The Ragged End of Nowhere

by Roy Chaney

  “How about Sidney Trunk—what was his stake in this?”

  “Trunk?” Winnie the Poof shook his head. “Now you’ve really lost me, Mister Hagen. I don’t know what you’ve heard but you’ve acquired some funny ideas. Sidney Trunk was of no account to me. I was sorry to hear that he passed over but not too sorry. And if you’ve heard that Trunk was interested in brokering the sale of this hand, you must remember one important thing—Sidney Trunk is dead. He isn’t brokering anything anymore. There’s no money to be shaken out of that tree.”

  Winnie the Poof raised his drink in the air and studied it, frowning, as though he’d just found a long crack in the glass. He snapped his fingers. “Dagmar, bring me a bottle of Tabasco sauce. This Mary isn’t kicking as hard as she ought to.”

  Dagmar disappeared into the house.

  “You’ve got him well trained,” Hagen said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I probably would be.”

  Hagen looked out on the shimmering water in the pool. He sipped his coffee. “What did you tell my brother it was worth?”

  Winnie the Poof laughed softly to himself. “Well, there we are again—this question of value. All I told your brother was that I was interested in seeing this item firsthand. I didn’t put a price on it. Our negotiations hadn’t gone that far. I have no idea what your brother believed it to be worth.”

  “But you’re willing to pay me ten thousand for it.”

  “A blind investment on my part.”

  “That’s difficult to believe.”

  “The difficulty is yours.” The valentine heart sunglasses stared at Hagen. Hagen could see beads of sweat on Winnie the Poof’s forehead. “I understand your predicament, Mister Hagen. Your brother was murdered. You want to know who murdered him. I won’t take it personally if you think that perhaps I know something about it. But as it happens, I know nothing about it. Your brother had something to sell that I’m interested in and that’s the extent of my association with your brother. I sympathize with your plight and I wish you the best of luck, but in the meantime I’m still interested in this artifact, and I agreed to speak with you on the basis of that continued interest. So let me encapsulate this discussion for you in case you’ve lost the thread of it somewhere along the way. If you have this artifact, I’m prepared to pay you ten thousand dollars if you’ll turn it over to me. If you don’t have it but you know where it is, I’ll pay you five thousand dollars for that information once I’ve verified its accuracy. So what do you say, Mister Hagen? Can we do business?”

  Hagen picked up the photograph again, studied the image of the prosthetic hand—dark, wooden, and somehow exotic. The lifeless fingers seemed to be reaching for something, grasping at something. The hand of the Vologda Jesus or the Hand of Danjou or a complete fake all the way around—it didn’t matter what it was called or how phony it was. Too many people wanted it. Maybe badly enough to kill Ronnie for it.

  Dagmar returned with a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a leafy stalk of celery. While Winnie the Poof held his glass up, Dagmar shook several drops of Tabasco into the drink, then stirred it with the celery. Winnie the Poof took a sip, swirled the tomato drink around in his mouth like a fine wine, smacked his lips together and smiled. Dagmar smiled back, then moved off. The whole scene had the feel of an inside joke—two grown men playacting an elaborate master-and-servant routine for Hagen’s benefit.

  Hagen set his coffee cup down. “I don’t know that I can help you, Wilson. It might be harder than you think for me to put my hands on this thing.”

  Winnie the Poof pulled his valentine heart sunglasses down on his nose again. The bloodshot eyes studied Hagen. “So you do know where it is?”

  “I may.”

  “And you can get it?”

  “There may be complications.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, I’ll let you know when I come up against them. But one or two complications might bring the price up. And before we can do business, I want to know who the buyer is.”

  “I can’t help you there.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe what you like.”

  “Then maybe I’ll turn the hand over to the police. They might be interested in a piece of stolen property.”

  “You’ll be ten thousand dollars poorer.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Winnie the Poof made a sour face. Pushed his sunglasses up. “Do what you have to do, Mister Hagen. I’m merely a businessman offering you a business proposition. If you’re not interested—fine. If you are interested, we can talk further when you have the artifact in your hands.”

  “I’ll have the artifact soon. But first, you’re going to tell me who the buyer is.”

  Winnie the Poof removed the celery stalk from his drink. He leaned his head back and let the thick red liquid drip off the stalk into his mouth, then bit the end of the stalk, dropped the remainder back into his drink.

  “Let me look into things,” Winnie the Poof said when he finished chewing the bite of celery. “Perhaps an arrangement can be worked out.”

  “I need to know now.”

  Winnie the Poof shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “Tonight then. Look into it. I’ll call you.”

  A long pause. “Call me tomorrow. You have my card?”

  Hagen said that he did.

  “Until tomorrow then,” Winnie the Poof said, impatient now to get rid of Hagen before Hagen made any other awkward demands. “Ciao, Mister Hagen.”

  Hagen stood up. Winnie the Poof snapped his fingers and Dagmar escorted Hagen back through the house and out the front door, the three Chihuahuas named Troy nipping at his heels.

  Hagen stopped at a gas station to fill up the Buick’s tank. He pushed the gas nozzle in, watched the numbers clicking by on the face of the gas pump, thinking of Winnie the Poof and his nameless buyer and the photograph of the wooden hand that he’d seen twice now. One thing was certain—Ronnie’s personal belongings didn’t include an antique wooden hand. Either the hand was taken from him, or he’d sold it, or he’d hidden it away, or he’d never had it at all.

  But now Hagen saw a fifth possibility.

  Ronnie had spent five years in the Foreign Legion, in Europe and Africa. And yet when he returned home to Las Vegas he carried only two suitcases with a few changes of clothes, a shaving kit, and not much else. There should have been more. A man would generally acquire many things over the course of five years. Hagen had assumed from the outset that Ronnie had probably shipped some of his belongings to Las Vegas rather than trying to bring them with him on the plane—that’s what Hagen had done when he’d gotten out of the military. It occurred to Hagen now that maybe the wooden hand had been shipped along with them. That might explain why Ronnie had passed out photographs of the wooden hand rather than showing around the genuine article. He didn’t have the genuine article—not yet. He’d been waiting for it to be delivered to him. And shipping the hand back to Vegas from France rather than carrying it with him wouldn’t be an unreasonable precaution to take. Shop around photographs of the hand and see what kind of deal he could make. Then sit back and wait for the hand to arrive, turn it over to the highest bidder when it did. It would keep the hand safe and out of the way—no one could take the hand from him by force if he didn’t have it with him.

  But if Ronnie had shipped some of his belongings home before he left France, where were they? Maybe they hadn’t arrived yet. Or maybe they had arrived and were sitting around right now in a shipping company warehouse, waiting to be picked up. Or maybe Ronnie had wanted them delivered somewhere. He wouldn’t have had the address of the apartment he rented, Hagen was sure. But he might’ve had Gubbs’s address. Gubbs said that he hadn’t been in contact with Ronnie, but at the moment Hagen saw no good reason to believe anything Gubbs said. Hagen believed one thing though. If Ronnie had shipped his belongings to Gubbs’s address, he would’ve told Gubbs to expect the delivery.


  Perhaps they had already been delivered.

  And the wooden hand with them.

  Gubbs—everything came back to Jack Gubbs. Gubbs knew Ronnie and Ronnie had stayed with him. Gubbs worked for Marty Ray. Gubbs threw business to Winnie the Poof. Gubbs hung around Harry Needles’s club. Gubbs stood at the crossroads like a baneful jittery scarecrow, pointing off in all directions at once. And all directions led right back to Gubbs.

  Hagen checked his watch. Twelve fifteen.

  It was time to visit Jack Gubbs again.

  Hagen drove over to Rainbow Road, followed it to the cross street that led to Gubbs’s place. The street in front of the apartment complex was quiet. Hagen parked and sat in the car for a moment, enjoying one last breath of cool air-conditioning. What was it the Sniff used to say on days like this? Hot enough to fry an egg on the roof. Ronnie had always liked that one. Who the hell wanted to fry an egg on the roof? A kid, laughing at the weirdness of his elders.

  Hagen walked onto the well-manicured grounds. The apartment buildings seemed deserted—not a soul in sight. Hagen climbed the stairs to Gubbs’s apartment. The curtains were closed but a radio inside was playing rock-and-roll music.

  Hagen knocked on the door and waited. No answer. Hagen knocked again, harder this time.

  Still no answer.

  Hagen tried the doorknob.

  It turned.

  Hagen slipped inside the apartment, closing the door quietly behind him.

  He looked around the dark living room. Dust motes floated in a rectangle of sunlight that crept onto the living-room carpet from the kitchen. Hagen half expected to find Gubbs lying on the couch in a drunken stupor but Gubbs wasn’t there. The rock song on the radio reached a crescendo. A high arching guitar riff flew past Hagen’s shoulder. Then a second one, softer, full of electric trills, floated lazily up to the ceiling.

  Hagen found Gubbs in the bedroom.

  Gubbs lay on his back on the bed. Fully clothed. His arms outstretched. His head rested on one pillow and a second pillow lay nearby, large burn marks in the center. The pillow under his head was stained dark red but the blue-and-black hole in Gubbs’s forehead, just above the bridge of his nose, was small and round and mostly bloodless. Gubbs’s eyes stared opaquely at the ceiling. On the radio in the living room the rock song ended and a disc jockey talked of the weather—“Hot and getting hotter . . .”

  10.

  HOUSEFLIES HOPPED and fidgeted across Gubbs’s face and the mess on the pillow.

  Gubbs had been dead for hours.

  Someone had covered Gubbs’s face with the second pillow, pushed the barrel of a pistol down into it, and fired. The pillow muffled the sound of the gunshot. Gubbs’s face was covered with bruises and abrasions. Gubbs had put up a fight before he was shot.

  Hagen stepped back from the bed. Took a deep breath. He knew he should get out of there. Right now. But he told himself to wait. If he wanted to take a look around Gubbs’s apartment, this was the only chance he’d get.

  Hagen opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers, found a pair of white cotton socks. He pulled the socks over his hands, wiped the knob of the drawer, then began searching the chest of drawers in earnest. When he finished he moved to the closet, pulling everything off the shelves, looking inside boxes, empty suitcases, a nylon gym bag. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He didn’t expect to find the wooden hand. If it had been here it was almost certainly gone now. But he might find something else—something that might give Hagen an idea where the hand was now and who had taken it. Something that might tell Hagen who killed Ronnie.

  After searching the bedroom Hagen moved into the living room. He kept glancing at his watch, knew that he was pushing his luck every second he stayed in the apartment. Suddenly he heard feet running on the walkway outside. He stopped dead still, not even breathing. The running feet belonged to children, three or four of them. They passed by the apartment and moved on down the walkway. Hagen resumed his work. The music on the radio sounded exuberant and macabre—a buoyant pop music melody for the listening enjoyment of the corpse lying in the bedroom.

  Hagen picked through the trash on the coffee table. Underneath a section of newspaper he found a personal address book. Six inches by four, with a black plastic cover. He opened it and paged through it as best he could, his sock-covered fingers bending the pages as he pushed them back. Names and telephone numbers. Most of them belonging to women.

  Hagen set the address book aside and moved on, but after ten more minutes of searching through the detritus of Jack Gubbs’s pitiful existence he found nothing else that interested him. Hagen pulled back the curtain and looked down into the courtyard. Empty—blessedly empty. He pulled the socks off his hands, picked up the address book and stepped outside. He wiped the doorknob with one of the socks before closing the door and stuffing the socks into his trouser pockets.

  Driving back to the Strip Hagen stopped at a con ve nience store, disposed of the two socks in the trash can out front, and went inside to buy a pack of cigarettes. Hagen didn’t smoke much anymore but it seemed like a good time to pick up the habit again. Nothing like a fresh corpse to put the kibosh on healthy resolutions. Hagen wondered how long it would be before the body was discovered and reported to the police. It might be days. By then every housefly in Las Vegas would have taken up residence on Jack Gubbs’s cold bloated face.

  Back in his hotel room at the Venetian Hagen flipped through the pages of Gubbs’s address book.

  Studying the names.

  Marty Ray’s name was there, of course, followed by several phone numbers. And there was an entry for Winnie P. But most of the phone numbers belonged to women. Many women. Dozens of women.

  Theresa Sanchez was one of them.

  So Gubbs knew Theresa Sanchez well enough to keep her name and phone number in his address book. What did that mean? Gubbs had said that he knew a lot of the girls who worked at the Venus Lounge, so maybe it meant nothing. But it made Hagen wonder. Sanchez had been worried about something last night when Hagen tried to talk to her. Might it have had something to do with Jack Gubbs? She must have seen Gubbs when he arrived at the club last night. What had he told her? What was she afraid of?

  Once again he saw Gubbs at the center of this—whatever this was.

  But Gubbs was dead now.

  Like Ronnie. Like Sidney Trunk.

  Hagen leafed through the phone book once more, didn’t find what he was looking for. An entry for Sidney Trunk.

  Hagen set the book down, picked up the phone, ordered a double bourbon and soda from room service. It wasn’t until right then that he noticed the message light flashing on the phone. There were two messages. The first one came in a couple of hours ago. It was from Peach, reminding him that they had a lunch date. Hagen played the second one. It was Suzanne Cosette. She wanted him to call her as soon as possible. It was Friday and she wanted an update on his progress.

  His progress—that was funny. Since he’d talked to her two men had died. Two men who knew something about this goddamned hand. If she wanted to call that progress, she was welcome to it. But maybe she knew what the body count was already. She and her friends—whoever they were.

  When the drink came Hagen drank half of it down right off. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.

  Cosette answered on the first ring.

  “So good to hear from you, Mister Hagen. I was afraid I might not.”

  “I haven’t forgotten about you, Suzanne.”

  “What is the status of our business matter?”

  Hagen kept his voice steady. It took some effort. He was on edge—way out on the edge. “Tell your boss I can get the hand. I don’t have it but I know where it is. But I want some information before we make any kind of a deal. First, I want to know who your buyer is. I want the name and I want some background. Second, I want to talk to Amarantos. Give me a number where I can reach him or have him call me, I don’t care. But I want to talk to him. Third thing, I want to know what the h
and is really worth to you.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then, “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “There’s not much to understand. You want the hand and I want information. This story about the Russian Jesus—it’s bullshit. This hand was supposedly stolen from the French Foreign Legion, isn’t that right? It’s supposed to be the Hand of Danjou. Except that maybe it’s not real. I want to know whether it’s real or not and I want to know what kind of price your people have put on it.”

  Another pause. Hagen thought he could hear Cosette taking a deep breath, as though trying to regain her composure. Then, “The Hand of Danjou—I’m not familiar with such a thing. Let me suggest this, Mister Hagen. Let’s talk about this in person. I’m finding this phone conversation to be a little disturbing. Let’s talk face-to-face and we can work out these differences.”

  “There’s no point in meeting unless you can tell me what I want to know. And one other thing—tell the boys you’ve got following me to back off. I almost shot one of them last night. Next time I might not be in such a good mood.”

  “You’re not making sense, Mister Hagen.”

  “The Englishman and the German—tell them to disappear.”

  “You are making a mistake. No Englishmen and no Germans work with me and I have asked no one to follow you. Let me do this—let me call Mister Amarantos right now. It may take some time to reach him but I will keep trying. Perhaps he can put to rest these concerns that you have. Then we can meet. And please don’t do anything precipitous with the hand until we can work this matter out. Does this sound satisfactory, Mister Hagen?”

  “Work on it, Suzanne. Don’t bother calling me back until you’ve got what I want.”

  Hagen hung up the phone. He wasn’t sure what he’d just stirred up and he didn’t care. He was going to keep stirring and keep stirring until he found some answers that made sense.

  Hagen stood at the window, drank down the last of the bourbon and soda and smoked a cigarette. Outside the traffic was thick along the Strip but Hagen didn’t notice. What he saw was Gubbs’s corpse in the dark apartment. Gubbs had been afraid that whoever killed Ronnie might come after him too. Now Gubbs was dead. Dead in a dusty apartment. He’d rolled the dice one last time and lost. He was out of the game for good. Were they the same dice that Ronnie had rolled?