Dead Man (14 page)

When the music ended, Vangie came hurriedly through the curtain wearing only the required cache-sexe, her otherwise nude and
magnificent body gleaming as if oiled. She had to corral Jimmy and send him hustling back to their room before her next show,
and before he…

But Harry was right beside her, his short fat legs trotting to match her long muscular strides. “Baby, you’re terrific! In
two weeks you’ve almost doubled the gross!”

“So double my salary, Harry.”

“Funny! Funny! Listen, baby, how about you be nice to me? I got friends. I can do you a lot of good in this town.”

She had just enough time between numbers to do it if… But Harry’s greedy fingers half cupped the ivory cone of one of her
naked breasts as she tried to get through the dressing room door. She stepped back with a look of utter revulsion.

“Jesus, what a turd!” she said in a low, despairing voice.

Harry crowded her back against the door frame, grabbed her hand, pressed it against the bulging front of his pants.

“Feel it, baby! C’mon, feel it!”

She bent his little finger back, he squealed and let her go as she darted through the doorway and slammed the door an inch
from his nose. She shot the bolt, yelled through the door.

“Go jerk off into a Handi-Wipe!”

Harry smashed the heel of his hand against the wall and turned away with a vicious, congested look. Inside, Vangie put her
head down on her arms. Oh God, for just a little release
from pressure! She raised her head and looked at her reflection in the mirror. The makeup lights made her look garish and
cheap.

“They don’t lie,” she said aloud to her reflection.

She had $2 million in bearer bonds but still had to dance until four in the morning because it wouldn’t be safe to cash them
in for another six months. Two million! Freedom. A way out. Worth whatever it took, worth doing damn near anything. The music
reverberated through the walls and she stood up.

If only Jimmy didn’t bring the hunters down on them in the meantime.

Dain, backlit for a moment by the lights of a turning automobile, looked hulking and pitiless. It was ten o’clock and San
Francisco’s financial district was zipped up for the night except for a few old-style restaurants like Schroeder’s down on
Front Street. As he passed the Russ Building’s inset entrance, Moe Wexler fell in beside him to hand over a small flat packet
a few inches in diameter.

“Great work, Moe. But why all the cloak-and-dagger?”

Moe’s eyes were constantly shifting, probing the empty street ahead and behind them. “When I went to check the apartment bug
tonight, there was another one in place that wasn’t there before.” His roving eyes slid across Dain, were gone again. “Ah… what if we’re talking Maxton here?”

“I thought Maxton didn’t bother you any.”

“Yeah, well, that was talk, this is the real world, like.”

Moe peeled off into Sutter Street. Dain kept going down Montgomery to Market, his face thoughtful.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his loft, a yellow Walkman Sport beside his thigh, listening again to Moe’s tape. Shenzie
listened also, head cocked to one side as if waiting at a mouse hole. The voice talked of the bonds with remarkable clarity.

“Nothing wrong with them, is there?” asked Farnsworth in a jocular voice. “Not forged? Counterfeit? Stolen?”

“Good God no!” Zimmer’s voice was high-pitched and full of fear. A voice that looked over its shoulder as it talked.

“Then take them to our Chicago office and—”

“I’m out of town.”

Farnsworth’s voice said, “Out of town where?”

“N… I can’t tell you that.”

Dain hit the stop button.

“Hear it, Shenzie? Hear the ‘N’ he didn’t quite swallow?”

Dain punched
EJECT
to pop out the cassette. Shenzie reached out a sudden delicate paw and struck the Walkman three times, very quick light blows,
then whirled and ran to the far corner of the bed where he crouched, glaring balefully. Dain ignored the histrionics.

“Just what I told you, cat. Hiding in her life, not his.” He tapped the cassette thoughtfully against his open palm. “But
just who put the other bug on Farnsworth’s apartment phone?”

Shenzie said
meow,
then relaxed his baleful stance to wash himself with a delicate pink tongue. Dain picked up the phone. “You’re gonna visit
Randy for a few days, cat. He volunteered.”

In the Vieux Carré, Vangie and Zimmer walked away from the far sad dying sounds of Bourbon Street. It was four in the morning.
Around them were darkened windows, rumbling garbage trucks, early delivery vans; ahead, a darkened movie theater marquee with
light spilling out across the sidewalk beyond it.

“Jimmy, I thought we’d agreed you’d stay off the street until I could get together another traveling stake for us.”

“I’m taking care of the traveling stake,” boasted Jimmy.

Since the bond theft, their original sexual relationship had developed an almost mother/son dimension. Vangie grabbed his
arm and hurried him toward the light laid across the sidewalk beyond the darkened theater.

“I don’t want to hear this—but I’ve
got
to hear it.”

They passed under the sagging marquee. Half its unlit bulbs were broken. It advertised a triple bill:
Caught from
Behind, Stiff Lunch, Nympho Queens in Bondage.
Beyond was the DELTA
HOTEL—DAY—Week—Month—Maid Service,
with rooms on the upper floors above the theater.

In the rear of the lobby a sallow-faced clerk dozed behind the check-in desk. A huge slow floor fan was trying to stir around
the heat and perhaps shove some of it out the open door. Two shirt-sleeved white men and three black men seeking some illusory
coolness not to be found in their rooms sat there despite the hour, wide-kneed and slack. Vangie half dragged Zimmer back
toward the elevator. Their eyes followed her across the lobby as most men’s eyes would always follow Vangie.

Zimmer was babbling. “See, Vangie, what I did was—”

“In the room, honey.”

“But you have to understand that—”

“In the room.”

It was a room where love and hope would bleed to death, blessedly dark except for street light leaking around the drawn window
curtain. Vangie locked the door, Zimmer switched on the single low-watt overhead. Vangie got a flat brown pint of bourbon
from the dresser, at the sink poured some of it into the glass from the toothbrush holder, added tap water. She leaned against
the sink to face Jimmy with glass in hand.

“Okay, Jimmy,” she said wearily, “hit me.”

“I called Bobby Farnsworth tonight.”

Despair entered her eyes, but somewhere she found a smile to paste on her mouth. “What’d you call him?”

“You know what I mean, Vangie—on the telephone.”

“Okay, what’d you
tell
him?”

“I didn’t
tell
him anything. He told me things. What’s the matter with you anyway?” His voice had a febrile hostility; since he’d found
in Vangie the strength he could never possess himself, he had to rebel against it. “I got the bonds for us.”

“Yes, Jimmy.” She took a big gulp of her drink, made a face. “You got the bonds for us.”

“Now I’m going to get us the money for the bonds.”

“Or get us killed.”

“Why do you always have to belittle everything I do?”
His face was petulant, his voice whiny. “I told Bobby I was out of town with some bearer bonds, and he told me how to convert
them. I didn’t even leave him a phone number or anyplace where—”

“We agreed we didn’t touch the bonds for six months, didn’t we, Jimmy?” Vangie set her glass in the sink. “Here it is less
than three weeks, you’re calling a broker already.”

“It’s easy for you. I’m stuck in this cockroach palace staring at the walls, while you…” His voice had been rising, suddenly
he was shrieking, his face red, veins standing out along the sides of his neck. “While you get your rocks off shaking your
titties for a bunch of fucking rednecks!”

Vangie seized her breasts and squeezed them cruelly. “You think having guys do this to you is fun?” she cried.

Then as fast as it had come, her anger was gone. She shivered and poured the rest of her drink down the sink.

“I know it’s hard for you to be cooped up here, honey, but as soon as I’ve gotten us together a traveling stake, we’ll move
on, I’ll get a waitressing job—”

“And make extra money on your back in the private room?”

She sighed and went to look out the window, standing with one knee on the edge of the bed, her other foot on the floor. It
was an unconscious pose of great grace, a dancer’s pose. Her voice was harsh and strained.

“Why don’t I just split with the bonds and leave you here for Maxton to find? Who the hell needs you?”

“Vangie, don’t talk that way!” He came up behind her, slid his hands under her arms. “Vangie, please, I… I love you. I want…”
His hands cupped her breasts as he kissed the nape of her neck. “I need to make love to you, need to know that…”

She shook him off without turning, irritation in her face.

“Jimmy, Jimmy, there’s somebody coming after us and all you want to do is fuck. Can’t you feel him out there?” “All I feel
is your rejection of me.”

He used his chastised-child voice. Vangie wasn’t hearing.

“Once I saw a deer some dogs had been running, Jimmy. They lost its scent, he came down to the bayou to drink.” She paused
to lay her forehead against the cool window
pane. “Usually deer, they just stay on the bank, sort of nuzzle aside the lily pads and duckweed and dead vegetation to drink.
But those hounds, they’d run this one pretty hard, he wanted fresh water. So he waded out toward the channel…”

“Vangie, I’m sorry, honey. Please don’t… shut me out.”

“Only the little regular splashes a deer makes walking are different from those a muskrat makes swimming or a raccoon makes
wading, and a gator can tell the difference, every time. Up the channel came
ol’
gator, underwater. When the deer waded out to the edge of the channel and put his head down to drink…
Snap!”

She slapped both hands, fingers splayed, against the glass.

“Ol’ gator had him by the nose.” Her palms left long wet smears on the glass. “He drug that deer into the water and gave a
jerkl”
—her hands jerked into fists pressed convulsively against her cheeks— “and the deer’s neck was broke.” She gestured down at
the empty dawn street. “Out there somewhere is
our
gator…”

“Vangie, please…”

She turned to transfix Zimmer with a whisper.

“Waiting to break our neck.”

After his 5:30
A.M.
workout at World Gym, Dain swung back to Tam Valley to pick up Shenzie. He let himself in through the front door, got the
carry case from Albie’s now-deserted bedroom, and went through to the kitchen.

“What?” he exclaimed.

There was a scrabbling of paws as the bandit-faced baby raccoon who was eating Shenzie’s kibble ran to squirm his fat little
butt back out through the cat door in a panic. An outraged Shenzie was sitting on the kitchen counter watching the thief eat,
his white whiskers standing straight out from the sides of his face like a radical acupuncture treatment gone awry.

Dain, fighting the morning rush across the Golden Gate, laughed at Shenzie all the way into the city. He arrived at Mel’s
Drive-in on Lombard just at eight. Mel’s was a deliberate anachronism, an attempt to recapture the fifties feeling of the
original Mel’s on south Van Ness, which had been a huge circular barn of a place with roller-skating waitresses.

On the walls of this Mel’s were black-and-white photos—stills from American Graffiti; Marilyn Monroe at the original Mel’s,
sucking on a malt; waitresses with beehive hairdos, wearing slacks and IKe jackets, serving hamburgers to grinning boys with
duck’s-ass haircuts and packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. A lot of the boys would have died in Korea.

Somewhere they had found old booths of cigarette-scarred vinyl with miniature jukebox selectors on the back wall. You could
flip through deliberately dated original cuts of Frank Sinatra, the Pretenders, Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine—pick your tunes,
drop your quarters, and the Wurlitzer gleaming in pastel yellow and purple and cherry red up by the cash register would play
them for you.

Doug Sherman waved a languid hand around when Dain joined him in one of the booths. “How banal of you, dear boy.”

“Not at all,” said Dain. “Lets you rub elbows with the common man.” He had been finding Sherman extraordinarily smug as of
late. “Have you ordered?”

“Just coffee. I figured once you’d had your little joke, we’d go somewhere to get—”

“This is a great breakfast place, Dougie. The four basic food groups—salt, fat, cholesterol, carcinogens. And
fourteen
Elvis selections on the juke, including ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ On Tuesdays you can join the fun with carhop
waitresses. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“My, aren’t we antic this morning,” said Sherman snidely.

A waitress bustled up on thick ankles, wearing a rustling black nylon skirt and white cotton men’s-style shirt with miniature
black bow tie. She would have been about twenty when the original Mel’s had opened a few years after the war.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes.” Dain decided to do the entire job on Dougiebaby. “And I’m ready to order. Bacon cheeseburger with fries, order of onion
rings, a chocolate shake.” He looked over at Sherman’s ashen face. “You ought to get one, Doug—they’re great!”

“My God!” breathed Sherman. “Do you realize what’s in…”

The waitress chirped at him, “How about you, sir?”

“Nothing, er, ah, a refill on the coffee, and, ah, a glass of orange juice.” She wrote, nodded, started away, Sherman called
after her, “Is that O.J. fresh-squeezed?”

“Yessir,” she piped, aged eyes bright, “I squoze it out of the carton myself just this morning.”

Sherman repeated, “My God,” then turned to Dain with a glint of anger in his eyes. “Why did you really bring me here?”