Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  “I haven't done anything wrong.”

  We sat silently for several minutes. Allison seemed to be doing a lot of swallowing. Finally she asked, “Where were you a policeman?”

  “In Mackie.”

  She nodded. “I watched the news on television. There was a story about a murder there. You were talking about it on the phone, about the man who was killed…”

  “I was talking to the detective who was interviewed. He's a friend of mine. I was just curious about the case. I promise I'm not a cop anymore. I quit almost three years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I quit?” Why did I quit? I told her the truth. “I didn't like the Halloween decorations they had at the police station.”

  That answer got just the look it deserved, truth or not. I half expected her to ask what I did now but she didn't. She examined her fingernails, which were long and slender like the rest of her, unpolished but carefully manicured.

  After a few minutes, I said, “Doesn't it bother you that they're probably worried sick?”

  “Who?”

  “Your parents,” I suggested.

  “Oh. No.”

  “Well, it should bother you.”

  “I meant nobody's worried about me. I don't have any family.”

  “What happened to your parents?”

  The look she shot me was almost lethal. “They died,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “I understood that. I meant—” I broke off and reached a hand across to her as she turned ashen and inhaled sharply. “I'm sorry. Did it happen recently?”

  She shook her head no, nodded yes, shook her head no again and stood up, shoving the chair backward. It didn't shove well on the carpet and tipped over, the legs coming up and catching her behind the knees. She toppled over with it. I stood up to help but sat down again—very abruptly—to give Allison, who was definitely a natural blonde, a chance to get her legs untangled and my shirts pulled down.

  When she was on her feet, I stood up and started to apologize again. She brushed past me. The bathroom door slammed. I sat back down and listened to her vomit, feeling like I'd just drop-kicked a kitten.

  She was even paler when she came out. She headed straight for her bed, crawled in, and pulled the covers up to her chin. When I crouched beside the bed and touched her forehead, she told me to leave her alone. Her skin was icy and damp. After a moment, I figured out what the funny noise was.

  “For Christ's sake, your teeth are chattering,” I said. “Scoot over.”

  She looked a bit wary but she scooted. I lay down beside her and pulled her close. “Body heat,” I said. “Mother Nature's miracle drug.” She felt stiff and resistant beside me. I cast about for a topic of conversation in a brain that was suddenly dealing only with tactile input. The best I could do was the weather.

  “This rain is typical Portland weather. They call it Portland mist. If you live here, you learn to ignore it. Residents of Portland are called Webfoots. There are mountains all around, the Cascades to the east and the Coast Range to the west, but usually there's so much cloud cover you can't see them. So when a nice clear day comes along, guess what people here say.”

  She raised up on her elbow to look at me. “Look, there are mountains over there?” she suggested.

  “Close, but no cigar. What they say is, 'The mountains are out.'”

  For the first time, Allison smiled at me, a smile like sunshine in Portland—well worth the wait.

  “The mountains are out,” she said. “I like that.”

  “So do I.”

  She lay down beside me again, banging her elbow against my gun in the process. She looked a bit puzzled but didn't ask what the hunk of metal against my side was. Maybe she thought I had some weird prosthetic device to keep the old ticker going. The old ticker was thudding heavily, coping with the stress of repressed lust.

  I felt around under the covers and found her hand. Her fingers were cool but not icy. I held her hand until it warmed up in mine then I pulled her a little closer. Her waist felt impossibly slender beneath the soft wool of my shirt. She no longer felt cold. In fact, her thigh resting against mine seemed to be generating a phenomenal amount of heat. I moved my head a bit to see if maybe she was thinking about how good I felt against her.

  She wasn't.

  I got my arm from beneath her without waking her and, after clearing away the remains of our dinner, I changed into jeans and a waist-length denim jacket over a blue chambray shirt. If I left the jacket unbuttoned, the gun wasn't obvious except to anyone who was looking for it. The western boots I pulled on made me six and half feet tall and the cowboy hat added a few more inches. As Virginia Marley had pointed out, surreptitiousness isn't my strong suit.

  I faced the mirror, drew two six-shooters and shot my reflection twice. I blew smoke off the barrels then twirled the guns elaborately, which is easy with make-believe guns, then slapped them into invisible holsters. There was a muffled laugh from behind me.

  “I want to be a cowboy when I grow up,” I said, turning to face the bed.

  Allison was raised up on one elbow. She brushed her hair back from her face and asked where I was going. I told her back to work.

  “You work funny hours.”

  “I have a funny job. Get some rest. It'll be late when I get back. Leave the dead bolt off and I won't have to wake you to get in.”

  She nodded. “Mr. Smith?”

  “Zachariah.”

  “Just… thank you.”

  “You're welcome,” I said and went out into a misty rain to look for Jessica Finney.

  Chapter Twelve

  I spent the evening hours on Southeast 82nd Street, where the cops' latest effort to curb the cruising didn't seem to be working. School was still several days in the future and the kids were out in force. The ones in cars were mostly suburbanites out looking for kicks.

  I was more interested in the kids in the shadows of the street, the runaways who wouldn't go home and the throwaways who couldn't go home because Robert Frost was wrong—they don't have to take you in. Some of them would be on the street briefly then go on to something else, something better if they were lucky. Others would live out their lives in this shadow world where a warm bed was a dream and a loving touch was no longer dreamed of. Still others would die on the street before they were old enough to understand that death was possible. There but for the grace of God and my parents' money…

  There are no palm trees on 82nd Street but in the ways that matter, it's no different from the street in L.A. where I sojourned in the shadow world half my lifetime ago. The street seduces with the illusion of freedom and the price of the illusion is isolation. I had watched muggings, had seen the aftermath of rape and murder, had watched someone whose name I knew—as close to friendship as you get on the street—die with the needle still in the vein. None of it touched me. And I didn't want to leave.

  I had to be locked up to be kept off the street and it was years before I felt any gratitude toward the people who had turned the key in the lock, years before I even acknowledged the simple fact that my parents might have had other uses for the thousands of dollars it cost them to get my act cleaned up. Years before I felt any guilt over what I had done to them or to myself. My only guilt back then was for Carrie and it was her guilt that she hadn't broken the code of our childhood and betrayed me that kept me from returning to the street. Carrie's guilt and the thin scar on her left wrist that was a constant reminder of that guilt.

  I didn't want to find Jessica on 82nd Street and I didn't. About a quarter to eleven I decided to see if I could find Virginia Marley instead.

  Once I located Tonita's, finding Virginia was a cinch. She was sitting at the bar, wearing a sizzling red dress and a matching smile. We had time for one quick drink before she asked me to walk her home, which turned out to be just around the corner. Her little orange bug was snug in a carport beneath her living room. The small apartment was haphazardly furnished and had a temporary look to it. Virgini
a hadn't struck me as the homebody type.

  She confessed to having three wine coolers and one carton of yogurt in her refrigerator. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “Or a joint? I don't have any coke. I started worrying about my nose and gave it up.”

  “Thanks, I don't want anything.”

  She was standing very close to me. She tilted her head and smiled and said, “Nothing?”

  I smiled back at her. “I can't stay. I have to get back to work.”

  She eliminated the few inches of space between us, sliding her arms around my neck and pulling my head down toward her. After a long kiss, she whispered those three magic words in my ear: “Quickies are fun.”

  I picked her up. “The bed's that way,” she said. She didn't indicate any direction at all but any halfway decent detective can find a bed in a three-room apartment.

  I left Virginia shortly after midnight. I had spent the evening watching the kids doing their buying and selling of booze and drugs and bodies. Now I set off to watch the grownups do the same thing. Drugs and bodies, anyway. They could buy the booze at any state liquor store.

  Portland doesn't have a well-defined red light district like Boston's Combat Zone. Late at night, downtown is largely the domain of the male prostitutes, some of the gay, some of them gay-for-pay, all of them virtually immune from arrest because cops don't like the role-playing necessary to get evidence against male prostitutes.

  The girls tend to work semi-residential streets close in to town. They work one street until the residents make enough noise to force the cops to roust them, then they move their operation a few blocks one direction or the other. I found the current “O's Stroll” by the simple expedient of asking a cop where the hookers were. He looked disgusted but he told me.

  Since prostitutes are pretty sure they know a cop when they see one, my conversations with them invariably began with the girls saying “Oh, fuck” in tones of deep disgust. Once they realized I wasn't going to take them out of commission for the couple hours it took to be processed and released, they were usually friendly and helpful. None of them had ever seen Jessica Finney.

  It was about two o'clock when I called my office number for the dozenth time. Dora, who was the girl mostly likely in my high school class, was delighted to tell me I was wanted by the police. I laughed obligingly. The message was to call Detective Bundy at the Justice Center. I decided to go see him instead.

  I drove downtown with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The last time the cops found a runaway I was looking for, she was dead.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jessica Finney wasn't dead as far as anyone knew, but the girl in the photo Bundy slid across his desk to me definitely was. She had frizzy blond hair, a pug nose, and a bullet hole in her forehead.

  “Ever seen her?” Bundy asked. He was a medium-tan black man with short graying hair and light brown eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. Anyone who overlooked the hard line of muscle beneath his shirt would have called him skinny.

  “No,” I said.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at me for a while then his phone buzzed and he spent several minutes saying “uh-huh” into it, staring at me the whole time. By the time he hung up, I was ready to confess to anything.

  Without looking at any notes, he said, “Zachariah O'Brien Smith. Age twenty-nine. Currently single. No military service. BA from Portland State in Administration of Justice. Six years with Mackie PD, four in uniform, last two as a detective. Two citations for meritorious service. Resigned three years ago citing personal reasons. Co-owner of C & Z Paperhanging, Incorporated. Sole owner and operator of Arrow Investigations for the past two and a half years. That about do it?”

  “Story of my life,” I said. Currently single. Interesting way to put it. Diplomatic.

  “What were the citations for?”

  “Why didn't you ask?”

  He tilted his chair back, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared at me.

  I cleared my throat. “Mackie's a small town. They give those things out all the time. Gives the newspaper something to print.”

  He kept on staring. I looked at my knees. Back at Bundy. Still staring. I checked out his desk. The nameplate said he was Jefferson Bundy. Good name.

  “One was for rescuing some old people in a nursing home fire. The other one… some hopped-up kid tried to hold up a drug store. It turned into a hostage situation.” It turned into a bloodbath.

  Bundy lowered his chair legs to the floor. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That's where I've seen you before. Knew you looked familiar. You're the cop in the picture.”

  The cop in the picture. My claim to fame. The picture had been in a lot of newspapers, in a magazine, and finally in a book after it won the photographer some kind of award. I had a copy at home but I never looked at it. It was a good picture in high contrast black and white that for some reason has a gritty realism missing from color photographs. A very good picture of a big tough cop with blood on his hands, caught in the act of crying.

  “Who's C?” Bundy asked.

  “Who's what?”

  “C & Z. The paperhanging business.”

  “Oh. My sister. She's management. I used to be labor but we have four guys working for us now and they handle most of it.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  I thought it over briefly. “Public relations,” I said. Carrie would have laughed herself sick.

  “What were the personal reasons?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious. Four years in school, six on the force, and six months after you quit you get a PI license. You must like the work. So why quit?”

  “What's with the dead girl?”

  Bundy touched the photo in front of him. “Diane Dobbs AKA DeeDee Dobbs. Part-time waitress, part-time night school student. Ex-hooker. Shot entering her apartment about nine this evening. Weapon was a twenty-two. No witnesses.”

  “I don't carry a twenty-two.”

  Bundy grinned. “Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. You want the serial number?”

  I shook my head. “What's it got to do with me?”

  “Maybe nothing. She had one of your pictures of the Finney girl in her purse.”

  I looked at the photograph again. “I didn't give her one. She must have picked it up somewhere. They're probably blowing all over the streets by now.”

  “Why do you suppose she kept it?”

  “How the hell would I know? Maybe she saw Jessica somewhere and was thinking about calling me. Maybe she needed a piece of scratch paper. Maybe she doesn't like littering.”

  “Didn't like littering. She turned seventeen last month.”

  “Yeah. I've never seen her.”

  “No military service surprises me.”

  “The draft was over. I offered to do my patriotic duty anyway but Uncle Sam didn't want me.”

  “Why not? They didn't have boots big enough?”

  “They didn't want an ex-junkie.”

  Bundy wasn't surprised. Whoever gave him his information had been thorough. “Shit,” he said, “the only time I did drugs was in Nam.”

  “You have any more questions? I've been up since five this morning and I'd like to get a little sleep if it doesn't inconvenience the cops too much.”

  “Where were you at nine this evening?”

  “When did they repeal Miranda-Escobedo?”

  “Couple weeks ago. It was in all the papers. Jesus, wouldn't that be the day?” Bundy laughed, his laugh turning into a yawn. “I hate these hours. I miss my wife poking me in the ribs all night, telling me to roll over and stop snoring.” He took his glasses off and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I just like to know who I'm dealing with. Keep in touch. I'd like to know if you find your runaway.”

  I stood up and held onto the back of the chair. “I quit… I don't know why I quit. My wife left me.” Understatement of the century.

  Bundy nodded. “See you around,” he said.

  It had been a
long day. I decided to call it a night.

  Allison slept through my homecoming. She had left the bathroom light on and I did the same in case the light was for her instead of for me. I pulled my clothes off and rolled into bed, thinking that for once I was surely tired enough to sleep.

  Thirty minutes later I was still staring at the ceiling, deep in my nightly litany of April memories. Damn April to hell anyway.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sleeping deeply is one of several things I'm lousy at. I was aware of Allison getting out of bed early the next morning. I heard her in the shower and I heard her moving around the room afterward. It wasn't until her movements took on a stealthy quality that I really woke up.

  I was on my stomach, my face turned toward the window. I kept my eyes shut and concentrated on breathing deeply. She seemed to stand at the foot of my bed for a long time, then I heard the soft rustle of her dress close by.

  I opened my eyes just in time to watch her slide my wallet out of the back pocket of the jeans I'd dropped on the floor the night before. She had her lower lip caught up in her teeth and a look of fierce concentration on her face. When she looked my way and our eyes met, she jumped about six inches and exhaled loudly. She also blushed, probably all the way down to her bellybutton but I could only see as far as the hollow in her throat.

  I took my wallet from her limp fingers, shoved it under my pillow, went back to sleep, and dreamed tortuous dreams in which I pushed through crowds of faceless people in pursuit of a dark-haired woman in an emerald green dress. She seemed to be very close but I could never reach her and when she looked back at me, she had a maddening habit of changing from April to Allison to Virginia Marley. When she turned into a frizzy-haired blonde with a bullet hole in her forehead, I struggled awake, with Jefferson Bundy on my mind.