Lisa leaned back to give him a full view. "Two sloeeeeeee gin fizzes," she said.
"And easy on the ice," Mona said.
“We don’t like them watery,” Lisa said.
“Yeah, right,” John said then went to work.
Lisa’s hands came out of her purse holding a long thin cigarette. She tapped my shoulder and I noticed her eyes then, a sparkling golden blue like clean ocean water. Then I wondered if there was such a thing as clean ocean water. But I was drunk, not thinking right.
"Got a light?" she said.
"Always," I said.
I got a match going and extended it forward, the cigarette firing up with a tiny crackle.
"You’re sweet," she said.
I waved the match out. "Sometimes."
“Oh, you’re bad,” Mona said.
"You Nick Constantine?" Lisa asked.
Though I had made the papers and the TV news years ago, I wondered how they knew my name, but the way they were looking, the thought didn’t cling.
"Who wants to know?" I said.
"I’m Lisa," she said looking back at her friend. "And she’s Mona."
"Shit, Lisa," Mona said. "You said it backwards."
"Oh, so what?"
"I’m supposed to do the names," Mona said.
"We’re roomies," Lisa said.
John had their drinks ready, and if I knew him, he had probably loaded up on the gin, thinking to do me a favor I didn’t need.
"I got these," I said to him.
John put the glasses on beer coasters.
"Thanks, you," Mona said.
"See, sweet, like I said," Lisa replied.
Mona took a dainty sip of her drink. "We heard you find people."
"From who?" I said.
"Around town," Mona said.
"I used to do a little of that.” I’d find them and break their arms or legs. Sometimes, I’d have to take it further.
"Good," Mona said.
"Because we got someone we want you to find," Lisa said.
3
We took our glasses and smokes to a booth in the corner, away from anybody else who might actually come in for a drink or two. The girls had polished off their first gins fast and had gotten another round on the house. I didn’t know how many drinks I had—I never knew—but my head was buoyant and my feet were weightless. We lit more cigarettes, a cloud lifting from the table like a campfire.
Sitting across from me, Mona and Lisa touched shoulders. One of their tiny hands slid a picture along the table, and I picked the glossy print up at the corner, bringing my head in close. It was a five by seven headshot of a guy, a few more years than my age, thirty-five, full brown beard, trimmed around the Adam’s apple, head of hair a little long but fitting the style of the beard. His cheeks were a bit puffy, the eyes big and cheerful, but it was the grin that drew my attention. It was the look of a charmer, a used car salesman, the fella who’s gonna sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
Lisa said, "His name’s Eddie.”
“He got a last name?” I said.
"He said it was Block,” Mona said.
“You don’t sound so confident.”
"We got trust issues with that guy," Lisa said.
"Major trust issues,” Mona said.
"Okay," I said. “So he may or may not be called Eddie Block.”
"Eddie hasn’t been around for the last few days," Lisa said.
"And he’s not returning our calls either," Mona said.
“Maybe, he’s busy.”
“Busy, my ass.”
"What’s the deal between you guys?" I said.
"He owes us money."
"Plenty of money."
"What for?" I said.
Lisa looked around the bar before she spoke. "It’s kinda’ a secret, Nick."
"Hey, you don’t want to talk about it," I said, "then don’t. I don’t care either way."
"We have to tell him, Lisa," Mona said. "Or he won’t want to help us."
"Yeah, I suppose," Lisa said. "We moved some stuff for him.”
“What stuff?” I said.
“Commodities.”
"He owes us near five gees,” Mona said.
The girls were drug mules. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Lisa took me by the hand, squeezing it. "We need you to find Eddie and make him pay up."
I needed the job like I needed another hole in my head. The whole thing sounded like a big headache, and I had had more of those recently than sober days. I only listened to their cock and bull because I wanted to screw the short one while her friend tickled my ass with a feather.
I tipped some ash from my cigarette. "I don’t know ladies," I said. "I really don’t do that kind of shit anymore."
"Why not?" They asked it together, giving the question some reverb.
I finished my drink. "I’m a responsible businessman these days. I own this bar."
I waved my arm out like a game-show host pointing out a fine prize.
"It’s a dive, Nick," Lisa said.
"Yea, a total shithole," Mona said. "Sitting on this seat without panties, I might catch something I’ll need penicillin to cure."
"It wouldn’t be the first time for you," Lisa said.
"Fuck you, bitch," Mona said.
Lisa ignored her and clutched my hand again; her blue eyes drilling into mine made my dick stir. "We need you," she said. "We have nowhere else to turn."
"And we’ll pay you good, Nick," Mona said.
I didn’t bother to tell them that I had more money than the Catholic Church on a Sunday, that the bar was a tax write off my certified public asshole had told me to buy. Somehow losing money kept me rich. Or so my accountant told me. I needed to pay him a visit and have him explain how it all worked. Again. All that guy did was confuse me.
"Half of what you can recover," Lisa said.
What was I? A repo man?
Mona whispered in her friend’s ear.
"I meant half of half of what you get from Eddie."
"A quarter of five large," I said.
"Yes, however much that comes to," Lisa said.
Mona looked into her purse, pushing junk around. "I left my calculator at home, Nick."
"My accountant would know," I said.
"What do you say, Nick?" Mona said.
"Pretty please," Lisa said.
I remembered reading this P.I. novel while I was tailing this dude, waiting for the right moment to strike. It had taken a while to finish the book and the guy off. In the novel, the investigator asked for some up-front money. If I wanted to sound legit, and still get a shot at my fantasy, I should mention it.
"I’ll need some kind of retainer," I said.
They exchanged worried glances. "But we don’t have any money to pay you," Lisa said.
"Not until you get Eddie," her roommate said.
"Gee," I said, "that is a problem right there."
Lisa smiled at Mona, who nodded, and said, "I think we arrange a down payment."
I stabbed out my cigarette. "I live upstairs."
I couldn’t remember a moment of my down payment with the girls—this morning’s escapade didn’t count for nothing. While I had had no intention of helping Mona and Lisa, a big pile of crap had ended up on my doorstep, and now I was going to do something about it.
I left the bar and walked around back to the open-faced garage, which housed the Beast. I got my classic car nearly twenty years ago, and with over 200,000 miles on it, the engine still purred like you were stroking the fur of a dog. There wasn’t a lick of rust on the body or frame because I washed the undercarriage after every snowstorm. I had the beige paint recoated when I came into my fortune. You scratch my Delta, I scratch you. You dent my Delta, I dent you. Get it?
I jumped on the interstate, not too worried about leaving the stiffs in my apartment. I couldn’t worry about tossing Mona and Lisa into the dumpster until after dark. I headed over the river on the Mark Twain Bridge, and got off the Connecticut Street exit
in East City, a trip of ten minutes tops, but with traffic it seemed like it took three hours.
The heat was baking the asphalt, sending up shimmering waves, and I was sweating out yesterday’s booze, beginning to feel human again. Cruising through the side streets with my elbow out the window and a hand on the top of the steering wheel, I stared down the lowlifes hanging around the sidewalks like stop signs.
I saw the tip of the Prospect Street Apartment Building as it rose into the sky like a dirty mound of loam. The soot and blackness of the bricks made you think a railroad yard was out back, but I left the Beast there, and I didn’t see no train tracks. Little porches hung from each unit, and the tenants who hadn’t parked their asses on them, filled the space with junk. There was more litter than grass around the outside of the building.
I went in the back entrance. The walls had more cuts and bruises than my liver. The hall reeked of piss, and further down, rotting food. From behind flimsy wooden doors, I heard TVs and angry voices blaring to the point where I couldn’t tell them apart. The place smelled and sounded like a barn. All that was missing was straw on the floor.
Around a corner, I bumped into a couple of fat ladies, a diabetes duo, waiting for the elevator. I had a cigarette burning, and they got to waving smoke from their faces and mumbling about how rude I was. I gave them my meanest grin, and they decided the stairs might be a better option for their blood sugar problems.
When the elevator doors parted, I waited for the cattle to discharge, then I went up six, lurching floors, my gut lurching in sync with the cables. I turned left first, then right, looking for 612, which was all the way down the corridor. Light from a window crisscrossed with wire shined on Lisa and Mona’s peephole. I knocked, thinking there might be another roommate, but no one opened up.
I needed to release some energy. Might of been the diabetes duo. Or the dead girls in my apartment.
Nah, Nick, it’s the heat.
I kicked the door, and it popped off its latch. I put on a pair of rubber gloves and flicked a wall switch that threw light on shabby furniture facing a wilted cabinet filled with the usual plug in stuff. Clothes were everywhere; across dirty dishes, alongside empty beer cans and on top of a scarred coffee table. It seemed like everybody needed a maid.
I slid open the curtain draped along the back of a sofa. Lisa and Mona’s dinky porch looked out over the Connecticut River, the water the color of diarrhea. A rubber plant stood strong against the direct blast of the sun. Folding chairs surrounded a small table with a smelly ashtray and a citronella candle on it. A blue jay perched on the railing eyeballed me. I flinched and he flew.
I heard something rattle behind me and I whipped around, my finger on the trigger of the .45 I always carried. I had almost blown away a kitten rubbing against a wobbly trashcan in the kitchen.
I squatted down. "Come here, you pesky shit."
He meowed his way over, brushing up against my legs. It was a cute little thing, a black and gray tabby, that didn’t stop talking. He had an extra digit on his front paws, making them look like mittens. I petted his head and he flipped to the ground, showing me his balls and belly, the fur there had some brown in it. I gave him a scratch and his paws stretched out, kneading the air.
“Aww, what’s the matter, little guy? You hungry?”
I walked into the kitchen and that bastard twisted up and was right between my legs, nearly tripping me. The bowl by the trashcan was empty, and I found a bag of cat food in front of the microwave. I overfilled the dish and freshened the water next to it. He didn’t care about the drink, he was crunching at his food.
The kitchen looked like my kitchen; dishes overflowing the sink, food containers lying around, cabinet doors left open, papers by the phone. The mail was all bills and junk. I leafed through an open notebook, seeing messages Lisa and Mona had left for one another: who had called who, what to make for dinner, how much the other owned for the cable. I jotted down some of the numbers I saw, hoping they’d be a path to Eddie Block.
I went down a short hall and into a bedroom, which had a king sized-bed in it, leaving almost no space to walk around to the far night table. Another phone was there, its accompanying answering machine flashing two over and over. I sat on the mattress and pressed the play button.
The first voice had a weasel quality that irritated my headache, sending shooters of pain down my neck. "Hey, ladies it’s me. I haven’t heard from Twodees yet. How can I do anything when I don’t have what I need to do it? Answer that one. Anyhow, call me. We need a face to face. Let me know what’s up. ‘K? Love ya like a bear loves honey. Bye."
Great. No name. No number. But a young guy, in his teens or early twenties. Certainly Twodees was Eddie. And certainly the caller was a homosexual. The message was cryptic, as they tend to be, and annoyed my headache.
The cat hopped on the bed and I stroked him as the second message came on. "Hello, Mona, Lisa, it’s Eddie." His voice was a smooth as twenty year-old scotch and as trusting as the priest who’s about to rape an altar boy. I turned up the volume because the cat wouldn’t shut-up with the meows. I shushed him, but he didn’t listen. "We need to meet tonight," Eddie went on. "At the office. To discuss things. Please be there around eight? Okay?" Then a click.
You don’t discuss owing people money. You pay them, shithead.
But had Eddie meant this evening? Or was the message old? The machine didn’t track the date or time.
"What do you think, kitty?" I said to my new bud.
"His name is Van Gogh."
The voice—the same geeky one I had just heard on the answering machine—had come from the bedroom door. He was a kid, all right, face covered with pockets of acne, whiteheads dripping grease worse than a slice of pepperoni pizza. He was as thin as a sapling but a lot taller than one. He had on cutoff jeans that outlined his significant package and a horizontal striped shirt, its colors much too cheery for a man who drinks to excess. He held a peashooter on me. My .45 was tucked back under my shirt.
"What?" I said, but only because he had surprised me.
"The cat," he said. "His name is Van Gogh. I call him Vincent."
"Why Vincent?"
"You don’t know who Vincent Van Gogh is?"
"Should I?"
"He was a painter," he said. "Mona and Lisa thought he painted the Mona Lisa—even though that was by Leonardo Da Vinca."
"Stop filling my head with useless shit, kid."
"I ain’t a kid."
I thought about pulling my .45 and shooting him. But he might tell me something I didn’t know—besides the painter who had done a portrait of Mona and Lisa before they overdosed in my apartment.
"You bust open the front door?" he said.
"I might have," I said. "What’s your name?"
"No names."
"I’m Nick."
"I don’t care about your name, mister."
"If we’re gonna talk, I need to know what to call you."
"Uh...Terry."
"Uh Terry what?"
"Terry is enough."
"Listen, Terry, put the gun down, before you get hurt."
"I know how to use it."
"You’re scaring me real bad. I may pee myself any second."
"Where are they?" Terry said, his gun staying pat.
"Where are who?”
"Mona and Lisa."
"At my place."
"What are they doing there?"
"Chilling out.”
"Cool."
I hoped more than that. "They hired me to find Eddie," I said.
"Are you some kind of private dick?”
Jesus, I knew he was a fag. “Forget it.”
“My bad,” he said. “I meant private investigator.”
"Something like that, sure."
"So if they hired you, why’d you break in? And why are you wearing those gloves?"
Good questions. He was starting to piss me off. "I know they did some work for Eddie, and I know not much else, Terry.
> "You gonna get their money for them?"
"Exactly."
"He hasn’t paid me either."
"What do you know about Eddie?"
"I can’t even find him," Terry said.
I got off the bed and took a step towards him.
"Wooo! Don’t move!"
"Hey, Terry, we’re all on the same side here," I said. "Looking for Eddie."
"I mean it, don’t move any closer!"
He pointed the gun further out. A street piece. Wavering his grip. If he fired, it would probably jam and take his hand off.
"Give me a break, Terry," I said.
"I’ll shoot!"
I was on him in a second, slapping him hard across his oily cheek with one hand, and taking the .22 with my other. He collapsed like a heart attack victim and started to sob.
"You bully!"
I kicked him in the ass. "Shut up and listen."
He looked up at me, crying, tears rolling into the pockmarks on his face. "You hurt me!"
"I haven’t begun to hurt you, Terry. Stop blubbering and listen very carefully."
"Please don’t hit me again," he said between sniffles.
"What’s Eddie’s last name? Is it Block?”
"He never told me. I call him Twodees."
"How’d you get together with him?"
"Through Mona and Lisa. They know I’m good with computers, and Twodees needed help with that. It was mostly techy stuff."
"Where’d you meet him, his house, office...what?"
"I don’t know where he lives."
"You’re not helping me here, Terry."
"I’m trying."
I stepped on his hand and he cried out. "At his office! I met him at his office!"
I removed my shoe from his hand. "That wasn’t so hard," I said.
"I think you broke my fingers!"
"I’m gonna hit you again, Terry."
"No, please..."
"Where does Eddie kept his office?"
"In North Chester."
"That’s pretty vague, Terry. Like thirty thousand people live in that hellhole."
"It’s closer to forty-five, actually."
"Terry."
"I don’t know exactly where his office is. It was late at night. I wasn’t driving. Mona was. I think it was the second exit off of 384. Nobody pays attention when they’re not driving. Ask the girls. They’ll know where it is."
The Big Bad Page 2