Bluebottle

by James Sallis

  "Wait."

  He started off, then came back: "Someone be with you to take your order soon." He vanished into the building.

  Not a creature was stirring.

  Well, in truth lots of creatures were stirring. Rats the size of beavers that in other parts of the city took to the trees hunting squirrel; cockroaches that, you cooked them up, they'd serve a family of four; street-smart starved dogs and scrawny cats looking as if every extra day tickedoff on the chart of their lives was a victory over holocaust.

  Just no human creatures. That you could see, anyway. Didn't mean none were there.

  And after half an hour or so, one was.

  Jimmie Marconi came down the outside stairs from the building's second floor, some kind of office up there probably, in the old days kept workers and management comfortably apart. One of Marconi's men, the wiry one from Leonardo's, followed him, stepping into the recess of a doorway at the bottom of the stairs to become shadow. His eyes peered out at car, street, buildings opposite.

  "Here's what you need to know," Marconi told me after he'd got in and sat a moment. "Nothing."

  Then he laughed. He and Joey could have worked up one hell of a routine together.

  "You do have a way of getting in over your head, Griffin."

  I allowed as how he had a point.

  'We counted on that."

  A kid on a bike came into view down the street and proceeded up it, weaving in slow curves fromcurb to curb. Marconi's man's eyes tracked him from the shadowed doorway.

  Death was the only thing that would ever rush Jimmie Marconi. I sat quiedy, waiting till he was ready to go on.

  "Funny how Eddie Bone never told you what he wanted, that time he called."

  "He said we'd talk about it when we got together."

  "Puts you off like that, then he doesn't show at all, sends along this woman instead."

  "Looks that way."

  "And you still don't have any idea what he wanted."

  "None."

  Marconi nodded. "Ambitious man, Eddie. Worked hard, took care of business. Good with details."

  Yes.

  "Ambitious. Always wanted to be a bigger man than he was. Had this whole world of his own, friends, places he went regularly, they'd treat him like some fucking big-shot You ever see the layout at his apartment, you know what I mean. Nothing wrong with any of that long as he kept it to himself."

  Marconi looked around at the seats, floormats, dash.

  "Nice car."

  "My girlfriend's."

  "I know. LaVerne. She's finetoo."

  He smiled, a perfectly gentle, suave smile that put me in mind of carnivorous fish.

  "Once in a while Eddie'd do contract work for us. Pickups, deliveries, moving things from here to there. Nothing complicated. Month or so before his death, things fell out so as he wound up holding more of our money than he probably ever should have. But he was dependable—-right? "

  Marconi watched the kid go out of sight up the street.

  "Eddie was okay long as he didn't try to think. Man just couldn't think in straight lines to save himself. Get things all tangled up."

  Marconi looked at me.

  "I'm telling you this. It don't go any further."

  I nodded.

  "I don't know what the fuck he thought he was doing. Got it up his ass somehow that he was gonna. . . what is it they're always saying in lousy movies these days. . . he was gonna 'make a difference.' This fucker in his silk suits he don't ever get dry-cleaned, they smell like a goddamn gym sock, but he's gonna make a difference.

  "Week or two goes by and we start to wonder. So Joey goes by. Eddie tells him the money's gone. This woman he had at the apartment must have taken it, but he's on her trail. Day later Joey goes back and wants to know how it's going. Good, Eddie says. Yeah, well we know where you been hanging out, Joey tells him. We know what's been coming out of your mouth."

  Marconi looked out the window. At one time the building's entire side had been painted with the firm's logo and name. Now only the ghosts of white letters, DY CL N NG, remained.

  "This was my folks' place. Started it the year they were married. He was nineteen and she was seventeen. Got the whole thing going on a hundred dollars. What you gonna do with a hundred dollars these days, Griffin? People in the neighborhood said Valentine Marconi could get the stains out of anything—maybe even your soul."

  Someone came down the stairs at the side of the building. The wiry bodyguard went over and they spoke. Then the bodyguard started towards the car. Marconi rolled the window down. The bodyguard spoke softly into his ear and Marconi nodded.

  "We still don't know," Marconi said. He cranked the window back up. "Maybe the woman took the money, like Eddie said. Maybe she talked him into doing it. Or maybe it was Eddie's screwed-up idea all along, his pitiful fucking idea of hitting the jackpot, and the two of them were together on it, accomplices.

  "Maybe these dickheads"—he glanced at the stairs, Ellis up there somewhere, in some condition—"engineered the whole thing. Took the money outfromunder Eddie or got him all busted up on their great cause. What we think is, one way or another Eddie gave it to them."

  "To make a difference."

  "Yeah. Boy up there didn't seem to want to talk about it. Thought he was some kind of soldier."

  "He's dead."

  Marconi shook his head. "Soon."

  "You, one of your gophers, killed Eddie."

  "It's what happens, Griffin."

  "And Dana Esmay?"

  "Police say suicide. Why not? Maybe she couldn't live with what she did, or with what she thought someone else was going to do once they found her. For all we know, she had the money, and the toy soldiers put her down for it—or because she knew they had it. We wanted to find her. Hell, I even asked you to help. And we needed to have a talk with the toy soldiers, ask them if maybe they knew anything about our money."

  "Which is why Joey was following me."

  "Sooner or later you were gonna come across those boys. You'd find them or they'd find you."

  Someone stepped onto the second-floor landing. He held his fist out, thumb down.

  Marconi shook his head. "Another tin soldier tipped over on the board. Dead with his toy honor intact Take care, Griffin."

  "Mr. Marconi."

  He stopped with one foot out of the car.

  "I don't much like being lied to."

  "I can appreciate that."

  "Or set up. Or tailed."

  He shrugged without looking back at me. "Who would?"

  The wiry bodyguard came out of the doorway. He stood scanning the street as Marconi went up the stairs, then with a glance my way turned and followed.

  10

  It was night now. Streetlights ran long fingers in through the window and caressed the back wall. Neither of us had made any move to turn on lights in the house.

  "You missed it all, Lew. I got up and came in looking for you and there was Hosie on the couch making these horrible gasping sounds. That was bad enough, but then they stopped. I couldn't tell whether he was breathing or not I didn't think he was."

  She drank off the last of her coffee. I'd made my way down the first third of a botde of Dewar's I'd got at the K&B up the street.

  "The paramedics said he aspirated—vomited while he was out cold, breathed it into his lungs. There was blood and vomit all over the couch and floor, that really scared me, but they said the blood was probably from his stomach too, that happens with serious drinkers. They hooked him up to monitors, put a tube in his throat, started IVs, and packed him up. The ambulance sat there for half an hour. All these faces all up and down the street peeking out from behind doors and windows, trying to get a look, find out what was going on."

  She got up and walked to the window above the sink, stood there looking out, not saying any more. A banana tree swayed outside, dipping one broad leaf into the air like an oar.

  Tm sorry, V."

  She nodded. "I'll make more coffee. Be a
long night." When she opened the refrigerator door, light leapt into the room. She took out a can of French Market topped with aluminum foil. Light caught in the foil as she unwrapped it, bounced about the walls, semaphore from signal mirrors far away.

  "You weren't here again, Lew. You're never here. All those cases you keep taking on, the Clayson girl, Billy Deacon, that man's new young wife over in Slidell. . . You're the missing person, Lew."

  She turned to look at my glass. "Can I get you more ice?"

  I shook my head.

  "I keep trying to tell myself it's going to change, for a long time now. I don't know how much longer I can go on doing that."

  She sat at the table to wait. We watched one another. Neither of us said anything. After a while she got up and poured coffee. A passing car lit the part of her face I could see, threw her shadow hugely on the wall.

  "Get you anything while I'm up?"

  Again I shook my head.

  "I wish I could. I wish there was something I could do for you."

  "You do a lot for me, Verne."

  "No. I don't. Nothing that matters. You won't let me, can't admit there are things you need. From me or anyone else."

  A moth flew once against the window, went away and came back. Nudged at it again and again, wanting in from the light maybe. In from the cold. Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.

  I remembered a story Mom told me, how when she and Dad were first married, living in one of the two-room shacks thrown up twenty or thirty to the block on hardscrabble acreage at the edge of town, this bird, a dove, got in the habit of coming by every morning. First day, it flew into the window and when Mom went out she found it lying stunned in the dirt under the window. She got some cornmeal from inside and piled it up by the bird. Next day about the same time, she looked up and there the dove was, sitting in the window looking in at her. So every morning after that, she'd put cornmeal out on the sill for it. Even after the dove stopped coming, for a week or so she went on putting out cornmeal.

  "I've met someone, Lew. An older man, and his life's different from anything I've ever known. Every time I see him it's like visiting another country. But I think he cares about me. I don't know if anyone else ever will, not that much. Or that way."

  I nodded. She sat at the table again.

  "I have to try this, give it a chance. Give myself a chance. See what might come of it."

  "Okay."

  "I'm sorry, Lew."

  "No reason to be."

  "Yes. There is. Good reason."

  She stood and dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink, rinsed the cup, set it on the drainboard.

  Years later, at an AA meeting, a member told us that just before swallowing an even hundred pills and opening her wrists in the bathtub with an X-Acto knife, his wife had spent the evening—he was out drinking as usual—ironing his shirts. They were in a stack on the kitchen table, neady folded, when he got home.

  "Rent's paid up through next month. You want, I'm sure Mrs. Vandercook would let you take over the apartment after that."

  Okay.

  "I'll be by to pick up my things later this week if that's all right"

  Yes.

  'Take care, Lew."

  "You too."

  When the front door closed half an hour later, I got up and went into the front room. I looked through the records till I found one with Duke Ellington's "In My Solitude." I played it sixteen times while I finished the Dewar's.

  "JESUS I'M SORRY, Lew."

  Coffee lurched over the side of my cup onto the table. I held on to the cup with both hands and leaned into the table. I'd just told Don about LaVerne leaving.

  He'd come by to let me know that Hosie was going to be all right and found me out back on the patio lying up against the fence with glittery tracks from slugs on my clothes. God knows how long I'd been out there or what I had thought I was doing.

  I told him what I'd found at Amano's trailer, about my visit with Jimmie Marconi. Then about LaVerne.

  "She'll be back, Lew. You guys have split up before, but you're meant for one another. Anything I can do?"

  "Yeah." I held up my empty cup.

  "Only if you promise to drink it this time instead of splashing it on the table." He poured, then sat. "This other thing, though . . . Have to tell you. You're in over your head on that"

  "Marconi, you mean."

  Don nodded. "Maybe this other shit too. But Marconi for sure."

  "He came to me, dealt himself in."

  "So you get up and walk away fromthe table. You're done playing. Where's the problem?"

  "I can't"

  "Yeah. Yeah, I know that."

  Don tipped his chair back, head against the wall, gently rocking. There were spots rubbed smooth on the wall where others had done that before.

  "So Bone hauls ash for Marconi's group and winds up with a bankroll he's not supposed to have. Somehow Marconi's sidemen are so busy they forget to ask him about this. By the time they do, the Esmay woman's in the picture. Maybe she's Bone's love interest, maybe she's running a scam. Maybe both. Then the money disappears. Someone climbs up on a roof and shoots at you and the woman. Bone gets wiped. The woman either kills herself or meets up with an unusually imaginative dispatcher. Meanwhile these self-styled Aryan types are buying up serious weaponry—with mob money?"

  "You tell me."

  "And Marconi's dogs are looking to pull them down, make some kind of example of them. One thing."

  "Where's the money?" I said. Just what I'd been wondering.

  Don nodded.

  "This guy Joey the Mountain pulled off of you, this Ellis: you don't think he walked down the back stairs, huh."

  "Not with his feet touching."

  "So what'd they get from this litde episode? They already knew the white boys were in it This Ellis didn't talk, and you say he didn't, what do they have they didn't before?"

  "Nothing."

  "So no way they're gonna quit. Not the kind of people that write off their losses and move on. These guys grab on to something, they don't let go."

  "But they still have me."

  "Exactly. Lonely no more. How well does Marconi know you?"

  "Well enough."

  "Then he knows you're not gonna lay this down by the goddamnriverside. Figure on havingfriends wherever you go for a while."

  "That's just it. I don't have any better idea than they do where to go. Closed doors and empty bottles everywhere."

  "So try rethinking it. They knew about your Nazis—you remember how Tarzan used to call them Nasties?"

  I didn't. The only movie house back home was for whites.

  "And they knew about the connection with the woman."

  "Right"

  "What they didn't know about, as for as we can tell, is Amano. Maybe that's the door you have to get your foot in. Maybe there's something else back at this Amano's trailer."

  "Whatever's there's likely to be on the abstract side." Like the occupant himself, I thought.

  "You able to get any real feel for what that was all about? With Amano?"

  "Yeah. I think he went in. Climbed aboard."

  "Joined them, you mean. The white boys."

  "Right. He was desperate, couldn't find his way into a new book however hard he beat his head against it. Maybe he thought this was the thing that would take him where he needed to be."

  "You're saying he went in undercover, like doing research. Look around, find what goes down, get the hell out of there and write about it."

  I nodded.

  "That's one side of the story," Don said. "Other is, maybe instead he goes in, likes what he sees, and sticks around. Winds up buying the whole shitload."

  "Possible. He was desperate in other ways too, not just about the book. Kind of person you don't have a lot of trouble thinking he might fall in the odd hole."

  "Amano's missing, the money's missing. Chances are good they're together somewhere."

  "Makes sense. But I ke
ep thinking about die bodhi-sattva."

  "The what?"

  "It came up in one of the versions of the manuscript The bodhisattva. Someone who postpones his own salvation in order to help others achieve theirs."

  That's not all I was thinking. I was thinking there was something at the trailer. Two somethings. And I was remembering an old saying. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

  THE FIRST SOMETHING was no problem. After five or six consecutive naps during the course of which I became vaguely aware of evening setding in again outside my window, borders of one nap blurring into the next, no checkpoints or crossing guards, I called Sam Brown, formerly of SeCure Corps, now consultant and freelancer.

  "Mr. Brown, I was wondering if you could explain to me exacdy what this Consulting' is."

  "Well I tell you, it's complicated. But breaking it down to the part a layman like yourself might understand, it has a lot to do with what we professionals call 'billing.' That help?"

  "Yessir, I believe that clears it up."

  "How you doin', Lew?"

  "Few months dumber and poorer than the last time I saw you."

  "Ain't it the truth? What can I do for you?"

  I described the uniform that Wardell, the security guard out at the trailer, had been wearing.

  "Stripe up the side of the leg, right? Like on old-time band uniforms."

  "Darker blue, yeah."

  "Has to be Checkmate, with that shoulder patch and those fruity pants. Owner's a chess nut."

  I thought for a moment he said chestnut, and wondered what new slang had started up. "You know someone there?"

  "Lew, I know someone everywhere. I'm assuming you need to find this guy."

  "As soon as possible."

  "Give me his description again. . . . Wavy black hair, shiny. Like Indian hair? Right. Skin grayish white Got it I'll call you back."

  He did, within minutes.

  "Boy's name is Wardell Lee Sims. Been with Checkmate a litde over a year, in town a little longer. Used an Alabama driver's license for ID when he applied. With a couple of other agencies before that."

  "Why the change?"

  "Knew you were gonna ask, crack detective like yourself. You put in about thirty more years, maybe you'll get to be a consultant."