NO Quarter

by Robert Asprin

  Bone apparently was, or at least he was looking to break into the field. His ex-wife had been murdered, and he had a real stake in seeing her avenged. And I had—what? A stake in not seeing him get himself into irreparable trouble, maybe get himself killed? He was going to be taking on a rough customer, an ex-con, one who’d punched an ice pick twice through his ex-wife’s heart—one who might possibly be dabbling in the occult.

  I still found it more amusing than irritating that I’d had to present Bone with my “credentials” to qualify to come on board this thing. But amusing or not, it showed me I was serious. Obviously I wasn’t in the habit of revealing my past to people. Bone, then, was different.

  When I entered the Calf, a nod Padre’s way was all it took to get me my Irish. When he brought it over, I asked, “Has Bone been through already?”

  “Nope.”

  I waited. The regulars popped up one by one or in pairs, but I didn’t join in any of the conversation clusters, not even when they started casting a fictitious remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  The night Sunshine had been murdered, Bone had gone off to Big Daddy’s asking questions. Bad move. It was sticking his head up unnecessarily, letting people know he was interested in the killing. The only one who really knew I was interested was Mother Mystic, and I knew she was trustworthy. She had proven that by sharing her information tonight.

  The clock was creeping up on two when I finally admitted I was worried. Bone still hadn’t arrived. I had an ashtray full of butts in front of me, which Padre spotted and dumped.

  “Another, Maestro?” He nodded at my rock glass.

  Should I go out looking? Did I really want to partner with someone as frankly amateurish as Bone? If he got himself in dutch, was I going to get pulled down with him?

  It was easier to answer Padre’s question. “Yeah. Please.”

  A short while later, Alex showed up and spotted me. “Thank gods it’s Friday,” she said as she gave me a swift peck and hug. It was the end of her workweek. I slid a bill toward Padre to pay for her drink and smirked at her “thank gods” comment. It indicated she was of the neo-pagan persuasion, a vague amalgam of earthy, aboriginal worships that seems to be the dominant religion in the Quarter. (I’ve been in the Deep South ten years. It may be the Bible Belt, but I still don’t personally know any Baptists.) I wondered fleetingly what beliefs Bone had, if any. I would have figured him for a devout atheist.

  Alex looked around as she took the barstool next to mine. “Seen Bone around anywhere?”

  I shrugged. “Must be running late.” I made it sound casual.

  She took a long pull on her cocktail. Obviously it had been a grueling week for her. She dug her cross-stitching out of her knapsack to show me her latest project, and I paid dutiful attention. And continued to wait.

  Bone doesn’t have much skin tone, even for a Caucasian, even for a Quarter night waiter. But he looked extra pale when he came through the Calf’s door.

  Alex hurtled off her stool faster than I guessed I could move even during swordplay. I hung back, waiting, very antsy now. Bone was quickly reassuring Alex, their voices below the level of the jukebox that someone had fed a few bucks.

  Their body language—especially Bone’s—told me that I was right in what I’d been thinking. Bone was starting to figure out how he felt about her.

  Finally they came over together.

  “Cops,” Bone said to me. “Actually—cop. A detective. Guy I know who knew where I work. He wanted to talk to me ... about Sunshine. Thanks, Padre.” He picked up his glass, took a swallow. I noted that his hand wasn’t shaky. Neither was he giving off a panicky vibe.

  Whatever had happened, he’d kept his cool.

  “Detective Zanders. He asked me my whereabouts. Lucky the night manager was there at the restaurant, and was there two nights ago too, when Sunshine ... well. You’ll be happy to know I’m not a suspect in her murder.”

  He met my eyes. I nodded with a shallow dip of my chin.

  Bone fished out a cigarette, but his lighter just threw sparks when he flicked it. “Dammit,” he muttered as Alex lit it for him.

  My gaze shot significantly at her as she leaned past me, then I threw a quick questioning look at Bone.

  It was his turn to nod slyly. He put an arm around Alex’s shoulders. “Alex,” he said, “I’m pretty wound up from this. Plus it was a rough night at work. Would you mind if I didn’t walk you home tonight? Let me call you a cab instead? I need to stay out a while ...”

  I moved away to let them talk in private. Bone had always insisted he and Alex were just good friends, but to me, it looked like something more, even if he wasn’t aware of it. He was very protective of her, and she always seemed to be there for him.

  A few minutes later Padre phoned for a cab. A few minutes after that the United rolled up to the curb and Alex went out after kissing Bone on the cheek and waving a big, general goodbye. The building that housed both their apartments was somewhere on Burgundy, more toward the quiet residential end around Esplanade. Quiet, yes, but also where predators will most often sneak through on the off chance of catching someone alone on the sidewalks. Alex, in her black pants and white shirt, was wearing “target” clothes: standard wait-staff wear, even though she was only a clerk in a gift shop. Therefore, the cab—even though home was technically easy walking distance.

  Bone sat down next to me with a grunt. “Christ ...”

  “Have you told her anything about it?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “It.”

  “Oh.” He took a swallow of his drink. “No. Nothing about going looking for Sunshine’s killer. These last two days ... they haven’t been fun. Alex and Sunshine were very close. They had this long-lost sister thing going. Before Sunshine ... well, shit! Before Sunshine started changing.”

  “Okay,” I looked at him. “Are you planning on telling her?”

  He regarded me flatly. “Yes. Of course. Among other things, she’s got the right to know.”

  “You think so?”

  “I definitely do. The three of us were like family ... once.”

  I’ve had relationships, mostly of the hello/goodbye variety, including several here in the Quarter, but I’ve never been married, never had a female best friend. I could understand Bone’s loyalty to Alex because I was experienced and knowledgeable and full of aging wisdom—ha!—but I couldn’t really understand, you know? It was guesswork on my part.

  Even so, I’m pretty good at guesswork. I figured that Bone had come to a sudden, dim realization regarding his feelings toward Alex, but he was still too caught up in his memories of Sunshine and their three-way friendship to see what anyone else could plainly see about Alex. She was completely gone on him, probably had been all the while when he was married to Sunshine, but she was far too good of a person to ever let it show. And she’d been there for him ever since Sunshine left him, being the friend he needed instead of pushing him to notice her. Probably suffering a little guilt for what she felt for him, too, and maybe even some misplaced guilt for the breakup of his marriage.

  A damned complicated situation, one mined with all kinds of potential emotional explosives. Would Bone’s decision to include Alex affect what he and I meant to do? Would she get underfoot, become a distraction?

  “So,” Bone drained his glass. “When Detective Zanders came around tonight to question me he pretty much confirmed, without actually saying as much, that the police haven’t made any arrests in Sunshine’s case. In fact, it seems that by questioning me they’re scraping the bottom of the suspect barrel. Which means they’ve got nothing, nada, nil. So ...” His eyes went to the clock on the wall. “Ding, ding. Time’s up. Forty-eight hours, Maestro. What do you say?”

  I sighed. “Sure you wouldn’t rather talk movies, have another drink? We were remaking
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest earlier. How would you cast it?”

  “Cuckoo’s Nest,” he said slowly.

  It didn’t seem credible he didn’t know it. Actually it didn’t seem likely there was a movie made he wasn’t thoroughly familiar with. “Y’know, with Jack Nicholson ...”

  “I know the film. Some things shouldn’t be tampered with.” He shook himself visibly. “Well, Maestro. We start this now, together—or we part company, now, over it.”

  I sat a moment, looking at him.

  “You understand that if the killer’s not in the Quarter we don’t stand a chance of finding him. If he’s split town, or even if he’s gone to ground in New Orleans East, he’s as good as on the moon.”

  Bone nodded. He was still waiting for my answer. But I’d already decided.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said.

  A lot of Quarterites draw the line in the sand at noon and will not cross it. Daylight is meant to be slept through, or so say those that work the graveyard shifts, or those that can’t stop drinking once they start and so do it until the sunrise tells them to go the hell home. The bohemians like this schedule because it further distances them from the bourgeois lifestyles they so loathe.

  Myself, I don’t like sleeping too, too late. It’s a lousy thing to stir in the late afternoon, brush your teeth, grab your shoes, and go to work.

  Even so, when I slipped out of bed shortly after 10 a.m.—having been out until the not-so-wee hours with Maestro—it was a shock to my system.

  Alex’s apartment had been dark when I’d come in last night, and there was no sign that she was stirring yet this morning. Hopefully she was still sleeping. Today was her day off. Which was why I was prowling out this early. I could take care of an item on the to-do list Maestro and I had concocted and be back about the time Alex normally got up. I had to talk to her. She had to know what was going on. That she had a right to know wasn’t just something noble-sounding I’d said to Maestro. It was the plainest truth. She had been Sunshine’s best friend, had been part of my family—while I’d had one. She didn’t show her pain and fury the same way I did, but I knew it was there. And I needed her to know that someone—that I—was trying to find justice for Sunshine.

  I threw on some clothes and started to make coffee only to discover I had run out. I grabbed my boots from the living room, where Booboo lay splayed comatose across the arm of the couch, no doubt dreaming she was a great leopard lolling on a tree branch on the Veldt. Her black, triangular ears abruptly perked up, reacting to some noise in her dream-hunt, her head lifted, rolled, and she promptly and gracelessly dumped herself to the floor. I pulled on my boots and got out of there so that her indignity wouldn’t be compounded. I’ve no children and never will have, but Booboo satisfies whatever paternal itch I might be harboring. Doesn’t matter that my child is a bit clumsy.

  Queasy heat and daylight were waiting for me. I swayed, realized I’d damned well better get some coffee in me if I meant to function at all. I started out toward the river. I could swing back around after, hit my target and then head home.

  Workmen were on several different surrounding rooftops above, yanking up old shingles, driving nails. That much nearer the murderous sun, and not a lick of cloud in the sky today, and doing manual labor ... dreadful. I could have a worse job than what I’ve got. I know that.

  Some part of the Quarter is always under repair. I sometimes wonder if we’re not the proverbial grandfather’s axe. You know the one: the handle’s been replaced four times and the blade-head three, but we still call it the original axe.

  I scratched the stubble under my chin. I hadn’t shaved yesterday or the day before, wouldn’t bother today. I don’t need to be unreasonably groomed for work.

  It had been that unpleasant, cringe-inducing incident at Molly’s on Toulouse—that and my ex-husband status was what had brought Detective Zanders around to see me. That very last time I had seen Sunshine alive, a week and a half ago now, and we’d ended up screaming at each other, squandering that last moment that wasn’t going to come again. My fist bunched at my side as I slogged on. Goddammit! It was so hateful, so cruel. More than my ex-wife, she had been my dearest friend, and we didn’t get our goodbyes in, didn’t leave things on anything remotely resembling a kind note. It was, I knew, one of those ruthless little jokes of fate that would stay with me for the rest of my days.

  Explaining the incident to Zanders, however, had meant recounting Sunshine’s condition that night—her high-tension anger, her shrieky mind-altered behavior. There was no way to pretty it up, to paint her personality that night as anything except that of a raving maniac’s ... and that hurt, describing her that way. It magnified how I already felt about the entire thing. It was like ... pissing on her grave.

  Except, of course, she probably wasn’t in the ground yet. There was a grisly thought. I knew she had family—a mother anyway—in Chicago and presumed the ... body ... would go there.

  Is this how it goes? Sunshine stops being Sunshine, and becomes, instead, a body; from animate to inanimate in my thoughts. Next? Sunshine was, not Sunshine is.

  These were inevitabilities, of course. That was how it went, and, more to the point, how it was supposed to go. Humans must process the deaths of those around them. Sunshine wasn’t the first person I’d known who had died, though she was certainly the closest to me. She was also the only one I personally knew who had been murdered.

  I generally frown on people that visit their places of work during their off-hours. Don’t you have anything better to do? Yet here I was, blinking at the familiar yet strange dining room currently awash in stark daylight and populated by just a few occupied tables, and this the decidedly subdued breakfast crowd.

  I went to sit at the L-shaped bar. A minute later P.J. came up to the other side.

  “Bone. Out in the daytime. And you haven’t burst into flames.”

  “Hilarious. Coffee, P.J. Please.”

  I’d always thought her a good waitress, too good to be wasting her time on this dead-ass shift. I dug out my smokes.

  She set a hot cup in front of me. “Do you want some breakfast with that?”

  I’d remembered to refill my lighter with fluid. I lit a cigarette. “This is breakfast,” I assured her.

  The coffee was good. I sipped, smoked and generally stayed hid behind my sunglasses. I thought about what I had planned for this morning. It was quite an itinerary we’d devised, Maestro and me, though—credit where credit’s due—last night he had laid out the bulk of the scheme for locating Sunshine’s killer. Actually, it was less than a scheme. Nothing flashy about it, just solid logical avenues to pursue. And he had rattled it off so easily and precisely, like he was reciting the rules to a board game. We could try this, we could look into that. We had such-and-such in our favor, but these factors were against us.

  We had moved off to a back booth of the Calf, and Padre had somehow magically orchestrated the crowd so that we were left alone. There we’d hatched and outlined and polished.

  There was in the end, of course, no presto-quickie formula for locating someone the police were already actively hunting. Our man—and “man” we took on faith, owing to the murder method and to Mother Mystic’s information—had eluded the cops long enough to outlast the immediate attention of the media, and thereby the public. That first go-for-broke frenzy would die down. This wasn’t to say that the police would just drop it now, or that they were more interested in good press than in actually catching the murderer. But—and Maestro had said it at the outset—they had limited manpower and resources, and other cases would be taking up their time by now.

  P.J. reappeared to refill my coffee. I was feeling a lot less zombie-like now.

  “Uh, Bone ...”

  I glanced up. P.J. is my age or older, with that accompanying maturity that sets both of us apart from the world’s tw
enty-somethings. She had a pageboy haircut, and her eyes were regarding me ... leerily, it seemed.

  “What?”

  “Did the cops really come by here last night and arrest you, or is that just crap?”

  I suddenly felt my blood cooling. I would have just sat there staring at her from behind my shades, but luckily my smartass-retort chip activated. “Do I look terribly arrested this morning, P.J?”

  Behind P.J.’s left shoulder, back toward the waiters’ station and the entry into the kitchens, I now noticed two heads peeking out. One was the dishwasher, a perpetually stoned gutter-punk-with-a-job; the other, one of the cooks. They were nudging each other with elbows, trading hushed, gleeful words, looking my way.

  Oh, Christ. Like I needed this.

  “You don’t,” PJ admitted, to my comeback. “Crap, then.”

  I pushed up from the stool, dealt two singles onto the bartop.

  “Coffee’s only a buck, Bone. And I’m not charging you for it.”

  “Then put it all in your pocket. If we don’t take care of each other, who will?” And I was out of there, aware that yet another onlooker had come out from the kitchens, to ogle, aware of those eyes following me back out into the blast furnace morning.

  I didn’t appreciate being gossiped about, but there wasn’t much I could do, and frankly, I should have seen it coming. The tale of Detective Zanders stopping by the restaurant to question me would, naturally, be passed on and embellished. You don’t have to go into a bar to make contact with the local rumor mill, I reminded myself. Still, as one who doesn’t listen to gossip, it irked me to be an item of gossip.

  * * *

  Sunshine, I knew, had moved sometime during the past two months from the apartment Alex had helped her find after our split. The second move had happened during that stretch when I was deliberately avoiding her. Changing addresses is nothing unusual here. Compared to the rest of the city—though certainly not to, say, oh, San Francisco—rents are steep in the Quarter. Your basic working class Quarterite might vacate his or her premises for a number of reasons. Landlords renovate buildings, raise rents, might even turn your place into condos. I had been lucky. Two years at the same apartment, still paying the same monthly rent.