Mike Reuther - Return to Dead City (9 page)

It took me about five seconds to realize the worst I might get out of this was a verbal lashing. The guy was out of his element. That was for damn sure. He was trying hard to keep his voice from faltering
,
and it was all he could do to keep both his bony hands around the puny .22 pistol he had trained on me.

He was this thin, almost emaciated guy with a sallow complexion and a little brush mustache. The red bathrobe he wore fell to just above the scrawniest pair of chicken legs I’d ever seen. All in all, I guess you could say he was a pathetic version of David Niven. If not for the gun I might have walked across the room and slapped him silly. It took some will power to keep from doing just that. I was convinced the twit didn’t have a clue about how to use a firearm.

“Identify yourself sir.”

He had gained some control of his voice
,
but it was plain he would have much rather been in front of a class discussing the symbolism behind
Moby Dick
than holding a gun on yours truly. He held the gun so tightly that the knuckles on his hands had turned white. Right then, I decided to see how far I could push him.

“What’s it worth to you?” I asked.

The chicken legs buckled for an instant, and it seemed to take all his strength in his hands to keep the gun steady.

“I could shoot you sir. You are, after all, an intruder in my home.”

“A home? Is that what you call this place. I could have sworn I was in a flea market.”

“Who is it Giles?” It was a woman’s voice from the stairway area.

“I don’t know Jeannette. A burglar perhaps. Get on the phone and summon the police.” I heard her footsteps move away upstairs.

“You’re wasting your time with the cops.”

“You’re wasting
my
time sir.” He moved toward me a couple of steps. “Get your hands up.”

I slowly brought them up but not without allowing myself a wise-guy grin.

“Now,” he added, pointing to the couch with the gun. “Sit down.”

He moved out of the hallway and into the living room still holding the gun on me. I decided to comply with the guy. Sort of anyway. Instead of taking a seat on the couch as he’d demanded, I reclined on the damn thing as if I was settling in for a ball game and a snooze. It was obvious now he didn’t know quite what to do with me next. I decided to turn up the juice a bit.
             
“Mind if I smoke?” I said, reaching into my pants pocket.

“Keep those hands where I can see them,” he screamed, fumbling with the gun.

“Don’t get nervous Pop. I just wanted …”

“Never mind that. If you wish to smoke. I’ll have Jeannette bring you one of my cigars.”

“Phew. Forget that noise. Cigars give me diarrhea.”

That nearly caused him to smile. “Oh really.”

“Yeah. That smoke gets in my bowels. It’s like someone blowing steam up my ass.”

“How perfectly revolting.”

He seemed to grow a little easier then. Relaxing his grip on the gun, he carefully set himself down into a nearby chair where he sat studying me.

“So now what,” I said. “We smoke a peace pipe and become blood brothers?”

“Hardly. You’re still an intruder here.”

“Would it ease your bladder any if I told you I was an Amway salesman?”

He shook his head and frowned.

“So what’s all this,” I said, looking around the room, “a setting for the Ladies Tuesday Morning Book Club?”

“Hardly. Books are my livelihood. I’m chair of the Department of Literature at Ocyl College.”

“A high calling I’m sure.”

“It’s certainly above that of a cheap, petty burglar,” he sneered.

“Heh. Heh. I guess it wouldn’t make your day to know that I was a detective.”

The remark caused him to stare blankly at me.

“Giles?” It was the woman again.

“Yes. Jeannette.”

“The storm must have knocked the lines down. I can’t get through.”

I thought for sure he’d faint. For a moment he stared hard at the floor.

“Heh. Heh. So now what do you do Pop?”

“Stop calling me that,” he snapped.

“Sure Pop. But with the police not coming you better think of what you’ll do with me.”

“L-l-look…Your still my prisoner.” Once again, he had both hands wrapped tightly about the gun and trained on me. Only now he was on the very edge of his seat and appearing not too steady.

“Prisoner. Whew. You mean like kinky bondage. You and me and the little lady upstairs.”

He shot out of his seat. “That will be quite enough sir.”

That did it. I got up too and moved slowly toward him. The barrel of the gun began to droop. He still had both hands around the weapon but with each step the barrel lowered more. About five feet away from him I stuck out my hand. “C’mon Pop. Be a nice boy and give me the piece.”

The barrel suddenly came up at me. “I’ll shoot you. Oh yes I will.”

With an open hand I knocked the gun across the room. He started to lunge for it, but by that time I had a healthy grip on the front of his bathrobe. I backed him up and bounced him down in the chair. He didn’t like that at all and attempted to rush me, but I knocked him back down into the chair again and fed him the back of my hand.

The gun rested on the hardwood floor behind him near the hallway, but he didn’t have it in him to go after it. He was slumped in the chair covering his face with his hands. About then his girlfriend, wearing this long bathrobe, appeared in the hallway. I recognized her as the same woman who’d been with him at the ball
park. She had on those dangling wind chime earrings and that same bored, haughty look that made me long to slap her a good one too. Almost immediately she spotted the gun.

“Don’t even try it honey,” I said.

She didn’t. With a shrug she settled herself into a nearby chair. Hampton, meanwhile, remained slumped in the chair. When he raised his head
,
his hand went to his mouth. If it was blood he was looking for
,
he found it all right. For the longest time he sat there staring at his bloodied hand in fascination. Then, quite suddenly, he began to sob.

“You happy now?”

It was the girlfriend. I gave her the cold eye and turned to him. “Come off it Hampton. I didn’t hit you that hard.”

And then he did stop crying. He brought up his head and narrowed his angry, wet eyes at me.

“This is an outrage. An utter outrage. How dare you break in here and assault me.”

I went over and picked up the gun from the floor. I checked the chamber. There were three bullets in it. I emptied it and handed it to him. “Don’t hurt yourself with this thing.” He snatched it from my hand
,
and I left him to sulk in the chair. That’s when I went to work on her.

She seemed to have a bit more mileage on her than I’d thought. Still, she was considerably younger than Hampton and probably a bit more than he could handle if my guess was right. And in more ways than one. Hampton had no doubt rescued her from some truck stop or sewing machine plant, elevating her social status by making her his secretary-mistress. God only knew just how happy she was with this little arrangement though.

“What the hell do you want?” she said.

She was tough all right. I’ll give her that. She was leaned back in the chair with her legs crossed and that bored, defiant expression. I threw my card at her. It landed on her lap. She didn’t move an inch, but her eyes went to the card.

“So?” She said.

“I’m investigating a murder. Lance Miller. Word has it you were familiar with him.”

She didn’t say anything right away. But she bit her lip for just a moment, blinked a few times and stared across the room. Then she turned back to me with those cold eyes.

“We were married. But that’s all over now.”

“Is it?”

I could tell she wanted to leap like a cat from that chair and sink her claws into me. I was kind of sorry she didn’t. A tussle on the floor with her might have been fun.

“Why don’t you go nab some dog snatcher or whatever it is you detectives spend your time doing.”

“Answer the question.”

“Go to hell.” She looked past me at Hampton. “This is your house. Tell him to leave.”

Hampton sat rubbing his head. “Jeannette’s quite right. It is time you show yourself to the door.”

I looked from Hampton to her. “I’ll be back.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said.

A steely gray sky greeted  me when I rolled out of bed the next day. When it’s August in Centre Town you can’t win. If the hot, humid crap doesn’t leave you feeling like a dishrag, dark clouds the size of continents block out the sun. And that’s when it’s not raining.

It was just starting with the wet stuff when I hit the streets that morning. Not heavy. But enough to make you lose faith in the glory of the good ol’ summertime. I grabbed a paper down the street and hit a coffee shop called Myrna’s around the corner from my apartment. It had been a couple days since my last drink - not very long to go without the stuff - and I could feel my body screaming for something stronger than caffeine as I sat down with my coffee and paper.

Myrna’s was one of those luncheons that moonlighted as a bar. The place had all the charm of a landfill. Dark and grim and moldering, it served as a stage for the low-life denizens of my neighborhood. Toothless old men with hacking coughs sat by themselves mumbling, and welfare couples fought out their daily squabbles here. In the two short months I’d been coming to Myrna’s I’d seen them all come and go from the place - the losers and the bums, the drifters and the grifters, the insane and the weirdoes. One poor slob got carried out after he and his wife got into it, and she stabbed him with a broken beer bottle. Apparently, the two had battled it out after hubby gambled away most of the loving couple’s welfare check. Then there was the Jesus freak who wandered into Myrna’s holding a gun to his head and threatening to meet his maker if everyone didn’t put their drinks down and follow him up the street to the mission to repent. Myrna handled that one like the pro she was. Announcing that his drink was on the house, she served him up a shot of Wild Turkey at which point he laid down his firearm. The night Oscar checked out was another one of those incidents that could only happen at Myrna’s. Oscar had barely settled into his favorite stool at the bar for his first drink of the day when he’d fallen off his seat. After hitting the floor, he went epileptic before succumbing to heart failure. As ol’ Oscar’s body
was
stretched out on the floor, one of the crustier customers of the place found it fit to comment: “And I thought booze would kill the crazy bastard.”

Myrna’s was the end of the road for the misfits and those who were washed up or used up. Myrna’s was where you came when your days were numbered and even the booze could no longer sustain hopeless dreams. Myrna’s served up the best coffee in town though, and if I wanted to stave off the alcohol for a while a shot of java was my best hope.

Some scarface at a table near the men’s room door sat with a beer in front of him glaring at me. I ignored the guy and kept scanning the paper. I could find nothing about the Lance Miller stabbing. The
Progress’s
reporters were either lazy or unable to get any new information on the murder. I decided to turn to the sports pages.

Gooden was pitching well for the Mets again after his arm troubles earlier in the season. Any chance of pennant fever at Shea could be kissed off until next year though. Since early in the month when Howard Johnson and Bobby Bonilla had gone down, the Mets had been reeling. The Mets’ Double AA farm team, the hometown Centre Town Mets, were scheduled to play in town this evening. But with the rain still coming down it didn’t look good for a game tonight. I tossed the paper aside and put four bits on the bar for Myrna. Passing the men’s room on my way to the front door I could feel Scarface’s eyes on me. I wouldn’t have given the guy a glance if he hadn’t called out to me in a heavy whisper.

He was a sight all right. His one eye was either blind or damaged by some retina condition. That poor peeper along with the scar, which looked like railroad tracks running from the bridge of his nose to his cheekbone, gave him the look of some twisted madman. Cleanliness wasn’t exactly next to Godliness with the guy either. His pants and shirt were tattered and filthy with grease spots and God only knows what else. What little hair he had seemed to be pasted in greasy strands across the top of his head, and he smelled like the bottom of a laundry basket. His grubby little fingers held the tiniest stub of a cigarette.

“I hear you’re looking for some information Jack.”

He was looking up at me and smiling. Let’s just say what teeth he had would not have done his dentist proud.

“I might be,” I said.

Myrna was pouring some coffee and watching us. One of the geezers at the bar gave us a glance before going back to his beer. Scarface had me zoned in with his one good eye. He motioned for me to come closer. I weighed my options: heading out to the rain to get soaked or stimulating conversation with this yo-yo. Call me crazy. I settled on the latter.