Charles Willeford - Sideswipe

by Unknown

  "It looks wicked that way, and you've sure ruint it for shooting birds."

  "It was more accurate, or wicked as you say, with long barrels, Pop, and you just proved my point. But I'd never shoot birds with a shotgun. I think hunting for game of any kind stinks, and I'm against it. The only way to justify hunting is if you're lost in the woods or something, and you have to kill a bird or a rabbit to survive. Otherwise, hunting for sport is cruel. It ought to be outlawed. You don't think so?"

  "I like quail, and there was a neighbor of mine up in Hamtramck who--"

  "I don't want to hear about it, Pop. If you want to eat quail, Dale can get you some at the supermarket. All you want. They raise 'em for that purpose, and you can buy 'em fresh frozen. You don't hunt, do you?"

  "No, not me, but I had this neighbor, and he used to--"

  "I said I don't want to hear about it. Where's Dale?"

  "After she finished the dishes I think she took a shower. I heard it running awhile ago."

  "What do you think of Dale, Pop, now that you've met her and had a chance to talk with her?"

  "She seems like a nice enough girl. A little forward, maybe."

  "She come on to you while I was gone?"

  "Oh, I don't know. A little bit, maybe. She felt bad about you not eating the apple pie."

  "That's my fault, not Dale's. I'll have to make a list of the things I like and don't like, so she won't make mistakes like that again. I can't blame Dale for my own oversights. But she'll learn soon enough what I like and don't like. It's her face that makes her so sensitive, Pop. Dale's life's been one rejection after another, so if she offers you head, you'd better accommodate her. Otherwise, she'll think you don't like her."

  "I like her fine, Troy, but I haven't done nothing like that in three or four years now, and I guess I don't have the desire anymore. But if there's any leftover pork chops, I wouldn't mind a cold pork chop sandwich before I go to bed."

  "Good. I'll tell Dale how you feel, and I know she'll be happy to fix you a sandwich later on. Or, if you want, you can have my piece of apple pie and a glass of warm milk."

  "I'd rather have the pork chop sandwich."

  The doctored weapon was still in the vise. Troy used a file to smooth the ends of the jaggedly cut barrels, which were not cut off evenly, and then he filed off the splinters from the stock.

  James drove a navy blue Chrysler New Yorker into the yard and parked beside the Honda and the Morris Minor. The big Chrysler dwarfed the two foreign cars. James honked the horn once and then jumped out of the vehicle as if it had been set on fire. He walked toward them, wringing his hands.

  "Oh, a terrible thing happened, Troy! And I didn't know what to do! I was chased, and if I hadn't cut off a pickup at the Miller exit they'd of caught me for sure!"

  "You didn't lead anybody back here, did you?"

  "No, I made sure of that. But I didn't mean to take the baby! I didn't see it back there when I got the car. There was this old lady with packages at the curb in Dadcland, and a younger woman was driving--" He was trying to catch his breath. "Then, when the woman got out to help the old lady with the packages, I jumped in and drove off. The keys were in the car and the motor was running. Both those ladies came running after me, and then a taxi chased me down Kendall Drive. I went through the red light and so did he, right on my back, all the way down the Palmetto to Miller--"

  "What baby?" Troy said, going over to the New Yorker and opening the back door. "Oh, shit," he said as he looked at the baby strapped in its car-seat in the back.

  "I never looked in the back, Troy. There wasn't time. I just took the car 'cause I only had a second or so to get into it and go. He didn't even start crying till I got onto Kendall Drive."

  "This is a nice car, James, exactly what I wanted, but it's useless to us now. Everybody in town'll be on the lookout for this vehicle. I try to think of everything, but I didn't tell you not to steal a car with a baby in it. I thought you'd have more sense than that."

  "I didn't -see- him," James said. "Then, when the cab started chasing me, I couldn't stop and get out. I had to lose him first."

  "What is it," Stanley asked, "a boy or a girl? The way it's bundled up and all..."

  "Boy or girl doesn't make a helluva lot of difference, Pop," Troy said. "Whatever it is, they'll want it back, and the cops'll be looking for this New Yorker all over the damned county. Are the keys still in the car, James?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I told you before not to say that anymore, James. We're all equals here, so I don't want to hear any more of that no, sir, yes, sir crap. I just asked if the keys were in the car."

  James nodded and gulped. The night was hot and humid, and James's shirt was soaked. Water ran down his flushed face as if he had just been doused with a hose.

  "All right," Troy said. "I'll get rid of this car and come back with another. You two go on upstairs, but don't tell Dale about the baby. Women get upset over misunderstandings like that. I don't know when I'll be back, but when I do get back, James, I hope you realize that I'll have to punish you for this mistake."

  James nodded and wiped his face with his fingers. "It ain't altogether my fault, Troy. These things happen."

  "I understand. And I'll take under consideration that you're a foreigner here on a student visa. But if I don't punish you in some way, you might make more mistakes that are even more serious. So go on upstairs now, both of you. And ask Dale to fix your pork chop sandwich, Pop."

  "I don't want it right now."

  "When you do."

  Troy took his shotgun out of the vise, loaded it, and put some extra shells into his -guayabera- pocket. He then got into the Chrysler New Yorker, backed and filled, and drove out of the yard.

  James took a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans. His old jeans, which he had worn to Dadeland, were stained from when he had wet his pants during the chase by the taxicab. James rolled the soiled jeans into a ball and took them, together with the garbage bags, down to the trash can in the yard.

  Stanley stripped to his underwear and went to bed on the porch. It was too warm to cover himself with a sheet, although a breeze from the bay made the porch a little cooler than the living room. The moon was up, and he could see everything in the yard from his window. The enormous two-story house was an ominous dark mass beyond the circle of light flooding from the bulbs inside the garage. James, apparently exhausted, slept on the couch in the living room, naked except for his jeans. Stanley couldn't sleep. He was worried about Troy driving around in the city with the baby in the back of the car. If they caught him in the car, he would be charged with kidnapping, as well as car theft. Troy should have made James take the car back to Dadeland. But that wasn't Troy's way; he was too responsible for that, despite all his other faults.

  Dale, wearing her nightgown, came out to the porch and sat on the edge of the bed. "Do you mind if I lay down here with you, Mr. Sinkiewicz? Just till Troy gets back. I can't sleep all alone. It's scary in the big bedroom all by myself."

  "I don't mind. But don't roll up against me. It's too hot for anything like that."

  Dale curled into a ball, sighed once, and fell asleep. A moment later, she was snoring through her damaged septum.

  It was well after two AM. before Troy drove into the yard and parked a dark blue Lincoln town car beside the back porch of the two-story house. Stanley woke Dale up and told her to go back to the bedroom. Troy came upstairs, woke James, and whispered something to him that Stanley couldn't hear. The two of them went downstairs again. The garage lights were switched off. Without the lights, Stanley could barely see them in the yard as they walked to the Lincoln. He heard the trunk of the car being raised, and then heard it slam down again. For a few minutes, the lights in the big house were on, and then they were switched off again. It was about ten minutes or so before the two men came up the stairs quietly. Stanley pretended to be asleep. James went back to sleep on the couch, and Troy went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  No
w that Troy was back safely, Stanley got so sleepy he could barely keep his eyes open. But then, why should he keep them open? He wondered, for a moment, what Troy and James had been doing in the big house, but he supposed that Troy had been bawling James out for taking the car with the baby in it. It didn't matter. As Troy said, if he needed to know, he would be told. After all, he was a guest here, and not part of the operation.

  CHAPTER 15

  Hoke was wearing his swimming trunks under his jumpsuit, but after he let himself in to Helen's apartment, he decided that he didn't want to swim in the pool. His right shoulder throbbed, and he rubbed it briskly. Massaging didn't help it any. He had a touch of bursitis, which came and went periodically and was back now because he had put too much shoulder into popping Skinner in the belly. Hoke had enjoyed hitting Skinner--both times--and he wouldn't mind going back up to the penthouse right now and hitting him again. But he would never hit the millionaire again, and he probably shouldn't have hit him the first time. Skinner was undoubtedly on the phone with his lawyer right now, getting some twenty-five-dollar-a-minute advice.

  And what would his lawyer tell him? If Skinner had a good counselor, and there was no doubt that he did, he would be told to count his blessings. That would be the end of it. Hoke wasn't angry, although Skinner had apparently taken him for a fool. Otherwise, he wouldn't have asked Hoke so disingenuously if he had known about the socalled burglaries when he first met him on the beach.

  Hoke looked incuriously around Helen's two-hundredthousand-dollar apartment, taking in the beige leather furniture and the Dufy-blue carpet that picked up the tints in the Hockney painting of a swimming pool above the fivecushioned couch. He decided that Skinner was as bored with his life at the Supermare as Helen had been. Like John Maynard Keynes, who had purportedly picked up the phone every morning and made two or three hundred pounds before getting out of bed, Skinner led a dull existence. After checking the market each morning, and then selling and buying stocks, Skinner didn't know what else to do with his spare time. Helen hadn't known what to do with her time either, living in this designer-decorated apartment, so she had moved in with Frank. Helen still slept until noon, but at least now she had started to engage herself in a few social activities, and she and Frank could always discuss which channel to watch at night. The fact that they had never actually gotten around to getting married didn't really matter.

  The spacious apartment had two bedrooms, two baths, and an enormous walk-in dressing room. Very few of Helen's clothes were in the closet. There was a layer of dust over everything, and an anthurium, leaning at a desperate forty-five-degree angle toward the window, had drooped and died from lack of sun and water.

  Hoke poured himself two ounces of Booth's gin from an opened bottle at the bar beside the television-hi-fl console. The refrigerator door was propped open with a yellow kitchen stool, and the plug had been pulled from the wall, so he drank his gin without ice. Except for Helen's ocean view, and it was an excellent one, especially from her bedroom floor-to-ceiling windows, Hoke decided that her apartment wasn't worth two hundred thousand--in fact, -no- apartment was. After the residents of the Supermare looked at their view in the morning, what did they do with the rest of their day?

  Frank was wise to go to the hardware store every day, Hoke concluded as he unlocked the chain from Aileen's bicycle down in the lobby. Of course, Frank had little or nothing to do with running the store any longer. Mrs. Renshaw now ran every aspect of the business. But Frank had his private office in the back, and he was on the telephone a great deal. There was big responsibility in handling a fortune. Occasionally, when Frank left his office, to go to the bank or to see his lawyer, he would wait on a customer--just to keep his hand in. But at least he had a place to go in the mornings.

  What did he, Hoke, have now, now that he had decided to leave the police department? In Miami, except for his job and his two daughters, his life had turned to shit--a big -nada-. But when they began to overload him and crap on him in the department, too, his unconscious mind must have rebelled against the work as well. Now his two daughters were almost gone, too, or soon would be.

  Hoke was feeling so sorry for himself that he was almost splattered across the pavement by a white Mercury convertible as he allowed his bike to wobble into the middle of the lane on Ocean Boulevard. Before reaching the mall parking lot, Hoke dismounted and pushed his bike for the rest of the way to the El Pelicano. He locked the bicycle in the small downstairs office, deciding to clean out the cluttered room some other time.

  The door to Hoke's apartment was ajar. He knew that he had locked it when he left, so he stood to one side of the door and kicked it open with his foot. Major Willie Brownley, the M.P.D. Homicide Chief, Hoke's boss, was sitting at the dining table playing Klondike with Hoke's deck of cards. There was a steaming cup of coffee in front of him on the table, and he was smoking a cigar. He looked up at Hoke and tapped some ashes into the saucer that held the cup.

  "I understand you're managing this apartment house now," Brownley said as he counted off three cards and looked at a three of hearts. The chief was wearing a Miami Dolphins No. 12 T-shirt, with "Free Mercury Morris" in white cutout letters across the chest. Hoke had rarely seen the major out of uniform, and it looked strange to see this relaxed black man sitting at his dining table.

  "I--I'm trying to, Willie," Hoke said, at last. "How'd you get in here?"

  "With my passkey. I hung around downstairs for a while, waiting for you, but people kept looking at me funny, as if they'd never seen a black man before. So I decided to wait up here in your apartment. If I were you, Hoke, I'd put a bolt lock on the door--especially if you're going to be fucking off somewhere instead of staying here to rent out your apartments."

  "I had some other business to attend to."

  "You know, the ten of diamonds and the four of clubs are missing from this deck, and I don't think you're playing with a full deck either. I lost two games before I found out." The major gathered the cards together and shuffled them. Willie Brownley's face was the color of an eggplant, and the corners of his mouth dropped sharply. His gray kinky hair was clipped short, with a razor-blade part on the left side. The yellowish whites of his eyes made him look jaundiced.

  "Sit down," Brownley said, putting the cards down and indicating a chair with his left hand. "Don't make me look up at you, you sneaky bastard."

  "Who's sneaky?" Hoke sat across from the chief. "You broke into my apartment."

  "You and Bill Henderson aren't half as smart as you think you are, Hoke. I signed your emergency leave without pay because I believed him when he told me your father was dying. But just because I believed him at the time didn't mean that I wouldn't check it out later. And I did. Your daddy told me on the phone that he was fine, that you seemed to be your old self again, and that it was nice to have you home.

  "Then I asked my secretary to call Ellita. Ellita, of course, gave Rosalie a full report and told her that you were under a doctor's care up here in Singer Island. Then I braced Bill Henderson, and he told me what really happened. As a reward for Bill's disloyalty I gave him all of your unprocessed homicide cases to work on--in addition to his other duties, of course. That should keep him so busy for a while that he won't be able to cover up anything else on me for a few weeks. While I pondered various disciplinary measures, if any, I wondered why you hadn't come to me with your problems, even if they were imaginary problems. Surely, by now, I thought, Hoke trusts me to do the right thing. Hoke"--Brownley shook his head and tapped his chest with his right palm--"it hurts me right here to have my trust in you violated."

  Hoke cleared his throat. "I can't explain myself, Willie. But I wasn't trying to bypass you, or anything like that. I was suddenly overwhelmed, that's all, and sort of blacked out. What I needed, I guess, was a rest. I'd been pushing hard, and I--"

  "Spare me the bullshit, Hoke. I had a call from Mike Sheldon."

  "Who?"

  "Mike Sheldon. The Riviera Beach police chief. Are you
going to pretend you haven't talked with him?"

  "Oh, sure, Chief Sheldon. I met him at my father's house. He seems like a nice guy. Used to be a homicide detective up in New Jersey. What's wrong with that?"

  "He called me and asked for a written recommendation, that's what. It appears that you applied for a lieutenancy in his department, and he wanted a letter so he could start on the paperwork."

  "He made a tentative offer, but I turned him down, Willie. I didn't -ask- him for--"

  "Bullshit! What hurts me, Hoke, you went behind my back. Why didn't you tell me you wanted to be a lieutenant? How many times, in the last three years, have I suggested that you take the exam?"

  "Several. But I told you I don't want to be a lieutenant."

  "What you mean is you don't want to be a lieutenant in Miami, working for me, but you'd like to be a lieutenant up here at half the salary you already make as a sergeant. That doesn't make any sense."

  "No, I don't want to be a lieutenant here, either. I do plan on taking an early retirement, but I'm not joining the Riviera force, Willie. The job's too much for me--at least I think it is. I don't really know any longer."

  "If you wanted an easier job, why didn't you come in and see me? My door's open at all times."

  "I -have- seen you! I've bitched about my overload plenty of times, for Christ's sake."

  "Everybody has a lot to do, Hoke. Didn't I give you Speedy Gonzalez as an assistant?"

  "He spends half his time in gas stations, asking for directions--"

  "He's getting to know the city, Hoke, and you just proved my point. It takes a long time to train a man for homicide work, and that's why I can't afford to lose you to some jerkwater little town like Riviera Beach. Hell, you'd die of boredom here. And you've already proven you can't run this little apartment house."

  "How's that?"

  "There was no note on your door saying when you'd be back. And some old redneck from Alabama, who thought I was the janitor, asked me to fix his toilet for him. He said no matter how much he jiggles the handle, the toilet still keeps running. You'd better do something about things like that."