Madman on a Drum (9 page)

 

I asked Karen if she was hungry. She said she was, so I drove to a vacant lot lit up by the streetlights on the corner of Arcade and East Seventh Street. There was a food trailer like the kind you see at state and county fairs anchored against a wooden fence. It was rigged with tiny yellow lightbulbs and covered with hand-painted scenes of a pastoral Mexico.

“You're kidding, right?” said Karen.

“It has authentic Mexican food,” I said. “The best in town. Unless you prefer Taco Bell.”

I had the impression that she did. Just the same, I parked in the lot next to a Lexus SUV, which was parked next to a Ford minivan, and joined the line. Karen followed reluctantly. The owner, a man named José, stood behind a white folding table loaded with pastel-colored coolers containing soft drinks. He scribbled orders on a pad and handed them through a window into the kitchen inside the trailer. There was a large chalkboard to his right. The trailer served a full menu, yet I recommended the tacos. The tortillas were warmed on a griddle and piled high with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, hot sauce, and your choice of fifteen different kinds of meat, including cow brains. I ordered chicken. Karen requested shrimp. I didn't say anything at the time, but shrimp tacos? Really? That's so Southern California.

There were a few picnic tables with huge umbrellas scattered around the lot, only they were all full, so we ate with the Audi between us, using the hood for a table.

“This is amazing,” Karen said after her second bite.

“What did I tell you?”

“The sauce, though. It's so hot.”

“I like it that way.”

We continued eating in silence until Karen asked, “How do they get away with this, selling food in a vacant lot?”

“The owners get away with it because no one has complained yet. I mean, look. Their customers love them.” The lot was filled with every ethnic group you can find on the East Side: Hispanics, Somalis, Hmong, Native Americans, blacks, and whites, some with money, some obviously without—a true melting pot. “ 'Course, it's only a matter of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sooner or later someone will complain, and the city will step in with their ordinances and permit requirements and zoning regulations and shut it all down. The owners and their customers will protest, yet in the end the city council will explain how it's making St. Paul a better place to live, and that will be that.”

“You're a cynical man, McKenzie.”

“No, I'm not. I'm just having a very bad day.”

Not as bad as the Dunstons,
my inner voice reminded me.

“Do you think Mrs. Thomforde was calling Scottie?” Karen asked.

“Who else would she call? All her friends were sitting at the table.”

Karen took her last bite of taco and washed it down with bottled water. “What do we do now?” she asked.

“If you're up to it, we could visit Lehane's and ask around, see if any of the regulars can give us a handle on this T-Man.”

“What do you mean, if I'm up to it?”

“It's a dangerous place. More Minnesotans have been killed in and around Lehane's than in Iraq.”

“It's not that bad.”

“How would you know?”

“I've been there.”

“Alone?”

“No, I was—all right, I was with police officers looking to serve an apprehension and detention warrant on an offender.”

“Yeah, well, it's different when you have guns. We should get guns.”

“No guns.”

“Karen.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

“They're not going to talk to you anyway, McKenzie. You start asking questions of that crowd and they're going to kick your ass.”

“That's debatable.”

“They might talk to me, though.”

“What makes you so popular?”

Karen's blue shirt was open at the collar. She reached up, undid the next two buttons, and batted her eyelashes at me. “I'm a babe,” she said.

I hadn't thought so when I first met her, but I was beginning to reconsider.

“Oh, this should be fun,” I said.

 

Lehane's was three blocks away from the taco trailer, yet it might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the similarities. For one thing, there were no minorities. Lehane's was whites only, and you didn't need a sign in the window to figure it out. The place reeked of bigotry and hate. Men didn't go there to relax or watch the ball game. They went to Lehane's to nurse their grudges against mankind and to plot their revenge. They went there to rage against the world and their place in it.

Fights were commonplace. When I worked the Eastern District for the St. Paul cops, the very last call you wanted to take was to quell a disturbance at Lehane's. Sometimes you found guys going at it with fists, sometimes with knives, sometimes with guns. That's how Patrick Lehane got his. A slug from a nine-millimeter fired by a customer who refused to take last call for an answer. That was back in the mid-eighties. Since then the bar had changed hands at least a half-dozen times while retaining its name, rowdy reputation, and white-trash clientele.

It was specifically because of Lehane's that the St. Paul City Council adopted what it labeled “a nuisance ordinance.” The statute allowed them to shutter any business they wanted if they could prove “by a preponderance of evidence that the property owners operated in a manner that maintained and permitted conditions that unreasonably annoyed a substantial number of people and endangered the safety, health, morals, comfort, or repose of considerable numbers of the public.” Yet, while the ordinance had been used to threaten and shut down several other less notorious bars over the years, including a pretty decent African American–owned blues joint, Lehane's remained in business. Go figure.

I opened the door and was slapped in the face by the smell of cigarettes and beer and the sour odor of industrial disinfectant. I tried not to react to it. The bartender glanced at me when I stepped inside. His eyes worked me over, wondering if I was trouble, how much, and whether or not he could handle it. From the way he smirked and turned his head, I doubt I impressed him much.

There were six other men in Lehane's. At first glance you would have pegged them as working class, except I doubted any of them actually had a job or filed a tax return. More likely, they all made their living in the so-called underground economy. I would have bet my Audi that each of them had a criminal record.

The men were divided into pairs. One pair sat at the bar near the door, and another sat at the opposite end, as far away from the first pair as possible. The two other men sat at a table in the corner, their heads close together, speaking intently—at least until I somehow interrupted their conversation by moving to the center of the bar. When they spotted me, they both leaned away from each other and frowned. The others looked at me with an expression of casual indifference before returning their attention to the TV above the bar—I could live or die or go to Iowa for all they cared. Maybe it was my clothes. I was overdressed because I was wearing a clean shirt and jeans. Maybe if I went outside and rolled around in the gutter.

Instead of a legitimate sport, they had ultimate fighting on—think professional wrestling with real malice, real violence, and real injuries. The customers didn't seem to be rooting for anyone in par tic u lar, just watching the mayhem, maybe taking mental notes on how to hurt and disable. “Wooooo,” one of them hummed when a fighter head-butted his opponent, hurled him down on the mat, and proceeded to pound his face with a forefist. “I bet that hurts.”

“He's a pussy,” his companion said without indicating which fighter he meant.

The bartender seemed annoyed that I distracted him from the program. He needed a shave and a haircut, his eyes were unsteady, and his belly strained the buttons of his shirt. I set a ten on the bar in front of him and said, “Shot of rye and a bottle of beer. And quarters for the pool table.”

“No bottles,” he said. “Only cans.” A good policy, I decided. Having been attacked with both over the years, I could testify that aluminum cans were definitely less lethal than broken glass.

While the bartender's back was turned, I fished a pack of Marlboros and a brand-new Bic lighter from my pocket. I had bought both at a SuperAmerica store down the street. When Karen asked why, I said, “Props. An actor needs his props.”

I was lighting the cigarette when the bartender set the shot glass and beer in front of me. “Law says you can't smoke in here,” he said.

“What the fuck do I care?”

The bartender gave me a small squat glass to use as an ashtray. “I don't want to see no butts on the floor,” he said, even though the black rubber tiles were already littered with cigarette butts as well as crushed pretzels, peanut shells, and kernels of buttered popcorn. There weren't any baskets on the bar, so I figured the debris must have been what remained of Lehane's happy hour spread.

The bartender took the ten and returned a moment later with my change, including seven quarters. I used four of them to buy a round of pool at the table in the back. I racked the balls and carefully selected a cue from the half-dozen sticks collected in a busted wooden frame screwed to the wall. I found only one that was reasonably straight and still had the tip attached. I was chalking the cue when she walked in.

The men had merely glanced at me, found me uninteresting, and looked away. Karen they studied with the intensity of an astronomer encountering a new celestial body. An unescorted woman in Lehane's? I doubted they could believe their luck. “Hey,” said the guys nearest the door as she passed. One of them patted his pocket, no doubt mentally counting his money, wondering if he had enough to pay her fee.

Karen spoke first to the bartender. The volume on the TV was up, and I couldn't hear the conversation. They spoke for a long time. Or maybe it was just me counting the seconds. More and more I began to feel that visiting Lehane's wasn't the best notion I ever had. If it hadn't been for Victoria, for my dismal failure at learning anything more about where she was and who took her, I would never have done it. Desperation makes fools of us all.

Karen made the rounds after she finished with the bartender, speaking first with the pair of jokers at the door, then the pair at the opposite end of the bar, and finally the men at the small table in the corner. I watched her the way a parent watches a small child at a crowded park while pretending not to, giving the kid her freedom, yet ready to pounce at the slightest provocation.

None of the men blew her off—I wouldn't have, either. They all smiled when she approached, all sat up straighter when she asked her questions, and none of them seemed remotely hostile. Yet all of them looked her up and down and licked their lips as if she were an ice cream cone and it was a hot day. The men nearest the door in particular—they stared at her breasts when she spoke to them, not her eyes, and when she left they tilted their heads so they could get a good look at her ass as she walked away. Instead of smiling, they leered. They called to her when she settled in with the bartender a second time.

“Hey. Hey, honey.”

Karen glanced over.

“What you doin' lookin' for this Mr. T asshole when you could have a real man?”

Karen averted her eyes.

“Seriously, me and Marky can help you out if you're lookin' for a good time.”

“I'll go first,” Marky said. He nudged his pal in the shoulder. “Joey here, he likes sloppy seconds.”

“Fuck you, man,” said Joey.

The bartender chuckled loud enough to be heard over the TV. He said something and laughed some more. Karen smiled weakly. The boys at the end of the bar kept at it. The one called Marky told a joke about the difference between a good girl and a nice girl that cracked up his pal and the bartender. Karen draped the strap of her purse over her shoulder as if she were about to leave.

“No, no, don't go,” said Joey. “How 'bout you let me buy you a drink?”

At the same time, Marky slid off his stool and casually moved to the door.

The bartender backed away from Karen, as if giving his customers plenty of room.

“No, thank you,” Karen said. Her voice was steady and clear.

“What? I ain't good enough for you to drink with?”

“No, thank you,” Karen repeated. She slid her hand inside her bag.

“You fuckin' look at me when I'm talkin' to you.”

Karen didn't look. If she had, she would have seen Marky sliding the bolts at the top and bottom of the door into place.

“Who do you think you're dealin' with, bitch, treatin' me like that? Like I ain't even worth lookin' at?” Joey said. He came off his stool and approached Karen from the edge of the bar. “You ain't friendly at all.”

Marky swung wide so that he could come up on her from behind. The other four men watched from their seats. None of them were looking to get involved in the action, yet I knew that none of them would turn it down when their turn came. As for the bartender, he seemed bored, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes half closed, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

Marky was about three steps behind Karen, who kept looking straight ahead. Joey was an equal distance to her left. They were closing in.

“You know what you need?” Marky said. “You need a good fuck.”

“Hey, pal,” I said.

Marky turned. I was behind him. He had forgotten about me. Everyone had.

He said, “Wha—”

That's all he said.

The pool cue was in my hands. I had rotated it so I was gripping the thin end. When Marky turned I swung it like a baseball bat. It made a loud whoosh as it cut through the still barroom air and then a cracking sound as it exploded against his face, catching him across the upper lip. I felt the contact rippling through my hands and arms and deep into my shoulders as I followed through. Marky's head snapped back and his legs came out from under him and he splashed against the dirty rubber floor, bounced once, and settled among the cigarette butts, pretzels, and popcorn.