Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  She looked scared and I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. “I … I’ll buzz him.” She picked up the phone and punched a button. “I’m sorry … I know … there’s somebody here about some space … I know … he’s got a tenant for the office on Spring Valley … . Yes. Yes, I will.” She put down the phone and pointed to the door behind her desk. “If you’ll go right through there, sir. First one on your left.”

  I said thanks and walked through the door. There was a narrow hallway and the first door on my left was open. I walked in. It was a larger and better furnished office than the one in the front. A middle-aged man sat behind an oak desk, white button-down shirt and tie undone, a stack of files in front of him. He stood when I entered and came around the desk, hand extended. “Howya doing? Tom Callahan. Nice to meet you. What can I do for you?”

  I shook his hand and said, “How are you, Tom? My name is Hank Oswald. My client is Charlie Wesson, and he needs to lease some space from you.”

  He gave me a blank stare, then a frown, then a blank stare again. “What?”

  “Miss January, out front, said you were in a meeting. I hope I’m not interrupting, but my client Charlie Wesson wants to lease some office space.”

  Confusion disappeared, replaced by hostility. “Who are you?”

  I didn’t reply, just stared at him. Silence was an old technique; don’t say anything, let the mark get nervous and fill the quietness. Tom Callahan must have seen that episode of Dragnet too, either that or he’d been negotiating real estate deals for too long to let a method like that get to him. Five seconds stretched to thirty and then a full minute. Finally he spoke. “There is a man named Charlie Wesson who works here. He didn’t show up today.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Who’d he work with?”

  “That really is none of your business. I’ve got things to do. I think you should leave.”

  “I was hired by his family to find him. It is my business.”

  Tom Callahan walked back to his desk and sat down. He began to shuffle papers. “Get out.”

  I didn’t move. “You’re pretty nonchalant about this. Do you have employees disappear all the time?”

  Callahan put down the file he was holding and looked at me. “Charlie Wesson was a druggie. I hired him to try and give him a chance at a normal life. But once a doper, always a doper. It’s a fucking disease, like epilepsy or herpes. Once you get it, you never get rid of it. Charlie fell off the wagon. He may be dead for all I know. That’s what you get when you deal with junkies.” His tone was angry and bitter, more so than the situation warranted, I thought.

  He seemed to read my mind. “My son went through rehab three times. Nothing worked. He died six months ago. Overdose. I thought maybe I could make a difference with Charlie.”

  I flipped a card on his desk and said, “If he turns back up, or you hear anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  At the front, the receptionist was back at the romance novel and sparking up another smoke. She ignored me. I stood in front of her desk and said, “Did you know Charlie Wesson?”

  She didn’t put down the book this time. “I’m not supposed to talk to you about that. You should leave now.”

  I left another card on her desk with the same request that I’d given her boss. Her eyes were pleading this time. “Really, for your own good, just leave.”

  Something was funny here. I couldn’t figure out how she had been told not to talk to me. There wasn’t time from when I left Callahan’s office and got to her for him to have called.

  I walked out into the heat of the afternoon sun. A single-engine Cessna sputtered in the rubbery-tasting air, heading across the horizon toward Addison Airport. Two men stood in the parking lot, leaning against the Mercedes. As I walked down the steps, they came forward, blocking my way to the truck. They were big, obviously strong and well built even though they were wearing loose-fitting clothes. One was white with a goatee, the other black and clean-shaven. The white guy had one hand in the pocket of his oversize jeans. His partner kept both hands hanging loose by his sides. They were professionals, hired muscle.

  The black one spoke first. “I hear you’re asking questions about Charlie Wesson.” He smiled as if enjoying the punch line of a joke. “That’s not a real smart thing to do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I kept my eyes on the white guy with his hand in his pocket but talked to the black one. They weren’t amateurs like the guy in the Camaro, they were the real thing. “Yeah, I’m asking around after Charlie. What’s it to you?”

  The black man smiled, displaying a set of perfect white teeth, movie star cuspids. He didn’t say anything, just held out the index finger of his right hand and pointed it heavenward. His partner grinned and moved a few feet to the side. He had a gold filling in his front tooth.

  “One time,” the black man said.

  I didn’t respond, figuring he would explain himself when he wanted to. Goatee took his hand out of his pocket and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. No guns so far.

  “You’ve got the look of a professional so I’ll give you this as a courtesy. One time only.” He waved his solitary finger at me. He spoke in clipped tones, without an accent. “Do not ask any more questions about Charlie Wesson. Do not make any more inquiries into his health or welfare. As far as you or any member of his family is concerned, he is fine.” He lowered his finger and clasped his hands in front of himself, parade rest. “Are we understanding each other, Mr. Oswald?”

  They knew my name so they must have been somewhere in Tom Callahan’s office, listening in on an intercom. Either that, or they’d placed a bug there and were outside eavesdropping. Neither of which was a particularly pleasing scenario. What had Charlie gotten himself into? I debated responses: be polite like he was, or surly. “Where is Charlie Wesson?” was the best I could come up with.

  Goatee started to flex his fists and the black man made a tsking sound. “I thought you were smarter than that. Did I not just say you were only going to be given one warning? Now my associate is going to have to explain the ramifications to you.” Goatee threw his cigarette down and started to come toward me. I could tell by the way he moved his feet and held his hands that he’d been in the military sometime in the last decade. Probably tried for some branch of the Special Forces and washed out. Maybe he’d stayed long enough to take the intro course in their particular brand of hand-to-hand fighting. Too bad for him I helped design the curriculum.

  He came in low and fast, feinting with his left and throwing a short knuckle jab with his right. I slapped his punch away and went lower, grabbing his right with my left and pulling him over my shoulder. My right arm looped under his leg and he fell on his back, behind me and to my left. One foot shot out and connected with the side of his head at the same time as I pulled my pistol out of the holster behind my hip. The black man and I were pointing nine-millimeters at each other.

  Standoff.

  I kept my gun at the ready and moved slowly in an arc, around the two men, toward my truck. Goatee lay on the asphalt, not moving. A trickle of blood seeped from his temple. He was mildly concussed, I didn’t put that much into it. His partner didn’t say anything, just tracked me with his gun as I moved.

  I was ten feet from my truck, walking backward now. “Is Charlie Wesson alive or dead?”

  He didn’t say anything. When my back was against the driver’s door, he holstered his gun and kneeled by his partner but kept his eyes on me.

  I got in the truck and drove off, pistol in my lap.

  I left the parking lot on Lindbergh as fast as possible and drove west on Belt Line, the opposite way from the tollway and home. I cut across two lanes of traffic and headed down a residential street. The area was bland, row after row of identical floor-planned, subdivided houses, circa 1970. No one was home yet in this corner of suburbia, so a tail would be easy to spot. It never hurts to be too careful, especially when you just kicked a mus
cle-bound gorilla in the head.

  I prided myself on keeping abreast of the latest personnel changes among the criminal element in North Texas. My line of work often depended on the knowledge, plus it was an excuse to hang out in a lot of sleazy bars. Neither of these thugs’ faces registered with me. Ernie might have an idea but I didn’t want to bother him. That left Delmar or Olson.

  It was Tuesday afternoon. Olson had dinner with his mother every Tuesday. He usually went over early to her house in Fort Worth, and worked on the odd jobs that had accumulated during the week. She fixed chicken casserole and fussed over him about not settling down and finding a nice girl. Tuesdays put Olson in a bad mood. All six foot six and two hundred and eighty pounds of him.

  I decided to call Delmar. He didn’t have a mother and his father was doing twenty to life in Huntsville for trying to whack a municipal judge in Lufkin. He was always in a bad mood but couldn’t do too much damage over the phone.

  He answered his cellular on the first ring. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Hank. I need some info.”

  I could hear movement and talking in the background. “This really isn’t a good time. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “The middle of something” could mean a lot of things with Delmar. I waited a moment but didn’t hear any gunfire or screaming. “Call me back when you’ve got a minute.”

  “Hang on.” More talking in the background, Delmar and someone with a German accent. I could hear Delmar’s voice: “Of course, Herr Muller. We shall talk in the morning. Auf Wiedersehen.” He came back on the line with me. “So tell me why the hell you are bothering me.”

  “Herr Muller?”

  “Yes. Herr Muller. He’s the German equivalent of the Duke of Earl or something. He’s got a matched set of prewar Purdeys, originally made for the British royal family. We’re in the middle of negotiating a price for them.”

  I noticed thunderclouds forming again. “What’s a Purdey?”

  “It’s the Rolls-Royce of shotguns, you fucking Philistine. Why are you calling me?”

  I chuckled to myself. Delmar specialized in exotic shotguns and custom rifles that usually cost more than a nice house in the suburbs. While I didn’t know much about either, I knew enough to enjoy playing dumb from time to time. It was fun to get Delmar riled up, especially at a distance. Olson dealt in machine guns, semiautomatic rifles, and pistols. I knew a lot about those.

  “I need some information. Two thugs. They were in a late-model Mercedes, gold stuff hanging everywhere and tinted windows. One black and one white. White guy has a goatee and a gold tooth. Both in their mid-thirties, six-foot plus, two-hundred-pounders. The white guy was military, no question. And they are definitely in the game, professionals. They tried to warn me off a case I’m investigating.”

  “What happened with the warning?”

  “The white guy got himself a concussion. The black guy stayed out of it, except to pull a pistol.”

  Delmar didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “What kind of pistol?”

  “I couldn’t tell.” I was out of the residential area with nobody tailing me. I pulled onto the LBJ Freeway, the inner loop of the city. Time to head home.

  “Think they were with Omar?” The cellular crackled in my ear as he spoke. Omar ran the largest gambling operation in the area, in addition to occasionally dabbling in other things like prostitution and drugs. He kept himself and his people close to home, though, in Arlington, one of the midcities between Dallas and Fort Worth.

  “I tried to make him work for this but couldn’t. He’s geographically undesirable. Plus this has to do with a real estate broker somehow.”

  We talked over various possibilities for a couple of minutes, assorted hoods and wiseguys, without finding a likely candidate. Delmar said he would make a couple of calls and get back to me. I drove to my neighborhood, anxious to be among the lowlifes and the relative safety of the narrow streets there, away from the chain restaurants and tract houses of the northern environs.

  I’d signaled to turn onto my street when I realized that the pantry at Casa Oswald lay bare. I sped up and headed for the nearest grocery, on Gaston Avenue. It was late afternoon and people thronged the aisles, a chattering blur of browns, yellows, and other earth tones. Their voices filled the air; mostly Spanish, followed by Vietnamese, then a slew of unidentifiable Central Asian dialects. The place smelled like a grocery store should, fruity and warm, the temperature of the air only slightly less warm than outside.

  I picked up a pair of bone-in chicken breasts, a bag of onions, some Asian greens for a salad, and a head of cauliflower. That seemed too healthy so I grabbed a twelve-pack of Coors.

  Back at home I put the chicken breasts in a casserole dish, drizzled them with olive oil, added salt, pepper, and a handful of rosemary from the bush that grew wild between my house and Mr. Martinez’s. There was a half bottle of decent Chardonnay in the refrigerator so I poured a couple of slugs in the bottom of the dish. A piece of foil over the top, and I popped dinner in the oven. The dog looked friendly, and I fed her.

  The chicken would take about an hour, so I changed into an old sleeveless sweatshirt and a pair of shorts and headed for the basement. My regimen is simple and I keep to it at least four times a week, religiously, unless I’m hungover or have something better to do. Fifteen minutes of skipping rope to warm up, followed by a half hour of work with the free weights. I ended my workout with some stretching exercises and a little time on the punching bag hanging from the rafters. On alternate days I run through the neighborhood for an hour. That’s the Hank Oswald Exercise Program. I ought to get my own video.

  I emerged from my home gym sweating and feeling virtuous. I drank a liter of water to rehydrate, then popped open a Coors to sip while I fixed the rest of my dinner. The aroma of roasted chicken and herbs wafted through the kitchen. I turned on the local news while I chopped cauliflower and prepared a salad. Authorities found a twelve-year-old girl, weighing fifty pounds, locked inside a closet in a double-wide trailer in Forney, a rural suburb to the east of Dallas. She was filthy, lying in feces and a pile of empty dog food cans, evidently her primary means of nourishment. The authorities also discovered the badly decomposed body of a prepubescent male under the trailer. It was thought to be her brother. The parents were members of a strange religious sect that worshiped the moon. They had a combined IQ of 150.

  I drank the rest of the beer and poured myself a glass of the Chardonnay.

  A radical environmental group staged a sit-in protest at the site of the Trinity Vista, a new development between North and South Dallas. The group of environmentalists said the land, a floodplain but soon to be reclaimed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, housed a rare species of lizard.

  I mixed some dressing for the salad: mustard with extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

  Police arrested a Dallas city councilman for drunken driving, his second time in as many months. A man with no legs sank a hole in one at a local golf course. The weather guy talked a long time about an unseasonable low pressure trough in the Gulf of Mexico. Expected temperatures to be higher than normal for the early part of the summer, certainly in the triple digits.

  I raised my glass in a toast to lizards, drunken city councilmen, and central air-conditioning. The chicken and cauliflower went on the next-to-last clean plate, the salad would do straight from the bowl. I pulled a bar stool up to the kitchen counter. Another glass of wine, a squeeze of lemon juice on the vegetables, and dinner was served, chez Hank. After eating, I cleaned the kitchen and then showered for my appointment with Nolan O’Connor, Ernie’s niece. I dressed for the evening: a clean pair of khakis, black rubber-soled shoes, and a navy silk Tommy Bahama shirt, untucked to hide my pistol. I strapped the usual assortment of weapons and private investigator paraphernalia to my body and went forth to meet the evening.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The woman stared at me when I said my name, a quick frown and raised eyebrow. Sometimes it’s n
ot easy being named Oswald, not in the city where Lee Harvey grabbed his infamy by the throat and choked it to death. I probably shouldn’t have introduced myself using my first name, Lee, but something about her and the place we were in made me irritable and belligerent.

  I tried again. “Just call me Hank.” I held out my hand. Hank was short for Henry. Lee Henry Oswald. The third. Thanks a lot, Dad.

  She shook it. “My name’s Janice. Didn’t you say your name was Lee Osw—”

  A waitress interrupted her. “What can I get you to drink?”

  Janice looked at me, then the waitress, then back at me. She finally ordered a Cosmopolitan and I got a Carta Blanca. She was pretty, slender with blond hair and green eyes that twinkled in the thin light. Thirty lay a couple of years down the road.

  “So, Hank, what brings you out tonight?” She earned points for not asking what I did for work or where I lived as her first question.

  We were in the bar at Enrico’s, the newest, hippest, place-of-the-moment for the young and pretty crowd. Enrico’s featured the latest trend in haute cuisine: Spanish-Asian fusion. A spring roll of shrimp paella for twenty-six ninety-five, washed down with a jasmine martini. The decor was raw brick, exposed wiring, and oddly spaced spotlights. You could see the whole place from where we sat. No sign of a woman with blue eyes and dusky skin, her hair in a ponytail.

  “No particular reason,” I said. “It’s been a long day. Thought I’d slip in and have a quick drink.” The waitress arrived with our order, and I paid her.

  Janice took a sip of her Cosmopolitan. “Yeah, me too. Just a quick drink. So what do you do for a living?”

  A direct girl, she was prequalifying me before she wasted any more time. I decided not to lie. “I’m a private investigator. What about you?”

  “I’m a-a-an, um—” She had trouble getting the words out. “I’m in advertising. Are you really a private investigator?”