Body Blows

by Marc Strange

  Good question. A better one might be Do I really want answers? He pulls a notepad out of his inside pocket. I munch toast for a minute, consult a mental checklist: Don’t broach the subject of Leo’s dead wife, oath of vengeance, definitely nope, and stay away from the fact that Raquel was in all likelihood pregnant at the time of her death. However … “I’d like to find out who defaced Leo’s award at the fancy-dress bunfight Monday night,” I say.

  “Defaced, how?”

  “Somebody bored a hole through his eye. Took some gear, timing, and somebody to do the job.”

  “That’s new stuff,” he says. His pen is moving but he doesn’t look down. “You figure it’s connected?”

  “Somehow. And the dead body, as yet unidentified, that they found in the construction hole, most likely fell from the penthouse.”

  “Aha!” he says. “This is not information that’s readily available.”

  “Something else,” I say.

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Okay, the limo company switched drivers between the time we got there and the time we left.”

  “So?”

  “So. The driver was the last one who had the award, and he’s gone missing.”

  “Better and better,” says Larry. “Cops looking for him I suppose?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Which company is it?”

  “Ultra.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He laughs. “I know that outfit. They chauffeured Ben Affleck last time he was in town. The entertainment mob was following them around for a week. Who’s the driver?”

  “Guy named Starr. Dimitar Starr.” I spell it for him.

  He writes it down carefully. “Never heard of him,”

  says Larry.

  “There’s a kicker,” I say.

  “Hey, don’t stop now.”

  “Ultra is owned by Theo Alexander.”

  Hattie’s holding the phone out to me. “Joe? It’s him.”

  Leo’s in the penthouse with Mooney and Pazzano. When I get there the three of them are outside. Gulls are wheeling overhead, yelling at the humans below to throw them something. Rain clouds are being pushed up the valley by a west wind and shafts of sunlight are bouncing off the puddles on the terrace. Leo and Mooney are engaged in an intense discussion that doesn’t look amicable. Pazzano is off to the side, edgy, like Cujo on a chain. His eyes light up when he spots me and he dances across the patio to block the French doors.

  “They’re busy,” he says.

  “Fine by me,” I say.

  “What were you doing up on the roof?”

  “My job, Detective,” I say.

  “Told you to keep your nose out of it.”

  “Didn’t think it was off-limits since you fellows had released the Crime Scene,” I say. “Prematurely as it turns out.”

  Pazzano’s hands are curled, almost fists, and he can barely keep from bouncing.

  “You gonna drop by for a workout one of these days?” he asks.

  “Detective, my fighting days are history,” I say. “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about miniature golf.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” He doesn’t bother to take the sneer out of his tone. “I was looking forward to working on a few things.”

  I move two steps sideways to look at the big oil painting over the fireplace; an America’s Cup race from the 30s, J-Boats, majestic sloops heeled over in a brisk Newport breeze. The brass plaque on the frame identifies them as Enterprise and Shamrock V.

  Pazzano follows me. “Guy in your line of work needs to stay sharp,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’ve been kicked up to management,” I say. “Got some fresh faces looking after the day-to-day.”

  There’s another marine painting on the wall to my left. TYRANNOUS, OFF CAPE FLATTERY reads the inscription. The lee rail is awash, the crew hanging over the high side, the man at the helm, bareheaded, windblown, bears a striking resemblance to Leo.

  “There’s a safe behind this painting,” Pazzano says. “You know what’s in it?”

  “None of my business, Detective,” I say. “Was it touched?”

  He doesn’t bother to answer.

  On a shelf is a model of the boat in the painting. A racing sloop, navy blue with a thin red stripe the length of the hull.

  “You like boats?”

  “Don’t know a thing about them, Detective,” I say.

  “She was knocked up. Did you know that?”

  “I do now,” I say.

  He makes a tour of the room, touching things, lifting things and putting them back in the wrong places, cigar box, porcelain figurine, a first edition Jack London Call of the Wild. He’s trying to irk me.

  “Yep. His little Senorita got herself knocked up. The lab hasn’t quite determined if he was the father, or if she had something going on the side, but we’ll find out sooner or later.”

  Mooney comes in from the patio. Leo is still outside, smoking a cigar, his eyes on mountains.

  “You ever heard of this Jesus Santiago before?”

  Mooney asks.

  “No, Detective,” I say. “Located him yet?”

  “He’s on everybody’s ‘Bust His Ass’ list,” he says.

  “Glad to be of help,” I say.

  “Some help,” he says.

  Leo glares in my direction when I step onto the terrace. The muscles in his jaw are clenched, the end of his cigar is ragged. Mooney’s interrogation has left him bruised and bitter.

  “Offensive and incompetent,” he growls. “They’re no closer than they were two days ago. They haven’t found the limo driver, they don’t have any witnesses, so now they’re coming at me.”

  “It’s what cops do,” I say. “Start over, re-interview everyone. Next they’ll be bothering Connie, Gritch, Ms. Saunders.”

  “Those people aren’t suspects.”

  “And you are?”

  “Not in so many words, but the implication was clear. Rich older man, hotel maid, pregnant, in the will for who knows how much, history of …”

  “Of?”

  “Old scars, Joseph. Old scars.”

  If he doesn’t want to tell me, fine. I’m happy to stay out of it.

  He wanders away from me toward a far railing, stands looking out at his city, hands clasped behind his back, cigar in his teeth. For a moment I can see him on the bridge of a clipper heading for Rangoon.

  “I once was a man, Joseph. I rode the range, I sailed the seas, I wasn’t locked up like fucking Rapunzel.”

  “If you want to go out somewhere, sir, I’ll be happy to come along.”

  “That’s just the point, Joseph! I have nowhere to go, or want to go, or need to go. I’ve cut myself off.”

  “Takes a little time.”

  His hands are gripping the railing and he’s leaning out, looking down. He takes a step back and jerks his head sharply as if banishing a fleeting impulse. “Find the son of a bitch, Joseph!” Leo mashes his cigar into the wet soil of a planter and heads back inside. “I need the books closed!”

  chapter twelve

  The Champagne Baths Spa and Fitness Centre has a full complement of Nautilus machines, treadmills, and free weights, none of which interest me much. However, on Leo’s instructions, a private corner has been set aside for my use, and for the convenience of anyone else who might feel the need to beat the living crap out of a heavy bag from time to time. I don’t do it every day, maybe three times a week, or on those occasions when there really isn’t any other way to relieve pressure. I’m making the big bag talk, snapping off left jabs, straight rights, left hooks, body shots, combinations, doubling up on the jabs, hooking to the body, back to the head, all the while indulging myself with mental glimpses of Pazzano’s smug kisser, Theo Alexander’s walrus belly, Lenny Alexander’s pugnacious nose, a half-remembered face with a moustache and a twitchy ponytail, and the heaviest shots reserved for a shadowman, a murderer, an evil sonofabitch, who robbed Leo, robbed the whole, damn, world, of a sweet, pretty, gentle
, loving, woman, and who deserves each, and, every, bone-breaking, jaw-crushing, kidney-bruising, spleen-rupturing …

  Sweat is pouring off me, my arms are sore and my hands are hanging down like sacks of lead.

  “I hear regular light workouts are good for one’s general outlook,” says Gritch.

  I haul in some ragged breaths and turn to see him perched on a padded bench chewing an unlit cigar stub.

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Long enough to watch you trash five-hundred-dollars-worth of Everlast.”

  A brief wave of dizziness washes over me as I grab a towel and a water bottle off the floor. “A heavy bag’s not earning its keep if it hasn’t picked up some duct tape along the way,” I grunt.

  “Sucker’s going to need a big roll,” he says.

  “He had it coming.” I pour some water over my head and towel my face. “I’m going to grab a shower.”

  “How about a steam after that?”

  “I don’t do steam,” I say. “Morley never let me steam. Said it sapped the body.”

  “You’re already sapped, pal,” he says. “Make it the sauna. I could use one myself.”

  Three ladies in the shallow end of the pool watch me warily as I trudge toward the men’s locker room. I’m pretty sure my cursing was all internal, I don’t think any of the words were audible, maybe the grunts alone were enough to make them huddle up. I force a smile as I pass by. It seems to terrify them even more.

  When I enter the sauna, Gritch is already there, sitting on the lowest tier, wearing a towel tied high under his armpits, his face ruddy as an apple.

  “Your hand’s bleeding.”

  “I scratched it up in the penthouse. Broken window.

  It’s not deep.”

  I sit one level higher with my elbows on my knees, hands dangling, head hanging, sweat dripping like a steady downpour. I can feel the toxins flushing out of me.

  “You’ve been down here almost two hours,” he says.

  “I thought you might’ve drowned in the new pool.”

  “Don’t swim either,” I say. “Another thing Morley Kline frowned upon.”

  “Chlorine’s bad for fighters?”

  “Everything was bad unless Morley said it was good. No swimming, no steam. Roadwork, protein, and lots of sleep. I never saw midnight except on New Year’s Eve.”

  We sit in silence for a while, listening to droplets tapping on cedar. My heartbeat is returning to a normal cadence, my breathing is slowing, the ache in my muscles receding, my murderous impulses returning to their locked compartment at the rear of my skull.

  “You thinking deep thoughts?”

  “Thinking about quitting my job,” I say.

  “And doing what?”

  “Always wanted to visit China.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Well I could use a damn vacation,” I say. I sound grouchy. “They’re starting to look at Leo for this.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “The perfect suspect. Even he thinks so.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t have a clue, damn it.”

  “Only two choices, pal,” says Gritch. “Choice One, Leo did a bad thing, in which case the pucky hits the fan and the world as we know it dims and dies. Or, Choice Two, Leo is innocent of any wrongdoing, and someone murdered his true love.” He smiles encouragingly. “So? Which one do you buy into?”

  A workout like that pretty much demands a beer. In the old days Morley would have the beer on my behalf. It always seemed to do him good. Besides, at this time of day Olive’s is a calm and quiet place where a man can mull over his limited options.

  Kyra handles the bar in the afternoons. “Hi, Joe,” she says. “Coffee?”

  “A cold Beck’s in a cold glass.”

  “You’re glowing. Steam room?”

  “Sauna.”

  “This’ll fix you up,” she says.

  The glass is frosted, the beer is glacial. I inhale half of it, like a man coming out of the desert. Kyra lets me be, goes off to change the CD. She knows what I like, something to warm a gloomy afternoon. I sit at the end of the bar and listen to Ibrahim Ferrer. The Havana rhythms remind me of Raquel and I long for a day when I can remember her as she was, cheerful, competent, alive. Instead, I keep getting flashes of her body on the kitchen floor. White apron, soaked in blood. A maid’s apron. Was it important for her to maintain the fiction that she was just his personal maid? It was her decision most likely; she was the married woman sharing quarters with a man not her husband. Leo says he wanted to marry her, and yet there he was, evidently at her urging, squiring a fashionable divorcée to a formal dinner while she stayed behind, in her maid’s uniform, arranging platters of snacks. No point trying to fathom other people’s relationships. No doubt they’d worked something out that suited them, or at least protected them from the outside world. But, despite all the insulation, the world barged in and now their relationship, their unborn child, the missing husband, and, if some reporter really wants to dig, the eerily similar murder of Leo’s first wife, will all come out. There isn’t much I can do about that. And I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a connection with what happened eight years ago. The police never solved that one. But then Leo didn’t give them much to go on.

  “Track you down sooner or later,” says Larry Gormé.

  “Who ratted me out?”

  “Gritch. He says you’re currently clueless.”

  “Accurate,” I say. “Beer?”

  “Definitely,” he says, grabbing the barstool around the corner from mine so that we can face each other. “Kyra, darling, one of those imported things. He’s buying.”

  “For you, Joe?”

  “Oh, why not?” I ask no one in particular.

  “My, my,” says Larry.

  “I’m being sociable,” I say.

  “I can see that,” he says. “Got a name for you.”

  “Whose name?”

  “The guy who got skewered. Name’s Newton.”

  “That a first or last name?”

  “Haven’t a clue. That’s all I could get from my friend in the Medical Examiner’s office. Newton.”

  “Never heard of him.” I roll the cold bottle across my forehead. There’s a headache lurking in there.

  “That guy Goodier at Ultra Limos is making himself hard to reach.”

  “Another dead end.”

  “Not quite,” he says. “Turns out you know one of the mechanics down there.”

  “I do?”

  “Mo Feivel. Used to fight out of Bellingham.”

  “Heavyweight?”

  “Yeah, you took his head off back in ’87, ’88, somewhere in there. Third Round, TKO, ‘referee stops contest.’”

  “He’s a mechanic?”

  “I’m nosing around the garage, figuring I’ll get the bum’s rush any minute, and up comes this face from the past. Recognized him right away. I covered that fight. Hey Mo, I say, how you doin’? He says, ‘Who the fuck’re you?’ Pardon my specificity, Kyra dear. Thank you. Have you trimmed your hair? It barely reaches your coccyx.” Larry eschews a glass, tips the green bottle and refreshes his larynx. “Anyway, before he can brain me with a tire iron I establish my bona fides and tell him what a great fighter he was in his day, which mollifies him somewhat. At least he let me walk. So I figure you two, belonging to the same fraternity as it were, might be able to establish some rapport, find common ground.”

  “We weren’t exactly best buds,” I say.

  “Don’t you guys have a secret handshake?”

  “If I have to drive, you’d better have this other beer,”

  I say.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” says Larry.

  chapter thirteen

  “Listen, Joe,” Larry says. “I’m not writing this up. Not for reasons of taste or anything alien to my nature, I’d just rather stay on your good side for a while.”

  “Do up your seat belt,” I say. “Not w
riting what up?”

  “I just want you to know that it’ll be common knowledge by tomorrow morning that Raquel Mendez was pregnant at the time of her murder, and that Leo is the presumed father, although the cops haven’t confirmed their findings.”

  “They’d been trying for a while,” I say.

  We travel for a time in silence, straight up Granville, heading toward the airport.

  “So why aren’t you writing it?” I ask.

  “I don’t think it’s the big story,” he says. “I’d rather see where you’re going.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  He stretches his seat belt over his shoulder. “Besides, Gloria will have it in the morning edition.”

  “Beat you to it, did she?”

  “The young ones are so ambitious.”

  “Reminds me. I need to buy some Kevlar.”

  “At least you get to cuddle with yours.”

  “Not since she switched to mornings.”

  “Hate these seat belts,” he says. “Always feel like I’m being garroted.”

  “What kind of a name is Starr?” I ask. “Dimitar Starr, what is that?”

  “Bulgarian. I think. Bulgarian or Russian maybe. Same part of the world anyway. He speak with an accent?”

  “Didn’t say anything.”

  “He look Russian?”

  “He looked, I don’t know, Mediterranean, I guess.

  Black hair, black moustache.”

  “What’d the replacement driver look like?”

  “Same. Sort of. Without the pony tail.”

  Ultra Limousine Service doesn’t present an ultra upmarket facade and were it not for the line of extremely expensive German transportation parked outside, it would look like any used car lot in the city.

  “Hey, hey, we’re in luck,” Larry says as I pull up to the curb.

  “How so?”

  “Parking space near the front door,” he says.

  “Reserved for B. Goodier. That’s the manager.”

  The obese man prying himself out of a Lexus has a neatly trimmed beard and wears a snap-brim hat of fuzzy green felt. He grabs a briefcase and a stack of files from the passenger seat and waddles toward the main entrance where he stops, perhaps wondering how to open it with both hands full.