So I told her, “That’s the problem with living in a post-relativistic world: You can’t really know anything — no real cause and effect anymore, so that any one phenomenon can be tied, eventually, to every other event that ever has or ever will exist.”
“What?”
“Everything is everything.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the girls in the trunk and the death of Ruby and the missing, fictitious wife of Leonard Cascade — they are all connected to each other, but they’re also connected to everything else in the universe, so the connection may not be all that significant. That’s the information explosion for you: In infinity everything is, by definition, connected.”
She looked at Hal. “Don’t give him any more of that snooty French red. He’s cut off.”
“This is only my second glass.”
She looked me up and down. “Looks like one was enough.”
“You don’t think everything in the universe is connected?”
“Yeah…but as they say in Animal Farm, some things are more connected than others. And by the way, didn’t cause and effect put a man on the moon?”
“Not in the grander scheme. In the grander scheme there’s always been a man on the moon, and there always will be.”
“Are you gonna find Lenny’s wife or not?”
“Yeah, but I’m just telling you that this notion of finding some weird connection behind your haphazardly assembled events is not that keen a possibility in my mind, nor that high a priority when it comes to finding Mrs. Cascade.”
The music stopped, and I realized I had been leaning into her and speaking with some amount of projection. I can get loud when I’m in the middle of a philosophy or two. She just patted my arm.
“Well, okay, but don’t be surprised if you’re wrong.”
I settled back in my seat and sighed out a long breath. “Dally…okay. I know.” Then, slowly, “I’ve been wrong so many times in my life that the power such a circumstance may have had to astonish me as a youth has long since lost its power. I am no longer amazed by my virtuosity in the realm of error.”
“Thataboy. Keep humble. That’s what counts.”
And she was off to the bandstand to tell everybody how great it was to have such swell guest artists in the place. I polished off my second wine listening to her and the honey of her voice. My mind drifted way back to the day President Kennedy was shot. I was remembering how everybody else at the grammar school was crying or white-faced in shock, and Dally looked over at me, squinting, and said, real quiet, “See?”
Chapter 5: Soul Food
There’s a certain time of night you don’t feel like diner food. Sometimes you’ve got to have something for the spirit, or I do anyway. That’s the time to trundle on over to the Golden Potala. It’s run by a family with an unpronounceable name that got out of Tibet, if you can imagine, somewhere around ’59, just before the Red Chinese muscled into their country and took over. How they got to Atlanta was a mystery even to me, and I’d been dining with them on and off for years. I just knew that the family had come south in the jumpy seventies and settled into a corner cafe not that far from Easy.
The old guy who owned the place had taught fencing or some such in Tibet. Here in the good old U.S. of A. he was a fry cook. He had a daughter who had grown up in Atlanta, danced ballet — and was the greatest waitress in the western hemisphere. She looked like royalty, cool as snow. She moved between the tables like a quiet stream flowing in between big old moss-covered rocks. The first time I saw her I thought she had the most mysterious, fragile face I’d ever seen. I was afraid to speak to her. Then she opened her mouth. It was like magnolia late on a spring night, just the right trace of a Southern accent, slow and warm. I thought then that she’d invented the concept of tranquility. I think I even asked her out a couple of times in the early days, but it never seemed to work. Maybe it was the language barrier.
The decor helped to emphasize that. The whole family was working, little by little, to get some of their more precious home furnishings and scattered pieces of religious art out of Tibet since the Reds stepped up all the pressure to be more like Mao. See, to the Red Chinese, religion is like opium: makes a country dull. The Red Chinese, they just think they’re cleaning up a drug problem, or so they say. But when it’s your religion you don’t look at it that way. So what family there was left in Tibet kept finding and sending things to the family here in Atlanta. They were beautiful little things, fans and coral carvings and flower petals made from carved wood that looked like they still had morning dew all over them. The overall effect was like walking into a church. The whole place was lit with candle-lamps on each table. It was like a holy place, only you could get chow. Great concept for a guy like me. Plus, they never closed.
The daughter drifted toward me like a swan on the lake.
“Hey, Flap.” I was a regular. They all knew my name, and none of that phony changing R’s for L’s either. They’d all learned to speak the language right the first time.
“Hey, Linda.” Her name wasn’t really Linda. Ling Liu, or something like it, but everybody called her Linda. America rubs off on everything.
She patted my shoulder. “You look puzzled, the way you used to. Don’t tell me you’re working again…at last.”
That’s the kind of regular I was. They even noticed subtle changes in my demeanor. “Yeah. That’s somethin’, huh?”
“Yeah, Miss Dally told me she finally got you up off your lazy backside.”
I smiled. “Oh, Dally told you, did she? Well, steady, sister. I think I could make a fair argument that my front side is every bit as lazy as the other one.”
She nodded. “Good one, Flap.”
“Okay, I need something that’s gonna help my concentration.”
“You been off your game for a while, huh?”
“Year and a half — they tell me.”
Shook her head. “That Neena. You better off.”
“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”
“You don’t know that sesame and pepper and a certain combination of special spices make the cabbage and rice just what you need tonight.”
“If you say so I’ll have it. What’s it called?”
“What do you care? You couldn’t pronounce it anyway.” She slapped my shoulder gently again and skated off toward the kitchen, calling out something to her old father in the musical language she was born with.
The food at the Golden Potala wasn’t the greatest-tasting food in the world to me, exactly, but anybody with half a brain could tell a difference in things after they’d eaten something there. The food went right to your soul, shaking it up with the hot pepper, soothing it with the perfect rice, forcing it to spin like a kid’s top with the subtle interchange of flavors. The food was like a perfect breath, purest water, clear light at the top of the world.
Into such a reverie the father intruded. “Flap. What you thinking about?”
“Food.”
He misunderstood. “Be here in a minute. You can listen to me?”
“Okay.”
He sat at the table. “My brother.” Like that was the end of the story.
I waited, finally had to ask. “What about him?”
“Linda says you working again.”
“Right.”
“Then you got to help my brother. He’s got trouble.”
I shifted in my seat. “Love to, but I got a job right now. It’s gonna take a while.”
“My brother can’t wait. He’s got big trouble.”
“Like what?”
The old guy lowered his voice and leaned in. “He saw a demon-man. The demon make him do something the wrong way.”
Now, ordinarily I’m a guy who’ll go along with most anything for a laugh, but this one really got me. Just a little too much of a coincidence considering what I thought I’d seen just yesterday in Teeth and Ruby’s backyard.
So I had to say out loud the only obvious response
: “Huh?”
The old guy sat back up straight. “Oh, he look just like a man, but you can tell this man is not right, not…” searching for the words. “This is many men in one body.”
I nodded. “It’s not that it doesn’t sound like fun, but like I said, Dally’s got me another gig, and you know I gotta do what she’s asked me to do first.”
He looked down. “I know. Miss Dally come the first.”
“But, when I get done with this job…”
He smiled, but it was the smile of somebody who was watching his own house burn down. “By then? Too late.”
He shoved himself up from the table and shuffled away without another word. I had to feel bad.
Linda came a minute later with a hot bowl and a pair of chopsticks. She set them down, poured some tea, and patted me again. “It’s okay, Flap. You came in here for some food, not another problem.”
I looked up at her. “Yeah. But, you know, when it rains it pours. I mean, I don’t have work for months and months, and now I got two jobs I feel like I gotta take.”
She nodded. “It wouldn’t be so bad for us if it was just the family here, but it’s involved.”
“Like how?”
“The family at home is in trouble.”
“In Tibet?”
She shook her head. “My uncle is in with somebody bad, and it involves the family at home. I don’t even know the whole story, but you know my father. He doesn’t worry that much.”
“Yeah.”
She stood. “So eat. Don’t let it get cold.”
I stared into the kitchen. “Look, tell your father I gotta go do some work for Dally tomorrow, but I’ll be back and we’ll talk. I can’t promise anything more than I’ll get to it when I can. You know what me and Dally got goin’.”
She smiled one of those smiles that convinces a guy that women know everything. “I know better than you do.” And she was off.
I stared down at my rice. The steam was filling the air around my head, warming my face, and relaxing the muscles there. I picked up the chopsticks and started in on the food. The first bite told me that Linda’d been right about what I needed. It wasn’t the taste so much as the effect it had. I started seeing everything very clearly. I started thinking I could do anything I had a mind to.
I left the Golden Potala thinking that now I had two different cases and I could handle them both better than anybody alive. Isn’t it funny the way you never know how things are really going to work out — even after a good meal?
Chapter 6: That Pretty Buick
Since I’d gone to bed fairly early — for me — and slept like the dead, I got up about ten the next morning. I wanted to call the lawyer Davidson, maybe see could I get some tips on business investing, now that I was coming into a little Cascade money of my own. I really didn’t want to drive downtown. Nobody does. It’s all one-way streets going opposite the way you need to go. Not to mention if you stay more than a half hour after 5:00 P.M., the whole joint’s a ghost town. It’s like the apocalypse. Oh, the Downtown Partners keep saying it’s all going to be revitalized, but it’ll never be like it was when I was a kid: a great big old small town. Now it’s all business. They call it the city too busy to hate. Atlanta loves business — and sporting events, and dining out at mid-priced restaurants. The symbol of the city is a phoenix because Sherman burned it down in what some call the Great War of Northern Aggression. Trouble is, like they say happens to kidnap victims, Atlanta got the idea that burning it down every once in a while was just what a city needed, so they keep tearing down all the old stuff and building up some god-awful slick new soulless edifice. You’re hard-pressed to find anything over twenty years old. Whenever anybody complains, the word profit is tossed around a lot. It’s why they also call it the city too busy to care.
So I was hoping a phone call would do the trick. “Davidson, Peters, and Conner.”
“Hi. Calling Mr. Davidson.”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Flap Tucker. I’m representing Mr. Cascade in some personal matters here in Atlanta at the moment.” No need to say which Mr. Cascade.
“Can you hold?”
“Sure.”
Music. Why do they force you to listen to music when the waiting is irritating enough all by itself?
“Hello, this is Harold Davidson.”
“Mr. Davidson? Flap Tucker. I’m helping Mr. Cascade with some personal matters —”
“Not Charles.”
“No. Leonard.”
“I see.”
“And I was wondering —”
“What’s the nature of your help, Mr. Tucker, do you mind my asking?”
“Don’t mind at all. Lenny’s wife is missing.”
“You’ve been retained under the auspices of a” — papers on his desk rustling — “Ms. Oglethorpe. Mr. Cascade — Charles Cascade — is aware of this situation. How may I help you?”
“Are there Cascade Art Imports offices in Atlanta?”
“No.”
That was it? Just no? “So you only —”
“Mr. Cascade relies on us from time to time with regard to his business dealings in Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston — that sort of thing.”
Not much to go on. “Business dealings?”
“They’re in the importing business.”
Right. “Importing?” Playing dumb can get something going a lot of times. Plus, I’m a natural at it.
“They import things.”
So sometimes it gets you nowhere too. One more shot. “Like food — or what?”
“Is this germane to your investigation?”
Pleasant as I could be. “Well, I’ll tell you what — everything is germane at this point. In fact, I’m talking to your wife next.” Why not? Take a shot.
Worked. “My wife? What’s the point of that?”
“Never can tell what you might find. I’m actually pretty good at this once I get wound up. Ask around; there’s plenty that think I’m aces. Now, about Mr. Cascade’s business —”
“How do you spell your first name, Mr. Tucker? Is it with an F?”
“F-L-A-P. You’re really not gonna give me the time of day, are you?”
“I don’t see why I should.”
I was increasingly nicer. “Well, the reason you should is because it makes me nervous that you’re not helping. It says to me that you got something to hide. It says to me that there’s more here than meets the eye. It says to me that you’re an uncooperative sort who has reason to keep things from me, things I want more than ever to find out. Thanks for winding me up, pal. And by the way, where you from, Mr. Davidson?”
Beat. “Bloomington…Indiana. Why?”
I smiled at him through the phone so hard he could feel it in his office. “Me? I was born here in Georgia.”
“And?”
“And I rest my case.”
Click. There’s a certain satisfaction comes from hanging up on a lawyer like that guy. Absolutely nothing to be gained from him but irritation of the stomach lining. I needed to get with somebody I could actually talk to. Somebody real. So I trundled out to my little car and headed to Buckhead.
I wanted to see the parking lot where the girls had been found, then head over to the wrong side of town to the Tip Top. Isn’t it funny how the south side is always the wrong one? I think it comes from a universal prejudice against all things southern. Even up in Yankee land the south side of Chicago is the roughest. I grew up in southwest Atlanta, and it surely was meaner than Buckhead and points north.
So I headed north up Peachtree Street, past the High Museum of Art, past the big St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral, turned in at one of the few “art” cinemas in town — Atlanta’s genteel code for dens of pornography — and there I was in Buckhead. The day had clouded over and the sky looked like snow, even though snow in November would be a remarkable rarity. Still, it was a snow sky. Everything was gray in the dim light. I might have been in another city than the one I’d been in t
he day before.
In the parking lot of the “art” cinema there were still those yellow police ribbons in a corner of the asphalt, but the car and its contents were, of course, long gone. I glanced up at the marquee. Big Wiggly Jeeters was playing. I think it was by Bergman.
I ought to have known better, but I went in anyway to ask the ticket taker if she’d seen anything.
“Eight dollars.”
“Don’t wanna see the movie. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
She was wise. “About the girls in the trunk.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I wasn’t here.”
“Who was?”
“I mean, the car got parked there after we closed.”
“At?”
“We closed at four A.M., like always.”
“And it was there when you got in?”
“I dunno. You insurance?”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause you look too smart to be a cop.”
“Had a bad experience with the police, have we?”
“Kiddin’? Look where I work. Once when they came in here and raided? Some guy told me it didn’t matter that all I did was sell tickets, he was gonna arrest me anyway. He says, ‘If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.’ I mean, what an awful thing to say.”
“Yeah.”
“I never boinked a dog.”
“No, I’d guess not — but for the record, that’s not what he was saying. He was just saying you were guilty by association. He meant the owner of this place is a dog.”
“Oh…” She shrugged. “Well, I did boink him.”
“There you go.”
She thought for a second. “That makes me feel better.”
“I’m glad.”
“’Cause I never boinked a dog.”
“Right. About the car…”
“I told the police. I said I didn’t even notice it.”
“Well…who exactly did notice it, do you know? I mean, how did they even know the girls were in there?”
Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 1) Page 5
