by Ed Gorman
“Coach,” I started, but I didn’t finish.
MEGAN ABBOTT is the Edgar(r)-winning author of the crime novels Queenpin, The Song is You and Die a Little, and the nonfiction study, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. A 2008 Pushcart nominee, her stories have appeared in Wall Street Noir, Detroit Noir, Storyglossia, Queens Noir and the upcoming Phoenix Noir. She is also the editor of the collection, A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir. A Detroit-area native, she has taught literature at the New School University and New York University. Her new novel, Bury Me Deep, which is loosely based on the Winnie Ruth Judd “Trunk Murderess” scandal of the 1930s, comes out in July 2009. She lives in Queens, New York.
Babs
BY SCOTT PHILLIPS
Visitor’s Center call you about a room?” I say to the woman behind the counter. It’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’ve been in the car since 4 in the morning. I haven’t yet hit the stage where the white crosses that have kept my eyes open have turned against me, but the time will be coming soon and I’ll crash and sleep the sleep of the damned, and I have business to take care of before that happens.
“Oh. You’re Mr. Gandy, hello. You’re lucky to get something. They got the Consumer Electronics show going on right now, good thing you thought to stop at the Visitor’s Center.” She’s shaped like a gourd, her hair long with ends split and dyed a shade of black that doesn’t occur in nature. Between the elastic of her paisley slacks and the bottom of her blouse, little black hairs dance obscenely around the milky white vortex of her navel. She takes a key hanging in front of a cubby in which three envelopes sit aslant and hands it to me.
“There’s mail in that slot,” I point out.
“There’s a fellow always gets this room when he comes through. Salesman.”
So I’m subletting someone else’s rented room, basically. I don’t care. I’m lucky to be getting anything, as the ladies at the Visitor’s Center pointed out to me when I pulled into town. It’s a modest little motel, the Visitor’s Center lady said, but super clean; you could eat off of those floors. I climb the open staircase to the second — floor balcony overlooking a swimming pool filled with cloudy water the color of urine. A couple are sitting next to the water smoking and glaring at one another without saying anything, and as one they swing their gazes upward toward me.
“What the fuck you staring at, faggot?” the woman says. She has on a shirt that says, I SUFFER FROM CRS. Her nipples are sticking straight out through the cotton, and at this moment there may not be a pair of tits on the planet I would less rather see, short of maybe Mother Teresa’s; this one can’t weigh much more than eighty pounds, with the emaciated face of a lifelong smoker. Even with her Jackie O shades on, her eyes look sunken.
“Seems like someone’s looking to get his ass kicked,” her companion says. He’s so obese I can’t imagine him able to get out of the lawn chair he’s overflowing from, but I stare straight at him and sense that he’s serious. I picture the fight and figure it could go either of two ways: He gets me down and crushes me under four hundred pounds of suet, or I dance around him and tire him out until he has a heart attack.
“Sorry!” I yell, and I head down the balcony looking for number 36. It’s around the corner, facing the back ends of some houses. A dog in one of the yards starts a vicious barking jag as soon as I come into view, and keeps it up once I get into the room.
Clean enough to eat off the floors, I think after a quick walkthrough, wishing I could force — feed the chipper Visitor’s Center lady a nice, greasy fried egg off of the gritty shag carpet.
There’s a ratty terry cloth bathrobe hanging from the clothes hook inside the bathroom door, presumably the salesman’s. He must be balding, because there’s hair all over the goddamned place: on the pillow, in the toilet, around the tub drain.
I’m not here for a vacation. Having spent the last few months tending bar for my stepfather’s strip club in Wichita, I’m on my way back to L.A., where I am foolishly expecting to be able to pick up my old life where it left off. When I called my friend Skip to alert him of my return, he had a proposition for me: If I was coming through Vegas, he’d give me two hundred dollars to pick up a package from a stripper named Babs.
I didn’t have to ask Skip to know I’d be carrying crystal methamphetamine. I’m more of a pothead myself, with a taste for the occasional hit of acid or pharmaceutical speed. Meth makes my teeth itch. But I can use the two hundred, and Skip is a good guy. (Within a couple of years, though, he’ll transform into a violent monster whose ass I’ll be forced to kick off my couch and out of my house in a futile effort to save my marriage. Said marriage hasn’t happened yet, either, at this point.)
When I call the number Skip gave me, Babs doesn’t bitch about the hour or seem surprised, just gives me directions to a bar called the Tumblin’ Dice a few blocks off the Strip and says she’ll meet me in half an hour. I tell her I’ll be wearing a Dodgers cap.
It’s past midnight and my new friends are still out by the pool. I stare as I pass by them and wink at the lady, who gives no sign of remembering me from twenty minutes ago. Her boyfriend doesn’t react, having by this time fallen asleep.
The Tumblin’ Dice is a monument to skank. No one here looks close to sober, particularly the lanky, disheveled bartender, whom I take at first for the victim of some exotic neurological disorder. After a long wait, he lurches over in my direction and braces himself on the bar with a big bony hand, a large bandage stretched across his right knuckles, blood starting to seep through the beige fabric.
I order a draft beer and park myself in front of a nickel video poker machine with hearts and diamonds faded to a cheerful, blurry pink. I play one nickel at a time, which proves to be a mistake.
“Fuck a duck, baby, you gotta play more’n a nickel a pop, you’re fucked that way if you hit a big hand.” The woman next to me is small and junkie — thin, with puffy dark circles under her eyes. I have no theoretical designs at all on the woman I’m supposed to be meeting but I can’t help hoping that this isn’t her.
“I’m just killing time, waiting for a friend.”
“Fuck, I’ll be your friend,” she rasps, and then slaps my back harder than I would have thought possible, cackling. “Just kidding. I will, though. I’m Nicki.” She rolls up her sleeve to reveal an amateur tattoo of a nickel the size of a silver dollar on her upper bicep. Jefferson looks pissed, like he’s not happy about being tattooed onto a junkie’s arm, or maybe it’s the big infected white — head erupting from his cheek. “Short for nickel’s worth, get it?”
I shake my head no, even though I do.
“I done time, baby. Five big ones. Know what I did?”
“No.”
“I’m not gonna tell you, either. Not till I know you better.”
“Okay,” I say, cursing the inborn Midwestern politeness that keeps me involved in the conversation and darting my eyes back and forth between the door and the machine. I drop another nickel and draw three nines and two queens, pat.
“Fuck, man, see that? You ain’t getting shit for that, baby. You should’ve bet five nickels, that’s the way you build up a bankroll.”
“Like I say, killing time.” Her short blond hair is spiky, but a stale odor emanating from her scalp makes me suspect that its body comes from a lack of washing rather than some salon product.
“What’s your name?”
“Tate.”
“Is your friend a lady, Tate?”
“Uh — huh.”
“A lady friend, like? Like a sex partner?”
I take a good look at her, trying to figure out exactly what she’s fucked up on. There’s glee in her face, childish and idiotic, and I can’t say whether it’s malicious or not.
“Probably not.”
“Cause I don’t want you getting any big ideas about me, cause I’m one hundred percent dyke, baby.”
“That’s okay with me.” I draw four clubs and a diamond, and trade
the diamond for a spade.
“Aw, baby, that’s a heartbreaker there. Not that it matters when you’re betting nickels. You ever play one of those five — dollar machines?”
“No.”
“My girlfriend, the one who died, she won a cool two grand one time. She was trying to pay me back all the money she stole.”
The smart thing would be not to rise to the bait, but I’m finding her more fun than the nickel poker so I do the callous thing and bite. “How’d she die?”
Nicki leans toward me and hisses the answer in my ear, filling my nostrils in passing with a bouquet redolent of tobacco, stale beer, and gum disease. “I had her killed.”
“No shit,” I say, nodding, trying to strike the perfect balance between looking impressed and credulous and sympathetic.
“Bitch ran up a thirty-thousand — dollar tab on my fucking MasterCard. I said, Bitch, you ain’t getting away with that. But I fucking loved her. It fucking broke my heart.”
“Is that what you got sent up for?”
“Fuck no, that was just a little cocaine beef. This deal with Betsy was just last week. Don’t you fucking tell anyone what I just told you, got it? Cause I’d hate to have to have you killed too.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I say, wondering how worried this should make me and cursing the white crosses popped in the course of the day’s drive. Five? No, six. Seven? No, six. Three at 4 in the morning at the first motel, and three in Utah. Was it Utah?
“Cause I really would fucking hate that, cause I like you, baby. You’re pretty good — looking, you know that?”
“Thank you very much,” I say, the way my mother taught me to respond to a compliment.
“When I said I was a hundred percent lesbian, I meant more like eighty, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh.”
“You have really big lips. Just like a spade’s, almost. Anybody ever told you that before?”
“Not in those exact words.” I look over at the bartender, but this apparently isn’t the kind of place where patrons are discouraged from bothering one another
“I can’t help thinking how they’d feel on my pooss — ay. You like the taste of pooss — ay, Tate?”
In fact, pussy is one of my favorite flavors in the entire world, at this juncture, however, my gag reflex is struggling with the back of my throat, trying to force it open to disgorge the beer I’ve swallowed.
A strange hand on my shoulder ought to come as a relief, but it makes me spill my beer on the foul carpet. I turn to face a woman with long, dark hair drawn up behind her long, graceful neck in a ponytail.
“Tate?” she says, her voice high and surprisingly sweet. “I’m Skip’s friend, Babs.” She looks over at Nicki. “Sorry, Nicki, I need your new friend.”
Babs is apparently higher than Nicki in the pecking order, because Nicki scurries back to the bar without a word. “I came in a cab,” Babs says. “Can you drive?”
“Sorry about that,” Babs says as we leave the parking lot. She struck me immediately as pretty, with the kind of sweet, big — eyed face I love, but the more I look at her the more character her face shows; the truth of it is she’s a beauty. “If I’d’ve known I was going to be that long in coming, I would’ve told you someplace nicer.” She spends a few seconds appraising my appearance, which makes me a little nervous, since I’m wearing the clothes I slept in last night. “You’re a big guy. That’s good.”
I don’t know how to interpret the remark, favorable though it seems, so I file it away for future obsessive, feverish rumination. “Kind of hard to picture you as a regular back there.”
“I’m not, exactly. I own it.”
“Really?” Skip said you were some kind of stripper, I almost add. Because I’ve been expecting somebody more like Nicki and less like Babs. She has on a loose — fitting shirt and jeans and not much makeup, and I can’t help thinking that she sounds smarter than any woman I’ve talked to in months.
“Yeah, the last owner died and my boyfriend was a regular there, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll buy it and let him run it. Well, that didn’t work out, did it? That was him behind the bar.”
“The, uh, that guy tonight?”
“Yeah, the shitfaced guy. He didn’t used to be like that. Guess I shouldn’t have bought him a bar.”
“I guess not.” I’m stopped at a long light and a tiny old woman shuffles across. She doesn’t look like she belongs in Vegas at all, let alone out on the street at 1:45 in the morning.
“Look at that poor old gal,” Babs says. “We should offer to take her home, except we’d probably scare her into a heart attack. So what brings you to Vegas?”
“Going back to L.A. Bugged out after the Northridge quake and spent a few months tending bar in Wichita.”
“Wichita? Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“I grew up in Wichita! For a few years anyway. My dad was stationed at McConnell. I had a little dog named Teenchie.”
“Teenchie? You a Song of the South fan?”
“Yeah, I love it. I know it’s supposed to be all politically incorrect and it probably is, but I saw it when I was little, so I can’t be objective. The other one I really love is Saludos Amigos. Ever see that one?”
“Part of it. I wrote my master’s thesis on Disney animation.” As a matter of fact I didn’t, my cousin did at USC, but I do know more than the average guy on the subject, and I’m truly bowled over to be asked such a nerdy question by this magnificent creature.
“Just loved all that shit when I was little. When I first started dancing, I used Teenchie as my stage name, can you believe that?”
So she is a dancer after all. I’m slightly more than half in love with her at this point in our ten — minute — long acquaintance, and I figure if the lush behind the bar at the Tumblm’ Dice is my competition, I’m in like Flynn.
But it’s late, so the aforementioned Midwestern politeness fails to stop me from asking the first question that pops into my head: “How can you afford to buy a bar on what a dancer makes?”
“Who said I was still a dancer?” She grins, a lopsided thing that shows a big expanse of teeth. She has, I finally notice, a slight overbite that makes her face perfect. She doesn’t offer any more than that, so I don’t pursue it further. “Turn left up here.”
Something that should have been nagging me all along starts doing so. “Hey, you know that gal Nicki I was talking to?”
“God, do I.”
“She told me she had her girlfriend murdered.” When I say it, I can feel microscopic particles of Dexedrine racing up my spinal cord to my brain.
Babs snorts. “Jesus.”
“Said this girl ran up a thirty-thousand dollar tab on Nicki’s MasterCard.”
“Think about it, Tate. If you were the bank, would you give that crazy bitch a MasterCard with a thirty-thousand dollar limit?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean, what would she put on the application where it says occupation? Crack whore? Meth cook?”
This sends the Dexedrine particles back down out of my brain, and a feeling of relative calm comes over me. We’re heading into a nice neighborhood now, a strangely empty subdivision. There aren’t any cars on the street, not even parked, and there aren’t any lights on anywhere; no late — night TV viewers or insomniac readers or dog walkers.
Finally, we get to a McMansion with all its lights blazing and two cars parked on the street in front despite a three — car garage. “Did you ever see The Omega Man?” I ask. “This is sort of like his place.”
“Kind of spooky, isn’t it? The subdivision went bankrupt before it was all the way finished and the developer’s on trial. They managed to rent out a few of’em to people who sublet the extra rooms.”
“Is this where you live?” I ask, hoping she’s bringing me home, even as I recognize the pathos of the fantasy.
“Hell no. I own, in a hell of a lot better nabe than this. This is where we’re getting your pre
sent for Skip. Park on the street, not too close to the streetlamp.” She opens up her bag and hands me a pistol. I’m a Kansas boy and I’ve hunted since I was little, but I’ve never had a real pistol in my hands, and to her consternation I hold this one like it’s a live fish.
“Hold it straight up and keep your index finger on the trigger guard.”
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“This guy’s an asshole. I just want you to stand there and look big, and if things get tense you pull the grip out of your waistband so he can see it.”
Not that I like anything I’ve heard in the last thirty seconds, but the thing I like least is the part where I stick a firearm down my pants. I can’t stand the idea of looking weak in Babs’s eyes, though, and by this time she’s out of the car, so I follow her to the door.
When the door opens, an expressionless woman about seventy years old lets us in without a word. She has on a tank top and a pair of shorts that reveal a big scab on her shin. It looks like she slid all the way down her driveway with only one leg of her pants on.
There are three medium — to — hot young women in the living room watching Cops. The action is taking place in North Las Vegas, and they’re excited because the bust onscreen is happening on a street they know.
“There’s Lonnie’s, look,” one of them says. She has long, frizzy red hair and freckles as big as moles, and like the old lady, she has a big scab on one knee. She’s picking at it with one long, red fingernail as she watches.
“I’ve totally seen that dude,” one of her friends says.
“Which? The cop or the pimp?”
“Wannabe pimp, more like. He comes in for a drink when he’s got cash.”
“Gross.”
“Where’s Kleindienst?” Babs asks, and when they ignore her she grabs the remote and shuts the TV off, which prompts a volley of protest until she asks again, louder.
