Eventually they were won over by my sterling personality and began to tell me things. There was one desk clerk who had checked Dresden in—“Completely normal check-in, American Express card, one bag, I think, and an open-ended room requirement. Did I do something wrong?”—and a telephone operator who remembered him calling a few times for messages.
“Where he called from, I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not unusual for people to check for messages by phone.”
Aside from those two, there was general agreement that Dresden showed, shall we say, a minimal use of hotel facilities. “Can we toss his room?” I said to the security guy, a tall redhead named Gurley.
Gurley looked like his stomach hurt. “No. You can knock on the door, but if he’s not there, I won’t let you in.”
“Don’t bother to come up with me,” I said. “I can find it.”
“I’m sure you could,” Gurley said. “I’ll come up anyway.”
So we knocked, looked at the door of 1417 for a few minutes, then rode the elevator back down to the lobby. “You might talk to the morning shift,” Gurley said. “I’ll tell Brownlow, my relief, to expect you. See him first, okay?”
The next morning Hilda departed for the Galleria with shopping fervor bright in her eye. I found Brownlow. He was shorter than Gurley, with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and a perpetual smile.
“How can I help you?” he said. “Come on, let’s see if we can help you today.”
We went back over the same ground I’d covered with Gurley. The desk people didn’t recognize Dresden’s photo. Neither did the bell captain, the bell staff, the parking garage attendants, anyone from the restaurant or bars, the staff … trust me, no one.
Brownlow said, “I know the cleaning staff keeps sending memos asking if 1417 is really occupied, because it’s never used.” His smile turned apologetic. “I don’t know what else I can do for you.”
“Don’t sweat it. Thanks.”
Brownlow went back to more normal work, and I shuffled off to drink lunch. I hadn’t expected to suddenly solve the Dresden disappearance overnight; I knew I was going back over ground the Houston PD had already covered, but even so …
Halfway through my third beer, I noticed a waitress pointing me out to a young woman in a blue suit and frilly blouse. I could imagine the conversation: “That’s him. Hotshot from Dallas who thinks he can—”
“Mr Rafferty?” the woman in blue said. “There’s a phone call for you. A police officer in Dallas. I thought it might be important.”
“Ed said I was to tell you,” Sergeant Ricco rasped. “We found Dresden. You can stop playing with yourself down there.”
“Dresden’s in Dallas?” I said. “But—”
“Naw, he ain’t here, but he ain’t in Houston, either. We don’t know yet if he’s been hiding in Galveston all along, but that’s where they found him this morning.”
“Galveston,” I said.
“Yeah. I gotta go now. Ed says call him when you get back in town.”
“Hey, wait a minute, Ricco! What does Dresden say? Why did Galveston pick him up?”
Ricco cackled down the phone line. “Say? He ain’t talking. And Galveston picked him up because his body was floating in the goddamned ship channel.”
Chapter 43
Hilda came back to the hotel at noon, alternately bubbly over her shopping triumphs and moaning about her sore feet. I had already packed most of our clothes and checked the departure time of every flight to Dallas that afternoon.
We squeaked onto a one-fifteen that was running late or was a special or something. Whatever it was, the door didn’t quite hit us in the backside getting on but almost. After takeoff I squirmed, wondered why they were flying the thing so goddamned slow, and muttered to myself.
Hilda, wisely, napped.
In Dallas I dropped Hilda at her house and drove downtown to police headquarters. I hit Ed Durkee’s office door with a dozen questions in mind. “Ed, what the hell is—”
“Here,” he said, and handed me the receiver of that portable phone on the floor beside his desk. “It’s for you. I forgot to have that call splitter changed. Sorry.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sa—hello!”
The voice on the phone was almost a caricature of a Hispanic accent. “Eh, Rafferty, joo gonna geeve me dat money? Or you want to go sweeming like your amigo Dresden?”
“You can have the money,” I said. “Why don’t you pick it up in an hour?”
Chapter 44
It wasn’t quite an hour, more like fifty-five minutes later when a new black Buick Electra ghosted to a stop in front of my house. There were several people in it.
I hadn’t been home for more than ten minutes, and I was still keyed up. It wasn’t easy to sit down in the living room armchair and wait for them to come in.
They didn’t knock. The front door suddenly flew open and banged against the wall. The knob went through the sheetrock.
“Eh, Rafferty-man, how joo doing?” The first one to come through the door was eighteen, maybe, give or take a year. His hair was slicked back with grease. His three-piece gray tailored suit had to be a thousand-dollar item. He had a pencil mustache and a fresh manicure and manic eyes. He was probably no more life-threatening than a blind airline pilot.
He swaggered into my living room and looked around. “Man, dis is a dump! Why joo wanna live in a dump like this, ennyway?”
Behind him, three other Hispanic youths slipped into the room. They wore designer jeans and baggy shirts, up-market, but not straight from the set of Wall Street like their main man. All three backup boys were armed. A weedy-one with a straggly goatee carried an Uzi; the other two had oversize handguns.
The showboat in the suit suddenly spread his arms wide and said, “Eh, where’s my manners? So sorry, Rafferty-man, I dint introduce myself. Call me Hector.” He pronounced it Hec—tor.” These are my, ah, bizniz associates, awright?”
Hector’s “bizniz associates” stared at me with varying looks on their faces. The most pleasant expression was mild disgust.
I nodded at them and waited. It was still Hector’s move.
“Joo prolly wonderin’ what’s goin’ on, Rafferty-man,” Hector said. “Zat right?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s simple, man. A bizniz arrangement fell troo, joo might say. I got ripped off. Imagine dat, rippin’ off Hector! Some people, man, dey is too dumb to live.”
“Life can be difficult,” I said.
“Hey, Diego, joo hear that? Rafferty-man sez life can be difficult. Well, no shit, huh?”
I said, “What I don’t understand is why you want this money.”
Hector’s eyes looked even more freaky. “Why? Why the fuck not, man? Goddamned old hijo de puta rips off my crack stash, it costs me money! I want it back.”
I patted the attaché case beside my chair. “This isn’t your money, Hector. I earned this. I killed Max.”
“Bullshit, man, joo din’t kill heem! Who joo t’ink joo are, tryin’ to tell Hector dat? Goddamned loco Anglo. Joo peess me off.” He paced two steps, turned, paced back, and said, “Fuck thees! I was gonna be easy with joo, Rafferty-man, but now …” He gestured abruptly to the one with the Uzi. “Diego—”
The Uzi swiveled my way, but it hadn’t quite come to bear when Cowboy leaned in the window and shot Diego in the side of the head. I was out of my chair by then, with the .45 from beneath my pant leg in one fist. As I rolled and twisted across the floor, I snapped off a shot at Hector and knew I’d missed as soon as I pulled the trigger.
The noise from the various muzzle blasts was a painful, jolting roar in the small room. Behind that roar, as if from far away, I heard shouted curses laced with fear. That may have been me.
The smallest drug dealer, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, tried very hard to kill me. Avoiding his first two shots, I misjudged the distance and came up short, crammed awkwardly against a wall with my gun hand trapped under my side.
The boy killer giggled and bounced like a boxer as he dragged the big magnum down from over his head, where the massive recoil had kicked it. He was a full second too slow. Mimi stood up behind the sofa and nailed him in the chest with her shotgun.
I think it was Ed Durkee who took out the third gunslinger, from the dining room doorway, shooting from a police-academy-perfect combat crouch.
I don’t know who shot Hector, not that it mattered. When the noise stopped and I looked through the haze—who says modern ammunition is smokeless?—I saw Hector crumpled against the side wall, with his chin on his chest and his legs straight out in front of him. His chest bubbled when he breathed. There was a new Beretta near his left hand, but he wasn’t reaching for it.
Mimi went around the room, checking the casualties. “One of these isn’t too bad,” she said. “Busted knee, that’s all.”
Ed Durkee grunted. “I’ll get an ambulance.” He pointed his finger at Cowboy and Mimi. “And you two get out of here! Leave a shotgun, or we’ll never sell this to the department, but you two go!” He stalked out of the living room, then returned immediately. “Don’t think this changes anything,” he growled at Cowboy. “We’re not on the same side, and we never will be.” He left again, and soon I heard him yelling into the kitchen phone.
Cowboy toed the Beretta away from Hector and waved his shotgun barrel like a pointer. “Sucking chest wound,” he said. “This one ain’t gonna make it.”
Hector groaned and rolled his head sideways. He looked up at me. “Hey, man, joo said joo’d give me dat money.”
“I lied,” I said. “Sue me.”
Chapter 45
“They killed Bert Cannon, too,” I said. “After he told them I was the one with the money.”
Hilda wriggled her mouth in disgust. “When?”
“About the time we were leaving Houston, apparently. The only one of the little bastards who survived doesn’t know everything but he’s telling everything he knows.” I checked Hilda’s wineglass—still half-full—and opened another beer for myself. “Seeing Hec-tor and his other buddies get blown away gave him an acute interest in good citizenship.”
It was Friday, two days after the living room firefight. My house still smelled of burned powder; maybe it would forever. Hilda and I were trying to get away from it all with another backyard barbecue and sipping session. But we couldn’t get away from the tangled Mini-Maxi screwup; that kept drifting back at us.
“They’d found Dresden in Houston, god only knows how,” I said. “He was holed up in one of those scungy dumps on Westheimer, so maybe a junkie turned him in for a pocket full of dreamtime. Anyway, Dresden gave them Tony Cordington’s phone number and said that was who he gave the money to. They whacked Dresden and came back to Dallas. Then they found Bert at Tony Cordington’s apartment—”
“Is she all right?”
“Yeah. Ed located her in a layover hotel in Tampa.”
“Sorry, go ahead.”
“Bert told Hector he didn’t get the money, but I did, so … there you go.” I wiggled farther down in my chair and looked at Hilda. “What makes me feel like a first class jerk is that Noonebury was right all along,” I said. “About the Mini-Maxi being a crack stash, anyway. It seems that Max—our quintessential Viking—made a deal with Hector. The Mini-Maxi needed cash flow, and Hector would pay big money for Max to hide crack in the back room. Or wherever he hid it; I don’t think they know yet.”
Hilda waved her arm at me and twitched her head. “Look over there,” she mouthed silently.
The orange cat had moved out of the shrubbery in the corner of the yard and sat watching us. It dropped its head and licked its chest twice, then went back to its imitation of a statue.
“Come here, Cat,” I said.
It didn’t.
I took the last hamburger patty, the one we hadn’t eaten, and put it on the ground by my chair.
“Nobody knows exactly how Max and Hector got together,” I said to Hilda, “but they did. And that’s why a few kids were always hanging around the store. They were watching the crack. While Noonebury was out busting crack houses in south and west Dallas, Hector was warehousing across town. How ’bout that?”
Hilda shook her head. “But why did they kill Max?”
“The kid canary says—aha!”
The cat trotted a dozen feet closer to me—probably closer to the hamburger patty, really—and sat down again. It took another bath.
“The kid canary says when they went to the store one night to withdraw the evening’s sale stock, some of their crack was missing. A lot of crack, I guess. Max wouldn’t tell them where it was, so they whacked him. Chopped his hand with a machete, too, and kneecapped him. Sort of a multicultural ‘See what happens to people who mess with us’ warning.”
“But if no one knew Max was connected with …”
“I said they were mean; I didn’t say they were smart.”
Hilda said, “Did Dresden know about Max’s crack plans?”
I shrugged.
“So we’ll never know what Dresden blamed Max for, the business downturn or the drug involvement. But either way, to get the insurance payoff and avoid bankruptcy, Dresden was willing to have Max killed. And at the same time, Max was trying to save the company his way, by going into the drug business with stolen crack.” Hilda sipped her wine. “Do I have all that right?”
“A cogent summation, my dear.”
“Oh, look, Rafferty. Here, kitty, kitty.”
The cat had moved again. Now it was only six feet from the hamburger patty.
“How you doing, Cat?” I said. “Come on over and eat.”
The cat yawned a boy-am-I-cool yawn. I’d know one of those yawns anywhere.
After a minute or two, when the cat hadn’t come any closer, Hilda said, “Because Noonebury was right about the crack, are you and Ed Durkee in trouble?”
“Us?” I said. “That gallant duo, the two-gun heroes of the morning papers and the evening news? Surely you jest.”
Hilda shook her head. “I’ll never believe another news story of my life.”
“Not a bad philosophy. Food’s here, Cat. Come and get it.”
The cat waited awhile, so I wouldn’t think it was obeying me or anything silly like that, then it walked closer. Now it leaned forward and sniffed at the hamburger still about eighteen inches from its nose.
“Hoo-oo, Muffin!” a woman’s voice shrilled somewhere close. “Where are you?”
The cat’s head swiveled around so fast it looked like it would twist off. The cat stared at the back fence.
A woman’s head appeared over the top of the fence. She had curlers in her hair and a screechy voice. “Oh, there you are, Muffin, you naughty cat.”
“Is it yours?” I said.
“I hope so,” the woman said. They were pink curlers, with a yellow net shower-cap gadget stretched over them. “Muffin’s a stray, I think, but we just moved in and—oh, I don’t believe we’ve met!”
“No, we haven’t,” I said.
Curlers let that one dangle in the air for a while; then she said, “I’ve been feeding him, so I guess he’s mine now.” She smiled and said, “I named him Muffin,” as if she was proud of it. “Him loves him’s fishie-wishies, don’t you, Muffin?”
“Oh, my God,” Hilda muttered.
Curlers beamed at all of us, then her head dropped down out of sight.
The cat and I watched her go, then it looked at the hamburger.
“Hey, Cat,” I said.
It looked up at me.
“Here’s the deal. Over there you may be Muffin with fishy-whatsits, but over here, you’re Cat with cold hamburger. Work it out for yourself.”
Hilda said, “Rafferty, you’re crazy.”
Cat didn’t think so. He came over and ate the hamburger. And purred.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the Shamus-award winning Rafferty P.I. mystery,
FATAL SISTERS
Chapter 1 - Fatal Sisters
&
nbsp; I knew it was going to be one of those days as soon as Patty Akister walked into my office. She fidgeted awhile, then she asked me to find her husband, Sherm.
Sherm, the secret agent.
Uh-huh.
Patty was thirty-five or so, with a fresh, well-scrubbed look about her. She was a couple of pounds past plump, nudging comfortably into chubby, and it looked right for her.
Her hair was brown and curly, cut just a little too short to suit her round face. Either she needed a new beauty parlor or she wore it that way to please someone. Secret agent Sherm, maybe.
Patty Akister also had apple cheeks and wide blue eyes and perfect skin and a pleasant face that, on a normal day, would have smiled often.
Norman Rockwell would have painted her in the kitchen, busy and happy, with smudges of flour on her calico apron.
Patty Akister wasn’t happy today, though. She was worried sick about poor Sherm.
“I’m afraid he’s been hurt, Mr Rafferty,” she said. “Or captured.”
“Captured,” I said.
Patty’s face fell even farther, and she twisted her dainty handkerchief. She had large hands and she gave it a pretty good twist. A watching chicken would have broken into a cold sweat, seeing that twist.
“Yes,” she said miserably, “captured. Look, I shouldn’t even be here. I promised Sherm a dozen times I would never tell anyone about his work, but … but he’s never been away on a mission this long. I’m scared.”
“On a mission,” I said.
“I went to the police first,” Patty said. “I thought maybe Sherm had an accident. You know, with the car. I was afraid he was stuck in a hospital, unconscious or something. But the police checked and he isn’t. They asked me questions and filled out forms and all that, but, you see, I told them Sherm’s cover story. I didn’t tell them he’s really on a mission.”
Cannon's Mouth_A Rafferty P.I. Mystery Page 18