Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

  The door exploded open, and Tracy’s husband crashed into the office. Ken Ayers stood just under six feet tall, weighed a lean one-eighty, and sported a Fu Manchu moustache that drooped around the corners of his mouth to hang an inch and a half below his chin. He wore a black leather vest over a black T-shirt and jeans. A folded red bandanna wrapped his forehead, tied at the back; he’d left the loose ends to trail down with his ponytail.

  “The sales manager called me. He told me Tracy was hysterical,” he said, his face red with anger. He looked from Harold to me and then back to Harold. “What the hell is going on?”

  Harold backed up behind Lorna and pointed at me. Lorna had her black leather purse in her lap like she was digging for her cigarettes or a lipstick—that’s where she kept her Walther PPKS. Ken looked at me and I pointed to the screen of the monitor on the desk.

  “You okay, baby?” he said as he stepped up behind Tracy’s chair and settled his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, that’s you on the TV.”

  “Right hon,” said Tracy, “and I’m in big shit.”

  “It’s worse than that, kiddo,” I said into the telephone, “the curtain is open like a Broadway play.”

  Both the ladies giggled. The lights came on in Ken’s eyes. He looked at me, leaned over the desk, and pushed the stop/eject button on the player.

  “Just a sec,” I said and whacked Ken’s patty with the telephone.

  Ken straightened up and snapped his hand back. He stared at me with his mouth open while he rubbed his right hand with his left.

  “Think ’obstruction,’” I said. I put the telephone back to my ear.

  “What on earth are you pounding on?” said Wendy.

  “Sorry,” I said. “There must be some way to reschedule.”

  Ken dove onto the desk and grabbed my tie. I bopped him on the nose with the telephone. Lorna stood with her right hand inside her purse. Ken let go of my tie and grabbed his face with both hands. I switched the telephone to my left hand and put it back up to my ear.

  Harold started for the door. “I’m calling the police!”

  I held up my hand. “Wait!”

  Harold stopped, his face drained of color. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “How soon do you want your money back?”

  Ken’s right hand went back to his hip pocket. By the time he got his butterfly knife up to my throat Lorna’s purse crashed to the floor, she had a double handful of Walther, and I had the front sight of my Detonics .45 inside Ken’s left nostril.

  “What is going on, and what’s all that pounding?” asked Wendy.

  “A man is holding a knife to my throat.”

  “Don’t shoot him,” said Wendy. “If you shoot him you’ll miss the meeting with Scott.”

  “Here, you talk to him,” I said. I held out the telephone for Ken to take. His face was less than a foot from mine, and he looked like he had just discovered a cabbage in his bowling bag.

  I waggled the telephone a little. “It’s my wife,” I said and nodded affirmatively.

  He took the telephone with his left hand and raised it to take a swipe at me. I thumbed the hammer on my lead launcher, and he lowered the telephone to his ear in short jerks.

  He listened for a few beats. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, a brown check suit.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Now I’m in trouble.”

  “Maybe you can bury him in it,” he said.

  I couldn’t hear what Wendy said, but Ken was done talking. His eyes went from narrow slits to saucer circles, and his face flushed. The knife rolled out of his hand and clunked onto the desk. He handed the telephone back and showed me his empty hands.

  I took the telephone. “Thanks, doll,” I said. “Looks like we have that cleared up. Just a sec.” I took the handset off my ear and pressed it to my chest.

  “You’re crowding the desk, pard,” I said. “You want to get back over on your side?” I arched my eyebrows, twitched his nose with the muzzle, and added, “Pretty please?”

  Ken’s moustache started to pulse, and his eyes crossed. I kicked my chair back. Ken snatched the bandanna off his head, clamped it over his face and sneezed.

  “Bless you,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said through the bandanna. He rolled over on his back, sat up facing away from me, and wiped his nose. I snapped up the safety on the pistol. He stashed the hanky in his hip pocket and scooted off the desk.

  I used the muzzle to slap shot the butterfly knife across the desk top. “Put that in your pocket.” I returned the telephone to my ear. Wendy was already talking.

  “—your fault. You wore that damn suit. I put it out for the clothing drive.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I like this suit.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  Ken cast Lorna a sidelong glance while she studied him over the sights of the Walther. “Just nothing sudden,” she said.

  “It was ugly when you bought it and the pants are too tight,” said Wendy.

  “Not anymore,” I said. Wendy didn’t answer.

  With his index fingers Ken folded the halves of the handle around the blade of the knife as it lay on the desk. “I’m going to pick it up now,” he said. He put it in his hip pocket with his right hand.

  “Okay Hon,” I said into the telephone. “Where do I meet him?”

  “Yesterdog’s on Wealthy,” said Wendy. “I told him that you’d be there at one. Try not to be too late. Scott pays his invoices in ten days.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” she said. She hung up.

  I set the handset back in the cradle.

  “Lorna,” I said, “please give the gentleman your chair. I’m going to put my pistol away but I think you should keep yours out.”

  Harold Butler took Lorna’s chair by the backrest and rolled it over next to Tracy. Ken sat. Harold backed over to the corner away from the door and across from me. He folded his arms, his face stern and accusing.

  “We’re almost done,” I said, but it didn’t improve Butler’s face. Ken made a tight-lipped smile at Lorna and folded his hands in his lap. Lorna lowered the pistol but kept her shoulders square and her stare icy.

  “Tracy, I know that this is all new for you—the getting caught part I mean. You’ve been stealing from Mr. Butler since the week you were hired.”

  “You can’t prove that,” she said.

  “You’re busted and you’re good for it,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say that was about right, Ken?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He rolled his eyes up.

  “So here’s how it goes when you’re busted and you’re good for it,” I said, but I had to wait for Tracy to stop glowering at Ken and look back at me. “You cop to it all. I mean everything. If you filched a tuna sandwich from the lunch truck—you tell us now. That way you make your best deal.” When I said the word “deal,” Ken straightened up in his chair and his face snapped over to meet mine. “That way nothing creeps up to bite you on the backside.”

  I nodded once at Ken, and he nodded back. Tracy let her mouth fall open as she directed a horrified gape to Ken, then to me, and back to Ken again. Harold Butler’s stern countenance softened.

  I took the folded ledger sheet out of the breast pocket of my jacket and slid it across the desk to Tracy. “Twenty-one thousand, eight hundred thirty-three dollars,” I said. “That’s all I can prove. If you got any more, I guess you got over.”

  Ken looked at Tracy with merry eyes. “Babe,” he said and tucked in his chin.

  Tracy backhanded the paper without looking at it. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  I pushed the play button on the video deck. “That proves everything,” I said. I left it running.

  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “Of course you do,” I said and leafed through the file to the financial work-up. “In the bank next door you have eleven thousand, six hundred and twenty-two dollars in a savings account. You haven’t made a deposit in three months, but the days an
d amounts of your deposits coincide with days that you worked and the amounts of missing invoices. Ken here,” I nodded and smiled, “just registered a brand new Harley Davidson with no lien.”

  “If the Glide has to go,” said Ken, leaning back in his chair, “the bitch can go to jail.”

  “Then there’s the white Jag convertible that you drive to work,” I said. “You only financed half the book value.”

  Tracy deposited a cobra stare on Ken. “All Billy got for a down payment was a blowjob,” she said.

  Ken swiveled his chair toward Tracy, put his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin in his hand. “You don’t think, maybe you could suck one out of him for me, do you, dear?” said Ken. “The black Targa GT on the front line kind of caught my eye.” His face turned malevolent as he sat back in the chair. He folded his hands in his lap and squared his shoulders. “And I’m going to need a ride if I have to give up my scooter.”

  “Clements?” asked Harold Butler, scratching a note into his pocket secretary with a gold fountain pen.

  “Yeah,” said Tracy, still staring at Ken, “fat, bald, wrinkled-ass Billy Clements—the sales manager.” She turned her face to Butler. “You can take that and stick it because that’s all I’m giving you. I want to see an attorney.”

  “That’s your right,” I said, and Tracy looked at me. “But if this problem leaves this room, right now, here, and today, it gets turned over to the bonding company. They’ll pay the entire claim and come after you like the cavalry. They always insist on prosecution because they want the court to order restitution plus interest. You get to pay an attorney four or five grand for a deal that makes you pay back what you stole and includes jail time.”

  “That’s blackmail!”

  “Call it what you like,” I said. “The judge is going to call it three to five on each count.”

  2

  “BITCH, BITCH, BITCH,” said Kim Goldberg. “I tell you what,”—he waved his tape measure at me—”Jews are God’s chosen people. The Irish?” He shrugged and backhanded the air. “Never more than a hobby. We got Egypt and Babylon. We got the Roman Empire and the Third Reich. What’d you get? Lousy potato famine! Still, you come stand around my shop in you unnapants and bitch about lucka-da-Irish.”

  He draped the tape around his neck and inspected the seat of my trousers at arm’s length. “Boy, you got some gas, eh?” he said and laughed. Kim glanced at me and winked. “A little Jewish-Korean tailor joke.”

  He’d parked his wire rimmed-glasses atop his bald head with the legs anchored in the short gray fuzz that his fifty-plus years had spared him. Maybe five feet tall on his tiptoes, he had a chest that was more like a divot between his shoulders. He wore a white shirt and used suspenders to level his tan wool slacks around a belly weaned on too much pot roast.

  “What’d you do, buy this for Dutch Schultz’s funeral?”

  “It’s the belt loops,” I said. “All the new suits, you know, the loops are too narrow for my gun belt.”

  “That’s because you shopping off da rack,” he said in a low voice, with downcast eyes—as if buying ready-to-wear was something furtive that people did in dark places. “Tell you what, you go get a cheap suit, bring back, and I’ll open up the jacket to hide a shoulder rig. I got good at dat in Chicago. Buy something double breasted; maybe I be homesick.”

  “I’ve been carrying on my hip for twenty-five years,” I said. “If I go to a shoulder rig I’m gonna die grabbing my ass.”

  “Art, I know exactly how to help you,” he said. He ripped the trousers in half and handed them back to me. “Next time you want something done, have it laundered before you bring here.”

  “Jesus, Kim,” I said, “I gotta meet a client in twenty minutes and I’m standing here in my boxer shorts.”

  “And cowboy boots. Most fetching, if you put da gunbelt back on. The little happy faces very chic.”

  “Maybe you got something to match the jacket?”

  Kim stuck his hand out and waggled his fingers. I dropped the trousers and shrugged out of the jacket.

  “I did dis lining for you,” he said.

  “Yeah. Pistol tears up the lining.”

  “Lining very handsome, but brown plaid make ugly suit.”

  “It’s very muted.”

  Kim took the glasses off the top of his head and settled them on the end of his nose. “Dis muted—I’m Air Jordan,” he said. He took a seam ripper out of his shirt pocket, made one quick fleck at the collar, and tore the jacket in half. “There, now matches pants.”

  “Are you nuts? My God! My suit!” My brain churned up the image of me standing in front of a judge who says, “Let’s see if I have this right, Mr. Hardin. You strangled this man because he tore your suit,” and me saying, “Well, Your Honor, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “Not to worry,” said Kim. He dropped the halves of my jacket on top of my divided trousers, tilted a tall gray waste can out from under the table, and swept my suit away like fish guts into a bucket. “Hold arms a little higher, please,” he said and whipped the tape measure off his neck and around my waist so quick and precise there should have been an audible crack. “Thirty-six,” he said.

  “Thirty-four,” I said.

  “You wish.”

  “The only thing I’m wishing for is pants.”

  “Maybe I got just the thing, match you shoes anyway. I think your belt fits da loops.” He turned and walked back toward the line of garments hung from a rod along the back wall of the shop. “You remember da country singer, da one with the big hair—was down at da Van Andle Arena?”

  I hadn’t the foggiest notion. “Sure,” I said.

  “His security guy come down here—slim hips and a lot of beef, just like you.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Conroy—he brought in some jeans to be hem and ordered a jacket.” He pulled a hanger of garments covered in dry cleaning plastic out of the line. “Said I cut da jeans too short, so he left it all.”

  Kim hauled up the plastic and showed me a single-breasted, Westerncut, gray herringbone jacket as he walked back to the table. From underneath the jacket he dragged out a pair of black stonewashed denim trousers. I stepped out of my boots.

  The jeans were starched and pressed. The pants legs had been hemmed on the bias. The waist was loose enough for a big pasta dinner and the legs wrinkled a little on the tops of my boots when I stepped back into them. “Just right,” I said.

  “I guess he taller than you, dey hung straight on him.”

  “That was the problem.”

  “So, how you mean?”

  “That’s right, you said ‘Chicago’; you’re not from Texas.” I laughed. The jacket fit a little snug under the arms but I generally wear them open anyway. I started my belt around the trousers. The magazine pouches and holster had to be threaded onto the belt between the loops.

  “What so funny—I like to know?”

  “The jeans are supposed to wrinkle up when you’re afoot so that they’ll hang straight when you sit on a horse.”

  “He came in a limousine—no horse trailer.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Trust me.”

  Kim shrugged.

  “How much?” I said.

  “Don’t worry, you regular customer, I’ll send you bill.”

  “How much, Kim?”

  “Special for you—just because we’re friends—five hundred dollars.”

  “I’ll give you a yard and a half—the rest I’m going to need for bandages and ice packs because I gotta walk around looking like Roy Rogers.”

  “Two and a half—you write me check.”

  I started the belt back out of the loops.

  “What are you gonna do? You can’t walk out of here in your shorts.”

  “Bet me.”

  “Two hundred—and I’m taking a beating here.”

  I stopped hauling on the belt. “You don’t sell these to me—they hang on the rod back there until Halloween.”

&nbs
p; Kim rolled his eyes. “You’re killing me. I gotta have cash.”

  “What tax bracket are you in, Kim? Twenty-eight percent? I’ll split it with you. A hundred and seventy-two dollars. Cash.”

  “Deal, and I hope you step in horse poop—Roy!”

  • • •

  Lorna sat at the wheel of her yellow Olds Cutlass, her eyes closed and her head nodding to something on the radio. When I opened the passenger door and climbed in, she gave me a glance, then snapped her head around for a double take.

  “Howdy, Tex.”

  “Don’t start,” I said. “We’re late.”

  “What’s the matter—Kim out of matador outfits?”

  “Gimme a break,” I said. Lorna pulled out of the lot and turned west toward Division Avenue. “Closer to take Breton up to Lake Drive.”

  “Traffic is a zoo,” she said.

  “How are you fixed for dough?”

  “I got parking money.”

  “Better hit a teller machine,” I said. “Kim skinned me for this outfit.” Lorna tightened her jaw but her eyes made merry slits under arched eyebrows.

  “I like this jacket,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Paid a hundred and seventy-two bucks for the jacket and jeans. Anything I pay that much for, I like.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I just got used to you looking like one of those guys in the old Raymond Chandler flicks.”

  “This is more casual. You know. They even dress casual in the insurance offices now.”

  She laughed. “In Texas.”

  “No, really,” I said. “This is an All-American outfit. Go to Europe—business suits. Go to Tokyo—business suits. Only in America do you get an outfit like this.”

  “In Germany they wear leather shorts, and in Scotland the men wear skirts.”

  “Yeah, and Dutchmen wear wooden shoes, but not to business meetings.”

  • • •

  There’s nothing like a Detroit Coney Island Hot Dog, especially in western Michigan. All you can get out here is a chili dog—which is not even close to the same thing. North and east of the city, in Rockford, the Corner Bar sells a lot of chili dogs—the blue-collar version with mustard, cheese, and onions—and holds pig-out contests. The winners take home a T-shirt and a box of Bromo Seltzer.