Someone had planted a seed of doubt about me. That’s where my thoughts were by the time the bus brought me to the stop just past the corner of Moreland and Ponce.
I hopped down into the street and headed up toward Easy. Even with the cars and the streetlights, the night seemed dark. Maybe it was the mood of the night, not the amount of light at all.
By the time I got to the club, I was in need of water before wine — not to put too fine a biblical point on my thinking. The place wasn’t crowded, and the band hadn’t even finished setting up.
Hal was talking to Phillip Raines, one of the best sax players in the city — he’d found contentment being a brick artisan by day, blowing blues by night. Each occupation kept the other one honest.
I took a seat next to him. “Phillip.”
He nodded, then looked at Hal. “Since he’s here” — he inclined his head my way — “I’ll sample whatever wine he’s got hidden under there.” He smiled at me. “If I may be so bold.”
“You’re as bold as you want to be.” I smiled back. “It’s a pretty okay Bordeaux tonight.” I glanced at Hal. “Château Tonnelle.”
“All right, then.” Raines approved.
I shrugged at Hal. “For two, plus a glass of water for me. And is Dally in?”
“Office.” He reached under the register and pulled out my bottle, poured two glasses, and set them down. “Phillip, here, was just telling me that he’s got a gig in Savannah.”
“No kidding?” I turned his way.
“Yeah.” Raines got the glass in his hand. “Some new club on River Street.”
That was all. He sipped and remained silent.
I took the whole glass of water, then the entire glass of wine down — it made both the other men stare. I didn’t care. I was in a hurry, and nervous about talking to Dally in this Doubting Thomas frame of mind. So: gulp.
“Be right back.” I tapped the bar, stood, and headed for the office.
I stood in the doorway, and watched her, for a second, bent over the desktop writing checks.
“Hey.”
She jumped.
“Sorry.” I didn’t move. “Didn’t mean to …”
“… Flap.” She stared.
“Yes. Correct. Flap.” I tried to remain steady.
“What are you doing here?”
I looked away. Then I stepped into the office and I closed the door behind me.
“I’m here to get things straight.” I shot right over to the desk.
She put her pen down. “Well, I don’t know how you think you’re going to do that.” She looked up at me, pale as the moon.
“I think I’m going to start,” I told her, “by asking you just what the hell is going on between you and me that you think you can’t tell me you’ve got a husband and that husband’s got a bad disposition. Then we progress to what’s going on with your getting little Jersey Jakes to watch out for you when that’s usually my kind of thing. And last but not least” — my voice was getting louder, but I couldn’t help it — “I’ve got to ask you what the hell is the matter with you thinking that I would kill your husband … without at least telling you first.”
I could see right away that I’d made the wrong move. It works about seventy percent of the time, this barging in and confronting thing. The rest of the time, you end up with the kind of reaction I got from Dally.
She slid her chair away from the desk, stood up, looked away from me so deliberately that it nearly burned a hole in the wall behind me as she brushed past.
She opened the door to the office. “Hal!”
He jumped. She hardly ever yelled that loud.
I knew where she was going with this little scene.
Hal was at the door in two seconds.
“Would you please,” she said calmly, “get Flap some more of that wine and make sure he leaves me alone while I’m trying to do these payouts?”
He grinned. “Flap’s in the doghouse.”
I stared.
He stopped smiling.
Dally moved back to the desk without looking at either one of us.
I left the office.
Hal closed the door.
Phillip Raines had taken off, but he’d left me a note: “Thanks for the wine, good luck with your misery.”
My head shot up. “Hal? Did you tell that guy what was going on with me and Dally?”
“No.” He grabbed a bar towel and started fussing with the countertop so that he could avoid eye contact. “But it’s not like it isn’t written all over your face.”
“It is?”
“You don’t play the kind of sax that guy does and not be able to tell when somebody else’s melody is off, you know.”
I finished the rest of the bottle slowly, with Hal carefully making charming albeit one-sided repartee. I had no idea how much time had passed, but I was on my last glass when Daniel Frank sat down beside me.
“I thought I might find you here.”
Hal brought Dan a soda water and lime. When Danny quit one habit, he liked to quit all habits. Since his drug days he had not had anything stronger than coffee to drink — or anyone stranger than Lorraine to love, but that was another story.
“I tried the direct approach with Ms. Oglethorpe,” I told him. “It was fairly disastrous.”
“You’re off your game.” That was his assessment.
“Oh,” I agreed, “I’m absolutely off my game.”
“You’re moping.”
“I am?”
“You’re sitting here drinking that French varnish” — he shook his head — “when you ought to be off chasing down fragments.”
“Fragments?”
“You know what I mean.”
And I did, in fact, know what he meant. But I was too confused to put anything together. So I finished my last glass of the Bordeaux and turned to face the music.
“Dan,” I said plainly, “I think I lost my thing.”
“That is a dilemma.” He sipped his water without looking at me. “You mean your trick.”
“It comes and goes, anyway,” I said. “And now with this thing about Dalliance — I don’t think I have it anymore.”
He looked at Hal. “How often does he go through this?”
“Let’s see.” Hal leaned forward onto the bar. “A while back there were a couple of dead girls hanging in Piedmont Park, and he had a little trouble like this.” Hal looked at me. “But now that I think of it, he goes through something like it almost every time.”
“So it’s a part of his process.” Danny shrugged.
“Are you talking about me like I’m not here,” I started, “because you want me to go away?”
“Not away.” Dan turned to face me. “When everything about you is turning to ashes — go to work. That’s what you want. Not moping and drinking and trying to muscle Dally. If” — he held up his index finger as if to make an important pronouncement — “you wish to prove to Ms. Oglethorpe that you’ve been to the ocean — then why don’t you get her a shell.”
“Nice metaphor.” I smiled at Daniel. “You’ve got the soul of a poet, you know.”
“Yeah, well” — he turned back to face Hal — “I’d like to give it back to whichever poet I got it from. It makes me itch. Now you can tell me what happened to my house.”
“What happened …”
“… I get home not half an hour ago, and I find evidence of a tussle in my kitchen.”
“Oh, that. Sorry. I should have cleaned up.” Although I couldn’t think what had gotten messed up enough to clue Dan to what had happened. Still, he was the observant type. “A couple of boys called Chuckie and Rimshot came by. They wanted to clip you for asking the wrong questions around town. They thought you wouldn’t mind it coming from them, being as they were old friends.”
“I’d call them more acquaintances.” He finished his soda. “So this means I asked the right questions somewhere.”
“I guess.”
“If only I knew what they were
— or where I’d asked them.” He stood. “Call me if you get anywhere. I’m going home.”
33. Itch
Danny was right: If I wanted to prove to Dally — and, much less consequentially, Detective Huyne — that I’d had nothing to do with killing Ronnard Raay, then I had to find out who did do it. The situation seemed just that simple to me, finally.
I was standing out in the parking lot in front of Easy, staring at the doorway to the place. There was still evidence of a scuffle — kicked-up dirt, a torn bit of moss between cracks in the sidewalk. So the idea that Jakes had been lying in wait for Mug to come out seemed a likely scenario.
I took the few steps toward the place at the far curb where Mug had told me the alleged delivery van had been parked. You never can tell, I thought, maybe somebody had dropped something. I wandered around in the street staring but not looking. That’s the way to do it. If you’re looking, you’ll overlook. If you’re just there to stare, things jump out at you.
But nothing did.
So I wended my weary way homeward. A nice walk in the sticky air ended in an unexpected bit of luck: There were no cops in evidence in front of my pad.
I turned, therefore, where any man in my situation might go in celebration of such good fortune: I hopped in my car and went to the county morgue.
A short drive later, I was inside the building. The security guard barely noticed me when I came in. He’d seen me there before, usually with policemen. Maybe he even thought I was a cop. I waved, he nodded, and I made it down the dry, fluorescent hall to the “new arrivals” section.
Reese was the attendant that night, which was a break for me. He was a good kid — under five feet tall, and looked like a teenage girl, even with his short-shock hair. He’d boosted a couple of cars in my neighborhood a few years back, and some of the neighbors had asked me to look into it. I did: I caught Reese with his hand still on the brick that he’d used to smash the window of a steel gray Volvo station wagon.
Instead of taking him right to the police, I made him go meet all the people whose cars he’d skimmed. It had turned out to be a pretty good idea. Reese was bopping the cars for drug money. And because my little Midtown neighborhood was filled with some pretty decent people from all walks of life, he’d gotten into a methadone program, been offered a job, and eaten a great meal from the caterers in my building — the aforementioned Kane and Paula duo — where he’d met Drexel, a goth-scene hairdresser who was to become his significant other. And that was just in the first week. I remembered thinking at the time that I ought to go into the rehabilitation business.
Now Reese was working at a job with dead bodies all night, which he loved. That always said something to me about the basic deficiency of his personality, but he was happy so who was I to dwell? He was taking cooking classes, and he and Drexel were happy as clams. I’m told clams can get pretty giddy when they want to. But I digress.
“Flap!” Reese was always delighted to see me.
“Hey, kid,” I nodded. “What’s it all about?”
“It’s all about time, Flap.” He smiled. “When you’re young, time’s the slowest thing on the planet. By the time you’re a grandpa, it looks like it’s racing for the finish line.”
“You’re saying it’s been a long night,” I guessed.
“Until now, yup.” He got up out of his chair. “Where are we going?”
“I’m going to look at what’s left of Jersey Jakes. Shot three times.”
“Okay.” He shrugged and turned around to check some papers on his desk. “Here he is, suite number seven.”
We went into the room beyond. It was dark and smelled like formaldehyde, a smell I could live for seven or eight lifetimes without.
He strolled over to the big drawer marked with a number seven and rolled it out.
There was poor old Jersey Jakes, and he was just about as dead as you can get. Under ordinary circumstances, I think I would have been relatively uncomfortable about jabbing at a dead body, but I was too tired and too weird to stop and feel anything at that particular moment.
“Can I get some gloves, Reese? I have to check a few things.”
“Sure.” He moved immediately to a little cabinet by the door. “You want more light?”
“Can I?”
He swiveled and flipped a switch. The place was flooded with white ice light, and I couldn’t see for a second.
“You see why we keep these off at night.” He was laughing.
When my eyes adjusted, I put on the gloves Reese had brought me and stared down at the man whose given name had been Risky. My first thought was to check his arms, just what I’d suggested to Huyne. I wanted to see if the inside of his elbows had anything on them — which they might have had, I thought, from his attack on Mug.
I lifted the right arm.
“You want a magnifying glass, Flap.” Reese was peering under my shoulder, staring at the arm I’d just lifted.
“Well, yes I do.” I smiled down at him.
He zipped to the cabinet again and was back at my side before a second had gone by.
I held the glass to the inside elbow of Jersey’s right arm and stared for a good while. Then I checked his fingernails, his legs. I just kept looking, but nothing revealed itself to me.
“What are you looking for?” Reese whispered.
“I guess” — I let the arm rest on Jakes’s chest — “maybe I’m looking for something that’s not there. I was hoping to find some shirt crud or a bruise or a scratch …”
“… like he’d been tussling with somebody before he got shot,” Reese finished.
“Right.”
“I’ve seen a lot of that.” He stared at Jakes. “But I didn’t see anything like that there.”
“Me neither.”
“What does that tell you?” He could see that something was troubling me.
“Nothing … by itself.”
“So.” He got it. “You’re not done tonight. You have more things to do.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” He smiled. “It’s a nice night for it.”
“Yeah,” I told him right back, “I know your ghoulish predilections.”
“For instance,” he seemed delighted to report, “Drexel and I have decided to drink each other’s blood. It’s like a wedding.”
“That’s just the kind of thing I was talking about.” I stepped away from the corpse. “You can put Jersey back to bed, by the way.”
He closed the drawer. “Did you want to look at the list?”
“List?”
“Of other people who had a gander at him.” He started toward his desk. “I have to get full identification and everything. It’s official.”
“More than the police came to see him?”
“Uh” — he turned — “yeah. Come on.”
I followed him back to his desk, and he picked up a clipboard.
“Am I going to be on that list?” I stared at him.
He looked away. “Well, Flap … I owe you a lot. But, like, the security guy saw you come in, and … you know, I like this job, and all …”
“… okay, okay,” I told him, “put me down.”
He did, then handed me the board.
Risky “Jersey” Jakes had been quite the attraction in the previous twenty-four hours — and it made me itch all over. Besides the police, he’d had visits from Daniel Frank, Mug Lewis, Chuckie Barnes, Rimshot Harris, Hal Beasely — and Dalliance Oglethorpe.
34. Visitors
Hal and Dally had come to the morgue together, and in the company of the police. The goons, Reese told me, had taken notes, if you can believe a thing like that. Danny had only stayed a second.
I took myself out of the morgue the way a good dentist would extract a tooth: very gingerly. Barely said goodbye to Reese.
I was on a pay phone outside within three minutes.
“What?” Dan’s usual greeting.
“I got somewhere — not sure where, but you told me to call. If I had s
omething.”
“Where’d you get this something so soon, if I may ask,” he said calmly.
“I visited my young ward, Reese. Know the kid I’m talking about?” In case his phone was bugged, I thought I was playing it cagey.
“I know the boy.” I thought I could hear him smile. “Just so happens I saw him recently myself.”
“I know. I saw on a list that he had. Who else was on the list? Would you care to guess?”
“The cops, of course.”
“Yes.” I shifted to the other ear. “But also: You know your two recent visitors, the ones I greeted for you?”
“Them?”
“How about that,” I answered. “Also a bartender and his boss.”
“That bartender I was just talking to earlier? And his boss? Well, isn’t that a little something extra.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I thought it was.”
“What do you make of it?”
“Well, they were there with the police,” I answered him, “but I’d certainly like to discuss it further.”
“Okay.” He took in a breath. “And just for laughs — I think you will find this amusing — let’s meet at your house, shall we?”
“My house?”
“Don’t you think it would be the last place anyone would imagine that we’d meet?”
“Sure.” I smiled into the phone. “I guess I do.”
I hung up without another word and made it to my place.
*
Danny was sitting on the curb outside the place when I walked down the street to my apartment building. He was talking.
There were two guys in a car across the street. They didn’t seem to be responding to him, much, but he was having a great time talking to them.
“So,” he was saying, “then when I was eleven, see, I had a vision of St. Thomas. Did you ever read the Gospel of Thomas? It’s great. It’s in the apocrypha sometimes, and in the Gnostic texts, of course. Now, my rabbi, he gets upset when I go to him and say, ‘I want to know more about St. Thomas.’ But, you can understand his pique, you know: He was named Levi, so he was kind of an old-school type. You can always tell by that name.”
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 14