“The owner.”
“Hmm?”
“Jerry, the owner. He gets all cheesed at these people who park in our lot and go shopping all these other places, so he told me to call and have it towed. It happens all the time.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, he said it was there, like, all night, he thought, and when it was still there the next day he told me to have it towed.”
“So you called.”
“Yeah, and the guy who comes to tow it? This is the third car he’s found with a body in it.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s what I said. He’s been towing for thirty-seven years, and this is the third time.”
“He told you this?”
“Yeah. Like I said, we call him all the time. He’s nice. Anyway, he goes to hook up the chains? And then he gets a whiff of the trunk, I guess, and the experience of the man kicks in, you know?”
“Right.”
“And he comes in, then, and says, ‘Kay, I gotta use the phone, I think we got a body in that car.’ And I say, ‘Get outta here!’ And he says, ‘I smelled it. My third one.’ And I say, ‘Jesus,’ and he dials 911.”
“He smelled it?”
“Yeah, turned out it was two bodies. Two girls. I guess you knew that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re not insurance, what are you?”
“Missing persons.”
“Oh.” She thought about something — maybe something from her own life. “Must be sad.”
“Sometimes.”
“Who were they?”
“They were just girls. They danced at a club in south Atlanta, and they were getting their real estate licenses.”
“Wow. You never know, do you?”
“Nope. Not once.”
We gabbed another couple of minutes, but I couldn’t stop thinking how you wouldn’t be able to smell a dead body, or even two, in this weather — unless they’d been in that trunk for a while.
I didn’t mention it to her though. “Mind if I come back in a day or two? I gotta go over to where they worked and all, but I might think of something else.”
She shrugged. “They tell me it’s a free country.”
I stuck out my hand. “My name is Flap Tucker.”
“Hey, Flap. I’m Kay.”
“Hey.”
“So this isn’t some line. You really are looking for the two girls or something.”
“Uh-huh. I guess a lotta guys hit on you in this line of work.”
“It falls into two types, actually: one, the type that thinks I’m easy, and the other, the type that’s embarrassed to be here. They don’t even make eye contact, you know? Let alone talk to me.”
“Besides” — I pointed to her ring — “you’re married.”
She looked down at her left hand. “Nah, that’s just a creep guard.”
“Ah.” I flashed her a smile. “Of course, now it won’t work with me.”
She shrugged again. “You’re not a creep.” It wasn’t an invitation, just a statement of fact.
I started to tell her just how much a matter of opinion that was, but a customer came in, and I stepped away from the counter. The guy was of the second variety she had described. He looked at the countertop like it was the Sistine Chapel, got his ticket, and zoomed inward toward the darkness. The doors to the theater opened long enough for us to hear the sounds of gasping and groaning.
She rolled her eyes. “See what I gotta live with?”
I shook my head. “It’s not easy.”
“Neither am I.”
“So you said. I meant life.”
“I know.” She sighed and looked out the thick glass doors to the parking lot. “That sure was a big, pretty Buick those girls had. Reckon how much a car like that would cost?”
I shook my head. “Too much for them. I don’t think it was their car.”
“Whose car… Jesus! You mean that car belonged to the guy that… Jesus! And he was right out there in the… Jesus!”
“Don’t figure on a girl like you being so religious.”
“I know, but…”
“Somebody had to drive the car here. And they weren’t really in a position…”
And, kind of unexpectedly, it was her turn to giggle. “Yeah.” She laughed again. “Can’t drive a Buick from the trunk, can you?”
I looked out at the lot too. “Nope. No, you can’t.”
“Especially” — softer — “especially if you’re, like, dead.”
“Right.”
She looked away from the parking lot then and said again, “Must be sad.” She looked up at me. “Must be sad work you gotta do sometimes. People are missing for…all sorts of reasons, aren’t they? I mean, people leave home and come to Atlanta and get a crummy job and stuff for…all sorts of reasons, I guess.”
I nodded. “All sorts. But sometimes, when I find somebody who’s missing or some stuff of theirs that they lost? It’s pretty great then. It makes ’em real happy. And then they’re reunited and all, and everybody cries, and it’s pretty great.”
“What if…” She tapped on the counter a second. “What if you find somebody and they don’t wanna be found?”
“Yeah, that happens sometimes. Nobody I ever met wants to be lost, but one or two didn’t really want to be found — not by me, anyway.”
“Too embarrassed to go home?”
I nodded, still kind of smiling at her. “Or scared, or…you know, just…different. That-was-then-this-is-now sorta thing.”
She sighed. “Yeah. What’s that expression? Water under the bridge, or something.”
“Right.”
“What’s that mean exactly?”
“Time’s like a river. It never stands still.”
“Boy, that’s the truth. One day you’re a kid and the next day you’re twenty-seven.”
I looked her in the eye, maybe a little more than she wanted me to. “Look. Twenty-seven is still a kid — from where I’m standin’.”
She smiled back and swatted the side of my arm. “Oh, like you’re ancient.”
“Feelin’ kinda old today.”
“Yeah.” She looked out the doors again. “You’re huntin’ down missing persons, who you lookin’ for? The girls already got found.” Then her eyes got bigger and she turned to me. “Jesus, you’re not looking for the guy, are you?”
“The guy that did it? Nah. I’m actually looking for another guy’s wife, but my…boss thinks this thing with the Buick has something to do with it.”
“Does it?”
“Not that I can tell. But she’s not wrong all that often — not about this stuff.”
“You got a lady boss?”
I smiled. “Boss is probably the wrong word. She got me the job, is all.”
“Still…” She was kind of teasing me. “You called her your boss. She your girlfriend or something?”
“No. We’re much better than that.”
“Wow.” She nodded, but she didn’t understand. “So…you married?”
“Divorced.”
“Ohh.” She said it like it explained something to her, then shifted in her seat. “How old are you?”
“Older than you.”
“That’s not old for a man.”
“What’s old?”
“Seventy.”
“Then you’re right. I’m not old.”
“And you don’t look older than me. You got a youngish-looking face and you’re not fat.”
“Don’t have enough money to be fat.”
“Brother, is that right.”
I tapped the countertop. “Welp. Gotta go over to the other side of town. Like I said, I might have to come back…”
She looked down. “That’d be good.”
I took in a little breath. “Look. None of my business — at all — but, you know, it’s coming up on the festive holiday season and everything… Why don’t you give the folks back home a call? They’d… I think they’d be happy to hear from you.”
She was still looking down. “No, they wouldn’t.”
I buttoned my coat. “Well…none of my business.” I shoved the door open and a cold trumpet of air played in.
She finally looked up. “’Bye.”
I waved. “’Bye, Kay.”
The wind was blowing pretty hard out in the parking lot, and those yellow police ribbons were whipping around like they were lightning. I shuffled over to the place where the car had been, and there were dead leaves and newspapers and Styrofoam cups all zipping around the edges of the buildings — and something caught my eye. I tapped away some gunk from under a drainpipe with my toe, close to where the car had been parked, and there it was: a little chain with hearts on it, too big for a wrist, too little for a neck — exactly like the one I had in my pocket from Ruby’s backyard the day before.
I couldn’t believe it. I bent down to pick it up, and it was only a partial chain — the rest was gone — but it was just the same. I took the other one out of my pocket and compared. And as I was standing there with the cold wind knocking me around and the gray sky threatening to rain or maybe even snow, I could see the lovely, irritating face of Dalliance Oglethorpe saying, “See?”
Chapter 7: Tip Top
The drive to southwest Atlanta can be all highways or all little surface roads, and I always avoid the fast way if I can. Riding all the way back down Peachtree, through downtown, past the old meat-packing plant, through the fifties-era projects, into West End, you turn onto Cascade Road, where I grew up. I’d driven on it a thousand times, but all of a sudden two plus two was roughly in the fourish neighborhood, and I made a mental note to ask my new friend Mr. Davidson sometime about its connection with international importing — or maybe just mention it to Lenny the next time I saw him.
Atlanta’s a funny place, at least geographically speaking: You have to go through West End to get to East Point — which is further south. Maybe it’s a religious thing: In Christ there is no east or west.
If you turn onto Adams Drive you go by the Adams Park Library, where I got my first book on mythology. It was a story about Baldar. He was the beloved of the Viking gods, but some other guy shot him through the heart with a stick of mistletoe. The mistletoe used to be a big tree, like an oak, but it got cursed because it was an instrument of death — and that’s also how come we’re supposed to kiss under it, to remember this guy Baldar that everybody loved so much. It’s basically the same story we have in the south about the dogwood tree. Once it was big like an oak tree, but it was used to make the cross, the one Jesus got hung on. So after that it got demoted. Still, it got to have the beautiful blossoms — in the shape of a cross. I’m not suggesting that Norse mythology and Georgia folklore have all that much in common, but it’s just too big a world to think that coincidence doesn’t mean anything. So my head was putting in overtime trying to figure how two identical kid necklaces fit the strangled-topless-dancer-drag-queen-pentagram picture. It occupied my mind all the way past Campbellton Plaza and into a part of town where a place like the Tip Top gave the rest of the surroundings class.
It was a nondescript, gray building. A neon sign with a smiling blonde was the only identification. The gravel parking lot was nearly empty. It was only about two in the afternoon, getting colder — and the Tip Top didn’t strike me as the kind of place you’d want to go for a bowl of soup and some peace and quiet, maybe a little Miles on the stereo — which is what I would like on a day such as this one. But it was my lot in life to barge into the lion’s den instead.
And barge I did, through the swinging doors into the smoky, dim light of iniquity — into the waiting room of shame.
“Ten bucks.” The bouncer was a burly chap, big as a boulder — looked about as bright as one too.
“What’s it gonna cost me to talk to you?” I had to lean over close to his head so he could hear me over the music, a funky little number called, as I gathered from the chorus, “Bang Bang Bang.”
“You have not got enough to talk to me, but it’s only ten bucks to get in there.” And he shoved his big thumb over his shoulder.
“You must be really interesting to talk to.” I shelled out the dough onto the little table between us.
He nodded, stone-faced, picking up the money. “I’m enchanting.”
“You know Teeth?”
Finally he smiled. “The fairy? Sure. Great guy. Why didn’t you say Teeth was a pal?” And he shoved back my two fives. Then he zoomed me up and down like a vacuum cleaner. “You don’t look like a fairy.”
“What do I look like?”
“A dick.”
“You think I’m a P.I.?”
“I do.”
“Well, I gotta say — and I’m hoping you’ll take this as a compliment since that’s how I mean it — you really are smarter than you look.”
He nodded, not the least offended. “It’s an advantage I got in life.”
“So what am I here to talk about?”
“Teeth and his boyfriend, the guy that got zotzed in his own backyard — which may I say it’s tough when you go and get it in your own backyard — or you wanna talk about the girls.”
“If I ever think of taking on a partner in my line of work —”
But he stopped me; shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Like your line of work is a piece of cake.”
He smiled again. And it was, in fact, an enchanting smile. “I got Teeth. He’d bite his own mother’s arm off if she was causin’ trouble in here. All I gotta do is make sure he don’t kill somebody.”
“Maybe a poor choice of words…if I’m here to talk about the girls.”
“Teeth wouldn’t do a thing like that. That was a sex thing.”
“What?”
“That’s what I think.”
“Really.”
“Look, I really didn’t know them girls all that well. Why’n’cha go on in and talk to some of the other ones, if they’re not on — and if they feel like it — and if you don’t look at ’em wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Starin’ at the chest-a-cological regions. A woman don’ like that. She wants eye contact. You’d be surprised, but that’s the main complaint: no eye contact.”
“You’re a good judge of character. Am I a gentleman or not?”
Then he got me in a vice grip of a stare — like he was in a trance for a second or two. Finally he blinked. “What are you, older than you look?”
“Just about.”
“So you look younger.”
“So I’m told.”
“Divorced.”
“It shows?”
“To me it does.”
“What else?”
“You a Libra?”
I nodded.
“A divorced Libra dick.”
“With whom the girls are…”
“Sadly, quite safe.”
“Great. Thanks.”
He shrugged. “It’s a gift.”
“By the way, in the current social climate we generally prefer the appellation ‘private investigator’ to the more old-fashioned ‘dick.’”
He was wise. He nodded. “Since the Nixon thing.”
You can see how that could crack a guy like me up. “Yeah…since Nixon.”
He appreciated my laughter for a moment, then slipped out his hand from behind the little table with the cash box. “Tony — if you need anything.”
I shook his hand, like we were on a reception line. “Flap — and I may need another laugh on the way out.”
He nodded. “See what I can do.”
I stepped into the nether room. The music was growling and the lights were surreal. I made it to the bar, took one of many empty seats. The bartender was there instantly, topless, chewing gum, tough as nails.
I stared so determinedly into her eyes that I think I made her a little nervous. “Could I get a screwdriver without the vodka?”
“You just want the juice?”
I smiled. “Yeah, but it sounds b
etter to say ‘screwdriver without the vodka.’”
“To who?”
“Okay.”
She didn’t move a muscle. “I gotta charge you for the screwdriver anyway.”
“It’s worth it not to have to drink the vodka, don’t you think?”
But my charm was lost on her. She stayed eye-locked for another second, trying to determine if I was a troublemaker — or just a loser. Then she shoved off to fetch my beverage.
The music was something out of Duke Ellington’s personal hell: crushing, mindless, as sophisticated as a cement mixer — bass cranked so high you could feel it screw with the natural rhythm of your heart. The new number was called, I believe, “Baby Baby,” those being the only two words in the song I could make out.
Our friendly bartender brought my eight-dollar orange juice, kept the ten I handed her, and disappeared into the smoke at the other end of the bar. I headed toward the “show.”
These places aren’t usually like what you see in the movies. There are no guys going “woo!” and being generally boisterous. They’re as quiet as the grave. Every so often a young buck’ll up and saunter toward the runway with a bill folded lengthwise in his hand. The girl on the runway — wearing nothing but a store-bought smile, a sleeve garter on her thigh, and a terrifically uncomfortable pair of high heels — cootchees over and kind of kneels where the guy can reach her. Then the guy — looking at the carpet, usually — shoves the bill in the garter, the girl winks, stands, and heads back up the runway.
These runways are set like high-fashion jobs, about fifteen feet long, one end jutting into the crowd at about shoulder level to the seated patron, the other end running under a curtain. Behind the curtain is the bull pen, the dressing rooms, the coffee machine. I caught the eye of Tony the Boulder, he nodded, waved at his colleague beside the curtain, and I headed back-stage.
I’d been backstage at an off-Broadway house; I’d been backstage at the Fabulous Fox in Atlanta; I even went into a trailer at the circus once: It’s all the same. No matter what the show is out front, a dressing room’s a dressing room. The mythology’s gone, the fluorescents are bright, the mirrors have little notes and cards and pictures on them: boyfriends, babies, parents. I was thinking how these kids weren’t that much different from any performers since the beginning of the business, how they were heirs to Sophocles and Shakespeare, when I got a pretty sharp jab in the ribs.
Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 1) Page 6
