NO Quarter

by Robert Asprin

“Oh ...” I heard Alex say, a little worried. The shutters were pulled over the Calf’s door. We had been at Molly’s fairly late, but had expected to catch the Calf just before Padre closed it. I was scheduled to see Maestro, compare notes. Alex was looking forward to it. She was proud of herself, deservedly so, over how she’d handled Chanel. I could not have accomplished that little ploy without her.

  We went up to the door anyway. I tried peeking through the slats, and Alex rapped on the jamb. From across the street, one of the Pat O.’s doormen hollered a hello. She turned, waved, and then the Calf’s door unlocked.

  Padre opened the shutters and ushered us inside, something like a smirk on his face. He threw a glance down the sidewalk at the pseudo-gangsta kids. If they hung around long enough, someone would ring the police house on Royal. Soon enough after, a squad car would do a slow roll down St. Peter, and the kids would scamper back to their normal stomping grounds. We’ve got our troubles in the Quarter. Gang violence isn’t one of them. City Hall and the NOPD won’t let it put down the tiniest root.

  The juke was silent, the lights turned up slightly, and Maestro waited, sitting back in what was becoming our booth. The booths are usually for diners since the Calf serves burgers and baked potatoes and whatnot. The grill, which operates out of the back, was being thoroughly renovated, though, so nobody was eating. Maestro had a cigarette going and a whiskey in front of him. Once again we had the joint to ourselves.

  “Does this mean I can’t get a drinkie-poo?” Alex asked Padre with a coyness that would have been nauseating from anybody else.

  “Madam shall have as madam wishes,” Padre pronounced, definitely pleased with himself about something. “Go sit. I’ll bring you your drinkie-poo. Bone?”

  “I’m good.” I walked past the row of empty stools, set down Alex’s knapsack of knitting and reading, and took a seat on the booth’s bench opposite Maestro.

  “Greetings,” he nodded, his somewhat lined, swarthy face, set in its usual, casually neutral cast. He wore an almost threadbare green T-shirt, and—were those blue jeans? Come to think of it, he’d been dressed rather out of the normal last night, too, when I’d bumped into him after that episode with the gutter-punks and the broken window.

  “Howdy,” I returned. I picked a smoke out of my pack, near the end of my supply.

  Alex paused to give Maestro the once-over. “Slumming it tonight, sweetie?” she asked, eyeing his ensemble. She leaned over, gave him an arms-around-the-neck hug. He smiled and returned the hug.

  Padre appeared with Alex’s rummincoke.

  “I got it.” Maestro quick-drew a five and slid it over. For an older guy he had fast moves. The T-shirt he wore also betrayed rather solid-looking biceps and chest. They weren’t a weight-lifter’s muscles—more like a dancer’s.

  “Did you shut down early so we could have privacy?” I asked Padre.

  The innocent blue eyes behind his old-fashioned, wire-rimmed spectacles blinked at me. “As the night bartender, Bone, I can close at two a.m., I can close at six. It’s up to me. It’s a sacred trust.”

  I chuckled, blowing out smoke. Well, as long as Franklyn, the owner, didn’t catch wind of it. Then again, Padre was the Calf, as far as a good many of his spending regulars were concerned.

  “Okay,” Maestro began as Padre went back behind the bar, tending to the restocking and cleaning up. “What have we accomplished tonight?”

  I told him what we’d gotten off Chanel at Molly’s: Sunshine’s preferred drug was crystal methamphetamine—something new for her, as far as I knew—and she had definitely been supporting Dunk, her live-in boyfriend. I made sure Alex got her credit. Maestro nodded a solemn bow her way, not being a smartass, just commending her.

  “So—” Maestro tapped a finger on the brim of his rock glass. “Dunk smokes grass, but Sunshine was into this other stuff ...”

  “Crystal meth,” Alex supplied. “Speed in crystal form.”

  “Gives you a big rush,” I added, seeing Maestro’s brow furrow slightly. “Makes you manic. You end up scrubbing your bathroom floor tiles for hours.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Maestro observed dryly, sipping from his cocktail. Ah, alcohol, blessed depressant.

  “Chanel made it sound like Sunshine had a hold of the habit,” I said, “not the other way around.”

  Maestro looked at me. “Did she do speed back in San Francisco?”

  “Might have tried it. I think she probably tried a little bit of everything at one time or another—just sampling.” I shook my head. “But not when we were together. All she did routinely was pop prescription pain pills when she could find them, and smoke pot. As far as drug usage ... I always thought it was pretty harmless.”

  “How common is this crystal meth in the Quarter?”

  I turned to Alex. We shrugged at each other. I said, “Common as anything else, I guess.”

  “Is there a particular group, like a subculture, that’s especially into it?”

  “Ravers?” I put out.

  Alex shook her head, “Ecstasy, more that crowd. Crystal meth doesn’t exclusively belong to anyone, I think. But at least we know what Sunshine’s thing was now. If we find someone that deals a lot of crystal in the Quarter, we may have her dealer.”

  She said it simply, clinically, and I felt a chill I couldn’t help. Alex had done good tonight at Molly’s. But ... hunting down drug dealers? I didn’t want her in danger, but I wasn’t sure that what I wanted had any bearing on reality.

  Across the table Maestro’s dark brown eyes had gone still. Nothing of it showed on his face, but I felt he was sharing my thoughts. He brushed back a lock of his thick, black hair.

  “Then there’s Dunk,” I threw out to break the pause.

  “This Chanel said he’d been on the scene with Sunshine how long?”

  “A month or two,” Alex sipped her drink.

  “It occurs to me,” I took a deep pull on my cigarette, “that Dunk’s status as a freeloading barnacle attached to Sunshine definitely lessens the possibility of his having killed her. Sunshine was his meal ticket. Why cut his own lifeline?”

  “Logic and murder don’t always go hand in hand,” Maestro said, “but that’s still good thinking. Do we know how Dunk met Sunshine, what he did before meeting her?”

  “Piper, the kid I bribed with a sandwich, told me he was just another gutter-punk not too long back. He’d be around, doing the panhandling and the rest of it. But he had a saxophone and could play it. Sometimes he’d blow it for spare change up by ... the ... river.”

  Maestro’s gaze sharpened slightly. Alex turned.

  I shook myself. “Hey, c’mon. Kids use the Moonwalk as a hangout. There are street musicians up there all the time. Just because Sunshine ...” Got killed there. Something unpleasant rolled over in my guts. My brain replayed the scene in Dunk’s apartment ...

  “Ahh—I think that Dunk had one of those voodoo dolls, the junk kind that they sell to the tourists. It was lying on a pile of Mardi Gras beads on the coffee table. Could be nothing, but ... ”

  Maestro nodded. “You’re right. It may not mean anything. I think finding out how Sunshine and Dunk got together, though, might be useful.”

  “Dunk’s gig at Check Point Charlie’s is tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ll be there. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “I’d like to go too,” Alex said, taking a sip of her drink.

  “Somebody ought to keep a job, Alex. One of us sacrificing a paycheck for this is bad enough. You shouldn’t have to do it, too. Besides, I may need you to rescue me if I run out of money for smokes.” I gave her a smile that I had to prop up slightly. Who knew what would happen at Check Point’s? The truth was that I didn’t want her exposed to that risk factor.

  “Bone ...”

  “Well, here’s what I did tonight,” Maestro
interrupted before Alex could continue. He ticked off the events, detailing everything neatly.

  “Nobody’s MIA among the usual Quarter ex-cons?” I asked when he finished.

  “Not as far as I could tell.”

  “Which doesn’t mean one of them isn’t our killer.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. Every last one of them’s a suspect.” Maestro ground one of his narrow black cigarettes into the ashtray. “Questioning each of them on their whereabouts on the night of Sunshine’s killing, or even establishing those whereabouts independently through our asking coworkers and such, that would be very tricky. Also time-consuming.”

  “And we might as well be waving a red flag announcing that we’re hunting her murderer,” I muttered.

  “Exactly.” He set his elbows on the table, steepled two fingers. “Of course, the cops know the ex-cons in the Quarter too, and they don’t need any pretext to interrogate someone. Investigating murders is part of their job, after all. They would’ve already questioned these guys. That no one among them has been hauled in means everybody’s already established their alibis.”

  “Christ,” I with a sigh, “you’d think being a vigilante and operating outside the law would make things measurably easier.”

  Maestro shrugged. “Yes and no. It’s not like there are no rules—just different ones.”

  I paused a moment, feeling it wash over me suddenly. And I marveled, uneasy and pleased in the same instant. Vigilante. I’d just used the word casually, applying it to myself. Operating outside the law. This was real. We were actually doing something about Sunshine’s death. I wasn’t sitting back, taking it, swallowing it ...

  I shook myself again. I could get philosophical about this later.

  “You got any thoughts on this Juggernaut guy?” I asked.

  Maestro pursed his lips a moment. “Big and dangerous. I can’t see any possible way of linking him to Sunshine—romantically, that is. Remember, that’s still probably our best bet, Sunshine having been killed by someone she was involved with. A lover, an ex-lover. Jugger’s homosexual.”

  “Um, Maestro,” Alex said, gently, “did it occur to you Juggernaut might be bi?”

  Maestro blinked, once, twice. “Frankly, no.”

  “You’re sure he’s gay, exclusively?”

  “I’ve got a source, Bone. That’s what he says.”

  I nodded. “Well, you’ve sort of made friends with this guy, right? You can keep an eye on him. Probably wheedle him for more info.”

  “Probably. He’s definitely a talker.”

  Dipping into my diminishing reserves, I lit another smoke. “And you’ve got a line on this Jo-Jo character too? Ladies’ man, works at the Two Sisters?”

  “Supposedly hangs at the Stage Door. But I didn’t see him at any point tonight. I’d rather scope him out there than try to stop in at his job. He’s still our number one candidate, even without a tie to Sunshine. ‘God’s gift to women’ a ‘dumb-ass, method Mexican’—that’s what those two waiters called him. He’s sounds like a prize. Sunshine’s cup of tea, wouldn’t you say?”

  I had to nod sad agreement. “What was that last bit, though?”

  “Huh?” Maestro was nearing the bottom of his Irish.

  “‘Something-something Mexican’—what those waiters were saying?”

  “Oh. I misheard ‘dumb-ass method Mexican.’ Don’t ask me what it means. Maybe it’s something the kids say nowadays.”

  “Method?” I frowned. “What—method actor ... ?”

  Maestro regarded me flatly. “Right, Bone. They were denigrating his thespian abilities.”

  Alex’s cocktail glass came down with a sudden bang. I turned, saw her large eyes light up, her lips quirk.

  Enunciating carefully, she said, “Dumb-ass, meth-head, Mexican.” At Maestro’s raised eyebrow she continued excitedly, “Don’t you see? Jo-Jo does meth. Enough of it that his coworkers know about it.”

  Alex had been proud of herself earlier. For this she could strut like a peacock if she felt so inclined. Neither I, nor Maestro, would stop her.

  “I’d call that a potential link to Sunshine,” I said. I grinned at Alex.

  “So would I.” Maestro raised his glass in salute. “Outstanding.”

  “Just paying back the drink you bought,” Alex said, raising her glass in return and grinning even wider.

  Having no drink I reached for my dwindling pack of smokes, then I remembered the envelope. We were late because I had stopped by the apartment to pick it up. I retrieved it now from Alex’s bag.

  “One more thing. I don’t think this is related to the murder, but I thought you might find it interesting.” I pulled the yellowed photo out of the envelope and pushed it in front of Maestro. “Doesn’t this guy in the picture sort of look like you? Maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago?”

  Despite his dark skin, Maestro turned pale. “Where did you get this?”

  “It came from Sunshine’s apartment. Dunk sort of “gave” it to me—when he thought I was someone else. I forgot about it until last night. Is that you in the picture, Maestro?”

  Maestro said nothing, just continued to stare at the photograph, not touching it.

  “May I see?” Alex reached for the photo. Maestro let her take it.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first,” I said, “so young and with that haircut. But last night something made me look again. I don’t know the woman, though she looks a little familiar, too. Who is she?”

  Maestro started to answer, but Alex spoke first. “That’s Hope. Sunshine’s mom.”

  Maestro and I both stared at Alex.

  “Sunshine once showed me other pictures of her from around this time. But I’ve never seen this one.”

  Now I knew why the girl in the photo looked familiar. She had Sunshine’s eyes, her smile. I’d never met my mother-in-law—Sunshine had cut all ties with her family—but I knew Alex was right.

  Maestro drained his glass in one quick motion. “Hope is Sunshine’s mother?” He looked like he was about to go into shock.

  “So you knew her? Hope, I mean?”

  “Yeah. We were close. I met her ...” He hesitated for a moment, and when he did speak, it was as if each word hurt him. “I met her after the ... shortly after I joined the Outfit.” He shook his head. “I was a young punk back then. Had a lot of girlfriends. But she was ... special. I lost track of her when she moved away from Detroit.”

  “Did you sleep with her?” Alex asked.

  Maestro gave her that hairy eyeball look.

  “Oh.” Alex got quiet.

  “So Sunshine could be ... ah, could have been ...” I couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

  “Not terribly likely,” Maestro said. “I was young, but I was neither stupid nor callous—at least, not in that way.”

  “But Sunshine might have thought it was possible,” Alex suggested. “That might be why she was trying to reach you. She told me she never really knew who her real father was. Her mom was a free spirit, met and married her step-dad after she was born.”

  “That’s right,” I said as I struggled to come to terms with ... what? The sheer Dickensian coincidence of it? People said that strange things happened in New Orleans, in the Quarter. I guess this was proof.

  “Sunshine never said anything about this to you?” Alex asked. “She never mentioned it?”

  Maestro shook his head, and the look on his face told me that he might need some time to himself to deal with what he’d just learned.

  Alex handed the photo back to Maestro.

  “May I keep this?” he asked. He had to clear his throat to speak.

  “Sure,” I said. “She probably would have wanted you to have it. I think maybe she meant for you to have it.” I gave him the envelo
pe. He looked at the “M” scrawled on the outside, nodded once, and then carefully put the photo away.

  I turned, looked at the clock on the wall.

  “Yes, time for all good children to be in bed,” Maestro said. He flicked a fingernail against his empty glass and pocketed his cigarettes.

  “I’ll call you before I head out to Dunk’s gig tomorrow evening,” I said. “Shall we do another late meet here?”

  “We’ll talk about it.” He moved to slide himself from the booth.

  Abruptly Padre was standing next to the table. With that odd smirk still on his face, he laid two objects on the tabletop. Small, oblong, faux walnut housing—matching cell phones.

  We all looked up at him.

  “Speed-dialers preprogrammed,” he said as he pointed proudly at the phones. “Hit 1 and it rings the other phone. There’re enough minutes on both you don’t have to worry about it. Use them till this thing’s done, then ditch them—preferably in the river.”

  “Padre ...” Maestro started.

  “Hey, thanks,” I said.

  “Bone, Alex—I’ve called your cab. Maestro, let me know if you two are going to want to rendezvous here tomorrow night. And a pleasant evening to you all.”

  We all exchanged silent glances and decided to let him have the last word. Alex kissed Padre soundly on the cheek on the way out.

  * * *

  Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:

  Ian Fleming was a hack novelist, & James Bond as the movie franchise hasn’t aged especially gracefully. The superspy-in-Cold-War milieu doesn’t have modern relevance. The world’s current villains are bargain basement thugs without any daunting resources but the willingness to surrender their own lives. Doesn’t fit, really, with the glamour & panache of a typical 007 baddie. Do I still like the series? Of course. Bond is great fun. I won’t enter into the Connery v. Moore v. Brosnan debate. Honestly, does the role require much from an actor? I often find myself more interested in the secondary characters anyway. The late Desmond Llewelyn, as Q, was my fave. He was the gadget supplier—dry wit, breezily good cameos in the vast number of the films. I mean, what would 007 be without his gizmos but an effete, martini-swilling, sex-addicted ninny? Appraisals: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as best Bond film (no, not Goldfinger & no, I don’t care about George Lazenby in the part); Paul McCartney gets best title song for Live and Let Die. No arguments.