“He’s bluffing,” Kirby decided while this went on. “I never saw any gun except mine.”
The hired hands each took a tentative step toward me. I stepped back against the wall.
And then I did a really stupid thing.
I shot a big hole in the pocket of my arctic parka.
Dramatic, yes, but dumb. I should have had the gun out and ready long before I needed it. I needed it now, obviously, but I didn’t particularly want the hammer to catch on a corner of the pocket, as it very well might have if I’d tried yanking it out suddenly. So … good-bye, parka.
Still, it was almost worth it. Everybody froze in place and Kirby paled visibly. I glanced down at the torn and burned corner of my coat, at the jagged hole in the opposite wall near the baseboard, at the three other men in the room.
“Put ’em up,” I drawled. Always wanted to say that.
They put ’em up, and I herded the two newcomers over behind the desk, next to Kirby—after belatedly withdrawing the revolver from its pocket. The coat was already ruined, of course, but I’m not terribly proficient with my left hand—my right was still too numb to be of much use—and I didn’t need the extra encumbrance now that the odds had changed. I wanted more freedom to maneuver my way out of there. Things were fairly even at the moment, thanks to my smoking gun, but they had the home-court advantage and it looked like the folks on the payroll were returning from lunch. The private-eye code forbade me from just rabbiting out of there, which is what I felt like doing, and required at least a mildly stylish exit. Certainly something a little more noteworthy than my departure from the Fat Lady’s joint last night had been.
So I smiled benevolently at the assembly. “Winken, Blinken, and Nod,” I said, largely because I thought it sounded like something the Saint would say. “It’s good to have you all together, cousins, because then I’ll have to say this only once: Leave me alone. Do you copy? Leave. Me. Alone. Stay out of my way, stay out of my hair, stay off my tail. Or the next time I come calling, Frank, it’s not your wall I’ll be putting a bullet through. Okay? And just so there’s no misunderstanding—your competitors aren’t the only ones who have big friends. Capisce?” That last part was pure malarkey, of course, but what did Kirby know? He’d thought I was bluffing about the gun.
I trailed my eyes from one face to the next. Cool, that’s me. Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Elvis Presley—they didn’t know from nothing, coolwise, compared to noble, heroic, and positively subzero moi.
I picked up my hat and arranged it precisely on my head. I slid out the door like the Shadow, closed it slowly, and then ran like mad through the reception area and out the door to the street. But coolly, of course. There was no sign of pursuit, no sign of anything, as I hurried up the block and across the street to my waiting car, jumped in, fired her up, and fishtailed away from the curb.
Geez, maybe they bought the cockamamie story.
I tooled around enough to convince myself that I hadn’t picked up a tail, then headed on home. Jen would be there—presumably—and in case I hadn’t made as big an impression as I hoped on the Greater Omaha Vending and Amusements Corporation, I thought it might be better for her to be elsewhere.
I needn’t have worried. When I came through the front door, the first thing I saw were two suitcases in the middle of the room. And they weren’t mine.
There’s no point in going into a lot of detail. It was as I had predicted. No, not predicted: known. We’d played this scene so many times before that it was now a bit like “predicting” the ending of Casablanca or Gone With the Wind or any other movie you’ve seen eighteen hundred times.
In our little drama, only Jen’s destination changed. This time it was Los Angeles. I thought she’d had “done” LA just a year or two earlier, but I abstained from commenting. At this juncture there was no point in sparking an argument. Everything that could be said had been said, everything that could be regretted had been regretted, every feeling that could be hurt had been hurt. We were left with no anger, no recriminations; only a kind of muted, stupefied sorrow.
She was flying out in a couple of hours with a friend of hers from college, a girlfriend.
Oh.
If I wanted to come with her I was more than welcome.
If she wanted to stay here with me she’d be more than welcome.
There was nothing for her here.
There was nothing for me there.
And so on.
I took off my ruined parka and balled it up and threw it into the uncomfortable armchair, then I perched on the back of the couch and watched her as she moved around the cramped, tiny apartment, gathering up the odds and ends she had missed, cramming them into this or that corner of this or that suitcase, inevitably having to sit on them in order to close and lock them.
Damn it, she was beautiful. And she was here, I could reach out and stroke her hair, her back, her breasts, and she would respond. But in a few minutes a hack would be laying on his horn outside, and when that happened it would be as if Jen and I were separated by the Iron Curtain, as if we lived on different planets, as if we had each existed at different points in history.
A car horn sounded downstairs.
Jen had already pulled on her tall leather boots and stowed her shoes in a gigantic shoulder bag. Now she pulled on her long coat and draped her scarf loosely around its collar, shouldered the bag and her purse, and lifted the two small cases in each hand. I didn’t offer to help.
She looked at me and I looked at her, and neither of us spoke. It had all been said. Eventually the taxi brayed again and Jen smiled wanly, snuffled, and turned toward the door.
I moved over to the sliding glass doors and looked down one story to the street. The driver helped her load her bags into the trunk. Then she got into the back seat and he got into the front seat and they drove up the Decatur Street hill.
The taxi was an orange Happy Cab. How’s that for irony?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I lay on the couch and looked out the glass at a gray flannel sky that couldn’t quite work up the enthusiasm to snow. I could relate. Slowly the sky grew grayer and grayer, beginning the color of dust and deepening to ashes and finally charcoal. Ultimately it turned black. That was fine with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
So I allowed myself a good wallow in self-sympathy, alternately excoriating myself for being a total washout at everything and damning Jennifer for being such an unstable little airhead. I lacked the strength and the will to peel myself off the sofa until nearly six. I did, at one point, reach over and grab my parka to use as a blanket when the room grew chilly, and that maneuver depleted what small reserve of energy I had had. I mightn’t have gotten up even then, but someone was rapping on my storm door. I could have pretended I wasn’t home. I felt like I wasn’t home, or anywhere, for that matter. But it was probably just the papergirl, and even a good-for-nothing loser like me hates to make a kid drag herself out a second time in the cold and dark.
I forced myself up off my back, my sore, cold muscles cooperating not at all, let the coat slide to the floor, and staggered toward the incessant rapping. I hit the wall switch next to the door and squinted against the floor lamp that came on. I pulled open the wooden door.
It wasn’t the paper carrier, unless the old one had sold her route. It was my former sparring partner, Bruno, wearing an old and much-abused overcoat, a black watch cap pulled down over his ears, and, as usual, no expression.
I wondered mildly if he had come for a rematch, to even the score. I didn’t much give a damn if he had.
He opened the aluminum door and poked his head into the room, glancing around impassively. Finally his eyes settled on me. “She wants to see you.”
“Who?” I said stupidly.
Bruno closed his eyes momentarily. It was as near as I had seen him come to displaying an expression. “The Fat Lady,” he said patiently. “At the bar. Midnight.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said, turning for my coat. “Le
t’s go now.”
His arm came through the opening in the doorway and his hand closed around my bicep and tightened like a blood-pressure cuff, the glove’s empty little finger daintily extended. “Midnight,” he reiterated. “At the bar.”
Bruno’s arrival energized me materially. The blood again circulated through my brain. The muscles, albeit still sore and stiff, seemed game. This could be a trick, I thought, a trap. But to what end? I had been effectively trapped last night, and she had let me waltz out of the dive. I recalled what Banner had said about women like the Fat Lady, that they did what they did only to make a buck or save their butt. Which would this be? I wondered.
“Midnight,” I told Bruno. “At the bar.”
He nodded solidly, once, closed the storm door, and plodded along the concrete walkway to the stairs. The whole building seemed to vibrate under his footsteps.
I closed the wooden inner door, set the deadbolt, and kicked into place the towel that allegedly blocked the draft from the threshold. What was the old girl’s game? You get into the habit of seeking out the ulterior motive. Sometimes there isn’t one. But not so often that you lose the habit. I wondered why, less than twenty-four hours after inviting me to stay the hell out of her gin mill, the Fat Lady was now inviting me back. What was in it for her—or what did she think was? Above all, what in hell did it have to do with anything?
Well, I could lean against the door and pose questions to myself all night; the more profitable course was to go and see what the Great One had to say for herself. That gave me—I glanced at my wristwatch—not quite six hours to bump off. Terrific. Maybe I’d go stick my head in the oven for a while. It was an electric oven, so the gesture would be largely symbolic, but it was indicative of the way I felt.
The oven hadn’t been cleaned in ages, however, so I went and stuck my head under the shower instead. Hot water and steam washed away some, not all, of the leaden feeling I’d had behind my eyes all day, of the thick cottoniness of my tongue. I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. I didn’t think I was. Maybe it was the goofy weather—highs and lows and warm fronts and cold fronts and all that other stuff. I’ve never paid much attention to such things, I couldn’t tell you what happens when the barometer goes which direction, but I’m nevertheless a mild believer in their having an effect on our health and emotions. On the other hand, it could just be a good excuse for what is commonly referred to as laziness.
After a time, when the room became so charged with steam that breathing was difficult, I shut off the water and stepped out of the tub. As I toweled off, I noticed that Jen had forgotten a small vial of cologne on the toilet tank. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled. I didn’t know the name of it, but it was Jen, all right.
I let the bottle drop from my fingers into the wicker basket next to the sink.
The shower had helped, but not enough. I thought of making a pot of coffee, but it seemed like too much work. I opened a can of Falstaff and stood with it in my hand and my head in the icebox, trying to come up with a palatable-sounding menu and not having much luck. I checked out a couple of plastic containers and made a little game of guessing at what the contents had originally been. That was good for ten minutes. I flipped through the TV listings from last Sunday’s paper. There was a movie on Channel 7, but it was described as “heartwarming,” and two things I steadfastly avoid are “heartwarming” drama and “outrageous” comedy. I thought about going over to the Castelars’—I supposed I was still on bodyguard duty—but I didn’t feel like it. I went back to my bedroom/office, folded up the convertible bed, and sat at my desk, staring at the typewriter like I’d never seen one before. Finally I decided that I didn’t care much for the company I was keeping tonight and that I should do something about it.
The Omaha directory did not list an overwhelming number of Koosje Van der Beeks—one, to be specific—so I was pretty sure I had the right one. I copied the number onto a small scratch pad near the phone, a strange habit that I can’t seem to break, then pulled another beer from the refrigerator.
It seemed distasteful to be calling one woman because I missed another. Dishonest, somehow. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to call Koosje in any case, but the timing was unfortunate. I wouldn’t want her to think I turned to her only because I couldn’t do any better. I wouldn’t want me to think that either …
Shit, we had enough unspecified guilt and mealy self-analysis going on here to keep a seminary full of Jesuits going for six months. Pick up the damn phone and call the woman. She’s probably got other plans already.
Koosje answered on the second ring and I identified myself.
“Of course I remember you,” she said in her barely accented voice. “How many private detectives do you think I meet in a day?”
“Well, I know it’s late notice and everything, but I was standing here staring at an empty icebox and I got to thinking that if you didn’t have other plans, maybe I could buy you dinner. Or something.” Is this guy smooth or what?
“Not a chance,” she said airily, and laughed. “I’m about to put my dinner into the oven. Do you like eggplant?”
I don’t, much, but I said I did and she told me where she lived—a fairly new apartment complex off Grant Street near Seventy-second. I told her I could be there in twenty minutes and she said give her at least half an hour to get the kitchen and herself cleaned up.
I zipped down the hall the way the Juice zips through airports, shucked my sweats, and climbed into something spiffier: lined navy chinos, lamb’s-wool burgundy V-neck, and my battered old corduroy sport coat. Then I tossed a few things into a canvas gym bag that had never seen the inside of a gym, overnight-type things: socks and shorts, a gray polo shirt, my shaving kit, and Boorstin’s The Discoverers, which I was doggedly working through despite its being about a hundred thousand pages of four-point type, twelve hundred lines to the page. It did, at least, add heft to the bag.
Fifteen minutes after hanging up the phone I was in line at the drive-up window of a liquor store I frequent down on Saddle Creek Road, swearing at a fat slob in a green Le Car who seemed to be laying in a six-month beer supply. Twenty-five minutes after that, Koosje was opening the door of her apartment to me, at the end of a short hall on the top floor of one of three four-story buildings with rustic woody façades.
Her long dark hair was loose now; it fell about her shoulders in lustrous ribbons. She wore very little make-up, a pale lipstick, and an aqua sweater-dress that ended just above the knee. A wide brass bracelet was her only jewelry.
I handed her the bagged bottle. “As far as I’m concerned, there are three types of wine: red, white, and pink. I couldn’t decide which shade went with eggplant.”
She pulled the bottle from the sack. “So you got black?”
“Very funny.” I slipped out of my parka. “It’s champagne. Well, not real champagne with a capital ‘Cham,’ but a Spanish sparkling wine that is very dry, light, fruity, and well-balanced, excellent for any occasion. See, it says so right there.”
Koosje was studying the gold-and-black label. “Freixenet,” she read. “Now how would you pronounce that? I suppose the X sounds like an H if it’s Spanish … . So what is the occasion? What are we celebrating?”
I shrugged. “Nothing, necessarily. Or anything you like. Beginnings. Conclusions. The new moon. The old neighborhood. You call it.”
She eyed me appraisingly. “Beginnings and conclusions, then. Is it cold enough to open now, or shall we wait?”
“It should be cold; I held it out the window on the way over.”
“Then why don’t you open it and I’ll hang up your—” I handed over my parka. “—coat. What happened to this pocket?”
I was peeling the rubberized foil from the neck of the bottle. “Hmm? Oh—I forgot to take my gun out of it before I shot a hole in a wall this morning. Silly.”
She gave me a distinctly worried look before hanging the coat in a narrow closet and sliding the door closed. “You’re joking.”
“I never joke. Just kidding.”
We were by then wandering out of the tiny foyer and into the apartment itself—a spacious but not opulent living room that segued into a nice dining area, beyond which was a reasonably large kitchen. Koosje found a pair of fluted glasses, the right kind for champagne, and I unbound the stopper and eased it out of the neck of the bottle. It came away into my hand with a deep, hollow ploonk!
Koosje said, “I appreciate your not shooting a hole in my wall.”
I poured alternately from one glass to the other, letting the bubbles rise and subside, and said, “My deah girl, one simply does not let a champers cork fly across the room like a misguided missile; the explosion absolutely destroys those precious little bubbles.”
“I had no idea I was in the presence of a connoisseur,” she deadpanned as I handed her a glass.
“I hope you found it inspirin’, because it’s the sum total of my knowledge, oenologically speaking, and I try never to miss an opportunity to show it off.” I raised my glass. “Well, here’s to crime.”
She lifted hers. “To beginnings and conclusions,” she corrected.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The dinner was ready so we went straight to it, Koosje pouring a dry red wine—“beloved zinfandel,” she called it—after we had finished our first glass of champagne. We chitted and chatted, weaving in and out and to and fro in the awkward oral mating dance that human beings insist on performing. Eventually the meal was finished, and we carried the remainder of the Freixenet to the living room. It was dark and warm there, illuminated only by the range light angling in softly from the kitchen, and a handful of candles that Koosje lit, gliding quickly and silently through the room.
She stood holding her dead match and smiled down at me where I sat on the overstuffed sofa. “Shall I light the fire?” she asked.
I looked around the room, airy, simply decorated. “Where? In an ashtray?”
Moving Targets Page 20
