Drawing Dead (7 page)

“How was the pizza?” Debrowski never had to wonder what to wear. Short, spiky blond hair streaked with blue, thick slabs of mascara, black leather jacket, shredded jeans, big black boots, chains and pins and dangling jewelry everywhere.

“Salty and sweet.” Crow looked at her face, small and childlike behind the rock-and-roll facade. “Was your peanut butter okay?”

“I didn't eat. You think they'll have any food there? God, I sure hope so! What kinda party is this? Jesus, Crow, you look even nerdier than usual. You trying not to impress somebody or what?”

“That's pretty close. Actually, the guy owes me some money.” They walked around the house to where his black Jaguar XJS squatted adjacent to the alley. Originally, the car had been a custom-ordered soft pink with matching leather upholstery. Crow had received it in lieu of payment from a former client—a pudgy liposuctionist named Bellweather with a taste for flesh tones. Bellweather had fled town, but he had left his Jaguar—decorated with several bullet holes from a nine-millimeter Glock—behind. Crow's body-shop man, a tall Hmong nicknamed Swede, had plugged up all the holes, then painted the outside of the car black.

Debrowski waited for him to unlock the door, frowning at the fleshy-pink leather interior. “Back to the womb,” she said. Chains jangling, she ducked into the low-slung cockpit and slammed the door. Crow twisted the key, turning the engine over for almost thirty seconds before it hiccuped, caught, and instantly roared up to seven thousand rpm. He waited for the twelve cylinders to settle back down.

“Car sounds all excited, Crow. I never know if I'm going for a ride or about to be digested. You sure you don't want to take my bike?”

“It'll be okay.” He'd been on the back of Debrowski's Kawasaki once and wouldn't forget it anytime soon. He dropped the Jaguar into gear and pulled away from the curb, rear wheels spinning. “It wants to go all the time, like there's a ghost on the gas pedal. I keep taking it in, and they keep charging me more money, but it goes like it wants to when it wants to.”

“Sort of like you.”

“It goes when it goes, though.” He tapped his foot on the accelerator and made her chains rattle.

“Jesus, Crow, when you gonna grow up.” She pulled a Camel out of one of the forty or fifty zipper pockets that decorated her leather jacket and a farmer's match out of another. She struck the match on a zipper and sucked the flame into the end of the cigarette. The tiny interior immediately hazed blue with smoke. “I suppose you're gonna get in another card game and leave me hanging out with a bunch a bozos, huh?”

“If the party's no good, we can leave.”

“We always have so much fun together.”

One thing I like about cats—they know what they want.

—Joe Crow

Most of the men
looked as if they had come to the party directly from their downtown jobs, a lot of gray suits and big black shoes. The women, fewer in number, sported more colorful attire. The scene looked and felt like an office party, men and women who had to work together trying to get drunk enough to like one another.

“Real hip crowd, Crow.”

Crow shrugged and grinned. People were distributed in small clumps around the three-lane lap pool, drinking and talking in loud voices. No one was swimming.

“Which one's your friend?” Debrowski asked.

“I don't see him. Let's look around.”

The party spread throughout the twenty-fifth floor, with groups of people gathered in the hallways. They found Wicky in his crowded kitchen, demonstrating the proper way to mix a martini. He was wearing a pair of neon jams under a Hawaiian-print beach robe.

“Joe Crow!” Wicky said. He handed the half-shaken martini to a woman with glazed blue eyes in a matching pale-blue suit. “Just shake it till you get thirsty, sweets.” He turned back to Crow. “Great! You came! Who is this?”

“My friend Laura Debrowski,” said Crow.

“Call me Debrowski.”

“Great!” Wicky held out his hand; Debrowski shook it, giving her chains a good rattle. “Great jacket,” Wicky said. He looked at Crow. “You see Catfish yet? No? She's wearing this little black dress, hair up on top of her head. You can't miss her.”

“I'll look for her. You think I could get that three hundred from you now?”

“Your consultation fee?” He looked at Debrowski and winked. “The guy costs me six hundred bucks an hour. You believe that?”

“You really charge that much, Crow?” Debrowski asked.

Crow shook his head. “Dickie gets a special rate.”

Wicky laughed, a little too loud, and slapped Crow on the back. “I'll be right back.” He maneuvered his way through the crowded kitchen and disappeared into one of the bedrooms.

“What an asshole,” Debrowski observed. “Who are these people, anyway?”

“Friends of Dickie's, I guess. He's a stockbroker.” The woman to whom Wicky had passed the cocktail shaker was pouring martinis into plastic glasses. Crow looked past her, through the living room, out onto the balcony. A woman in a black cocktail dress was standing at the railing smoking a cigarette, looking out over the Mississippi River. The sky beyond was the deep gray of dusk's final moments.

Something in her shape, or in the way she smoked the cigarette, made him want to keep looking at her. Her hair was black, like her dress, and her skin looked flushed, as though she had spent the afternoon in the sun. She had an extraordinarily long neck. Debrowski was complaining about the music, some new-age stuff with a rock-and-roll backbeat. Crow said, “Uh-huh,” but kept his eyes on the woman on the balcony, who he had decided must be Catfish Wicky. He was watching her when she turned and looked into the apartment. Her eyes raked over the crowded room and caught his. To his own surprise, Crow looked quickly away.

“You hear this kind of shit in grocery stores,” Debrowski was saying.

“What?”

“Muzak, Crow. Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry. Where'd Dickie go? I have to take care of some business.”

“You didn't tell me we were here on a collection call. Do I get a piece of it?”

Some time later, Crow found Wicky in one of the bedrooms, laying out a few lines of cocaine. The sight hit him like a bellyful of cold; he took a quick step back and collided with the martini woman.

“Hey!”

“Sorry,” Crow said, turning and making his way back out into the living room. Debrowski had disappeared, and Catfish Wicky was no longer on the balcony; Crow took her place, watching the line of headlights streaming up and down the East and West River Roads, trying to erase the image of the white lines of coke from the screen in his head. He imagined himself walking back into the room, Wicky handing him a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill, clapping him on the back, offering him the biggest, fattest, purest line in creation. . . . Crow shook his head violently, dislodging the fantasy, forcing himself to watch the traffic twenty-five stories below. “That was before,” he said out loud. “This is now.”

“Hey, Crow.” Wicky's voice. Crow took a breath and turned to face him. Wicky was holding out his hand. “Sorry, I got hung up. Three hundred, right?”

“Right.” Crow took the cash, three hundreds. The top bill was curled up, as if it had recently been rolled into a tube. Crow folded the money and pushed it into the front pocket of his jeans.

“Where's your girlfriend?” Wicky asked.

“I don't know.”

“Maybe she's out by the pool. You see Catfish yet?”

“The little black dress, right? Yeah, I saw her.”

“She's really something, isn't she?”

“I didn't get that good a look at her.”

“You hang around very long, you'll get a real good look. I guarantee it.”

Debrowski was not at the swimming pool. Crow leaned against a cool tile wall and watched a very drunk woman explaining to a very drunk man how drunk he was. The couple stood unsteadily near the edge of the pool, taking turns talking, arms churning in dangerous gesticulation. Crow thought it was close to a sure thing that one or both of them would fall in before the night was over—about six to five that the man would get wet first. He was enjoying this thought when he felt something warm behind him. Turning his head, then his body, he looked into a pair of uneven black eyes. She was too close; he stepped back and crossed his arms.

Catfish Wicky smiled, thick red lips stretching across small, even teeth. Crow thought, again, what an odd-looking woman. Something about her features—their relative size or shape, maybe—was alarming, as though at any moment he might discover that she had two different-color eyes (though both now looked solid black), or that her nose had the wrong number of nostrils (but he counted two), or that her teeth had been sharpened. And perhaps they had. He had the strong sense that her parents ought not to have met.

“Do y'all find me attractive?” she asked.

Crow's eyes went to her lips. They looked swollen and soft, as though she had just been making love. They seemed to add a soft Southern buzz to the words passing between them. He remembered the way his lips had once felt after eating a wide bowl of peppery crawfish etouffee somewhere far south of New Orleans in the toe of Louisiana, some low, tangled place where humans mated with swamp creatures. Crow's eyes dropped to the spray of freckles across the tops of her breasts and tried to make sense of her question. Did he find her attractive? One thing he knew for sure: he was no way going to answer it.

She took a step toward him. “I saw you watching me,” she said. “When I was on the balcony you were looking right at me. My name is Cat Fish.” She said her name distinctly, tearing it apart, making two separate words. “Do you know me?”

“No.” She was not a person he would forget.

“What's your name?” She smelled of cigarettes and spice.

“Joe Crow.”

She swiveled her head slowly, taking in the room. “People are so boring, Joe. I get so bored I want to take my clothes off and scream. I saw you were watching me, Joe. I thought I'd better introduce myself. I don't mind if you look at me. I kind of like it.”

Crow thought it safest not to reply. There was something odd about the way she talked, as if her accent and her speech mannerisms had come to her late in life. It was there, and then it wasn't. Catfish smiled and punched him lightly on the arm. “y'all come on over here, Joe Crow. I want to show you something.” She grabbed his wrist with a hot, dry hand and pulled him toward a door at the far end of the pool area. Crow made a feeble attempt to disengage, but her grip was determined; he let her guide him down the length of the room.

The door led into a game room with a Ping-Pong table, a pool table, and three card tables. A noisy group of men was gathered two deep around the pool table. “The lady says she's hot,” he heard. “She wants those bones, cool her down.” Then he heard a familiar jangle of metal links being shaken together and Debrowski's husky voice: “Come
on
you mother
fucker
. . . yes! Four-three for me!” Then a man's voice: “You sure you never played this game, lady?” and a chorus of male laughter.

Catfish was beside him, still gripping his wrist. “That's who y'all were looking for, right?”

Crow nodded, moving around the table, Catfish staying with him. He decided that the problem with her voice was that she didn't say “y'all” like a real Southerner. The contraction came and went, as though she was using it consciously. But the buzz in her voice, the sound of forgotten French, sounded real. Cajun? Now he wasn't sure. Debrowski was at the end of the pool table, shaking the dice hard in both hands. “Shake them puppies, baby, heat 'em up,” urged a flushed young man, his unknotted maroon-and-black rep tie hanging over the lapels of a light-gray suit.

“I's born in sixty-one, six-one for the vix-un! Yeah!” Debrowski let the dice fly, pitching them hard down the length of the table, bouncing them off the chests of the men crowded against the opposite end. Six and one: seven spots. “Yes!” She thumped her fist on the table and collected from three of the bettors.

“How are you doing?” Crow asked.

Debrowski grinned and gave him the thumbs-up, then her eyes snagged on Catfish and went narrow. It lasted only an instant, and Crow was not sure he hadn't imagined it. Crow watched her throw two more naturals. He tried to keep his mind on the dice, calculating odds, wanting to bet but adhering to his personal proscription on games of pure chance. His body, at the same time, was acutely aware of Catfish Wicky standing close by his side. She was like a furnace; he could feel her body heat warming his entire right side. Her hand, resting lightly on his hip, felt as though it would leave a blistered palmprint.

“Are y'all going to play?” she asked, her mouth inches from his ear.

“I don't play craps. Just poker.”

“Poker's boring. But I bet Dickie could probably get up a game, if you want to play. Dickie loves to lose our money at poker.”

“That's okay.” Crow brushed her hand off his hip. Catfish smiled and crossed her arms over her freckled breasts. Now her eyes were pitched at different angles, and the right one looked noticeably larger. Crow felt as if he was going to fall into it. “Excuse me,” he said, stepping back. He turned and started toward the pool area, came face-to-face with Dickie Wicky.

“Dickie!” Crow was discomfited, as though he had been caught undressed with the man's wife.

Wicky was grinning broadly, showing too many of his peglike teeth, holding a large, frosted glass full of olives and gin with both hands.

“You see what I mean?” he whispered loudly.

“Excuse me.” Crow made a detour around him, headed back through the pool area. The man who had been in conversation at the pool's edge was now standing in four feet of water, wearing his suit, his hair plastered to his skull, still talking to the woman, who sat with her feet dangling in the water. Crow kept moving; he had the idea that a glass of cold water would make the feelings go away, the memories triggered by the cocaine and the sense of inevitability brought on by the heat of Catfish Wicky's body.