Goofy Foot (17 page)

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Authors: David Daniel

BOOK: Goofy Foot
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He lowered the contraption and sat up, squinting as his eyes focused. “Somebody pinch me. Can it be? Lowell's finest.”
“I don't carry a badge anymore.”
“That's what I'm saying.” He sprang out of the chair more spryly than his sixty-odd years ought to allow and took my hand in a vise grip. “Sunlight's good for you,” he said.
“On Neptune, maybe. Here it causes cancer—they just found that out about twenty years ago.”
His dark hair was combed in a pompadour you could have surfed on and was only faintly threaded with gray—and he did have a hell of a tan, I had to give him that. “Come on inside.”
The building was equipped with rebar over the windows and an
alarm system. FORGET THE DOG: BEWARE OF OWNER, read one sign and, to show he was full of good humor, PREMISES GUARDED BY—and a taped-on picture of Woody Allen from
Take the Money and Run,
holding a gun carved from soap.
“Lowell's finest PI,” he said when we were in, as if he were trying to immortalize it. “I tell you, I sleep better knowing you're out there, Rasmussen.”
“Me and Woody.”
“I'm not just talking this neighborhood. Crime keeps getting uglier all over.”
“I hear retirement in Florida is still a good value.”
He scowled. “What do I need Florida? I dig it here. I was brought up in this neighborhood all my life.”
“I like it that I don't have to keep pulling your card off my Rolodex and throwing it away.”
“Sunshine. You could use some, brother. You're light. Okay, we kibitzed enough. What brings you? I know you ain't got old jockstraps in that canvas sack.”
I set the gym bag on a long worktable, unzipped it and drew out the sawed-off shotgun. “I came into possession of this recently.”
He licked his lips and ran a hand across them a few times, but he didn't reach.
“Is it any good?” I asked.
“Not to win beauty contests, it ain't. Set it down there a minute.” He stepped over to an oak rolltop desk and pulled up the top with a clatter. Inside he found a visor with a magnifying lens built in, the kind that aging dentists wear, and he put it on. He drew on white cotton gloves. Now he did pick up the shotgun, handling it with care, turning it over, microscoping it with his eyes, which had become the size of beer coasters. He didn't say anything for a few minutes, and I let him look.
I
looked.
The office was vintage, from the rolltop and the black rotary-dial telephone to the big water carboy in the corner with the pointed paper cones. Even the pinup calendar on the wall looked quaint, July's buxom nudie discreetly wrapped in a ribbon of Old Glory. The hat rack was home to a solitary pearl-gray fedora with dust in its crease. Add a brass spitoon and the place could be closed off with
a velvet rope: “American Office, circa 1935.” The desk had a warren of little cubbyholes that I'd have bet were stuffed full of old shipping tags and yellowing bills of lading for cargoes that had reached their destinations lifetimes ago. In some drawer, perhaps, secured with a crisp rubber band, was a stack of faded index cards that, if you could shuffle them in just the right order, might solve all our enigmas. Behind the wainscoting, mice nibbled the cheese of time. I felt as if I was slumming in an earlier decade. It was nice, but the present was calling me back.
“How'd you say you got this?” Charley Moscowitz asked.
I hadn't, but I told him now. I knew that neither the story nor the gun would end up anywhere it wasn't supposed to. “A cop friend said it hasn't been flagged in any crimes. Nothing recent, anyway.”
“Entirely likely. Some of those downtown shops look the way they did during Prohibition. Proprietors used to keep their own peacemakers against the strong-arm that went down—and I'm not just talking crooks. There were bulls on the force you wouldn't bring home to Mother, unless she was Ma Barker.” He looked at the shotgun again. “Decent workmanship went into this. Some sawed-offs there are steel filings all over 'em, and you just know the missing barrel's still clamped in the owner's basement vise, waiting for the cops. Even Mark Fuhrman could make that case.”
Charley ran a white-gloved hand over the shortened double barrels, and, aside from some rust, it came away clean. Likewise with the breech. “I'd venture to say it's never been fired.” He took off the gloves and scratched some of the corrosion off with his thumbnail. “Did you see this?”
I squinted and made out a year etched into the metal: 1928.
“Parker Brothers was out of Connecticut,” he said. “They produced a line of sporting arms, then, the early thirties or thereabouts, they quit. I think Remington took them over. A good firearm is like a good violin.”
“And plenty have been carried in a violin case.”
“If it's cared for, it keeps making music.”
“Is that a good one?”
“It's no Stradivarius, and it's chopped, but, yeah, it
was
good. Cleaned up, it'll work fine.” He took off the visor and turned his
normal-sized eyes on me. “You want it should work?”
“I'd like to have it cleaned.”
“Who you planning to shoot?”
“The wolf at my door. Would a gun collector be interested?”
“There are some. People are into quirky things. Restored, you're looking at maybe a grand.”
I whistled. “For a sawed-off?”
“If it's had a colorful life, maybe more. Bad guns, like bad girls, have a following.”
“How much to restore it?”
“Let me do the work first. Later we'll talk.”
It sounded okay to me. If it sold, I told him I'd go threes with him and with Vito at the pizza shop. “You want a down payment?” I asked.
“What down payment? I've got the gun, don't I?”
He walked me out, taking his sun reflector with him to go back to work on his George Hamilton tan, but the sky had grayed. He glowered up at it. “Figures.”
From my car I pointed at the sign with Woody Allen on it. “You should get Chuck Heston.”
“Nah. That name makes a dirty pun in Greek, you know.”
“Heston?”
“Very dirty.”
I didn't know, and I didn't ask to be let in.
You can live in Lowell a long time and never know all the barrooms, and if you tried, you wouldn't live a long time. There's logic there; I just can't express it right. The Mill Stone was a rat hole on Decatur, between a twenty-four-hour Asian market and a rooming house with an improbable striped canvas awning over the door. More improbable was the name—the Ritz Manor—but the ersatz dignity didn't hide the laundry blowing from clotheslines on the side porches of the triple-decker. A neon sign in the bar window gleamed on the shadowed sidewalk and said FINE FOOD & CHOICE LIQUORS. A little past three o'clock I stepped inside and waited as my sudden blindness faded.
Half a dozen souls were arrayed along the bar. Off to one side were a Keno screen and an Instant Action lottery machine, both unoccupied for the moment. Grady Stinson sat alone in a booth, wreathed in cigarette smoke. My notion was that perhaps Stinson might have a motive to come back at the lawyer who'd kept him out of uniform. I started having doubts as soon as I started over. Though only five or so years older than I, he had the potty physique of a man who takes his exercise on a barstool. There were patches of stubble on his sunburned cheeks and scabs on his nose and chin,
as if someone had taken out divots at Pleasant Valley that afternoon. I x'd him off my possible suspects list. He'd have been no match for a feisty sixteen-year-old. He took a deep drag on the butt and squashed it in a foil ashtray.
“Good to see you,” he greeted me, in a wood-rasp voice. We shook hands. As I was about to sit, he flapped open my sport jacket. “Not up to anything sneaky, are you?”
“Like getting you on tape? What'd be the point?”
“My case is on appeal,” he said, waving me into the booth. “I'm gonna get my shield back.”
Not according to Ed St. Onge, I knew, but I just nodded.
“Name your poison,” he said.
It wasn't necessarily a euphemism. I asked the bartender for coffee. He brought it and poured another shot for Stinson. Bushmills chased by Guinness. He was going all-Irish. “You want any food with that?” I offered. “That stuff drinks hard.”
He belched softly. “Nah, I already had a coupla tube steaks,” he said, as if I wouldn't have guessed.
“Tell me about you and Ross Jensen.”
“That lousy bloodsucking SOB. Am I making my point?”
“Go on.”
“Some gold dust'd be a nice thing.”
“You're on paid leave.”
“I got expenses. Drinking top shelf ain't cheap.”
“Bad info is. Show me your line, then we'll talk what it's worth.”
He frowned. “An honest cop doing his job is a target for lawyers. Their job is to bend the law. Difference between them and crooks is lawyers get to
make
the rules, too. And it's all a lousy game. They win, and they do that phony dance about how the system works and how it's flawed but it's the best there is. Justice be damned, it's who wins and who loses. It's all mental macho.”
“What about Jensen?” I asked.
“That's what I'm saying. I hate him, okay? If there was an open season, I'd choke the bastard myself. But if you're asking did I hassle with his kid—the answer is n-o.”
“Okay.”
He lit another weed and forked smoke from his nostrils. “So, you're working for his old lady? What's she like?”
“She likes her children. Have you spoken to Ross Jensen since your case?”
“Threatened him, you mean?” It was an interesting word choice. I let it hang.
“Not a chance.” Stinson huffed more smoke. “You don't talk to lawyers. You pay, they talk. They're too in love with the sound of their own bullshit to listen.”
As a legal commentator he was a half bottle ahead of me, and I had no interest in catching up. I took a twenty from my wallet and palmed it on the table.
“Gee, I'm going all giddy,” he said.
I laid a ten on top of it. “I'm trying to get a line on his stepdaughter.”
He scrubbed his whiskered chin a moment. “Well, now, here's a tale.” He leaned forward, a gleam in his eye, glad to tell it. “I went to his office a couple weeks ago.”
“I thought you said you hadn't seen him.”
“Keep listening. I went at night, after closing.” He gauged me, weighing my reaction. When I showed nothing, he said, “Fancy lobby, skylights, palm trees. The building's constipated with lawyers. You'd need a suppository the size of a hand grenade to clean out the joint. Randolph, Blinkman and Bearse were on the second floor. But security was nothing; a Girl Scout could break in. People like that are so arrogant they think no one's going to come at them.” He spilled more Guinness into his mouth and wiped his lips. “I went in and sat in his big soft chair—like sitting in God's hand. You got the picture? We're probably looking at a couple grand for the desk alone. At first I thought I'd trash the place, toss files all over, maybe take a leak on his rug.” Stinson gave me an expression that was more grimace than grin. “I'm kidding. In the end, it was enough to be there. To be there and to know it. You getting this?”
“It's got ‘movie' written all over it.”
“Wait. He had the photo there. ‘The family.' The photo that big shots always have that says, ‘I'm jus' plain folks. My family comes first.' Meanwhile, they're sticking it to the rest of us working stiffs
and hauling off the seven-figure bonuses and a home on Nantucket. You notice that?”
“The photo,” I said.
“It was Jensen and his old lady—nice-looking broady, from the picture. You're working for her. She hot?”
“Keep going.”
“Okay, and a little kid in pigtails. Seven, eight. The one you're talking about was out of the picture.”
“She wasn't in the photo?”
He was shaking his head, his face damp in the neon gleam. “She was out of the picture. It was one of those clear plastic frames. I turned it over and saw she was folded over on the back, so the rest of the family could fit. I mean, c'mon, would it kill the guy to get a bigger frame?”
“You recall what she looked like?”
“The fold-over?” He rolled his shoulders. “The way they do these days—short black hair and ratty clothes, kind of an ‘I'm-pissed-at-the-world' look. But she wasn't any dog. Had her old lady's looks.”
I uncovered the bills. He scooped them up. “Have a drink,” he said.
“Another time.” I was on my feet.
“You say when. Hell, if things don't work out with the job, I'll get into
your
dodge.” He laughed. “That's gotta be nice—no heavy lifting, except your client's wallet. 'Cause I got it coming,” he called after me with bitter relish. “You know what it's like, Rasmussen. To've been a cop and been shafted. We're two of a kind!”
As I drove back downtown, I cooled. I was even able to summon a small ration of pity for Stinson, but no sympathy. He could rant about the stacked deck and about Ross Jensen, and maybe he was right—I wasn't Jensen's biggest fan, either—but Stinson's real enemy was the man in the mirror. As Ed St. Onge had said, a bent cop has to go. Some people had felt that way about me.

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