The Bum's Rush (29 page)

"Maybe I'm losing my touch."

"What you must be losing is your voice."

"What?"

"Nobody down in the square remembers one damn thing
about you trying to turn up any woman named Selena Dun lap. Not one.
Not a bartender. Not a regular. Nobody. I sent George and Ralph down
there today, and you know--they came up just drier than hell." He
looked to his left at George, who met his gaze and then reached around
him for the schnapps.

"So what?"

"So, just this week, some guy nobody ever saw
before, some gorilla, managed to damn near find old Selena in one day's
time. Kicked up her flop. Smacked a couple of her friends around. What
do you make of that?"

He turned back my way. "What are you, the better
business bureau? So what if I took the kid's money? Maybe I didn't hoof
it all over. What business is that of yours?''

"I'm making it my business, Charlie. I'm making it
my business to find out what you spent your time doing when you were
supposed to be out looking for the kid's mother, and I'm not going away
until I'm satisfied. If that fucks up your present gig, so be it. The
way I see it, that kind of depends on you."

I could almost see the gears turning in his head. "Why you all over my ass?" he demanded. "What have I ever done to you?"

"Because, sometime about when you were supposed to
be looking for the kid's mother, somebody got nervous enough about
something to slip Lukkas Terry enough heroin to kill a cow. And I think
whatever in hell it was you were doing is what set it off."

He showed me a palm. "I don't know nothing about no death. You got that? Nothin'." He took a deep breath.

"I never said you did."

He wiped his hands down over his face and walked
out into the seating area. "Okay," he said. "So I didn't look for the
woman. Maybe I'm not Sam Spade. So what?"

"What happened?"

"Well, you know, like I told you, the kid didn't
have a goddamn dime. Took me over to his agent's place. Had this big
old party going on." He stopped. Considering his options. "So we just
get there, all these fucked-up people milling around, and the kid gets
lost. Leaves me standing around with my thumb up my ass. Turns out
later he's downstairs fucking around in this recording studio they got
right there in the house. I mean, you oughta see this place. Christ.
I'm wandering around checking out the sights when this Conover guy
takes me into his office. I figure he's either gonna write me a check
or throw me out, right? But instead he up and asks me what I know about
the kid, and I tell him I know nothing. Like I'm just being hired to do
a job."

He stopped. Another deep breath. Charlie sat down backward on one of the black chairs, leaning his forearms on its rounded back.

"So?" I pushed.

"So the guy goes into this big song and dance.
Tells me this sob story about the kid. About this really weird life
he's had. All alone in the world. How he's more like a father to the
kid than a manager. How the kid is wired real tight, and how concerned
about it he is and how he, first off, don't think the kid really saw
his mother and how, second off, he don't think the kid's any way
capable of handling anything as traumatic as finding out his mother is
a bag lady."

"How much?" I asked quickly.

He almost smiled. "You got a nasty mind."

"How much?" I persisted.

He flashed a certain pride. "Twenty-five hundred."

"Not to look."

He nodded. "Just keep the kid happy and get lost."

"Then what?"

"There's no then what," he said. "That was it. I
took the money and ran." He pushed a finger in my direction. "And I
don't care what you say. You would have taken it too." I didn't argue
with him.

A silence, punctuated by the clink of glass on glass, settled in.

"You remember my aunt Karen?" I said finally.

He knit his brow. "Which one?"

"The one just a little older than me. Used to be married to Bert."

"The one with the ?" He used his hands.

"Yeah, that one."

"What about her?"

"You remember what she does for a living?"

"Sure as hell must be something for the city," he
quipped. "Everybody in your family's out there on the city dole
somewhere. Your old man saw to that."

"Licenses, building permits. Business licenses,
shit like that. That's what she does." I reached into my inside pocket
and pulled out a wad of paper, which I smoothed on the bar in front of
me. I looked over at Charlie Boxer. He looked old. "Before we go
through this," I said, "I want to say again that I'm not the law.
Whatever I might personally think of what you did, it's not my place to
be cleaning up after the cops."

"I told you what I did."

"And you know, Charlie, if it wasn't for this stuff" I tapped the pile of paper "I probably would have just let it go at that."

He didn't say anything, so I asked the question for him.

"It's the liquor license for this place."

His face turned the color of old custard. He
gripped the chair back with both hands. I went on. "It's weird too,
Charlie. Because if some woman hadn't gotten me thinking about building
permits and my aunt Karen, I would probably never have thought to look
it up. Strange how life works, isn't it?"

I thumbed through the pile. "Tell me how I should
interpret this, Charlie, and if it's good, I'll just go away. How's
that?" Stony silence.

"Beginning about three years ago, the city
licensing bureau and the county health department started trying to get
the Red and Black Lounge and its registered owner one Helen Cleveland to clean up a number of serious
health and safety violations." I wet a finger and worked down through
the pile. "They've cited the place here no less than thirteen times.
Bad ventilation. No handicapped access. Sanitation concerns about the
bathrooms." I flipped || through the citations.

I pulled a piece of violet notepaper from amid the
pile. It was covered with a fine and quite precise handwriting. "All
this time Helen has been claiming that the bar barely supports itself,
that she is crippled and has to hire help, and there is no way she
could possibly get the place up to code. Asked the city to work with
her."

I pulled out a piece of city stationery. I waved it
at the inert Charlie Boxer. "And, believe it or not, the city actually
tried to help. They came up with a bare-bones renovation plan. They
estimated it would come to about fifteen thou to get the place up to
snuff and made some suggestions as to contractors. Pretty nice of them,
I thought."

I looked over at Charlie. He didn't seem to agree.
He was doing uninterested. I fanned the pile of paper. "To make a long
story short, about three months ago, the city, as cities will do,
finally lost its patience and gave your Miss Cleveland ninety days to
get up to code or get out of business. Guess what?"

Apparently, Charlie wasn't in the mood to guess, so
I helped him out. "On March fourth, a mere twenty-five days before the
place is going to be padlocked, out of the blue, like a gift from the
heavens, Helen Cleveland suddenly finds the cash to get the place fixed
up. She beats the deadline. Spends twenty-five grand on repairs. The
place looks great. The city's happy. She's happy, and" I let it hang
"your name suddenly appears on the license as half owner. Wadda you
think of that?"

"A major step up,'' said George.

"A dream come true," agreed Ralph.

"Must be his animal magnetism," suggested Judy.

"Isn't it weird how all this stuff Lukkas Terry's death, the remodeling of the bar, all this shit coming down at the same time?"

"Get the fuck out of here," Charlie said, rising to his feet. "I don't have to talk to you. Get out of here."

I stayed where I was. "Call the cops," I suggested. "So, what did you think when the kid turned up dead?"

"Go on, get out of here."

"You gonna try and tell me it didn't cross your mind?"

"I'm not telling you anything."

"I know, Charlie, and the bad news for you and your little love nest here is that I'm not leaving until you do."

For a brief second I thought the little guy was
going to rush me, but the moment of anger washed completely through
him, leaving only resignation behind.

He wandered about. There were tears in his eyes. He
held out his arms. "I can't lose this, man. This is all I got. My whole
future."

"You didn't believe a word Conover told you, did you?"

His anger came flooding back. "He was full of shit.
Twenty-five hundred not to work. Just 'cause he was such a nice guy.
Who the fuck was he kidding, anyway? Thought he could con a Conner."

"What did you do?"

"I started to look anyway. That's when Frank and
Judy saw me. At first I thought I'd see if maybe I couldn't turn the
woman. You know, see what it was was making him go jumpy about turning
her up."

"And then?"

"Then I had a better idea. I figured, what the hell, I'd been paid, I might as well put in a little time, so
I camped out up the street from that mansion of his and followed him
around."

"The whole week?"

"Yeah. The whole week."

"Don't make me pull this out of you, Charlie. Let's get this thing over with as quickly as possible."

He seemed to be ready for it to end. The last of it
came out of him in a rush. "Auburn. The Muckelshoot Casino. Every day
around three. Stays till around eight and then back home."

"Gambling?"

"With some folks, it's a gamble, but not with him;
with him it's a sure thing. All that son of a bitch does is lose. He
couldn't pick a winner in a one-horse race."

"You saw this yourself?"

He moved to the back of the room now, leaning
against the wall between the rest rooms. "I followed him in. Watched
from the bar. He plays that James Bond game. The one where you try to
make eight."

"Baccarat?"

"Yeah, that's it. I got friendly with a couple of
waitresses who work the tables. Fucker's famous down there. He's the
biggest loser any of them have ever seen. Said it was nothing for him
to lose thirty grand in a weekend. Ten, twelve, easy, four or five days
a week. None of them could even begin to guess the total. Hundreds of
thousands, anyway. That's what they said."

"So you put two and two together, didn't you?"

"Didn't take no genius. We got this high roller,
with expenses through the roof, with a gambling jones that's pissing
away money hand over fist down in Auburn, and he's managing this golden
goose who don't give one flying hit for his money." He shrugged. "So why does
Conover give a shit whether the kid finds his mother or not? Unless of
course he's so deep into the kid's pockets that he can't afford any
change at all in the status quo."

"So you shook him down."

"He didn't take much shaking," Charlie Boxer said
quickly. "He's a smart boy, that one. I knew what I needed. I didn't
get greedy. 1 kept my end reasonable. He could see right away that if
he paid me off, I was going to be in no position to come back at him.
I'd probably have done more time for the extortion end than he ever did
for skimming the kid. Just good business, really," he said finally.

"And when Lukkas Terry turned up dead? What, it never crossed your mind? You gonna try to run that shit by me?"

"What crossed my mind's none of your damn business."

"Sure turned out to be Lukkas Terry's business."

"The kid was crazy as a shithouse rat, Leo. Had
whole talks with himself. Just sittin' there. No telling what mighta
actually happened. What is it you want from me anyway, huh?"

It was my Catholic upbringing. I wanted contrition.
Instead, I bit my tongue. I want to tell the old man that he may as
well have just shot the kid himself. That just walking up and blowing
Lukkas Terry's brains all over the wall might have been kinder and
gentler. But I didn't. Instead I said, "Hope this works out for you,
Charlie."

It looked like a time warp. As if some ancient
wandering band of Goths had suddenly stumbled into a modern dining
room, found the fare to their liking, and begun setting up their hide
tents.

We'd had to put both extra leaves in the table,
which now spread out before us like the banquet plank of some medieval
keep. The five chairs on the left side were occupied by George, Harold,
Big Frank, Judy, and at the far end, Normal, towering up into the
morning light as if he were sitting in a booster chair. At the foot of
the table, Ralph shoveled scrambled eggs into his yawning mouth. The
better part of an egg and a half adorned his faded shirtfront. As a
fellow spiller, I knew in my heart he'd get to it later.

Selena sat next to Ralph and across from Judy. Way
up at this end, Beth Goza sat directly across from George. She and
Selena had been allotted the extra bedrooms. Everybody else had bunked
in the basement, whose palatial appointments had been the major topic
of breakfast conversation prior to the arrival of food.

Duvall had elbowed me awake a bit after seven. "This is your party, Sherlock. I suggest you beat feet to the store."

I'd begun to protest. "There's some eggs and stuff, isn't there?"

"There's no nothing." She kneed me in the back.
"I've never seen anything like it. They're like locusts. They got the
last of the rice and canned peaches at two." Another knee. "Norman used
my pottery project for dip. It was hideous." She elbowed me again. This
time harder. "Go to the store."

I went. But not before I called Jed. My turn to wake his ass. .?

"Jed James," he said crisply.

Damn. He was up. "Top of the mornin' to ya," I said.

"And to you, my good man."

"Can you come over to Rebecca's?"

"Now?"

"Yeah."

Before he could ask, I filled him in. Mrs. Jolley. The Goza girl. Selena. Charlie Boxer. The whole thing. I heard him sigh.