Drawing Dead (6 page)

“Cat needs a lot of attention,” Wicky said. “I can't always be there for her. I have to make a living, you know? Like, this last couple weeks I been so busy with this Galactic Guardians deal, I don't know, I don't always get home at five, y'know?”

“Galactic Guardians?”

“That deal I mentioned. Very sexy. You sure you aren't interested in a good short-term investment?”

“Yes.”

Wicky shrugged. “Anyway, I've been working my ass off. One thing Cat knows how to do is spend my money.”

Crow nodded, thinking that Dickie knew how to spend money too. The Rolex on his wrist had probably cost him more than Crow had won in the last three months, and that suit fit his lumpy body so well it had to have been custom tailored. Add to that the silver Mercedes he drove and the money he dropped every week at Zink's card game…

“…you know what I mean?” Wicky was saying.

Crow, who had not been listening, nodded. Wicky had been drawing more lines and shapes. Now there was another triangle, with a dotted line leading to the circle. The new triangle, Crow decided, was cuckolding the Dickie triangle. He remembered now why the symbols were familiar; they were the symbols used by anthropologists to describe familial relationships. So, college had not been a complete waste of time after all.

“Were you an anthropology major?” Crow asked.

“Psychology,” Wicky said. “Are you going to help me?”

Crow shook his head. “I don't know what it is you want me to do.”

“I want you to save my marriage.”

“I couldn't even save my own marriage, Dickie. What makes you think I can help you?”

“You can help me, Joe.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“Cat doesn't like to talk. She's a body person.”

Crow wondered which tabloid personality test had produced that insight. “If you're going to try to catch your wife with some guy—assuming she's seeing anyone at all—it might not do much for your marriage.”

“That's not what I want to do. That's not why I called you.”

“Exactly what is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to talk to the guy she's seeing. I don't even want to know who he is. I just want you to find him and get rid of him.”

Crow jerked his head back. “You want me to kill him?”

“I want you to
pay
him,” Wicky said.

“You want me to pay him,” Crow repeated, somewhat relieved.

Wicky turned to the pad of paper and drew a dollar sign over his wife's lover's triangle. “Pay him to go away,” he said.

Crow cleared his throat and looked off to the side. He felt as if Wicky was showing him a sore on his cock. Paying him to look at it. He was embarrassed to be in this sterile room with this lumpy man, taking his money, looking at his circles and triangles and dollar signs.

“This isn't my sort of thing, Dickie,” he said, wondering as he said it what his sort of thing was.

“Joe, I trust you.” Wicky caught Crow's eyes and held on. “I know you can handle it. Professionally. If I tried to do it myself I'd lose it. I'd kill the son-of-a-bitch. I can sit here and talk about it with you all rational like and calm, but if I saw the guy face-to-face I just don't think I could hold myself back. I'd be like a wild animal.” He paused, his little eyes flickering back and forth over Crow's face.

The image of Dickie Wicky becoming a wild animal was almost too much, but years of poker playing enabled Crow to hold his face rigid.

Wicky continued. “Look, Joe, I can afford to make it worth your while. And you'd be doing me a huge favor. Wait. . .” He held up a palm, halting Crow's refusal. “Don't give me your answer now. I just want you to think about it. Would you do that for me? Think about it?”

The way he put it, it seemed so reasonable and fair. Crow tried to shake his head no, but found himself nodding. Why was he so gutless in the hands of a salesman? Was it the eyes? Later, on the phone, he could say no and he wouldn't have to look at those pale, quivering eyes.

“Okay,” he said.

Wicky stood up and gave Crow's hand a firm, moist shake. “Thanks, Joe. Thanks for listening.”

Crow felt as if he had just paid too much for something he didn't need. Wicky was still holding on to his hand. He clapped his other hand on Crow's shoulder. “Say, do you like to have a good time?”

“Not particularly.” Crow pulled his hand away and stepped back. Wicky held his palms out, facing Crow as though to show him that they were empty, a magician about to perform sleight of hand.

“We're having a little wingding tonight. Lots of food and booze. Or whatever you want. I'll even have some of that fake beer stuff that you drink. Bring a friend if you want, or come alone—there'll be plenty of women there. Besides, it'll give you a chance to get a look at Catfish. Here.” He produced an expensive-looking pen and wrote on the back of a business card. “You know where The Summit is? Where I live? It's right downtown, right on the river. Here's my address and security code. Just buzz yourself in and go right on up to the twenty-fifth floor. We got the whole floor opened up—swimming pool, game room, whatever—so come by anytime.” He held out the card.

“I'll try to make it,” Crow lied, dropping the card in a pocket, not looking at it. “What's the occasion?”

“It's my birthday,” Wicky said. “I'm going to be twenty-seven.”

Crow blinked. Twenty-seven? He would have guessed closer to forty. “Congratulations,” he said, apropos of absolutely nothing.

“Thanks!” Wicky opened the conference room door.

“What about my fee?” Crow asked.

Wicky furrowed his brow, then brightened. “Oh, of course. How much was it?”

“Three hundred.”

“Ouch! You want to flip for it?”

“No, thanks.”

Wicky opened an oversize ostrich-hide wallet, and looked inside. “Oops! I'm gonna have to stop at the bank. I'd write you a check, Joe, but I'd just as soon not have Cat asking me about it. How about I have it for you tonight? Come on, I'll walk you out.”

In the waiting area, Wicky insisted on shaking his hand again. The receptionist was staring into the screen of her word processor, tapping her perfect front teeth with the end of a plastic pen. She looked up, but not at them, and wrinkled her nose as though detecting an unpleasant odor.

Wicky said, “Janet's our best girl, isn't that right, Jan?” Wicky was leering at her.

Janet snapped her eyes at him. Crow could almost hear the eyelashes clatter. She turned back to her machine and began typing furiously.

It occurred to Crow that both he and Janet were there to serve the whims of Dickie Wicky. He felt a surge of empathy and decided to revise his feelings about Janet the Ice Queen. She was who she was for reasons he was beginning to understand. To distract Wicky, he pointed across the room at the Picasso print hanging above the fake-leather sofa. “Is it real?” he asked.

Wicky looked and laughed. “Are you kidding? Nothing in this business is real.”

“I didn't think so.”

“Besides,” he said, “they're getting so good with vinyl there's really no point. It looks just like leather, don't it?”

On
his way home, Crow stopped at a discount electronics store on Lake Street and bought an answering machine. He spent most of the early afternoon getting it hooked up and then trying out an assortment of announcements ranging from the clever to the offensive to the absurd. He soon tired of hearing his own voice and settled for the mundane and minimal.

“Wait for the beep.”

Debrowski
said, “Are you asking me out, or do you just need a chaperone? Don't answer that. Just bang on my door when you're ready; I got nothing going on. I'll be around all night.”

Crow broke the connection. A moment later, the booming from the apartment below returned to its previous level, or perhaps a notch higher. Debrowski, his downstairs neighbor, was a breath of rock-and-roll in a Muzak world. Crow had first met her at Cocaine Anonymous, back when he was going to three, four meetings a week—not because he was afraid of fucking up but because it bored him stupid to be sober alone. Lately, things had been better. He hadn't been to a meeting in over a year.

Laura Debrowski still attended her weekly meetings. Before checking herself into Saint Mary's two and a half years before, Debrowski had looted and all but destroyed her one-woman booking agency, “and had one hell of a good time doing it,” as she put it during one group session. Crow had liked her right away. Debrowski had held on to a bit more fire than most of the CA people. She met her recovery with backtalk, tears, and laughter.

Crow's return to sobriety was more sullen. He was rarely heard from at the meetings. When he confessed to his former profession, the news was greeted by most of the others with hostility. Cokeheads didn't like cops, period. Crow couldn't blame them. He didn't like cops, either.

Debrowski had said, “You don't look like a cop to me, Crow.”

“I'm not now.”

“It shows.”

A few weeks later, pushed out into the gray, pallid world of mineral water, coffee, and cigarettes, they had stayed in touch, doing regular lunches at Emily's Lebanese Deli, where they satisfied a mutual craving for olives, feta cheese, and company of a kind. Friendship formed around the seed of their shared addiction and continued to grow. They discovered in each other a sense of humor so dehydrated that to laugh out loud would cause a joke to crumble. To others, their conversations at Emily's looked serious, even somber, but Crow always remembered them as scintillating, comical, humorous.

Debrowski had rebuilt her booking business within a few months. In the rock-and-roll business it was generally understood that drug problems are a hazard of the trade, and her past was quickly forgotten. She was representing a dozen groups already, including the Coldcocks, Bad Dream Danny, and Bad Beat. Drug-addicted cops were not so quickly pardoned for their sins, and Crow had been drifting from one thing to another for the past two years, none of them real jobs, none of them with even the pretense of permanence. So far he liked it that way. When Debrowski had mentioned the vacant apartment upstairs from her place, Crow abandoned his sterile suburban efficiency and moved into the city.

He didn't want to go to the party, but the idea that Dickie Wicky might be trying to stiff him for a lousy three hundred dollars was sticking in his throat. Going with Debrowski made the prospect a bit more appealing. She kept him from taking people like Wicky—or himself—too seriously. He was comfortable with her. Her boundaries were solid and clear. They were friends. They could go to the party, stay sober, have a good time, and be back in their respective beds by midnight. Besides, there were no good poker games around, and it was Friday night.

If he had a cabin on a lake, he would now grill a few walleye fillets, saute some wild mushrooms, sit and listen to the loons calling. Instead, he dialed Peroni's Pizzeria.

“P'roni's.” Crow could hear crashing pans and loud voices in the background.

“One small anchovy and pineapple, light on the cheese.”

“This must be Crow.”

“Just take it easy on the cheese this time, okay, Jake?”

“Small anchovy pineapple, easy cheese. Got it. Anything else?”

“That's it.”

“You still living in that dump down on First?”

“You calling my place a dump?”

“You kidding? My driver won't go down there 'less I make him a loan a my piece. Oughta drop a bomb on that neighborhood.”

“You don't want my business, Jake?”

“Keep your shirt on, Crow. We'll get you your pizza.”

Forty minutes later, a tall kid with greasy hair and a pizza showed up at the door. Crow asked to see his piece. The kid looked confused.

“Jake didn't loan you his six-gun?” Crow asked.

The kid shook his head and stepped back. Crow took the pizza. It was enormous. “I ordered a small,” he said.

The kid shrugged. “You want I should take it back?”

“Forget it.” Crow handed him a twenty.

“Pizza's sixteen bucks. You want change?”

“Forget it.” He closed the door and carried the pizza into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and made another call to his downstairs neighbor.

“Debrowski here,” she shouted into the phone, rock music pouring across her voice.

“What's that you got on down there?”

“What?”

“This is Crow. What are we listening to?”

“Just a second.” He heard the receiver drop. A few seconds later, the music stopped and Debrowski got back on the line. “Hello?”

“This is your upstairs neighbor. What were we listening to?”

“Bad Beat. I got them booked into First Avenue in front of Concrete Blonde.”

“Congratulations. You eat yet?”

“You gonna take me out to dinner, Crow? This must be a date.”

“I've got more pizza than I can eat here.”

“What kind of pizza?”

“Anchovy and pineapple.”

“Jesus, Crow, you ever hear of sausage and mushroom? Thanks but no thanks. I'll make myself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner.”

“I had that for lunch.”

“Couple of gourmet cooks.”

Crow managed to eat all but three slices, which he folded back into the box and put in the refrigerator. It might start looking good again by morning.

His
first idea was to throw on a jacket and a tie. He was, after all, going there to collect a business debt. But he didn't want to overdress, wind up looking like some nerd. His second idea was to go in shorts and a T-shirt. Crow vacillated for about three seconds between slob and nerd and ended up in jeans, open-collar shirt, and faded black cotton sport coat. He would cover all bases, look like a slob and a nerd. Locking his door, he walked downstairs and pounded on De- browski's door until it opened.