I seated myself in a barrel chair with smelly cushions.
“Let me tell you what I’m about here.” I tried to give myself a touch of a New York accent, Brooklynish, not over-the-top. Just a suggestion of dirty bite. “Lemme tell ya what I’m about here.”
I took a sip of my highball, and Trix said, “I know it’s shitty whiskey.”
It certainly was; it was bottom-shelf swill that needed every bit of the sweet ginger ale to ameliorate it.
“Mm, good drink. My first of the day,” I laughed. After a pause I said, “I work for a guy on the East Coast. I tried somethin’ stupid with him. Maybe after another couple a drinks I tell you the details.”
I saw, aside from the despair in Trix’s eyes, a kind of greedy passion. It was a type of gullibility, actually. It was that she saw me as a scummy person, and she was eager to believe that I was a scummier person than she was. I watched her look closely at my face.
I went on, “He caught me out. My ass is in I-can’t-tell-you how deep of a shitpot. I begged him, ‘Let me do something for you. Something to make up for how much of a stupid, selfish cunt I was.’ He says ‘All right.’ So I’m looking for somebody he wants to get in touch with.”
“But it’s not me,” said Trix.
“Right, it ain’t you, sweetheart. I got Chino helping me. This guy that I’m looking for, I know him a little. And the bottom line of it is he owes my boss some money. What else, right? It’s an old debt. A real old debt. I haven’t seen the guy in years. A little bug told me you might have some information on him. He’s supposed to be here in Vegas.”
“Well, who is it?”
“Guy from Miami named Bill Sechrist.”
The name visibly punched her in the lungs. Her mouth fell open and she looked away to the shaded window, to the afternoon sunlight pouring down beyond it.
I waited, sipping my drink. Fortunately she’d poured me a light one. I’d deliberately built up my spiel to give the name maximum punch. And punch it did, oh yeah.
“Bill Sechrist,” I repeated. “Goddamn that sonuvabitch. He was smooth, ya know?”
I watched Trix some more. Through whatever semi-stoned fog she was in, she was thinking hard, real hard and fast.
I said, “You know the guy.”
Trix suddenly refocused. She scanned the coffee table. There was a pack of Newports on it, which she reached for until she realized she still had an unlit one between her fingers. She leaned forward and picked up a plastic lighter. Chk! She inhaled deeply from the cigarette, exhaled in a long stream upward, past the tip of her nose.
“Want one?” she said, gesturing toward the pack.
“No, thank you.” Newports are terrible.
Slowly, she said, “I don’t know where he is right this second. But…”
I waited.
She said, “You said you could maybe help me if I helped you.”
I smiled and leaned forward. “Yeah, definitely. Here’s the deal. Bill owes my boss $38,000.”
“Yeah?” Her eyes got a little sharper.
“An’ like I said, it’s from a long time ago. Bill thinks the debt’s been forgiven because of a job he did one time for my guy. But my boss decided it wasn’t. It’s still a debt. If I collect it, I’m off the hook, see? I get no cut of that money, so I can’t share it around. But I’m willing to give two thousand to whoever leads me to Bill Sechrist. Because I got two grand, but I don’t got thirty-eight grand. And hearing that Bill’s supposed to be in Las Vegas, I figured, well, maybe Vegas is the place where I can turn two grand into thirty-eight.” I sipped my highball. “When I knew Bill Sechrist, and that was, God, a hundred years ago, he was doing all right. This was in Miami.”
“You knew him in Miami?”
“Yeah, he bragged that he pulled off all sorts a shit for big money. And he threw it around too.”
“He did?” These exclamations popped out of her like gumballs.
“Yeah, oh yeah. I was a stupid kid, didn’t know any better than to let him buy me junk jewelry, cheap steak dinners, that kinda shit. I would’ve been his child bride except for—well, never mind. Yeah, especially he bragged about this arson job he claimed to’ve done in Chicago, I think he said, this bar that a buddy of his owned, and—”
“It was Detroit. Hah! He pulled that off, all right! He pulled that job all the way down the crapper, is where he pulled it.” Her voice became throatier. “That son of a bitch couldn’t pour piss out of a boot. So he was boffing you in Miami too.”
I fought to keep my composure. I was right. I was fucking right. Blood rose behind my eyeballs. Oh, how I wanted to know more. Don’t blow it. Be patient. Be patient.
“Huh,” I said, “whaddaya mean he put it in the toilet? Just fucked it up? He kept saying—”
“He never got a dime for that job. Shit! What a mess. All these promises is all I got.” Her eyes clouded over, and I saw to my grim satisfaction that she was thinking about the innocent lives snuffed out that night. I waited.
“Listen,” Trix finally said, “how did you know to come looking for me?”
Earnestly, I said, “I can’t tell you that. I mean, I can’t tell you because I myself don’t know. I got a name and an address.”
She digested that. “Who’s your boss, then?”
“His name is Steve Goldberg.”
“A Jew?”
I nodded. “Big Stevie. I doubt you know the name. Not many people do, and I shouldn’ta told you. But I feel like I can trust you, Trix. I dunno. Somehow I just feel that. Steve’s a Miami guy, he’s very low-key. He deals a lot with the Cubans.”
“Phew,” she mused, “I wonder how somebody would’ve thought—”
“How’s business?” I asked suddenly.
She looked at me. “I’d like to get out of it.” She stubbed out her Newport and reached for another. She was thinking hard.
“Like,” I said with warm sympathy, “you had no choice, huh?”
“Boy, you know it.”
“Well, I sure been there. Might find myself there again before long, who knows?” I laughed harshly. “How much do ya charge in this town for a blow job anyway?”
Trix said, “You mean how much do I charge? Fifty bucks.”
“Well, that ain’t too bad.”
“Well, I don’t know where you used to work.”
I took a cigarette from her pack and toyed with it in my fingers.
“Hey,” she said, “I got somebody coming in soon. I’ve been thinking. I’ve got a deal for you.” She sat upright, swinging her feet to the floor.
I smiled hopefully.
“I can deliver Bill Sechrist to you. But you’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna do it for chump change.”
My smile faltered.
Loudly, she said, “What the fuck are you thinking? What the fuck kind of person do you think I am?”
I looked at the floor, as ashamed as a dog that’s just clawed the Rembrandt off the wall.
Trix went on, “I’m not gonna sell out another human being for 2,000 fucking bucks!”
I shifted uneasily in my seat and kept my gaze on the floor. “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered.
She knew she had me. “Well, I’ll tellya what you’re gonna do! You’re gonna get out, and you’re gonna come back and give me half of that thirty-eight grand you’re gonna get from Bill Sechrist!”
My head snapped up in panic. “Whoa! Whoa, lady! Trix!”
“You’re gonna give me that money up front. Yeah, you are.”
“I can’t! I don’t have it!”
“Well, you’ll just have to get it, won’t you?”
“You want me to give you, what, nineteen grand?” I gripped my head with both hands.
She said, “An even twenty would be better, but I guess I’ll take nineteen.”
I gazed at her pleadingly. “What if I do get that much money and give it to you, but then Bill don’t give up what he owes? Or what if I do, and he does pony up, and that’s a pretty fu
ckin’ big if! Then I’m still gonna be out half of that money.”
“You’ll have to tell your guy…”
“Big Stevie.”
“Big Stevie that you couldn’t get it all. Or,” she snickered, “maybe you can double your share right here in Las Vegas, like you said in the first place. Hey, don’t cry, look—your boss, he’s gonna be over the moon to get half of that money. Believe me.”
I snuffled, “But what if he wants to know where it went?”
Trix stood up, and I did too. She stepped toward me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen to me,” she said eagerly, and it was just like when she was helping me with my homework. I glanced at her from under my lashes and felt her whiskey breath on my cheek. “You have to tell him you could only get half. Or here’s what you do—here it is—you tell Bill you need more, like you tell him you need, lessee, 60,000. Because it’s the old debt plus interest. And that’s cheap! Your boss told you to insist on that, see.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Then you’re covered.”
With a shaky hand I drained my drink. “I gotta think about that. I gotta talk it over with Chino.”
“Well, you do that. Think you can come up with it? How ’bout that car out there?”
“I dunno. I dunno.”
“It’s what I need, and it’s only fair. Come to think of it, it’s less than fair. Honey, you know what? I can tell your ass is in a deeper crack than you tried to make out. He worked you over but good, didn’t he?”
I hung my head.
Triumphantly, she whispered into my ear, “And the next time he won’t stop there, will he?”
Softly, I said, “No.”
“Well, then. I’d say I’m your only hope.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Yeah.”
16
In the car with Duane all I said was, “It’s her.”
We needed to reconnoiter. The diner we stopped at was the kind that served club sandwiches and decent coffee. The sandwich revived me, and the coffee cleared my head after that awful highball.
Duane was freaking again. Having taken off his cap in the restaurant, a courtesy all too rare these days, he pulled at his lank hair with his fist. “So my dad really—he was involved—he actually—he actually did arson?—I mean that’s the way she made it sound—or conspired. At least.” His other hand shook as he lifted his coffee mug to his lips.
I said, “Your dad, wherever he is, is an arsonist and a murderer.”
Duane cried out, “Oh, God!” Other customers looked over.
“Shhh, my friend.” He put down his mug and I covered his hand with mine. “You know, whatever happened exactly, it’s all over. The dead did all their suffering that night. It’s over and done with. Nobody’s suffering anymore.”
“Except you and me.”
“Eat your sandwich. We can get into the self-pity thing, I guess, if we want to. I’m not saying I’m not feeling this. But we’ve got to compartmentalize here. We’ve got to manage our feelings. Because we can either fall apart and be ineffective, or we can focus and execute. Eat. Man-size bite now.”
My friend bit into his sandwich. “That’s it,” I encouraged. They were good sandwiches. Decent food can ground you when things go freaky.
He chewed, swallowed, and shook his head. “I can’t handle this.”
“You can. You can, Duane, come on, stick with me here. We’ve got to go see her again.”
I watched him try to pull himself together. I gave him some quiet.
The waitress came with the coffee pot. “Yes, please,” I said.
At length Duane said, “Do you want to talk to her again to ask—”
“I really want to find your dad now. I want her to tell me more about that night, about her involvement, and then I want to find your dad. Cut to the chase.”
“You think she really knows where he is?”
“No. I think she’s scamming us. I mean, I think she thinks she’s scamming us. My main purpose in coming here was to confirm her existence, which confirms that a crime took place that night. Finding your dad would be a pot of jam. And I want that jam pot. It’s obvious there’s a lot more she can tell us, but she doesn’t know that’s what we want to know. She’s greedy. You should’ve seen her eyes light up, all excited and hard, when I said ‘$38,000.’ If we go back there with a bag of money, she’ll loosen up some more. I laid a C-note on the coffee table just before I walked out, and I could see her forcing herself not to snatch it up before I turned away.”
“A C-note.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to call them, haven’t you watched any movies?”
That got a smile out of him, the first in hours.
“Do you think,” he said, “that we could go back there with, like, a fake bag of cash, and get her to talk more? Maybe she’d do it for the 2,000 anyway. Maybe she knows we’re bogus.”
“Oh, she doesn’t think we’re bogus. She knows we’re for real, she just doesn’t know for real in what way. She’s nothing but a low-budget bangtail, and she knows we know it. I’ll bet you anything that that hundred bucks is already converted to coke and up her nose. Did you see how scrawny and twitchy she is?”
I took another slug of coffee and went on, “So she needs money, wants it bad. I can’t tell yet how much sense she’s got left. People coming around offering money for information, that doesn’t happen every day. She sees a big opportunity here, a chance for a score, and she wants to make the most of it. We could try to get her to take the two grand, but I don’t think she’ll do it. I mean, what leverage do we have? A bag of fake money would be stupid. She’d insist on seeing it. What are we gonna do, photocopy a bunch of money?”
“You mean we should just give her $19,000?”
“Not necessarily. We need to have it. We need for it to be real. Then…maybe we do give it to her. How much is the truth worth to us, after all this time?”
Slowly, Duane said, “I’m not sure I agree with you. Anyway, how’re we going to come up with 19,000 bucks?”
“Well, we only need 17,000 more on top of the 2,000 you brought. Seventeen thousand, two hundred to be exact. I sure as hell don’t have it. I’ve got forty-three dollars and eleven cents in my checking account.”
He looked at me. “Why did you have to say 38,000 in the first place?”
“It seemed like a believable figure. Big enough to be impressive, not a round number, and yet not too big. Not small-time, not big-time.”
“Well, I don’t have 17,000 more dollars handy.”
“How quick could you get it?”
“Lillian, I’m stretched pretty thin financially.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got equity in your house, right?”
“Look, I only put five percent down on it. No, I don’t have that much equity in my house. Even if I did, it’d take time to get it.”
“Well—your T-bird?”
“Leased.”
“Oh.”
“I told you you were naive to assume the trappings of glamour are always paid for.”
“Man, Duane, you’ve been making good money for years, right?” He nodded.
I said, “And yet your net worth, I mean, is only like—”
“Lillian. Come off it. You know how it is. You get it and you spend it. You do the same thing.”
“Yeah, but—” I stopped. He was right. I had to admit that. He looked me full in the eye. “I don’t know about this, Lillian. Be honest now. You don’t really know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”
“I hate it when people ask me that.”
“Well, I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too. We’re supposed to be scared.”
“I just don’t like it.”
“We’re not supposed to—”
“I want to go back to Detroit!”
“Duane!”
He looked at me helplessly. “What do you want me to do?”
“Lend me your cell phone.”
_____
&nb
sp; I stepped outside the restaurant into the toxic afternoon heat, consulted my notebook, took a deep breath, and punched in Minerva LeBlanc’s number. The sun dropped lower to meet the tips of the mountains to the west.
I was braced for Tillie’s voice, but Minerva answered. I started talking. She listened. I talked on. She asked a question here and there, in her deliberate way, but mostly she just listened.
At length I wrapped it up. “So, essentially, all I need right now to keep this thing rolling is $19,000 cash.” I tried to sound energetic and unpleading. It was a struggle not to grovel, but I managed it. “What do you say?”
There was a very long pause. I heard her breathing.
At last she spoke. Her voice, in spite of its deliberate pace, was electric with excitement. “Tell Duane to go home if he wants to. Go to the Las Vegas Hilton. Not the Flamingo Hilton on the Strip, the Las Vegas Hilton on Paradise. Wait for me there.” Her voice was absolutely alive, dancing in my ear.
Oh, boy.
_____
By the time I got there she’d arranged for a room and left a message giving me her arrival time the next day. I was escorted up to something like the 300th floor by a guy in a suit, not a bellman. He insisted on carrying my gym bag. This was an executive type dude. White, fiftyish, moderate paunch, gold wristwatch, manicure. He opened a set of double doors onto a suite of rooms that thank God weren’t ridiculously opulent. Windows on the mountains. Fruit bowl.
“I hope you and Ms LeBlanc enjoy your stay,” said CEO dude. “We look forward to serving her again.” He handed me his card. “Is there anything you need right now?”
“Uh, no. No, thank you.” As he turned to go I said, “Oh, wait a second,” and dug in my purse.
“Oh, no no no,” he said with a wide smile. He looked utterly sincere. “It’s my pleasure. Really.”
I hung up my change of clothes, put my toilet kit in the bathroom, pulled off the wig, and removed my falsies. I scrubbed my face, fiddled with the thermostat, and flopped down on a comfy couch in a state of relief.
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 55