Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

  “We like to check out all the angles. Curves, too. But legs are just a hobby and I’m working now. I really just wanted to talk. Let’s talk about cars first.”

  “Cars?” She laughed brassily. “Sure. Then do you want to talk about girls, or sports?”

  “Or about girls who are sports? No, cars is cool. Let’s start with mine.”

  Her mouth remained twisted mockingly, but her eyes were serious and her voice level. “All right. Fine. Tell me about your car.”

  “It’s a ten-year-old red Chevy Impala badly in need of a new lower ball joint. As of today it also needs a paint job and a new windshield, because someone took an intense dislike to it in a parking lot this afternoon.” I watched her face while I gave her the capsule review. Her expression changed not at all, except perhaps for the smile growing fixed as she grew bored with my rendition.

  “That’s too bad,” she said when I wound down. “Vandals are all over, I guess.”

  “This wasn’t vandals. Not in the usual sense. Someone was sending me a message.”

  She took a final drag on the cigarette and smashed it to death in an amber ashtray she had balanced on the chair’s threadbare arm. The ashtray had pale lettering in the bottom but I couldn’t read it from that angle. When she was sure the cigarette was a goner, Christina said, “What, you think I did it?”

  “I confess the thought crossed my mind—”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she said blisteringly. “On the way down to the police station I asked the cops to stop by your place so I could mess up your wheels a little. The white-haired guy even pried the lid off the paint for me.”

  “—but I quickly gave it up. The time-frame was all wrong. And I couldn’t figure out what your motivation would be.”

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  “But Jennings, that’s another story.”

  “Walt?” she spat. “You’re crazy. What’d he do a thing like that for?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m scaring him. The detective said modestly. Maybe I’m getting too close for comfort. His comfort.”

  She made a spitting, puffing kind of laugh. “Close to what?”

  “To him. The way the cops figure it, the weather all around us was and is too crummy for travel. That means Jennings and the Castelar girl are probably around here somewhere. I’ve been trying to figure out where somewhere is.”

  “And you figure you’re getting warm, so Walt trashed your car.”

  “That’s about the strength of it.”

  “Why didn’t he mess up you? I mean, he already killed a guy; what’s he got to lose?”

  “Not enough time. From what I gather, it took forever and a weekend for him to work up to killing Castelar, and look what Castelar did to him. The way I look at it, I’m safe from physical injury for the next four or five years.” I said it breezily, but she had a point.

  “Well, maybe,” she said dubiously. “That’s the sort of stunt that Walt used to pull—chicken stuff, kinda, like thumbing your nose at someone when they’re not looking. If someone’d jump his space in a parking lot—you know?—Walt’d never confront him, but when we’d go by the other guy’s car he’d put a long gash in the paint with his keys. But that was before. I don’t think he’d risk getting caught doing bullshit stuff like that now. If he thought you were breathing down his neck, he’d maybe come out and make sure you knocked it off, but he wouldn’t risk it just to fuck up your car.” As she spoke she shook her head with conviction. “Nah, if he’s hid good, he’s going to make sure he stays hid.”

  “Hid where, do you think?”

  Christina leaned forward to shake another cigarette from the red pack on the low table. I didn’t get to see any cleavage because the front of the dress reached all the way to her throat, so I had to settle for the legs, which were still there. She stuck the cigarette between her lips and said, “I thought I already told you that. The cops, too.”

  “Yes, you mentioned a couple of bars.”

  “Yeah?” she said expectantly.

  “Well, I’d like some details, please.”

  “I don’t have any details. I told you guys everything I know. The Cattleman and the Bottom Dollar; those are two of the places I heard him talk about once or twice. The only two I can remember.”

  “All right—but he must go someplace besides bars.”

  “If he isn’t in a bar, he’s with a girl,” Christina said, and her eyes were green and direct. “If he isn’t with a girl, he’s here with me.” I waited for her to add “A woman,” but she spared me that.

  I said, “That doesn’t leave him much time for a job.”

  “He doesn’t get much work in the winter. Since he lost the farm, he sort of works wherever and whenever he can. Construction, farm, yard—stockyard, I mean.”

  I said I knew and asked where he went when he was with other women. Not very delicately put, I know, but since Christina didn’t seem much concerned about it why should I have been?

  “How should I know? I never asked him. I figured they went to the girl’s place or they got a room somewhere. They could do it in the back of the pickup, for all I care.”

  “The modern couple, eh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, Mama doesn’t mind Daddy’s girlfriends and Dad doesn’t mind Mom’s boyfriends. Very democratic.”

  The eyes went cagey on me. “What makes you think I’ve got a boyfriend?”

  I widened my eyes. “A girlfriend, then? We’re more modern than I thought!”

  She spat smoke at me. “You have a dirty mind.”

  “ ‘Suspicious’ is the word. You don’t get all dolled up like that to do the laundry, do you?” She smiled perfunctorily. “I didn’t think so. Is he anyone I know?”

  Her mouth opened so as to show only the lower teeth, the way the women on “Dallas” do when they’re trying to look sexy, and her topmost leg dangled languidly. “He? Maybe you’re right, maybe it is a girl. Would that turn you on?”

  “I don’t know; maybe I should stick around and see.”

  She waved the cigarette expansively. “Have a chair. Have a drink. Stay as long as you like.”

  Then the business with the window shade had been to signal someone to stay away, and I could stick around and let him—or, let’s be liberal, her—do drive-bys until dawn. But what would be the gain? I pushed away from the door and straightened up. “No, thanks. I guess I’m getting conservative in my old age.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She made no move toward rising.

  I turned and put my hand on the doorknob, then stopped. “Just one thing,” I said. “How’d you know I was private?”

  Christina smirked. “What’s the matter, don’t’cha like anyone else doing detective work? Well, for one thing, I saw that car of yours. That’s no cop car. So I asked those other two and they told me.”

  “The direct approach,” I said. “I’ll have to try that one sometime.” I dallied at the door a moment. It didn’t look like Christina was going to really come on to me—obviously no devotee of private-eye novels, she, or she’d have known what was expected of her—so I thanked her for the loan of the hall and left.

  I sat out in the car for thirty minutes, burning gas, running the heater, listening to the radio, watching the stars in the clear indigo sky. I was parked half a block down and across the street from the Jennings place, and I kept my headlights off and my foot away from the brake pedal while I studied the house in my outside driving mirror. The roller shade had come down almost immediately after I left. The living room curtains parted a couple of times as Christina peered out into the inky night, but no one showed. One car, a banged-up Malibu wagon, drifted lazily down the street, but not so lazily that you got the idea the driver was checking things out. Eventually the car vanished into the night, never to return.

  Finally I got bored and cramped, and the relentless output of the car heater was putting me to sleep. Whomever Christina had been expecting, whomever she had trie
d to warn off didn’t seem likely to happen by in my lifetime. And it probably didn’t have anything to do with my business anyhow. It’s ridiculous to believe that the only people who like to keep their private life private are people who have something to hide. Me, I get a big charge about keeping trivia mysterious. It drives my friends crazy.

  I cracked open a window, put on the headlights, popped the car into gear, and slid off into the night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They were not the sort of places you’d take a date after the movies. They were dingy and cramped, hot and smoky and noisy, filled with hard, emaciated, sideburned cowboys in checked shirts with fake-pearl snaps on the pockets; with hard, garish, bewigged women crammed into blue jeans a size too small; with hard, unsmiling, big-bellied bartenders unversed in the art of crafting exotic drinks but able to expel unruly drunks the way you’d flick away a housefly, and after you’ve visited the first two or three, the thrill begins to get a little frayed around the edges.

  I had gotten used to being stared at. It was understandable. After all, I wasn’t up to the dress code. I wasn’t wearing—I didn’t even own—cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and one of those Western-cut fur-trimmed winter coats like McCloud always wore. I didn’t have a wallet chained to my belt. I didn’t walk like I had a bad case of jock itch. Worst of all, I didn’t have a familiar face, and while these were neighborhood bars, it was not in the “Howdy, neighbor” sense, but rather in the “You’re not from the neighborhood” sense. Strangers are a strange sight there. “Cheers” it ain’t.

  Consequently, the responses I got in the first three I visited—the Cattleman, which Christina had mentioned, plus the Broken Bow and the Crow Bar, which were practically next door and seemed to be of the same ilk—ranged from dead silence to know-nothingness to unmasked hostility. Oh, a few people had been willing to talk; you’ll always find a couple of talkers, even if they’re inviting you to go to hell with every other sentence. But no one really had anything to say. Some figured Jennings had done it, some figured the cops had it in for him. Some said Jennings had been right there in the bar last night, some said he hadn’t been around in weeks. Some wanted to be bought a drink before they’d talk, and I soon discovered that that wasn’t as economical as it seemed. Cash you can grab back if they bullshit you; you can’t get beer back into the bottle.

  There was no reason to expect the reception or the results to be any better in any of the other joints lining the streets, but sometimes you just go through the motions.

  So I went through four cowboy bars in something less than three hours, starting with the Cattleman and working my way through the neighborhood, and by eleven I was pushing open the painted-over glass door of the other name Christina had given me, the Bottom Dollar.

  It was a long, narrow, high-ceilinged place with all the charm and personality of a monk’s cell, and not much better populated. Perhaps a dozen people, I guessed as I sized up the room. The building had presumably seen better days, but they were far beyond living memory now. The hardwood floor was badly scarred, its finish worn almost completely away. The wainscoting was scuffed and warped, and the wallpaper above it was faded and torn, discolored by decades’ worth of cigarette smoke, stained by the dried remains of airborne liquor.

  To the right of the room as you entered was the bar. It too was real wood, and it too had been badly abused. The foot-and elbow-rails may have been brass in a previous life; now they seemed to have transmogrified into some new and unknown metal roughly the color of strong tea. Behind the bar was a yellowed mirror, one of those moving-picture clocks advertising Hamm’s beer, and an impressive array of liquor bottles. The bottles’ tax stamps were still intact. I’d’ve bet it had been absolute ages since anyone in the Bottom Dollar had ordered a daiquiri or a Mai Tai or a Tequila Sunrise or anything sexier than a boilermaker. I toyed with the idea of breaking the monotony, but the bartender didn’t look like the type who’d know how to make a really good King Alphonse. Or who’d like to learn.

  He went well with the bar, though, because he had seen some rough stuff too. He was a short guy, shorter than me, but broad enough for two. He had very short hair the color of metal filings and a shapeless nose that had been broken—hell, smashed—more than once and a lined, stony face. His little finger (he had only one) was as big as a thumb. His thumbs were as broad as shovel handles. His hands—okay, you get the idea. Once upon a time he had probably been built like a chopping wedge; now he was well into his fifties and the beer and whiskies had caught up with him, settling in around his gut, bulging over the top of his grimy apron. A Bruno if there ever was one, I told myself as I wandered over to the near corner of the bar.

  I leaned against it and watched him at the farther end engaged in quiet discussion with a younger man. The younger man had greasy blond hair and a prominent Adam’s apple and something hidden under the hand he had cupped on the bar. Bruno’s hands lay placidly on either side of the other man’s. But for only a few seconds. Then Bruno’s hand moved as the other man pulled his toward himself and the bartender’s hand ended up where the other’s had been, covering whatever the customer had been concealing. A pretty fair piece of legerdemain, it was, with neither of the men ever looking anyplace but in the other’s face during the exchange. Then the younger man left the bar and approached a door set in an outcropping of the wall that ran behind the bar. The door was marked private but that didn’t bother our hero. He pulled it open and gave me a glimpse of narrow wooden stairs leading up. Then the door was closed and Bruno, or whatever his name was, was moving down toward me. His left hand now in his pocket, I noticed.

  He looked at me, saying nothing. I opened my wallet. He looked down at it, moving only his eyes, then back at me.

  “Yeah?” he said. Impressed as hell. They always are.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Yeah?” he reiterated. He went back up the bar, toward a pair of upright rails between which stood a girl with an empty round tray. She said something to him and he grabbed three longnecks from under the bar, one-handed, and pried the caps from them with easy, economical grace. He used a bottle opener, but he probably wouldn’t have had to. The girl left with her tray, but Bruno stayed where he was, leaning against the back counter, arms folded, studiously scrutinizing the brittle paper on the wall ten feet across from him.

  All right.

  I pushed off and moved to the back of the room, eventually coming to a vacant four-top from which I could see the whole place. The table was plastic on a single wobbly support; the chairs were torn vinyl and pitted chrome. I selected the one that seemed most likely to stand the strain and sat and studied the waitress as she flirted with a couple of cowboys who were with a very drunk woman whose platinum hair was piled nine inches on top of her head. One of the men—the one who had his hand high on the drunk woman’s thigh—said something to the waitress, who looked surprised, laughed, and batted him lightly on the shoulder before taking the empties and moving away. The other cowboy made a halfhearted grab at her as she walked by, but she slapped his hand away playfully and sidestepped out of his reach with practiced skill.

  Then she was at my table, the smile still in place, the giggle still rising up in her throat when she asked what it’d be.

  “Coffee.” I might have said milk from the look she gave me, but she shrugged and began to head back to the bar. “Just a second,” I added, and she turned back to me expectantly. “Old Walt Jennings been in here lately?”

  The smile stayed, but it changed somehow, became less genuine. One dark brow inched away from her eye. “I don’t have time to talk,” she said. “I’m working now.”

  “I won’t keep you. I just owe Walt some money is all, and I been trying to find him so’s I can pay it back. You know old Walt, don’t you?” The spaghetti-Western speech pattern came naturally after the first couple of bars.

  She studied me for a minute, her expression unchanging. She was a pretty girl—pretty, not gorgeous—twenty-three, twenty-fiv
e, with long wavy dark hair and looks that may have been Greek. She wore a Western shirt with the topmost buttons undone, well-worn brown cords, and cowboy boots. Not the sawed-off Dale Evans type, but full-fledged boots, elaborately tooled, reaching almost to her knees. The legs of the cords were stuffed into the tops.

  “Sure I know him,” she said at last. “He’s a regular.”

  I grinned. “Up or down?”

  Her smile remained intact and her tongue came to join it, running quickly along the cutting edge of her small teeth. “Maybe both,” she said, and the giggle bubbled up on the end of it before she turned again and left. That didn’t tell me what was going down on the second floor. Girls or a game, I figured. Maybe both.

  She and Bruno were exchanging words. He looked over at me once, caught me looking at them, and quickly turned his attention back to the wallpaper. Maybe he was thinking of redecorating. The girl came back with a heavy white, or once-white, mug centered in her cork-lined tray. The smile was gone, replaced by a tight, troubled scowl, and she didn’t meet my eyes as she set the coffee in front of me. I grabbed her wrist lightly and she froze.

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “No problem, if you let go of me right now.” Her voice was even, but with a nervous underpinning.

  I didn’t budge. “Look, I don’t want to create any heat for you. As the bartender probably told you, I’m a private investigator. I’m trying to get a line on Walt Jennings.”

  She yanked her wrist away. “You didn’t expect to find him in here downing beers when every cop in town’s looking for him, did you,” she said acidly.

  “I don’t know that I expect to find him at all. Mainly I hope to find someone who knows him well enough to tell me where he might have holed up.”

  She looked at me. “No one around here’s going to tell you that, mister. Even if they knew. You understand? That’s not how they’re put together.”

  “All right. Tell me this: When was the last time Jennings was in here? Who knows,” I added quickly; “you might help fix an alibi for him.” That not-quite-hidden gun at the Jennings place had been bothering me more and more all evening. My thoughts were still random and unfocused enough that I was reluctant to come right out and say the word, but I was thinking of something along the lines of what you’d put around a picture of the wife and kids.