Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  She whooped and drained her glass. “Nice. Nice one, Bongo. You do okay with that line?”

  He hung his head. “Not really. Not lately anyway.”

  Later she said, “There’s an elephant in the room.”

  He nodded.

  “We should, sometime, talk about the elephant.” She thought for a moment. “No, maybe not.” They were tiptoeing in partner territory but not deep enough to get all confidential.

  They went through the statement she’d taken from the black guy who saw Agatha Burns get into Phil Harvey’s Camaro. Ray Tate stood behind her chair, watching her long brown finger trace the lines of handwriting. She had perfect penmanship. Her fingernails were chipped and worried. He thought he smelled a faint spice off her skin then it was burned away by her bleached hair.

  She looked up at him. “You reading this? You read dyke?”

  “Sure.” He was a little drunk. “Sure. I read all the romance languages.”

  She laughed and briefly there was something open and unguarded in her look.

  * * *

  On the way to Phil Harvey’s place in the east end she drove away from the river into an industrial area and they stopped for dinner at a chicken-and-biscuits joint.

  “Maybe we’re going at it wrong, Ray. Maybe we should work from Agatha Burns and go backwards. She left a phone number. Maybe we talk to the family and find out how she got from cradle to grave.”

  He shrugged. An anti-gang ghost car, all black with fat blackwalls and whip antennae, pulled up in the lot beside the Intrepid and two chargers got out. They stood huge in their vests and utility belts in the parking lot, like they owned the kingdom. Their sidearms were tied to their thighs by straps, gunslinger-style. Two lanky guys in gold chains sitting across the restaurant headed for the back door. The clerk yelled into the back to make two with extra hot wings, Petey and Gary are here. The chargers came in and looked at everyone. One kept his eyes on Ray Tate, then on Djuna Brown, then back. They were being added up and divided by suspicion. Ray Tate had done it himself a thousand times, reaching conclusions based on what was visible, reading tea leaves. If you asked the cops next week who was in the chicken joint when they went in that night, they’d get it right, right down to Djuna Brown’s slippers and Ray Tate’s scuffed cowboy boots. He thought: a competent cop is the best of creatures if they were caught young and mentored out of their hubris and stupidity. These two, he decided, had benefited from a crusty old duty sergeant, not from some crafty self-guided missile heading for a white shirt at the Swamp.

  “We got to shake something up, Djun’,” he said. “Let’s do Harvey’s place and if it washes, we’ll put the chick through.”

  “Okay.” She reached over to help herself to his coleslaw. While he watched her concentrate on balancing a wad of ’slaw on her fork he saw her lashes were long, her eyes had a Chinese slant, her skin, even in the fluorescent light, was smooth with tiny pores. There was muscle in her neck, long cords that stood out when she jutted her pointed chin out to let falling coleslaw fall on the plate instead of her horrible jacket. The hair was crazy and he wondered about a cop who wore embroidered slippers. But he did want to paint her. There was a hint of the exotic about her. He felt like he was on a teenage date with absolutely no shot.

  She dabbed her lips with a paper napkin and caught him staring. She made a wide smile. “Imagine, Ray, if you were a chick. Where’d you have me right now? In the back seat, that’s where.”

  He felt his heart race.

  * * *

  Djuna Brown drove lightly with the tips of her fingers. Periodically she glanced at them and regretted the worried nails. She drove with one eye on licence plates and the other on the traffic flow. The Staties were taught to drive inside a created bubble, to outfit themselves with a zone of protection as they swooped and whipped up and down highways. Beside her, Ray Tate was quiet, listening to the city dispatchers sing their songs. As they drove across invisible sector lines, he leaned forward to change frequencies, each time picking up a new dispatcher. He laughed when a bland charger came on looking for a “female-speaking officer” to search a shoplifter.

  Being a dyke had served her well during her time up in Indian country, where the farm boys stayed away as though she had a disease they might pass on to their wives. The one guy who’d tried to jump her had been drunk. He smelled of manure and hay and announced he’d never had black ass, especially queer black ass. She’d surprised herself when she went for her stick and started in on him. She had just one partner after that and he never said a word to her. When he wanted a meal break, he burped. When he needed a bathroom break, he tilted and farted.

  There was an ease in the Intrepid. She’d heard about cops like Ray Tate. Not the racist gunner stuff, although there was a lot of that, especially inside the Gay-Glo. She’d heard of coppers who were coppers to their core, who passed on lore and knowledge like old alchemists. You felt safe and never alone and always in company with a keeper of secrets. She’d never met one before; they were increasingly rare. The bitter dykes at Gay-Glo said that was all technique. They wanted to be daddies and get into your pants.

  Suddenly, Ray Tate asked: “Hey, Djun’, where we at?”

  She looked around. “Uh, eastbound … uh …”

  “See,” he said, laughing. “When I was first in the suit I was out with an old sergeant. Turn here, he said. Turn there. All the while he’s talking baseball, he’s talking gossip. Then he says, Hey, boy, where we at? I go, Fucked if I know, and I start looking around. He reaches over and grabs me by the ear and twists. Fuck it hurt. He says, If you need help and you go on the radio, what are you going to say when they ask where you at? You’re gonna say, Uh … uh. And you’re going to bleed out. I guaran-fucking-tee it. Always, always know where you’re at.”

  She looked at him. He was smiling at the windshield. “You going to twist my ear, Ray? Make me a cop?”

  “Ah …” He looked at her ear and seemed about to say something but instead flipped through his notebook. “Anyway, Phil Harvey. State Motor puts two vehicles under him. The black Camaro, registered two months ago, and an old knucklehead Harley. The Harley lapsed out and the address was on a commercial strip over in Stateline. The Camaro’s registered to an apartment in the Beach. Old Harv had a change of status for the better, it seems.”

  Ray Tate felt like a working cop. As Djuna Brown drove he watched both sides of the street, counting pedestrians. “The Stateline address is a strip club. The Beach is a condominium. Lake view, tennis courts.”

  She steered through a jam-up in Little India, four short blocks decorated with strings of Christmas lights that burned year round. A turbaned man was selling grilled corn on the corner, rubbing the cobs down with a lemon, waving a can of salt over them. A woman in a headscarf modelled a sari in a doorway for another woman, both of them giggling behind shy hands. Ray Tate was in love with every colour and smell and weird sitar note blaring from a speaker. Past the street crowd, Djuna Brown cut south and picked up speed, timing the lights.

  Phil Harvey’s condominium was just across a wooden boardwalk from the lake. Djuna Brown cruised the parking lots in case the Camaro had made its way back from the north country. She drove to a Donut Hole and Ray Tate, following the tradition that the shotgun buys, bought two coffees. At Harv’s building she backed into a handicapped slot with a view to the front door of the building and the entrance to the parking lot and they racked their seats back.

  “So,” Ray Tate said, “let me ask you one. What’s with the hair?”

  “What’s with the painting?”

  They were silent. He said, “There’s always Harry Potter. That’s a safe subject.”

  “That little fag?”

  They sat companionably and didn’t say anything for a long time.

  Chapter 12

  Connie Cook felt at loose ends. Harv had called and given him a heads-up about the surveillance on Agatha Burns’s stash house. Agatha was gone, someplace, probably not a very nice
place, he imagined. He missed yakking with Harv, he missed packing Ag, he missed the slow trails of blood soaking in the fine hairs at the back of her neck.

  “There’s heat on Ag’s, Connie,” Harv had said. “Red Intrepid, a black chick with white hair, a white guy with a beard. They might be there for the local spades, but I’m gonna go under for a while. You okay for now?”

  Captain Cook went to a gallery opening in the capital with his erect, frozen wife. The artist scented dough on the fat donor with the champagne glass in his hand and made a point of leaning into him as he did the rounds of the walls. She was a tall woman with explosive red hair and a loose-lipped red mouth. “My vision,” she said, “is of angst. But of love, too. That’s why all the red and black.” She read his vibrations and gave him a sad smile. “Love is pain, pain is love. I have to accept that in order to grow. Accept the sacrifices.” She began nattering about the artist’s life, of being born too late, of having missed the golden age of artists and their generous patrons.

  The Captain bought three hugely depressing oils. The artist put the red dots under the paintings and stood back pleased. She gave him her card and said she had canvases at her studio on the river, or she would anyway, until the landlord locked her out. She looked mournful at the land sharks who were driving property values through the roof. If ever, she said, the art world needed true patrons, now was it. She actually batted her eyelashes.

  Captain Cook felt the hustle and appreciated it. It was his money she was in love with, not somebody else’s. He scoped her ass and looked at the nape of her neck. He felt a rumbling. He was amazed at what people would let him do to them for his money.

  When they got off the Interstate, his wife directed him past their house to two adjoining lots. “We can get them both, a million three they’re asking.”

  Connie Cook said he’d get his secretary to look into it and she wrote down the developer’s phone number. Connie Cook stopped at the curb in front of his house and walked his wife in, turned on the lights, and said he had to go out for a while.

  It was dark. He drove a couple of blocks then rounded on himself and shut off the lights. The lake was off to his right. On his left he could see his own house, the far side overlooking the backyard of the house where Agatha Burns had lived, had done her high kicks, had been a golden girl beyond his reach. The rich young, he thought sadly, didn’t care about money. He wondered if life was satisfying without it. He could have offered her a million dollars to flash him a boob but she’d’ve turned him down and gone to laugh with her little friends. His life had been like that. Cornie the Horny, a girl at school had called him. Fatty Unbuckle. Jabba the Gut. If a man couldn’t get it with money or his looks, then what was left to him? Pillage, that’s what. Pillage was the most successful foreplay.

  He watched his house until his wife turned out all the lights upstairs and left the light in the portico lit for him. The door glowed with the hall lamps. To a passerby, he knew, the house was welcoming and homey, clearly a place of expensive textiles and furnishings, fireplaces, chandeliers, staircases. He dreaded going inside. There was nothing for him there.

  He didn’t know what to do with himself. Harv was off someplace, gone under. Ag wasn’t around anymore. He thought for a moment that maybe he’d been too quick to sic Harv on her. He should have waited until he had someone else in the bullpen, warming up. The pigpen, Ag had called it, and he recalled with some sadness how that had lifted his heart.

  Connie Cook started the Mercedes and rounded the block. He took a long, last look at the old Burns house, almost hidden by new construction hoarding, then continued on and eased through the gates onto his interlocked driveway. He’d been surprised that the Burns couple stayed there so long, after their Agatha had run off or been taken. Old Jerry Burns had been a rich playmaker in the political halls of the state legislature and he’d sat, Connie Cook imagined, for a long time waiting for the call for ransom, waiting to negotiate in his resonant voice, waiting for the call that never came. Or for Agatha to call, regretful, from some roadside phone booth, wanting to come home.

  In the foyer of his own house, Connie Cook stood, wondering what to do. Harv was out riding around, doing who knows what, swooping through the underworld in his leather bat coat, pouncing on the weak. Ag wasn’t Ag any more. He headed for the kitchen where the food was but even that didn’t interest him much.

  Who’d’ve thought, he thought, crooks ever got bored?

  * * *

  Phil Harvey left the Camaro under a tarp in the barn. The farm was abandoned. Two outbuildings had been cleaned up a little and both were fully functioning water farms with trays of hydroponic plants set in neat rows under halide fixtures. The keeper, a toothless old farmer with a double-barrelled shotgun and bib overalls, wandered the buildings. The farm was in Indian country and when the Natives came prowling for their burial grounds or whatever, the old toothless guy gave them a blast of the Old West, complete with cackling and whoops. Set in the furthest reach of the property, not quite on it but in a wedge of government land, was the super lab. In the evenings the fumes drifted towards the farm, away from the highway. A backhoe had dug a huge hole in the ground a hundred metres beyond the lab. It was jammed with the leavings of the crank and X trade. When Harv had had the lab up and running, the Captain had come up and was disappointed. He’d expected a gleaming laboratory with white tile walls and floor, fluorescent lighting bathing pristine equipment, little, thoughtful gnome-like technicians in white coats scampering from stainless steel vats, consulting clipboards. He hadn’t been impressed with the reuse electric stoves, the rat’s nest of exposed wiring, the patchy dirt floor, the open rafters with rustling bird life, the white plastic jugs rolling around, and the disarray of tangled tubing heaping on old wooden tables.

  “What the fuck, Harv? This place is a fucking … barn. I expected something a little more, I dunno, German? Like the place where the Nazis did their experiments. This place is a pigsty.” His pride of ownership had evaporated.

  “It’ll do the job, Connie. Check this.” Harv felt sorry for him and took him over to a pill-pressing machine with Chinese characters stamped into it. “This is the best. Taiwanese. This’ll turn out more pills than we can handle. We can use a hundred imprints. Peace doves, number ones, death’s heads, you name it.”

  “You can make anything? Any symbol?”

  “Yep.”

  Captain Cook had stared at the machine. It was impressive. It looked industrial and solid. “You ever see that symbol for women’s stuff? Chanel?”

  * * *

  Harv put the speeding ticket he’d attracted on the way north into his jeans pocket and wrapped the fluted revolver in a sweater he found in the main house.

  Snapping his stringy saliva like it was bubble gum, the grumpy old keeper drove him in a busted-up pickup truck down the long rutted laneway to the sideroad and out to the highway. They went south to Widow’s Corners where Harv got out at an all-night diner on the edge of town. The old man spat out the side window as he drove off but the window was cranked up and Harv had a bit of a laugh as he crossed the parking lot to a pay phone booth and called one of his guys to come up and get him.

  Harv went into the diner, ordered a meal, and went into the washroom. He stashed the bundled pistol behind the toilet cistern then sat in a booth with a view of the washroom doors and the entrance. Wrapped in his black leather coat he ate a jailhouse meal: meat loaf with instant mashed potatoes and limp vegetables, and several cups of coffee. Truckers came into the place with regularity and barely glanced at him. Long-distance truckers with patches of the flag on their jackets and the words, These Colors Don’t Run, hunched over plates, eyes down, yawning. Those guys, Harv knew, had seen shit and he wasn’t much different from the rest of it, a white man swathed in leather, wearing sunglasses at night, in a town notorious for Indian ribaldry and criminal doings in the bush.

  * * *

  Waiting, Harv reflected on a life away from the city, a life with a wom
an and maybe a kid, although that was a long shot, in a place where he could finally stop. He hadn’t worked a day in his life, except in custody when he did some cooking and scrubbing in the industrial prison kitchens, or shovelling coal in powerhouses, or hoeing on work farms. On the streets he’d never been more than a couple of thousand bucks from being broke, always with an eye for a decent score. Hooking up with the fat fucker had taken care of that problem: Harv had enough money to last for years. He wouldn’t have to work in a chemical fog, wouldn’t have to daydream while watching a Brinks truck rolling up to a bank. Life should’ve been golden, but associating with Connie Cook had, he believed, diminished him, made him as much a lunatic as a crook. Harv knew he could steal or deal all the livelong day. He could collect loans, hustle huge quantities of dope, even do the odd armed robbery to keep the wolf from the door. That all made sense: no one could fault a man for what he did to keep food on the table, especially if he was willing to pay the grim bill when the cops came knocking. But since he’d been with the Captain he found himself thinking of himself as … something other. Depraved came to mind. Psycho, maybe. Snaffling up a girl and locking her down until she had a bad habit was strange. Turning her over to a gross pervert for months of playtime, that was degenerate. There was no end in it for anyone. Harv made a good end with the Captain’s criminal schemes but the weird perversion bothered him. Agatha Burns had cried for him, apologized for sucking and licking his scars. No sorrow for maybe being a rat, no whining about having maybe betrayed him, no remorse for facilitating the drug trade. She just wanted forgiveness for what she did to him. As if that was her biggest crime, the headliner in a theatre of confession.

  * * *

  The Captain had wanted to become a kingpin.

  “Where’s the money, Harv, where can we make out best?”

  Dope, Harv had advised. Water farms, labs.

  “Yeah, Harv? How about broads. Any dough in running hookers?”