Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales (2 page)

The briefing's a no-brainer. This Nola Rockover has had it with her boss. He's a lawyer and a sexual harasser besides, it's a wonder the Democrats haven't tapped him for the nomination. It's her word against his, and he's a partner in the firm, so you know who's going to come out on the short end if she reports him. Her career's involved. Admit it; you'd take a crack at him yourself. That's how you know it's worth investigating. The odd thing, one of the odd things about getting a conviction is the motive has to make sense. Some part of you has to agree with the defendant in order to hang him. It's a funny system.

Getting ready for a sting you've got to fight being your own worst enemy. You can't ham it up. I've seen cops punk their hair and pierce their noses—Christ, their tongues and belly buttons too—and get themselves tossed by a nervous bouncer before they even make contact, which is okay because nine times out of ten the suspect will take one look at them and run for the exit. I know what I said about bars and subtlety, but they're no place for a cartoon either. So what I do is I leave my hair shaggy from the gardening job, pile on a little too much mousse, go without shaving one day, put on clean chinos and combat boots and a Dead T-shirt—a little humor there, it puts people at ease and mostly for my own benefit I clip a teeny gold ring onto my left earlobe. You have to look close to see it doesn't go all the way through, I've spent every day since the academy trying to keep holes out of me and I'm not about to give up for one case. Now I look like an almost-over-the-hill Deadhead who likes to hip it up on weekends, a turtleneck and sport coat on Casual Friday is as daring is he gets during the week. Point is not so much to look like a hit man as in not look like someone who isn't. Approachability's important.

The tech guy shaves a little path from my belt to my solar plexus, tapes the mike and wire flat, the transmitter to my hack just above the butt-crack. The T's loose and made of soft cotton washed plenty of times. Only competition I have to worry about is the bar noise. Fortunately, the Rockover woman's Saturday night hangout is a family-type place, you know, where a kid can drink a Coke and munch chips from a little bag while his parents visit with friends over highballs. Loud drunks are rare, there's a Julie but no band. The finger's a co-worker in the legal firm. I meet him at the bar, he points her out, I thank him and tell him to blow. First I have to reassure him I'm not going to throw her on the floor and kneel on her back and cuff her like on Cops; he's more worried she'll get herself in too deep than about what she might do to the boss. I go along with this bullshit and he leaves. Chances are he's got his eye on her job, but he hasn't got the spine not to feel guilty about it.

The place is crowded and getting noisy, the customers are starting to unwind. I order a Scotch and soda, heavy on the fizz, wait for a stool, and watch her for a while in the mirror. She's sitting facing another woman near the shuffleboard table, smoking a cigarette as long as a Bic pen and nursing a clear drink in a tall glass, vodka and tonic probably. I'm hoping I'll catch her alone sometime during the evening, maybe when the friend goes to the can, which means I don't count on getting any evidence on tape until I convince her to ditch the friend.

So I wait and watch, which in this case is not unpleasant. Nola Rockover's a fox. Not, I hasten to add, one of those assembly-line beauties on the order of Heather Locklear or some other blond flavor of the month, but the dark, smoldering kind you hardly ever see except in black-and-white movies and old TV shows. She's a brunette, slender—not thin, I've had it with these anorexic bonepiles that make you want to abduct them and tie them down and force-feed them mashed potatoes until they at least cast ,a decent shadow—I'm talking lithe and sinuous, like a dancer, with big dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. You're too young to remember Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show. I know you've seen her on Nick at Nite, but your generation's got some fixation on color, so I'm betting you're thinking about that thing she did in the seventies. You had to have seen her in capri pants and a pullover to understand what I'm getting at. If you were a man or a boy, you fell in lust with that innocent female panther, and she was all yours. I mean, you knew she was beautiful, but you thought you were the only one in the world who knew it. Well, that was Nola Rockover.

She was sitting there in this dark sleeveless top and some kind of skirt, no cleavage or jewelry except for a thin gold necklace that called your attention to the long smooth line of throat, and she had a way of holding her chin high, almost aloof but not quite, more like she hadn't forgotten what her mother had told her about the importance of good posture. She's not talking, except maybe to respond to something the other woman is saying, encourage her to go on, except I'm thinking she's not really that interested, just being polite. In any case it's her friend who's flapping her chin and waving her hands around like she's swatting hornets. Probably describing her love life.

Yes, miss, another Chivas
, and how's yours? Sure? Now you're making me look like a lush.

Nola's friend? Okay, so I'm a chauvinist pig. Maybe she's talking about the Red Wings. She's got on this ugly business suit with a floppy bow tie, like she hasn't been to see a movie since
Working Girl
. jogs, drinks bottled water by the gallon and two percent milk, got enough calcium in her you could snap her like a stick. Takes the
Cosmo
quiz on the G spot. One of those goddamn silly women you see walking in sheer hose and scruffy tennis shoes, poster child for penis envy. I'm giving you a better picture of her than Nola, and I never saw her again or learned her name. I'm thinking Nola tolerates her company to avoid drinking alone in public. Maybe she already suspects she's said too much in that condition. You can see I'm kindly disposed to her before I even make contact. There's no rule saying you can't like 'em and cuff 'em. I get Christmas cards, sincere ones from killers and pushers I sent to Jackson. Meanwhile I don't know a lawyer I'd go out for lunch with, and we're supposed to be on the same side.

I watch twenty minutes, my drink's all melted ice, and I'm starting to think this other woman's got a bladder the size of Toledo when she gets up and goes to wee-wee. I give it a minute so as not to look like a shark swimming in, then I wander on over. Nola's getting out another cigarette and I'm wishing, not for the first time, I didn't give up the weed, or I could offer to light her up from the Zippo I no longer carried. Sure, it's corny, but it works. That's how some things stay around long enough to get corny. So I do the next best thing and say, "I hear the surgeon general frowns on those."

She looks up slowly like she knows I've been standing there the whole time, and you'll like what she says. "I don't follow generals' orders any more. I got my discharge." And she smiles, this cool impersonal number that in a book would be a page of dialogue about what a load of crap the mating ritual is, and why can't we be more like cats and get right down to the scratching and yowling. Either that or she's saying go fuck yourself. I'm not sure because I'm too busy noticing what nice teeth she has—not perfect, one incisor's slightly crooked, but she keeps them white, which is not easy when you smoke, and it's good to know there's someone with the self-confidence to refuse to send some orthodontist's kid to Harvard just to look like a model in a toothpaste ad. Her eyes don't smile, though. Even if I didn't know her recent history I'd guess this was someone for whom life had not come with greased wheels.

I'm scraping my skull for what to say next when she throws me a life preserver. "You like the Dead?"

Copy that. Not, "You're a Deadhead?" Which is a term they know in Bowling Green by now, it's hip no more, but most people are afraid not to use it for fear of appearing unhip. The way she doesn't say it, though, tells me she's so hip she doesn't even bother to think about it. I admit that's a lot to get out of four words, but that was Nola, a living tip-of-the-iceberg. Thanks, honey; I like my Scotch good and orange.

I lost the thread. Oh, right, the Dead. I take a chance. Remember everything hangs on how I broach the subject, and the conventional wisdom is never, ever jump the gun. If opening it up standing in front of her table with her friend about to come back any second is not jumping it, I don't know what is. I say: "I like the dead."

That was it. Lowercase, no cap. Which you may argue makes no difference when you're talking, but if you do, good day to you, because you're not the person for what I have in mind. No comment? There's hope for you. Then you'll appreciate her reaction. Her face went blank. No expression, it might have been enameled metal with the eyes painted on. She'd heard that lowercase d, knew what it meant, and quick as a switch she shut down the system. She wasn't giving me anything. Wherever this went, it was up to me to take it there.

"I know about your problem," I said. "I can help."

She didn't say, "What problem?" That would have disappointed me. Her eyes flick past my shoulder, and
I know without
looking her friend's coming. "Have you a card?"

This time I smile. "You mean like 'Have gun, will travel'?" She doesn't smile back. "I'm known here. I'll be at the Hangar in an hour." And then she turns her head and I'm not there.

I confer with the boys in the van, who take off their earphones long enough to agree the Hangar is Smilin' Jack's Hangar, a roadhouse up in Oakland that's been around since before that comic strip folded, a trendy spot once that now survives as a place where the laws of marriage don't apply, which is enough to pay the bills even after it gets around that it's not Stoli in the Stoli bottles but cheap Smirnoff's and that a ten-dollar bill traded for a three-fifty drink will come back as a five-spot more often than not. Every community needs a place to mess around.

So forty minutes later, wearing fresh batteries, I'm groping through the whiskey-sodden dark of a building that was once an actual hangar for a rich flying enthusiast under the New Deal, my feet not touching the floor because the bass is so deep from the juke, looking for a booth that is not currently being used for foreplay. When I find one and order my watered-down Scotch, I'm hoping Nola's part bat, because the teeny electric lamp on the table is no beacon.

No need to worry. At the end of ten minutes, right on time, I hear heels clicking and then she rustles into the facing seat. She's freshened her makeup, and with that long dark hair in an underflip and the light coming up from below leaving all the shadows where they belong, she looks like someone I wish I had a wife to cheat on with. I notice her scent: Some kind of moon-flowering blossom, dusky. Don't look for it; it wouldn't smell the same on anyone else.

"Who are you?" She doesn't even wait for drinks.

"Call me Ted."

"No good. You know both my names, and if we do this thing you'll know where I work. That's too much on your side."

I grin. "Ted Hazlett." Which is a name I use sometimes. It's close to "hazard," but not so close they won't buy it.

"And what do you do, Ted Hazlett?"

"This and that."

"Where do you live?"

"Here and there. We can do this all night if you like."

My Scotch comes. She asks for vodka tonic—I'm right about that—and when the waiter's gone she settles back and lights up one of those long cigarettes. Determining to enjoy herself.

"We're just two people talking," she says. "No law against that."

"Not according to the ACLU."

"'This and that.' Which one is you kill people?"

I think this over very carefully. "'That.'"

She nods, like it's the right answer. She tells her story then, and there's nothing incriminating in the way she tells it, at least not against her. She's a paralegal with a downtown firm whose name I knows having been cross-examined by some of its personnel in the past. Attends law school nights, plans someday to practice family law, except this walking set of genitalia she's assigned to, partner in the firm, is planning even harder to get into her pants. You know the drill: whispered obscenities in her ear when they're alone in an office, anonymous gifts of crotchless panties and front-loading bras sent to her apartment in the mail, midnight phone calls when she's too groggy to think about hitting the Record button on the machine. At first she's too scared to file a complaint, knowing there's no evidence that can be traced to him. Then comes the day he tells her she'd better go down on him if she wants a job evaluation that won't get her fired. These evaluations are strictly subjective, there's nobody in the firm you can appeal to, the decks are stacked in management's favor. The firm's as old as habeas; no rec means no legal employment elsewhere. To top it off, this scrotum, this partner, sits on the board of the school she attends and is in a position to expel her and wipe out three years of credits. Any way you look at it he's got her by the smalls.

What's a girl to do? She's no Shirley Temple, lived with a guy for two years, object matrimony, until she caught him in the shower with a neighbor and threw his clothes out a window—I mean every stitch, he had to go out in a towel to fetch them. So she does the deed on the partner, thinking to hand in her two weeks' notice the next day and take her good references to a firm where oral examinations are not required.

Except she's so good at it the slob threatens to withhold references if she refuses to assign herself to him permanently, so to speak. Sure, I could have told her too, but it's a lot easier from the sidelines. She knew the odds, but she rolled the dice anyway and came up craps.