by David Bishop
Chapter 6
At seven, with the morning sun tussling with the hang-around fog, Fidge called to say the department had reached the manager of the restaurant at his home. Surprisingly, Cory Jackson still worked there after eleven years. The manager told Fidge the address we had for Jackson was no longer good. The manager had not known the new address by memory but he had it in his office in the back of the restaurant. Fidge would meet the manager there in an hour. He also told him to hang out his help wanted sign. I couldn’t tag along, official police business and all. At this point, there was nothing that clearly drew a line between the old Corrigan case and last night’s murder of Cory Jackson. My hanging around while Fidge worked this case would do nothing but suggest that line existed.
I decided I’d beat it over to the address the Whittaker case file carried for Cory Jackson and sniff around before the cops shagged the old address, if they ever did. The murder of Cory Jackson would not be a high profile case. Well, not unless it got tied back to the Corrigan murder and by extension to General Whittaker, one of Long Beach’s most storied residents.
Jackson’s old address was a tired building on the sand along an old road near Seal Beach, south of Long Beach. From the street I could see an opening for a double carport with one vehicle inside. As I approached on foot, a lamp shining through an upstairs window revealed living quarters over the carport which appeared to be that same size. A set of stairs went up the side of the building past a rusty metal mailbox that hung crooked just below a porch light filled with cobwebs, but no bulb. The stairs were gloomy, but the morning sun from the east had already cracked open the new day. The air still felt cold. The fog wet. A gull screeched as I put my foot on the first stair.
According to the restaurant manager, Cory Jackson didn’t live here any longer. Of course we knew that to be true. In point of fact, Cory now bunked in the County Coroner’s office. But someone was inside. I decided to proceed cautiously and avoid provoking someone who might be an innocent citizen. At least until I knew more.
The door bell didn’t work. I flipped on the tape recorder in my jacket pocket and knocked, loudly, which wasn’t hard. The screen door, warped from the damp air, and dried by the wind and salt, no longer fit the doorway, so it rattled and banged from a normal knock. My knock exceeded normal.
The upper third of the door was a filthy glass panel shrouded with what had once been a white curtain. After a moment, the silhouette of a man’s head blocked some of the faint light that made its way through the smeary coating on the glass.
“Who is it?” the blurry figure said through the door.
“Cory Jackson?”
“He’s not here. I don’t know the guy. Go away.”
For starters, this guy wasn’t too bright. He had begun talking before he finished thinking about what he didn’t want to say. “I’m not going away,” I hollered back. “And your door won’t keep me out.”
He pulled the door open. I didn’t hear any metal, so it had not been locked. He stood on the other side of the screen door wearing a pair of black drawstring sweatpants and a yellow v-neck t-shirt. I couldn’t tell if the color was how it came when he bought it, or had yellowed through a devoted avoidance of laundering. He wore dirty white athletic socks and no shoes. The way the sock fabric twisted in front of his toes told me he was right handed. People make hard turns with greater pressure on the more coordinated leg, thus the sock on that foot bunches up and twists more. He looked close to thirty, but beyond it. His left sleeve, rolled up on top of his shoulder, held a pack of smokes.
“Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter-”
“It does to me,” I said interrupting him. “You know Jackson and we’re going to talk so don’t make this harder on yourself than you need to.”
“You the cops?”
“No. And that’s the good and bad parts.”
“What’s good about it?”
“The good part’s to my advantage. I don’t have to waste time doing things by the book or respecting your rights or any of that crap. That’s also the bad part. That part’s yours.”
I grabbed the little handle on the screen door and rattled it until he slapped the hook out of the eye screw and pushed it out toward me. I walked right at him until he gave ground and backed up into the clearing in the center of the main room. A sort of brown contemporary couch, liberally stained, stood against the far wall, fronted by an early American coffee table. A blue Naugahyde chair sat to the side. The light that had filtered through the window came from a milk glass up-lamp that sat in the corner behind the blue chair. His decorator favored the style of mix-and-match-nothing.
“How do you know Cory Jackson and where is he?”
“I don’t know where he is. He don’t live here no more. Lives alone in a studio unit a couple blocks from the restaurant he works at.”
“You were rooming with Cory back when he testified about seeing Eddie Whittaker kill his fiancee. Let’s start with why he lied about that.” In fact, I didn’t know if they roomed together then or not. I made it a presumptive statement. He didn’t disagree so it was true.
“Hey. He saw the dude. Least he said he did. No reason to lie.”
“What’s your name?”
“Quirt. Quirt Brown.”
I walked over to the table and picked up his wallet. His driver’s license confirmed his name, Quirt Brown. “Quirt?” I said, with an inflection that asked, where had that come from.
“My parents were John Wayne fans. Quirt was the name of one of his characters.”
“Hey,” I said while still looking in his wallet. “Look at the bright side. No one gets you confused with anyone else and it’s easy to pronounce and spell, well, pronounce anyway.” When I turned back he had moved closer and his right hand held a gun.
“Okay, pal. Who the hell are you and why are you here asking about Cory?”
Quirt wasn’t a big man but he had big hands with longish fingers, webbed together the way hands come, like linked sausages with transplanted fingernails.
I stuck my thumbs in my waistband. “Now why did ya wanna go and do that? We were having a friendly little chat. No reason to go hostile.”
“Now I ask the questions,” he said.
“Quirt, a man’s got to learn his limits, and when he knows them he’s got to live within them.”
“I don’t wanna hear that shit. Who are you and why are you here?”
“My name’s Carson. Kit Carson. I’m working my way through college selling magazine subscriptions. We got whatever you want. Mysteries, sci-fi, erotica, handyman mags, you name a hankering, I got a subscription fer ya.”
“Okay, wise guy. Let me see your wallet.”
I pulled my left thumb out of my waistband and reached around to the left side of my rump, my right thumb staying cinched in behind my belt. As I brought my wallet around slowly, I dropped it. When he reflectively glanced down, I thrust my right hand out from my waistband with maximum force and jammed the flat of my palm against the finger side of his gun. I also slammed my left hand against the outside of the wrist. The timing resulted in nearly simultaneous blows, each driving against the force of the other. He involuntarily straightened his fingers. The move also drove his hand away from me, which was good in the event he somehow got the trigger pulled. He didn’t. His gun was now in my hand.
“Okay. I’ve got the gun and everything you thought you controlled is now gone, or dripping down your leg.”
“What do you want from me?”
“All of it. Why Cory Jackson lied about Eddie Whittaker. And who paid him to tell that lie. That’ll do for starters.”
He just stared at me. Eventually, stupid fosters its own punishment. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go outside. Down by the surf.”
“I’m not going out there with you.”
I poked him in the belly with the barrel end of his gun. It was rude of me, but he brought the gun into our conversation and he might have planned to
use it for more than stomach poking.
“If you plan to die defending your home, this place ain’t worth it.”
“Cory’s a friend.”
“Would your attitude change if you knew he was dead?”
“Dead?” He turned slowly in a circle, his head shaking, and his hands on his hips when they weren’t jabbing the air to punctuate what he said. “I don’t believe you. No. I just saw him last night. We had beers. He split around ten.” Quirt put his palms together and blew into the crevice between his hands as if they were cold. Then he turned back the other way as if unwinding his first turn. “No. He can’t be dead.”
I took out my cell phone and brought up the picture of Cory lying in the surf. Wet and cold, only Cory no longer felt the wet or the cold. The hole in his forehead meant nothing good other than the politicians would be leaving him alone because Cory Jackson would not be voting in the next election. I handed Quirt the phone.
He looked at it. His other arm dropped to his side. His chin touched his chest. “We was brothers, man. He’s my kid brother, different fathers.”
“Sit down, Quirt. I’m sorry to bring the message so hard. I didn’t know.”
“When?” He sagged down onto one end of the soiled brown couch.
“Last night. He was found early this morning. In the surf, down from the restaurant where he worked, not far from where he claimed he saw Eddie Whittaker kill his woman.”
“Why? After all this time. Why?”
I sat in the blue chair to the side of the couch “I assume by ‘after all this time,’ you meant time after the Whittaker thing. Right?”
Quirt just looked at me. I tried to break his malaise. “Your brother’s dead. Whoever framed Eddie Whittaker appears to be sweeping his trail clean. I’m after that son of a bitch. Will you help me or are you going to clam up and help the guy who killed your brother?”
“Cory lied. He didn’t see nobody kill that woman.”
“First off. Did you or Cory know Eddie Whittaker before all this happened? Ever see him? Have a run in with him? Anything like that?”
“I didn’t know the dude from nobody, man.”
“What about Cory?”
“Far as I knew, Cory didn’t know the guy. I knew everybody Cory knew. If there’d been a hassle between Cory and this Eddie Whittaker, Cory would have filled me in. No. No way. We didn’t know him from Adam.”
“Okay. So Cory was paid to lie. Who paid him? Who wanted Eddie Whittaker jailed?”
“I got no clue, man. Listen, I need a beer. You want one?”
I nodded and followed him to a white Kelvinator that was old enough to be gaining value as an antique. While we twisted the tops off the beers, I asked, “Who did Cory say paid him?”
“He didn’t know. He was sitting on the beach one night. Back then, he did that a lot. On a log that had washed up on shore. He heard a voice that told him if he turned around he’d die. Right there, man, killed for just turning the fuck around.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man. Wouldn’t be no woman. Would it?”
“You’re sure?”
“Hey, I wasn’t there. Cory said it was a dude. That’s all I know.”
“Okay, so what did Cory do?”
“He didn’t turn around. I’ll tell ya that. The voice told him which house and what time to be there and on what night. That he would see a man kill a woman inside. Shoot her dead. That Cory should go to the cops after he saw the woman’s picture in the paper. He told Cory the woman’s name, but I don’t recall it. He handed Cory a picture of Eddie Whittaker and shined a flashlight over Cory’s shoulder so he could see the picture. He told him to study it and remember the man’s face. He even pointed out a few facial features that would help Cory remember the dude. He told Cory that his life depended on his doing it right. Then he pulled the picture back.”
“Go on.”
“He handed Eddie one hundred twenties, that’s two thousand bucks for IDing a guy. In those days, Cory was into drugs and always needed money. But Cory’s straight now … He was straight … anyway.”
“That’s nice. To die clean.”
“The voice told Cory that if he done it just like he was told there would be another eight thousand. If he didn’t, there’d be a bullet. A mercy bullet, the guy said, because he would first cut off each of Cory’s toes and fingers. Then he told Cory to count to one hundred by ones before he turned around or he’d get the bullet right then.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Cory did what he was told. He got the rest of the money. Found it in his bedroom, on his bed. Right here, just down the hall. Right down there,” he pointed. “How’s that for putting the willies in you, right on his fucking bed, man. Cory was mighty happy that someone came forward to save Eddie Whittaker from being put away for something he didn’t do.”
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember thinking how weird it was the dude gave Cory the rest of the money after Eddie Whittaker got freed up.”
We talked some more, but Quirt had nothing more to give. Then he asked for his gun back. I considered tossing it in the ocean, but one gat more or less wasn’t going to change the local crime rate. After my pardon the state lacked adequate legal grounds to deny me a PI license, but given my conviction for shooting someone, they were able to deny me a license to carry a weapon. My lawyers are still fighting that. They expect to eventually win the point that a pardoned man has full rights, including obtaining a gun permit. Still, for now, I decided I’d hang onto Quirt Brown’s gun for a few days.
“I’ll hang onto this for now,” I told him, “but one day fairly soon you’ll find it in your mailbox.”
I must have brought back memories for Quirt. Halfway down the stairs I heard the sound of him engaging the deadbolt.
Chapter 7
At eleven-thirty that afternoon, Axel had walked four blocks toward downtown Long Beach. In the next block, just around the corner, he would arrive at Mackie’s. He lunched there most days along with a handful of the city’s oldest ex-cons. Men now retired from their life’s work. Mackie’s had also become a popular lunch spot with the area’s white collar workers so he required his former jail pals to meet a certain dress and behavior code. The rules began with no drunk or loud behavior and no planning the kind of jobs that led to them all meeting in the first place. Mackie’s served great food, with soft Sinatra and Steve Tyrell in the background mixed in with Linda Ronstadt and Mackie’s personal favorite, Julie London. Sure, his music was dated, but so was Mackie. It happens when guys like him and Axel spend decades up the river, as Mackie called prison. They came out wanting their now world to be as much as possible like their then world.
The booths were well padded and the walls coated in hunter green wallpaper with cherry wood wainscoting. An assortment of sports pictures hung around the perimeter along with sexy women dressed in cherry wood frames. The lights were low, but not so much that you couldn’t read the menu or see the lovely ladies that waited tables and brought drinks wearing outfits that made you think of Hooters. It was all in good taste. A place you’d take the girl you were going to bring home to meet mother, assuming mother was reasonably hip, as they used to say.
As Axel turned the corner, a block from Mackie’s, Axel was approached by one of the street’s younger women who worked the world’s oldest racket. “Hey Mister, want something different for lunch?”
Axel walked over to the blonde who he sized up as having less crust on her than the other young woman standing beside her. She was taller than five feet, but not by much, and had the smile of an angel wearing too much eye makeup and swap-meet perfume. Axel shushed away the other girl standing near her. “I want two hours of your time, young lady. What’ll it cost me?”
“Two hundred … How about one-fifty,” she said a moment later, negotiating against herself.
“Anything I want?” Axel said. “No hassle. I’m the boss for my two hours.”
“Whatever
you say, mister.”
“Forget the one-fifty, I’ll give you the two hundred, but if you resist whatever I want, the deal is off. Agreed?”
She looked at Axel. “You’re the boss.”
“Okay. What’s your name?”
“They call me Lacey ‘cause I wear lots of lacey stuff.”
“I didn’t ask what they called you. I asked your name. I thought we agreed I was the boss? Now are we ready to start this relationship or end it? It’s your call. Makes me no never mind either way.”
“My name’s Hildegard. My family calls me Hillie.”
“Come with me, Hillie. I’m Axel.” They walked until they were outside Mackie’s where he pulled open the door and pointed his head in a way that said, go in. She did. He followed. Mackie looked up from behind the bar and waved. Several others along the bar and three guys at a far table raised a hand or nodded a head. A few also mumbled something Axel couldn’t quite hear.
“Sit down, Hillie.” She turned to face Axel with a confused look on her face. “Here’s where we’re spending our two hours. Order whatever you want from the menu. It’s over and above your fee. For two hours we’re going to talk. No bullshit. No lies from either of us. You ask me whatever you wish. I’ll do the same. Straight talk for two hours. Can you handle this without going all bratty on me?”
“What do you mean, bratty?”
“You know. The attitude you gave your parents before you ran away. Shrugs. Looks at the floor. Pouts. Lies. Telling them they don’t know or don’t understand. That attitude won’t fly with me. If our relationship is gonna work, we’ll do it with straight talk. No meanness for meanness sake. We’re equals. We’ll talk that way. I hold nothing back. You hold nothing back. You game or do you want to skip lunch and hit the streets looking for a guy who only wants to get in your pants or to get you in his? That’s not me. I wanna get in your head. Decide now, before we order.”
