Devil's Arcade

by Robert Bucchianeri

  I listened absently, but my mind was whirling back over my conversation with the oh-so-credible imposter who’d come to my boat and, with a performance that had my vote for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy/Drama, convinced me to go looking for Bobby Fenderdale.

  It made no sense.

  Something so planned, calculated, outrageous, and dangerous had to have a motive. And a damn important one.

  I hated being played. More troubling, something was going on behind the scenes that was profoundly unsettling and likely hazardous to the wellbeing of everyone in the room, including me.

  I had the feeling that unless I figured something out and real soon, we were all in a heap of trouble.

  My thoughts drifted, and I heard Paula say, “Daddy, go to Uncle Poe. Don’t worry about me. He’ll protect me, protect us. He’ll forgive you.”

  Bobby had already summarized the whole story, leaving out some details it was best a man’s daughter not hear.

  Snorting cocaine from between a woman’s breasts was never mentioned.

  They argued for a while. She sat on the bed next to her father, holding his hands, looking into his eyes. I tried to stay out, let them talk. I made another pot of coffee and shared it all around.

  I called the number that phony Paula had given me. It went to voice mail with a robotic message. I thought about calling Marsh to see if he’d made any progress on the background check I’d requested on the woman but realized he wouldn’t have come up with anything other than the assumedly mundane information on the real deal. I hadn’t given him a picture of the woman who’d tried to hire me, not being in the habit of taking snapshots of my clients.

  I might have to rethink my protocol.

  I called Alexandra and told her I’d be home late. It annoyed her that I had made myself so scarce right before we were scheduled to leave. I apologized and told her I’d be home as soon as possible. I didn’t go into the complexities I was confronting.

  “Famous last words,” she said.

  I guess I hung up after that without responding. I called Marsh and left a message telling him we needed to pow wow.

  Back in the motel room, I found both of them in tears.

  I made more coffee.

  I stood near the bathroom waiting for the caffeine express to stop its racket.

  “Daddy told me everything. He told me who did this. We’ve decided to go see Poe,” Paula said, after blowing her nose. Bobby sat silently, teary-eyed, a hangdog expression on his face.

  “That’s probably a good idea. He’ll find you anyway, eventually.”

  “Can you come with us, Mr. Plank? Daddy says you told him that his brother tried to hire you to find him. That means he must trust you. That you’re good at what you do.”

  I didn’t know if Poe trusted me, or anyone else, but even if he did, I didn’t want to run interference.

  “Daddy thinks you’ll do a better job explaining it all to him. He doesn’t think he can do it. He’ll break down and make a mess of it.”

  I wanted to say no. Me being there would likely piss Poe off.

  Bobby had to man up.

  But, I knew Paula was right. Her father would probably screw it all up and get the worst possible reaction.

  “I’ll consider it, only if you tell me who Jewel’s accomplices were and everything you know about them.” I looked from Bobby to Paula. It seemed more vital now, after finding out how I’d been duped, that I get every bit of information he had.

  Then, out of the blue, a realization hit me like a revelation from on high.

  I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been the first thought when the real Paula showed up.

  “Bobby, describe Jewel.”

  He twisted his mouth to one side in puzzlement.

  “What does she look like? Describe her as best you can.”

  He described to a tee the woman who came to my boat with such a convincing story and performance.

  Which made me feel better because it made perfect sense. But that feeling didn’t last long.

  How had she found me?

  How did she find out about Poe trying to hire me?

  That thought brought up so many new questions it made my head spin like a dreidel.

  Was Poe involved more deeply than he’d let on? Was someone inside his organization still tied to Jewel and her accomplices?

  Was Jewel using me to find Bobby because she was worried that he’d disappeared and might go back on his promise, despite the danger to his daughter?

  I had the feeling that there was more here than any of that. But untangling it with so few facts seemed impossible.

  I needed to be alone to think. I needed to brainstorm with Marsh, tease out the possibilities into likelihoods.

  Most of all I needed to find Jewel Allen.

  And I might have to start back at Pirate’s Cove, in Poe’s lair, as it had all started there—the initial scams and the plot to involve me in all of this.

  So maybe going with Bobby and Paula to see the big boss was the right move, after all.

  It was then I realized I’d probably lost fifteen hundred dollars and incurred the wrath and disappointment of my woman once again.

  I wasn’t going to Hawaii.

  Bobby mumbled his response to my demand for more information. “Right. Sure. But God, I’m hungry. Can we get some dinner, and I’ll tell you while we’re eating? The place right across the street,” he mumbled, waving with his hand to point toward a Chinese joint within sight of the motel.

  I didn’t want to wait another second. But he was a man about to burst or break. That wouldn’t help anyone.

  Bobby wanted Beef Chow Mein and Egg Foo Young. Paula didn’t care.

  Neither did I. I told them I’d be back in twenty minutes.

  It wouldn’t hurt to give father and daughter a little time alone.

  Bobby said he couldn’t face his brother that night. He was too fried.

  Paula said she’d stay with him and they’d go together in the morning.

  I thought about whether they’d be safe there for the night.

  I thought about calling Marsh to send a man to watch over them but decided against it. After dinner, I’d go home and explain things to Alexandra, hope that she still liked me enough not to dump me like yesterday's leftovers.

  Then I’d come back and watch over them. I was still confounded about Jewel’s intentions and afraid that she and the other thieves might be desperate enough to show up out of the blue.

  I couldn’t help but feel it was on me to make sure that father and daughter remained safe for one more night.

  Fourteen

  I jogged the roughly fifty yards across the street and ordered.

  Like most Chinese restaurants, the Jade Dragon was a deceptively popular place. Only an elderly couple sat silently at one of the nine plastic-topped tables inside, but there was a constant flow of people picking up takeout.

  The place was tiny, cramped, loaded with Asian tchotchkes from plastic jade plants to multicolored fans to photos of cuddly panda bears.

  The lobby in front had a red vinyl couch that looked back on the road and the motel. I stood with my back to the counter where a half dozen authentic Asians busily cooked, packaged, rang up orders, and chattered incomprehensibly.

  While I waited, I kept an eye on the motel. The Beachside looked forlorn and spooky in the shadowy pall cast by dull overhead street lighting. A crescent moon halfway up the sky peeked out between black and gray clouds drifting low.

  While I watched absently, I thought about how Jewel Allen had known, because I’d told her, that I had only less than a day, a few hours at most, to look for Bobby.

  She may have known that before she came to visit me.

  Did that mean she knew that was all it would take for me to find him?

  Which argued for the possibility she already knew where Bobby was and directed me right toward him using Karin at Fred’s casino, despite what Bobby had said about the fact that they were strangers to each
other.

  And perhaps, although it seemed improbable, with an assist from the owner, Leslie, at the gym.

  The more I thought about it, the more perplexing and impossible to fathom the whole affair seemed.

  As I tried to piece all the fragments of the past day together to make it fit into a more coherent pattern, the door to Room 12 opened and a dark figure who was not Bobby or his daughter stepped out, closed the door, paused for a moment, looking out to the street, toward me, and then moved to the side of the building and disappeared behind the motel.

  My heart stutter-stepped, and I rushed out of the restaurant with the cry of “Mister? Mister! Your food is ready!” echoing in my ears.

  I raced across the street and through the parking lot, veering past the edge of the motel, following the track of the shadow. I pulled up to find a shallow, dry creek bed, tall grass, a line of elm trees, and an empty horizon. I stood still, scanning the entire area, looking for the slightest movement.

  Nothing.

  The dark shadow had disappeared.

  The figure leaving Room 12 had been fully dressed in black, with a hoodie covering its head.

  I had seen no facial features. It was just too dark and far away.

  But something in the way the shadow moved, the tilt of the head, the grace of the movements, immediately brought a name to mind.

  I couldn’t be sure. It was just a feeling, but I would have bet a nice, clean one-hundred-dollar bill I was right.

  I was out of breath. I felt my heart hammering my chest, herky-jerky, as I thought about the fact that if I was on the money about the identity of the intruder, then everything I’d been thinking was wrong.

  The intruder.

  I dashed back to the room, threw the door open, stepped inside.

  Bobby lay across the bed at an odd angle, his head lolling over one side of the mattress. One of his eyes was missing.

  Every other moment, a drop of blood spilled from that void in his face and made the large black stain on the shag carpeting beneath him that much larger.

  I turned to rush back out and continue my search for the shadowy intruder, and, at the same time, felt more than heard a rustling motion and glimpsed pale flesh and a black object filling the space in front of my face.

  I fell, the floor rushing toward me fast and final.

  An explosion burst in my head, along with a deep cratering darkness.

  I felt my body spasm and then I felt nothing.

  Fifteen

  It was dark, and I was floating, hovering in a dreamscape, somewhere vast and strange. There were stars in the swirling black clouds above me, and I was part of them.

  I thought nothing for a long time until I realized that my eyes were closed.

  When I opened them, there were no stars or clouds or black sky, or maybe there were, but I wasn’t seeing them.

  I was staring at a stained popcorn ceiling.

  I wondered how old the ceiling was and if it was riddled with asbestos and whether the exposure might make me sick at some future time.

  My thoughts were a jumble, as was my place in space and time.

  My eyes closed again, and when they opened, I was still staring at that ugly ceiling, but this time I knew where I was.

  A room, number twelve, at the Beachside Motel.

  All of it came rushing back in a moment’s exhalation. And it made me sick. I rolled over, lunged to the corner of the bed, and vomited all over the floor.

  I felt better after that until I registered that I’d vomited onto a large dark spot on the carpet below me. I glanced sideways and found Bobby’s face still hanging in mid-air, still missing an eye.

  A series of sharp smells assaulted me—rotting meat, cheap perfume, shit.

  Bobby had soiled his pants.

  I wretched again but didn’t throw up. I made it to my feet and stumbled away from the bed and into the bathroom to look at myself.

  I examined my face and head in the dirty mirror. I felt beneath my hair. A large bump swelled painfully on the rear right back of my skull. A purple bruise darkened the right side of my face, and my ear looked like a discolored, misshapen hammerhead. Max Weinberg was taking a break from his duties with the E Street Band to pound drums inside of my head like some mad demon.

  I was probably in need of a concussion protocol.

  But that would have to wait.

  I had to get out of that room. But before I stumbled out, a thought occurred to me.

  Where was Paula?

  At the same moment, I looked at the flowered curtain hanging from a faded golden rod pulled across the bathtub to my right.

  My stomach roiled and retched.

  I drew the curtain back.

  Paula lay sprawled at the bottom of the tub, her mouth curled into a surprised rictus. A small, black, jagged hole lay just below her hairline.

  A pool of blood encircled her hair.

  I stumbled out of the bathroom and looked at Bobby on the bed and then back at Paula.

  What had I allowed to happen to these two poor souls?

  Sixteen

  Ten minutes before midnight.

  When I’d re-entered the motel after my visit to the Jade Dragon, it had been a little after 8 p.m.

  I’d been out for almost three hours.

  Why was I still alive while Bobby and Paula had been eliminated as threats?

  And to whom?

  I couldn’t get the notion, the near-certain feeling, that I knew who the shadowy figure I’d seen outside the room was.

  Poe’s Angelique.

  His right hand, a trained killer. A pro.

  I couldn’t believe that this was how Poe would take care of his brother and his innocent niece.

  Poe was guilty of a lot of things, but this seemed beyond the pale, even for him.

  More likely, Jewel and her accomplices had acted out of desperation, of fear, not of the police, but of what Poe would unleash if Bobby told his brother who they were.

  They could run, but eventually, one way or the other, Poe would find them and teach them a lesson that other fools could learn from.

  You don’t mess with Poe or his endeavors ever.

  Without having seen the dark figure outside the room, I would have had to blame the casino thieves—Jewel and her gang gone mad.

  And even now, I thought there had to be an explanation for Angelique’s presence, if it had truly been her, other than murderous intent.

  But maybe she was just on my mind since I’d seen her yesterday and I was imagining things. Could the figure who disappeared behind the motel have stepped back into the room in time to knock me out?

  It seemed improbable. Could she have circled around and gotten inside through the little bathroom window that looked out over the gully in back of the motel?

  Impossible.

  If Angelique had been there, maybe Poe just had her following me, hoping to find Bobby, or help me if I ran into any trouble.

  But, if it wasn’t Poe and Angelique, and the casino thieves had tracked Bobby here, if my own visits to the gym and the casino had led them here, then they couldn’t be sure that Bobby hadn’t told me everything he knew.

  Keeping me alive was too much of a risk.

  Had they thought I was dead?

  They would have checked my pulse. And put a bullet in my head just like poor Paula.

  I was sitting in a chair pressed against the wall, as far as I could get from Bobby’s stench. I had a wet hand towel from the bathroom pressed over my nose and mouth.

  My stomach roiled, and I struggled to keep any remaining contents down.

  I had to call the police. Or Marsh? Or Poe? Or Alexandra?

  My mind wasn’t working well. My thoughts flashed and crashed and dissolved into a muddle.

  Damn it, Plank. This is important. Why had they left me alive?

  I looked around, surveyed the room. Looked down at my hands, noticed the red and purple blotches on my fingers. On the nails. The stains on my shirt and pants.
r />   It couldn’t be.

  They’d never get away with it.

  If they planned this on the fly, it wouldn’t work.

  In any case, it wouldn’t.

  No one would believe it.

  Well, mostly no one. There were doubters in any crowd.

  And could Poe somehow be involved, either on his own, for his own nefarious purposes, or had he formed an unlikely alliance with Jewel and her gang?

  I couldn’t dismiss the notion, but I didn’t believe it.

  Poe was capable of setting me up. He had people he controlled in the police department and throughout San Francisco’s circles of power.

  Why?

  I had a big bump on the back of my head.

  I had an explanation, perfectly logical.

  I was in no shape to look for evidence, to see what they had planted to make me look guilty, other than the victims’ blood on my hands.

  I scoured the room anyway, looking for a gun or anything else suspicious. I searched the bodies and found nothing important. My card was in Bobby’s pocket. That could be explained, but I took it anyway.

  I cursed myself for leaving the room before I got the names of Jewel’s accomplices from Bobby. I felt guilty as hell for leaving them alone.

  I had nothing. I was nowhere.

  The killers had left me alive for no clear reason. They didn’t know that I didn’t know who they were.

  My thoughts circled themselves, whirling dervishes in search of enlightenment.

  Exhaustion along with a cratering migraine of pain racked my head.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  I bent over, my chest on my knees, afraid I might upchuck again.

  The sirens got louder, screeching like a murder of crows, rushing closer.

  I put my hands on my head trying to contain a blast of emotion.

  I needed time. The sirens howled closer.

  If I ran, there would be consequences.

  If I stayed, there would be a grueling night of questions for which I felt not near capable. I couldn’t imagine bearing it.