Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (5 page)

So we arrived in New York City after that long drive, and spent the whole cold February in a Winnebago parked on the edge of Manhattan, playing Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and a slew of other clubs in Manhattan and other places within a half day’s drive. The Winnebago was much cheaper than a hotel, but it was cold and cramped. We spent a lot of time huddled on the top of the Winnebago sharing a cheap local brand of whiskey. I forgot the name, but not the motto: “Only the finest, since 1974.”

One night the stars managed to peek out through the murky sky as Leo and I polished off another bottle.

“You know, when I was a kid,” he said, “I used to shoot at the moon and stars with this little .22 rifle. Take real careful aim, you know, and fire away. I thought I was bound to hit one of them. The moon was a lot easier target, but there were so many more stars, I figured I had a better chance hitting one of them. I knew they were a long ways off, but I had no earthly idea how far, and I didn’t know how far the gun would shoot.” He shook his head, grinned, and took another slug of whiskey.

“Don’t you feel a whole lot older and wiser now?” I said. He tilted his head back and took in the view. “Not as many to shoot at here. Think kids who grow up here know what they been missing?”

“I doubt it.”

“Thing is, Martin, sometimes I’d have a sort of a pang. I’d think, shit, what if I hit one, and the thing goes down? What if I did get a bull’s eye on the moon, and the damn thing comes falling out of the sky? You know what I thought?”

“Thought you’d get in trouble, I bet.”

“Well, the only thing I could think, that the damn thing would come crashing down right on top of my parents’ house.”

“Then you’d be in trouble for sure.”

He laughed. “Yeah.” He sniffled, bunching up inside his parka. “Ain’t that something? Now why would I think it would land on top of my parents’ house, instead of somebody else’s?”

“You were a kid, Leo. Young and dumb.”

“Yeah. Never dreamed I’d be up here in West New York in a trailer park, freezing my ass off, playing for a bunch of goddamn yanks whose idea of showing their appreciation for a band is to put their drinks down once in a while so they can clap once or twice. Audiences suck here, man.”

“I definitely prefer the whooping and hollering back home. I don’t think I’ve heard more than one or two people whistle after one of your lead breaks the whole time we’ve been here. But it’s good exposure. Who knows, maybe they’ll run our picture in
Interview
again.”

“Yeah, whatever. I guess we’re lucky to be gigging. A lot of bands can’t even get a weekend gig in their hometown. Here we are, in a situation a million kids would give their right arm to be in, and we’re complaining about the audiences, the weather . . .”

“Their lousy excuse for Mexican food . . .”

“No ice tea refills . . .”

“MTV brats who never heard of Howlin’ Wolf . . .”

“But the bars stay open later, and the pizza’s a hell of a lot better.”

“They’ve got the Chrysler Building, and we’ll be home in a few weeks.”

“Yeah,” he said, cracking a smile. “I’m starting to like that Caribbean food they got here, too. It ain’t Seis Salsas, but it kinda tickles my spice gland. Might as well bone up, keep on doing what we do. We do what we do, do we not?”

“That’s right. If you’re a musician, you gotta make music. And we’re a long way from your parents’ garage.”

“That’s right,” he said. “And the moon never fell on it, so I guess I’ll just keep on shooting.”

&&&

I took Nick’s dirty ashtray out on the balcony. Even though I’d been dying for a cigarette just minutes before, the urge was gone and the sight and smell of used ones was annoying. I’d deal with cigarettes and crazy guitar players later. Right now I needed to get back to trying to piece together what had happened in my blackout period.

I caught my next-door neighbor just before he went to bed. He’d fed the cat and kept an eye on the apartment while I was on the road. But he hadn’t heard me come in last night and couldn’t say if I came home alone, unattended, or if I just beamed down from the Starship
Enterprise.

I called the guys in the band. Leo was out. I called Nadine at the diner, and she said she hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t come home last night and when she went out to the store and came back he’d dropped off his stuff and left again. She said it looked like he’d bought a new guitar. That would make thirteen.

Kate said that Ray had a gig, which was no surprise.

Billy’s answering machine didn’t say where he was, but I figured he was down at the studio, and it turned out the answering machine was on there, too.

I tallied up the rest of the Continental Club money and looked over the road ledger and tally of charge slips. It looked like Sunday night’s pay would just barely cover the bills that would be coming in.

I made myself another drink. It didn’t taste right. Even the cat was avoiding me. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I drank the drink and still I didn’t look any better. I realized I hadn’t showered since I’d gotten to town. I showered, shaved, and put on a clean white shirt and some trousers that still had creases in them. Thin white socks, black faux alligator shoes. A skinny black belt with a deco buckle.

Ten o’clock at night, no cigarettes, what does a potential rapist-murderer do next? Sitting around, watching TV, waiting for the phone to ring with reports from the police lab would only ruin the creases in his trousers. Damn, I thought, I’ve got to do something.

Time to prowl.

&&&

I pulled the rain cover off the Karmann Ghia, folded it up, and stuffed it in the boot. Low slung, sleek, retro, it was a 1970 convertible with a fresh coat of what the paint shops call Texas yellow. All the dings had been taken out, including the small dent in the nose, which was now perfectly rounded again. I gave it a little pat, admiring its streamlined face. The vents in the nose were its slanted nostrils, the headlights staring out from the sweeping front fenders were its eyes. It had upwards of 150,000 miles on it and it fired up right away.

I rolled out the drive onto South 1st and headed south toward La Quinta Motor Inn. There was just enough cool and damp to the air that the neighborhood fragrances carried in the breeze, and it seemed that my head was finally clearing as I made the uncomplicated cruise of the near South Austin neighborhood around Bouldin Creek, a cozy old shoe of narrow streets and sprawling oaks, tire swings in yards and a high density of Mexican food restaurants. The average resident was either a blue-collar worker or a musician, or both. I swung east on Oltorf Street across the interstate feeling no nostalgia, only an overwhelming need to pick up no clues that belonged to me at the motel.

It didn’t feel familiar. The desk clerk barely looked up as I crossed the lobby. I went out through the glass doors into the swimming pool area. I walked around until I saw the room on the second floor roped off with yellow crime scene tape. The lights were on.

I took the stairs up to the second floor, walked down toward the room like I was a guest, and peeked in through the window. Two cops in almost identical brown suits were wrapping things up. The walls were still splattered with blood, not the bright red stuff you see on television and the movies but the ugly dark- hued stuff that really is blood, flung into cross-hatched patterns and dribbling smudges that left a horrifying drop cloth blueprint of violent frenzy.

I thought about how I’d accidentally bloodied her nose and my stomach immediately knotted up. I recalled that the incident had had a sobering effect. Standing there in a house full of people, hot and sweaty with a strange girl who was not my girlfriend, I had asked her if she was ready to go, then downed that margarita in one gulp. So where did I think we were going when we left?

The walls, door frames, double bed, TV, recessed vanity, table and chairs were all smudged with fingerprinting powder. The radio was on, playing “Stairway to Heaven.” Her bags were parked by the door. One of the brown suits held open a large shopping bag while the other dropped a string of costume jewelry beads into it like a dead snake. I caught the name of the store on the shopping bag: The Discount Aristocrat.

I checked my watch. There was a good chance that Carolyn, the proprietor of the shop named on the bag, was still at work. She usually closed at ten and liked to have a couple of dry martinis while she waited for her husband to pick her up. It was no accident that I knew this information. I was a regular customer, and I’d found that this was the time to get a real bargain.

“Stairway to Heaven” was just climaxing on the car radio as I fired up the Ghia, and neither Led Zeppelin nor bargain hunting was foremost on my mind. I sailed over Oltorf, then wound up on Lamar Boulevard and turned left toward Clarksville. I killed the radio, preferring the screeching wails of my tires to those of Robert Plant.

&&&

“I agree with you, Martin, she didn’t seem the type,” Carolyn said, her voice a pleasant West Texas twang as she set her martini glass down on an end table that was a thick tinted glass top mounted atop the head and hands of a scantily clad ceramic Egyptian dancer. One copper-colored breast had popped out of the dancer’s bustier and she didn’t have a free hand to put it back in. “But I take whatever customers I get. All kinds of people come in here and buy stuff to wear to a costume party, or a gift for one of their token weird friends. My regular clientele, people like your saxophonist, they come in and spend a couple of hundred every other month on Bakelite or doggie bone sofas. Ladonna gets a lot of stuff here, too. You know that. If not for them, I wouldn’t be in business. But that walk-in trade, the people who do ninety-five percent of their shopping at the malls, their money is green, too. So I don’t care if they’re the type or not. But there
was
something strange about her.” We were sitting behind the counter of her little storefront on West Lynn. Shafts of moonlight shot past the racks heavy with old suits and cocktail dresses, shelves packed with big chrome toasters and espresso makers and martini shakers, glass cases with Bakelite kitchenware, and rotating racks of wide silk ties, hand-painted.

Carolyn was in her late thirties. She used to breast-feed her son Ransom, now twelve, at concerts at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the old National Guard Armory that had been a sort of counterculture chamber of commerce back in the ’60s and ’70s. She’d seen a lot and forgotten little.

“I thought maybe she was picking up some souvenirs to take back to LA,” she said, taking another sip of the martini, smacking her lips, “since she seemed like she was strictly Melrose Avenue—off the rack and a little dated. The thing I’ve noticed about LA fashion, Martin, is that they get a hold of a style and they don’t let go of it for two or three years. That death-rock look, and the biker-cowboy thing. And boots. They really like their boots. But she’s cute, and I kinda liked her. I tried to get her interested in a mink wrap, or one of those Joan Crawford padded shoulder jackets, but she didn’t go for them. She kept coming back, though. She’d hang out, ask about things and about people around here. She’d usually buy a little something, but I never figured her out.”

“She said she was a detective,” I said.

“Well,” she laughed, “maybe so. Maybe she was investigating the thrift shop business.”

“She ask about your business, or about any of the other stores in town?”

“Well, mostly about old Vick. She seemed pretty curious about him. I’d tell her what I know about Electric Ladyland, St. Vincent de Paul, Room Service, and Flashback, but she’d always come back to asking about Vick. I guess he does have the most interesting place in town.” She finished her drink and stood, smoothing out the folds of her hand-painted muslin
china poblana
skirt as headlights swooped over us through the front window. “Ransom’s here, and it looks like my husband’s letting him drive, too. Can you believe it? Nice talking to you, Martin. Buy something next time.”

&&&

I was starting to feel better and worse at the same time. Better, because my head was clearing and so was the situation. Worse, because it didn’t make me like the situation any better. Retha Thomas had asked me about Vick Travis and how he was supposed to be some kind of character. She also told me she was a detective. At the time, it all seemed like after-hours chatter, the kind of thing that someone says and you play along with it. If you had more important things to talk about, you’d probably do it somewhere else, during a different time of day.

Lasko didn’t seem very interested in the detective angle. He had plenty of other angles to keep him busy. However, it was one of the few things I had to go on, and, besides, Vick’s muscle man, Ed the Head, had been at the party. Maybe he knew something.

I sped down 12th Street east toward the Capitol building, admiring its hard pink granite double dome bathed in respectful lights on a lap of cool green grass and surrounded by pecan trees, memorial statues, and silent cannons. I swung right on Congress Avenue, a corridor of brassy postmodern pyramids that elbowed out the older nineteenth-century structures, hogged the sidewalks, mostly stood there vacant—Johnny-come-latelies in the ’80s boom that had gone bust. Downtown was quiet.

As I waited at the light at East 1st Street, the green mossy smells of Town Lake drifted over, cool and clinging. From where I sat, you couldn’t see the litter and scum floating on the surface or hear the wicked undertow swirling below, and you might mistake the bats fluttering around the streetlights for sparrows. When the light changed I took the left and pulled over just past the Sheraton Crest. Vick’s Vintage sat in the shadow of the hotel parking garage, a two-story flat-roofed yellow brick shoe box on the rise off the north shore of the lake, with no other concession to style than a curved wall of glass brick on either side of the front door now gray with street grime. I parked behind an olive green late ’70s Plymouth with a blistered, peeling vinyl top and bondo spots on the trunk. There was a vaguely human shape in the doorway of the store, apparently locking up. I bounded out of the car and trotted up the sidewalk.