Cannon's Mouth_A Rafferty P.I. Mystery

by W. Glenn Duncan

  After ten catless minutes I heard Ed lumber into the kitchen. I went inside.

  “Sorry about that,” Ed said. “I’m a little preoccupied about this, uh, situation.”

  “Do, uh, tell.”

  He leaned against the. kitchen counter and looked at me. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said.

  “I’m tough. It won’t bother me.”

  Ed said, “Me, damn it. I’m the one it embarrasses.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant. You want to talk about it or not?”

  Ed shook his big head. “Later, maybe.” He shuffled his feet. The process vaguely resembled two aircraft carriers changing places at the dock. “Rafferty, how do you feel about me taking that cash? I can’t give you a department receipt for it.”

  “Oh, damn. There goes my condo in Vail.”

  “Thanks,” Ed said. “Well, look, make notes about last night while it’s still fresh in your mind. It may take a while, but the grand jury will hear this one. Guaranteed.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

  “You got it.”

  Ed pushed himself away from the counter and walked out of the kitchen. As he went through the doorway, he said, “I owe you.”

  “Write that down,” I said. “Sign it.”

  Twenty minutes later, the cat came out of a bush and licked the plate. When it had finished, it looked at me for a while, then jumped the fence.

  I walked into the yard and picked up the plate. It was spotless

  How about that? With a hardworking cat around the place you don’t need a dishwasher.

  Chapter 12

  I went to the office Thursday afternoon. Mostly I sat around, although I did put in a fast fifteen minutes work on the Smith case. Hah! Some case.

  Five months back, I’d been hired by a lawyer to find a nineteen-year-old who had inherited three thousand dollars from an uncle he may or may not have remembered. The kid—his name was John Smith, I swear—didn’t know about the money yet. A year ago he had headed out of town with a bicycle, a backpack, and a plan to travel around the world. He failed to specify a starting direction.

  Washington admitted Smith had a passport but said there was no record that he’d left the country. That didn’t necessarily mean he was still here, though. He could have walked across into Mexico with the tourists. (Or into Canada, which I kept forgetting; down here border means Mexico.) Or Smith might have signed onto a tramp freighter or fishing boat; some of them are weak in the record-keeping department.

  Mom and Dad Smith didn’t know where John was, and they didn’t seem to care much. I guess Unk didn’t remember them in the will. The parents steered me to an old girlfriend who now lived in Midland, though. Girlfriend was certain she would hear from John sooner or later, because they “were, like, really, really close, you know?”

  And there was an aunt in Minnesota with a voice like soft chimes. I always felt good when I talked to her.

  I phoned both women every few weeks, but so far neither of them had heard from John Smith. Every other month I billed the lawyer for the long-distance charges and one hour’s work. So far he still paid the bills. That wouldn’t last.

  I put another quarter-hour’s labor on the lawyer’s tab, then wondered what else I could do to pass the time until tonight’s dinner with Hilda.

  About then Ricco phoned. “Ed with you?” he said.

  “No.”

  “All right,” Ricco said. “I’ll find him.” There were traffic sounds behind his voice.

  “You move your desk out onto the sidewalk for the fresh air?”

  “Cute, Rafferty. I just don’t trust those … forget it. If you see Ed, tell him I called.”

  “Sure. Have you picked up Dresden yet?”

  “Don’t I wish,” Ricco said. “Naw, he’s still out there, as far as I know. He ain’t at home, anyway.”

  “Try his office, wherever that is.”

  “Yeah, that’s next,” Ricco said.

  “I gave Ed a plate number this morning.”

  “I know. It’s a rental. The company’s checking now to see where it is.” He paused and let me listen to buses for a moment. “Tell you what, Rafferty, I got a bad feeling about this one.”

  “Be of stout heart, valiant crime fighter.”

  Ricco blew a raspberry and hung up.

  I put my feet on the desk and read for a while. I’d become addicted to C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels about that time, so I settled in with good old Horny. Between the two of us, we sank a couple of French frigates in no time at all.

  Hornblower and I were pacing the quarterdeck, looking up at the t’gallants, whatever they were, when the phone rang.

  “You Rafferty?” a man said aggressively.

  “Me Rafferty,” I said. “You Jane?”

  “What? Uh, maybe I got the wrong number here. Where is this anyway?” His voice ricocheted back and forth between bluster and cunning.

  “Just think of me as Superman for the over-twelves. What can I do for you?”

  “Over-whats? Superman? What kinda—”

  “Scratch Superman,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Well, I’m not … I …” His voice was suddenly defensive.

  I waited; he spluttered and hedged long enough to convince me he didn’t know what he wanted. I said, “Let me ask you a question.”

  “What?” he said. Very wary there. Touchy, touchy.

  “What’s a t’gallant?”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, damn,” I said. “And I was so sure you’d know.”

  He hung up. So did I. Horny and I sank another frigate.

  That night Hilda and I had one of our dual dinners. She calls them “movable feasts”; I prefer “schizophrenia with gusto.”

  We did Hilda’s half first, at an uptown place where all the wine was imported and there wasn’t a word of English on the menu. The place was so classy, I even wore a tie. For Hilda.

  I think Liz Browning forgot to write down “wearing a tie” when she counted the ways.

  Our waiter was named Philippe—uh-huh—and he thoroughly approved of Hilda’s wine selection. He brought me a beer, but pretended he hadn’t.

  I had been telling Hilda about the Mini-Maxi fiasco. “I suppose you feel responsible for the man being killed,” she said.

  Philippe showed up with our appetizers then. Mine turned out to be a single deep-fried shrimp in the middle of a big white plate. I ate the shrimp but left the single strand of green pepper and puddle of two-tone sauce. Wouldn’t want to get a reputation for being piggy.

  I said, “Yeah, I do feel kinda bad about Max.”

  “Don’t.” Hilda’s appetizer was a thin slice of avocado with a tablespoon of oily vinegar and one strawberry. She took very small bites and made it last a full minute.

  I told her how Dresden had appeared out of left field to pay me for killing Max. “And the cops didn’t want me to touch him. Strictly hands off. Figure that one out.”

  Philippe whisked away the appetizer plates and brought our entrees. I almost called him back, but then I found my veal cowering under a slice of tomato. I ate the veal and the tomato.

  Hilda tasted her small square of fish. “Um, delicious,” she said.

  “So was mine.”

  Philippe brought a small serving plate of vegetables. Hilda took a potato the size of a golf ball. I passed; they didn’t look big enough to leave the nest.

  Hilda said, “Why can’t they catch this man, uh, Dresden. Surely that can’t be so difficult.”

  “No argument there, babe.”

  “After all, you gave them his name. And a license number.”

  “Ricco says he’s not home and the car was a rental. And Dresden said something about being out of town. That’s his alibi.”

  “How can that be an alibi if he’s not out of town?”

  “I’d say he made a big deal out of catching a plane, then came back. He could have driven back or flown back under a different n
ame, depending on how far away he went in the first place. When they find out where the car was rented, they’ll know which.”

  “It seems to me that only tells them which city to search,” Hilda said.

  I shrugged. “Hell, his office probably knows where he is. And if they don’t, it’s nothing a few thousand phone calls to hotels won’t fix. Police departments are good at that stuff.” I finished my beer; Philippe was nowhere in sight. “But they don’t really have to do any of that, Hil. Any day now Dresden will rocket back into town, brimming over with crocodile tears about his poor partner, Max.”

  “So they only need the rental car details to prove later what he did. For the trial.”

  “You’re good, tootsie. Wanna go partners? Rafferty and Gardner: Private Heat. It has a nice ring to it.”

  “Gardner and Rafferty,” she said. “Discreet Investigations for the Truly Discriminating.”

  “Forget it.”

  We had dessert; a postage stamp of chocolaty gunk for Hilda; a spoonful of ice cream for me. Philippe brought a big bill in a bigger leather folder. He came back three minutes later and seemed shocked to find I’d put nasty old money in there instead of a pristine credit card. He took the folder away to sterilize it.

  Hilda finished her wine. “Anytime,” she said.

  “Hot damn,” I said, “now we can go eat.”

  “That fancy French stuff is okay,” I said, “but when you’re hungry, it’s hard to beat traditional Italian food.” I took another bite.

  Hilda said, “Pizza and beer is hardly traditional Italian cuisine.”

  “Close enough.”

  She took another slice of pizza, but not before she’d swiped extra pepperoni from the adjacent slice. “I don’t understand all this trouble your friend Ed is having,” she said. “Do police really swipe cases from each other?”

  “Not normally,” I said. “Oh, well, there’s always some office politics, of course; any big organization has that. But this is different. Damned if I can figure it out.”

  “By the way, how do you find places like this?” Hilda said. “Much as I enjoy being the best-dressed woman here, I—”

  “Modesty, woman, modesty.”

  “Rafferty, I’m the only woman wearing a skirt!”

  “That may be so, but I find many of the T-shirt slogans have great social relevance.”

  We went to my house. “Burping gently into the good night,” Hilda called it with post-pizza accuracy.

  We put a bowl of milk on the back step but never saw the cat. The bowl was empty in the morning, though, when Ed and Ricco came around to haul me downtown.

  “Wow,” I said. “Can we turn on the siren?”

  “This ain’t funny,” Ricco said. “This ain’t funny at all.”

  Chapter 13

  We rode downtown in a department Dodge. Ricco drove. Ed sat up front with him, turned halfway around to talk to me. I had the backseat to myself.

  This was not an especially good deal. You need a bad head cold or a clothespin to enjoy the backseat of a working police car.

  “The Scotsmen want to talk to you,” Ed said.

  “I guess I came in late. What Scotsmen?”

  “The klutzes who screwed all this up. It’s a special antidrug group.”

  “A task force, no less,” Ricco said. He sounded bitter.

  Ed said, “Move Against Crack Task Force. MACTF. MacTuff. They call themselves The Scotsmen.”

  Ricco spat out the car window. “That bullshit name is one of them incentive gimmicks. You know, Tiger team and Eagle squad, all that motivational shit.”

  “What happened to just catching the bad guys?”

  “It’s hard to find time these days,” Ed said.

  Ricco said, “They got my goddamned incentive so high, I keep bumping into it.”

  A block later, I said, “These Scotsmen, they’re the guys who wouldn’t let anyone near the Mini-Maxi place; then they didn’t show up themselves, right?”

  “Yeah,” Ed said.

  “Why?”

  “I want to hear Kevin’s answer to that one myself,” he said.

  Ricco grunted cynically and spat out the window again.

  “Kevin who?” I said. “Isn’t this fun, guys, we’re playing Twenty Questions during our ride in a real police car. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.”

  Ricco found a pothole; Ed’s jowls bounced. “I see your point,” he said. “Okay. Kevin Noonebury runs this MacTuff thing. He conned a deputy chief into setting it up. I don’t think you know Kevin. He’s a lieutenant, but way up the list. A show-boater. Talks to civic groups; wears Italian suits; got a skinny wife with too many teeth. You know the type.”

  I said, “And late at night he hears small voices whispering, ‘Chief Noonebury’ in his shell-like ear.”

  “You got that right. Kevin’ll probably make it, too. He’s no more aggressive than your average mama grizzly defending her cubs.”

  I said, “You know, as a name, MacTuff sucks.”

  “Don’t it?” Ricco said. “Sounds like a hamburger to me.”

  “Or a computer.”

  Ed said, “That’s how they got involved with this Mini-Maxi thing. They must have a trigger on the computer. You phoned me about the possible hit, we did a routine scan on the address, and ten minutes later one of Noonebury’s stooges told us to butt out.”

  I said, “To repeat myself, why?”

  Ed scowled. “Let’s see what Noonebury says.”

  “How big is this group of his? Sounds like they’ve got a lot of clout.”

  “Aw, the clout is because they’re after crack. Half of what the TV and newspapers say about crack is bullshit, but the public doesn’t know that. People are uptight about crack, which means the brass is uptight about crack.”

  Ricco said, “Which means Noonebury can do no fucking wrong.” He cut over in front of a pickup truck, braked abruptly, and hooked a right toward the central business district.

  Ed said, “Kevin’s a political son of a bitch. He’s dragged in a bunch of outside drones to make his MacTuff empire look bigger. There are four or five state guys attached to it now. And the local Feebies drop in every couple of days; they stand around in their tailored suits and say things like ‘liaising’ and ‘maximization of enforcement resources.’ Your federal government in action, huh? Oh, yeah, and DEA sent down one of their jerk-offs.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “And has this concentration of superheroes accomplished anything yet?”

  “A little bit, I guess. They’ve busted a bunch of street dealers. And a crack house or two. All low-level stuff, though.”

  “They’re all arrest numbers,” Ricco said. “Noonebury gets off on arrest numbers.”

  Ed rubbed his stomach and winced. “That’s right,” he said “Guys like us—you, me, Ricco—we think of the street. Who’s the bad guy this time? how are we going to catch him? and so on. Noonebury thinks of computer printouts and bar graphs and percentages.” He shook his head. “The man’s a goddamned bean counter, Rafferty. He should be a CPA, not a cop.”

  We turned the corner around the DPD headquarters building and dropped down the ramp into the underground garage. Ricco parked; we got out.

  I said, “I’m disappointed in you, Ed. You’re about to throw me into a room with a number dumper named Noonebury and a DEA dude in a Captain Drugbuster suit. This could seriously affect our friendship.”

  “Oh, I’m going in with you,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  “That’s different,” I said. “Can we hold hands if I get too scared?”

  Chapter 14

  Kevin Noonebury was five-tennish, with short black hair, tiny white teeth, and a suit worth more than my car. He bustled Ed and me into a conference room—Ricco hadn’t made the cut—and introduced the DEA rep. His name was Ernie Boyle. Or maybe it was Bailey; something like that.

  We all sat down around a blond table. There were legal pads in front of Noonebury and Ernie Whosis, and a casset
te tape recorder in the center of the table.

  Noonebury sat very erect in his chair, pink-cheeked and after-shaved and perfect. He gave Ed and me two seconds of formal smile, punched a button on the tape recorder, and began to recite the date and time into it.

  I pulled the recorder toward me and fiddled with it until it came open. Noonebury’s eyes narrowed; Ernie’s eyes widened and darted toward the closed door when I removed the tape, threw it and the recorder into opposite corners of the room, and leaned back in my chair. I smiled at Noonebury.

  He didn’t smile back. He said, “That was entirely uncalled for.” He probably used the same tone of voice when his kids left their bikes in the driveway.

  “But it felt so good,” I said. “And you don’t really want a tape of me calling you a horse’s ass. You know how those things get copied and passed around the department.”

  Noonebury leaned forward on his elbows and played with his felt-tip pen. He gave Ed a cold look.

  Ed shifted in his chair; it creaked. “I’ll take him out and pistol-whip him, Kevin, if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  I said to Ed, “Watch what you say in front of old Ern here. He looks like those wimps who used to turn guys in for smoking in the locker room.”

  Ernie began to write things on his legal pad. He wrote very diligently. Without looking up, he said, “You do know you could be arrested for interfering with a police investigation, don’t you?”

  Noonebury looked pained. Ed rolled his eyes. I said, “Oh, no, Mistah Fox, don’t throw Brer Rabbit in dat bad ole jail. ’Cause den he got to tell all dem lawyers and newspaper folks ’bout how da po-lice let dat poor man get kilt—”

  “All right!” Noonebury snapped. “Could we attempt to conduct a little business here, please?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “All this power-play horseshit is boring.” I smiled at him again. “How may I help you?”