her nose was so stopped up she was forced to breathe through her mouth. In spite of all that, she managed to smoke, lighting up a Virginia Slim the minute we sat down.

  “You should be home in bed,” I said, and then wondered why I’d suggested such a thing. Billy and Lovella were currently back there groveling around on the floor, probably causing the trailer to thump on its foundations. Who could sleep with that stuff going on?

  Coral put her cigarette down and took out a Kleenex to blow her nose. I’ve always wondered where people learn their nose-blowing techniques. She favored the double-digit method, placing a tissue over her hands, sticking the knuckles on both index fingers up her nostrils, rotating them vigorously after each honk. I kept my eyes averted until she was done, wondering idly if she was aware of Lovella’s current whereabouts.

  “What’s the story on Lovella? She seemed distraught at the funeral.”

  Coral paused in her endeavors and looked at me. Belatedly, I realized she probably didn’t know what the word distraught meant. I could see her put the definition together.

  “She’s fine. She had no idea they weren’t legally married to each other. That’s why she fell apart. Freaked her out.” She gave her nose a final Roto-rooting and took up her cigarette again with a sniff.

  “You’d think she’d be relieved,” I said. “From what I hear, he beat the shit out of her.”

  “Not at first. She was crazy about him when he first got out. Still is, actually.”

  “That’s probably why she called him the world’s biggest asshole at the funeral,” I remarked.

  Coral looked at me for a moment and then shrugged noncommittally. She was smarter than Billy, but not by much. I had the same feeling here that I’d had with him. I was tapping into a matter they’d hoped to bury, but I didn’t know enough to pursue the point.

  I tried fishing. “I thought Lovella and Billy had a thing at one time.”

  “Years ago. When she was seventeen. Doesn’t count for shit.”

  “She told me Billy set her up with Daggett.”

  “Yeah, more or less. He talked to Daggett about her and Daggett wrote and asked if they could be pen pals.”

  “Too bad he never mentioned his wife,” I said. “I do want to talk to Lovella, so when you see her please tell her to get in touch.” I gave her a business card with my office number on it, which she acknowledged with a shrug.

  “I won’t see Lovella,” she said.

  “That’s what you think,” said I.

  Coral’s attention strayed to the bartender who was holding a finger aloft. “Hang on.”

  She crossed to the bar where she picked up a couple of mixed drinks and delivered them to the one other table that was occupied. I tried to picture her flipping Daggett backwards out of a rowboat, but I couldn’t quite make it stick. She fit the description, but there was something missing.

  When she got back to the booth, I held up the high heels. “These y
ours?”

  “I don’t wear suede,” she said flatly.

  I loved it. Like suede was against her personal dress code. “What about the skirt?”

  She took a final drag of the cigarette and crushed it in the metal ashtray, blowing out a mouthful of smoke. “Nope. Whose is it?”

  “I think the blonde who killed Daggett wore it Friday night. Billy says she picked him up in here.”

  Belatedly, she focused on the skirt. “Yeah, that’s right. I saw her,” she said, as if cued.

  “Does this look like the skirt she wore?”

  “It could be.”

  “You know who she is?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude about this, Coral, but I could use a little help. We’re talking murder.”

  “I’ve been all tore up about it too,” she said, bored.

  “Don’t you give a shit about any of this?”

  “Are you kidding? Why should I care about Daggett? He was scum.”

  “What about the blonde? Do you remember anything about her?”

  Coral shook another cigarette out of the pack. “Why don’t you give it a rest, kid. You don’t have the right to ask us any of this shit. You’re not a cop.”

  “I can ask anything I want,” I said, mildly. “I can’t force you to answer, but I can always ask.”

  She stirred with agitation, shifting in her seat. “Know what? I don’t like you,” she said. “People like you make me sick.”

  “Oh really. People like what?”

  She took her time extracting a paper match from a packet, scratching the tip across the striking area until it flared. She lit her cigarette. The match made a tiny tinkling sound when she dropped it in the ashtray. She rested her chin on her palm and smiled at me unpleasantly. I wanted her to get her teeth fixed so she’d be prettier. “I bet you’ve had it real easy, haven’t you?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “Extremely.”

  “Nice white-collar middle-class home. The whole mommy-hubby trip. Bet you had little brothers and sisters. Nice little fluffy white dog…”