I stared. “In the first place, the cops aren’t that stupid. They know the difference between poisoning — which I assume is what you’re getting at — and suffocation by pillow.”
He stared right back. “You and I know Janey as a sweet kid who maybe shouldn’t have hung out with types like us. The cops think of her as one of us, wouldn’t you say?”
“Could be right.” I nodded slowly. I was thinking of how quickly Dane’s niece had become a so-called suicide, which was much more farfetched than what Mick was telling me.
“So before I could even work my magic connections and get somebody to perform an autopsy, Janey’s body is shuffled off to the crematorium, and all that’s left is something to scatter on the roses in the park.”
“She’s already been cremated? That seems kind of … fast.”
“Exactly. And the memorial ceremony’s tomorrow.” He looked down again. “I can’t stop thinking about her, Flap. It’s like, as they used to say in the old gangster films, I have that well-known monkey on my back. I can’t stop thinking.”
“I know what a problem that can be.” I rubbed my eyes for a second. “But what makes you think there’s any link at all between the stolen toxins and this business?”
“Well” — he started slowly, gathering his strength again, with what could only have been described as an atomic twinkle in his eye, “maybe it’s because the private notes of one Detective Burnish Huyne would indicate that he suspects exactly the same thing.”
“Okay, in the first place, how would you know something like that?” I shook my head. “I’m positive Detective Huyne does not post his notes on the Net.”
He shrugged. “A guy distracts him while he’s writing his reports. Some other guy looks over his shoulder. Picking his mind is simpler than picking his pocket. Simplicity itself.”
“Somebody you know looked over his shoulder while he was writing his notes? How twentieth century is that?” I had to smile. “But you are something of a Machiavellian wonder, if I may use that term.”
“Use away.” He smiled back brightly. “I love that term. I always appreciate it when you try to match my level of grammatical prowess.”
“Still,” I hesitated, “there are only about a thousand holes in the theory.”
“That may be,” he nodded. “But why does Huyne have that theory in the first place? That’s what we want to find out, wouldn’t you think?”
I stood. “Possibly.” I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose they’re letting you out to go to Janey’s service tomorrow.”
“No.” He was trying to the stoic version of tough: His mouth was set hard, but his eyes gave him away.
“How about if I go, then,” I told him, “and say goodbye for you.”
He tried to answer, but he didn’t manage it.
19. A Bigger Bite
For some reason I found the idea of calling Dally’s house from the downtown police station amusing, so I dialed her up on one of the pay phones.
“Hello?” She was her old self again.
“So,” I spoke smoothly into the receiver, “care for dinner?”
“Hey.” She was glad to hear my voice, I could tell. “I have to tell you I’m relieved that you didn’t mess around and come over here when you called before —”
“Because Huyne and a gaggle of investigators were at the time paying you a visit. I know. I did come over. But when I saw the cars, I beat it. I’ve been talking to Mickey instead.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yes, really. So, dinner?”
“You’ll pick me up? I have so much to tell you from my recent visitation.”
“Right,” I told her, “so let’s just go on over to Le Giverny.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised, impressed.
“I’ve got an envelope filled with dinner money, remember. And I haven’t tried the new snails they have on the menu yet.”
“Plus,” she picked right up, “they put the ’86 Simard on the wine list.”
“At a remarkable inflated price.”
“What do you care? You’ve got an envelope.” That smile. “So how was your Tao session today, tell me?”
“On the fritz.”
“What?”
“Didn’t happen.” I tried not to sound too dejected. “I think it’s broken.”
“You think your Tao’s broken?”
“Somehow.” I shifted the phone. “Maybe.”
“Well” — she spoke quickly, in something of a mocking tone, I thought — “then we don’t have a moment to lose. Get over here fast. We’ve got to get some snails and overpriced wine into you before the hour’s out.”
Big grin from me. “I’m for that.”
*
Le Giverny’s a small place, but we were early enough on a weeknight to manage a table. It was noisy and full and smelled like a bistro in Paris.
“I’ll go first,” Dally announced, just as she finished pouring my second glass of Simard. “Huyne and his pals were visiting me because one of the gentlemen in the parking lot down from Foggy’s Imports happened to recognize me as we made it to your car.”
“You really are the policeman’s friend these days.”
“Shut up.” She smiled sweetly. “They also knew you. Huyne thought you’d be with me, and he wanted to haul us both in, along with Foggy — who is nowhere to be found, by the way — and even our boy Paul.”
“They even wanted to haul in Paul? Huyne has been keeping an eye on us then.”
“Wouldn’t you have noticed a tail?”
“Usually.” I nodded. “But something’s not right about all this. I’m really off-kilter, or something. Maybe it’s just the two cases at the same time and a little overly personal involvement.”
“Personal?” I thought I might have sensed a little jealousy in the air.
“Not like what you’re thinking.” I smiled. “But let’s take a quick check of the facts: I knew the kid who got smothered — if that’s how she died at all, but that’s another story I’ll tell you in a second. I know Dane, and he knows me. I’ve known Joepye for years, and he’s telling the cops I might have iced the girls all the while he’s taking me to see both of them before the cops get there. And on top of it all, I got shot at in my own club?”
“Whose club?”
“Don’t I remember” — I looked down at my glass — “something about a silent partner paper thing involving me in your unsavory establishment?”
“So you got shot at.” Big shrug, avoiding that particular issue. “Like that hasn’t happened before.”
I stared off. “I’ve got a weird feeling in my head.” I got lost momentarily in that feeling. “What if Mickey actually shot me that night, I’m lying in a hospital bed, and this is all an opiated hallucination? Or what if he really did kill me, and I just don’t know I’m dead yet, still wondering around like a Chinese ghost in one of those stories I’m all the time reading?” Healthy sip of wine. “Ever feel completely abstracted like that?”
“What the hell is the matter with you?” She leaned forward impatiently. “You don’t have time for this kind of goofy meandering. I mean, it’s fine for you when there’s nothing else to do, but at the moment you’ve got to stay on the beam, Mr. Tucker, and cut out all that metaphysical onanism.”
I came out of my mood pretty quickly. “Hey. Nice turn of the phrase.” I caught her eye. “And thanks.” Sip of wine. “What in fact is the matter with me?”
“You look okay.” She started hesitantly. “Except you look like you could use a little extra shut-eye.”
“What?”
“Dark circles, is all.”
“Ah, well, I’ve been up the past few nights.” I nodded, hefting my wineglass again. “So let me tell you what Mickey told me.”
“Right. Good.” It was obvious that she was happy to get me out of the weird zone and back on track.
“He tells me that Detective Huyne suspects a connection between the toxins Paul told us about and the murders
of the hanging girls. He pickpocketed the guy’s mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I smiled, “he just got a glance at the detective’s private notes. Also, get this: Mick was in fact at the murder scene, at Janey’s. He found her dead, touched everything in sight so as to get his fingerprints all over everything, and then split.”
“And he’s not nearly that stupid.” She lifted her glass.
“Exactly. Or that calm, remember. He’s supposed to be the violent type, not the snuff-them-in-their-sleep type.”
Our snails came. An odd recipe: They were wood-smoked and without a hint of garlic or butter.
“Where does this leave us with the police, by the way?” I asked Dally before I popped the first one in my mouth. “Are they looking for me? Am I, by any chance, illegally at large?”
“Well” — she didn’t wait, took a bite in midsentence — “remember your information exchange agreement with Huyne? Hey, these snails are great.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “the normal way always has too much butter for me. And yes, I remember my agreement with the detective.”
“Anyway,” she went on, “I think you’re okay for the time being. I told him everything: what we got from Foggy and from Paul. That satisfied his information exchange quotient for the day, and he left.”
“Because he’s got a crush on you the size of Wyoming. He wouldn’t have gone away that easily otherwise, do you think?”
“Wyoming?”
“Sorry” — I shrugged — “that’s from some thinking a little earlier in my day. While I was sitting around not doing my thing.”
“So, your thing’s got engine trouble or something?” She’d already finished her snails.
“I don’t know what it is.” I got my last snail taken care of quickly, because I saw her eyeing it. “But I had absolutely no luck today. And I’m telling you, it’s left me a little droopy.”
“A little what?”
“I’m tired, is all — like you said.”
“Maybe it’s just like you said.” She shrugged. “Sensory overload. You’ve got a lot to think about.”
“I guess.”
Our salads came, and we spent the next fifteen or twenty talking about how good it was, how to duplicate various recipes in our own little kitchens — anything to avoid the real issue. I had never had trouble with my trick before, and I guess it scared us both a little. Maybe it was that I hadn’t used it in a while. Maybe I’d used it all up.
I mean, what if it was gone forever? That’s what I was thinking. What if I could never see the big picture again? What if all I could do was wander around in this life looking at the trees and never again seeing the forest? I’d miss the forest. I liked the forest. It’s, as they say, lovely, dark, and deep.
Dally’s the one who finally met the issue head-on, God bless her.
“So, okay, how about if it’s like riding on a horse. How about if you just get back in there and try it again after dinner?”
“No good.” I shook my head. “I’ve already had this very nice wine and you can’t do the thing with a fuzzy head.”
“Like your head’s not fuzzy all the time.”
“There’s no doing it tonight.” I was firm on that. “The angel won’t kiss you if you’ve had too much to drink, and tonight it’s my plan to have too much. But first thing in the morning.”
She nodded slowly, and our meals came. I had the trout in parchment and she had her perennial Pasta Monet. All was well and relatively silent for the next half hour.
When she finally laid down her fork, sipped the last of the wine in her glass, and leaned forward to look at the dessert menu, she had made up her mind: “You’re staying with me again tonight. (A) I want the company. (B) I’ll see to it that the first thing you do in the morning is get down to business with your little concentration exercises. (C) It’ll confuse Detective Huyne, who, I am convinced, will be back to visit me tomorrow.”
I smiled. “Reason number C is by far the most compelling.” I rapped the table. “I’ll do it.”
She had a B&B, I had a cognac; we paid with some of the cash from my magic envelope and split.
In the parking lot Dally looked up at the stars in the cold January air. “You know, some of those things are actually all gone — those stars. Burned out. The only reason we still think we see them is just that the light hasn’t finished making it all the way to our little corner.”
“Yeah.” I looked at her sideways. “I know.”
“So, we’re looking at the past when we look up at the sky.”
“Okay.” I nodded slowly, wondering where she was going.
“So the sky we’re seeing now? It’s not accurate. It’s a lie.”
“Dally?”
She finally turned to look at me. “The big picture that you’re always going on about? The one you have to get a glimpse of to get yourself organized around your so-called cases? It’s like the sky. It’s no more definitive than all the little pictures. It’s just a bigger bite of the illusion.”
I just stared at the curve of her cheek as she turned her face back up to the stars.
20. Clatter
Maybe it was the good night’s rest — I’d slept like the dead — or the hot shower. Maybe it was the calm air in the house; Dally had tidied up her living room. Or, most likely, it was the forty-five minutes I’d spent considering how absolutely correct our Ms. Oglethorpe had been about the nighttime sky. What I was so desperate to get ahold of — the big picture, the prize behind the golden curtain — was just another trick of light, a lie of the mind, a gander at the grand illusion.
So, with the pressure off, as it were, I had slipped more easily than I ever would have imagined the day before, right into a state of extreme relaxation. I was letting images float into and out of my field of vision as if I were watching fish swimming in a clear pond.
All you have to do really is breathe. If all you are is breath, the rest comes easy. In. Out. Nothing to it. Just sit, and the angel creeps up behind you and kisses you with light.
There was the hazy golden glow in front of my eyes. There were bright fish swimming.
Janey’s face. Beth Dane’s face. Old man Dane playing a familiar tune on his bass — which looked like a naked woman from the back — with a hacksaw. Joepye picking my pocket. Girls in a long line dancing the tango. Spiders crawling on a corpse. Beth hanging in one of Minnie’s photographs. Joepye being arrested over and over again. Mickey shooting me in the heart.
I felt the bullet inside me, but all the tissue and muscle and bone around it — all moved aside in order to accommodate the bullet. The bullet became just another part of my anatomy. It did me no harm.
Then I saw a gallery, a long line of photos in a darkened hall, like the tango hall. Only one of the images — I couldn’t see who it was — climbed out of the frame of the photograph and stole away, down the hall, laughing quietly. Then, a moment later, it brought another photo of another girl and hung it where the original had been, tossing away the empty frame.
More dance music, and all the photographs on the wall came to life, stamping, clapping, raising a banging clatter.
*
I snapped my head up. Someone was hammering on the door with the brass knocker. It had popped me out of my reverie.
I looked around, but Dally was nowhere in evidence, so I assumed she had slipped out while I’d been under. Damn. I finally got a good thing going, and then someone wrecked it.
The racket came again, only more insistent.
I stood up, skipped putting on my shoes as I ordinarily would have. I think it’s bad manners to answer a door in your stockinged feet, but the person at the door was obviously in no mood to wait.
I swung the door open just as the noise had reached a fever pitch.
Silent staring for a full ten seconds was followed by a radical mood shift in both faces.
Mine got very genial. His just got madder.
“Detective Huyne. I might have known i
t would be you.”
“What took you so long to get to the door?” He brushed past me and came on into the room.
I closed the door behind him. “I was thinking.”
“Uh-huh. Where’s Ms. Oglethorpe?”
“I have no idea.”
He stared. “Looks like you slept in your clothes again last night.”
“Yeah.” I looked down at my rumpled condition. “Does look like that, doesn’t it?”
“I’m getting a little tired of finding you here when you say there’s nothing to your relationship with Ms. Oglethorpe.” He was biting his lip, and I could smell the tension.
“I never said there was nothing to my relationship with Ms. Oglethorpe. In fact, quite the opposite. I think there’s everything to my relationship with her. It’s just not the way you mean — or most people mean, for that matter. Maybe you’d find it amusing to know that you and Mickey Nichols share this fascination with the nature of my relationship with the woman in question.”
By his expression I gathered that he was in fact not at all amused by this observation. “Well, I’m glad you’re here anyway. I have a lot to ask you.”
“Look,” I began reasonably, “I thought we were going to be friends. You seem very tight just at the moment, and I’d like to see you calm down before we get into what you think you have to ask me.”
His face just got harder. “If I kicked your ass right this minute,” he whispered harshly, “no one would think a thing about it.”
I’ll admit to being a little shocked at that observation, but I managed a smile. “I don’t know what makes you say that. This is Dally’s apartment. She’s bound to ask somebody how her living room rug got all messed up. And then there’s a certain bartender at Easy who worries about me if I don’t show up in good condition after a couple of nights. Not to mention Dane and Mickey, both of whom need me in good shape because they’ve hired me to help out with a problem they have. So all in all, I think you have underestimated my popularity. But that’s not what I’m most worried about. What I really want to know is why you’re so bent on doing me harm in the first place. As I have done nothing to you.”
Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Page 11
