Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split (25 page)

He’d been watching for five minutes when he saw one of the female tellers at one of the betting windows approach the door, open it, and go in. Truman felt his pulse quicken.

Two minutes passed. Finally Jackie emerged. Truman caught her eye. She shook her head, then motioned for him to follow her.

She was walking rapidly up the stairs toward the second level when Truman caught up with her. “No good,” she said. “The key fit in the lockers, but it wouldn’t turn.”

“So we’re on the right track,” he said. “But in the wrong place.”

“I had an awful thought,” Jackie told him. “What if she put it in one of the men’s lockers?”

“I guess if you can play dress-up, so can I. Where do you want to try next?”

“The Derby Club,” she said.

They caught the elevator up to the Derby Club. A hostess was stationed near the door. She asked if they wanted a table for lunch.

“Uh, no,” Truman said. “We’ll just sit at the bar, thanks.”

When they were out of earshot of the hostess, Jackie whispered, “I see an unmarked door over there, near the kitchen. I’ll check it out, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll go back in the kitchen.”

“Don’t take so long this time,” Truman said. “My nerves aren’t what they used to be.”

“Get a drink. Watch the races on TV. I’ll be right back.”

Truman sat down at the bar and ordered a beer. “You like horses?” The bartender was standing in front of him, polishing glasses.

“Nah. I just like to get out of the house. How about you?”

“They’re okay,” the bartender said. He was short, nearly bald, with four or five springy wisps of black hair protruding from his scalp. “What I really like is jai alai.”

“No kidding,” Truman said. “I never went to jai alai. Years ago, when I first moved down here, somebody told me it was rigged.”

“Used to be it was rigged. Now they got all kinds of state guys watchdoggin’ it. I tend bar over there at the Tampa fronton, during their season.”

“Good money?” Truman asked idly.

“Not bad,” the bartender was saying. “A different class of people over there, those Cubans, you know what I’m saying?”

Truman had no idea what he was saying, but he nodded gamely.

“And then there’s them damned Canadians. Come down here in October with a hundred-dollar bill and a clean shirt and never change neither one all winter long.”

“Hah, hah,” Truman laughed. The bartender rambled on, stopping every so often to fill a drink order for one of the waitresses, in between times regaling Truman with stories about ignorant jai alai fans who didn’t know jackshit and couldn’t talk English.

Truman had drained his glass and was considering fleeing to the men’s room to escape when he saw a familiar streak of red moving toward the elevator doors. Jackleen turned and flashed him a hundred-watt grin. He hurried over to her side.

“I got it,” she whispered. “I got the disk.”

Mel Wisnewski lay on his side in the bed, a thin blue cotton blanket pulled up to his chin. His eyes were tightly shut.

There was a nurse in the room. Bustling around, talking to him, calling him by his name, as though she knew him.

“We’ll get this straightened out and you’ll feel better,” the nurse was saying. She opened the cupboard and rifled through the clothes.

He tried to tell her “Go away.” But he knew he was mumbling.

The nurse was thin and blond, not one of the nice black nurses whose thighs made a rubbing noise when they walked and who sometimes came and sat by the bed and talked softly with him.

She was jerking clothes off the hangers, throwing them on the floor. Not straightening things at all. Then she moved to the dresser. The noise was so loud. He opened one eye and peeked. She took his clean socks and underpants and pajamas and dumped them out on the floor and pawed through them. Mel was embarrassed. He did not want this woman touching his things.

She did the same thing with all the other drawers in the dresser and then she attacked his nightstand, spilling a glass of water.

Mel moved his mouth to tell her to go away, to leave him alone.

She shook him by the shoulder. “Mel!” she said sharply. “Pay attention, Mel. Did you take something from Rosie? A disk?”

Mel squeezed his eyes shut tight.

“Look at me, Mel,” she said angrily. “I’m talking to you. Where did you put it? A disk? A little square of plastic. Did you hide it?”

Her nails dug into his shoulder blades, cutting the paper-thin skin. “Where is it, dammit?” she said, her breath hot in his ear. “We’ll hurt your wife. Is that what you want?”

A single tear ran down his cheek, followed by another. He shook uncontrollably. “Go away,” he tried to say. “Leave me alone.”

Now she was pinching his ear, squeezing, he felt it would pop like a grape.

“I want that disk, Mel,” she hissed. “And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll hurt you. Hurt you bad.”

There was a knock at the door then and the rattling sound of glass on metal. “Mr. Wisnewski,” a cheerful voice called. “Are you dressed? Can I come in?” It was the nurse who brought him Jell-O.

The bad woman sucked in her breath. He opened his eyes just a crack. She moved quickly toward the door, pushing it open, hard. Then she was gone, and he was crying. His ear hurt. Where was Pearl?

Cookie rattled the door so hard the whole trailer shook. “Let me in, Butch. I know you’re in there, you lowlife scumbag maggot.”

A woman riding by on an adult tricycle stopped pedaling and watched, open-mouthed.

Cookie took off one of her spike heels and hammered at the glass panel. “I’ll break the goddamned glass,” she screamed.

The woman gasped and started pedaling again.

Cookie whirled around and looked for another weapon. The yard of the trailer was weed-strewn, with dirt ruts. A long-abandoned tire swing hung from the branch of a pine tree, the only tree in the whole lousy trailer park as far as Cookie could see.

She stepped off the crude wooden landing and scooped up an armful of pinecones from under the tree, dumping them on the landing in front of the door. She got out a small gold cigarette lighter.

“I’m gonna set this goddamned cheese box on fire,” she hollered. “I’ll smoke you out if I have to, you sorry son of a bitch.”

She was bent over, holding the lighter to one of the pinecones, when she heard the door being unlatched. Cookie kicked the pinecones aside and threw open the doors.

The inside of the trailer was dark and rank-smelling. After her eyes adjusted to the dim she saw Butch. He sat at a plywood dinette table. A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He was unshaven, his thinning dark hair uncombed. He was dressed in a pair of grayed-out white Jockey shorts and an equally dingy pair of sweat socks. He squinted in the half-light. And he held a .45 aimed at Cookie’s chest.

“Shut the door,” he said quietly. “The light hurts my eyes.”

She pulled the door closed but didn’t take her eyes off the gun.

“I want my money back,” she said, her voice level.

He picked up the cigarette and inhaled deeply, coughing on the exhale. “What money?”

“The money you stole from me last night, you bastard. The money you took off Michael. There must have been at least five thousand. Give it back. Or I’ll go to the cops.”

“And tell them what?” Butch said, coughing.

He’d quit smoking months ago, but the first thing he’d reached for when he was finally ambulatory this morning was a cigarette. He’d found a half-pack of Kools in a jacket pocket. They tasted like roach droppings. He’d smoked them all, one after the other, saving just this one for the moment he’d been expecting.

“So. Michael’s dead?”

“You could say that.”

Cookie thought about things. Her discussion with Newby had been brief but profitable. They would be partners, in a business sense only. Maybe, she thought, he would be willing to deal with Butch.

“Give me back the jewelry,” she said finally. “You can keep the money. But I want the jewelry back. It’s no good to you. You can’t pawn it for anywhere near what it’s worth.”

“Probably not,” he agreed again.

“Just my Rolex and the diamond ring then. Please?”

She edged a half-step closer.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Butch said, waving the pistol. “Mother, may I?”

“Give me the ring and the watch, Butch. Give them back and I swear to God I’ll never say a word about what happened last night. So far the cops just think it was an assault and robbery.”

Butch laughed. “You ain’t sayin nothin’ to nobody, Cookie. Where’s the murder weapon? Better yet, where’s the body?”

“You dumb-ass,” Cookie said. “You’ll get caught. You always do. The cops will find the body and the gun. Face it, Butch. You’re a screw-up. And you know what else? Michael was connected. Yeah, big-time connected, with the Gianni family. Sallie Gee’s boys are gonna come for you. And if they don’t catch you, the cops will.”

Butch stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and yawned. “Wanna fuck?”

She turned on her heel and stalked out, one hand holding onto the wig.

“Is that a no?” he called after her.

“Hurry up,” Truman said, gripping the back of Cheryl’s chair. “Can’t you make it go any faster?”

Cheryl Kicklighter swiveled around in her chair to face her father. “Calm down, Dad,” she said. “The computer has to run an anti-virus program. It takes a minute or two.”

Her voice echoed weirdly in the empty classroom. Cheryl didn’t own her own computer. But she did have the key to the media lab at Bay Point Elementary School, where she taught.

“You mean computers get sick?”

“People plant deliberate problems in programs sometimes. It screws everything up,” Cheryl explained. “The anti-virus program tracks them down if they’re there.”

She punched some buttons and the screen began to fill with a grid full of names and numbers. “It’s some kind of chart,” she said. “Is that what you were looking for?”

Jackie leaned closer to get a better look. She pointed to a line on the chart. “This is it, Mr. K See this name, Kinda Kinky? I remember it ran the night we went to the track with Mel.”

Truman followed her finger down the chart. “Looks like some kind of numerical ranking is assigned under different categories, but they’re abbreviated. I can’t make heads or tails of it.” He felt let down.

“It’s numbered,” Jackie pointed out. “This is the first race. Are there other races on here too?”

Cheryl tapped another key. “I’ll scroll down.”

The next race appeared on screen, eight dogs, each one ranked one to five in six indecipherable columns. Cheryl tapped the button, held it down, and the screen scrolled through fourteen charts. The last four charts were incomplete.

“Fourteen charts, fourteen races,” Jackleen said. “This is what Rosie Figueroa got killed over.”

“And this is what put Mel Wisnewski in jail, and in that pisshole of a nursing home,” Truman said bitterly.

“And Miss Pearl in the hospital,” Jackleen added.

“But these charts are only good for those specific dogs that ran on that one night,” Cheryl said. “Why would someone break into Pearl’s room, beat her up like that, to get a program that predicts race results that are more than a week old?”

“For the charts themselves, the program, the system, whatever you call it,” Truman said. “Somebody’s convinced this thing is important enough to kill for.”

“Somebody like Rosie’s boyfriend, that Wade guy,” Jackleen said. “Or that blond woman, the one who was following him around.”

Cheryl knit her brow and chewed her bottom lip. “Dad, don’t you think you’d better turn this disk over to the police?”

“Not yet,” Truman said stubbornly. “I want to see how it works.”

“What?” Jackie said. “I thought we were just gonna get it and give it to the cops.”

“The chart and the ranking system,” Truman said. “They’re standard from what I can tell. All we need is somebody to help us fill in the blanks. Somebody who knows greyhounds, knows how to handicap ‘em. That’s what we need.”

“To do what?” Jackleen demanded.

“To try it out. You said it yourself, it must be good if these guys were willing to kill to get it. All I want is one shot; one shot to see if it works. A day at the races. Then we’ll turn it over to the cops.”

“You’re crazy,” Jackie said.

But she was already calculating how much cash she could round up. How much was in the tip jar she kept in her bedroom closet? A hundred, maybe more?

The Fountain of Youth was a battlefield under siege. Workmen battered the old plaster walls of the lobby with sledgehammers, spewing the fine white dust everywhere. In the corner, behind the reception desk, an electrician on his knees snaked coil from a new receptacle box toward the desk, where a telephone lineman waged war with the receptionist.