Fiddle Game (3 page)

In another part of the room, some teenagers were doing a bad imitation of playing snooker, and clowning around about their own ineptitude. Otherwise, the place was empty. There was no jukebox or piped-in Muzak, just the click of the balls and the whir of overhead fans and whatever the players had to say. In that respect, Lefty’s is just like Ames’. You want to be surrounded by sound, go to a rave.

I put the belly of the warped cue stick downward and stroked a nice, clean break. Not a money break. I almost never sink anything on the break, and I’ve given up trying. That’s why I like the longer games—rotation or straight pool—where there’s time for a few wild cards to emerge and enough pauses to work the opposition’s head a little. I studied the spread after the break for a while and decided I was shooting eight ball. Ten shots later, my burger came, in a cute little basket that looked like it was made for holding a fancy wine bottle. The no-name bartender put it down on the window sill, next to my drinks, along with another basket that had napkins, salt and pepper in heavy glass shakers, and ketchup in a wide-mouthed jar instead of one of those plastic squeeze bottles. Lefty’s is a classy place.

I ate about half of the burger, punctuating the last chew of each mouthful with a little bit of alcohol and foam. It was good stuff, and my body was grateful for it, but my eyes kept wandering back to the table. I didn’t consciously decide to put the food down, but pretty soon I was back to staring down the cue stick, sizing up a long, single-cushion shot on the ten ball. Going into my spatial meditation mode.

Shots with a lot of open green are a kind of Zen thing for me. At first, I can’t see the angle and can’t compute my way to it, either. Might as well shoot with my eyes closed. But if I wait, take my time, and sort of
identify
with the space of the setup, suddenly the line will reveal itself to me and I absolutely can’t miss. When I drop the ball, it will look like a lucky fluke, but luck has nothing to do with it. I did a few practice strokes and waited for the line to appear. Did luck have anything to do with Amy Cox? A lot of long green on that table. Much less on Jimmy Cox’s bond. Eighteen K is little people’s dreams, not the stuff of conspiracy or murder. Sixty gets a bit more interesting, but whoever killed Amy wouldn’t actually get their hands on even the eighteen, much less the big money.
Did I use enough chalk? You have to put it on before you go out in the rain. Otherwise it won’t stick, and you’ll wind up like
…Jesus, where did that come from? And why couldn’t I see the line yet?

The felt turned a slightly darker shade of green, and I looked up to see two guys blocking the light from the window. Closest to me, looking as if he expected something, was a big, shapeless, forty-something guy with an oversized head and puffy, babylike features. The kind of guy that will still look like Baby Huey when he’s eighty. Scowl marks by the mouth and eyes told me that he worked a bit too hard at overcoming that image. The other guy was smaller in every dimension, with dark, stringy hair and a gaunt face that looked like a poster for European famine relief. As if he had read my mind, he made a show of eating the rest of my burger.

Both guys had brimmed hats pulled low and semi-respectable topcoats that were bulky enough to hide all kinds of hardware. And they were both working very hard at looking mean and serious. Was I about to be leaned on? What the hell for? I looked over to where Wide Track was still shooting with the Asian kids. If he had picked up on the situation, he made no sign, but then, he wouldn’t. Hollow Cheeks spoke first, while Babyface continued to stare me down.

“Good burger. Get me another one, will you?”

“You think so?” I said. “I put it down after I thought I saw something moving in the onions, but maybe that was just my imagination.”

“Bullshit.” Obviously, not the captain of his high school debating team. I continued to bend over and sight down the pool cue, only now I was visually measuring its length against the distance between me and the big guy.

“You Herman Jackson?” Babyface, this time.

“Who’s asking, exactly?” Too far. I needed to get about two feet closer, for a really effective swing.

“Detective Evans, Homicide. My partner over there, with the tape worm, is Stroud. We gotta show you our badges?”

“If we’re talking business here, that would be the professional way to proceed, wouldn’t it?” I stood partway up, but I didn’t let go of the cue stick.

Evans made a show of looking put out, but he pulled a gold badge out of an inner pocket and gave me all of a three-second look at it. His partner gave me an even shorter look at his. I tried to think of a recent homicide case that I had carried a bond on, but I was coming up empty. “Did one of my customers show up missing?”

“Not as far as I know. We’re here about the woman who got killed in front of your office today.”

I finally let go of the cue and stood up. “Amy Cox,” I said. “You’ve decided to call it a murder?”

“Yeah, we call it murder. But we don’t call her Amy Cox. And we’re very interested to know why you do.”

“How about because that’s who she is? Get a clue here, detectives. Haven’t you talked to her brother yet?”

“We talked to a James Cox, recently released on a bond provided by you.”

“And?”

“He says he doesn’t have a sister.”

“What?” Now it was my turn to say “bullshit,” but I didn’t want to sound just as lame as Detective Stroud. “Did you make him go look at the body anyway?”

“You’re not too bright, are you, Jackson?” Stroud was shifting away from the window, towards me. I think he was trying to be menacing, but he didn’t have the stature or the presence for it. “If he doesn’t have a sister, he can’t exactly tell us if that’s her, can he?”

“We made him look,” said Evans, ignoring his partner.

“And?”

“Says he never saw her before.”

“Then why would she hock her heirloom violin to bail him out?”

“Well, we don’t really know that she did, do we?”

“No,” said Stroud, now moving around so he and his partner flanked me at the table. “Alls we know is what Jackson here told the officer at the scene.”

“Officer Krupke?” I said. That wasn’t the officer’s name, of course, but it seemed like a clever thing to say.

“Yeah, Krupke,” said Stroud. “Good cop, but he don’t always know to ask the right questions.”

Oops. If that didn’t clinch it for me, it should have.

“So we’re thinking,” said Evans, “that you maybe ought to just show us the contract you had the woman sign.”

“And maybe the violin you say she gave you for security, too,” said Stroud.

“And maybe you’d like to show me a warrant,” I said.

“Maybe we could get one.”

“Maybe you couldn’t, too. What do you think you have probable cause to suspect, anyway, issuing a bond to the wrong client?” I bent back down and took the shot on the ten ball, missing it badly.
Wait for the Zen moment, Jackson?
But the new lie of the balls gave me an excuse to move out from between my new friends and take a stance by the opposite rail. As I moved around the table, I looked over at the ongoing nine ball game. Wide Track Wilkie was nowhere to be seen. I began to get a very bad feeling in my gut that had nothing to do with Lefty’s onions.

“Murder,” said Evans.

“We agree about that,” I said, bending down to sight the new shot, again measuring the geometry of space and bodies. “So why aren’t you guys out checking body shops and outstanding traffic warrants?”

“Because the car didn’t kill her,” said Stroud.

“Excuse me all to hell,” I said, mentally adding
you dumb shits
. “I was there, remember? I saw them put her in a body bag.”

“Oh, she was dead, all right. Wasn’t she, Detective Stroud?”

“Dead, Detective Evans. Broken neck. But it wasn’t broken by any car. According to the M.E., somebody did it to her with his hands, real up-close and personal, like.”

“We think maybe it was you,” said Evans. “So, like we were saying, we think maybe you better show us that contract.”

“And that violin,” said Stroud.

The room was starting to feel very small. “I think you’re both so full of shit your eyeballs are brown,” I said. “I don’t believe the M.E. has even looked at her yet. I want to see the medical report.”

“Oh, we’ll do better than that,” said Evans. “We’ll take you down to the Morgue, and you can see for yourself. We’ll go there on our way to the precinct, to talk it all out.”

“After he gives…” began Stroud.

“Shows,” corrected Evans.

“…yeah, shows us the violin.”

They were single-minded goons, I had to give them that. “Am I under arrest?” I said.

“You want to be?”

I thought about it for a minute. Forcing them into one more formality might slow them down a bit, but I didn’t need the extra handicap of wearing cuffs. And I now had no doubt that I was going to have to go with them, whether I insisted on formalities or not. “No,” I said, “but I want to call my lawyer.”

“Be our guest.”

They would say that, wouldn’t they? Especially since we all knew we weren’t going anywhere near any cop station. I went over to the bar and asked non-Lefty for a phone. He produced one from somewhere in or near the sink and plonked it down on the polished top with his dishwater-wrinkled hand, saying, “No long-distance.”

“The least of my needs,” I said.

I figured they’d notice and cut me off if I dialed 9-1-1, so I called my own office instead, and mentally cursed when I got my voice mail. After the piercing little beep, I said, “Listen, Agnes, get ahold of the cops as fast as you can. I’m about to be abducted from Lefty’s Poolhall by a couple of thugs posing as police detectives.” I gave her a quick description of my companions, including the names they were using. “After the cops, call Nickel Pete and tell him not to give the Amati to anybody, including me, unless I’m alone. Then call every damn bounty hunter we ever use and tell them…”

“Done yet?” Evans loomed over me like a glacier about to calve.

“Not quite.”

“I think you are.” He pushed the button on the receiver cradle, and the phone went dead. I hung up and shrugged into my trenchcoat, which he had thoughtfully brought from the back of the hall, and we proceeded to the door. There wasn’t a lot else I could do. I began to wonder if I had any of my electronic tracer gizmos in my pocket. They wouldn’t help my present situation much, but I thought it might be nice if somebody found my corpse.

Chapter Three

The Zen Moment

The stairway to Lefty’s is too narrow for three people to go abreast, so the skinny guy went ahead of us while Babyface Evans stayed tight to me, on my left and slightly behind. He didn’t poke a gun in my ribs, but I figured he had one handy, if not already out. Stroud didn’t use the handrail, and I thought about how easy it would be to reach my foot out, tap the back of one of his knees, and send him crashing down the rest of the flight. Then I would only have the big guy to take out.

Tempting. A lot of people assume that since bonding is a nonviolent, even sedentary profession, all of us are flabby little wimps who haven’t been in a fight since the age of seven and would faint dead away at the sight of a gun. In a lot of cases, it’s true. “Nothing but Milquetoast, on the gravy train,” is the saying.

I grew up in a neighborhood where people thought
The Godfather
was a sitcom. Becoming a bondsman was a way of graduating, not running away, from my own violent past. If these two thugs didn’t know that, it could give me a significant edge. But only once. Not yet, I decided, since I couldn’t see what Evans was doing until I was already committed to a move. But soon. It had to be soon, or it wouldn’t work at all.

We clumped down the sloped shaft and out onto the street, where both the daylight and the rain were running out of juice. Somewhere in the distance, some noisy pigeons were announcing the end of the deluge. I don’t know if any of them had an olive branch in his beak. Parked at the curb was a massive Chevy of the kind the cops use a lot, a Caprice or some such model, but without the extra bells and whistles. What it did have was a right rear tire that was flatter than my Aunt Hannah’s bra. When Evans and I came out the door, Stroud was already looking at it, fists on his hips, as if he had never seen such a calamity before. Evans acted more like he had seen a lot of them and took them all as personal insults.

“Look at that, man. Is that all we need, or what? I mean, my God.”

“I see it, Stroud. I’m sharp on that kind of shit, you know? Picked right up on it.”

“So, what do we do?”

“We? What I do, is I babysit our friend here. What you do is, you change the tire. That’s what
we
do.”

“Why’s it always me that’s got to do the hard stuff?”

“Yeah, why does he?” I asked. Not that I gave a damn who changed the stupid tire. I just liked the way the partnership was coming unglued, and I thought I’d help it along a bit.

Evans ignored me and glared at Stroud. “Why?” he said. “Because you’re a sneaky, lazy, stupid Rom who isn’t worth the powder to blow you to hell or the match to touch it off with, that’s why. Because you’ve screwed up this operation from day one, and you probably drove over something to blow that tire, too. And because if you don’t, I’m going to kick your skinny little ass around the block a few times, just to keep my foot from going to sleep. Is that enough ‘whys’ for you?”

I wondered what a Rom was, but I figured it wasn’t a good time to ask.

“Your time’s gonna come,” said Stroud. But his voice had no conviction, and he was already putting the key in the trunk lock.

“And when it gets here, I’ll kick your ass, then, too,” said Evans.

He had taken a step away from me, to intimidate his partner better, and I was considering what to do about that when Stroud popped open the trunk on the Chevy and got instantly sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner pipe.

“What in hell…” said Evans.

I didn’t care what in hell. I clipped him in the back of the knee, the way I had wanted to do to Stroud on the stairs, and as he was dropping to the pavement, I pretended his head was a soccer ball and the car was a goal net. I didn’t know how hard I kicked him, and I didn’t care. Three seconds later, I was around the corner and running like a scared rabbit.

I turned into an alley a couple of blocks away and chanced a look back. Nobody was following me. I slowed down to a trot and then a walk, looking for a place to hide among the trash bins, piles of junk, and service doors. I liked what I saw. Lots of back doors in that alley, and lots of fire escape ladders. Too many places for a pair of pursuers to check by themselves, unless they already had a glimpse of their quarry.

The smell of fresh rain mixed with that of old garbage, plus something else that took me a minute to identify, something sweet and vaguely oily. Glycol, I decided. Antifreeze.

Parked tight to a brick wall a half block away was an ancient ton-and-a-half truck with the back of the cab cut off and a square, homemade, windowless van body crudely grafted to the frame. The sides were badly warped plywood, covered with faded-out slogans and biblical quotations, done in an amateur sign-painting hand. Or maybe they weren’t exactly biblical. One said, “He that bloweth not his own horn, Neither shall it be Blown.” Another was something, mostly unreadable, about strumpets sounding at “the crank of dawn” and the “Horn of Babylon” having something to do with the “Car Lot of Jerusalem.” Across the back was one that had been renewed several times, in several colors. It simply said, “Yah! Is My God!” The plywood looked grateful for any paint it could get. Near the front of the vehicle, green fluid trickled down onto the pavement and formed a small stream that meandered towards the center of the alley, producing the smell I had noticed. If the truck wasn’t already a goner, it was definitely bleeding to death. Yah, with or without exclamation mark, was clearly not the god of radiators. I decided the truck looked like a good blind, and I followed the slimy green path.

Sitting on what was left of the rear bumper was a black man who could have been any age except young, reading a battered paperback that had no cover, and absent-mindedly stirring a pot of something on a Coleman camp stove. He looked up at my approach, huge, fierce eyes peering through a tangle of dark locks.

“Praise Yah!” he said, putting plenty of breath into it.

“Yeah?”

“You pronounce it wrong, pilgrim.” His voice had a rich, melodic quality. It wasn’t strident enough for a preacher, but it definitely got your attention.

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

“You making fun of me, asshole?”

“No.”

“Lucky for you.” He grinned, the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen accenting his dense beard. Then he chuckled. “But you’re right, too. There is a lot of that going around. A lot of damn heathens in this valley of sorrows.” He took the pot off the fire and stood up, offering his hand. “I’m the Prophet,” he said. “No doubt, you’ve read my work.”

“No doubt.” His hand was frail, almost bird-like, but his grip was firm. “Listen,” I said, “I need…”

“I knew you were coming here.”

“Of course you did.” I turned to watch the alley behind me. I was still clear, but I absolutely did not have time for this kind of crap.

“Yah! told me.”

“Well he would, wouldn’t he? Listen…”

“A man in a shitload of trouble, said Yah! A man in need of sanctuary. A man with a riddle.”

“Right. I don’t suppose Yah told you what to do about him?” I didn’t bother to ask if Yah had told him all that before or after he saw me out of breath and looking over my shoulder.

“Yah! does not meddle in the affairs of Caesar.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Twenty bucks to hide in the truck for an hour.”

“Seems like sanctuary is a pretty good business.”

“It has a trap door in the floor and spy holes in all four sides.”

“Deal.”

While he unhooked the padlock on the flimsy door, I reached in my wallet and pulled out two twenties. “If trouble is still following me,” I said, “it’s going to be here a lot sooner than an hour. When that happens, I could use a bit of diverting bullshit, okay?”

“I am a prophet and a holy man, brother.” He straightened up and solemnly laid a palm against his breast. “Bullshit, I got.” He took the twenties and ushered me inside.

I stepped into a cluttered space lit by a tiny plastic skylight that doubled as a vent. When the Prophet closed the door again, I could see that each wall had not one, but two spy holes, one with a wide-angle lens, like a hotel or apartment door, and one that was just a plain hole. There was a four-legged stool on the floor, and I put it by the back door, planted myself on it, and looked out. The Prophet went back to reading his book and cooking his potion. When I didn’t see any other action for ten minutes or so, I looked around the interior a bit. The trap door was easy enough to spot, if you were looking for it. It was off to one side, presumably to miss the drive shaft. That’s if the truck still had a drive shaft. It looked like it hadn’t moved for several decades and if it did, about half a ton of junk would immediately wind up on the floor, along with the flimsy roof. It smelled like dust and brake fluid and old, damp paper. Somehow, that seemed right for an ersatz holy man’s cave.

I looked again at the spy holes. The plain ones were about an inch in diameter and just down and to the right of those with the fish-eye lenses. Just the right size and location for a gun muzzle, I thought. Did my man the Prophet go in for holy wars? I was about to turn away from the hole and have a closer look at the cabinets on the walls, when I saw something move outside.

The big Chevy nosed into the alley, bouncing heavily on its springs, stalking, sniffing. It straightened out and cruised straight at us, taking its time.

“Tally ho,” I said through the hole.

“Trust in Yah!” said the Prophet. “And keep your ass down.”

When the car got within twenty feet of my hidey hole, it stopped. The driver’s door opened and a shape emerged. And emerged some more. A bigger shape than the phony cop, by at least a hundred pounds. Apparently, Wide Track Wilkie hadn’t abandoned me, after all.

“Praise Yah!” said the prophet.

“What’s he done for me lately?” Wilkie wasn’t big on chit chat, as a rule.

“He has led you to me.”

“Yeah? Well, you better hope he doesn’t tell me to stay. I’m looking for a guy might have run by here fifteen minutes ago.”

“Might have. You can build a universe on ‘might have,’ pilgrim. Perhaps you’ve read my theological work on islands of alternate consciousness in the bicameral…”

“Look into my eyes, asshole.” He came close enough for the man to do exactly that. “Do I look like a philosopher, to you? Do I look patient?”

“Up,” said the Prophet, backing against the truck.

“Up what?”

“A hunted man always goes up. It’s a primal instinct.” He stretched out a bony arm to point at the fire escapes on the other side of the alley, and Wilkie backed off a half a step.

“Which one?” said Wilkie.

“On the back of the locksmith shop.”

“That’s more like it.” He turned on his heel and strode away, his tent-like coat billowing out behind him like the wake of a garbage scow.

I decided the show was over, so I opened the door and stepped out. “Nice to see you, Wide,” I said.

“Hey, Herman.” He spun around and smiled. “I thought you looked like you didn’t like your blind date much, up there in Lefty’s, so I stowed away in the limo. Was that okay?”

“Much more than okay.”

“Glad you think so, because that was a really horseshit little space. I don’t know why they can’t make a vehicle with a bigger trunk.”

“Like a Euclid truck?”

“Just like that.” He came back over to the truck and gave me a bear hug that fractured a rib or two. “You all right, man?”

“I was, until you did that. Where’s my two new friends?”

“The big guy is having a little nap in the trunk. I took his gun and the other stuff out of his pockets, just so he wouldn’t be too uncomfortable.”

“Very considerate. What about his partner?”

“He took off, after I made him change the tire. Never saw a man so scared of a little bit of work.”

“You think that was smart?”

“Making him change the tire?”

“Letting him go.”

“Well, I thought if I bopped him one, he might just get chickenshit later on, and finger me for assault. He looked like that kind of wuss. And he isn’t going anywhere very far, right away. Seems to have lost all his clothes, poor bastard. Also his money and ID.”

“Shoes, too?”

“Hey, am I a thorough professional, or what?”

I laughed out loud at the image of Stroud padding down the sidewalk in his bare feet and skivvies.

The Prophet seemed to like it, too, and he added, “The wolves shall devour each other, and the loin shall lie down with the limb.”

“I got my twenty bucks’ worth of bullshit already, “ I said.

“Me, too,” said Wilkie. “Go preach to a stone, or something.” Turning to me, he said, “So, what’s the story, Herman? I could see you needed some cavalry back there, but that wasn’t your usual kind of action, to say the least.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. I filled him in on the high points of the day’s events. The Prophet also leaned into the conversation, as if he were an old conspirator. Wilkie gave him a dirty look now and then, but otherwise left him alone. I decided it couldn’t hurt to have a possibly crazy person listening in on a definitely crazy story, and I left him alone, too.

“What the hell is going on?” said Wilkie, when I had finished.

“Well put,” I said. “I haven’t a clue.”

“What’s in the trunk?” said the Proph.

“An unhappy camper,” said Wilkie. “The other stuff, I put in the back seat.”

“And it is…?” I said.

“Interesting,” said Wilkie. He led us over to the car and opened the back door.

“The little guy…”

“You mean Stroud,” I said.

“Stroud, my ass. The guy had a briefcase full of phony ID, some of it pretty good, and his own little printing press and art supplies for making some more.” He pointed to a pile of papers and cards in an open case. “He’s got more damn names than a downtown law firm. Look at this: James Stroud, Strom Jameson, Tom Wade, Wade Thomas—you see a bit of a pattern here?—James Cox…”

“James Cox? Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. That’s one of his better sets, even has a real-looking driver’s license. Is that important?”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Which one?” said the Proph.