Wrong Place, Wrong Time

by W. Glenn Duncan

  “Larry Davis,” he said. “It better not.”

  There was a staircase leading upward off the hallway, an old wide one with carpeted steps and a bannister darkened with age. I wondered if, and how, Larry Davis ever used his upstairs rooms.

  We rolled and walked on down the hallway, past an office with a pair of three-drawer file cabinets and a desk but no chair. At the end of the hall we entered the kitchen.

  Davis went straight to a refrigerator, pulled out two cans of Pearl Light, and handed me one. “Sit down,” he said, and motioned to a table with three chairs. “Usually I drink 3.2 beer,” he said. “I can’t handle much of the full-strength stuff.” He waved at his legs. “Not enough body mass. I get drunk too easy.”

  I sat at the table; he rolled into the chairless space. I drank some Pearl, then said, “Will we be joined for drinks by your twin brother, Super Black the Ferocious?”

  He grinned hugely. “Like that? I use that routine when the council comes to hassle me about running a business in a residential area. Confuses the hell out of ’em. The liberals eat up that angry-black-stallion number and the rednecks get tight-assed when I tell them how if dey fucks ovah me, mah black brothers gonna come pourin’ outta the ghetto.”

  “Ghet-to!” I said. “Nice touch.”

  Larry Davis sipped his Pearl contentedly and shook his head. “It works for me,” he said, “but you just don’t have the complexion to make it play.”

  “True. What can you tell me about Luis Ortega?”

  He nodded to himself. “Thought that might be it.” He shrugged. “Way I hear it, Luis got himself offed in a pool hall somewhere. Down in the ghetto, maybe.”

  “Not quite,” I said, and wondered which way to play this. I decided to take a chance on losing my private-eye merit badge; I told him the truth.

  He waited quietly while I explained how I’d been there, told him about Toby Wells, and admitted I was poking around for myself, not a client.

  He frowned slightly. “You got cop trouble because of all that?”

  “Not headed-for-the-slammer trouble; it’s not that bad,” I said, “but Wells made me look pretty goddamn stupid. I want to find him.”

  “I expect you do,” Larry Davis said. “Don’t know how I can help, though.”

  “I figure to backtrack through Luis Ortega. About the only sure thing in this whole mess is that it was a planned hit. Wells even used Ortega’s correct name when he conned me. So—”

  “So this Wells dude must have a reason, right?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “A nice emotional one, with any luck. If Ortega knocked up his daughter or stole his car or made him lose his job, anything like that, I’ll turn over Wells as I work backward through Ortega.”

  “You called it a hit. What if this bounty hunter was a pro? He wouldn’t have been close to Luis until he actually offed him.”

  I nodded. “And if it was a pro hit, the guy will be back in Detroit or Miami now. Even so, I might find whoever hired him. I don’t have many choices here, Larry. Ortega is the only string I can pull and hope it all unravels.” I shrugged at him. “It’s the way I work.”

  Davis sat, apparently thinking, for a while, then roused himself and said, “First, I have to tell you what I told the real cops.” He smiled to soften the phrase “real cops,” as if he thought I might be offended. It didn’t bother me; I’d been a real cop once.

  “This pool-cleaning gig isn’t much of a business,” he said. “Oh, I do all right, but Fortune hasn’t been around to see if good old Aqua-Tidy should be in this year’s five-hundred.” He held out his arms expansively. “What you see is what you get. I got three of those little bitty Jap vans, a garage full of chlorine and stuff, and this house. Which is really my home. Which drives the local council crazy and makes me invent all kinds of weird defense tactics.

  “Peoplewise, I got one salesman and two full-time pool cleaners. The third truck and weekends I cover with a roster of a dozen guys who work part-time; some pretty regular, some only occasionally. Luis Ortega was a part-timer; he worked three or four afternoons a week.”

  He took a quick sip of Pearl and put the can down immediately. “Plus, I got an accountant who comes in once a week to do the books and a cleaning lady who comes in once a week to do the floors. And a kid who cuts the grass whenever I can find him, which isn’t often enough. And that’s the Aqua-Tidy story, as they say in the company propaganda videos. It ain’t much, but it keeps me off the streets and out of the food-stamps line. For a black cripple, that ain’t doing too bad, thank you very much.”

  He slapped his hands down on the arms of his wheelchair. “The whole point is, I don’t know much about my people’s private lives. That’s none of my business, for one thing, but mostly—as I just explained—we all do our work separately. Hell, they’re out cleaning or selling, and I’m in here answering the phone, sending out bills, making heavy-duty management decisions like do I change my Yellow Pages ad this year? So when would we get together and become good buddies? Luis Ortega was an average guy. He worked hard enough to keep his job, not hard enough that I worried about losing him. He showed up on time, mostly, and he got along with people as far as I could tell.”

  He looked me in the eye and said, “And that’s what I told the real cops, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “However,” he said, “I believe I forgot to mention to them that Luis has—had—been renting one of my upstairs rooms. Probably some of his stuff is still up there.”

  I said, “I can see how a thing like that could slip your mind.”

  “Actually,” Davis said, “it didn’t slip my mind. I was waiting for them to beat it out of me. But they didn’t.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And they called me sir.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s enough to make a man lose his faith in social stereotypes.”

  Chapter 9

  “I suppose,” Larry Davis said, “you want to go up there and rummage around in Luis’s room.”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s it! I knew the book from Famous Detective School had mentioned this. I just couldn’t quite remember—”

  “Ho, ho, ho,” he said. “Look, I was gonna go up myself. My old chair’s up there, but it’s a bitch of a job to drag myself up those miserable steps. So I’ll tell you what. You go do your Sam Spade thing, but you gotta do two things for me, okay?”

  “Probably. What?”

  “First, see what you can find out about Luis’s relatives; see if there’s anyone I can phone or write, so they can get his stuff.” He frowned. “Assuming he left anything up there. Anyway, you’ll find that out. Second, make sure he didn’t leave anything too embarrassing, eh? I don’t want to have his people go up there, find any inflatable women, drugs, black-magic bullshit, whatever. I mean, what good would it do; the guy’s dead, right?”

  “You got it,” I said. “How long did Luis Ortega live here?”

  “Couple of months, maybe a little longer. I can check my deposit slips if you need to know exactly.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know yet. Where did he live before he moved in here?”

  “Good question. He’s been working—uh, he worked for me for three years, off and on. I mailed his first W-2 to whatever address he put on the form, I forget now what it was. It doesn’t matter; the W-2 came back. Luis tried to laugh that off. After that I just handed him his W-2s with his paycheck.”

  “What a wonderful word, paycheck. As it happens, I remember the part about tracing checks very well. Would you mind …?”

  “I’ll get one of his canceled checks for you,” Davis said.

  “Good.” I drained my beer and went upstairs.

  At the top of the stairs I stopped beside the worn old wheelchair there and looked back down. I had climbed the flight of stairs in, oh, less than ten seconds, surely. I tried to imagine crawling up, with my legs dragging uselessly behind me. I felt vaguely lazy and embarrassed because I could walk.r />
  There were four rooms off the upstairs hallway. Two were empty; one was half-filled with old furniture. There were spiderwebs and dust balls in the rooms. Larry’s cleaning lady needed a swift kick in the scrub brush.

  At the end of the hall was a small bathroom—clean enough, without being television-commercial sparkly—and across from the bathroom, Luis Ortega’s room.

  There was a single bed, a rumpled easy chair covered in floral fabric, a small table with an el-cheapo television set on it, a pine dresser, two shelves, and a closet.

  I tried to tell myself that the room was filled with juicy clues. I didn’t believe me, but I went to work anyway.

  It took me an hour to toss the room properly. It wasn’t the most fruitful hour I’d ever spent, but it wasn’t the most useless, either.

  The general impression was one of impermanence. Ortega had a full complement of clothes, but he was light on other things. This was a place for sleeping or killing time; it wasn’t a permanent residence. The feel of the room was wrong for that.

  In addition to vague impressions, I found two addresses for Ortega. One was on a layaway receipt for fifty dollars from a Grand Prairie menswear store. The date on it was five months ago. I found it at the bottom of a wastebasket with a batch of other junk that seemed to be debris from that typically male ritual: the periodic wallet cleanout.

  The other address was more iffy. It came from the back of a snapshot tucked in the mirror frame over the dresser. The picture showed a beaming Hispanic family posed in front of a small, white stucco house. Mom & Pop, three girls, and a boy. The boy was in his late teens and there was a five-year-old date penciled above the address on the back of the photo. So the boy might be Luis. Might be. And the address would help if the more recent address on the receipt turned out to be a loser. Maybe. Still, in my business, very often maybe was as good as it got.

  I left the room carrying the photo, the receipt, and the wastebasket. The wastebasket was for the half-dozen issues of soft-porn men’s magazines, the little Baggie of grass, and three pairs of panties I’d found tacked to the inside of his closet door.

  All in all, I was disappointed. I hadn’t learned much about Luis Ortega, especially anything to tell me why anyone wanted to cancel his breathing permit.

  Larry Davis must have heard me coming down the stairs; he called out as I reached the bottom step. Supersleuth that I am, I tracked him down in his office on the first try.

  He handed me three canceled paychecks made out to Luis Ortega. “Dead end, looks like,” he said.

  Each check had been endorsed by Ortega. Below those endorsements was a red FOR DEPOSIT ONLY stamp with an account number, then CASH-QUIK.

  Davis said, “You’re the hotshot private eye and all that, but I don’t like your chances of tracing Ortega back through a street corner check-cashing service. You ever see one of those places on a Friday afternoon?”

  I wrote down the details anyway, and showed him the addresses I’d found. He wrote them down.

  “Want lunch?” he asked. “I doctored up a frozen pizza with extra onions and all, put it in about thirty minutes ago. Plenty of beer left, too.”

  “Pizza and beer?” I said. “No red beans and rice, no corn bread? No greens? Davis, my man, you are missing an integral part of the black experience.”

  “I’ve experienced it. You want some pizza or not?”

  “Sure.”

  So we ate pizza, drank beer, and leafed through Ortega’s magazine centerfolds. There was some brief discussion about relative merit, but not much. Larry Davis and I both preferred women with IQs above room temperature.

  After lunch, I threw the magazines away, along with the grass, the panties, the pizza crusts, and the empty beer cans.

  Chapter 10

  “Goddamn if I understand this,” the old man grumbled. “What’s coming next, missy? You gonna try to put me in a home somewhere?”

  Beth Woodland patted his hand. “Now don’t be silly, Thorney. Of course not.”

  We were sitting in the living room of Walter Thorneycroft’s house. It was a nice house, built in the twenties or early thirties probably, with heavy dark timber throughout the interior. As Beth had said, it was slightly smaller than most of those nearby, but it was no dump. If old Thorney ever decided to cash it in, he’d get a check with lots of zeros on it.

  Much of the property in and around the Park Cities was like that. A lawyer I occasionally snooped for had pointed out a house a little like Thorney’s. It was less than six blocks away, and it was backed hard up against the new DART track. One-point-two million. Numbers like that—for a house!—were beyond me.

  Thorney pointed at me angrily. “What is he, a male nurse or something? He gonna put me on the crapper every couple of hours?”

  Thorney was a good-looking old guy. Not handsome, but still rugged. He had somehow avoided getting either fat and wobbly or cadaverously thin. I decided I wanted to be like Thorney when I grew up. Grew old. Older. Whatever.

  Thorney still had plenty of hair, too. It was cut short but shaggy and worn uncombed like a white skullcap. His right ear was slightly cauliflowered; probably an interesting story there. Thorney had icy blue eyes, with crinkles at the edges. I decided he’d stared into big chunks of sunlight. And he had worked with his hands, not just occasionally but long and often. His hands were huge, big-knuckled and sausage-fingered. All in all, Walter Thorneycroft looked like the kind of guy I’d like to know better.

  If only he hadn’t been such a whiny son of a bitch.

  Thorney was still pointing at me. “He supposed to wipe my bottom like I was some broken-down old fool who can’t look after himself?”

  “Thorney …” Ron Woodland said patiently. Beth’s husband was a blond guy in a sport coat. He did something in the education department, he seemed totally unperturbable, and he’d been saying, “Thorney …” for the past several minutes.

  “And I don’t need a bodyguard, either,” the old man rumbled. “Not to protect me from those snot-nosed little pukes.”

  While Beth and Ron Woodland tried to calm the old man down, I got up and wandered around the room. It wasn’t an especially large living room, but Thorney had a batch of terrific junk in it.

  He had a framed map of Australia hung on one wall. Between the map and the glass there were five or six old snapshots with crinkly edges and black-and-white images; old-fashioned box Brownie photos. One was a picture of what seemed to be a mining town in a desert; another showed a fairly large gaff-rigged sailing boat. In another snapshot two men stood on a city sidewalk. They had their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders and they grinned self-consciously at the camera. In the background there was a car loaded down with a contraption I’d never seen before.

  “What’s this funny-looking car?” I said. Behind me the muttering and grumbling stopped abruptly.

  “What’s it to you?” Thorney snapped.

  “If you don’t know, don’t worry—”

  “What car? What about it?”

  “It’s in the background here,” I said. “It’s old and lumpy, probably British, but what’s that big bag for? And the thing bolted onto the rear bumper? Some sort of steam gizmo?”

  “Naw. That’s a charcoal burner. Aussies couldn’t get much gasoline during the war and right after. Rationing. Some smart cookie came up with those burner things. They made something; coal gas maybe, I don’t know for sure. Whatever it was, a motor would run on it. Filthy, stinking gadgets, but they worked.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  I studied the boat photo next and wondered how big she was and how far you could sail in her and whether she was still afloat. Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d been born about fifty years too late.

  Thorney kept bitching at Beth and Ron. “Why’d he want to know that? What’s he gonna do, ask me every stupid question he can think up?”

  Beth said something soothing. Ron made his “Thorney …” drone again. I kept working my way around the room bein
g nosy.

  On a shelf near one corner I found a wooden box about a foot square and six inches high. It had tarnished brass corner protectors and a scuffed leather carry strap. I peeked into the box.

  A sextant. Old, probably. Well-worn, at least, because the markings on the arc were dim and hard to make out. That was the third time I’d seen a real sextant close up. Again I promised myself I would learn how to use one someday.

  “That’s it,” Thorney roared. “Bad enough you all got to come around here, taking up my time. Now he’s pawing through my stuff. Get away from there, you.”

  I gently closed the box and turned toward him. “I’ll pay you two hundred dollars if you’ll teach me how to use a sextant,” I said.

  “Go on, get out of here, all of you.” The old man was seated on a cracked leather couch beside Beth. She tried to calm him down. He waved his arms around, to keep her from touching him, apparently. She kept trying; he kept flailing his arms. Twice he almost clipped her in the face with one of those big hands.

  I stepped over and grabbed his right wrist. “Settle down! Or you’ll hit her by mistake.”

  Beth shrank back to her end of the couch. Ron stopped saying “Thorney …” and started saying “Rafferty …”

  “Lemme go, you big hunk of …” Thorney said. He struggled. Got to give him credit, the old man was powerful for his age.

  I motioned to Honeybu—why did I keep reverting to that name?—I motioned to Beth and she left the couch. When she was out of Thorney’s range, I let him go. He snatched his arm up close to his chest and rubbed his wrist with the other hand.

  I sat down beside him. “Now listen to me, you snarly old fart. These people care for you. They’ve wasted the last half hour trying to convince you to enjoy what’s going to happen. Me, I don’t care whether you enjoy it or not. So I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I will be around here off and on for a few days. I’ll be assembling a file that might—repeat, might—help you in case you pull another screwball stunt like shooting at those kids. That’s what I’m going to do whether you like it or not, whether you help me or not. If you will help me and if we get lucky, maybe I can get those kids off your back.”