Cocaine and Blue Eyes

by Fred Zackel

  His face was drawn, and his eyes avoided mine. "Did he suffer much?" he wondered.

  "Probably not. Probably never saw the other car."

  He seemed relieved. Then he hesitated. "Was it pretty bad?"

  "As bad as they get."

  Silence for several miles. Parnell lost in thought, while I wondered whether I had paid my burial insurance. He drove like a junkie heading for a fix, and his truck stirred up enough dust to make a cowboy homesick. There was a ravine on one side, of course, and a hillside of boulders on the other.

  His fist slammed the steering wheel. "That dirty little cunt." He slammed the truck into a lower gear. "I told him to look out for her. I meant take care of her. He shoulda done it the other way. He shoulda steered clear of her."

  "He wasn't with her when he died."

  "He didn't have to be."

  "Are you saying she caused his problems?"

  "He wasn't a burn-out when he met her."

  "He had a police record when he met her."

  "Oh big shit. Joyriding and possession of grass. Half the kids in this state have that before their senior prom."

  "How long have you known him?"

  "We grew up together in Spokane." He pressed down on the gas pedal. The pickup scooted like a jackrabbit. "He was a good guy until he met her."

  "What was he like?"

  "Joey was the smallest kid in school. Always getting into fights, and not just the bullies, either. Everybody picked on him because he was so short. He never won a fight, you know."

  "Being short preyed on him?"

  "That's why he did so much cocaine. You see, cocaine's a Cinderella drug. It makes every dream come true, for thirty minutes. It gives you guts, stamina, brains, whatever. And Joey was in heaven. Coke made him feel six feet tall, which was all he ever wanted from life."

  "Did he do a lot?"

  "The last I heard, he was getting off it. He was pretty strung out in Sausalito. Mostly coke mixed with speed. But that was before Dani left him. He might've been doing some after she left, but not much. Another couple of weeks, and he would've given it up for good."

  "Why didn't he quit sooner?"

  "He could've easily enough, I s'pose, but he liked it. Coke's an upper, not a downer. He was Superman on nose powder. It maintained his fantasies, and Dani could afford it. When she left, he couldn't afford it like before, and there wasn't much reason to keep on doing it."

  It made sense. Joey Crawford had never been dependent on cocaine. He had been dependent on Dani. When she left, she took the pleasure of cocaine with her. People can take it or leave it. He had been trying to leave it.

  "You introduced them, right?"

  "Yep." He glanced out the window. He didn't want his face seen. "I knew her six, seven years ago, back in the city. I was living just below Union Street and Telegraph Hill. I met her in Vesuvio's over a beer. Maybe I shouldn't tell you?"

  "It's up to you." I watched the road. He might know it well, but we were moving fast, and the road was shitty with ruts and chuckholes. I lit a cigarette.

  "Better put it out. Even with all this rain, there's always fire danger."

  I used the ashtray. "If you can't trust a private eye, who can you trust?"

  "What's that s'pose to mean?"

  "What happened at Vesuvio's?"

  He missed a tree somehow. "She walks up and asks me if I want to sleep with her. We went to my place and she stayed a week."

  I grinned. "Sure she did."

  "Go fuck yourself. That's what she did."

  I stared out the window and counted trees as if they were out-of-state plates. After a couple of dozen, I looked back at Parnell. He was intent on the windy road.

  "It's your story, not mine."

  After a while he agreed. "I left for Seattle when she left." He looked like he had tasted something bitter. "I heard the rest when she came up to Seattle." He almost slowed down. "She was at Vesuvio's with some other guy. She was bored, I guess. She told him she was leaving with the next asshole who walked through the door."

  "You were the next asshole."

  "I wasn't the only one." He glanced over. "The other guy had just proposed to her."

  We drove along the hillcrest until we crossed into the next valley. There was a ranch house below us. It was single-storied and rambling, like an old hunting lodge, the kind the Big Money Boys built after the railroads. I doubted they'd recognize it now.

  The road seemed to sink, and we downshifted towards the ranch house. Tan fields and tall grasses stretched ahead of us. A pack of mongrels came from the tall grasses and chorused our arrival. We parked near a stone cistern behind the house. Naked children splashed water and shrieked at us. Chickens ran loose.

  Within moments, the commune came to unload the groceries. The men were lean and rangy, like their dogs. Most carried knives and leather stash bags on their broad belts. Long-haired and bearded, they all went shirtless, and their bodies were baked by the sun. The womenfolk were all baby machines, chubby-cheeked and broad-haunched. They wore billowy skirts and no make-up, and their long hair hung to their spines.

  "When you got a commune," Parnell said, "it's like running a restaurant. No matter how you plan ahead, you still gotta go shopping every day." He asked if I were thirsty.

  "I'm always thirsty," I said.

  "We make our own beer up here."

  I told him to lead the way. We didn't help with the unloading. Our long strides scattered chickens.

  A narrow dirt path beyond the cistern headed uphill, an alleyway of eucalyptus on either side. The path made a half-turn after a hundred yards, and the trees began to thin. Some tool sheds were hidden beneath some sycamores.

  He threw open the doors on a tool shed, flooding it with sunlight. The shed was a cover over a dirt wall cellar. The floor was inch-thick sawdust, and the walls were beams packed with dirt. The cellar looked like a liquor wholesaler's warehouse. There were cases of unlabeled beer bottles stacked against every wall.

  We went down the stairs. I found an empty case and sat on it, while he opened a couple of bottles.

  "We don't use the chemicals the commercial brewers use," he told me. He said they collected rainwater into earthen crocks. Malt and yeast were added, as was sugar. After fermentation in a real tool shed, the beer was siphoned off, bottled and capped, then stored in the coolness of this dirt wall cellar.

  The beer was sweet and cool and mellow and light.

  He told me to nurse it. "It's potent stuff. We get a higher proof, too. Almost thirty percent higher. You can get off on one bottle." He chugged in celebration.

  "You said you knew her in Seattle."

  The pleasure left his beer. "She was in Seattle. She dropped out and came north. She was in pretty bad shape when I found her. Staying in crash pads, shoplifting supper at the supermarket. She had lost thirty pounds in two months. She was skinnier than me, nothing but elbows and knees. Her face was breaking out. She was even losing her hair."

  "Sounds like a lot of dope."

  "It was. Mostly uppers and downers. She was strung out bad. Taking anything around. She had the stutters for a while, like speeders get. Their mouths work faster than their brains. And sometimes she'd be in a downer frame, and you couldn't get a word out of her for days."

  "So you introduced her to Joey."

  "And that same night she took him to bed. It was his bed, but she took him there."

  "Love at first sight," I said.

  "He felt sorry for her, for what she was doing to herself. He thought he could straighten her out, get her off pills. Dani, well, she needed room and board, and she thought it was pretty funny. Here's this little guy from the wrong side of the tracks playing social worker to the debutante."

  "Sounds like a perfect fit."

  "It was. He let her move in, got her a job at the cannery where he was working, even made sure she worked alongside him, just so he could watch out for her."

  "Did you see them often?"

  "Once after t
hat in Seattle." He shook his head like a man shaking off a panhandler. "I got a letter from these people." He indicated the commune outside. "They needed a brew master, and they wanted me. I decided to accept the gig, so I went over to Joey's place to say goodbyes." His lips were wet with beer. "Dani wasn't home, but Joey was. He was in the kitchen heating a spoon over the gas burners."

  I lowered my beer. "Smack?"

  "I knocked the spoon out of his hand. Called him every name in the book. Then I walked out on him." His face was sad for his little buddy. "It wasn't very strong stuff. Kool-Aid strength maybe. But he was skin-popping it, and that stuffs easy to go for again."

  "Where'd he get smack?"

  "Dani. Nobody else could get him to try it. He couldn't wipe his ass unless she said it was okay."

  "D'you think he kept trying it?"

  "After what I said to him?" But Parnell wasn't a hasty man, and he tried being reasonable. "I doubt it. Maybe." He looked sadder. "We better start heading back."

  I told him I hated to leave. "D'you make house calls on this stuff?"

  He knew it. "It is good beer."

  I bought a case for five bucks. He threw a six pack in.

  "For the ride home?" I wondered.

  He didn't smile. "This stuff you can't drive on."

  The sun was glacier-white when we came out. Across the valley, some people from the commune were finishing the first half of a geodesic dome. Its mylar exterior was a mirror of sunshine against the tan hills and green trees. A hawk coasted on a thermal.

  "Have you seen either one since then?"

  "Last month. The Friday after Turkey Day. I hadn't seen them for ages. Not since they moved down to Sausalito. Then I get this postcard inviting me to a Thanksgiving party. I guess they wanted me to see how well they were doing. I know that's why I went. I wanted to see how they were doing, too."

  "How were they doing?"

  He didn't know. "They were blasted out of their minds." He smiled like an old fan listening to a has-been comic working for laughs in an empty lounge. "I've never seen so much cocaine at any single party."

  "They were both doing coke?"

  "Lots of coke. Line after line."

  "Did you talk to Joey about it?"

  "I tried a couple of times. He wouldn't listen. Why should he? He was in heaven on coke. He never saw what it was doing to him, what he was doing to others. I told him, if he kept it up, he'd find himself picking beets on a state prison farm."

  "Why was Dani doing so much coke?"

  "Dani likes the party scene as much as her sister does. Coke brings out people to a party. The more coke you got, the more guests. Dani dug the attention everybody gave her."

  "Did you talk with her about it?"

  "Not about coke. She came up to me early and got the point across that she wouldn't mind rekindling whatever had been between us. Even though she was still living with Joey. I told her to get fucked. If she wanted me, she had to dump him. I wasn't trying to be cool, I was just trying to help him out. If she cut him loose, he might've had a chance."

  "How did she react to what you said?"

  He didn't know. "That's when the fight started."

  "Between who and who and over what?"

  "It was really stupid. Joey baiting a poor Chinaman. Accusing him of switching flour with his cocaine. The poor kid didn't know what was going on. I tried stepping in. So did Jack Anatole, Dani's cousin. We almost got it on together. He wanted to smear Joey's face, just knock him flat. I wanted to get Joey out of there."

  "Why save Joey's hide?"

  "He didn't know what he was doing. He had done so much coke, booze, weed, whatever that night, he couldn't taste a cigarette. He was only fighting because the Chinaman was his size. Why fight when you can't stand up?"

  We passed more communards coming back. The womenfolk sang or hummed to themselves. My presence seemed to put them off slightly, but they could still smile and whisper hellos. The men kept to themselves, as if they'd been poaching deer in the lowlands. Only their heads would nod when our paths crossed. There wasn't a black or brown or yellow face in the whole crowd. There were no teenagers, either, and no one looked middle-aged or older. It was as if certain generations had been deliberately skipped.

  "Dani was here last week."

  I stopped in midstep. "What day was that?"

  "Oh Christ." He watched the sky. "A couple of days before Christmas, I think. She told me she'd left Joey. She said he was impotent from doing so much coke. I think she got tired of cheating on him, got bored with guilt. She wanted to move in with me right then and there."

  "Just like that?"

  "Yep. That's when I hit her." He wasn't embarrassed. "I'm suppose to be a pacifist, but she pissed me off…" He realized the show he was putting on for my benefit. His voice trailed off.

  "Where did she go when she left here?"

  "Back to her sister's house, probably. She told me, if I changed my mind, to call here there. Not that that's likely to happen. Not after what she did to Joey."

  He drove me back to the cyclone fence. He opened the gate for me, then came over to my car. I rolled down my window.

  "How'd you know where to find me?"

  "Davey Huie." I saw the name meant nothing to him. "He was that Chinese kid at the party."

  "No kidding. How's he doing, anyway?"

  "He's dead." I watched his eyes.

  He was confused. "He was with Joey on the bridge?"

  "An overdose of cocaine, apparently."

  Parnell almost laughed at that. "You need a swimming pool full of it before you can overdose."

  "Like I said, apparently an overdose."

  "I don't get you."

  "Maybe he'd been doing it for years and poisoned himself. Maybe he did one helluva superhuman dose. Maybe it was cut with Draino, or maybe it wasn't even coke. Maybe he had a weak heart. Maybe somebody jammed it into him."

  Parnell was stunned. "But that would be murder."

  "I don't know if it is," I said.

  But he saw an answer in my eyes.

  He stayed for a while in my rear view mirror. He looked like a man who had been left behind. He didn't look grateful.

  Chapter 20

  Daylight glowed on polished oak paneling. I looked over the library shelves. Not a paperback in sight, just bound volumes of century-old literature, none by any author I recognized.

  "What are you doing here?"

  I spun around feeling guilty.

  Catherine and her goddam entrances. "Just what the hell are you doing here?" She wore a Jaeger blouse and embroidered jeans. Her tennis shoes were street-worn and holey. She still looked good, a living doll. She was unbearable, a golden pain in the ass.

  "I came to see you." I forced myself to cool off. "Aren't you going to wish me a Happy New Year?"

  She came on like a fertility goddess who had just caught her high priest messing with a sailor. "And what did you do to your face?"

  I gave up being polite. "I want to see Dani."

  "She's not here," she snapped.

  "She's been here since Christmas Day."

  She stopped dead. "Who told you that?"

  "Aw, c'mon. Does it matter?"

  She poked her face into mine. "Who are you?" she hissed.

  I was surprised. She was afraid of me. "I want to know who you are."

  I almost snickered. "You know who I am. You hired me. You remember that, don't you?" She wasn't half so regal this close.

  "His parents never heard of you."

  "Whose parents?"

  "Joey Crawford's, that's whose." She looked down on me. "Dani called Spokane, and they never heard of you."

  "I never heard of them, either."

  That stopped her. "But you represent them."

  "I never told you I did."

  She backed off. "Jack told me." She tried her information on me. "He called here yesterday after you left. He said you were out at the fish company asking about my sister. He said you were working for
his parents."

  "I never told him that."

  She shook her blonde hair. "He said you did."

  I said that to Alex Symons. "Mind if I smoke?"

  "Yes, I do mind. If you must, use the back porch."

  I shoved my smoke back into its pack. She was another goddam clean air freak. They were determined to bring back Prohibition. "What else did he say?"

  "He said I shouldn't trust you."

  "So why are you telling me all this?"

  She wasn't flustered. "I want to know what's going on."

  "Why didn't you tell me Dani was here?"

  "Nobody was supposed to know." She was an older sister still keeping little girl secrets. "Joey was calling all the time. If he knew she was here, he'd start coming over, and Dani didn't want to see him." Older sisters get protective.

  "If she saw him," I argued, "she could've told him it was all over between them."

  "But she didn't know whether it was all over. She didn't know if she wanted a reconciliation. That's why she came here. She needed time to think it over."

  And of course Catherine had agreed. She thought she could poison Dani's mind against Joey. "Why did you hire me?"

  "I wanted to know what was going on. I was buying time. Time until I found out from Dani what was going on."

  "Did you tell her about Joey Crawford?"

  "Yes." She hated to remember. "She went up to her room." Her chin quivered. "She told me to leave her alone. She locked herself in."

  Oh boy. So much for my case.

  "And I told her about you," Catherine said.

  Aw shit. "What did you say?"

  "That you were here. And what Jack told me."

  "Did Jack get a chance to talk with her?"

  She didn't know. She couldn't remember.

  "What did Dani say about me?"

  "She didn't say anything." Catherine walked around the desk. "She called Spokane. His parents said he died in an automobile accident. Is that true?"

  "As far as I know."

  "You said it was murder."

  "I said the police don't confide in me." I sighed at wasted time. "Where is she?"

  "I don't know." Sounded like a probation officer called on the carpet because her prize trophy robbed a gas station and split town in a police car.