Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” she said when I sat down. “She’s just a kid and she doesn’t know any better.”

  “While you’re all grown up,” I said.

  Stacey giggled again and Laurel glared at her.

  “I’m as grown-up as they come around this joint,” she said defiantly. She stuck out her chest. “If you’ve got a hundred dollars, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “If I was a cop, I could bust you for saying that.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Arrest me.”

  I grinned at her and Stacey laughed.

  “What’s so damn funny?” Laurel said to her.

  Stacey shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “That’s your whole problem, girl—you don’t know nothing. Why don’t you just go over to the bar and find some company of your own?”

  Stacey gave me a disappointed look, picked up her drink, and got to her feet. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” she said to me. She stared daggers at Laurel and walked away.

  “She’s such a child,” Laurel said.

  “Not too neat, huh?”

  Laurel sneered at me. “I still think you’re a cop, you know.”

  “I’m not a cop. I’m a private detective.”

  “Bullshit!” Laurel said with a giddy laugh.

  “Want to see my ID?” I pulled my wallet out and flipped it open to the Photostatic copy of my license.

  She studied it for a moment. “Is this a joke or something?” she said, tapping the license with her thumbnail.

  “No. That’s me, all right. Harry Stoner, Private Investigator.”

  “Well, who the hell are you investigating? Me?”

  I shook my head. “I’m trying to find Bill Parks.”

  “Why?” she said. “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. He’s a missing person.”

  “Bill?” She screwed up her face, as if she thought I was putting her on. “This is a joke, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-uh. He really has disappeared, and I’ve been hired to find him.”

  “Hired by who?” she said suspiciously.

  I’d already given her Petrie’s home phone number, so I saw no reason not to tell her the rest of it. “By the Cougars. By the guy you called up last night.”

  “Oh, yeah? I thought I recognized the name.” She laughed her ticklish little laugh. “All the guys think he’s a bastard, but I thought he sounded kind of sweet.”

  “He’s a lollipop, all right,” I said to her, although I was thinking that Laurel Jones was far too young to be in the trade she was in. “You can be a big help to me, Laurel. Last night you told me that Parks was seeing one of your friends. How about telling me her name and where I can find her?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said with a frown. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “There won’t be any trouble. All I’ve been hired to do is find Parks and put him in touch with Cougar management.”

  “Yeah, but what if he doesn’t want them to know where he is?”

  I didn’t have a particularly good answer to that one—no better than I’d had when Kaplan had asked me the same question.

  “He probably doesn’t,” I admitted. “But I’m not going to arrest him, just talk to him.”

  She combed her curly blond hair back from her forehead with her right hand and sighed. “Christ, why couldn’t you be someone simple, like a plumber or a bricklayer or something?”

  “I thought you liked football players.”

  “I’m not too crazy about the one you’re looking for.” She let her hair drop back down, although a couple of strands continued to stand up at odd angles, giving her a rumpled, electrified look. “Let me think about it, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “How about we go someplace else?” she said suddenly.

  “Like where?”

  She grinned and her cheeks dimpled up. “I’m still not convinced you aren’t a cop.”

  “What’ll it take to prove it to you?”

  “I’ve got a test in mind,” she said with a twinkle in her blue eyes. “If you’ve got the cash.”

  I studied her sweet little grin and wondered if she really was as ingenuous as she pretended to be. She looked so damn appealing that I wasn’t sure that it mattered. But for just a second I had the terrible feeling that around Laurel Jones, I was the one who wasn’t old enough for the trade.

  10

  WE WENT uptown to a hotel room and completed the transaction. Laurel had a firm, athletic body, and she was expert at using it. A little too expert, I thought when we were done. The lovemaking wasn’t exactly by the numbers, but she did order everything on the menu, like a teenage kid trying to impress his date. She’d impressed me, all right. She’d also worn me out a little too soon to do my ego any good, although she seemed to take my lack of staying power as a compliment. Seeing me tangled in the sheets, spent, sweating, and out of breath, she’d grinned with satisfaction, as if in her world wearing her partner to a nub was as close as she ever got to expressing affection.

  Only that wasn’t quite fair. Afterward she sat at the top of the bed, her legs and hips covered with the sheets, her small round breasts and flat tummy exposed, and watched me with what I took to be genuine pleasure as I dressed.

  “What are you grinning at?” I said to her as I put on my shirt.

  “I had a good time,” she said, “so I’m smiling. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  I smiled back at her. “Sure, it’s okay.”

  I got my wallet off the dresser and plucked two fifties from it.

  “You don’t have to pay me right now,” she said. She blushed a little. “It kind of spoils the fun, you know?”

  I sat down beside her on the bed. “You’re a weird chippy, you know that?” She giggled. “If it means anything, I had a good time too.”

  She put her arms around my neck and pulled me toward her. “Good,” she said, kissing me on the mouth. “Now how about taking me out to dinner? I’m starved.”

  “Okay. What do you want to eat?”

  “Pizza!” Laurel said. “I just love good pizza.”

  “Pizza it is, then,” I told her.

  ******

  We went to Papa Dino’s, a little restaurant on Calhoun Street. Somehow the girl looked more at home sitting across from me in a pizza parlor booth than she had in the hotel room, although I was probably kidding myself about that. She really wasn’t very old, and once we got to the restaurant she started to act her age, ordering Coke upon Coke while we waited, and oohing and aahing when the pizza finally arrived on its beaten tin platter. She pulled a stringy piece of cheese off the top and dangled it above her mouth.

  “I just love pizza,” she said, and swallowed the cheese like a strand of spaghetti.

  I think I had more fun watching her eat than eating it myself.

  About halfway through the meal, I asked her how a nice girl like her had found her way to a place like the Waterhole.

  “You make it sound like the end of the line,” she said with an embarrassed laugh. “It’s a big step up for me.” She blotted her lips with a paper napkin and folded her hands under her chin. “I used to work in Newport when I was younger, but nude dancing gets old pretty fast. And things aren’t what they used to be in Newport, anyway. There’s more class on this side of the river. Better opportunities.”

  “More football players?” I said.

  She shook her head. “Not really. They hang out at the strip joints, too. Only over there they just automatically think of you as a piece of meat. Over here, you got a chance to be treated like a lady, if you dress nice and talk nice.” She beamed at me like a girl in a promotional brochure. “Hey, it can happen! And even if you don’t land a football player, there are other advantages.”

  “Such as?”

  Laurel gave me a suspicious look. “You sure you’re not a cop?”

  “Would a cop treat you to pizza?”

  “That’s practically
all they eat,” she said dismally. “I know. I used to go out with one in Highland Heights for a couple of years.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, he was too serious about things,” Laurel said. “He wanted to settle down right away, start a family. But I’m not ready for marriage yet. I want to have a little fun first. Try to make a big score, you know? Shit, ol’ Dicky would die if he knew some of the things I’m into now.” She looked down gloomily at her plate, but the gloom didn’t last very long. “It’s my life, isn’t it? And I’m only going to have this one chance, right? I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to waste it by getting married right away, like my momma did. Or her momma did before her.” She lifted a piece of bacon off the pizza and tossed it in her mouth. “You ever been to Corbin, Kentucky?”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  “That’s where my family is from is all. Corbin’s like that scene from Deliverance, the one with the idiot boy on the porch. Most depressing spot I ever lived in. Only thing it had going for it was sulphurated apples. Boy, I used to love those things, sliced up and fried in butter.” She licked her lips as if she could still taste them. Then her expression changed, as if that memory had led her to other, less pleasant ones. “You know, they say down-home folks are straighter than other people, more righteous. Don’t you believe it. The only thing they worship down in Corbin is money.”

  Laurel threw her hand at me in disgust. “Don’t tell me about down-home folks being more righteous! They tell me I’m bound for hell. I tell them right back, ‘Then, I’ll meet you in perdition.’”

  She reached down and picked up another slice of pizza. “The way I live may not go down so good in Corbin, but I’m using what God gave me the best way I know how. And I’m improving myself all the time. Like right now I’m taking ballet classes at CDT. And twice a week I take this night course at Xavier on short stories. I’m not just...Well, what they say I am.”

  I smiled at her. “No, you’re not.”

  She smiled back and bit into her pizza. “That’s what I like about football players,” she said as she chewed. “I can identify with them. I mean, they’re in the same situation as me. They’ve got to sell their bodies for money too.”

  It was a novel way to look at it. “Have you had any luck with them?”

  “Not really. But C.W.—” Laurel clapped a hand over her mouth and threw the piece of pizza back onto the pan. “Damn,” she said with disgust. “Look what you made me say.”

  “I take it C.W. is Parks’s girlfriend?”

  She nodded hesitantly.

  “What’s C.W. stand for?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t stand for anything,” Laurel said. “We gave her that nickname ‘cause of the movie Bonnie and Clyde. Because she always wore a cap like C.W. Moss. Her real name is Carol. I’m not going to tell you her last name.”

  “She used to work with you at the Waterhole?” I said.

  Laurel nodded and made an unhappy face. “I guess we’re bound to talk about this. I guess I knew that all along. But if we do, Harry, you gotta promise me that you’ll never let anyone know where you heard it. ‘Cause C.W. would never speak to me again if I got her man in trouble. God knows, she has enough to worry about as it is. And then there’s Bill.” She shivered a little. “He just isn’t like other people. I’ve known a lot of guys, so you can believe what I’m telling you.”

  “How is he different?” I asked.

  Laurel shook her head. “You gotta promise me, first.”

  I promised.

  “And this is going to cost you something, too,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her.

  “More than a pizza?”

  She laughed. “The Cougars can afford a few dollars, can’t they? I mean if it’s so damn important?”

  “I’ll work something out,” I said.

  “All right. But I’m not going to tell you where C.W. lives. You can ask me anything but that.”

  “That’s what I need to know.”

  “Take it or leave it,” Laurel said firmly.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it. Now tell me about Bill.”

  She leaned back against the booth seat and hunkered down, as if she were bracing herself for an ordeal. “Bill’s a real tormented guy. I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t so damn mean. I don’t know exactly what his problem is, but he acts like somewhere along the line someone made him feel so bad about himself that he never got over it. I mean, he’s always on the muscle. Always. He’s got to be the toughest, the baddest, the strongest. And if anybody even looks at him funny, he’ll take him apart. Believe me, I’ve seen him do it at the club. He’s just not like the other guys. They act macho too. They go into the john at the Waterhole and do push-ups, so they can come out with their arms all pumped up and strut around like gamecocks. But once they start coming on to you, they’re just like any other guys. But Bill...It’s not an act with him, you know? Being strong, being tough. It’s for real. I think the only thing Bill Parks really cares about is playing football, being the toughest player he can be. I mean, he’s more hung up about it—about building his body up, making contact—than anyone I ever met. It’s like he’s got tough all mixed up with the rest of life. Like tough’s the only answer in his head. It’s scary to be around him.”

  Laurel ducked her chin. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I will. About a year and a half ago, I went to a party with Bill. This was six months before he met C.W. Anyway, I was kind of young and I wanted him to like me. So we ended up in a bedroom, upstairs in this house where the party was. I got undressed and lay down on the bed. But Bill...he just stood there staring at me, like I was painted on the bedspread. I remember thinking that he was looking at me the way a butcher must size up a carcass of beef, like I was one of those drawings with the parts of the cow on it, all the choice cuts and the waste. Like that was all he was seeing—just a diagram of parts.”

  She shuddered up and down her spine. “I’ve never been raped. I’m not even sure I believe in it. But I’ll tell you this—I never felt more helpless in my life. He never got undressed. I don’t think he even came. I mean, I could feel all these vibrations coming off him, all this heat. But they just never connected up with me. It was like he was still alone. When he was done, I practically jumped into my clothes and ran downstairs and went to the most crowded part of the room and stood there for a real long time, listening to people talk and joke and eat. And after a while I started to feel like a whole person again, like I was something more than this.” She pinched the skin of her forearm between her right thumb and forefinger. “What I’m trying to say is that Bill Parks just isn’t human.”

  “Your friend must think he is,” I said.

  She nodded. “C.W. loves him. Don’t ask me why, but she does. He hurts her so much...and she just doesn’t seem to care! You know what she told me once? She told me that she thought when he beat her up, it was the only way he knew of touching her! Like that was a kind of loving.” Laurel shook her head. “C.W.’s crazy. First she went crazy for guys. Then she went crazy for God and got all fired up about Jesus. Then she just had to go out and find the most miserable sinner in the world and change his life too. Sometimes I think that’s what she really loves about Bill—his badness. If he went over to Jesus, I bet she wouldn’t know what to do.

  “Oh, hell,” Laurel said. “That’s not fair. She has changed his life some. She’s got him going to that Reverend What’s-His-Name that all the players’ wives like so well. And she got him off the drugs. Or so she says.”

  “What drugs?” I asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Laurel said in a little voice. “But I think he did a lot of cocaine.”

  “This could be important, Laurel,” I said. “Are you sure about the drug problem?”

  “Pretty sure,” she said. “I know he was snorting a whole bunch of stuff right before he met C.W. I think he may even have been shooting it up, ‘cause I saw some works in his john. Then when they started living together l
ast winter, she made him swear it off. And she claims he’s been sticking to it ever since.”

  “She started living with Bill last winter?”

  Laurel nodded. “At the end of December. I know it was December because that’s when C.W. found out that she was preg—” Laurel covered her mouth, then dropped her hand. “Oh, hell, I guess it’s okay to say that. Most everybody knows it, anyway. To tell the truth, I think that’s how she got him to propose to her—telling him about the baby.”

  Something was rattling around in the back of my mind, some detail that didn’t quite fit in with what Laurel was telling me. When I couldn’t summon it up, I asked an obvious question. “I thought you said C.W. was born-again. Getting pregnant without getting married isn’t part of that deal, is it?”

  Laurel smiled. “She’s real religious now. But she wasn’t so faithful when she first met Bill. She didn’t really get soulful until she had this car accident on New Year’s Eve, and one of her friends got killed. Plus she’s got this funny way of justifying things. She believes she can only save Bill by turning him toward Christ. And she thinks that anything she does to turn him in that direction is okay, ‘cause Christ himself came bearing a sword to cleave sinners away from their sinful lives. She believes having a baby means Bill’ll have to marry her. And once they’re married, she thinks she’ll be able to keep him away from all evil influences, like the drugs and the bad company he keeps.”

  “What bad company?”

  “Oh, he used to be friends with this real hard-nosed football player that C.W. doesn’t like. I don’t know him, but I think she doesn’t like him because he doesn’t think much of all that Jesus stuff.”

  I thought of Bluerock and smiled.

  “Then there’s those guys at the gym.”

  “Kaplan’s gym?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with surprise. “You know about that place?”

  I nodded. “I am a detective, Laurel. I did do a little poking around.”

  “Well, C.W. doesn’t like them either, ‘cause they’re heathens and other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?”

  She looked over her shoulder, to make sure nobody was listening in—then whispered, “I think that’s where Billy got some of his drugs.”