Lloyd and his buddy walked out of the bar. By the time they reached the door they were arm in arm and laughing. “Shitty way to make a living sometimes,” Joe said to me, and filled my glass on the house.
“You bartend a long time?” I asked him.
“Five years. Worked construction before that. Nonunion. Worked Morrell’s in Ottumwa before that. Union. The best money I ever made, but they closed her down. Flunked out of junior college before that. What’s your trade?”
“Private investigator.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Say.” Joe snapped his fingers and the solitary drinker down the bar jumped like he’d touched a hot wire. “You here to find out who killed, what’s his name … Billy? He’s your kin, right?”
“Right. That’s not why I came to town, but I’ve been looking around a little. You hear anything about it?”
“Not much. Lots of folks glad he’s out of their hair, though. No offense. Had this ear he used to pull on people. Gross as hell.”
“I’ve heard that before, that Billy made people mad. Why do you think that was?”
Joe sipped a clear liquid from a glass, then put it back on the shelf behind him. “You live in a place like this, the only way to survive is to play a role. Like in the school play or something. Me, I’m the tough old bastard behind the bar who’s good for a free drink once in a while if you behave yourself. I mean, I raise rabbits, English Lops, those ones with the long droopy ears, and I know a hell of a lot about it, win prizes in Chicago and everything, but that don’t make no difference. I’m the bar-keep, pure and simple. And we got our upright citizens and loving wives and political powers and the wheeler-dealers, bums, drunks, and what else have you. Everybody’s got a part, only Billy, he wouldn’t let folks play the game, and that didn’t sit real well with some.”
“Like who?”
“Well, your brother-in-law, for one. Suppose you heard about that. And Clark Jaspers, the lawyer, for another. And Chuck Hasburg, but that was different. Woman trouble.”
“You know anything else about Billy, Joe? I mean, that he was into something that might get him killed?”
“Nothing besides that WILD bunch.”
“What’s the story on them?”
“Well, they’re supposed to do all this environment stuff, and I guess they do, some, but word lately is you want to score some dope in big quantities that’s not a bad door to knock on. Zedda’s the guy you talk to, he’s the boss down there.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Marijuana, mostly. But coke, too, if you got the money, which most don’t. Even heroin, they say, though that may just be bragging. Not much call for heroin around here. Farm folks are dumb but they ain’t that dumb. Gettin’ there, I admit.”
“Tell me about Chuck Hasburg.”
“Chuck? Good man, or would be if they let him.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, just that life up and kicked Chuck right in the gonads a few years back, then hauled off and did it again for good measure. Lost his job, then lost his woman six months later. With most folks that’s about all there is to lose. Chuck’s on edge, like a lot of guys around here, nothing left for him to do but drink and whore. It’s okay for a while, but after too long you get so deep in shit you can’t climb out. Then either your liver rots or your dick does and either way you got a world of hurt.”
“Is Chuck that far along?”
“Close. Comes in just after we open up, most days. Stays all day some days, too.”
“What time do you open?”
“Seven A.M.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus don’t have nothing to do with it, Marsh. He ain’t stopped in here for years.”
Someone down the bar made a noise that meant nothing to me but did to Joe, and he went off to fill another glass. When he came back I had a question for him. “You know of any relationship between Chuck Hasburg and Billy Tanner? I mean, something before Billy moved in on Chuck’s wife?”
“Well, now,” Joe mused. “Let me chew on it a minute. Meantime, you want to kick the mule again?”
“I shouldn’t but I will.”
“You just sang the story of my life,” Joe said, and went off and came back with a drink out of a bottle he pulled out from under the bar. “That bar Scotch’ll turn your toenails green,” he said. “This here’s twelve going on a hundred.”
“Thanks. But at this point you could serve some after-shave and I wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Welcome home,” Joe said, and toasted me with an imaginary glass.
“Be happy to buy you one of the same,” I said.
Joe shook his head. “Haven’t had a drink in eight years,” he said, then left me alone to imagine the reason.
Some more people came into the bar, a young couple looking like they were slumming and a drifter in a cowboy hat and a sparkling shirt trying to kill some more of a life that wouldn’t stay dead. Joe went off to serve them and I sat where I was, drunk as a skunk, and toyed with the image of Chuck Hasburg, my old pal, with Billy’s blood on his hands.
Chuck. The blood on his hands had once been mine, the day he’d helped me to the hospital when I’d been cut to the bone by a skate in a pickup hockey game back when we were about twelve. Now it turned out that Chuck had not only cuckolded me in a fashion, he had bitterly resented me for thirty years. Nothing is ever the way it seems, not even friendship. I finished off my drink and spun on my stool to leave and looked into the smiling countenance of Sheriff Rex Eason. Joe slid the sheriff a Bud in a bottle without being asked.
“Mr. Tanner,” the sheriff boomed, rattling even the drunk at the end of the bar. “You still in town?”
“Last I looked,” I said, the booze rendering me as silly as a vaudevillian at the bottom of the bill. “You find who killed my nephew yet, Sheriff?” I asked, the words long and thick.
“Don’t think there’s anyone to find. Pretty sure it’s suicide.”
“Oh?”
“That’s right. Got no reason to call it murder. None at all.”
“What the hell, Sheriff?” I thought you said Billy wasn’t the type to kill himself.”
“Well, Billy was peculiar enough, plus I hear he was real sick. Sick people do things they wouldn’t normally do, is how I see it. It’s how you’d best see it, too. Save you a bunch of grief.”
“Who got to you, Sheriff? Gladbrook? Mary Martha Whoever, the newspaper lady? The mayor? Who?” I didn’t recognize the voice as mine.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Tanner.”
“I’m talking cover-up, Sheriff. I’m talking ‘let’s let Billy die a suicide so the business folks who’re thinking about coming here won’t get all excited by some scary talk of murder.’ I’m talking about a sacrifice, Sheriff. Billy Tanner’s name for this town’s future.”
“You got no reason to talk that way, Mr. Tanner.”
“Don’t I?” I teetered on my stool.
“You appear to be a bit inebriated, so I’ll take that into account. But I’d advise you to get on home now, and to think real hard about leaving town in the morning.”
“Are you telling me the investigation is off, Sheriff? That you’re not even looking for a killer anymore?”
“Oh, I’m checking some.”
“Checking how?”
“I visited the people out at WILD today, for one.”
“And?”
“Nothing much. Toilet in the back flushed a bunch of times while I was there, is about all.”
“Who’d you talk to?”
“Zedda.”
“How about his girl? Tamara?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Don’t know the lady. What’s she got to do with it?”
“Damned if I know,” I admitted. “She might have had an affair with Billy at some time. Which means she might have seen him the night he died.”
The sheriff swore. “If I look up every woman the boy slept with I’ll be wo
rking till retirement,” he said with a sad grin. He killed his Bud and moved a step away.
“So what else are you going to do?” I challenged, more belligerent than I had a right to be.
The sheriff seemed not to notice. “You going to keep on going around asking folks about Billy?” the sheriff asked me, his voice so smooth I had trouble holding the words in an intelligible order.
“Till I come across something that makes sense,” I said.
“Sometimes death don’t make no sense at all,” the sheriff said. “You got some kind of client in this?”
“I do. A client of sterling character, I might add.”
“Who?”
“Me.” My gesture was as grand as my boast.
“You best get on to where you sleep, Mr. Tanner, before you fall off your stool and Joe has to put you up in the back.”
“Well said, constable,” I said.
“And you be careful,” the sheriff added. “Some people might not want you sniffing too close in their affairs. Lots of folks in this part of the country, they hear someone sniffing around the barn lot, they just pull the old Remington off the wall and fire away. Know what I mean, Mr. Tanner?”
“You got anyone specific in mind that’s so sensitive, Sheriff?”
“Not a one,” the sheriff said. “Joe. Thanks for the beer. Mr. Tanner, you take it easy. I’ll get them if they’re there to get, but I’ll do it my way. I got to live in this town after we get this all straightened out, and you’ll just be moving on. So we got different ways of traveling to get to where we want to get.”
The sheriff went out the door before my besotted mind could frame an objection to his counsel. Joe came over and asked if I wanted another belt. I shook my head, which taxed my motor skills to their limits. “I been thinking about what you asked,” Joe said.
“What was that?”
“About what there was between Chuck Hasburg and Billy.”
“Oh. That. What have you got?”
“Well, only one thing comes to mind.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll have to check at the courthouse to make sure, but I think old Chuck was on the draft board some years back. I think he was the one sent Billy Tanner off to war.”
Twenty-one
In my dreams I was surrounded and attacked by creatures with turned-up collars and pimpled faces, wearing white socks and angora sweaters, with hair in ponytails or flattops with wings. Above them all Chuck Hasburg threatened me with a bomb in the shape of a football. When I got to the Laundromat I was dulled and pained from lack of sleep and from the hot sour residue of booze and smoke. The spinning dryers and sudsy washers didn’t do a thing for me.
There was only one person in the place, a girl standing way in the back. The mounds of clothes in plastic baskets that surrounded her looked like outsized scoops of pistachio in sugar cones. She was an unreconstructed flower child, with straight blond hair, bare feet, feathered headband, love beads, granny dress and glasses, and rings on every digit but the thumb. Behind the glasses her blue eyes were baked enamel, impervious to whatever enemy had surrounded her. When I walked up to her she raised a hand to wave me away. “I got no change, mister,” she said, already angry, perhaps perpetually so. “No spare soap, either.”
“I’m not here to wash clothes,” I said. “Just cleaning up the past a little.”
“Is that supposed to mean something rational?” Her mouth twisted with the acid taste of disdain.
“I’m Marsh Tanner. Are you Tamara?”
“What if I am?” Suspicion tugged down her brow and made her ugly, the way suspicion always does to anyone.
“If you are, I’d like to talk to you about Billy. Billy Tanner, my nephew.”
The baked eyes widened. She checked the clothes in the spinning dryer, then looked at me through tiny glass discs that made her eyes seem jeweled. “I’m Tamara. You the guy came to see Zedda the other night?”
“Right.”
“And took Starbright to see them bury Billy’s bones?”
“Right again.”
“She says you’re mellow.”
“Why don’t we assume she’s right?” I smiled a great big smile. It bounced back at me off a flat board of boredom.
“Starbright thinks Reagan is mellow,” Tamara said brusquely. “Zedda know you’re here?”
“No.”
“You tell him you were going to check me out?”
“Nope.”
“You going to tell him anything I say?”
“Still no.”
She glanced around the room and saw nothing but mildew and machines. “My load has ten minutes left in the cycle, then I got to get back. We could go next door till then.”
“What’s next door?”
“Head shop.”
“In Chaldea?”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t realize there were that many dopers in this part of the country.”
“There’s dopers where there’s dope.” Tamara led me into the shop next door.
The establishment was named Head Case, and it contained a rather uninspired collection of drug paraphernalia and an odor of incense heavy enough to stun anything olfactory. There was a girl behind a counter with a tulip tattooed on her cheek. A WILD poster on the wall featured poisoned fish and empty barrels of pesticide. My guess was the place was an offshoot of the group, another of Zedda’s integrated enterprises. My next guess was that there was a cop permanently stationed nearby, on the alert for reefer madness.
Tamara mumbled something to the girl behind the counter and she left the room as though she were walking on clouds, taking her tattoo and her incense with her. The speakers in the corner squirted heavy metal, the sound as thick and numbing as the acrid smoke that soured the room.
“What about him?” Tamara asked as she lowered herself to a pillow on the floor. I didn’t want to sit down there with her—there’s something perverse about sitting on the floor while wearing a necktie—but I did.
“Billy was killed,” I said, when our heads were on the same plane.
Tamara frowned. “Zedda said suicide.”
“Zedda was wrong.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
Tamara squirmed on the satin pillow, then reached into her bag for a cigarette and added to the haze that billowed about us. “Who wasted him, then?” she asked, after she’d waxed her lungs with tar.
“I don’t know that. It’s why I’m here.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Do you want to?”
“Not really.” The words were elaborately casual. “I’ve got enough friction in my life already. Billy’s karma was bad and I don’t need any of it laid on me. I mean, I’m thinking about splitting this scene anyway. I can’t afford to get involved in any pig trip.”
“What if Zedda killed him?” I asked harshly. I was mad at her dismissal of Billy, at her easy ability to deprive him of significance.
The question startled her for a minute, seemed even to confirm a fear, but then she relaxed. “He didn’t,” she said, and seemed certain of it.
“Were you with Zedda that night?”
“It was Monday, right?”
“Right.”
“I was with him.”
“Doing what?”
“Massage. We gave him his massage that night.”
“You and who?”
“Me and the chick who just left.”
“Did you see Billy at all?”
“No.”
“What time did things with Zedda start?”
“Eleven or so.”
“And you were all together till when?”
“Morning. I mean, we smoked a little weed and got it on and bagged out right after. Anyway, why would Zedda kill Billy?”
“Maybe because Billy was sleeping with you.”
She frowned and checked the door. “That’s garbage, man. Who told you that?” There was even more fear behind
the little glasses now, and it spread electrically to her fingers, which crushed a fold of her skirt.
“Come on, Tamara. Don’t play games. I can get it from you here or we can bring in the cops and let them sweat it out of you. I don’t think you want that.”
She closed her eyes and said nothing. She looked older, suddenly, too old and wise to be who and where she was. When she opened her eyes the jewels within them had vanished. “Zedda can’t know about this,” she said in a whisper. “I’m trying to get out of here and the only way is for him to give me the bread. If he flashes on me and Billy he won’t dole.”
“How much money do you need?”
She thought. “A hundred will get me to Tucson. I got friends in Tucson.”
“I can give that to you. If you tell me all you know.”
“When?”
“Now. I’ve got the money with me. It’s yours when we’re through talking.”
She released her skirt and looked despondently at the wrinkles she had made in the thin, flowered fabric. “What do you want to know?”
“Just about you and Billy. What was the arrangement?”
“We got it on, is all.”
“How often?”
“Once a month, maybe. Not that often, really.”
“Where? At WILD?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Then where? Billy’s cabin?”
“Not there. Starbright was there. There.”
She grinned and pointed out the window of the shop, at the building across the street. “The church?” I asked, my voice cracking with amazement.
“You got it, Jack.”
“How?”
“Billy knew about this little room in the basement. Said it used to be his Sunday school room. Billy knew the Apostle’s Creed, can you dig it? They use it for storage now, I guess. Has an old couch, a rug, and the door was never locked. Churches still don’t lock things. Comes in handy sometimes.”
“So you and Billy just crept in there and did your thing once or twice a month. That’s all there was to it?”
“That’s it.”
“Why? I mean, you each had other partners, why go to each other?”
Tamara laughed bitterly. “Kicks. The only reason there is for anything. Plus who knows? Maybe I owed Zedda some things and this was one way to pay him back. And maybe I felt sorry for Billy.”
Fatal Obsession Page 19
