by Otto Penzler
“Just tell me,” Skig said, “am I still gonna die?”
The quack hunched over a child-sized table, briskly flipping through some arcane-looking charts. “We’re all going to die, Mr. Skorzeny.”
A pathologist and a philosopher. Skig crossed his brawny arms above his thick belly, waiting to hear the bad news.
Finally the quack glanced up. Jeez, he was young. How much could a kid this age know about diseases of the colon? Plenty, judging by the framed degrees, diplomas, and certificates tacked to the wall. But Skig wasn’t impressed. Paper was paper.
“The tests were inconclusive,” the quack said.
“What!”
“The tests were inconclusive. We’ll have to run them again.”
“Somebody screwed up, you mean.”
“There’s no need for acrimony.”
“There’s a need for something. You think it’s happy days goin’ through all that?”
“You’re overwrought.”
“No, I’m underwrought. When I get overwrought, you’ll know it.”
The quack was unintimidated. That impressed Skig. With cool detachment, the young man insisted Skig leave another sample for the lab. The Styrofoam container looked just like the kind the Greek at the corner sold his chili burgers in.
—
When Skig got home, there was company waiting. An unmarked car with two watchful dicks in it, parked in the front yard where the gas pumps used to be. In his younger years he might have cruised on by, circled the block, gave some thought as to how he would handle things. Now he just rolled in and stopped right beside them. What were they after? Someone to shoot? Pick me, Skig thought.
They got out of their car slowly and purposefully, an air of menace hovering about them. Something they learned at the academy: how to get out of your vehicle with an air of menace. Skig got out too. As he straightened, the pain darted inside him like the tip of a cork puller he’d ingested by accident somehow, and he steadied himself.
The dicks were focused, professionally intense. The older one moved in. He was going to fat, wore an old loose-fitting suit, and showed salt-and-pepper hair around his ears. The one who’d been driving was younger, tall and lanky, and dressed like he was going to a job interview.
“You guys collecting for underprivileged cops?” Leo said. “I gave at the office,” thinking of the container he had left with the quack. He brushed past the dicks, jangling his keys, and unlocked the repair bay door. When he heaved it up he thought his stomach would bust open and dump some major organ right there on the ground. He swayed.
“Mr. Skorzeny?” the fat one said.
“You know it.”
“Are you all right?”
“Top shelf. Right up there with the chips and cheesies.”
The dick studied him, taking his measure.
“We’ve got a few questions. Think we could go inside?”
“No.”
The dick held his gaze. Then he shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He took a pen and notebook out of his pocket, flipped pages, glanced up again. “You know a man named Dwight Keevis?”
“No.”
“Owns a car dealership. Also goes by the name of Dan Duchek. Happy Dan.”
“Oh, that Dwight Keevis.”
“Then you do know him.”
“No.”
The dick pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right. Let’s go about this another way. An employee says you dropped by to see Mr. Keevis earlier today, unannounced. You didn’t come to buy a car, and you weren’t very friendly. We’d like to know what you talked about.”
“You asked if I knew the guy. I don’t.” Skig looked the two dicks over again. A mulish-looking couple of plugs. Stubborn as dirt. Better give them something. The truth was best. “I did stop by about a car. I been told I should trade up.”
Behind the fat dick, the lanky one stooped over the window of the Vic. He made a sour face. “That might be a plan. This one stinks.”
“Funny,” Skig said, “it smelt good till you showed up.”
The lanky dick’s face tightened, and the older one reined him in with his eyes. Then the older one turned back to Skig.
“The employee claims you threatened Mr. Keevis when you left his office today.”
“Is that what this is about? I said an unkind word to somebody?” Skig remembered the extremely pretty young woman, the acid look on her puss as she trip-trapped out of the room.
“Well,” the dick said, “whether you did or you didn’t, Mr. Keevis now happens to be dead. Died of gunshot wounds at the QE Emergency”—he glanced at his watch—“going on two hours ago.”
“You don’t tell me.”
“I do tell you. And after what the employee said, and seeing as you’re not exactly a stranger to us—”
“Got a sheet on you like the Yellow Pages,” the lanky dick put in with venom.
“—we thought,” the older dick continued, determined to finish, “that it might be a good idea to come by and hear what you had to say about it.”
“An’ you did. An’ I answered you,” Skig said. “So take off.”
“You won’t get far with that attitude.”
“I only need to get through that door to my bottle of scotch. You want to arrest me because some rip-off artist stopped a long overdue slug, go ahead. But my doctor may have something to say about that. And my lawyer will cut you off at the knees.”
Skig got back in the Vic, dropped it in gear, and let the fast idle roll the smelly old car inside.
—
In the gloom of the kitchen, he rinsed a glass in the sink, rattled some ice into it, and topped it up with Teacher’s. He pushed the news about Happy Dan around in his head. Not all that surprising. Probably tried to screw the wrong sap, that’s all. The sap got wise, dug his howitzer out of a shoebox, and returned to the lot, bent on revising the terms of their understanding. The fat monthly payment and, oh yeah, a little something else.
Skig glanced at the clock. Solly Sweetmore was late. If he didn’t show, Skig would have to go to him, give him a slap or two to get his attention.
He sat down in his ratty recliner—collapsed into it, was more like it. Switched on the TV, jabbed the mute button, took a quick slug from his glass. The liquor did what it was supposed to do, burned for a moment, then mellowed him, but it didn’t help his gut. He shook out two of the big fat brown capsules the quack had slipped him—samples, he’d said, take one before eating—and washed them down with a swallow of booze.
Then he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, there were shadows in the room, the afternoon sun dying fast behind the fly-specked window over the sink. The light from the silent television winked and gamboled on the walls.
A TV news lady was doing a location shot. The background looked vaguely familiar. Skig frowned as two giant double Ds reared up on the screen—Dan Duchek’s rip-off center. It was an earlier tape, sunlight beating down in the background where a bagged stiff was being rolled out on a gurney. He poked the mute button. The TV lady, brushing a sweep of lustrous hair out of her eyes, said, “…all police would reveal was that the owner of this downtown dealership was shot dead in his office by an unidentified assailant.” Skig wondered if Dan still wore his grin. “CTV has learned that at least one person has been taken into custody…” The canned shot changed. And to Skig the monologue faded as a jerky camera lens zoomed in on a gray-haired woman being bundled into a police patrol car. The woman looked dazed. It was Eva Kohl.
“Ah jeez,” Skig said.
—
He made a call to his lawyer Saul Getz, then rolled down to the cop shop in the Vic. Saul was there waiting for him. A thin man with patient eyes, he was thoughtfully stroking his trim, white goatee.
“You talk to her?” Skig asked.
“Yeah, I talked to her. They didn’t arrest her. That woman wouldn’t shoot a pop-gun at a plastic monkey to win a coconut.”
“You got that right. You pry her loose?”
“Oh sure. She’s an unhappy lady, though. Forensics impounded her car. Seems Happy Dan was about to drive it into the shop when the shooter stepped in and popped him. Two hits, one miss. Quite a mess.” He smiled. “She’s feisty. She says if the police take people’s cars away, then they ought to provide loaners. I sent her home in a cab.”
Skig said, “They recover the gun?”
“No. But they think it belonged to the victim. He kept a Smith in the desk, according to an employee, and the cops can’t find it anywhere.”
That helpful employee again. “Anything else?”
“One slug was recovered in pretty good shape. Went into the headrest. When they find the gun they’ll do their ballistics thing, and that’ll be it.”
“They think.”
“They’re pretty sure. One of the techs took a quick look. He said it ought to be a slam dunk, far as the gun is concerned.”
“Meantime, Eva doesn’t get her car back.”
“Oh, it gets worse. When I showed up and started speaking for her, the detectives figured out the connection pretty quick. I mean, from me to you, then Eva. They brightened a little. The younger one grinned and said maybe they’d bring her back in for more questioning.”
“They’re outta their minds.”
“They seem a little miffed at you, Leo. Did you yank their chains or something?”
He told them how he had been at the lot for a few minutes and how the fat cop and the thin cop had stopped by and braced him later.
“Buying a new car, Skig? Hey, that’s a plan.”
“Don’t start. I was there at the lot just before the guy got it, an’ because I’m me, they made a little too much of it.” Skig eyeballed a policeman stepping by them in the hall. “I ran them off.”
Saul stroked his goatee, thinking. “No, there’s more to it. They got that witness. That employee. We don’t know what she saw, or what she says she saw. She could be fingering you and your friend.” He puffed his cheeks out, gave his head a shake. “Did you rub her the wrong way too?” When Skig didn’t answer, he added, “Why would she finger a nice old doll like that?”
“I dunno,” Leo said, “but I’m gonna find out.”
He had just caught a glimpse of the extremely pretty young woman being ushered out of an interview room down the hall.
—
The sun had gone down fast. Wisps of pink-bellied clouds lingered way out low over the Arm.
Skig sat in the Crown Vic with the blower on and the windows all the way down. The car smelled especially rank today. The sludge at the bottom of the harbor wasn’t violets, that was a fact. But minutes later the night breeze was buffeting through the car again, as he trailed the extremely pretty young woman’s taillights down Gottingen Street. She drove fast. She tailgated. She yapped into her cell nonstop.
She drove out to Clayton Park, sped north on Dunbrack, then turned in at a block of apartments that sprawled above the slope to the basin. Shot down the ramp into the underground parking with the phone still glued to her head. Skig found a slot outside in the visitors’ lot, angled so that he could watch for an apartment light to go on. He knew he had about a fifty percent chance, and his number came up. Tenth floor, northwest corner.
“Bang,” Skig said.
He kept waiting. Imagined the cell phone burning. Minutes later, headlights lit the Vic from behind, a car coming up fast, flashing by him into the visitors’ lot, subwoofer pumping out some irritating hip-hop crap. Nice car. A yellow Audi.
“Boom,” Skig said.
—
Skig knew the vehicle. He’d seen it around. A car like that, you might as well have a neon sign over your head jabbing blinking arrows at you. And seeing it here now, Skig suddenly realized who the kid at the car lot had been, the one with the eyes.
The name he went by was Caesar DeLuca. His real tag? Probably not. He was Filipino. Smart with the ladies. Though what young women saw in guys who looked like extras from Night of the Living Dead, Skig had never been able to figure out. And DeLuca was mean. He liked to hurt people. It wasn’t just an unavoidable part of doing business with him, he enjoyed it. Beyond that, Skig didn’t know much about the guy and didn’t want to. He couldn’t care less what turned DeLuca’s crank, but that would change fast if the guy had his rat’s nose buried in this business somehow.
DeLuca swaggered from his car to the building, gold chains, body ink, and attitude. Skig considered the setup so far.
A car dealer shot dead. In his proximity, four people: a gentle unassuming older lady, the extremely pretty young woman, and rat boy here, Caesar DeLuca. And himself. Which of these was most likely to have had something to do with it? Since the cops apparently didn’t know about DeLuca, Skig was number one on the list. But he had an alibi with the quack. The cops had probably discovered that. Which left the girl—and the older lady, of course, according to Fatty and Skinny. They had sherlocked it out.
Of course, they hadn’t seen DeLuca nosing around the car lot earlier, but on the other hand they didn’t seem too interested in finding out about him either. Had they asked Skig if he’d seen anybody else there? No. Had the girl volunteered the information? Skig didn’t think so.
Upstairs, the window darkened. Somebody had pulled the drapes. After about half an hour, DeLuca sauntered out of the building and squealed away in his thumping pimp mobile. Skig eased out of the old Vic, locked the door, and followed a tenant and his fuzzy white dog in through the front entrance.
The apartment door on the tenth floor had a spray of dried flowers on it and a ceramic plaque that said RUSSELL. The girl pulled open her door and stared at him.
“Name’s Leo Skorzeny, Ms. Russell,” Skig said. “Remember me?”
Her face paled in alarm, she started to close the door, and he put his foot in the way.
“Tired of talking about what happened to your boss today?”
That stopped her. She hesitated, found that hissy look somewhere inside herself, then stood back and let him in. She waggled her fingers at a chair and flounced down on the sofa, one leg tucked up, lips clamped together tight. Skig didn’t like the idea of fighting his way back out of the overstuffed bucket she had consigned him to, so he dragged a kitchen chair out of the ell and sat down gingerly on it. Jeez.
She shot a meaningful look at a table clock, something modern in plastic and glass. “You’ve got five minutes.” She had a harsh voice. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“I’ll take it. I can use all the time I can get, according to my proctologist.”
“Are you trying to be crude?”
“I’m trying to be accurate. You were pretty accurate yourself when you put those holes in your boss.”
She brought one foot down hard on the rug, shoving forward at him. “Don’t you dare imply I had anything to do with that!”
“I’m not implying it. I’m saying it. You shot him, all right, you or your boyfriend did. An’ when you couldn’t frame me, you had to settle for the old lady.”
She jumped to her feet. “Get out!”
“I could do that. An’ I could head back down to Gottingen Street and lay it all out for the dicks.”
She stood there breathing, dainty nostrils flaring, considering her options. Then she plumped down on the sofa again and gnawed at her lip. He knew he was on the right track then.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s hear your delusional idea.”
“I got two, three of ’em,” Skig said, ignoring the dramatics. “I been thinking down there in the car. First one is, you were cozy with Happy Dan, shining his cars for him, only somethin’ went wrong. He took off to Aruba without you, had a good time in the sun, an’ when he got back you tore a strip off of him.”
She gave a short, barking laugh.
“That’s insane. You don’t know anything. What makes you think I wasn’t with him?”
“Where’s your tan?”
It stopped her. But just for a moment.
“Dwight was married. He flew d
own there with his wife. He couldn’t have taken me along if he’d wanted to.”
“Oh, there’s ways. But we’ll put that on hold. Here’s delusion number two, coming at it from the other side. The guy was hitting on you, you finally lost it with him, an’ you pegged him.”
“Oh puh-lease!” She made her eyes go round. “Why would I do that? I could have walked away if what you’re saying is true. Do you think I’m out of my mind?”
Skig looked at her. She was struggling. A pretty bundle of raw nerves curled up there on the couch.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think that. I think your boyfriend’s got a loose connection someplace. What’s his part? He came to your rescue?”
“My boyfriend? Now what are you talking about?”
“The little weasel I just saw scuttling out of here.”
She rolled her eyes again. “I don’t even have a boyfriend. Nobody left here.”
“He was in this building.”
“It’s a big place.”
“Yeah,” Skig said. He wasn’t ready to mention he’d seen the two of them arguing earlier under the big double Ds at Happy’s place. “Where can I find him?”
She studied Skig a moment. Worked on that lip again. She really didn’t want to get going on DeLuca, that was obvious, and suddenly a miracle occurred. Her face turned all sweetness and light. Just like that.
“Look, we can be friends, you know.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t think I’m cute?”
“Puppies are cute. So are Kewpie dolls. You’re in there somewhere, I guess.”
She threw her drink at him, the glass tumbling past his ear, splatting against the heavy drapes, then falling to the rug, miraculously unbroken. The drapes hadn’t fared so well, a broad stain running down them. A few drops darkened Leo’s sleeve.
He got up painfully. “Nice to have met you, Ms. Russell.”
Two things he’d gotten out of this. Number one, she was scared of the cops. Number two, she was protecting rat boy.
