Smoked Out (Digger)

by Warren Murphy

  "I promise."

  "You can have a glass of my vodka, if you want. A small glass."

  "Thank you."

  "As I was saying, there was all this noise in the hall outside my apartment. I looked out into the hall and there was this pretty little Japanese woman standing there naked, looking like she didn’t know whether to try to kick down the door or run away before the police came. And she had this pretty little body, not buxom and chewable like the redhead who just sat down on the chaise next to me, but all smooth and delicate lines, as if God had ruled out sharp turns and all angles of more than thirty degrees when he made her.

  "She looked at me when I opened the door and I said, ‘Get the hell in here, will you? You’re scaring my tropical fish.’ She didn’t know what to say to that, so she came in.

  "What do you do with a naked woman who steps inside your apartment door? I’m not Allen Funt. I offered her a blanket. Or a tablecloth. I told her the tablecloth might go better with her dark eyes because the blanket was brown. She said that she could make do with a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt. I figured she was a hooker and liable to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, so I made her walk with me into the bedroom and I got the clothes out of a dresser and I stayed there while she put them on. Or, rather, wrapped herself in them. I’m almost a foot and a half bigger than she is. Then she came back into the living room with me and I asked her what happened.

  "I guessed it’d take her two sets of lies to get to the truth, but she blurted it out. ‘I’m here on vacation. I’m not supposed to drink, but that guy across the hall fed me some drinks and then invited me up here ’cause he wanted to go down on me, he said. When I took my clothes off, he pushed me out into the hall. And he’s got my clothes and my purse with all my money. Call the fucking cops.’

  " ‘That’ll teach you,’ I said. ‘Teach me what,’ she said. ‘That man does not live by head alone,’ I said. ‘Woman, neither.’

  " ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘Who says you can’t find a metaphysician when you need one?’

  " ‘For that,’ I said, ‘I’ll get your clothes back. You don’t want the cops.’ I knew the guy across the hall. He was some kind of blowhard from Georgia, leisure suits and white patent-leather shoesies, so I knocked on his door. I knocked loud and long and finally he opened it, with his mouth ready to snarl and growl at the little Japanese girl he expected to find there. Instead, he saw me, and I’m too big for most people to growl at. The best he could do was a curt, ‘What do you want.’ I said, ‘My cousin’s clothes and pocketbook. With all the money in it.’ And he said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and as things worked out, I kicked him in the balls.

  "While he was lying on the floor, I went inside and found her clothes on the bed and her purse with them. I looked inside the pocketbook and saw money inside the wallet, so I figured he hadn’t stolen anything, just a good ol’ boy having a leetle fun. So, to give him some, I stomped on his ankle when I left the room. I brought the stuff back to my apartment, the key to which I had cleverly stuck in my pocket, and gave it to her. Koko said, ‘Let me get dressed so I can thank you.’ And I said that was exactly the wrong way to do it, but she got dressed, anyway, even though she knew that I was going to undress her later. Women like that. She kind of hung around from then on."

  "Wait a minute."

  "Are you talking to me?"

  "Of course I am. There’s nobody else at the pool. This Koko, did you give her what she wanted that night you met her?"

  "Do I look like the kind who eats and tells? You said you weren’t going to interrupt. And that’s a pretty big glass of vodka."

  "The woman had needs, you know. We all do."

  "You, too? Besides most of my vodka?"

  "Absolutely. You think I can lie here listening to the memoirs of Casanova without feeling it?"

  "Do you think anybody’ll buy it?"

  "Buy what?"

  "My memoirs. After I get all this tape-recorded and all, you think somebody might want it?"

  "Of course. With your reputation."

  "You’ve heard about me," Digger said.

  "Yes."

  "You want to make love to me?"

  "Yes. My room or yours?"

  "Well, if you’re going to argue about it…" Digger said. He turned off the tape recorder. The redhead stood up at the same time he did. She was almost five-feet-ten.

  "One thing first," Digger said.

  "What?"

  "Do you type?"

  "No. Does it matter? I’ll learn if I have to."

  "Not really. You carry the vodka. I’ve got the tape recorder."

  Even by Hollywood standards, Digger thought it was three miles shy of a meaningful relationship. The redhead had a body that looked as if it should have a fluffy white tail glued to the butt. All tit-and-ass fantasy. But it seemed as if she had taken lessons from Sonje. She moved at all the right times, made the right sounds, was strategically moist where necessary. But all very practiced and routine. Even the music that she found on the radio fit in. All Los Angeles stations played bubble-gum music, Digger had learned early. Music to have a root canal done by. The redhead had managed to find a classical music station. It was playing Carmina Burana, a piece of music that Digger considered the epitome of classical vulgarity. The woman never asked his name.

  "You’ve found the only piece of music that could accompany this wonderful thing between us," Digger said.

  "Not Ravel’s Bolero?"

  "God, no."

  "Wasn’t that a good movie?"

  "Grand. The best thing I’ve seen since Eisenstein’s Potemkin. I can’t wait for the sequel. The next dozen sequels, all the way up to twenty-two."

  "Do you write that kind of movie?"

  "No."

  "What kind do you write?"

  "Training films for the Army. You know, The Seven Warning Signs of Chancre. Starring Sperma Toesies and Spiro Keats and like that."

  "Then what was all that dictation before into the machine, the scenes and stuff, the little Jap girl and all that, what was that all about?"

  "That’s my autobiography."

  "You mean, it’s true?"

  "It’s the curse of most autobiographies. You should have seen the one I wrote for General Patton. It was a beaut. And all true."

  "You’re not Alrod Jettson?"

  "No. Who’s he?"

  "You’re not a screenwriter at all, are you?"

  "No."

  "Then what are you doing here?"

  "Catching a murderer."

  "Oh, fuck."

  "We just did."

  "You’ve cost me the whole fucking day."

  "It was good for me, too."

  "What a bastard you are."

  "I’m sorry. I thought it was the start of something beautiful."

  The redhead jumped out of bed. She ran into the bathroom. Digger heard the water running briefly, too briefly for a shower. It was a whore’s bath, crotch and armpits. The redhead was back out, adjusting her bikini top, stuffing her feet into her high-heeled shoes.

  "I thought you were somebody else."

  "I guess this is goodbye for us."

  "I hope the guy you’re chasing kills you."

  "He already tried that."

  "Goodbye, jerk-off." She slammed the door behind her. Digger looked at the door. He yelled at it. "For this, I give up my shot at literary immortality?"

  He reached for the dregs of the bottle of vodka. He drank from the bottle and carefully replaced it on the end table before he fell asleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When he opened his eyes, Digger thought how merciful the telephone had been not to ring to break his sleep. He looked through the window. The sun had set and dusk was gathering. His mouth felt stuffed with cotton. He needed something to drink. He went into the bathroom and ran a glass of water. He saw the washcloth crumpled up on the sink, left there by the redhead, and he picked it up delicately between right thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the corner wh
ere he neatly dumped his dirty towels.

  He went out to visit the lobby bar. The clock in the lobby said 7:00 P.M.

  The desk clerk called him.

  "Yes?"

  "You’ve got a number of messages."

  "Why didn’t you ring my room?"

  The clerk looked confused. He was a beefy-faced man who had never recovered from a case of adolescent acne.

  "I…we did. We were ringing all afternoon."

  "Oh. Okay. I took something and I was sleeping."

  The clerk nodded and handed Digger a thin stack of yellow slips. Digger thanked him and went into the bar. Before he was through the door, the bartender was pouring Finlandia into a rocks glass.

  Shucks, Digger told himself. This time he had wanted Perrier water. But there was no point in making the bartender throw out good vodka. He took the drink to a table with a telephone.

  He looked through the messages, then sorted them into two piles. A pile of four was from Walter Brackler, starting at about 3:30 P.M. and then calling every hour until 6:30 P.M. Each said the same thing. "Call immediately. Urgent."

  Digger put them aside and looked at the important messages. They were from Lt. Breslin. They started at four-fifteen. "Call me." Then five-ten. "Have chemist’s report." Then six-fifteen. "For Christ’s sake." It left a telephone number that wasn’t the police department.

  Digger dialed the number and Breslin answered.

  "This is Digger."

  "Where the hell have you been?"

  "Work, work, work, work, work."

  "Jim McArdle, the chemist, called me when you didn’t call him."

  "What’d he say?"

  "He said he liked doing business with another good ol’ boy. What kind of line of shit did you give him?"

  "Never mind," Digger said. "What’d he say?"

  "Let me look. I wrote it down to get it right. You gave him two envelopes. Envelope A, that was marked ‘Vial’. Those were aspirins. Envelope B, that was marked ‘Desk’. That was trimethadione."

  "What?"

  He pronounced it carefully in syllables. "Trimeth-a-di-one."

  "What the hell is that?"

  "Aaaah, something the big Las Vegas insurance genius doesn’t know. Well, don’t you worry. Your old friend and buddy knows you don’t know shit, so I asked McArdle. Trimethadione’s for epilepsy. Hey, you still there?"

  "Yeah. Thinking."

  "What about?"

  "I was just thinking about Romeo and Juliet," Digger said.

  "Why would you think about guineas when you’re talking to me? What about Romeo and Juliet?"

  "You’re crass," Digger said. "Just a quote. ‘O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick.’ "

  "Not that crass," Breslin said. " ‘Thus with a kiss I die.’ "

  "Does everybody in Southern California know Shakespeare?"

  "I played Romeo in high school," Breslin said. "When I still thought I was going to grow tall. Anything else you need from me?"

  "All that other stuff I asked you for. Moira Walker. Her husband. Any business with Welles."

  "I’m working on all that," Breslin said. "Maybe I’ll have something later. Anything else?"

  "You got a spare head lying around?"

  "You’re on your own, pal."

  Digger hung up. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on another chair and sipped the vodka. Then he quickly gulped it down and waved at the bartender for a refill.

  Trimethadione. For epilepsy. And aspirins. The aspirins were in the vial in Mrs. Welles’s medicine cabinet. But who puts aspirins in a vial? Why not just leave them in an aspirin bottle?

  Trimethadione for epilepsy. In Dr. Welles’s desk. Loose.

  The bartender brought the refill.

  "Give me a glass of club soda on the side, too, please."

  "Sure."

  Digger sipped the vodka. Aspirins in a vial in the medicine cabinet. Not that strange. Maybe the aspirin bottle had broken. But they made aspirin bottles out of plastic now. They didn’t break.

  There was something he wanted to see in his mind, but he couldn’t bring it into focus. It was the medicine cabinet in Jessalyn Welles’s bathroom. He closed his eyes. He pictured himself walking into the room. The revolting wallpaper. The flowered toilet tissue. He could see it. Then he opened the medicine cabinet, and he couldn’t see the inside of it.

  He drained his glass, stood up and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. Almost as an after-thought, he took the pile of yellow message slips and walked quickly back to his room.

  The tape he had made that morning after breaking into Welles’s home was on the top of the pile in his dresser. He inserted it into the recorder and spun it backward.

  His whispering voice came hissing out of the machine at him. He was in the bedroom. He sped the tape forward.

  "Flowered toilet paper." He was in the bathroom. "Puke wallpaper." Then "mirrored medicine cabinet." He could hear the click of the cabinet door opening. "Midol, Lysette douche, Neutrogena cream, Vitamin E caps, Comtrex, dental floss, Secret roll-on, Vaseline, bottle of Bayer’s Aspirin, half full, pill container."

  Digger turned off the tape recorder and rewound it.

  There it was. There was a bottle of aspirins in the medicine cabinet. So why would she have a vial of aspirins in there, too?

  Because the vial wasn’t supposed to be holding aspirins.

  What was it supposed to be holding?

  There was trimethadione in Gideon Welles’s desk. Trimethadione for epilepsy. And Jessalyn Welles was occasionally ill. She had spells. She fainted. She froze in position.

  She had epilepsy.

  Digger didn’t know anything about epilepsy. There had been an epileptic child in his third grade class. The kid had taken fits. Digger and all the other assholes had laughed at him. The teachers didn’t know how to handle it, so their third-grade teacher tried to look the other way, tried to treat the child as if he were just another member of the class with no problem at all. But he had had a problem, a medical problem. If the teacher had tried to explain it to the students, maybe they would have acted human. But the teacher never did and the boy’s family moved away the next year.

  He thought he knew one fact about epilepsy. That it doesn’t develop in adults. It was a childhood illness that hung on.

  He thought he knew that but he had to be sure.

  Why was her epilepsy medication in Welles’s desk?

  He found the slip of paper with Peter Breslin’s home phone number and called it again.

  "This is Digger."

  "Hey, champ. Time out. Cut me a break. It’s the end of a busy week. I’m here cooking for me and that little piece of trim who’s going to be over here in ten minutes and you’re back again. Work human hours. My sauce will be ruined."

  "Don’t you ever do police work?"

  "I’m trying out for the sex-crimes unit," Breslin said. "Fuck you. Anway, this is police work. That reporter’s coming over. Goddamnit, my sauce is burning."

  "Just one question. Stir it while you’re talking."

  "All right," Breslin said.

  "Do you remember what Jessalyn Welles had in her pocketbook after the accident? Did she have a pocketbook?"

  "Yeah. The usual crap in it. Wallet, keys, sunglasses, comb, wallet, couple of bucks, etcetera."

  "She wasn’t wearing her sunglasses."

  "No. Guess not. They were in the pocketbook."

  "Did she have any pills?"

  "Let me think. Yeah. She had pills. They were aspirin. I checked. I tasted them."

  "Let me guess. They weren’t in an aspirin container. They were in a little vial that you get medicine in from the druggist. But no identification on it, right?"

  "Yeah, come to think of it." His voice turned quickly suspicious and interrogating. "Why is that important? What did I miss?"

  "Thanks, Pete. I hope you score tonight."

  "Don’t hang up now, you Irish-Jewish prick. What did I miss?"

  "Stir your sauce.
It’s burning."

  Digger hung up. He did not want to think about what Breslin had just told him. The best way to solve a puzzle sometimes was to walk away from it and let the back of the brain work on it without your being aware of it. The unconscious mind could walk around a problem, take its time, look at it from all sides, and then stick an answer in your head while you were trying not to solve it. Because he wanted to be sure not to think, he called Walter Brackler at his home in White Plains, just outside New York City.

  "Kwash, this is Burroughs."

  "Have you talked to the L.A. office?"

  "Why should I?"

  "You’ve busted it this time, Burroughs. Really gone and busted it good and proper."

  "For not calling the L.A. office?"

  "Where were you this morning?"

  "Sitting at the pool, working on my tan."

  "Early this morning."

  "Working."

  "Dr. Gideon Welles, for your information, says you were breaking into his home. He has a witness to you and your car."

  "The hell you say."

  "Yeah. The hell I say. Try this. Welles has retained the services of an attorney. He is going to sue the ass off BSLI unless we pay his full claim immediately, and even then he might sue our ass off. Wait a minute, I got it here. He is going to charge an agent of our company, Julian Burroughs, alias Tom Median, alias Tom Lipton, alias Orville Fudlapper—"

  "Fudlupper. Lupper, not lapper."

  "Fudlupper, alias Rico Bravo, with harassment, character assassination and anything else he can think of. I bet you thought those names were cute. He might charge your idiot ass with burglary, you dumb shit."

  "Now, now, Kwash. Don’t get upset."

  "Upset? You don’t know about upset. He files a freaking suit and we look like the cheap, cheating assholes of the insurance industry in the whole freaking world, not wanting to pay off on our policies. Dumb shit like you pulled can ruin this company."

  "It’s not that bad."

  "It’s worse. Where were you all day?"

  "Sitting by the pool working on my autobiography. It might make a good movie, Kwash, and I was going to talk to you about the company backing it. Then I made love to a beautiful redhead. It left us both dissatisfied and empty, so I’d rather not talk about it."