What’s sad about houses like this one is that they don’t begin as sad little houses. When this place was built, forty or fifty years ago, it was someone’s dream house. Some young couple, the ink still fresh on their marriage certificate, moved in there when the house was shiny and cute and the tiny lawn out front was green and well-tended and every house up and down the block was the same way. Dad went to work in the morning and mom stayed home and looked after a kid or two, and after a few years when things were better they all moved to a bigger house and a better neighborhood, and the people who moved in here after them didn’t have as much or didn’t care as much. And the cycle, the downward spiral, began.
The cycle wasn’t finished yet. But it didn’t look like it had much further to go to hit bottom.
I put the book away and closed the glove compartment door. The book hadn’t been too fascinating. It wasn’t as if Jahna Johansen was one of those fashion-model types of call girls with a little black book full of the names of socially and economically and politically prominent men. She was two-bit, strictly third-class. The book, as I’ve said, was filled mostly with initials and numbers. I could have made some guesses at some of the initials—and, in fact, a few of them and one or two telephone numbers struck chords in my mind—and I could have tracked down most if not all of the numbers if I was so inclined. But I wasn’t. I wanted a rematch with Aurelio Ramos, one in which he didn’t have his goons to help him, and Jahna’s book was simply my insurance that I would have my way without her tipping my hand.
The front door of the house opened and voices spilled out into the night. I sat up.
Ramos’s two friends stepped out onto the concrete patch. They looked around, trying too hard to look cool and tough. They wore hats with wide brims, canted at rakish angles. One of them wore a long, oversized green coat that reached down almost to his ankles and which was tied around his waist with a sash. It was hard to tell his racial heritage. He looked white, but there was something Latin around the eyes. His companion was black, although light-skinned. He wore a baggy, shiny double-breasted suit and red high-tops. A moment after they stepped out a girl joined them, a slim black girl with straight blond hair that may or may not have been a wig. She wore a plastic raincoat, open, and a dark, shiny mini-dress.
A minute or so later Aurelio emerged. He too wore a floppy black hat, but his was pushed back on his head. He had an overcoat draped over his shoulders, a white scarf draped over that. Under the overcoat he appeared to be wearing a dark suit with a ruffled shirt, no tie.
They climbed into the Buick—Aurelio first, into the back seat, followed by the woman; the two goons up front—and took off like they had somewhere to go.
Me too.
We went clear the hell across town, practically to Millard, and ended up in one of those shiny, too-perfect suburban strip-malls near 120th and Q. By then I had half-guessed where we were headed: The Queue, which billed itself as “a civilized eating and drinking emporium,” whatever the heck that meant, and which would be gone and replaced by a liquidation center inside of six months. At the moment, however, it was the latest “in” spot.
I was a little old for the place, judging by the look of the youngsters filtering in and out on their way to and from cars to engage in their various vices, but at least I was up to the dress code, which leaned toward the upscale.
They nicked me for a cover charge at the door, and I paid without complaining—more of Michael Berenelli’s money, I figured, although the nature of my mission was personal—but the cover was taken under false pretenses. I don’t mind so much when its purpose is to underwrite live music, but when all you get for your five bucks is a pimply-faced kid spinning records while lights flash and the fishnet-stockinged waitresses go by with overpriced, watered-down drinks … Well, I was glad it wasn’t my money.
The main room, the drinking and dancing room, was done in dark green and brass and mirrors. Music blared from a dozen speakers hung at ceiling level around the room. Each was the size of a small African nation. There was a big U-shaped bar with low-backed stools; lots of small, long-legged tables with the same stools; and, in a back corner, a kind of alcove, very intimate, with very low tables and very low overstuffed chairs and couches.
It was there that Aurelio Ramos and company were seating themselves as I entered.
The place had as many video monitors as stereo speakers, also hung from the ceilings. Some of the monitors showed the DJ at “work” in his glass booth next to the dance floor. Some of the monitors, inexplicably, showed the people on the dance floor, which you could have seen “live” by merely turning your head. And some of them showed random, ever-changing images—clips from old movies, old cartoons, old commercials. Odd, and oddly hypnotic.
I found a stool at the bar, from which I could keep an eye not only on the monitors and dancers but also, incidentally, on the Ramos party, shouted a drink order at the bartender, forked over so much money that the bartender had to have a friend help him cart it over to the cash register, and settled in.
It was to be a long wait. I didn’t mind. The music was okay, if too loud, and my ordering neat bourbons made it tough for the bartender to water them down, and the waitresses weren’t too hard to take. They wore high-necked jackets reminiscent of the ones bellhops always wear in the old movies and, between the bottoms of their jackets and the tops of their high-heeled shoes, not much else besides legs. As I said, I didn’t mind the wait. I nursed two bourbons, almost enough liquor to fill a bathroom Dixie cup, and kept half an eye on Aurelio Ramos while letting the remaining half an eye alternate among the action on the dance floor and the shenanigans of the disk jockey and the legs of the waitresses. I consulted Jahna Johansen’s little book once. Something about it stuck in my craw, but I couldn’t think what and now was not the time to puzzle it out.
Thus passed ninety minutes, give or take. Their waitress had made four trips to the Ramos table, her tray filled each time. I figured I wouldn’t have long to wait and I was right. Aurelio stood and said something to the black girl sitting next to him. She nodded. The guy in the double-breasted suit stood, too, and followed Ramos as they picked through the tables and the people, heading toward the front of the room.
I was ten steps ahead of them.
When you entered The Queue’s tiled lobby, you had two choices: You could bear left, to the disco, or continue forward fifteen feet to where a tuxedoed maître d’ would feed you dinner if he liked your looks. Across from the maître d’ there was a little alcove partly shielded by a pale gray wall that stopped ten inches shy of the ceiling. You didn’t have to be much of a detective to guess what was through that alcove. You also didn’t have to be much of a detective to guess where, after three or four drinks, Aurelio Ramos and his double-breasted buddy were headed.
I was there first, and took up a position in the stall nearest the door.
The self-closing door to the restroom opened and there were footsteps on the mosaic tile, and low, echoing comments between Aurelio and his friend. I gave them half a minute, kicked the flush lever on the toilet, and stepped out of the stall.
The setup was good. Not perfect—perfect would have had Double-Breast in one of the stalls and Aurelio alone at the urinals—but good. Aurelio was indeed in place, taking care of business, while Double-Breast stood with his back against the opposite wall, arms crossed, legs spread in an unmistakable imitation of a bodyguard. Aurelio Ramos had a delusion about himself, and the delusion was that he was important enough to need protection. This one night, he was right.
Double-Breast glanced at me desultorily, glanced away without interest, then, a spark of recognition igniting in his head, glanced back.
He spent too much time glancing, and he was positioned all wrong. Between his first look in my direction and his second I covered the short distance between us and brought my right knee up between his obligingly spread legs, and hard. He doubled up, naturally, and I brought my fist up under his chin, also hard. His head went back an
d cracked the tiles on the wall and he collapsed like a South American government.
The event filled no more than ten seconds, perhaps as few as five.
Ramos looked over his shoulder. There was no concern in his pretty little face, just mild curiosity. Getting a look at me moving toward him changed that. But he was not in the best of positions, standing there with his tool in his hand, in medias res, so to speak. He didn’t know what to do first.
I did. I put a foot in the small of his back and pushed. He fell forward with a guttural cry, grabbing the plumbing for support with his free hand. Trying not to fall in, he kind of spun around on the tile, still hanging on to the fixture. I had to dance back a couple of steps to avoid getting my shoes wet. Then I moved in and grabbed Aurelio by the lapels and slammed him against the metal wall of the stall that was just right of the urinals. He yelled, or tried to. It emerged a strangled squeak.
“Remember me, sweetie?” I said into his face. In the hard, white light of the restroom his features appeared more strongly Hispanic than they had last night, although not exclusively so.
He gulped.
“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk last night, Aurelio, on account of your friends. Now it’s just you and me.”
He gulped again. The light, long whiskers on his chin and lip vibrated. “Now wait a minnit, man—”
“Shut up. You got to talk last time. Now you listen. I know who you are and where you live and what you do. I even know when you go to take a goddamn leak, Aurelio—”
He tried to break away but I slammed him against the wall again.
“Stand still,” I growled. “And listen. You seem to think you’re something, some kind of big shot, some kind of important man. You’re not. You’re nothing. Your hired muscle is nothing. And from what I can see”—I glanced pointedly at his exposed privates—“you’re just a boy, not a man.”
He moved to cover himself but I slammed him again.
The restroom door opened and a fat kid with wet-curly hair came in, caught sight of the unconscious man on the floor and Aurelio and me against the wall, and stopped dead.
“We’re full up, kid,” I said and he beat it.
I turned back to Aurelio. “Now here’s the arrangement. You’re going to forget me. You’re going to forget who I am and where I live and how you know me. You’re going to forget everything about me except my face. And you’d better remember this face, pal, because the next time you see it is gonna be the last time you see it. Understand? I don’t like fucking around with third-rate losers like you. It’s a waste of time. So stay the hell away from me. I don’t care if we’re in a a goddamn Kmart, you see me and you’d better get the fuck out of there before I see you. Got it?”
I was putting it on thick, of course. The idea was to catch him with his guard down, or rather knock his guard down, show him how flimsy and transparent it really was, shock him and reduce him psychologically, then hit him hard with the message. Although I doubt he had ever thought of it in such terms, it’s exactly what Ramos had tried to do to me. His big mistake was using his goons—although he lacked the physical resources to have handled the job himself. But anyone can be beaten up when he’s ganged up on. There’s no shame in that, no psychological stripping. I had done the opposite: I had single-handedly torn through Ramos’s line of defense like wet tissue—it was almost laughable, of course, but he hadn’t thought so—and gotten to him. I had manhandled him and insulted him and reduced him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Unless I missed my guess badly, Aurelio Ramos would run in the other direction if he caught sight of me at the other end of a supermarket aisle.
As if concurring, he nodded with quick, jerky bobs of his head.
I pulled him away from the metal wall and hurled him against it again. “I can’t hear a nod, Aurelio!”
“All right,” he blubbered. “I got it.”
I let him go, straightened myself up, smoothed his lapels, flounced the ruffles on his shirt front. He was sniffling, trying to keep the panic in check, trying not to cry or do anything else that would qualify as uncool. It was too late for that, standing there with his dick hanging out. “Good,” I said calmly. “As long as we understand each other.”
Ramos sniffled once or twice and started to zip his pants. As soon as he had both hands occupied I grabbed him again and spun him around and took him by the back of his jacket collar and pulled him toward the urinals and stuck his head into the one he had been using. He let out a cry and I drove my right knee into his ribs.
“You forgot to flush, Aurelio,” I said, taking care of it for him. Then I let him go and he fell onto the floor, wiping water and piss out of his face. I moved to the sinks and smoothed my hair in the mirrors above them. “Can’t stand a guy who doesn’t flush when he’s done,” I said to the reflection.
I paused out in the parking lot, lounging near the Radio Shack window two doors down along the mall. I didn’t think it too likely that Aurelio Ramos would pull himself together, pull his double-breasted bodyguard together, collect the other bully-boy and come after me. I considered it more likely that he and Double-Breast would compose themselves as well as possible in the john and return to their table, saying nothing, ever, to their comrade or anyone else. Maybe later tonight the girl would wonder why Ramos couldn’t get it up. Maybe she wouldn’t. Gift horse, and so on.
Still, a jittery fellow like me likes to make sure. If they were going to come, they were going to come within ten minutes. No more. I could afford to blow ten minutes.
Radio Shack had computers on sale. For the eleventieth time I indulged my fantasy that electronics was the key to converting my writing income from embarrassingly low to embarrassingly high. To an extent it probably was true. I’m the world’s worst typist, and the amount of time, effort, and paper I devote to producing clean, final drafts, particularly of any manuscript longer than about thirty pages, could be put to better use. Especially where my novels were concerned—I had the guts to refer to “novels,” plural, even though to date there was one completed and one on apparently permanent hold—it would be nice, when finished, to simply push a button and produce a clean manuscript instead of facing the mind-and finger-numbing chore of having to type the damn thing in a form that could be deciphered by a human being or even an editor.
I looked at the price on the card in front of the display. Not bad. Then I squinted out the fine print and saw that the figure didn’t include a monitor, a printer, or, more than likely, the cord you needed to plug the machine into the wall.
We live in a wonderful age.
Seven minutes went by with no sign of the Ramos party. I was in the clear, but I decided to stick to the full ten minutes. I wandered past The Queue’s front doors and loitered down by Twenty-Four-Hour Martinizing—I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to get anything out of those people in an hour—and watched my minute hand creep around the dial.
My hand went back to Jahna Johansen’s book, in a side pocket of my sport coat. Something about it kept gnawing at the back of my brain like a forgotten appointment. I tried to switch off the conscious part of my mind and flip through the little book on autopilot, hoping for my subconscious, a gestalt, or The Force to kick in.
It did. I stopped the backward riffle of pages and thumbed forward slowly, a page at a time, to see what had caught my eye without my mind being aware of it.
A telephone number. One of dozens in that book; one of a half-dozen or so that were unidentified even by a pair of initials, suggesting that Jahna was well familiar with the number and its owner.
I went into my pants pocket and got out my card case and went through the contents. Like standing around in front of the dry cleaners, it was an unnecessary maneuver.
“Sorry about your beauty sleep,” I said curtly. “Maybe you can catch up at the office tomorrow.”
Steve Lehman pawed self-consciously at his tousled red hair, which at the moment looked a lot like Stan Laurel’s coiffure. He wore pale ye
llow pajamas with blue windowpane checks, a blue cotton robe, and a squinty, scrunched-up look that indicated he had been deep in the arms of Morpheus when I came pounding on the door of his apartment. It was, after all, well past midnight. But my apology was far from sincere.
“Well, what’s the matter,” Lehman grumbled sleepily, flopping on a sofa that was too big for the room. “Is it about Meredith?”
“Not exactly. It’s about you. It’s about this.” I spun the little address book through the air and into his lap. He picked it up and went through the pages.
“What is it?”
“It’s an address book. It belongs to a woman named Jahna Johansen. Know her?”
“Nope.” He went on flipping through the book.
On TV, liars give themselves away with obliging flickers of their eyes, or even more unsubtle reactions. In real life people are less cooperative. Not that the planet’s teeming with poker faces, but there are enough of them to keep an investigator interested.
“Well, that’s odd.” I had gone into my pocket and pulled out Lehman’s business card, on which he had jotted his home number. “She’s got your number in the book,” I said. “Ninth or tenth page from the back, if you’re interested.”
He wasn’t, not enough to check. He put the book on a yellow plastic table near the end of the sofa and said, “So?”
“I had hoped for better,” I admitted. “Shall I put on a pot of coffee?”
He nipped at a fingernail, or what was left of it, but the gesture wasn’t significant. “Look, Nebraska, I’m in sales. I meet people all over the place. I go to every ribbon-cutting, every open house, every Chamber deal I can manage. I talk with people and I trade business cards, and et cetera, and I basically try to meet as many people as I can. But I can’t remember everybody I meet. What difference does it make anyway?”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 23
