Damnation Street wab-3

by Andrew Klavan

  "You're so dead it's not even funny," she said.

  The kid at the hotel had been right about Adrienne Chalk. She thought she was something. Weiss could see it in the way she came toward him along the side of the bed, swaying her hips and keeping her chin lifted as if she were moving into the camera for her big close-up. She had dyed blond hair and a mean face. Maybe her face had been pretty once in a cheap kind of way, but now it was just cheap and mean. Her lipstick was too red, and she wore too much makeup on her cheeks and too much whatever that stuff was called-mascara-under her eyes. She wore a blue suit, skirt and jacket, that might've been meant to give her some style. It didn't. She had too much ass for it, especially the way she swayed.

  She came to the edge of the bed. She gripped the gun tight, kept it trained on Weiss's midsection. Weiss didn't like it. He had a temper. He got angry when people pointed guns at him. Guns, knives. They just pissed him off somehow. Chalk's smirky little smile didn't do much for his mood either.

  "Where do you want it, fat man?" said Adrienne Chalk.

  "Put that down or I'm gonna slap you," Weiss told her.

  Adrienne laughed. "Slap me? I'm gonna shoot you, you dumb shit. No court in the world'd convict me."

  Weiss slapped her-a good one with the back of his hand. She fell over onto the bed. He reached down and took the gun away from her.

  "You son of a bitch, you hit me!" she gasped.

  He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket. He kept his hand on it. "So what? You been hit before, haven't you? Sure you have. I'll bet you been hit plenty."

  "You bastard," said Adrienne Chalk. "How about I start screaming?"

  "You start screaming, I'll shoot you," said Weiss-which he wouldn't have, but how the hell was she supposed to know?

  She touched the side of her mouth. Looked at her fingertips. Either her lip was bleeding or her lipstick was smeared, Weiss couldn't tell which. Neither could she, it looked like.

  She sat up on the bed slowly. "Ya fuck," she muttered.

  Weiss shook his head. What a world. People pulling guns on you. Women pulling guns, for Christ's sake. He could never shake the idea that women ought to be better than that somehow.

  If anyone could've changed his mind, it would've been this prize piece of work. He stood, looking down at her. He searched her face for any sign that she could be Julie's mother. He didn't find any, but then he didn't want to find any.

  "All right," he said. He leaned back against the wall. He had his hands in his jacket pockets, one hand on the gun. "What is this?"

  " Aaah, " she said, angry. She wiped her sore lip with the meat of her hand.

  "I mean it. You pull a gun on me?"

  "I should've shot you. I was going to. I just wanted to see you sweat first."

  "What the hell?" said Weiss with a laugh. "No, I mean it.

  What the hell? You leave the door open like that so I walk in and then you're gonna shoot me?"

  "I saw you coming. I saw you from the window."

  "So what? You don't even know me, you crazy bitch."

  " Aaah, " she said again. "I know enough. I knew you were coming, didn't I? Someone like you. Some thug he'd send."

  Weiss made a ch sound, air between his teeth. "I'm a thug now? What is this?"

  "I know what you are." Adrienne Chalk looked him over. Meanwhile, she worked her jaw with one hand to make sure it still worked. Weiss was large and powerful, and he'd slapped her hard. "You're some private investigator type. Am I right? Ex-cop, you look like. I know. Nice, respectable people, they slip you an envelope, you make things go away. Anything that doesn't fit the nice, respectable picture- poof! right?-they pay you; it's gone. He'd like that, I bet. Mr. Nice Respectable. With his wife and kids and his house and his church and whatever bullshit. He'd like it if I just went away. Well, you go back and you tell him he can forget it. 'Cause guess what? I'm his memory. I'm all that's left of Suzanne, and I'm the price he pays for his nice respectable life. And if he don't like it, he can go fuck himself and so can you."

  Weiss listened, leaning against the wall. He looked at her. Sitting on the bed with her legs curled under her. Snarling at him with the fat lip he'd given her. What a skank she was. Was it possible she was talking about Andy Bremer? She thought Bremer had sent him to make her disappear, was that it?

  Weiss asked her. "You mean Bremer? You think Andy Bremer sent me? The Realtor guy from Hannock?"

  Chalk sneered and eyed him sideways. For the first time, she seemed unsure of herself. "What're you talking about? Obviously Bremer. I saw your plates, the California plates. Who else do I know in California?"

  Weiss cocked his head. "You see a lot, I'll give you that."

  "I knew what he'd try. Fuck you. You tell him: 'Fuck you,' I said. And fuck you too."

  She massaged her jaw with her hand some more. Weiss considered her. His temper had cooled now. He was sorry he'd hit her. But not that sorry. The skank.

  "So let me get this," he said. "Every two months you show up at the Hannock Super 8 and Bremer pays the tab. Now you figure he sent me to make you go away?"

  Chalk kept eyeing him, snarly and uncertain. "You trying to tell me Bremer didn't send you? How come you know all about him, then? Huh? Who are you? If he didn't send you, who did?"

  But Weiss was ahead of her. It was coming clear to him now. "I get it. You're blackmailing him, right? Is that it? All that stuff about you're his memory. You're the price he pays. You got something out of his past, and you're blackmailing him with it."

  "Fuck you. Who are you anyway?"

  "What is it? What've you got on him?"

  "What're you, a cop?" said Adrienne Chalk. "You're no cop."

  "Who's Suzanne? You said you were all that's left of Suzanne. Who's she?"

  Spit fizzled between Chalk's lips as she glared at him.

  Weiss made a noise. He pushed off the wall, straightened. He lumbered along the side of the bed, big in the narrow passage. Chalk scrambled away from him to the far side of the mattress.

  "You keep away from me!" she said.

  Weiss didn't answer. He went to the bedside table. He pushed the romance novel aside. A Ring for Cinderella, my ass, he thought. He lifted the first manila envelope underneath, opened it, looked at the papers in it. Sex stuff, money stuff, stuff from one of the strip clubs across the street. Femme Fatale was right.

  "You work in this place?" he said over his shoulder.

  "Yeah. So what?"

  "You blackmail the guys who come in here too."

  "So what?" she said. "Some of them."

  He picked up the next envelope. It hit the brass ashtray. The ashtray fell to the wooden floor with a clang. It spilled butts and ash over the floorboards. In the envelope, sure enough: photographs. Guys with topless women on their laps. Grainy printouts, from a phone camera probably. Addresses, web pages. All kinds of information on these poor hard-ons.

  "That's my shit," Adrienne Chalk protested. "I got copies. I got plenty of copies, believe me."

  "I believe you. Who's Suzanne?"

  Weiss went through the loose papers, tossing them aside. They floated down to the floor to lie on top of the envelopes. Finally the table was empty.

  He rounded on Chalk. "Come here," he said.

  "Stay away from me."

  "This is all small-time shit. Husbands getting lap dances. This is penny-ante shit. No one pays good money for this. If you think Bremer's coming after you, he's paying you good money. What've you got on him? Who's Suzanne?"

  "Fuck you. I don't have to tell you nothing."

  But she was scared. Her eyes moved. Weiss saw it. Her eyes moved to the cabinet on the lower half of the table. She was scared and she couldn't help herself. Weiss pulled the cabinet open.

  "Hey," she said. "Hey. That's my shit. I got copies."

  He found another bunch of manila envelopes in there. He pulled one out.

  "Gimme that," said Adrienne Chalk.

  She made a move to come toward him on the bed. Wei
ss cocked his hand at his ear as if he'd hit her again. He would have hit her again. He was well past ready. He'd had enough of her. She scrambled back out of his reach.

  He opened the envelope. He pinched the sheaf of papers inside, tugged it out. He scanned the paragraphs, lifted the pages, looked at the photos. He went over the whole story, his stomach churning. Jesus, he thought. Jesus.

  "Suzanne Graves," he said, reading the name off the newspaper printout. "What was she? Your sister?" He got no answer. He glanced up. "Listen, I'm sick of you. Don't fuck with me. What was she, your sister?"

  "Half," grunted Adrienne Chalk, sulky. She touched her hair as she said it. She shifted where she was sitting and sort of posed for him, arching her back, showing off her tits, which were all right. She must've sensed Weiss was looking her over, comparing her to the photos of Suzanne Graves. Graves was prettier, a lot prettier. Which gave Weiss another lurching pain in his belly. Suzanne Graves not only looked like Adrienne Chalk with her pinched, mean features; she also had the high cheeks and the fine complexion and the slightly uncanny gaze that made her look like Julie Wyant too. It was easy to see the truth. Adrienne Chalk wasn't Julie's mother. Her half sister was; Suzanne Graves was.

  "That's a crap way to die," said Weiss, rapping the printout with his knuckle. "Got her head caved in with a clawhammer, it says. That's a crap way to die."

  "While she was asleep," Chalk spat angrily. "He just crept up on her in her bed while she was asleep."

  Weiss read from the printout. "'Police are hunting the dead woman's husband, Charles Graves.'"

  "Look at the picture," said Adrienne Chalk.

  Weiss had already looked. He saw how it was. The photo-captioned: "Charles Graves, wanted for questioning by the police in the murder of his wife"-showed Andy Bremer as a younger man. So Bremer had been married to Suzanne. They'd had Julie together and another daughter too, according to the paper. Then, when Julie was maybe thirteen or so, Bremer had murdered the girls' mother in her bed. Crept up on her while she was sleeping with a clawhammer in his hand and pounded her skull until her brains burst out onto the pillow. Nice. Weiss thought about Bremer the way he was now. Doing the dishes in the kitchen. Joking around with his wife and children. Singing in church. Nice.

  "He killed her, huh," he said aloud. "He killed his first wife."

  "My sister. That's right."

  "In Ohio, this was?"

  "In Akron, yeah."

  "Seventeen years ago, it says."

  "So what? She's still dead."

  "Right. She's still dead."

  He tossed the envelope onto the bed. Adrienne Chalk seized it, clutched it to her breast protectively. Weiss walked back around the bed to the window. He looked out and down on the street of strip joints, the blinking signs. Femme Fatale. Gangster Pete's. What a world. He checked his gray Taurus, sitting at the curb, dull and dependable as an old nag under the blinking sign for The Black Hand. He scanned the faces of passersby, looking for that one face he could not remember.

  Finally, he turned to Chalk. Propped his butt on the windowsill. Looked her over.

  It made her nervous. "Who are you?" she said. "Who sent you, if Bremer didn't? What're you gonna do to me?" It was more than nervous. Weiss could see she was really scared now. She didn't know anymore what he was here for. Maybe he wanted to move in on her, shake her down, steal her stuff. Maybe he even wanted to kill her. She didn't know.

  Good, Weiss thought. Let her worry. It'd make it easier to get the whole story out of her.

  "You're something, all right," he said. "You're a real piece of work. I gotta hand it to you. Seventeen years ago, Bremer kills his wife and gets away with it. Runs off, changes his name, gets married again, starts a new life. And all that time, you look for him; you hunt him down. Seventeen years you wait for the chance to put the squeeze on him."

  "I didn't look for him," said Adrienne Chalk. She kept her eyes on Weiss all the while, watching him, scared, not knowing what he was here for, what he would do. "I wouldn't've known where to start. One of those things just happened. You know the way things happen sometimes? A couple of years ago, I saw Charlie's picture in the paper. Some kind of convention, some kind of charity thing. The Children's Charity, that was the name of it. People from all over the country were in Albuquerque for it, and there was some guy from Reno there. So they had him, the guy from Reno, they had him in the local paper. And in back of him-in the picture in back of him-there was Charlie, big as life. With one of those name tags, you know. Andy Bremer. So I went on the computer and found him. That was it. It just happened."

  Weiss laughed. "Beautiful. So the guy's giving to charity-you figure he must have money, right? You go to California; you find him with his new name and the wife and the house and everything. It's a perfect setup. Enough of this penny-ante shit, right? Bremer has to pay you real money and keep paying you or else you send him to the Graybar."

  Adrienne Chalk gave a jerky, nervous shrug, always eyeing him. "Well, why should he just get away with it? Right? All his Mr. Nice Respectable shit. Like you said. He's got the house, the wife, the kids. He's got money enough to give it away to charity. I mean, my sister's fucking dead."

  "Your sister's dead!" Weiss sneered. What a skank. What a piece of work. "Your sister's dead-you go to the police."

  "What good is that to me? The police. My sister's dead and he gets the good life? What're the police gonna do?"

  He shook his head. "You're something. You really are."

  "Look," she said. Her tone changed suddenly, went softer. "Look. Who are you? What do you want? You want money? I mean, we can work something out. I got this, I got a couple other things going. We could even work together on some of this." She lifted her chin. She posed her tits for him again. "You might like working with me, you know. There might be benefits…"

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Weiss. "You'll blow me; you'll cut me in-whatever. Fuck you. Here's what I want. This woman, your sister, Suzanne. She had two kids, right? Two daughters. The newspaper doesn't say their names."

  "The daughters?" Chalk said-there was a hopeful, calculating note in her voice. She hadn't been thinking about the daughters. She didn't care about the daughters. If Weiss was here about them, maybe it would be all right. "Mary and Olivia-Livy."

  "Mary and Olivia. What happened to them? Where are they?"

  Adrienne Chalk hesitated. Weiss could practically hear her thinking. Trying to figure what she could get out of him for this. "How would I know about that?" she said.

  "You know," said Weiss. "This didn't just happen. You kept tabs, kept watch. Sat on top of it until it broke right for you. You're the sister. The aunt. Bremer killed his wife and booked it, left the kids behind. It would've been easy for you to find out where they went, keep watch on them, in case maybe he got in touch."

  Chalk seemed about to lie again but must've given up on it. "You see a lot yourself, don't you?"

  "Where are they?"

  "What's in it for me?"

  "I go away."

  She snorted.

  "All right," said Weiss. "I don't go away. I go to the police. Bremer goes down for murder; you go down for blackmail. It's nothing to me."

  That got her. She thought it through. "How do I know you won't tell the cops anyway?"

  "Because why would I? I just want the girls. You and Bremer can torture yourselves to death, for all I care. You deserve each other."

  Adrienne Chalk thought it through some more. "They took the daughters into homes," she said then. "After Suzanne was killed and Charlie booked it, the daughters got taken into foster homes, and like that. The older one, Mary, she went bad, ran off. I don't know where she is. I don't, I swear. The younger one, Livy, Olivia, she's in Phoenix. She's a-whattaya call it?-like a counselor, a shrink or something."

  "Olivia Graves-is that still her name?"

  "Yeah, that's right. She's not married or nothing. Olivia Graves."

  Weiss pushed up off the windowsill. "Thanks," he said. He took A
drienne Chalk's revolver out of his pocket. He tossed it onto the bed. It bounced on the mattress next to her legs.

  In a flash Adrienne Chalk threw the envelope aside and pounced on the gun. She snapped it up with both hands. She pointed it dead at Weiss. "You never should've slapped me, you son of a bitch," she said. She pulled the trigger.

  Weiss was already walking to the door. He already had his hand in his jacket pocket again. When the hammer of the 500 snapped down, he paused and turned. He shook his head. He brought a fistful of bullets out of his pocket. He flung them in Adrienne Chalk's face. One hit her; the rest flew all over the room, pattering on the wood floor.

  "What a skank," Weiss muttered.

  The bullet that hit Adrienne Chalk fell on the mattress and rolled under her knee. She was furiously trying to dig it out, get ahold of it, trying to shove it into one of the cylinder's chambers as Weiss left the apartment and shut the door behind him.

  24.

  Later it came to him, in the desert, in the dark. He knew what he had to do.

  He'd been driving for hours and hours by then. Pushing on, relentless, through relentless emptiness. Rain came be- fore night fell, a slashing downpour. Then night fell under stuttering thunder. Awesome threefold barbs of lightning jagged from the core of the vast sky to the horizon. The desolate land lit up-endless desolation at every window, in all directions-and then vanished into desolate darkness… the sheeting rain on the windshield… the wipers working back and forth.

  Weiss drove on, tired, tired. It was hard going. Hard to see anything, hard to make any time. Hour after hour, slogging through the rain. He gripped the wheel, peered into the night.

  He thought about Julie.

  The Graves family had been poor. That's what Chalk's old newspaper stories said. The father, mother, and two daughters lived in a cramped, dilapidated house on the edge of the east city. The father had worked in a tire warehouse before the company shut down. Afterward, he mostly did odd jobs, off the books, hauling and lifting for whatever outfit would use him. The mother, Suzanne, was a drunk and a meth addict-a whore, too, when she needed money for the drugs. Otherwise, she worked in the local Hoffman's department store from time to time.