Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  The chairs were marshalled up; the room buzzed with laughter and comments. The Chief of Ds banged the side of his fist on the podium. “Not a fucking word of this gets out. I see any of this in the media, everybody in this fucking room is riding a pencil until you retire.” He shook his head. “Fuck sakes.”

  The chief hammer from Homicide whispered into the Chief of Ds’ ear. The hammer’s name was Bob Hogarth but he was called Hambone. A legend was that on his first murder, a hubby-on-wife bludgeoning with no weapon found and the husband bobbing and weaving pretty good, he’d tracked back a lengthy grocery list from two days previous and saw a frozen ham bought on sale. He got a warrant for the undisposed garbage and the contents of the house, detailing refrigerators, freezers, and other receptacles where frozen meat might be contained. After the search turned up the hambone in the garbage, he introduced himself to the husband. “Detective Robert Hogarth, of the … Hamicide Squad.” “Fuck,” the husband blurted, slumping.

  The Chief of Ds stepped back. Hambone Hogarth had a different kind of weight: his team was four for four on taking down cop killers dead. No one who’d ever killed a city cop on his watch was alive and doing time. He was smart and he knew cops: he had no mask, his suit was rumpled, he had bed-head, and he hadn’t shaved. He’d been seen in the streets, knocking doors, visiting victims’ families personally because he had a lot of manpower off sick. He lit off a whistle. “Okay, kids, the program’s over. Decision of the judges? Unanimous. Marty Frost gets the title, she goes to the welterweight finals.”

  Another round of applause and whistles and the task force began seating themselves.

  “Aw riiii,” Hogarth said, and the room quietened. “We’re getting some help. State’s sending us some bodies. We got some auxiliaries, some kids from the academy. There’ll be teams listed up on the board tomorrow. Everyone report here, seven a.m. We’ll have all the prints from the bottles back, and we’ll have a roster up, once we see how many bodies are getting borrowed to us. We’ll keep up Volunteers surveillance by day, catch them for anything, traffic, spitting on the sidewalk, public mopery. But we bring ’em in and sweat them for the murders.” He looked around. “If the girl wakes up and fingers the mayor as the guy, we can all go home, done the good job. Until then ...” He simpered, “We thuuuck it up.”

  There was scattered laughter. One charger in the back said, in a high-pitched voice and a lisp, “But what about the moneys ... The over-thime? ... I needs a Bra-thill-ian waxing, I gots ex-penthess.”

  Another said, “Keep the money, dude. Just pair me up with that cool chick over there behind Ray Tate. Where you from, honey?”

  And Djuna Brown said, “Paris, bongo. I be from beatnik life.”

  Ray Tate felt her light, fragrant hand on his shoulder and a soaring in his chest. But he made his face bland, twisted in his chair and looked at her deadpan.

  For a moment her heart dropped. He’d forgotten her, moved on.

  Then Comartin said, “Fuck, Picasso, that looks like the chick you sketched this morning.”

  Djuna Brown smiled.

  Chapter 8

  They stood with Brian Comartin and Martinique Frost in the parking lot. The youth officer used tissues and spit to get blood off her knuckles. She’d opened the skin pretty good. A broken bloody tooth fell from the cuff of her uniform tunic. They all looked down at it for a few moments.

  “Wow, that was ... Wow.” Comartin was in awe. “Ah, I’m Brian Comartin, half a traffic cop, maybe, but all poet. You, ah ... This is Ray Tate, and ...”

  Djuna Brown was a little in awe, too, of the stocky black cop. She’d seen violence but never delivered with such righteous determination. “Trooper Sergeant Brown? Djuna? Ah, with the State?” She spoke tentatively, as if she needed Marty Frost’s permission to be that.

  Marty Frost, blowing softly on her right-hand knuckles, shook hands all around, awkwardly using her left. “Pleased.” She looked pretty happy in the afterglow.

  Comartin said, “You, ah ... Wow.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her and kept glancing down at the bloody broken tooth.

  Ray Tate and Djuna Brown glanced at each other, amused. The fat policeman shuffled like a schoolboy. Marty Frost stared at him as though she’d never actually personally spoken to a stout white poet before. They were the about the same age and height, and about the same build, but Marty Frost had an easy muscular confidence in the way she stood. Even without the uniform, Ray Tate would have made her as a cop, would have recognized her as a charger even in silhouette. Her authority emanated.

  She waited, watching Comartin. She seemed amused, too.

  “You, ah, you like, like ... poetry?”

  When she spoke, her voice was flat as if dealing with a suspect in the night. “Po-et-tree.”

  “Ah, yeah. You know. Moon, June, spoon.”

  “I’m into rap. You into rap, Traffic man?”

  “Not so much. Yet?”

  “We’ll see. You married?”

  “No. Not anymore. Just to my poetry.”

  Marty Frost turned to Djuna Brown and shook her head. “Hustlers, the both of them. White boys looking to score off us dark sisters.”

  “Really?” Djuna Brown made a sad smile of perfect little white picket teeth. “I heard of guys like that. But I never actually, you know, met one before.” She looked up from under at Marty Frost. “We don’t have that kind of stuff up in Indian country.”

  While Marty Frost made a show of looking Comartin up and down, Ray Tate read her. In angry battle she’d looked heavier and had thickened fixtures infused with anger, her grey-tipped cornrows held flat by tiny intricate African-looking barrettes. But now, outside the task force briefing, deflated back to normal size and calm in the sunshine with the violence out of her system, she was pretty and relaxed. Ray Tate figured she was into her late forties, maybe fifty, and he computed where she was on the job twenty-five years earlier. Tough days, he thought, tough nights. Any female cop who came out of those days in one piece and stuck it out was a little tougher than he could handle. He felt bad for Brian Comartin. He was in for an interesting time. He was going to miss his traffic surveys.

  “Okay, Traffic man.” Marty Frost nodded. She knew she had him cold. “First date, we double date, okay? Nothing on the first date unless I say so. Don’t make me give you a beat down.”

  Brian Comartin looked insanely happy, as though a thorough beat down was all he’d ever wanted out of life. “I can get behind that.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.” She turned to Djuna Brown and smirked triumphantly. “Two weeks, I bet, two weeks and I got him wearing gold chains and puffy Converses.” She handed around her business cards and said to call her for dinner. “We’ll go out and eat some food and we’ll figure out how to get some justice for those poor ladies.” She nodded at the geometric Jank Center behind them. “Those pinheads couldn’t catch their ass.”

  “Oh, let’s do dinner at my place.” Djuna Brown made a bright smile. “I’m at the Whistler. Great dining room. All in on the tab. Dinner’s on the state. Ah, ask for Inspector Brown, okay? They got confused when I checked in. Seven o’clock? In the dining room?” She nodded to herself. “Marty, if you want, come by at six before dinner for a spa session. I’ll book it. The state owes you a spa day. No charge, because your state government appreciates the contribution of municipal law enforcement in the maintenance of a safe and civil society.”

  Martinique Frost nodded. “It’s about fucking time.”

  Djuna Brown knew there’d been no harlot with big boobs and no goggled Harley harpy in Ray Tate’s immediate past. His need was unfulfilled. He had no new tricks, no new moves. He was a ga-ga schoolboy. In the Taurus racing to the Whistler he nearly cracked up a couple of times, glancing at her as if she might not still be there. In the elevator, the moment the doors swished shut, he had his hands on her; in the hallway he urged her along. The moment they walked into the bordello of the suite he was all over her. His breathing was heavy. The rough chintz of the
loveseat rubbed on her but she hadn’t actually removed any clothing and it was a just matter of friction and noise. Her little bra ended up over a French lampshade, her Chicago panties around one ankle. She felt he wanted to devour her, and afterwards, as she lay on top of him, finally naked, she asked him about his habits.

  “Well,” he said languidly, “it’s been a while.... A couple of days, anyway. A chick in Records. Just physical. Nothing serious. You?”

  “A guy from the new sawmill. He couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I had to cuff him up, get the thing done.”

  “Fucking civilians.”

  “Fucking civilians. But, hey, when you got the need, you got it, right?” She looked down at him to make sure he knew she was kidding, that he was kidding. “Really? You have someone?”

  “You have a logger?” His hands were on her face, as if to confirm the brown little face was actually under the spiky hair and that she was this close to him.

  “No. No logger.”

  “Then, no, no chick in Records.”

  “Okay, okay, then.” She stretched luxuriously. “I could get used to this. Paris must be like this. You ever think about it, Paris, anymore? Running away?” She trailed her thumb over the bullet scar near his hip. “With me, I mean?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I do. At night, mostly, when I’m painting. But then, in the daytime …”

  “I want to see your new stuff, what you’ve been painting. After dinner tonight, let’s go to your place. You still in the apartment where she … Where you got shot?”

  “Yep. Gin in the fridge, water in the pipes.”

  “Gin and taps. I haven’t had one since the last time I had one with you. Well, except a triple-o when I checked in.” It had been a joke, a kind of inside joke between them back when they began seeing each other. One or both of them would have gin but neither ever had any mix, and if they did, they lied. A lime was heresy. They spent drunken soft nights sipping gin and tap water like fools and parsing their pensions for a lifetime in Paris. Djuna Brown thought of it as their beatnik dream.

  She put her head into his neck and muttered, “Beatnik,” and rolled over onto him.

  She mixed their drinks and they carried their guns and robes into the bathroom. While the tub filled she called the front desk and made an appointment for Martinique Frost, a guest of the state government, in the spa at six, and a reservation for four at seven o’clock in the dining room.

  Watching her standing naked, looking tiny and brown in front of his eyes, Ray Tate lay in the tub of bubbles and mentally engraved the moment for later at his easel, where he could conjure her presence, even in her absence. He had a mental catalogue of those gravure moments and they’d keep him painting and sketching for a lifetime in imaginary Paris. He was already becoming overwhelmed by the possibility of changing his life, of not being a cop but instead being something more internal.

  When the phone rang at seven o’clock, they were still in the tub enjoying long conversations about nothing amongst long periods of contented silence. There was nothing left they could do. It was as though the year apart had been a long blink. The bathroom was dim and the water, emptied and refilled hot a half-dozen times, was again tepid.

  She caught the phone on the fourth ring, standing at the wall phone, listening. The receptionist announced their guests were seated in the dining room. Djuna Brown, a dark shadow of form in a dark flat shadow, thanked the woman softly, although she wanted to scream abuse at her for bringing the real world of broken dead ladies into their Paris.

  Chapter 9

  Under the wide crystal chandelier in the dining room, Brian Comartin and Martinique Frost debated whether to order drinks or wait for Ray Tate and Djuna Brown. Comartin said if the state was picking up the tab, he was up for a bottle of Cliquot. He’d been researching wines, he told Marty Frost, in anticipation of moving to Europe, particularly Spain, living on his half of his pension and working on his poetry.

  “Get the champagne, poetry man,” Marty Frost told him. “They’re upstairs banging. I know it. They’re gonna be late or we might not see them at all, you ask me. You see how they looked at each other at the Jank? They’ve got history, those two. I bet they didn’t even get the car parked before they were all over each other.” Even though Ray Tate and Djuna Brown were only a half-dozen years younger than her and Comartin, she shook her head and smiled. “Kids.”

  She ran her eyes over his ill-fitting suit with amusement. She could tell he’d spent some time preparing: his hair was still damp, he was freshly shaven, and she smelled cologne. But his eye sockets still sagged, and he looked exhausted. Everybody on the job looked tired the last while. But at the same time he looked a little excited and shy and she felt a bit of it herself. No one had been interested in a long time.

  She wondered how to handle him. Before being sidelined to the youth squad, she’d been a Sector Four detective, periodically detached to Homicide on sex cases. She was in demand for tough jobs that needed a certain hand. Now she was a just another brick in the wall. Being a brick wasn’t bad, necessarily. It simply meant you were a nobody like all the other blue nobodies, competent maybe, but without the distinction or talent to stand out. You were interchangeable with all the other bricks, part of the average crowd, a blue grid of wallpaper. You’d never get ahead, you’d never fall behind. Not being noticed had become her status quo and she was confused about the shy interest from this fat white poet.

  Her investigative specialty was conversation, although she never got to exercise it much any longer on the surly youths that came through her office. She hated the term interrogation. It was oppressive. Even interviewing wasn’t what she did. Dialogue had been her specialty. For hours she could sit in a room with a murder suspect and chat the day away, never asking a direct relevant question, slowly bringing the conversation around to why they were really there. People found her likeable, and, before being handcuffed and led away, many seemed to want to hug her or shake her hand. She always closed. Now she tried to get children to explain why they were voids, why they murdered and beat and robbed and raped. But they had no vocal skills beyond yelling and threatening and whooping.

  Brian Comartin was intimidated, knowing he was a cop in name only. He could detail how many cars on an average Wednesday in winter went through the intersection of Erie Avenue and Stonetown Way in any direction and at what average speed. He could tell you the gradient of Harrison Hill. He knew the loony mayor had the lights through the downtown timed so motorists never caught a break, forced to stop at each intersection, idling and fuming, then gunning to the next corner, only to be caught by another red light. There were twenty-seven miles of bicycle lane across the city, used for ten months, maximum, by two hundred people, maximum. He wondered what he could talk about to a real cop over a glass of wine under a crystal chandelier.

  The sommelier came by and saved him, offering a thick wine list. Comartin, who had been to Champagne for two nights during a two-week vacation after his divorce, handed it back without opening it. “We’ll have Cliquot. Chill it a little longer than you want to. Flutes, please.”

  The sommelier bowed slightly and went away.

  “Flutes keep the bubbles longer, better bouquet,” Comartin said for the sake of something to say. “If you’d prefer, I can get you a coupe.”

  Marty Frost recognized a suspect filling silence with babbling bullshit and began having the first really good time she had, except for acing the headquarters hump that afternoon, in a year. She stared at him without blinking.

  “The coupe is the shallow glass.” Comartin rambled. “They say it was modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breast.”

  Marty Frost turned her head slightly to the left and raised an eyebrow.

  Comartin licked his lips. “The left breast.”

  Marty Frost smirked a little cynical smile to go with her raised eyebrow.

  “But, ah, it was actually invented before she was born.”

  Marty Frost watched him try to mine the arcane f
or a moment, then had pity on him. “Traffic man, slow down. You might got a shot.”

  Comartin felt a thrill. He had tales about how to uncork champagne, tales about the life and times of Widow Cliquot. His hold-back story of his adventures in the champagne world was when he beheaded a bottle with a long sabre, the only person on his tour to do so on the first attempt. It was a rare, almost accidental physical accomplishment and the wine company had given him a certificate.

  He decided to save that for when he knew her better, when he needed the edge.

  As the wine steward subtly twisted the cork from the champagne, Djuna Brown entered the dining room, alone. Her hair was spiked and glossy. She wore a pair of batik-brown harem trousers, a sleeveless batik-blue shirtwaist blouse, and her lucky red slippers with the little silver decorations. Turquoise good-fortune earrings that some children in Indian country had made to protect her from harm dangled from her earlobes. Her skin shone. Her gun hiked the loose batik blouse a little behind her right-hand hip, and she looked boneless, fluid. In anticipation of connecting with Ray Tate and possibly having to pry him off a city chippy she’d packed a short black skirt, a tight red silk blouse, a push-up bra, and high heels she’d picked up in Chicago. Where to keep her gun out of sight had been a problem, and she’d wished she’d looked into a garter holster. She was certain that her little silver automatic in a black garter when he ran his hand up there would put him through the roof. But clearly the skirt and push-up and garter hadn’t been needed. The tight red silk blouse action could be kept in reserve for when he flagged.

  She saw Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin staring at each other over the candles on the table under the sprawling chandelier. They looked like stiff kids on a date.

  As she slipped into a chair, she looked around and said, “Oh, Ray’s not here yet? Anybody seen him?” Her long cat’s eyes were wide and innocent.