Rainy City (22 page)

Vintage thirty-year-old jazz oozed out of 301. I rapped on the door and waited. I rapped again.

Eventually a thickened voice slurred, “What you want?”

I couldn’t tell if it was Bledsoe. I tried the doorknob. The door swung open, the bottom edge rasping on the thick multiple layers of carpeting.

Bare legs crossed, Melissa hunkered in a corner, smoking hash from a long, slender, imitation corncob pipe. She wore a skimpy pair of black bikini briefs and nothing else.

Judging from the glazed look in her pale blue orbs, she had more than just hash racing through her veins. Romano Bledsoe squatted on the bed. He wore a misshapen sleeveless tee shirt and white trousers that belonged to the suit I’d seen him in yesterday. The suit jacket was slung over a chair, the elbows still discolored by coffee. His Pat Boone whites were lined up on the dresser as though his mother might have done it. I didn’t see his mother anywhere.

Bledsoe pawed through an assortment of fuzzy Polaroids spread across the sheet. The blankets and bed-spread had been ripped off the bed and flung against the wall. It only took a pinch of imagination to guess what had been transpiring.

“Get the hell out of here!” snarled Bledsoe.

I closed the door behind myself and spoke evenly. “Put your clothes on, Melissa.”

Dropping the pipe, she covered her breasts and looked at me, wide-eyed—wide-eyed but not innocent. Smoldering particles of hashish splashed onto the carpet and glowed like cats’ eyes in the night.

Scuttling down the length of the bed on his knees, Bledsoe tumbled off the end and sprang toward me, a six-inch knife clutched in his fist.

The blade looked wicked and sharp, as if he honed it every hour on the hour. One of the Polaroids got sideswiped off the bed and landed next to his skinny, stockinged foot. It was a shadowy photo of Melissa having sex with a middle-aged fat man. The picture was made more than obscene by the fact that the fat man had doffed all of his clothes except his long black socks and his hat.

It wasn’t hard to figure

Distraught and confused, Melissa had run back to Bledsoe. Seizing upon his opportunity, the scumbag had doped her, gave her to the first wino he found sober enough to handle it and froze the whole nauseous affair on film. Now, she was his. If she wanted to leave, he could flash the photos around. If she got a job he could flash them in front of her boss. Her mother. Father. Even her kid. They would be a hell of a lever.

He came at me like a snake, weaving from side to side, the knife flicking from left to right. It was a steel tongue and I was a tidbit to sample.

“Out,” he whispered. “Out. Get the goddamn fucking hell out of here. This ain’t no goddamned business of yours. This is strictly private. The little lady and I are going into business fucking full-time and no smart-mouth like you can do a thing to stop it.”

Years ago, my first instinct would have been to pull out the .45 and drill a slug through his foot, or maybe his brain, but I left the pistol where it was.

“Melissa,” I said. “Burton’s out of jail. He’s coming home and he needs your help to get Angel back.”

Her voice drifted from the corner like a wisp of fog. “Angel?”

“Your daughter. Remember her? You want her to live with your father for the next fifteen years?”

“Me and the little lady’s got a deal,” Bledsoe said, loving in on me, blade first. “A real deal.”

I could hear choking and sobbing in the corner. “Angel?”

He locked his angled brown eyes onto mine and I wondered, if he were to pull a ski mask on, whether Kathy might not recognize him. He wasn’t tall enough to thump his head on the top of a doorway, but Kathy had been frightened. She could have transposed some of the details. Or maybe he had been wearing platform shoes, or standing on a stool. The burglar had been a sadist.

The man in front of me was a sadist. I decided to worry him a bit. I lifted my jacket and displayed the butt of the .45. He grinned. He grinned as if we were two buddies swapping nasty stories over a pitcher of suds. He straightened up and dropped his knife-hand down to his side, as if he would not be needing it now that he had seen the gun. I knew what he was plotting. He was plotting to catch me off guard, then lunge forward, sticking and slashing. Blood would fly.

I gave no warning. I caught him cold. Before he could make a move, I kicked him in the testicles. He doubled over like a spring-loaded machine and I quickly booted him in the face twice before he could roll out of range.

Sure, it was a dirty move, but we had no referee and someone had forgotten to deliver my copy of the rule book. I didn’t wish to let Melissa out of my grasp again. Nor did I want my face butchered.

When I was done kicking him, he spraddled out against the dresser and slid to the floor. I had to admit he was game. Aching and bloodied, nose broken, he managed to scrabble to his hands and knees, still clutching the knife. He started to crawl across the obscene Polaroids toward me. I stepped on his knife-hand and heard the loud sound of fingers snapping.

Removing my foot from his broken hand, I scuffed the knife across the floor, and said, “How many pictures of her do you have?”

He was breathing the way a very sick animal might. I kneed him in the ribs.

“Pictures? I ain’t got no pictures.”

“Sure you do. How many?”

“You’re hurting him,” said the dazed woman in the corner, clutching her small breasts to herself like a pair of newborn puppies.

“Look here, mustard-breath,” I said. “I’m going to take your little meal ticket back home and I don’t want any bad pennies turning up. I don’t want any funny photos getting stuffed under her door in the middle of the night.

“I ain’t got no steeeenking pictures!”

I kicked him in the ribs. Hard. He spun around, one arm veed down between his thighs. He was hurting all over. I kicked him in the shoulder, the back, the thigh. He retracted into the corner between the dresser and the wall, a snail being chased with salt.

Reaching down, I picked him up by the belt. I slammed him into the wall. A burnt-orange painting of a sunset fell off the wall, hit the dresser, bounced off his Pat Boones and landed on the floor.

Twice, I cocked my arm back, fist closed, and slugged his face. Then I let him slump down into a cringing heap.

“Where are the rest of the steeeenking pictures?” I asked.

He peered up at me, slowly raising his head, squinting through a swollen, half-closed eye.

Without warning, he sprang forward, grabbed my leg and sank his teeth into my thigh, clinging like an oversized leech. Involuntarily, I screamed, then reached down and tried to pry him off. I dug my fingers into his neck as deeply as I dared, gouging as deeply as I could without killing him. He wouldn’t release my thigh. He actually seemed to bite harder.

I couldn’t believe it. He was a wild animal.

I karate-chopped the back of his neck, once, twice, then three, four, five, six times. He flopped backwards, eyes rolling toward the ceiling as though drunk, blood spilling from his mouth, trickling down his cheek. My blood.

Limping across the room, I picked up his knife using three fingers, hobbled back over to him and buried it in his right leg, almost to the hilt. He shrieked like a man caught in a machine, regained consciousness completely and tried to claw the whalebone handle out with his one good hand. I pinned his good shoulder to the wall with my good foot.

“Leave it alone until you find a sawbones,” I said. “You’ll bleed to death if you yank it out.”

“She ain’t worth all the trouble you’re in now, you bastard,” Bledsoe seethed, through tightly clenched, bloodstained teeth.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “She’s worth every bit of it.”

“She’s just a tramp.”

Applying pressure to his shoulder with my shoe, I said, “How many pictures did you take?”

“They’re all over there, man. Lay off. They’re all over there.”

I kept an eye on him as I pulled Melissa to her feet and shrouded her in a dress. He was twisted into a grotesque pretzel. She seemed to be transfixed by all the bright shiny blood and the sight of the whalebone handle protruding from Bledsoe’s thigh like a holiday ornament.

First Holder and now Bledsoe. Maybe they could organize a club. The let’s-nail-Thomas-Black club. A simple missing persons case had turned into a real mishmash. ?

I COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING WITH HER. SHE DIDN’T resist. Whatever chemicals Bledsoe had pumped into her system had made her docile as a lamb. Straightening her clothes, I walked her barefoot downstairs and out the back door. The Volkswagen hadn’t been towed away, although some enterprising meter maid had pushed a ticket under the wiper. It floated off on the freeway.

We were north of Federal Way. She had been half asleep and I had already shunted her head off my shoulder more than once. She smelled of beer and spit and cigarettes and old mattresses. She smelled like the proverbial horse who’d been ridden hard and put away wet.

“Why did you run away, Melissa?” I asked.

“Run away? Did I run away?”

“Don’t you want to see your little girl?”

When I looked down at her, she was weeping. She stopped as precipitously as she had begun, like a sloppy drunk. “Angel needs a real mother. Not me. She needs a real home. I can’t give her anything.”

“I think you can.”

“What?” she challenged. “What can I give?”

For a few seconds I was afraid to say it. I didn’t know how she would take it.

“Love. You can give her more love than anyone else on earth.”

It was almost the hook, but not quite. “Me? I’m nothing but trouble for everyone.”

“Are you?”

“Look at Aunt Mary. She’s dead.”

“You didn’t do that.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I took the bus up and killed her.”

Melissa gazed at the freeway in front of us, her eyes wide and dry and bloodshot, like somebody who had been awake two or three nights in a row and now couldn’t sleep no matter what she tried.

“Let’s talk about it,” I said. “Did you kill your aunt?” She turned and faced me. She was awfully close in that tiny, cramped car. The Polaroids in my pocket were less than an hour old. That fact, combined with her proximity and aroma, made me slightly uncomfortable.

“What about Helen?” she asked. “Did I kill her? Somebody tell me if I’m a murderer. Everyone I need seems to be dying. And you’ll die, too.”

“I won’t die. And you’re no murderer,” I said without conviction. “You’re just a sad little mixed-up girl.”

“I think I am a murderer. Why else would Auntie Mary be dead? And Helen? I must have done it. Strangers wouldn’t do those awful things.”

She was still dopey when we arrived at my place. I put my arm under her legs, swept her off her feet and carried her into the house, spotting Horace next door as he peeped out from behind a venetian blind. No doubt he thought I was buying into the white slave trade. First I was a gigolo, and now a white slaver. Start with one or two and gradually build up the inventory until the basement and garage were filled with shackled women I could sell to the Arabs. We would have words next week. She was drooling and muttering, “Murderer. Murderer.”

I stood her in the bathtub and pointed the shower spigot at her head. The lukewarm spray hit her at neck level and quickly drenched her only two articles of clothing, the thin dress and her black bikini briefs. Wet, the odors of her transgressions began to come out. Rolling up my sleeves, I shampooed her hair, peeled off her water-heavy dress and had already soaped and rinsed her when she seemed to realize what was happening for the first time.

“Who are you?” she asked, in a startled voice, shielding every vital part of her body with elbows and splayed hands. In other circumstances it would have been comi-cal. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing to me?”

“I’m Thomas…”

“Get the hell out of here!”

“I’m

”

“I don’t care if you’re Santa Claus’s little helper. Get out!”

“You’re doped up

”

“Out! Out!”

I limped into the kitchen and ate an apple. Ten minutes later, she emerged, wrapped in a long, floppy robe that had been hanging on the back Of the door, her hair swathed in a towel. She stared at me accusingly.

“Only trying to help,” I said.

“Help?”

“Yeah,”

“I was naked. You soaked my clothes. What am I going to wear?”

“You were doped up.”

“I don’t do dope.”

“You recall how you got here?”

Incredulity struck her face like the back of a hand. Slowly, her jaw dropped open and she looked down at the bathrobe as if she couldn’t recall how she’d gotten into it, as if perhaps it were alive and had leaped up and wrapped itself about her on its own. She looked around the room.

“You’re that detective. You’re Kathy’s friend.”

“That I am.”

“You don’t have any business undressing me. I think you were taking advantage. Where’s Kathy? You were trying to compromise me.”

“Compromise?” I pulled a handful of pornographic Polaroids out of my jacket pocket and flung them at her. “Compromise? How’s that for compromise? Who are you trying to kid? You did that without any help from me.”

One of the Polaroids wafted through the air and stuck on the belt of the terry cloth bathrobe. She reached down and turned it right side up, staring at it for a long while, trying to recognize the performers, trying to recall the performance. I could tell she had finally succeeded when she collapsed onto the floor and began weeping. Stooping, I tried to comfort her. She shied away.

Several minutes later when I came out of the bathroom, after bandaging the teeth marks on my thigh, she was sound asleep, still huddled on the floor. It was only three-thirty in the afternoon, but I had good reason to believe she hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours.

Gently, I scooped her up and deposited her on the davenport in the living room, covering her with a comforter Kathy had stitched for me.

Melissa looked like a wilted flower, resembling some drab bloom you’d find on a grave at the end of the week. When Kathy came home, she went in her own downstairs door, rummaged around for twenty minutes, then came up through my kitchen. I motioned for her to be quiet as she tiptoed into the dark living room.