“Are you finished?”
“Let’s see … geese, fish — care to hear something in a ‘blind alley’ phrase?”
“What clues did you come here looking for then?”
“That’s just the thing,” I explained, looking around the room again. “I try never to come into a situation like this one with any preconceptions at all. I try to let the clues find me, rather than the other way around.”
“How often does that work?” His voice was dripping, but I couldn’t decide if disdain was the predominant chord, or only irony.
So I stared him in the eye again. “Every time.”
He didn’t blink. “Still, the doll’s not here. Is it.” Not a question.
13. Zen Punch Line #13
“So the doll wasn’t there? So what?”
Dally was still pacing. She’d been doing it since I’d returned from Beth’s apartment.
“That’s not the point, pal. The point is, the place was all locked up from the inside. Something Dane didn’t even comment on.”
“Oh.” She stopped. “Right. But was it because he was so focused on the money thing or because he already knew it would be locked from the inside?”
“Exactly.” I nodded. “I don’t trust him for half a measure.”
“I was wondering when we’d get around to the musical metaphors.”
“Oh.” I leaned forward, “You’re going to fault me for a little in-keeping-with-the-situation phrase?”
“So why’d you leave the kid’s place so quickly?”
I sat back into the sofa. Dally’s sofa is alive. You lean back, it embraces you, and you feel comforted. I sighed.
“Well” — my eyes half closed — “just as we were going to give the outer room a good going-over, we heard people rousing themselves downstairs. Apparently they’d been there all the time, although it was hard for me to believe that my racket hadn’t piqued their interest before.”
“I guess when your upstairs neighbor is a streetwalker, you get used to a little ambient chaos.” She disappeared into the kitchen.
“I guess. So Dane beat it out the front door, I clicked the padlock, shimmied down the trellis in the back, and we were gone before the guys downstairs had a chance to heat up their first shots of the day.”
“Junkies?”
“What crackhead’s going to sleep through all that noise? I’m telling you I could have waked the dead, maybe did. Only junkies can sleep like that.”
“Okay, so what was the point of going over there, again?”
I closed my eyes completely. “(A) To fit Dane into the picture, (B) to check for clues like a real detective, (C) to get the lay of the land.”
Her head poked out of the kitchen. “Explain C.”
“Is this neighborhood the center point, or is it the park?”
“What do you mean?”
“My fear” — I opened my eyes — “was that Beth’s place was somehow close by here and that the person who’s hoisting up these women to give them dancing lessons is just grabbing anybody in your neighborhood.”
“Oh.” Merest of pauses. “And?”
“And Beth’s place is like another part of town. Close to here geographically, yeah, but it’s another world, economically or … socially. I mean, junkies and hookers and bikers and rats. Not someplace you’d just casually wander to from here. You know how Midtown is.”
“Which makes the park” — she went back into the kitchen — “the actual territory de crime.”
“Check.” I slouched. “But there’s more.”
“Such as,” she called, invisibly.
“Such as a photo on her bedroom wall that looked, I think, like the work of your recently deceased upstairs neighbor.”
Silence.
“Dally?”
She reappeared. “One of Minnie’s photographs was up in Dane’s niece’s apartment?”
“That’s what it looked like to me, at first glance. Also there were charcoal sketches — like an art student might draw.”
She just stood there.
I watched her for a moment, then spoke right up again. “As long as you’re doing your impersonation of the baffled club owner, tell me what’s wrong with what I’ve said about the kid’s apartment so far.”
“What are you asking me?”
“The place was locked from the inside — door and window.”
“Like you said.”
“And there was police tape across the front …” I waited.
Her eyes grew wide. “Are you saying that the police haven’t been inside her apartment yet?”
“It’s not likely they got in and out the same way I did.”
“Wouldn’t they have just busted in?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t want to disturb the scene, as they say. Huyne seems like a stickler to me. I guess it could be that the boys in blue found the place, couldn’t get in, slapped up a little tape, and are planning to come back in the very near future for their official visit.”
“Well,” she smiled, “that’s got to be kind of bad news for you, seeing as you’ve now slathered your fingerprints all over the joint.”
I nodded. “If only I’d thought of all this before I went into the place.”
“Still,” — her smile got bigger — “our boy Huyne, stickler or no, seems an understanding sort.”
“That’s one way to put it.” My eyes opened up plenty. “And by the way, just exactly what did he want after I left?”
“Like he said, he just wanted to make sure I was all right.” She stood in the doorway, not looking at me. “I think he was so stunned by your manly presence here that he skipped whatever else he might have wanted — for the time being.”
“Good.” I nodded. “I owe him one anyway for making me feel like a hound dog and for scaring poor little Joepye.”
“You know you don’t want to mess with that mean policeman.”
“I don’t know that at all.” I squinted at her. “I just might want to mess with him a good bit.”
“So.” She disappeared again. “What’s your next move then, cowboy?”
“Well, if there is a connection between Beth and Minnie, I’d like to know what it was.”
“Maybe she just bought the photo somewhere.”
“You didn’t see the place, hon. This was not a well-thought-out decor. In fact, there wasn’t anything else at all up in the bedroom. And in the living room there was a Domino’s coupon sheet stuck up with a pushpin.”
“I love that pizza.”
“Be that as it may.”
Silence.
Then, her face again in the doorframe. “By the way?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really glad you stayed the night last night. Just thought I’d mention it.
“Okay.” I smiled. “It was worth it, actually, just to see the look on Huyne’s face.”
“Wish I’d been there.” Back into the kitchen again.
“Man.” I leaned forward. “I’ve really got to stop staying up all hours. I feel like a nap.”
“A nap?” she called. “Some tough guy.”
“How many times have I told you I never even pretended to be a tough guy?”
“Exactly seventeen thousand, I believe.”
“And” — I finally managed to stand — “you still don’t believe me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving,” I told her, straightening my jacket.
“Before breakfast?” She made her grand appearance through the doorway with a brimming tray.
I stared. “You made breakfast for me?”
She gave me a curt nod. “Yes, sir, I did. It’s a thank-you-Masked-Man breakfast, the kind the Lone Ranger would never stay and eat.” Then she tossed her head toward the rarely used dining room table. “Sit.”
Usually Dally’s dining room table would be cluttered with newspapers and mail and half-read books. But it was cleared and spotless. Kind of frightening.
“Wh
o came in and messed up your usual table decor?” I stood my ground.
“Move, wise guy.” She shoved me a little with the tray.
We both sat; she shoved plates of food my way: French toast, smoked trout, red seedless grapes, bubble water, and more espresso.
I gave it all the once-over. “What’s the occasion?”
She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out an envelope, “Payday.” She dangled it for a moment, then laid it in front of me.
On the front it said “Dick test.”
I looked up at her. “Test? Did I pass?”
She didn’t smile. “A Dick test is the test doctors give you to see if you’re immune to scarlet fever or not by injecting you with scarlet fever toxin.”
“Really?”
“That’s right.” She nodded, staring at the envelope. “Take a look inside.”
I did. It was full of hundred-dollar bills.
I looked up at her.
“As soon as Huyne left, some guy as big as a cement mixer came pounding on the door. Said the envelope was for you.”
“Did he say who it was from?”
She leaned back in her chair. “The Pineapple.”
“Oh.”
“You haven’t even started working on his case, have you?”
“Not exactly.” I pulled the French toast toward me. “But it’s been on my mind.”
“So why do you think he sent you all this stuff about scarlet fever?”
“Well, you know about his penchant for hundred-dollar words and phrases.” I put a fork in the toast. “It’s my guess he’s playing some kind of word game with me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Just seems like his way.”
“So what are you going to do about it — his Janey problem?”
“Don’t know.”
“Big money, mystery maladies, and Mickey Nichols — and you don’t even have the courtesy to break a sweat.” She leaned forward. “Are you just trying to make me irritated by being calm and obtuse?”
I paused a second in my attack on the fried bread. “When things threaten to get complicated and to overwhelm you, and there’s a policeman, a gangster, a Joepye, a murderer, and a rich man all circling around you like hungry tigers, and you’re eating a fine repast like this” — I looked up at her and took a bite — “all you can say is … ‘Now that's a great breakfast.’”
“So you are trying to irritate me.” She stared.
“Don’t you know that Zen story?” I kept eating. “The guy hanging from a ledge with a vicious tiger above him and a hungry tiger down below? And what does he do? He reaches out, tastes a grape that’s growing there on the cliff, and thinks, Now that's a good grape." I smiled. “See?”
“I see that if Mickey ‘the Pineapple’ Nichols gets mad all over you,” she insisted in a low voice, “you will be in one sad and sorry world, my very good friend, and in no condition to be eating grapes at all.”
“Doing your Mickey imitation is not helping my digestion of this exceptional smoked trout. Where’d you get it?”
“Where I get my smoked trout is not the point.”
“All right, I’ll tell you the point.” I set my fork down for emphasis. “The point is, I need to clear my mind, not clutter it. If I start worrying now about this-and-such riddle, or that-and-so threat, I can’t do my job. Then I’m good for nothing.”
“So you’re trying to stay calm so you can get the job done.”
“Right. No thanks to you, I might add.” I picked up my fork again. “A lot of people mistake my relaxed grip on the situation for being lazy, you know.”
“That’s because,” she began, already elevated in volume from the previous sentence, “you’re always saying you’re lazy.”
“Correct.” I nodded. “But I’m almost positive that you’ve figured it out by now: I’m deliberately trying to mislead everyone. It gives me an advantage to be incorrectly perceived, don’t you think?”
“You don’t think that I don’t know by now that you’d like for me to think that it’s just a pose when you say you’re lazy but that you actually are lazy and you just pretend to be to cover that up?”
I looked up from my delicious breakfast. “I have no idea what that sentence even means.”
“It means, don’t play games with me, mister,” she told me in no uncertain terms, shaking a finger dangerously close to my face, “because I know what you really are.”
“Well, that’s true.” I smiled. “You might actually be the only person alive who knows what I really am.” Smile got bigger. “I guess I’m lucky that way. Most people stagger around without anyone at all knowing who or what they are.”
She took her time, but she gave me the big sigh. “Well, you sure can be sweet when you want to be.”
“That?” I pushed my plate away. “I wasn’t even trying with that.”
“So maybe now you’ll tell me,” her voice was quieter again, “what you’re going to do next.”
I nodded, wiping my lips with the handy paper towel on the tray. “I’m going to visit Foggy Moskovitz.”
She nearly lifted out of her chair. “Oh no you’re not.”
“I’m not?” I stuck a somewhat jaunty elbow on her table and leaned in. “And why not?”
“Because I don’t want you anywhere near those thug types when your prints are peppered all over some murdered hooker’s bedroom, that’s why. You’re liable to lose what good standing you have with Detective Huyne.”
“And yet” — I forged bravely ahead — “Foggy is the key to Janey and Mickey.” I cocked my head. “Hey. Mickey, Minnie, Foggy — is this a Disney movie?”
“You keep it up with the wisecracks. They love that sort of thing in prison.”
“I’m not going to prison.”
She stood up. “That’s right, you’re not, but no thanks to you.” Big sigh. “I have to do everything.”
I stood too. “Everything in this case means …?”
“I’m going with you to visit Foggy. You need a shield.”
From cruel experience I had long since realized the folly of denying Ms. Oglethorpe a trip if she really wanted to travel — and so we set off together for the wrong part of town.
14. The One That Got Away
Of course, in Atlanta there are so many neighborhoods vying for that title that we could have gone in nearly any direction. Southwest, where I’d spent some of my younger days, could be pretty rough in a juvenile delinquent sort of way. And for my money, Buckhead’s a bad environment just because of the overabundance of young lawyers with hormones in bars, but I digress.
In our particular case that day, we headed south down Peachtree. After we passed through a stretch of abandoned buildings and homeless nirvanas created by belly-up businesses, we came to a stop just short of the actual downtown area on a block that was dominated — if that’s not too coy a reference — by a huge store called Good Vibrations, where they sold battery-operated companionship and leather goods too expensive for your dog.
Foggy Moskovitz had an “office” in the lofts above the store, a small room with a few chairs, a coffee machine, and no windows.
Even though we hadn’t called ahead, I was fairly certain he’d be there. He was known as a conscientious sort who, despite his reputation as a prime booster, had a work ethic that would shame a nineteenth-century farmer.
We parked on the side street at a broken meter and zipped up the stairs in back of the building.
His door was open, and there was soft humming coming from inside. I peered in, keeping Dally a little behind me, and there was Foggy, eyes closed, singing along to a tune he was listening to on his portable CD player. He was dressed in a gray double-breasted that could only be called dapper, cuff links, silk tie, high-tone Italian loafers.
I knocked hard on the doorframe, and his eyes popped open.
“Huh?” He threw himself forward, put his hand over his heart like he was having an attack, but I knew what he was checking.
He smiled and sat back in his chair. He held up one finger, nodded, then punched the CD player.
“Mr. Tucker.”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “And look who’s with me.”
Dally poked her head in and smiled that smile.
He stood instantly. “Ms. Oglethorpe. My God.”
He gave the room a quick once-over. “You must excuse the way the place looks. I am, as you can see, between decorators.”
“Yes.” She couldn’t help laughing as she stepped in, “I can see that. Still, I love the simplicity of the current design.”
“Universal essences” — he held up a finger again — “should not be unnecessarily multiplied.”
“Occam’s Razor.” She nodded. “I’m familiar with the concept.”
He stared at me. “Is she the finest woman in the Western Hemisphere?”
“Without a doubt,” I told him in no uncertain terms.
“So to what may I owe the considerable pleasure of this visit?” He glanced between the two of us with just the right combination of amusement and suspicion.
I held out my palm again, this time to indicate the well-worn chairs. “Shall we take a seat?”
“Oh.” He looked at the chairs. “I see. This is to be a sit-down visit.”
“If you don’t mind.” I hesitated.
He took half a moment, then moved. “Who would mind?” And he stood holding the back of one of the chairs for a full twenty seconds before Dally realized he was holding it for her. Then he called out, “Daniel? Would you come in, please?”
Daniel Frank materialized in the doorway. He’d been behind us the whole time. I knew the guy from the old days, when we were both playing in bands. He was a tenor sax man, stood about four and a half feet tall, and was solid as a fire plug. He claimed to be related to Anne Frank, which I never believed, and to Leo Frank, which he had documented to my satisfaction one late, late night at Easy. Leo Frank was the man who had been incorrectly lynched — if that’s not a redundancy — for the murder of Mary Phagan in the old days. Daniel had told me he still carried a grudge. The last time I’d seen him was when his band had played at a fundraiser for Sam Massell, Atlanta’s only Jewish mayor, which had been quite some time back.
Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Page 8