Read Sleeping Dogs Online

Authors: Ed Gorman

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Sleeping Dogs (7 page)

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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“I'd still feel better about us having coffee down the street.” No matter how often you sweep an office, there's always the possibility
that some new electronic spying gadget won't show up on your radar. If this office was bugged, all kinds of information would now be in Lake's hands. But nothing about blackmail and hotel maids.
“You're the boss,” Nichols said. He tried to keep it light whenever he said that, but there was an edge of bitterness to it. We slipped out the back way and took the scenic route down the alley.
 
 
 
B
ack booth. Place packed. Poor waitresses frantic.
I said, “Hotel maid. Married man who happens to be a United States senator. Sound familiar?”
At first he didn't seem to understand. But then every feature on his face was suddenly dragged down as if by gravity.
“I thought you gave that shit up, Warren.”
He made a fist. “That was a slip.”
“Some slip.”
“How the hell did you hear about it?”
“Courtesy of R. D. Greaves. He wants one million dollars cash for the video he has.”
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“He says you come from big money. As you do.”
“Not that kind of money.”
“We pay for our sins, Warren.”
Waitress. All either of us wanted was coffee. There's something about blackmail that curbs the appetite. We gave her our order then resumed talking.
“God, last night and now this? R. D. Greaves is scum. He must've planted a camera in there.”
“Yeah. He did. And the girl was a plant. He has the tape, Warren. Adultery. Sleazy video.”
“One million bucks. That bastard. I really think I'm going to start hyperventilating. No shit.”
“Warren, we have to face this.”
“I can't believe this.” He shook his head three or four times. A fine sheen of sweat covered his face. “Have you seen the video?”
“No. But I will before we arrange for the money.”
“How will you contact him?”
“He'll call me. He doesn't have any reason to hide.”
“There's no way I can come up with a million. No way at all. Getting that much would cause so much suspicion we'd have the feds on us. And anyway, that kind of money is invested. Nobody would have it laying around in currency.”
“He's given us till tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, I won't do it. I'd rather resign my office.”
“No, you wouldn't.”
“Shit.” Then, “You're right. No, I wouldn't.”
I said, “There's another angle here.”
He smiled sadly. “With you there's always another angle. You work like a confidence man sometimes, Dev. Nobody knows quite what's going on except you.”
“You'd know the same thing if you thought about it.”
He shrugged. “Probably not. You've got street smarts, I don't. There's a downside to growing up privileged. You don't know jack shit about the real world.”
The waitress gave us more coffee.
“I can tell I'm not going to like this,” Warren said.
“You're right. You're not going to like this.”
“You can be a real prick sometimes.”
He'd spoken too loudly. The crowd had thinned considerably now that it was pushing nine o'clock. You could hear actual words instead of just noise. A couple of men in blue real-estate blazers looked over at
us. They were surprised to see their senator. He usually had a bodyguard with him. Right now he was just another guy.
In a stage whisper, he said, “You can be a real prick sometimes, you know that?”
“Here's the other angle. It's called honesty. When I signed on with you, one of the first things we discussed were all the rumors about you chasing women around. You said you'd given it up. Bopping a maid doesn't sound like you were telling the truth.”
“She was the only one.”
“Bullshit.”
He really hated me at that moment. Senators don't get pushed around the way regular folks do. Many of the laws that apply to us don't apply to them. And they don't take kindly to regular folk challenging them.
“The truth, Warren. I have to know what might be coming at us sometime. You know, like Clinton's ‘bimbo eruptions.'”
He sat back and for a long moment closed his eyes. He wasn't a drama queen, so this kind of behavior told me that he had some serious fessing up to do.
“Six or seven others,” he said when he returned to earth.
“In what period of time?”
“The last year, say.”
“All one-night stands?”
“All but one. A stewardess. We got together three times.”
“All in Washington?”
“No. All here. In Chicago. I have a small apartment absolutely nobody but me knows about.”
“You said the last year. How about the last two years? How many would that be?”
“Probably about the same number. Six, seven a year.”
“So we're talking twelve to fourteen potential scandals.”
“They won't talk. Hell, a few of them are married. They sure aren't going to risk their family life.”
“How many are married?”
“What difference does it make?”
“How many?”
“Shit, I don't know. Say, uh, four.”
“Four from twelve leaves eight. Eight potential bimbo eruptions.”
“They haven't said anything so far.”
“So far. But three weeks is a long, long time. And maybe one or two of them are mad because they wanted more than a one-night stand. It's not very often that a woman gets to sleep with a real senator. But you blew her off. So every time she sees your face on TV she gets mad and hurt and vengeful. Most women just ride with it. They don't want to humiliate themselves by getting caught up in a scandal. But there's always one who's like all those people you see on trash TV. ‘Sure I'm having sex with my mother, but I'm on TV and that's all that matters.' Maybe one of these eight women you feel so confident about, Warren—maybe at this very moment she's picking up the phone and calling Lake headquarters and saying that she's got a piece of information that's so hot she'll only talk to Lake himself. Remember Paula Jones, Warren?”
“You're scaring the hell out of me, Dev. And I mean that.”
“Well, you're scaring the hell out of me, too. Right now I want to punch your face in.”
“I don't blame you.”
“Oh, don't cheese this up with remorse, Warren,. You lied to me and now we're all in trouble.”
“Well, excuse me for saying I'm sorry. I guess that's a no-no with big bad Dev, huh?”
“We've got Greaves—or rather he's got us—and we've got to explain to the press about last night, and we've got a campaign to run. If
we've got time to squeeze it in between everything else, that is. And then on top of it all we've got maybe one or two women who just might like to see you take a real hard fall.”
By this time he was pale and sweaty and a familiar tic had started working on his left eye. The tic usually appeared when stress reached overload proportions for him. He was suffering and I was happy to see it. He'd lied to his wife, to his staff, and to me. Laura had told me soon after I'd signed on that he'd gathered them all together one day and told them in a very formal way, “I am changing my lifestyle. I want to become an adult instead of this compulsive teenager I've been all my life.” He didn't have to elaborate. He didn't have to say that heretofore he couldn't seem to keep it in his pants. They knew what he was talking about.
“So now what, Dev?”
“Now we just go on and do our jobs and hope for the best. I want to see Greaves's video, and then I want to see if I can find that makeup woman.”
“She doesn't matter anymore.”
“Sure she does. If she'll admit that Greaves or somebody else from the Lake camp hired her, we can coast the rest of the way home. We'll wind up with a ten-point lead.”
“But what about the tape?”
“Separate issue. I'll look at it and tell you if I think it's been altered in any way.”
“But I'll never be able to come up with a million dollars.”
“You won't have to. Get me three hundred thousand in cash. I'll bring that to him when we make the swap. He'll piss and moan, but the sight of all that green—he'll come around.”
“God, I hope you're right.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I hope I'm right, too.”
Daily Double Discount was located in what had once been a two-story concrete block building belonging to the YMCA. The neighborhood had gotten too rough for the Y folks, so they'd sought safer digs.
The interior had the eternal smell of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, that faint whiff of the grave that is actually an amalgam of fabrics, mustiness, and the inexplicable scent of decay.
The merchandise was thrown on long folding tables and displayed as was. No racks, no hangers, not even any signs directing you to clothes, housewares, appliances, and so on. I assumed the second floor was more of the same. I browsed the shirts while I waited for the two women up front wearing matching DDD blouses to finish talking to a customer.
Every shirt I picked up had some small thing wrong with it. A pocket had been stitched wrong. One sleeve was a few inches shorter than the other. Color was faded here and there. These kinds of factory rejects could be bought for a fraction of regular wholesale price and
sold cheap. I wandered back to housewares and found that all the boxes the irons and mixers and lamps came in were pretty badly banged up. Some of the boxes were crushed, some were so worn on the edges that only the cardboard base was left. Presumably the appliances worked.
A Christian radio station filled the tinny speakers stationed on walls throughout the store. It used to be said that the devil got all the good music. These days it was the reverse. Christian music could claim lots of stars who were talented musicians and singers. My problem was the lyrics. I'd once heard a song where a young woman sang to Jesus as if he were her lover. It made me very uncomfortable.
Hey, Jesus, let's get it on, dude
.
The people were heartbreaking to watch. No matter how low the prices were, they were still too much for many of the customers, those being members of America's first official underclass—black, white, brown, red, physically challenged, mentally challenged, druggies, winos, the perpetually underemployed, people so old they didn't have to die to become ghosts, people possessed of rashes, scars, boils, walleyes, black teeth, yellow teeth, no teeth, the crippled, the insane, the grotesquely fat, the junkie thin—all these being things that a good job with a good health plan could cope with if not resolve, except for the junkies and the insane. Many of these minds would be focused on survival basics—what kind of grub they could scrounge up for dinner tonight. And the place was packed with them.
I went back up front. The black woman at the register said, “Help you, sir?”
“I hope so.”
She had a sweet smile. “Well, I'll try, anyway.”
The first thing I did was give her the physical description of the makeup woman. I didn't bother giving her the name, because the name was a phony. “She might be or have been a hairdresser who knew something about makeup. For TV. A lot of local newspeople get makeup advice when they get their hair cut.”
She had a button with a photo of her granddaughter on it. Cute little two- or three-year-old. She touched it as she squinted her eyes, furrowed her brow, trying to shape all the words I'd given her into a picture.
She didn't address me. She called another cashier over. “Nikki, this gentleman is trying to find a woman he thinks may come in here. I can't place her, but you work nights half the time. Maybe she comes in then.”
Nikki was white, thirty-something going on sixteen what with the nose ring, the tongue stud, the goth eye makeup, the spiky bottle-blond hair. If her face was hard, her body was soft in an extremely pleasing way.
She started shaking her head before I got halfway through my description. “That could be several of our customers. Is there anything weird about her?”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, you know. Like a sloe eye or big nose or a scar or something?”
“Not really.”
“Hmm.” Then, “You know who might know her? Janine in back. She's tried just about every hair place in the neighborhood. She's very, very picky. She probably knows everybody who works around here.”
“Could I talk to her?”
“Sure. C'mon, I'll take you back.”
“Thank you,” I said to the black woman.
Janine was indeed a fan of hair salons. She had a cast-iron hairdo that had last been seen in the known universe around 1960, a kind of modified reddish hair helmet that was a perfect complement to the wild makeup that gave her the look of a sinister doll. I put her age at fifty-five or so.
Nikki did the introductions and left me alone with Janine, whose job, apparently, was going through the warehouse part of the store and
matching the numbers on her clipboard with the numbers on the boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. They'd damned well better tally.
“Makeup, huh? Those are the hardest ones to find. Just because a gal knows hair don't mean she knows squat about makeup. And I've tried 'em all. And you know what? I do my own makeup now. I used to tell them how I wanted it to look—just the way it is now—and they'd try and talk me out of it. Every single time. Hey, who knows what I want better than I do? That's what I finally decided, anyway.”
“So nobody comes to mind?”
“Sort of—vaguely, I mean. I mean, there was somebody who was supposed to be a real pro with makeup—and I'm sure I tried her, too—but right now I can't get a name or a face. You got a phone?”
“Why don't I give you my cell phone number?”
“You ever read those things can give you brain cancer?”
“I've read that. Some studies say yes, some studies say no.”
I wrote my number out and handed it to her.
“If I come up with anybody, I'll call you.”
“I'd really appreciate it.”
She patted her hair helmet. “I just wish my hair gal knew about makeup. If I had the time, I'd sit her down and explain it to her.”
She was deranged but oddly likable. But then I realized that this description could probably apply to me, too. “I'm sure she'd appreciate that,” I said and got out of there.
 
 
 
A
breast, a thigh, a buttock, a young woman easing herself down on a man's penis. Breath coming in bursts, gasps. She has a fine, tight, lithe body. A couple very clear shots of her face. Surprisingly pretty.
The man—our own Senator Warren Nichols—is also seen very clearly at least three times in the eight-minute videotape. He looks a
lot better with his clothes on. He is also less than an ardent lover. He just wants to get off. He could be having sex with an inflatable woman. He just keeps wrenching her into whatever position is best for him at any given moment. A few of the positions are obviously painful for her and she mutters protests. Not that he gives a damn. Not that he tries to be any more considerate. Not that he treats her like any kind of equal.
His cry is almost savage when he comes. Her expression is almost comic in the disgust and contempt it conveys as she watches him fall off her, sated and out of breath, flinging his arms out and lying on his back.
“You're quite the lover.”
But he doesn't catch the sarcasm. Through gasps, he says, “Thank you. You're not bad yourself.”
If he notices her slipping from the bed, tugging on her thong, combing her hair with her fingers, you can't tell it from what the camera eye sees. He still seems to be riding the wave of his orgasm.
“See you,” she says, a slight figure moving swiftly to the door.
“You take care of yourself now,” Warren says from the bed.
R. D. Greaves's laugh was harsh. “Your man is some lover. Shit, I've treated whores better than that. Even the ones that gave me crabs.”
His hotel room apartment was a nice one. Too nice for somebody like good old R.D. There were two Renoir prints, a massive TV, and a screened fireplace with an imposing natural stone hearth with rough edges. I would have been even more appreciative of the living room if I hadn't been brooding over the videotape.
“So, Sport, now you know I'm not bullshitting you, right?”
We sat in chairs side by side in front of the TV set. Curtains drawn. Day for night.
“I guess.”
“You guess my ass. This is the real thing and you know it.”
“A million dollars—we can't come up with it.”
“Listen, man, I had my accountant check him out. That much cash is always a hassle, but it's there to be had. And if I don't get it by tomorrow noon—”
“I get sick of your threats.”
“Well, I get sick of your bullshit.”
“How about opening the drapes?”
“Scared of the dark?”
The sunlight was so stark it made me wince. This was one of those Midwestern turnaround days that would be unimaginable anywhere else. A near blizzard last night. Forty-two degrees this morning, the snow melting so fast it was flooding certain parts of the city.
I was thinking about tomorrow, about what I had planned for it when I came back to this room just before noon. It was crude but it would work. It had damned well
better
work, anyway.
“So what's it going to be?”
“We don't have much choice, do we? Tomorrow noon, you'll have your money. Where do I bring it?”
“Right here.”
“There's no point in asking you if this is the only copy. I'm sure you've made several dupes of it. And I'm also sure you're going to come back for more.”
“Not unless I blow through that million awful fast.”
“That's reassuring.”
“I don't get the full million tomorrow, asshole, I'm going to feed you to the rats. I don't like people who waste my time.”
I walked over and picked up my coat and slid my arms into it. “What happens if Lake ever finds out that you didn't turn the tape over to him?”
“What happens? Nothing happens, because he'll never find out. You sure as hell won't tell him, because then he'll know your secret. And I sure as hell won't tell him, because then he'd tell everybody what I did, and that wouldn't exactly be good for my business rep, now, would it?”
“Nothing's ever that easy, Greaves. You should know that by now. You've convinced yourself that this is the easiest money you've ever made. But you know how things can happen, things you don't expect at all.”
A sneer. “If you're trying to scare me, man, it won't work. I want a million in hundred-dollar bills, just the way I told you. Then I'll worry about the rest.”
At the door, I said, “I'm still going to nail your ass for drugging the senator's drink last night.”
He smiled. “You never quit, do you?”
“Not when I'm after a scumbag like you.”
“Aw, there you go again, Sport. Hurting my feelings. I guess you just don't know how sensitive I am. You get me?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I get you all right.”
“I didn't have jack to do with putting anything in his drink. And neither did Lake. If he had, I would've known about it. He would've asked me to do it.”
The sunlight highlighted the coarseness of his face. The old pockmarks, the furious redness of the booze over the years. Once again I didn't want to believe him, but I did. Nothing to do with rigging Warren's drink.
“You got some nice pussy working for you. Don't suppose you'd line me up.”
“Only way they'd ever go out with you, ‘Sport,' is if they could wear biohazard suits.”
“You're forgettin' how sensitive I am.”
I got out of there without him winking at me. A small victory.
BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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