Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  “Sorry. I fed one of your pralines to the dog.”

  Vangie shuddered as if the scorching sunlight had a wind-chill factor. “Jesus, you’re a cold-blooded bastard.” No answer. “It was that goddam phone call of Jimmy’s, wasn’t it?”

  “That confirmed it, yes.”

  The river looked very peaceful. Downstream the same side-wheeler full of tourists that Dain had ridden two mornings before bellowed raucously with its steam whistle. Dain chose his words carefully, as if they were brittle and might break.

  “Maxton is screaming for blood, but I think if he had his bonds back he’d not go looking too hard for you or Zimmer.”

  She began shrilly, “That fucker’s screaming for blood? What about…” She stopped, controlled herself. “Yeah, we give you the bonds and they don’t get to Maxton, and we end up—”

  “I don’t want the bonds, Vangie.”

  “Oh sure, I believe you.”

  Dain scratched the black Lab behind the ears, stared out over the slow brown water, shook his head, said patiently, “You came in by bus, you’re too smart to leave a locker key with Zimmer, so if I searched you right now…”

  Vangie had sprung to her feet at mention of a bus depot locker key. This jerked the Labrador’s head up, but she was just standing there. He chuffed and put his head down again. Slowly, uncertainly, Vangie sat back down.

  “Maxton doesn’t know where you are—yet.” He turned to look at her. “I stirred somebody up by coming here to look for you—for my own reasons I want to find out who and why.”

  “Maybe that I’d believe. Good old self-interest.”

  Dain was stroking the dog’s back absently. “But I’m going to have to give him something pretty soon.”

  She said despairingly, “If I fuck you will you—”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that we might be killed?”

  “I stopped worrying five years ago about what happens to people.” Smothered anger entered his voice. “Especially people who ask for it.” He stood up. “If you don’t give them back to Maxton I won’t be able to help you, Vangie.”

  “Jimmy won’t do that,” she said regretfully.

  “Then you give them back.” He was suddenly, harshly angry. “You stole two million dollars from a guy who said he loved you and then offered you to his friends—”

  “Yeah, so I stole his fucking bonds. And you know what? I’m glad I did if it gives that pig one sleepless…”

  She ran down again, a startled look on her face as if she hadn’t known she was capable of so much hatred. Dain nodded.

  “That’s terrific, Vangie. Some great revenge you’re getting on him. Think about what can happen, for Chrissake! Keep the room you have, but have a friend rent you another room in your hotel under another name and sleep in that one. And keep Zimmer off the street—I might not be the only one looking.”

  Vangie started to speak, stopped. Her spirit was gone.

  “How do I get hold of you?”

  “Call me at the De La Poste Motel in Chartres Street by this time tomorrow. I can give you that long.”

  “Edgar Dain. De La Poste Motel. Tomorrow afternoon.” As he nodded and turned to start off up the steps, she added almost wistfully, “We almost made it, didn’t we?”

  Dain looked down at her bowed head for a long moment.

  “You weren’t even close,” he said.

  It was dusk, the huge high piles of cumulus on the western horizon were shot with pink, Bourbon Street was opening its doors and tuning up its music. Vangie sat on the edge of their bed in the Delta Hotel regarding Zimmer with resigned eyes. Between the edges of the curtains on the window behind her was the pornhouse marquee, the scattered lights on it still unbroken flashing intermittently.

  “It’s the only way, Jimmy. You know that when Dain tells Maxton where we are…”

  Jimmy, a weak man scared, kicked over a chair. “No, goddammit, no!”

  Vangie sighed, got to her feet, went to him. She put her arms around his neck, her face close to his. “Jimmy-honey, listen to me! You know we have to—”

  He shook her off angrily.

  “All I know is that I lose the bonds, I lose you!”

  “Maybe, maybe not—but you won’t lose your life.”

  “According to Dain.”

  Vangie controlled her anger. “Not just according to Dain. You know what Maxton is capable of—”

  “I never knew Maxton as intimately as you did.” He had worked himself up into a fine, nasty, self-justifying anger. “You’ll end right side up, though—or should I say backside up? I bet you slept with Dain this afternoon and made plans to—”

  “Jimmy, I have to go to work. I get paid tonight, we need the money. We’ll talk about it when I get home, okay?” Zimmer was petulantly silent, refusing to meet her eyes.

  “At least think about giving them back. And please let’s get another room like he suggested.”

  Zimmer replied in his childishly defiant way, “I’ll do whatever the fuck I please.”

  At Carnal Knowledge, the musicians were just arriving, having a drink, looking to their instruments. A few local guys on their way home after work were having a quiet beer before the entertainment drove the prices out of reach. Two bulky men, Nicky and Trask, entered like matched, mobile, very heavy bookends. They moved in on the bartender in unison.

  “Harry?”

  The bartender jerked an indifferent thumb toward a dark corner by the end of the bar. Bulky guys asking questions were no novelty to him, and Harry was a pain in the ass.

  “Him.”

  In the dark corner, Harry had Noreen crowded up against the wall, trying to caress her breast while talking earnestly about sexual matters. Noreen looked bored. The bookends closed in on Harry as if he were an encyclopedia of slime molds. Seeing them over Harry’s shoulder, Noreen did a quick and grateful fade, then found something to talk about with the bartender, out of earshot but able to watch obliquely in the backbar mirror.

  The one named Nicky, who had a whole lot of blond hair, said to Harry, “You phoned about a girl named Vangie.” He tossed a photo of her on the bar. “Yes or no?”

  Harry picked up the picture, studied it with a show of concentration. He had gotten a sly, money look on his face.

  “Well-1-1… I can’t be certain.”

  Trask, the one with short black hair, said, “Get certain.”

  “I ain’t gonna get in trouble over this, am I?” asked Harry with belated caution. “I mean… how heavy is it? I mean… what’d she do?”

  “Asked questions,” said Trask.

  Harry said hurriedly, “Ah, yeah, yeah, she’s the one, all right, fellas, she dances here.” He added in a smaller voice, “Stuck-up fuckin’ bitch.”

  Nicky rolled two $100 bills into a cigarette-like cylinder and stuck the cylinder into Harry’s shirt pocket.

  “See, pal?” he said. “Easy money. Now just tell us where she parks her pasties and we’ll be on our way.”

  Harry told them. As they started out of the place, Trask paused to finger Harry’s shirt collar regretfully.

  “Ring around the collar, Harry,” he said. “Mention us around town, you got no collar. Maybe even you got no neck to go into the collar you ain’t got. Capisce?“

  He guffawed loudly and swaggered out after Nicky. He had really liked that TV series, Crime Story, about the old days in Vegas, and had patterned himself after the show’s mob characters.

  18

  Noreen, in pasties and spangles, was doing an exaggerated and prolonged grind in front of the dressing room mirror. She added an exaggerated bump! to the grind that made everything jiggle, and winked at her own overmascaraed eyes in the mirror.

  “So why ain’t you rich, kiddo?”

  A mile away in the porn palace next to the Delta Hotel, a couple of dozen male patrons of three races—white, black, Asian—sparsely studded the theater like chocolate chips on a store-bought cookie. Management didn’t mind the nea
rly empty theater; it was only a money-washing operation anyway.

  Zimmer, absorbing the raw sex and grunts and four-letter exhortations from the screen, fondling his own half-hard-on furtively like everyone else, jerked his hand away abruptly. Why was he here with these freaks and weirdos who couldn’t afford a VCR, when he had something like Vangie waiting in his bed?

  She wasn’t waiting in his bed, that was the answer. She was out shaking it in a Vieux Carré sleaze joint, or maybe right now fucking the guy who was after them to rob Jimmy Zimmer of the bonds. For her own good, he’d force Vangie to give him the locker key, he’d control their destiny…

  Zimmer emerged into the polyglot, swarming street crowd, no tourists, all local. When he turned in at the Delta Hotel, a bulky man sauntered in ahead of him. A bodybuilder, mirror athlete, all muscle and no guts, deep tan and a great shock of almost straw-yellow hair.

  Another bulky man, equally large but with black hair cut Marine Corps short, turned away from the check-in desk to meet the blond man in front of the elevator. They shook hands noisily as Zimmer reached around them to punch the button. Cream puffs—these hulking overinflated guys were all fag for each other.

  “Hey, man, what about this nightlife, huh?” black-hair asked blond as the elevator door opened.

  “Yeah! Thompson’s got the broads up at the room already!”

  The three men got on. Zimmer, closest to the panel of floor buttons, pushed 6 just as the blond man said, “Hey, punch six for us, will you, buddy? Thanks.”

  Zimmer turned right, toward his room. The two big guys paused, debating which way their room was. They ended up following Zimmer down the corridor.

  Heavy applause, rebel yells followed the distant music. Down the corridor from the backstage area came the approaching click of high heels; Vangie came in wearing only an exhausted expression, spangles, and sweat. She sprawled in one of the straight-backed chairs with her arms hanging limply at her sides. Through the half-open door came Harry’s voice from backstage.

  “Noreen, get out here! You’re on next!”

  “Her master’s voice,” said Noreen, but she made no move whatsoever to get out of her chair in front of the makeup mirror.

  Nicky and Trask were coming up the hall behind him with their loose drunken conventioneer laughs when Zimmer opened his door. Trask shoved him hard between the shoulder blades. Jimmy ran across the room, arms flailing, to smash into the dresser. Nicky shut the door as Trask pulled a blackjack from his pocket. Zimmer turned to protest, but Trask waved the sap in front of his startled eyes.

  “Make a sound I splinter your nose.”

  Zimmer pressed himself back against the dresser, terribly pale, his terror-filled eyes darting from one hulk to the other. Nicky was at the phone, dialing 9 for an outside line. When he had it, he dialed a local seven-digit number.

  “Six forty-seven,” he said into the phone, and hung up.

  “Noreen! Get your fucking ass out here!“

  Noreen went languidly to the door. She caught the frames on either side of it to do a high kick out into the hall. She stuck her head back in.

  “I almost forgot, kid,” she said over her shoulder, “couple creeps laid two C-notes on shithead earlier—both looked like that Arny Schwartzynigger guy, y’know? Had a picture that from fifteen feet away in bad light looked like you.”

  She was gone, leaving Vangie gasping like a netted fish.

  “Noreen! Wait…” Noreen was still gone. “But… but he can’t… we can’t…”

  She ran almost blindly at the door, slamming it shut and bolting it. Panting, she reached down the front of her cache-sexe and took out a flat old-fashioned tin aspirin box. She dropped it into her purse as she crossed on wobbly legs to the pay phone beside the door. She dropped her quarter into the slot and began tapping out a number, leaving the receiver hang on the end of its silvery flex so she could be pulling on her street clothes with the other hand. She was almost crying.

  “He… he promised me, tomorrow afternoon… it isn’t fair…”

  Zimmer’s eyes darted toward the door at the discreet knock. His face looked flayed down to the bone. Maxton came in wearing an elegant summer-weight suit and open-throat raw-silk sport shirt. He looked a question at Nicky, who shook his head. Trask came out of the bathroom. Like Nicky, he wore thin surgical gloves. He also shook his head.

  “Indeed.” Maxton dragged a straight chair in front of the door, sat down in it backward so he faced the room with his arms on the back, said to Zimmer, “James, take off your clothes.”

  “No!” cried Zimmer in a terrified voice.

  The phone rang. Zimmer jerked galvanically toward it. Maxton shook his head and said soothingly, “Just to make sure you aren’t hiding some significant other in your shorts, James.”

  The phone kept on ringing, but it was now much too late for anything outside this room to affect events inside it. Zimmer began to unbutton his shirt with leaden fingers.

  Vangie was buttoning her last button with one hand while slamming the receiver back on the hook with the other. She grabbed her purse from the dressing table, her high heels clattered down the hallway on her way to the alley door.

  Maxton was out of his chair, leaning against the inside of the door with his arms folded on his chest, staring at Zimmer nude and shivering in the middle of the floor. Zimmer had thin arms and a sunken chest with a single scraggly tuft of brown hair growing over the breastbone. Nicky dropped the last of Zimmer’s clothes on the floor.

  “Nothing significant, Mr. Maxton.” He snapped Zimmer’s flaccid organ with a finger, chuckled, “Especially not in his shorts.”

  “So she does have the bonds. Dain was right.” Maxton spoke almost to himself. He turned an icy eye on Zimmer. “James? Talk to me.”

  “A key,” said Zimmer eagerly. “Vangie has it. It was all her idea to take the bonds, Mr. Maxton. I… I didn’t think until… until it was too late…” Maxton was silent. Zimmer cried, “Dain! Dain knows she has the key!”

  Maxton’s voice was a whip. “You spoke with Dain?”

  “Vangie did.”

  “Key to what?”

  “To a locker. At the bus depot.”

  Maxton was silent, then smiled and nodded. “Yes. I see. Thank you, James. You’ve been a great help.”

  “Can… can I get dressed now, Mr. Maxton?”

  Maxton gestured to his men. “Goodbye, James,” he said.

  He turned away as Nicky and Trask began crowding Jimmy back toward the open bathroom door like driving a steer into the slaughterhouse chute. He clung to the door frame with despairing strength; their big athletes’ hands tore his soft deskman’s hands free like wet blotting paper. They shut the bathroom door behind them. Maxton could hear the muffled sound of water being run into the tub as he departed the hotel room.

  Vangie came through the open street door at almost a run, slowed abruptly to a walk, trying to look casual and not making it. As she put out a finger to press the elevator button, it started down from the sixth floor. She ducked into the doorway of the emergency stairwell beside the elevator. Nicky and Trask left the elevator glancing around the lobby, seeing nothing of interest, strutting toward the street. Trask was telling Nicky a dirty joke, and they were guffawing.

  Vangie cautiously opened the stairwell door to peek out into the hallway. Empty. She shut the door behind her, trying to stifle her panting from the six-floor all-out stair climb. The elevator descending from this floor didn’t have to have anything to do with her and Jimmy. He probably had gone out just to bug her, and hadn’t come back yet. That was all.

  Still she hesitated before keying the lock with exaggerated caution. She let the door drift open on its own. The dim overhead was on, the bed still looked freshly made.

  “Jimmy?” It was little more than a whisper. She moved in, shut the door behind her. “Jimmy?”

  The closet was empty except for their clothes; she edged toward the bathroom door, cautious as a doe at the edge of a clearing. Tu
rned the knob, feathered the door open, stuck her head in. The very narrow wedge of light let her see Jimmy’s bent knees rising above the water in the nearly full tub. One arm, resting against the edge of the tub, was also above-water.

  Vangie pushed the door wider and fumbled along the wall for the light switch. Relief made her voice buoyant.

  “Why in heaven’s name are you taking a bath in the dark?”

  The room sprang into view. The water filling the tub was rosy with diluted blood, with Zimmer’s bent knees islands above this pastel surface. Brighter, richer red had run down the forearm above the water from his slashed wrist.

  Vangie reeled against the sink, gripping the sides with her hands, face contorted, mouth working. Somehow she kept from screaming, though she clapped a hand over her mouth as if to physically hold in the sound. She ran from the room.

  The Delta’s only bellboy, an aged man in his seventies with little hair and one cloudy lens in his eyeglasses, was leading an equally aged couple down the hallway outside with their suitcase in his hand. Vangie erupted from her room and knocked him down, bounced off the wall, eyes vague and unfocused, a hand still across her mouth. She lowered it to speak.

  “Ex…excuseme…”

  She ran away down the hall, careening from side to side like a car driven by a drunk. The bellboy braced one hand on the wall and with the help of the couple got shakily to his feet. He stared after Vangie, then turned and looked at the open door of the room. Back down the hall. To the room.

  He started shakily through the open doorway.

  19

  The gypsy cab driver lit his cigarette, shook the match out and dropped it into the street. Vangie, after being handed a wig box by the woman behind the counter, came out of the exotic underwear shop in her very short skintight skirt and blouse with the top four buttons undone. She opened the rear door of the cab but the cabbie patted the seat beside him insinuatingly.