“Heavy?”
“Middle, back then. Twenty-five, thirty years ago. But he was the same then as now. Never learned how to move. He could drop anybody with a single punch, but the dancers, they could always wear him out.”
It was to cry, except my gut hurt too much.
“But you ain’t here to talk about Edgar.”
Edgar? Nah. Bruno. Bruno was a much better choice.
“No. I’m a private inve—”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand and sent cigarette ashes fluttering across my pants legs. “Me, I’m Ella Fitzgerald.” I pulled out the wallet, opened it to the right leaf, and handed it across. The Fat Lady hadn’t been the least concerned as I reached for it. It so happened that I wasn’t carrying—I’m not a big fan of guns—but she didn’t know that. Evidently she didn’t much fancy anyone’s chances of shooting his way out of her place.
“Nebraska!” she hooted as she let the wallet close itself. “Pretty funny name, ain’t it?”
“Could be worse. They could call me the Fat Lady.”
Her face solidified into a grotesque parody of mirth. She sucked the cigarette down to the halfway point and exhaled the smoke into my face. “Yeah, you’re stupid enough to be a private cop.” She tossed the wallet at me and I caught it against my belly, which was a mistake. I must have gone two shades whiter, but the Fat Lady didn’t comment on it. “That piece of paper doesn’t give you the right to come in here bustin’ heads and butting into other people’s private business,” she was saying as I tried to get my breath back. “Lauren says you’re nosing around, asking about Walt Jennings. Says you say you’re looking for him but you ain’t looking for him. What kind of bullshit’s that?”
I couldn’t see what lying would gain me, and I couldn’t be sure how much of what little I’d told Lauren she’d told the Fat Lady. All of it, probably, what with the ruler trick and all. “I’ve been hired to find someone who may be with Jennings. That’s about it. Seen him lately?”
Again, it might have been a smile. “How do I know who your someone is?” she wondered, purposely opaque.
Play the idiot game. “Not someone. Jennings.”
She said nothing.
“Lauren told me he was in last night.”
“Lauren talks too much. We’re gonna have to work on that.”
“You mean ‘work over,’ don’t you?”
The Fat Lady lifted the ruler from the desk and it glinted in the yellowish light from overhead. It was a solidlooking thing, bronze-colored and festooned with advertising. “You talking about this little fella? Stings a little, I suppose—but that’s the point. We got certain rules for running this business, and every so often someone has to get reminded of them.”
“Wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient to just toast their tootsies in an electric skillet? You’d burn a few kilowatts, but you wouldn’t work up such a sweat.”
She shrugged. “The door was unlocked. I didn’t nail her shoes to the floor. If she’d’a walked out, I wouldn’t’ve tried to stop her. But she didn’t.” Again the shrug. “Her choice.”
“Uh-huh. What have you got her on?”
The Fat Lady laughed a mirthless caw, pushed away from the edge of the desk with some effort, and rolled back around to her side of the desk. “You’re guessing,” she spat before lowering herself with a whooof! onto the flattened cushion of her swivel chair. The chair was the armless type favored by typists. She probably couldn’t have wedged herself into an ordinary desk chair.
She was right, of course; I was guessing. But it was a good guess, as her attitude proved. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had given away the razor in order to sell razor blades, only in this case the freebie was probably heroin; and, given Lauren’s looks, the Fat Lady was almost certainly more interested in putting her to work in one of the upstairs rooms than in selling her more horse. Lauren couldn’t have been hooked too badly—she didn’t look or act it—but badly enough that she’d rather suffer the ruler than withdrawal.
Yes, it’s great being a private detective; you get to meet such interesting people.
“So I’m guessing,” I said. “What about Jennings?”
“What about him?”
“Was he in here last night?”
The last half of the cigarette vanished in one long drag. She used the fag end to light a second one, then threw the butt on the floor and squashed it underfoot. When the Fat Lady squashes something, it stays squashed.
“Could be.” Smoke leaked out of her nostrils. “I didn’t get downstairs much last night. Too much business up here.” The maybe-smile reappeared.
“You strike me as the sort of person who keeps a pretty sharp eye on everything going on.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I understand Jennings is something of a regular here.”
“Oh yeah?”
I stifled the impulse to say Yeah! and see if I could turn it into a contest. “Does he usually come alone?”
She looked at me evenly, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, arms folded across her breasts, a faint particle of amusement playing around the porcine eyes. “I suppose,” she said at length.
“Does he ever come in with anyone else, a woman—say, his wife?”
Again she cawed. “Walt Jennings never had no wife.”
“Really? There’s a woman going around who says she is.”
“And I’m Ella Fitzgerald,” she repeated. I guess that’s what passed as wit around there. At least she didn’t say “Oh yeah?” again.
“Why would she say she was if she wasn’t?”
She took the cigarette from between her lips and studied the hot end of it. “Must be love. How the hell should I know? This Christina chick’s pretty cra—” She clapped her mouth shut and narrowed her eyes.
“—zy,” I supplied. “You know her.”
“I seen her.”
“In here?” A halfhearted nod. “With Jennings?”
She made a noise. “You bet,” she said sarcastically. “Anyway, who gives a shit? I’m only interested in what you’re doing tearing up my place.”
“I told you: I want to find someone who’s probably with Jennings. That means I should find Jennings. His wife—or whoever—said he hangs out here. I’m hoping somebody here might know where he’d’ve gone to ground.”
“They might. Doesn’t mean they’d tell you, though.”
“I get that impression. The thing is, what if Jennings didn’t do it, didn’t kill the man everyone says he killed?”
“What if?” She replaced the cigarette but she didn’t smoke it; it just hung there.
“The word I get is that Jennings was here last night, in the early evening. If he was still here when Castelar was busy being killed, or here so late that he couldn’t have gotten out there in time to do it, then anyone who could step forward and say so would be doing Jennings a favor, not ratting on him. If nobody does, they’ll probably end up hanging it on him. And hanging him.”
She took the Pall Mall from her red mouth and leaned forward. “You’re not getting the picture.” She paused to spit a fleck of tobacco from her tongue. “Nobody’s interested in giving Jennings an alibi. I sure as shit ain’t. He’s an okay guy, I guess, and he’s a pretty good customer, but he ain’t my boyfriend. The way I look at it is, I don’t like people nosing around in my business, so I don’t go nosing around in theirs. That way there’s never no hard feelings, right? If Walt Jennings was here playing bridge with me at the exact minute they say this other guy got his, I still wouldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t say yes and I wouldn’t say no; I wouldn’t say nothing. Not because I want them to burn him or anything, but because it’s nobody’s goddamn business. You get me?”
“Like a dose of clap. That sounded like a farewell address.”
“So take the hint, why don’t’cha.”
Pain and nausea rolled through me as I stood, but I made myself straighten up and look down at her. The private-eye code called f
or me to say something contemptuous or foreboding or wise-ass at this point. But I couldn’t think of anything good. So, rather lamely, I said, “I’ve been thrown out of rural banks, two-bit bars, and private homes today, and I keep hearing variations on the same theme—butt out. That’s all right. People can slam doors on me all over the place. It doesn’t mean I’m going to go away; it just means I have to find a different way in.” For good measure, I added my best withering sneer but she didn’t wither much. I guess she wasn’t such a delicate flower after all. She regarded me dispassionately, and I had the uncomfortable sensation that she was some grotesquely overfed frog deciding whether it was worth the effort to snag a passing fly: me.
I shook it and, unable to recall any appropriately caustic parting shots from the many detective novels I’ve read, was turning toward the door when the old girl made up her mind about whatever she had been inwardly debating. She lifted a pudgy paw. “Hang on a second,” she wheezed.
The Fat Lady pirouetted—not a pretty sight, believe me—and found a small scratch pad among the clutter of her desktop. “You know CB?”
“I know it.” I didn’t think anyone called Council Bluffs “CB” anymore—that seemed to have peaked out in the late seventies—and when I say I knew it, I knew it as well as most Omahans know the city across the river, which isn’t very. I don’t have much occasion to go over to CB, and I don’t know many people who do. The traffic pretty much comes this direction.
“Okay. Kinda the other side of their downtown, right?”
“Right.”
She ripped off the sheet she’d been scribbling on with a chewed-up stick pen and handed it to me. It bore a childish line map drawn in blotchy blue ink. “You go on a while and all of a sudden things start to get kind of scuzzy. The neighborhood gets real bad, nothing but winos and hookers and pushers and stuff. Then, sort of set back on a little hill, you see this place.” She bobbed her head at the map. “Big old four-story house, square, beige stucco, sitting off by itself kind of. You can’t miss it. About a hundred years ago it belonged to a railroad tycoon or something. Then the area got built up and they turned it into apartments. Then it was a hotel. Now it’s just cheap rent for winos and vagrants. It’s a good place to lay low for a night or two, because the cops don’t worry much about the bums who live there.”
My heart throbbed in my ears. “Jennings is holed up here?”
She made her face go blank. “I don’t know. I don’t know him and I don’t know that place and I don’t know you.”
That robbed a little energy from the surge of excitement pulsing through me, but I still could have shouted out loud. This was not exactly the mental picture I had been lugging around all day—I had been thinking more in terms of a deserted warehouse, the kind that Batman always gets to infiltrate—but this was the closest thing to a break I had encountered so far. I could have kissed the fat old thing, except I’d forgotten the iodine. Instead I nodded, folded the scrap of paper, and opened the door. Then I paused. “Tell me,” I said, “why the sudden change of heart?”
Again the piggy eyes were shiny and inscrutable. The Fat Lady turned, maneuvered her bulk around to the business side of the desk, and reacquainted her voluminous backside with the mashed cushion of her chair. She threw the memo pad onto the desktop, Bogarted the Pall Mall, and fixed her eyes on a point somewhere beyond my right ear. “I don’t ever want to see you in here again,” she said, as if it were an explanation.
Banished. Expelled. Thrown out into the night, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. A fate too horrible to contemplate.
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Going down the stairs wasn’t too bad, but I still allowed myself a moment or two and wiped the clammy sweat from my face before I pulled open the door and entered the barroom.
Business had picked up in the time I’d been upstairs. The furniture had been righted and the glass and beer had been swept up and no one but Edgar—the hell with that: Bruno—gave me a second or even a first glance as I tried not to limp toward the front door.
Bruno’s gaze followed me out onto the street. There was no telling what, if anything, was behind it.
Snow was falling, softly but seriously, wet, cottony flakes. The girl, Lauren, was sitting in a lighted bus shelter halfway down the block.
I stepped through the open dorway and stood under the small heater in the ceiling. Strangely enough, it was working, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the cold sweeping through the transparent plastic walls of the shelter.
Lauren ignored me at first, the way you always ignore people in situations like this, then she became aware of my staring at her and, timidly, glanced up. “Oh, it’s you.”
“No argument here. You okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” She went back to studying the bus-route map mounted under a filthy plastic pane opposite her.
“What’s she got you on?”
The eyes flickered my direction. “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh. You let her beat you like you were a schoolkid because it’s fun, right? What do you get on your birthday—birch rods soaked in vinegar?” A picture of Kate Castelar, and an echo of what her ex-boyfriend had told me about her, flashed through my mind.
Lauren’s eyes flashed, and they were moist. “Shut up,” she hissed. “It’s none of your business. You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know enough. I know what goes on upstairs. I know how it works. First the shit’s just a little fringe benefit. It’s all in the brochure: group health, pension plan, paid vacation, hot and cold running heroin. All free. But expenses keep rising, you know, and then all of a sudden the employee’s expected to kick in. However, the job doesn’t pay that well and you don’t have the money to support the habit, so the Fat Lady graciously allows you to work it off. Upstairs. On your back.”
Lauren was crying now, her head down, her gloved hands clutching her bag, the shoulders of her red jacket shaking. Mr. Wonderful, that’s me; spreading cheer and goodwill everywhere I go. “It’s not like—that,” she snuffled. “No one’s ever asked me to—do anything …”
“That’s because you haven’t been on the stuff long enough. And when you have been, she won’t have to ask. You’ll be on your knees begging her to let you do anything to get it—”
“Shut up!” she bawled. “You don’t know anything about it, so just shut up!”
“I can help you, Lauren. I want to help you. I can get you into a program …” I didn’t know if I could or not, but it’s what they always say on TV. I suppose I could have; ultimately it didn’t matter, because the girl suddenly jumped up and pushed past me.
“Lau—”
“Leave me alone, dammit.” She lashed out at me, hitting me in the arm, and stumbled out of the shelter and on up the dark street. “Just leave me alone,” she yelled.
I stood in the plastic cubicle and watched her disappear into the night. The snow kept coming down, gently; there was no wind. After a minute or so the overhead heater switched itself off. I left and walked slowly up the street, in the other direction.
I sat in my car and studied a real map and thought. I had almost begun to believe that I was developing quite the silver tongue. I mean, first Charlie Castelar had crumbled before my relentless logic, then the Fat Lady had melted like a box of chocolates left on top of the refrigerator. But my little exchange with Lauren put me back in touch with reality, or what passes for reality in my line, and set me to wondering again about the first two episodes.
I was slightly more comfortable with the Fat Lady’s suddenly seeing the light than I had been with Uncle Charlie’s unexpected conversion. That the Fat Lady was involved in all kinds of unsavory endeavors was obvious; she therefore had a legitimate interest—although “legitimate” isn’t the correct word—in seeing that people didn’t go prying into her affairs.
It didn’t necessarily mean she really was handing me Walt Jennings on a platter, just that she wouldn’t hesitate to if it served her purposes.
/> The defroster was running warm and I had a pretty good idea of how to get where I was going, so with some swearing I got the map folded and put away, slipped the car into drive, and threaded my way up to the expressway, across 80 and up 29 and around the northern part of Council Bluffs, around the top curve of Iowa where, following the path of the Missouri, it bulges like a backward B into Nebraska. I made good time; traffic was light, because of the hour, because of the weather. The snow must have come on duty some time ago, by the way it had piled up. I’d’ve rather it had been seventy degrees and sunny, but this was surely an improvement over the dry, gritty, pissy stuff we’d had the past two or three days, and the sub-subarctic winds that had come with it. This kind of snow made driving more difficult—it was slippery, and the moisture it contained softened the packed snow underneath it—but it was a change, at least, and I welcomed the marginally warmer temperatures that came with it.
As spotty and vague as they had been, the Fat Lady’s directions proved reasonably easy to follow. I got lost only once, and half an hour, forty-five minutes later my headlights were illuminating the big square building, seated atop a broad bluff above what once had been a business district but was now a neighborhood of boarded-up storefronts and crumbling façades and smashed windows. The streets were littered with garbage and broken bottles. Only a few souls risked the elements and the neighborhood after dark; more than one of the few I saw slept huddled in doorways.
The placement of streetlights had become less regular. The night was black and moonless; snowflakes seemed to jump out of nowhere and into the glare of my headlights. I sighted my destination before I could figure out how to get to it; eventually I pulled around behind the abandoned stores and found an unpaved road leading up the bluff. The road was unplowed, had been all winter by the looks of it, and I fretted over the sound of deep snow dragging against the undercarriage of the car—not the sort of neighborhood I care to spend the night in—and for perhaps the hundred thousandth time thought that a guy who doesn’t have better sense than to live in this part of the world should at least have the sense to get a Blazer or a Bronco or some similar vehicle for his winter driving. In one of those four-wheel-drive monsters you could drive up the side of a ten-thousand-foot-high mountain of snow, let alone an eighteen-inch drift.
Moving Targets Page 13