Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I had lunch. I ordered in.”

  “I ain’t in Jersey. There ain’t been a room-service waiter at your door all day.”

  “How did you get that room?”

  “Tell you all about it over steaks. There’s a chop house on La Cienega where good steers go when they die. They shot part of Prizzi’s Honor there. I know all you farmgirls like your meat bloody.”

  “Medium rare,” she said, surrendering.

  She was famished.

  FIFTEEN

  Ace Aberdeen was observing the third anniversary of his decision to have his first name legally changed.

  Ace was not a nickname. His father, who traced his lineage to a slave in Virginia, had inherited the family name Angus from that individual, who had taken the name of the Scotsman who had owned him and the plantation where he worked until Emancipation. In a move intended to ingratiate himself with his in-laws, the latest Angus had combined his first initial with those of his wife’s father, Charles, and her brother, Everett, when it came time to christen his firstborn son.

  People had considered Ace a cute name when he was small, and when he was in high school it had led acquaintances to think he had dash, at least until familiarity proved otherwise. But since his current standard of living depended significantly upon gambling, the name was a liability. It had become increasingly difficult to persuade fellow employees at the succession of firms where he’d worked to take part in football pools started by a man everyone called Ace, and poker games were hard to find. People were becoming more cynical. If it weren’t for professional bookies, who didn’t care what a man called himself as long as he settled his losses in decent order, he would have been forced to subsist on his paycheck, and the even more uncertain income brought in by his part-time fencing operation. This was out of the question with an ex-wife in Kansas who was sufficiently unliberated to accept alimony, and an eight-year-old boy in Indiana named Angus who required support.

  He’d settled on Darien. It was a name with poetry, slightly studious, but not uncommon among black men. The Scots surname, coupled with the dubious Ace, prepared people for something else. By and large they were unaware of how many Southerners were descended from Scottish colonists, or how many of them lent their names to their slaves. People didn’t like to be surprised, to admit they were guilty of misconception, and sooner or later they came to resent the person they’d been mistaken about. That was no way to begin a gambling relationship. A Christian name like Darien kept them from jumping to conclusions.

  Darien it was going to be, then. But it had been going to be for three years, because whenever he had enough put aside for the filing fee, the goddamn Saints (or Lions, Lakes, Steelers, Nets, Ravens; enter name of team here) missed the spread and he was back to case dough. The fee wasn’t that much. It was just that all his sure things seemed to go south on him just when the rent was due or his alimony was late or his car insurance was about to expire, and the longer he’d gone without changing his name the less urgent it seemed against the prospects of moving into the street or going to jail or losing his only means of transportation in a place where everything he needed was a twenty-minute drive away, minimum. Lately he’d begun to think God wanted Ace to stay Ace or He’d pick some other time to fling shit at him.

  He was still stinking up the place from the latest round, Tampa fucking Bay tromping the Rams in a game that all the oddsmakers had put in the win column for St. Louis a week before kickoff. Jackson had played the second half like a kid in the Pee-Wee League, and the Bucs had walked right over him and spiked Darien Aberdeen right along with the game ball.

  Ace rented his house in Leon Valley, a town whose address he never used because it sounded to him like another name for Steve Urkel, that annoying nerd kid that lived all over the TV dial in reruns. Instead he’d taken a post-office box in the city. A. Aberdeen, San Antonio had resonance. Names, of people and places, were important to him. If it meant an hour there and back to pick up his mail, or by God another three years to scratch up court costs so the bank would accept his endorsement on checks made out to Darien Aberdeen, the results were worth the time. Time was one thing a man had plenty of in Texas, if he weren’t an oilman or a killer on Death Row.

  When the word killer occurred to him, he turned his head and spat, missing the sidewalk in front of the post office. He was as superstitious as any gambler, and he shared every other suburbanite’s fear of the city, which, like most deposited its worst elements outside government buildings. The duffel bums and a couple of meth dealers he knew by sight if not by name were already working their way among the natives and tourists, smelling the coming of sunset. In a couple of hours they’d be shooting up and dealing in front of the monument to the heroes of the Alamo.

  Today there was nothing in his box except bills and a glossy circular offering him the opportunity to acquire the world’s greatest books for the low price of $39.95 a month for the rest of his life. He was still trying to get through last year’s Stephen King, and there wasn’t a third notice among the bills, so he chucked it all in the trash can outside the post office and went to the Riverwalk for an early supper.

  Julio, his favorite waiter at the Mexican restaurant where he liked to read the sports sections in the L.A., Denver, and New York papers over a plateful of smothered burritos and two Dos Equis, led him to a table by the railing, where he could watch the tourists craning their necks on the flatboats, and ogle the fine tall Texas women in their little white shorts and blouses tied under their breasts. There was just enough breeze to blow away the humidity, and he was content to sit there with the papers stacked on the table and count belly buttons. He needed those tight tan midriffs and long brown legs to settle his thoughts, which for some reason had turned dark.

  When Julio bustled out from the restaurant’s shadowed interior to seat another lone customer, Ace looked up and damn near crossed himself. He wasn’t Catholic, but he preferred to play the percentages. God was fucking with him again, sending Johns Davis to him only moments after he’d been thinking the word killer.

  Well, Davis wasn’t a killer, but someone had tried to kill him, and in Ace’s book it amounted to the same thing. Death was contagious. People caught it like a cold, for no other reason than that they had stood too close to someone who was carrying it. It didn’t help that it was Davis who’d taken his action on the Rams disaster. Ace snatched the top paper off the stack and spread it open in front of his face. It happened to be the financial section from the Post, all those rows of little numbers, with no odds in sight. Talk about gambling.

  “Ace, it’s me, for chrissake. You don’t know Wall Street from Walgreen’s. Put down the fucking paper.”

  He lowered it. “Jesus, Johns, it ain’t been forty-eight hours. How’d you find me?”

  “Your phone didn’t answer. You eat here every time you’re in town. I’m not collecting today. Unless you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t, but I will. My credit’s good.”

  “I don’t care what your credit is. What do I look like, TRW? Your food’s here.”

  He hadn’t noticed Julio hovering over him with the steaming plate. He laid aside the newspaper and let the waiter set it and his beer down.

  “Sir?” Julio looked at Davis.

  “You serve Miller Lite?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. I’m not eating.” He sat down opposite Ace. “I can’t eat Mexican. You believe it, living here? I gas up like the Goodyear blimp. Go ahead and eat. I don’t mind watching it. You heard what happened, I guess.”

  “I heard something.” Ace took a bite of his beef burrito, then tried the bean and then the chicken. Today they tasted like the same grade of soggy cardboard. He’d never eaten in a bookie’s presence before. Gamblers and the people who took their action didn’t belong to the same class. One wasn’t higher than another. They were just different.

  “You hear anything else? Like who punched the ticket?”

  “Hell, no. I saw all I know on th
e news. You think I’m an underworld character? Man, I got to change my name.”

  “You think I am? Which is why I came looking for you.” Julio came with his beer. Davis waited until he left, then leaned forward on his elbows. “You still deal merchandise, right?”

  “I sold some things.”

  “Guns?”

  “A time or two. To friends. Other people, strangers, you never know when it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. These days you’re better off selling dope, and I wouldn’t touch that. Man in your work, I’d of thought you had all you need.”

  “What, dope? This beer and a Scotch later, that’s it for my day.”

  “I mean guns.”

  “I had a gun, you think I’d let some shit choke me to death in front of the fucking Alamo? I place bets, Ace. I’m not in the Cosa fucking Nostra. I wouldn’t know the handshake.”

  “You try Goliad?”

  “Goliad’s the first place I’d go, if I didn’t know the Spaniard had controlling interest there.”

  “You think it’s Rivera?” Ace lowered his voice, and they were already whispering.

  “He says no. He wouldn’t lie, right? So can you help me out or what?”

  “I think I can help you out.” Ace sat back.

  After a moment Davis exhaled. “Okay, you’re in for a grand and a half on the Tampa Bay game. Call it a grand and I’ll credit you a dime next time out. That’s pretty generous, considering I could score a Saturday Night banger on Commerce for a couple of dimes.”

  “If you could you would. But okay. You did all right on Tampa Bay, huh?”

  “Couldn’t’ve done it without Jackson.”

  “You know he was going to tank?”

  “He didn’t tank. No one can afford to pay a first-string NFL quarterback to tank. That went out when free agency came in.”

  “You knew something, though. I called all over Vegas and they wouldn’t give me your odds.”

  “I haven’t got Vegas’s overhead.”

  Ace gave up. “Fall into my place around seven. I’ll have something then.”

  Davis rose and put two singles on the table. “For the beer.”

  After he left, Ace cleaned his plate and ordered another Dos Equis. Everything had begun to taste better.

  The gun was a 9-millimeter Ruger, with plastic grips and a brushed finish. It looked to Davis like a faucet. He knew next to nothing about firearms and Ace had to show him how to rack in a shell and take off the safety. He gave him a box of cartridges and demonstrated the loading procedure.

  The bookie hefted the pistol, feeling awkward. “You got like a holster? I can’t carry this thing in my pocket.”

  Ace rummaged through the junk drawer in his kitchen and snapped a couple of rubber bands around the handle. “Stick it in your pants in back. You got a nice little hollow there so it won’t stick out. The rubber bands’ll keep it from sliding down into your crack.”

  Davis did that, dropping the tail of his sportcoat over the handle, and tried walking around the room. “I feel like the fucking Tin Man.”

  “I hear you get used to it. I wouldn’t know. I bought it in a lot from a collector that didn’t want his guns going to his wife in the divorce. It’s registered to a dealer in Dallas, so if you lose it, let me know so I can tell him to report it stolen. If you have to shoot anyone, get rid of it and call me.”

  “I hope to Christ I won’t be calling you.” He took another turn around the kitchen. “It’s not so bad. I feel better just having it.”

  “Good luck, man.”

  “Fuck luck. I’m a bookmaker.”

  Davis couldn’t get comfortable in the driver’s seat, so he took the gun out and put it in the glove compartment. The car was a Cougar he was renting while the Jag was in the body shop. He hated the automatic running lights and the goddamn seat belt that fitted itself around his torso when he turned the ignition and that he had to duck under whenever he got in. The dome light came on whenever he parked and turned off the ignition, which made him a fine target. He’d taken care of that by switching the light off manually, but he’d be a lot happier when he had his car back. He hoped he’d live that long.

  He’d been lost in these thoughts and had no idea how long the lights had been flashing in his rearview mirror when he heard the swoop of the siren. It scared the living shit out of him, but not as much as when he’d swung over to the curb and put it in park and remembered anyone could get hold of lights and a siren. He thought of the gun in the glove compartment. But if it was a cop, he could get shot reaching for it. And he was wondering irritably just what good a gun was at all when someone tapped on his window. He sighed and whirred it down. What the hell. It was probably better than the fucking garrote.

  “Mr. Davis, I’m Lieutenant Childs, with the San Antonio Police. Would you mind telling me what you were doing at Ace Aberdeen’s house? I’ve got a man there asking him the same question.”

  He looked from the gold-and-enamel shield in the man’s hand to his face, young and black behind prim-looking spectacles that glittered in the bouncing red-and-blue lights. He remembered the face from police headquarters.

  “Jesus, I’m glad to see you.”

  When the lights went on in the windshield of the unmarked car that separated his rental from Davis’s, Macklin drifted over to the curb and killed his headlamps. He’d been aware since leaving San Antonio that his was one of two vehicles following the bookie, but had been uncertain until that moment whether Maggiore was doubling up on him. He knew then it was the police. The hunchback was superstitious about cops and would no more have one of his people impersonate one than a certain kind of person would sit in a wheelchair if his legs worked and he didn’t want to tempt fate.

  He watched as the young man in plainclothes stooped to accept something from the driver of the Cougar, and saw the light reflect dully off the brushed finish of the semiautomatic pistol as he carried it back to his car. The young man got in and pulled away, swerving around Davis, who drove off a moment later.

  It hadn’t been an arrest, then, just a disarming. If it weren’t a Maggiore operation, he’d have suspected the police were cooperating. Instead they were just using Davis as bait. That was useful to know.

  During the conversation up ahead, Macklin had reached down and poked the .38 farther under his seat so the handle wouldn’t show in case the officer had noticed him pull over and came back to shine a flashlight inside the car. Only amateurs and idiots stashed guns in the glove compartment. That was the first place cops looked.

  SIXTEEN

  There was a forty-minute wait for seating at the chop house on La Cienega. Abilene left his name—the host, a twenty-something with zigzags shaved into his carroty temples, didn’t raise a brow at the sound of it—and he and Laurie found a seat at the bar. There were rose-colored mirrors behind the bar and movie posters in frames on the walls. An ordinary-looking suit of clothes hanging in a glass case near the telephones had a printed card identifying it as one of the costumes Jack Nicholson had worn in Prizzi’s Honor. A framed photograph of the actor with his arm around a man in a bad hairpiece bore Nicholson’s signature in black marker. Laurie supposed the man in the hairpiece was the owner. She asked the bartender for a Kahlua and cream.

  “Tequila, straight,” Abilene said. “No fruit or shit.”

  “You want me to hold the lime?”

  Abilene showed his teeth like Nicholson. “‘I want you to hold it between your knees.’”

  The bartender’s face went stiff and he turned away to pour the drinks. Laurie guessed he was too young to have seen Five Easy Pieces, even the last time it was shown on TV.

  “You believe that?” Abilene said. “I mean, every time he looks up from the tap, Jack’s staring right at him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have cable.” She wished the young man would hurry up with her drink. Making conversation with Abilene was something she didn’t want to do sober.

  “What you think of Hollywood so far?” Befor
e she could answer, he said, “Tell you what I thought the first week. It’s phony, but I expected that. What I liked, it didn’t know it. I mean, the town conned itself better than it did the tourists. It bought into its own backstory. ‘Backstory,’ that’s a word you hear a lot when you hang around the studios. They think they can make anything stand up if they shovel in enough horseshit behind it. Thing is, most of the time they’re right. That’s how come a freak like Jim Carrey pulls down twenty million a picture and a great actor like Jimmy Caan has to do shit like Mickey Blue Eyes. You ever see Thief?”

  “I think so. Carroll O’Connor was the crime boss?” She scooped up her glass and sipped. The bartender had used milk instead of half-and-half. She wondered if that was because Abilene had offended him.

  “No, that was Point Blank, which was a pretentious piece of shit. Except for Lee Marvin, my man Lee, who couldn’t help being great. It was Robert Prosky in Thief. Anyway, the studios will reissue a great flick like that in an anniversary edition, wet all over themselves telling how good Jimmy Caan is, sell them cassettes and DVDs, then turn around and cast him in a piece of shit for scale and all the doughnuts he can eat off the caterer’s cart. They’ll even mention Mickey Blue Eyes on the Thief box so the kiddies’ll know who he is. They really believe it when they say both pictures are great, on account of what Mickey did the first weekend. They write puff and then they read it and say, ‘Holy shit, this picture’s even better than we thought.’ It’s kind of sweet.”

  Laurie took a long drink. She hadn’t eaten all day and the coffee-flavored liqueur was filling her head like a balloon. “Do you think you could complete a sentence without using the word shit?”

  “What’s that?” He turned his head away from his glass.

  “It’s redundant. The word loses all its power. And it makes you sound stupid.”