Her eyes went skeptical. “That’s right, the cops are always looking for ways to help guys like Walt Jennings get out of a jam.”
“I told you, I’m a private cop. I don’t even care about Jennings so much, just someone who might be with him. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Lauren,” she said hesitantly.
“Okay, then, Lauren, here’s what I can tell you.” I took a pull from the mug. What can be better than coffee that’s sat and cooked all day on a hot plate? I set it aside. “The cops think Jennings killed a man last night—”
“I know that already.”
“—and then went into hiding because the weather’s been too bad to get out of town. Now, maybe he did it and maybe he didn’t; I don’t care. What I care about is another person who’s probably with him. That’s my job, finding the other person. I’ll leave Jennings to the cops. Okay?”
Lauren stuck out one hip and rested the edge of the round tray against it. “Yeah,” she said uninterestedly. “Well, look, he was in here last night and he was alone. That’s all I know.” She turned away.
“What time last night?”
When she turned again, her dark eyes were pleading. “C’mon, mister, you’re gonna get me in trouble. I’m supposed to be working—”
“Early? Late?”
She sighed heavily. “Early. I come on at eight and he was already here.”
“How long did he stay after you came on?”
The burly bartender had come from behind the bar and toward us with lumbering steps. Lauren threw him a glance over her shoulder. “That’s all I can say,” she whispered quickly and moved toward a booth a few feet farther on, wiping down the table with her damp rag. The boards under me shook as Bruno pounded past, grabbed Lauren just above her left elbow, and jerked her around, shoving his face into hers. He was trying to be quiet, but he didn’t have the temperament or the voice box for it. I missed the first couple of syllables but “keep your goddamn mouth shut” came through loud and clear.
“He’s not a cop,” she whispered back. “He asked about Jennings. I just told him he was here last night. That’s no secret, is it?”
“Stupid cunt,” he said, pushing her away as he spat the last word. He grabbed the rag from her violently. “Gimme that,” he growled, “and go upstairs. The Fat Lady’ll want to talk to you.”
A shadow crossed Lauren’s face, but she went away quickly enough. Probably glad to get away from the old bruiser. I watched her go toward the door that led upstairs. From my angle I couldn’t actually see the door—it was set in the narrow end of the outcropping that enclosed the staircase, facing the front of the room—but there was no place else for her to have gone but through it.
I stood, and the bartender was at my elbow. “What do you need, buddy?” he wondered in a voice that made it sound like he thought what I needed was an ice pick in my spine.
I matched his expressionless expression and made my voice go flat and rough. “Where’s she gone?” I said. Tough. Hard-boiled. That’s me. Someone who’s played fast and loose with Mafioso—Mafiosi?—and lived to tell about it. Small-time toughs like you don’t cut no ice with the likes of me, brother. So shove off. Put an egg in your shoe and—
“Nothing to do with you, buddy.” Bruno was obviously ignorant of my accomplishments.
“Doesn’t look like it to me. Looks to me like I was right in the middle of it.”
“Well, it’s between her and the boss now. Understand? So why don’t you just head on home or someplace.”
Coming from him, it sounded like a fine suggestion. I threw a dollar on the table and walked away.
But, of course, I took a detour as I came up even with the end of the bar. And, of course, he anticipated me.
When I thought back on it later I realized there had been a buzz among the Bottom Dollar’s few patrons, but it was Bruno’s quick and heavy footfalls on the floorboards that told me I wasn’t going to get through the stairway door before he was on me. Realizing this I began to turn, and was able to sidestep enough to avoid being flattened like a bug against the wall near the door. I had some of the wind knocked out of me, but Bruno had it worse, because he had expected to have me as a cushion between him and the wall when he smashed headlong into it. It shook him enough that I was able to dance away, out into the room. No way did I want to be confined to that corner, my back against the wall.
He turned heavily and stopped, half-crouched, arms bent away from his body, hands knotted into fists the size of telephones. His expression was still as vacant as the moon, but his face had gone pink from the exertion.
I didn’t want to get into a slugfest with him. Sometimes these big burly guys aren’t as tough as they seem—they never had to become tough, because their size alone always intimidated people—but old Bruno here looked like he was the genuine article. Or had been. He was older and fatter and slower now, and the effort of pushing himself rapidly across six feet of floor had set his chest to heaving, but you’d still want to keep him at arm’s length, or better.
Then he lunged for me, swinging his left like a sledge. I had seen it coming about twenty-four hours earlier, however, and was easily able to feint a duck under it, pulling back at the last instant. His right fist sailed through the air where I should have been, pulling him off-balance. Then I stepped back in. And made a very bad mistake.
I committed the unpardonable sin of assuming a fat man was a soft man, slammed my left into his belly with almost enough force to dent the frosting on a chocolate éclair, and realized with sick horror that Bruno wore his nice thick pad of hard fat over a nice thick pad of hard muscle. My punch had about as much effect as a baby’s kiss, and gave him time to regain his balance. Now he showed me how it should have been done, sending his left into my stomach so hard that my knees buckled and the picture went gray and fuzzy around the edges. By some miracle I got an arm up before his right crashed home. My left arm went numb from the shoulder down, but I didn’t mind that so much; it was supposed to have been my head. A roundhouse like that would surely have knocked me cold, and any blow strong enough to put you out carries the threat of at least some brain damage. This, in my book, is something to be avoided.
Luckily there was a table behind me, so I could lie down for a second or two and rest up. I heard glass shatter as the bottles that had been on the table ended up on the floor, to somebody’s evident amusement. I turned my head to one side and saw, as if through a piece of gauze, the drunken woman who had been with the two cowboys. She was still with them, in fact, and one of them had it in mind to help me to my feet but I didn’t want to get up yet. I started to tell him as much, but then Bruno was approaching rapidly again.
It was only instinct that caused me to raise one knee protectively as he hurtled down at me, but then a golden shaft of light cut through the fog closing in and illuminated a particle of reason.
I straightened my leg like a piston and let Bruno carry his momentum square into it. The heel of my boot sank into his gut where it ballooned over the small apron. I saw his mouth drop open and his face go the color of fresh plums just before the table went over and me with it.
There seemed to be a lot of beer on the floor, and I seemed to be lying in it. I turned over, got up on my hands and knees, got one foot on the floor under me, and paused while my stomach argued with my head over whether I should pass out or throw up. They couldn’t reach an accord, so I put my weight on the foot and stood, carefully. Nothing broken, as near as I could tell, except for some beer bottles, and I hadn’t even been cut by the pieces of brown glass around me. My left shoulder throbbed and my guts felt like someone had tried to rip them out through my navel, but I imagined I would survive. I straightened myself as best I could and looked around the room. My two cowboy friends were bent over Bruno, who lay sweating and groaning on the floor. The girlfriend had kept her seat, and was now locked into spasms of soundless laughter. I hoped she’d laugh herself sick. I guessed she had just enough beer in her to do it.
<
br /> No one was paying much attention to me, and the few who had been staring went back to their own business when I met their eyes. Don’t tread on me, boy. There’s more where that came from and I’ll be happy to show it to you just as soon as I’m off the critical list.
Trying not to lurch too badly, I covered the five or six feet to the door with the store-bought private sign nailed to it, tugged it open, and hauled myself up the stairs, hoping tonight was not the night the rickety handrail came away from the wall.
The stairway was long and narrow and steep; getting up it took some doing. But, oddly, when I reached the top I found I felt better. A little light-headed, along with all the other symptoms, but I no longer felt I was going to black out at any moment.
The old and bowed stairs ended at a three-foot-square landing with blank walls to the front and the right. To the left a narrow hallway went back the other direction, toward the front of the building. The hall was lighted by a single bare bulb, and broken by four closed doors along the wall opposite the staircase.
I looked back down the stairs. The door was shut, as I had left it. No way to secure it, however. If I’d had a wire coat hanger I could have looped it through the door handle and twisted it around a handrail brace, but somehow I had neglected to bring one along. Besides, Bruno didn’t strike me as the type who’d agonize long over whether or not to smash down a door.
I moved down the dusty hall runner as quickly but as quietly as I could, pausing to listen at the first door. Nothing. From behind the second door came the squeak of mattress springs moving in an unmistakable rhythm. The door was locked. I thought I had been quiet in trying the knob, but a male voice—the blond man from downstairs?—gasped the protest that he still had time.
The third door. Nothing. I paused again, expecting at any moment to hear a ruckus from below, the hammering of several sets of angry feet on the stairs. I had put myself in a bad spot, cornered myself. There appeared to be only one way out, and that was back down the stairs and through the valley of the shadow of death. Perhaps now was a good time to be thinking of potential escape routes. Perhaps one or more of these rooms had a window leading to the outside …
I was about to open the door to the third room when I heard it. A muted whack! followed by a low moan, then several more blows in quick succession and a louder, longer moan. I felt clammy sweat gather along my spine, and it seemed to take my legs a little while to get the idea that I wanted to go check it out.
The noise had come from behind the fourth door, the last one at the end of the hall. I put my ear against the wood panel, but could hear nothing but the murmur of voices and a quivering, snuffling sound.
When the next whack! came, it sounded like a rifle going off in a small room. I was through the door before I fully realized I had made the decision to enter.
The room was tiny and dingy and stuffy—right in line with what I had seen of the rest of the building. The floor was warped and beat-up, the walls were cracked and peeling, the ceiling was water-stained and buckling. There were two windows, I noted subconsciously; one at what was the front of the building, overlooking the street, the other on the wall opposite the door. Both were closed. A radiator under the second window puffed out an oppressive amount of heat and made quite a fuss about it.
Sweating in the heat, behind an ancient wooden desk planted in the middle of the room, sat a woman. A fat woman—monstrously fat. She looked up quickly as I flung open the door, and the hard, sharp eyes sunk deep in the folds of her fleshy face glinted angrily in the pale fluorescent light. Standing next to the desk was the girl, Lauren. She had her hands extended, palms up. The Fat Lady had her chair swiveled around toward the edge of the desk and had reached across to grab Lauren’s wrists in her flabby left hand. In her right she held a heavy steel ruler, which she was preparing to bring down once more across the girl’s outstretched palms.
Lauren’s head was back; she swayed unsteadily in the dim light from the desk lamp and a dull croaking moan escaped her parted lips. She was pale, and it wasn’t a trick of the bluish lighting: The Fat Lady’s face was flushed and shining.
“Who the fuck are you?” the Fat Lady demanded in a voice that had had too much cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey washed over it.
I ignored it, took two steps across the floor, grabbed the upraised ruler out of her hand and flung it backhanded across the room. I had sort of been aiming for the glass—it would have been a nice effect—but since the radiator produced a gratifying clang when the ruler collided with it, I was satisfied enough. I didn’t see the point of answering her question; my name would have meant nothing to her—I’m not Zorro or Captain America or anybody—and I would rather have shoved her out the window than talk to her. If I could have gotten her crammed through the window, that is. I treated her to a minute’s worth of a stare that was meant to be hot and contemptuous. Then I turned to the girl.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded dazedly.
The Fat Lady had let go her wrists; I now grabbed them and held her hands to the cool light. The skin was unbroken, but the palms were red and swollen. Lauren moaned again.
“Go run some cold water over them,” I said. “Then go home.” She looked at the Fat Lady and the great loathsome slug nodded. The girl moved unsteadily toward the door.
“Wait a minute,” the Fat Lady rasped when Lauren reached for the knob. Lauren stopped and looked back toward the desk. The Fat Lady angled her several chins toward the opposite corner. “Pick it up.”
Lauren glanced at me and then turned her eyes toward the floor, crossed the room, bent, found the ruler, and brought it to the desk.
“All right,” the Fat Lady said when the girl had set the ruler in front of her. “Get out of here.”
When the door clicked shut the Fat Lady turned on me. “Where do you get off busting into people’s offices an——”
“Shut up,” I said. “Let’s get some light in here.” I turned toward the wall switch near the door, illuminated the bulb in the overhead bowl, and turned back to the Fat Lady. I liked her better with the lights out, because then I could only imagine what a disgusting creature she was. Her hair was gray and wild and oily. Her make-up consisted of a lopsided smear of red across a mouth that looked like it belonged on a Muppet. The exposed skin of her face and forearms was rough and flabby, as if it had been stretched out of shape. She was not merely fat, she was bloated. Next to her, Nero Wolfe would look like the Thin Man—and I don’t mean William Powell.
Equally ugly was the black automatic resting on some papers on the desktop, not three inches from her right hand. Maybe it had been there all along, maybe she had silently removed it from a drawer when I turned away to put on the lights. It was all academic now.
“Sit down,” the Fat Lady suggested. It sounded like a fine idea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Give the devil her due: She didn’t wave the thing around or point it at me or threaten me with it in any way. She didn’t touch it, or so much as allude to its presence. It could have been a paperweight for all the attention she called to it. But it wasn’t.
I sat on a couch—the sprung and tattered centerpiece of an old sectional—shoved against the wall opposite her desk and started to put my right ankle on my left knee, casual-like. It made my poor, abused gut ache. So I started to spread my arms across the back of the couch, but that hurt worse. I settled for sitting forward, hands planted on knees.
The Fat Lady opened the desk’s center drawer, pulled out a pack of Pall Malls, and slammed it against the desktop half a dozen times to tamp down the tobacco. Then she yanked the plastic tab around the top of the wrapper, ripped open the foil, and liberated a cigarette, which she stuck in a corner of her maw while she rummaged in the drawer for a match. She found a tattered folder, lighted the cigarette, and threw the spent match on the floor.
“An old joint like this could go up in a minute,” I said.
She shrugged, and the folds of flab on her jowls rolled. �
�I got insurance.” She stood up—the effect was negligible, since she wasn’t much taller standing than sitting—and waddled around the side of the desk. She wore a shapeless black shroud that spread tight across her chest, stomach, and backside. Her white legs stuck out below the hem of the dress; they too were shapeless—rather, they were the shape of an umbrella stand. The legs ran straight from the knees into plain black unheeled shoes, the tops of which cut into the flesh where her ankles should have been.
The Fat Lady propped herself against the edge of the desk, resting her folded arms against the colossal shelf of her bosom. She smiled down at me. At least I think it was a smile; it could have been her dinner making a return engagement. “Let’s start this again,” she said in what she probably thought was a gentle voice.
Before she could continue there was a racket in the hallway outside. Her face took on a sour look that wasn’t too far removed from the smile. The door burst open and in came Bruno, looking a little ashen, I noted smugly. Other than that, he wore his only expression: none. He looked at the Fat Lady standing there smoking her cigarette, looked at me sitting there watching her, looked back at the Fat Lady. “Thought you might need help,” he said tonelessly.
“Oh yeah? What for? To protect my virtue?” She laughed sarcastically and told him to get out. He got. “Stumblebum,” the Fat Lady said, but I noticed she waited until his footsteps had gone far down the hall before she said it.
“I wouldn’t want to go against him too often,” I said measuredly. “He’s slow and he doesn’t have much wind, but if he connects it’s lights out.”
She eyed me appraisingly. “He used to be pretty good,” she said after a long drag on the gasper. “Never a contender or anything, but he was okay.”
Moving Targets Page 12
