Play It Again (4 page)

He rinsed his mouth and washed his face with a cold cloth. He stood at the mirror, unmoving, scarcely breathing. Looking into his mother’s eyes.

“Honey? You got another chick stashed away in here?”

He moved his eyes to Gloria’s reflection in the mirror as she snatched back the shower curtain and pretended to look for another woman. Gloria wore pearl earbobs and R.J.’s tattered bedroom slippers and damn little else. She struck a pose and pouted at him. “Somebody you like a whole lot better’n you like me, from the way I got treated last night.”

He shook his head, watching as she stepped into the stall and turned on the water.

“I knew you wouldn’t take advantage of me, though—me drunk and with the blues so bad.” She stretched out her arms through the cascading water. “But I’m not drunk now, and I don’t feel bad at all.”

He moved into her instinctive embrace, burying his face in
the crook of her neck, letting the water run over him. “Oh, baby, baby,” she crooned. “What’s the matter? Tell mama what’s the matter.”

But R.J. just stood for a long moment, letting the water soak his clothes.

* * *

The lounge over on 42nd Street was a mistake.

There was a TV set behind the bar. It was blasting out the news, polluted with facts and lies about Belle Fontaine. A local producer named Casey Wingate had been doing a profile on his mother at the time of her death, and an abbreviated version of it was getting a lot of play. R.J. had left before he finished his drink.

Now, sitting in a back booth on the dark side of Jago’s Restaurant and Bar near the old Chrysler Building, he nursed a bottle of rye under the disapproving, one-eyed scowl of Peter McInerny. In the last decade, the “Pirate” had served R.J. through the delirium of drink and the horrors of sobriety.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink. But then, he couldn’t remember the last time his mother had been killed either.

In the flesh, that is. He’d seen her die many times in celluloid, larger-than-life fade-outs. He remembered the first time. Maizie, their maid, had taken him to a theater near the ranch house in Brentwood. An aspiring actress, she believed that Belle Fontaine would open the right doors for her.

The movie was
Blood on the Sun.
His mother had looked so pretty. He was only five or six, but he could still recall the way she walked, the smoky sound of her voice, and the way her eyes misted over whenever a scene required emotion. He remembered her dimpled smile, sun-lit hair blowing in the breeze on the deck of a small cabin cruiser. The action was supposed to
take place on the China coast, but he had recognized numerous California landmarks, even at that tender age.

In the movie his mother came up from the cabin in a tailored fatigue uniform, something to do with the war effort. She was met simultaneously by the love of her life and a hail of Japanese machine-gun bullets. Close-up. Fade-out. The End.

It had taken three hours and a double sedative for his mother to get him to sleep that night. Maizie was sent packing the next morning, and R.J. was sure she hadn’t bothered to ask for a reference.

That was the first time. There had been a lot of others. Over the years he’d gotten used to seeing his mother die, and that was part of the shock he was feeling now.

Because this time the death was real. So said Uncle Hank, the police, and the medical examiner. And a TV producer named Casey Wingate. He frowned. There was something disturbing about that piece of film he’d seen in the other bar…

A face. A familiar form. Some shadow from the past—

No. It was no good. He couldn’t grab hold of it, bring it into focus.

Maybe it was just that he’d been drinking for the last few hours. Maybe that had driven it all out of his head.

But R.J. had a bad feeling that even if he stopped drinking he would not remember. It was too shadowy, too elusive—

“Why don’t you go on home, R.J.? You had enough to drink.”

The waitress was the only person he’d known since Billie Sue who could stretch a one-syllable word into three. She was a teenager who hadn’t shed the Georgia shantytown of her birth. “Doreen, there’s no such thing as enough to drink,” he said.

Experience told him he was in shock, that he had to fight it or go back under. He made an awkward effort to straighten his
collar and brushed away the blade of hair slashing across his forehead. His clothes were a mess, his eyes scorched.

“You want some comp’ny, then? It ain’t good to drink alone.”

“Gotta do it alone, sweetheart. Like living. Like dying.” He took a belt of whiskey and shuddered like a wet dog.

Doreen wiped his table. “You jes’ let me know if I can help,” she said and went behind the bar to talk with McInerny.

R.J. saw their reflections in the beveled mirror. The Pirate would foul his whiskey with water for the rest of the voyage. Damn.

Doreen’s heart was in the right place, though. She was a good kid. They all were. He’d never met a cocktail waitress he didn’t like. R.J.’s mother had been a cocktail waitress in the old days, between high school and movie stardom. He remembered a picture of her in a movie magazine, wearing a skimpy cocktail outfit with a cotton tail on her cute behind.

R.J. remembered a lot of things about his mother. In particular he remembered that last strange lunch with her almost a year ago. Her reaching out to him. Him not believing it.

He sniffed the lingering fumes in his glass. At least he wouldn’t have to identify the body. Uncle Hank had seen to that. Just like he’d been seeing to so many things for thirty-some years, since that day he’d noticed the lonely boy on the movie set and taken him under his wiry brown wing.

And he’d been there ever since. When R J. got into trouble at school, it was Henry Portillo who showed up to whip him into line. Belle was too busy, of course, although Uncle Hank would not listen to R.J.’s bitterness about that.

And when R.J. finally graduated, it was Henry Portillo who sat on the cheap folding chair with a Kodak and a proud smile.

He was always there, always doing the dirty work when Belle was too busy—always—and when R.J. needed a friend.

R.J. was glad to have him do the dirty work now. The police would have come knocking at R.J.’s door had they known of the blood relationship, but R.J. used neither parent’s name in his profession. He’d have to face them sooner or later, but he would just as soon steer clear of the police for a day or two.

The door opened and a gust of wind-driven rain blew into the room, ripping the smoke apart. Disgruntled voices moaned and cursed, and a man in the next booth yelled an obscenity, then boxed his companion on the arm. She was thin, with stringy bleached hair and dark circles under her eyes that even her heavy makeup couldn’t hide. He was just an everyday jerk.

“What the hell was that for?” the girl complained, rubbing her arm. R.J. heard their conversation beneath the plaintive voice of Michael Bolton from the jukebox.

“Give us a kiss,” the jerk growled.

“Okay, but cut the rough stuff. I don’t like it that way.”

“Sure, baby. Call me Rex.”

“You wanna play rough, Rex, I got a girlfriend who specializes. I can give you her number.”

“Don’t get all riled up. Here, see how this feels. A hogsleg a girl can get a handle on.”

“Wow,” she said, her hand sliding under the table, “that’s a big one all right.”

Jesus, thought R.J. It was time to leave. He pushed himself up from the table—and bumped into hard steel.

“Where you going, gumshoe?”

In the dark room R.J. could see little more than the whites of the man’s eyes. He jumped back reflexively.

“Don’t
do
that, Hookshot! Sneak up on me like that, you’ll get a goddamn bullet between the eyes one a these days.”

White teeth flashed to match the eyes. “Buy me a beer.”

“Buy your own goddamn beer. You got more money than I’ll see in a hundred years.”

Wallace “Hookshot” Steigler signaled the Pirate for a beer, then leaned his gaunt frame into the booth across from
R.J. He was dressed in black and looked like a bird of prey—a bird with one steel wing. He put the hook that had replaced his right hand on the table with a thunk.

“Sorry about your mother,” he said.

R.J. nodded, and Doreen brought their drinks, pausing to touch the gleaming steel hook like she couldn’t quite help herself. She caught herself and looked at Hookshot guiltily.

“Help yourself, darlin’,” Hookshot told her. “No thrill like the feel of steel.” He smiled as Doreen shivered and backed away.

“One of these days,” Hookshot said when she was gone. The way he said it implied things way beyond kinky that R.J. couldn’t even imagine. He laughed in spite of his mood.

“You’re dreaming,” he told Hookshot and laughed again. He could always count on Hookshot for a laugh. That was one of the reasons he loved him.

Wallace Steigler was a Jewish black man. His father had been assigned to the United Nations when Israel was called Palestine and wasn’t a nation yet. He’d been one of a small band of men lobbying for votes for the Jewish state. A tough man, hardened by half a life of fighting.

At a cocktail party on the East Side he’d met Hookshot’s mother, a Harlem beauty who took away his breath and his common sense with their first kiss. He was killed by an Arab League assassin a month after their son was born.

Growing up in Harlem, young Wallace had displayed a tremendous talent for basketball, until a run-in on the wrong turf had left him without his shooting hand.

Lean to the point of cadaverousness, Hookshot was without apparent age. He might have been forty, fifty, even sixty. Nobody knew for sure. He had managed a news kiosk in Midtown Manhattan for thirty years. He knew every man, woman, and child who’d ever dealt with him, and quite a few who hadn’t. His kiosk was an unofficial base for intelligence drops
on both sides of the law. Besides Uncle Hank, Hookshot was the only real friend R.J. had.

“I don’t like to intrude at a time like this—”

“But you will.”

Hookshot looked away. “Hank’s worried. Says you didn’t take the news too good.”

“I’ll try to do better next time.”

Hookshot ignored the sarcasm. “Gloria said she didn’t know where you went.”

R.J. shrugged. “A rainy day in Central Park.” Even to his own ears his voice was filled with whiskey-phlegm and the gut-wracking ache of self-reproach. He belted his watered-down drink and signaled for Doreen.

As R.J. reached for the fresh drink, the steel hook trapped his wrist. “You don’t need any more, man, you had too much when you uncorked the bottle.”

“I need your advice I’ll ask for it,” R.J. said. “You got a cigar?”

“Don’t need any smokes, either. You’ve done enough wallowing to get ready for what you got to do.”

“Got nothing special to do. Burkette case is about finished. I might take a vacation. Miami, Bermuda, Trinidad. Sun and sand and sea.”

Hookshot frowned. “Hank says they don’t have a make on the dead man with her yet. Killer might not have been after Belle at all. Maybe the man’s wife went nuts or something. Or maybe he was running an overdue tab with a bookie. Those boys get grouchy when you come up short. Anyhow, I’m putting out feelers.”

“Steel feelers?”

“Okay, you the pro. What do you think happened?”

R.J. shook his head. “Go away, Hookshot. Not tonight.”

Hookshot leaned in toward R.J. “Especially tonight.”

R J. pulled back and waved his glass at Doreen, but Hookshot waved her off. “Come on, man, what are you gonna do about this?”

“Go to another bar if they won’t serve me here anymore.”

“The murder, man.”

“Let the police do something. That’s what we pay ’em for.”

Hookshot’s lips curled into a snarl. “You trust them with something this important to you?”

R.J. glared at his friend, who leaned his gaunt face across the table, growling like a small animal.

“There’s a killer out there,” Hookshot said deliberately. “A murderer on the loose. Feeling like he got away with one. And it’s your mama. He killed your mama. She’s dead, you’re alive. Time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your skinny white ass and
do
something.”

R.J. straightened his shoulders. The murky film over his eyes faded. Hookshot noticed the response and leaned back slightly.

“All right. That’s better. Now let’s get outta here. We’ll go to my place and talk. Hook up with Hank, see what he knows. He’s been to see the cops. And he tried to find that TV producer, Casey Wingate, the one been digging up stuff on your mother.”

But R.J. shook his head. “Not tonight.”

Hookshot glared at him, then stood up. “Suit yourself,” he said coldly. He took a step toward the door.

“Hey, Rufus, how you pick your nose with that thing?” It was Rex, the redhot lover in the next booth. Hookshot moved to go around him, but Rex stuck out a leg to stop him. “I hear you coloreds are so talented down there. How you shake yours out when you pee? Got holes in it from that banana hook?”