USA Noir Noir

by Johnny Temple

  I thought about that fine, beautiful woman inside.

  I thought about the deceased Christine Coyer and all the money she’d left behind.

  I thought about all that I didn’t have, all that I’d fooled myself into believing I didn’t care about—a set of new clothes, a soft mattress, something as simple as a haircut, for God’s sake, nothing big really, but still out of my reach.

  I was a starved man looking at the possibility of a feast. In the end the choice was easy. After all, what good did justice do the dead?

  I got the telephone number from a friend still employed in the newspaper business. I kept calling until the rich man answered.

  I identified myself—not with my real name—and told him I was a friend of Lester Greene.

  He scraped together a showing of indignity. “I can’t imagine what we have to discuss.”

  “A gift,” I told him. “One your wife gave to him. Only she wasn’t really your wife. She just pretended in order to lure Lester to your house to be murdered.”

  “I’m hanging up,” he said. But he didn’t.

  “Ask the woman with the long black hair,” I urged him. “Ask her about the gift she gave to Lester. Here’s a hint. It’s black and silky and small enough to be an eye patch for a pygmy. Ask your beautiful friend about it. I’ll call back in a while.”

  I hung up without giving him a chance to respond.

  When I called back, we didn’t bother with civilities.

  “What do you want?”

  Justice for Kid is what I should have said. What came out of my mouth was, “One hundred grand.”

  “And for one hundred thousand dollars, what do I get?”

  He sounded like a man used to wheeling and dealing. According to the paper, he was a financial advisor. I advised him: “My silence.” I let that hang. “And the panties.”

  “You could have got panties anywhere,” he countered.

  “She’s beautiful, your mistress. Who is she, by the way? Your secretary?”

  “Christine’s personal assistant. Not that it’s important.”

  “But it is important that she’s not very bright. She took the panties off her body and gave them to Lester. A DNA analysis of the residual pubic hair would certainly verify that they’re hers. I’m sure the police would be more than willing to look at all the possibilities more closely. Do you want to take that chance?”

  “Meet me at my house,” he suggested. “We’ll talk.”

  “I don’t think so. Your last meeting there with Lester didn’t end well for him. We’ll meet on the High Bridge,” I said. “I get the money, you get her panties.”

  “The panties I can verify. What about your silence?”

  “I talk and I’m guilty of extortion. Jail doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does to you. The truth is, though, you have no choice but to trust me.”

  “When?”

  “Let’s make the exchange this evening just after sunset. Say, nine o’clock.”

  I wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the money so quickly, but he didn’t object.

  “How will we know each other?” he asked.

  We’ll have no trouble, I thought. We’ll be the only cock­roaches on the bridge.

  * * *

  The High Bridge is built at a downward angle, connecting the bluffs of Cherokee Heights with the river flats below Summit Avenue. Although it was after dark, the sodium vapor lamps on the bridge made everything garishly bright. I waited on the high end. Coming from the other side of the river, the rich man would have to walk uphill to meet me. I found that appealing.

  The lights of downtown St. Paul spread out below me. At the edge of all that glitter lay the Mississippi, curling like a long black snake into the night. The air coming over the bridge smelled of the river below, of silt and slow water and something else, it seemed to me. Dreams sounds hokey, but that’s what I was thinking. The river smelled of dreams. Dreams of getting back on track. Of putting my life together. Of new clothes, a good job, and, yeah, of putting the booze behind me. I didn’t know exactly how money was going to accomplish that last part, but it didn’t seem impossible.

  The evening was warm and humid. Cars came across the bridge at irregular intervals. There wasn’t any foot traffic. I thought for a while that he’d decided I was bluffing and had blown me off. Which was a relief in a way. That meant I had to do the right thing, take the evidence to the cops, let them deal with it. Kid might yet get his justice.

  Then I saw someone step onto the bridge at the far end and start toward me. I was a good quarter-mile away and at first I couldn’t tell if it was him. When the figure was nearly halfway across, I realized it wasn’t the rich man. It was the personal assistant. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited, looking up at the Heights, then down toward the flats, uncertain which way I would come.

  What the hell was this all about? There was only one way to find out. I walked out to meet her.

  I wasn’t wearing the gray suit, but she recognized me anyway.

  “You were at the house this morning,” she said in that accent I decided was, indeed, French Canadian. Her hair hung to her ass and rippled like a velvet curtain. She wore an airy summer dress. The high hem lifted on the breeze, show­ing off her legs all the way to mid-thigh. Killer legs. Against this, Kid hadn’t stood a chance.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Who cares, as long as I have your money.” Her lips were thick and red around teeth white as sugar. I smelled her deli­cate perfume, the same scent that had washed over me that morning. It seemed to overpower the scent of the river.

  “Show me,” I said.

  “Where are my panties?”

  I reached into my pocket and dangled them in front of her. “Where’s my money?”

  From the purse she carried over her shoulder, she pulled a thick manila envelope. “The panties,” she said.

  “The envelope first.”

  She thought about it a moment, then handed it over. I looked inside. Four bundles of hundreds bound with rubber bands.

  “Want to count it?” she said.

  All I wanted was for the transaction to be over with and to be rid of this business. “I’ll trust you,” I said.

  She took the panties and threw them over the bridge rail­ing. I watched them drop, catch the breeze, and cut toward the middle of the river, swift as a little black bat.

  “Gone forever.” She smiled.

  “You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”

  “They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.

  I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.

  I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.

  “I’ll take the money.”

  He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.

  “I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.

  His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”

  I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus that swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.

  The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that
I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.

  My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.

  But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.

  I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.

  I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.

  VIC PRIMEVAL

  BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  Kearny Mesa, San Diego

  (Originally published in San Diego Noir)

  You know how these things get started, Robbie. You see her for the first time. Your heart skips and your fingers buzz. Can’t take your eyes off her. And when you look at her she knows. No way to hide it. So you don’t look. Use all your strength to not look. But she still knows. And anybody else around does too.”

  “I’ve had that feeling, Vic,” I said.

  We walked down the Embarcadero where the cruise ships come and go. It was what passes for winter here in San Diego, cool and crisp, and there was a hard clarity to the sunlight. Once a week I met Vic at Higher Grounds coffee and we’d get expensive drinks and walk around the city. He was a huge guy, a former professional wrestler. Vic Primeval was his show name until they took his WWF license away for getting too physical in his matches. He hurt some people. I spend a few minutes a week with Vic because he thinks he owes me his life. And because he’s alone in the world and possibly insane.

  “Anyway,” said Vic, “her name is Farrel White and I want you to meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m proud to have you as a friend. You’re pretty much all I got in that department.”

  “Are you showing us off, Vic? Our freak show past?”

  He blushed. “No. But you do make me look good.”

  Vic was bouncing at Skin, an exotic dance club—strippers, weak drinks, no cover with military ID. “I don’t love that place,” I said.

  “Robbie, what don’t you like about pretty women dancing almost naked?”

  “The creeps who go there.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky. You’re lucky with the ladies.”

  “What do you know about my luck with ladies, Vic?”

  “Come on, man. You’ve got luck. Whole world knows that.”

  More luck than I deserve, but is it good or bad? For instance, seven years ago Vic threw me out the window of the sixth floor of a hotel he’d set on fire—the Las Palmas in downtown San Diego. I was trying to save some lives and Vic was distraught at having had his World Wrestling Federation license revoked. This incident could be reasonably called bad luck.

  You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semi-famous—The Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.

  “Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”

  * * *

  We stood in the rear employee-only lot in the winter dark. I watched the cars rushing down Highway 163. The music thumped away inside the club and when someone came through the employee door the music got louder and I saw colored shapes hovering in the air about midway between the door and me.

  I’ve been seeing these colored objects since Vic threw me to that sidewalk. They’re geometric, of varying colors, between one and four inches in length, width, depth. They float and bob. I can move them with a finger. Or with a strong exhalation, like blowing out birthday cake candles. They often accompany music, but sometimes they appear when someone is talking to me. The stronger the person’s emotion, the larger and more vivid the objects are. They linger briefly then vanish.

  In the months after my fall I came to understand these shapes derived not so much from the words spoken, but from the emotion behind them. Each shape and color denotes a different emotion. To me, the shapes are visual reminders of the fact that people don’t always mean what they say. My condition is called synesthesia, from the Greek, and loosely translated it means “mixing of the senses.” I belong to the San Diego Synesthesia Society and we meet once a month at the Seven Seas on Hotel Circle.

  Farrel had a round, pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair cut in bangs, and one dimple when she smiled. Her lips were small and red. Her handshake was soft. She was short even in high-heeled boots. She wore a long coat against the damp winter chill.

  “Vic tells me you’re a policeman. My daddy was a policeman. Center Springs, Arkansas. It’s not on most maps.”

  “How long have you been here in San Diego?” I asked.

  “Almost a year. I was waitressing but now I’m doing this. Better pay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-four years old.” She had a way of holding your eyes with her own, a direct but uncritical stare. “Vic told me all about what happened. It’s good that you’ve become a friend of his. We all of us need at least one good friend . . . Well, guys, I should be going. I’d ask you in and buy you a drink, but it’s supposed to work the other way around.”

  I glanced at Vic and saw the adoration in his eyes. It lit up his face, made it smarter and softer and better. Farrel smiled at him and put her hand on his sleeve.

  “It’s okay, Vic.”

  “Just so good to see you, Farrel.”

  “Vic walks me in and out, every night. And any other of the dancers who want him to. You’re a cop so you know there’s always someone coming around places like this, making trouble for the girls. But not when Vic Primeval is in the barnyard.”

  “I don’t really like that name,” said Vic.

  “I mean it in a good way.”

  “It means primitive.”

  “It’s only a show name, Vic. Like, well, like for a dancer it would be Chastity or Desire.”

  I watched the inner conflict ruffle Vic’s expression. Then his mind made some kind of override and the light came back to his eyes. He smiled and peered down at the ground.

  A hard look came over Farrel’s face as a black BMW 750i bounced through the open exit gate and into the employees-only lot. It rolled to a stop beside us. The driver’s window went down.

  “Yo. Sweetie. I been looking for you.” He was thirty maybe and tricked out in style—sharp haircut, pricey-looking shirt and jacket. Slender face, a Jersey voice and delivery. He looked from Farrel to Vic, then at me. “What’s your problem, fuckface?”

  I swung open my jacket to give him a look at my .45.

  He held up his hands like I should cuff him. “Christ. Farrel? You want I should run these meatballs off? They’re nothing to do with me and you, baby.”

  “I want them to run you off. I told you, Sal. There isn’t a you and me. No more. It’s ove
r. I’m gone.”

  “But you’re not gone, baby. You’re right here. So get in. Whatever you’ll make in a month in there, I’ll pay you that right out of my pocket. Right here and now.”

  “Get off this property,” said Vic. “Or I’ll drag you out of your cute little car and throw you over that fence.”

  Vic glanced at me and winced right after he said this. When he gets mad at things he throws them far. People too.

  Sal clucked his tongue like a hayseed then smiled at Vic as if he was an amusing moron.

  “No more us, Sal,” said Farrel. “We’re over.”

  “You still owe me eight thousand dollars, girl. Nothing’s over till I get that back.”

  I saw black rhombuses wobbling in the air between us. Black rhombuses mean anger.

  “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You think I’m dancing in a place like this just for the fun of it all?”

  “Move out of here,” I said. “Do it now.”

  “Or you’ll arrest me.”

  “Quickly. It’ll cost you forty-eight long cheap hours or two expensive short ones. Your pick.”

  “I want what’s mine,” Sal said to Farrel. “I want what I paid for.”

  “Them’s two different things.”

  “Maybe it is in that redneck slop hole you come from.”

  The window went up and the car swung around and out of the lot, the big tires leaving a rubbery low-speed squeal on the asphalt.

  “I’m coming in for a while,” I said.

  I had a beer and watched Farrel and the other dancers do their shows. They were uninhibited and rhythmic to say the least. Some were pretty and some were plain. Some acted flirtatious and others lustful and others aloof. Farrel seemed almost shy and she never once looked at either me or Vic from what I could tell. She had a small attractive body. Vic stood in the back of the room, lost in the lush plum-colored curtains, his feet spread wide and arms crossed, stone still.

  After an hour passed and Sal had not come back, I nodded a goodnight to Vic and went home.

  * * *

  Two days later Vic left a message for me and I met him outside the Convention Center. There was a reptile show in progress and many of the people were entering and leaving the building with constrictors around their necks and leashed iguanas in their arms and stacks of clear plastic food containers filled with brightly colored juvenile snakes.