by Grant Mccrea
I slipped Manny twenty bucks to hustle them out of there, and we took up residence.
The room wasn’t really a room at all. More like a cubicle, slightly elevated and concealed from the rest of the degenerates in the place by a set of long-faded cigarette-burned vintage 1930s speakeasy-style maroon velvet drapes.
The VIP cubicle.
I was happy to see that Rod didn’t stand on department protocol, and ordered a Guinness with a tequila back. I refrained from commenting on the curious libatious juxtaposition. More power to him, I thought.
Mr. Pockmark stayed at the door. I guess they figured me and Butch for an escape risk. Or maybe an excape risk, as I imagined Mr. Pockmark putting it.
After the obligatory pleasantries between Butch and Rod, Rod leaned his chair back against the wall, gave us the download. Slowly. Taking his time. Like a guy having a beer after a hard day pounding the pavement.
She’d been found face up. There were open wounds on her back and buttocks. Looked like lash marks. Cause of death as yet undetermined. But ligature marks on her neck pointed to strangulation. Whatever it was, it hadn’t happened across the street. The body had been brought there from somewhere else.
Sexually assaulted? asked Butch.
I’m not the medical examiner, said the Bear, making a show of scratching his crotch, but just between you and me, yeah. Anal.
Shit, I mumbled into my scotch glass. The fucker.
What you say? asked Rod, his chair banging to the linoleum as he leaned forward to give me a hard look.
Damn, I said. I wish I hadn’t said that.
No you don’t, he said. You’re damn happy you did. ’Cause if you didn’t, when I found out later you knew something you didn’t tell me, I’d be reaming you a new asshole. Maybe two.
In the circumstances, I regarded the remark as being in poor taste.
And you’re going to be a damn sight happier, he went on, when you tell me what the hell you meant by that. Or should I say, fucking unhappy as hell if you don’t.
Hey, hey, said Butch, calm down, Rod. Rick’s going to tell you.
I know he is, he said evenly.
Rod didn’t take his eyes off me. His Look was half ‘you dumb fuck’ and half ‘you bought it, now you gonna pay for it.’
I know I have to tell you, I said. I’m going to tell you. But my information comes from a case I’m working on. Very private matter. Very sensitive.
Not as sensitive as your left nut’s gonna be when I get through with it, Ricky boy.
Come on, guys, let’s take it easy, said Butch. Rick, go to the men’s room or something, I got to talk to Rod about something.
I got up real quick. Rod didn’t seem too happy about it. Nodded at Mr. Pocky. Pocky followed me to the gents, stood outside the door. I guess that was his specialty. Standing in doorways. He must be in big demand, I thought. Everybody needs a guy to stand in a doorway.
I took my time. I took enough time that Pocky came in to check me out. See if the perp had fled out the two-foot-by-six-inch barred window seven feet above the urinal. Anyway, I gave Butch enough time to soften Rod up. Alert him to the sensitivities. Nothing would come back to us. He’d use what we told him, but he’d take ownership of it.
That was good enough for me. Hell, it had to be. I get an allergic reaction to jail cells. And testicle clamps.
I told Rod the story. Some of it, anyway. I didn’t need any nods and winks from Butch to know not to tell him Butch had been at the stakeout. I told him about the Hooded Man. Gave him the best description of the guy I could. Which wasn’t much. And the car. Told him we’d already run the plates. Rented. Butch had followed up. Guy who rented it didn’t exist.
So, Mr. Rick Redman, said Rod when I’d finished the story. Just how did you come to be staking out the suburban home of the recently deceased, anyway?
Suburban? I said involuntarily.
Rod, Rod, said Butch. Can you give us a ride on that one for now? Just for a while. You know Rick was on a job. The client doesn’t know about … what happened. The thing across the street. I’m telling you, man, if you guys barge in with this news … the client—Butch almost slipped up and said ‘she’—ain’t gonna give you a thing. You gotta trust me on this one, man. We go to the client, the client trusts us. Trusts Rick. We can get stuff you wouldn’t. Whatever there is, anyway. I can tell you for sure the client isn’t involved in this. But the client may have … some information. I don’t know. But you have my word we’ll share it with you. Just give us a day or two.
Rod never looked at Butch during this speech. He kept looking directly at me. He stared me down. I played with my scotch. I sucked on an ice cube. Hours went by. Well, minutes, maybe. Or seconds. But they were those hour-type minutes and seconds.
Okay, said Rod.
My toes unclenched.
I remarked to myself that I had been unaware that my toes had been clenched. In fact, I ruminated, I hadn’t even been aware that toes could be clenched. The concept of toe clenching was a new one for me. I wondered whether it was a tell. Like tooth clenching. Or riffling your chips with your left hand instead of your right.
Rod turned to Butch. But only ’cause it’s you, he said. I’m releasing this guy into your custody.
What do you mean, releasing me? I said. What the fuck did I do?
Material witness, he said. Whatever. I don’t need to justify it to you. You’ll get plenty of justification later.
Jesus. I hadn’t felt such palpable disrespect since the old days with that pompous martinet Warwick, esteemed chairman of my late and wholly unlamented law firm. Hmm, I pondered, was the expression ‘pompous martinet’ redundant? Are all martinets pompous? I shelved the question for another day.
Anyway, Rod’s pronouncement would have to do. I was still a free man.
It was a start.
We went out to flag a cab. In the empty lot next door, sitting on a decaying concrete block, was a dyed blonde in cutoff shorts and a Megadeth t-shirt, her thighs tattooed from the knees up. She had a slight pot belly, and when she smiled you could see the missing molars. She was playing with a raggedy little girl. She was holding one end of a stretchy rubber spider. The kid was trying to pull it away from her mother. It stretched and stretched, snapped back to Mom, sending the little girl into cascades of giggles. They did it over and over.
They looked happier than anyone I’d seen in a long time.
71.
WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? Sheila asked.
Doing what?
This orgy of self-destruction.
Is an orgy something that you do?
Rick.
Yes, okay. I’ll stop being childish.
Silence.
I don’t know, I said.
Then let’s talk about how you feel.
Feel about what?
Not about. When. How you feel when you’re doing these things.
What things?
Rick, please.
Okay, okay. Let me think about it.
Silence.
I don’t know, I said at last.
You don’t know.
You know what’s nice about this motel room?
What?
There aren’t any mirrors. The only mirror is on the inside of the closet door. I can keep it closed. Not have to look at myself.
Rick.
Yes?
Can we get back to the question?
What was the question?
How you feel when you’re doing these self-destructive things.
What self-destructive things?
Rick, it’s your money.
Yes, yes, sorry. You mean, drinking myself sick every night? Shooting people? Getting into debt to known Russian psychopaths?
That kind of thing.
Embezzling client funds? Getting into fights? Messing up every relationship with a woman I’ve ever had? Having unprotected sex with near strangers? That kind of thing?
That kind of thing.
I don’t know.<
br />
You don’t know.
No, I don’t. I really don’t. Because when they’re happening, I’m just there. It’s happening. Stuff is happening. And I may be terrified. I may be confused. I may be riding the endorphin wave. Either way, I eat it up. I need it. There’s something in me that just needs it. Whatever it is. The more extreme, the better. The more outrageous, the better. It’s like I’m proving something.
What are you proving?
I’m not sure.
Think about it, she said.
I didn’t want to think about it. But I pretended to anyway.
I couldn’t think of anything.
It seems to me, she said, that anybody in your position would be angry. Furious. Enraged. Somebody drugged you. Left you shackled. Your friend died. Somebody killed your client’s sister. But you don’t seem to be angry.
No, I’m not angry.
Why not?
I don’t know. I guess I’ve trained myself. Not to go on tilt. Poker tilt, life tilt. Tilting is bad. When you tilt, you lose.
Poker isn’t life.
Yes it is.
No it isn’t, Rick. In life, if you suppress your emotions, they come back later, in another form. Illness. Anxiety. Depression. Does that sound familiar?
I thought depression and alcoholism were diseases.
They are. Of course. But the things you do can make them worse. Much worse.
I know I’m not perfect, I said. Jesus, I know I don’t even come close. My problem isn’t that. It’s that I can’t stop worrying about it. Keeping score. It’s like my life is the perpetual World Series of Goodness. Night of laughter and love with Kelley and Peter—home run. Run off to the bar to avoid ambivalence about the direction of my life—two-run double for the Devil in Me. Quit my job—okay, that was a while ago, and it’s hard to say who scored on it. Call it a wash. Do they have washes in baseball? A scoreless inning, I guess. Poker metaphors are better. Hit the flush on the river. Folded Aces on the turn. Got my Kings cracked by Seven, Eight suited. Every poker hand has a real-life analogue, contrary to the opinion of certain shrinks of my acquaintance. Fail to save two lives, big suckout, baby. Big suckout.
Rick, you realize what you’re doing, don’t you?
Yes, I do, actually. Avoidance. I’m supposed to be thinking about what I’m trying to prove.
How you feel about it.
That, too. Exactly. I know, I know. I’m babbling. Free-associating. Trying to eat up the minutes with trivial entertainment so I don’t have to face up to the pathetic reality that is my life.
Entertainment?
Okay, okay. A desperate but doomed attempt at entertainment.
She laughed.
It felt good.
But you’re right, she said, serious again. Not the pathetic part. The avoidance part.
So let’s face up to it, I said. Let’s square up to the basket. Let’s shoot the ball and see if it goes in.
Rick …
Yes, yes. Jesus, I can’t stop myself.
Let me try, she said.
Shoot, I said, wincing.
Rick, she said sternly. I want you to stand up.
I stood up.
I want you to walk to the closet door.
I walked to the closet door. I felt oddly relieved. Someone was taking responsibility. Taking my choices away. The choices I didn’t know how to make.
Open the door, she said.
I opened the door a foot or so.
It’s black in there, I said.
All the way, she said.
I opened the door all the way.
Look in the mirror, she said.
I looked.
What do you see? she asked.
Veins in my nose, I said.
What else?
Three days’ growth.
And?
A paunch. Slumped shoulders, narrower than they used to be. A guy who needs a haircut. Badly. A long stain on my shirt that looks like dried blood and probably is. A shirttail hanging out. My right-hand pant leg partly tucked into my sock. Red rings around my wrists.
Yes?
How the hell did that happen?
And?
Blood in my eye?
Blood in your eye?
It’s a metaphor.
A metaphor?
Yes, I thought, a metaphor.
Back to that.
72.
BUTCH AND I TRIED TO FIGURE STUFF OUT. We didn’t get far.
I got to go tell Louise, I said.
Yup .
The cops won’t have found her yet.
Doubt it.
There’s no way. There was no record of Eloise under her real name. They won’t be able to trace any relatives. Not for a while, anyway.
Yup. You got to tell Louise.
I was afraid you’d agree with me.
Not looking forward to it?
What do you think?
He grunted. For Butch, it was part of the job. And it would have been for me. Sort of. If I hadn’t turned Louise into more than a client. Bad enough I’d somehow let the client’s sister get killed. The object of my job. But now. Layers. Multicolored layers of guilt. Eons of striations of guilt. Guilt sediment.
I wasn’t about to tell Butch about it.
Tell me about the last time, said Butch.
What?
The last time you saw her.
Who?
Eloise, you dumb fuck. Who are we talking about?
Oh. Yeah. What’s to tell? I told you already.
Go over it again. Tell me what she looked like. Go back to the trailer. Tell me every damn thing you saw. Every damn word she said. Don’t leave anything out. There’s always something there. Something you didn’t think was important.
Jesus, Butch, who’s the detective here?
Me.
Oh. Right.
I went back over it. Every ugly detail. I described how she’d looked. Handcuffed to the bedstead. Face to the wall. Bruises everywhere. Black, blue, yellow.
Wait a minute, said Butch.
What?
What did you just say?
I repeated the thing about the bruises.
Yellow?
Yeah, yellow. But mostly black. And blue. Like they say in the comics.
What’s comical, said Butch, is your … ah, forget it. How long was it? Between the time you saw the guy go around the house and the time you got there?
I don’t know. Five minutes. Ten.
Think about it. Jesus.
Jesus what? What’s your fucking point?
Rick, how long do you think a bruise takes to turn yellow?
I don’t know. Never thought about it.
I was thinking about it now.
Days, Rick.
Days. Of course.
Meaning …?
Yeah, Butch. I’m not all that stupid. She’d been beat up before. Recently. But not that day.
You got it.
So she knew it was coming.
She knew the guy.
A reasonable assumption. But where does it get us?
We go there. We talk to your Elmer buddy. We talk to the neighbors. We find out who she knew. What they saw.
The cops are doing all that shit.
Maybe.
Of course they are.
All right. You’re right. We wait to see what they come up with. If they come up with shit, we do it ourselves. That what you’re saying?
I don’t like it, I said, but I can’t see any other way. We start stepping on their dicks, it’s the last time we get anything from them.
Yeah. You got a point. So we wait for them on Eloise. What about Brendan?
Same thing, I guess.
No. We don’t wait for them on Brendan. They’re not doing anything on Brendan. They’re waiting for the Toxicology results. They figure he OD’d or something. Why waste resources on a degenerate?
How do you know that?
Please, Rick.
Okay. We wait on Eloise. Brendan,
we find out where he went. We retrace his steps. We shake down some transvestites.
All right, man. You’re the boss.
Damn. I like the sound of that.
Butch went to his room. Brought out a pine box. Opened it up. Took out his gun. Started disassembling it on the coffee table.
I smiled. I couldn’t help it.
That Pandora’s box? I asked.
Butch looked up. Grunted. Went back to cleaning the gun.
73.
YES, IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT. And yes, or no, I had no reason to believe that Louise was the kind of person who stayed up that late. Much more the early-to-bed type. Overly controlled. Controlling. Whatever. I was quite sure she had a regimen. She was very regimented. Unless spread-eagled on a marble bathroom …
I buried the thought. Inappropriate, I told myself, at this time. Anyway, this was an emergency, if ever there was one. Well, sort of. What happened had happened. I’d already procrastinated for hours. But we couldn’t risk her finding out from some other source. The cops weren’t going to find her. But the news would get out, probably. Vegas had a high murder rate. But this one was kind of sexy. I slapped myself. Inappropriate. Newsworthy, I meant. They’d probably be all over it. Damn. I hadn’t thought of that before. It might already be all over the TV. What the fuck was wrong with my brain?
A question that was coming up way too often.
They’d fixed the Mini Cooper, put it back in the lot for me. I went to get it. It was a half-hour exercise. Go down the escalator. Present your ticket to the surly woman at the desk. Watch while she takes three phone calls, chats with her girlfriend at the next computer station. Argue about the five-dollar charge. I play here every day, you say. I’m a regular in the poker room. Wait while she calls the poker room, confirms your bona fides. This time, it works. Save five bucks. Be happy. Wait for the car jockey to bring the Mini. Another ten minutes. Watch the folks from Idaho, sad and swollen and laden with way too many suitcases for a weekend trip. They don’t speak to each other. They don’t speak at all. The Mini heaves into view. Tip the guy five bucks. Oh well, there went five bucks. It’s Vegas. What’re you gonna do?