Dead Man (17 page)

“Harry?”

The bartender jerked an indifferent thumb toward a dark corner by the end of the bar. Bulky guys asking questions were no
novelty to him, and Harry was a pain in the ass.

“Him.”

In the dark corner, Harry had Noreen crowded up against the wall, trying to caress her breast while talking earnestly about
sexual matters. Noreen looked bored. The bookends closed in on Harry as if he were an encyclopedia of slime molds. Seeing
them over Harry’s shoulder, Noreen did a quick and grateful fade, then found something to talk about with the bartender, out
of earshot but able to watch obliquely in the backbar mirror.

The one named Nicky, who had a whole lot of blond hair, said to Harry, “You phoned about a girl named Vangie.” He tossed a
photo of her on the bar. “Yes or no?”

Harry picked up the picture, studied it with a show of concentration. He had gotten a sly, money look on his face.

“Well-1-1… I can’t be certain.”

Trask, the one with short black hair, said, “Get certain.”

“I ain’t gonna get in trouble over this, am I?” asked Harry with belated caution. “I mean… how heavy is it? I mean… what’d
she do?”

“Asked questions,” said Trask.

Harry said hurriedly, “Ah, yeah, yeah, she’s the one, all right, fellas, she dances here.” He added in a smaller voice, “Stuck-up
fuckin’ bitch.”

Nicky rolled two $100 bills into a cigarette-like cylinder and stuck the cylinder into Harry’s shirt pocket.

“See, pal?” he said. “Easy money. Now just tell us where she parks her pasties and we’ll be on our way.”

Harry told them. As they started out of the place, Trask paused to finger Harry’s shirt collar regretfully.

“Ring around the collar, Harry,” he said. “Mention us around town, you got no collar. Maybe even you got no neck to go into
the collar you ain’t got.
Capisce?
“

He guffawed loudly and swaggered out after Nicky. He had really liked that TV series,
Crime Story,
about the old days in Vegas, and had patterned himself after the show’s mob characters.

Noreen, in pasties and spangles, was doing an exaggerated and prolonged grind in front of the dressing room mirror. She added
an exaggerated
bump!
to the grind that made everything jiggle, and winked at her own overmascaraed eyes in the mirror.

“So why ain’t you rich, kiddo?”

A mile away in the porn palace next to the Delta Hotel, a couple of dozen male patrons of three races—white, black, Asian—sparsely
studded the theater like chocolate chips on a store-bought cookie. Management didn’t mind the nearly empty theater; it was
only a money-washing operation anyway.

Zimmer, absorbing the raw sex and grunts and four-letter exhortations from the screen, fondling his own half-hard-on furtively
like everyone else, jerked his hand away abruptly. Why was he here with these freaks and weirdos who couldn’t
afford a VCR, when he had something like Vangie waiting in his bed?

She wasn’t waiting in his bed, that was the answer. She was out shaking it in a Vieux Carré sleaze joint, or maybe right now
fucking the guy who was after them to rob Jimmy Zimmer of the bonds. For her own good, he’d force Vangie to give him the locker
key,
he’d
control their destiny…

Zimmer emerged into the polyglot, swarming street crowd, no tourists, all local. When he turned in at the Delta Hotel, a bulky
man sauntered in ahead of him. A bodybuilder, mirror athlete, all muscle and no guts, deep tan and a great shock of almost
straw-yellow hair.

Another bulky man, equally large but with black hair cut Marine Corps short, turned away from the check-in desk to meet the
blond man in front of the elevator. They shook hands noisily as Zimmer reached around them to punch the button. Cream puffs—these
hulking overinflated guys were all fag for each other.

“Hey, man, what about this nightlife, huh?” black-hair asked blond as the elevator door opened.

“Yeah! Thompson’s got the broads up at the room already!”

The three men got on. Zimmer, closest to the panel of floor buttons, pushed 6 just as the blond man said, “Hey, punch six
for us, will you, buddy? Thanks.”

Zimmer turned right, toward his room. The two big guys paused, debating which way their room was. They ended up following
Zimmer down the corridor.

Heavy applause, rebel yells followed the distant music. Down the corridor from the backstage area came the approaching click
of high heels; Vangie came in wearing only an exhausted expression, spangles, and sweat. She sprawled in one of the straight-backed
chairs with her arms hanging limply at her sides. Through the half-open door came Harry’s voice from backstage.

“Noreen, get out here! You’re on next!”

“Her master’s voice,” said Noreen, but she made no
move whatsoever to get out of her chair in front of the makeup mirror.

Nicky and Trask were coming up the hall behind him with their loose drunken conventioneer laughs when Zimmer opened his door.
Trask shoved him hard between the shoulder blades. Jimmy ran across the room, arms flailing, to smash into the dresser. Nicky
shut the door as Trask pulled a blackjack from his pocket. Zimmer turned to protest, but Trask waved the sap in front of his
startled eyes.

“Make a sound I splinter your nose.”

Zimmer pressed himself back against the dresser, terribly pale, his terror-filled eyes darting from one hulk to the other.
Nicky was at the phone, dialing 9 for an outside line. When he had it, he dialed a local seven-digit number.

“Six forty-seven,” he said into the phone, and hung up.

“
Noreen! Get your fucking ass out here!
“

Noreen went languidly to the door. She caught the frames on either side of it to do a high kick out into the hall. She stuck
her head back in.

“I almost forgot, kid,” she said over her shoulder, “couple creeps laid two C-notes on shithead earlier—both looked like that
Arny Schwartzynigger guy, y’know? Had a picture that from fifteen feet away in bad light looked like you.”

She was gone, leaving Vangie gasping like a netted fish.

“Noreen! Wait…” Noreen was still gone. “But… but he can’t… we can’t…”

She ran almost blindly at the door, slamming it shut and bolting it. Panting, she reached down the front of her
cache-sexe
and took out a flat old-fashioned tin aspirin box. She dropped it into her purse as she crossed on wobbly legs to the pay
phone beside the door. She dropped her quarter into the slot and began tapping out a number, leaving the receiver hang on
the end of its silvery flex so she could be pulling on her street clothes with the other hand. She was almost crying.

“He… he promised me, tomorrow afternoon… it isn’t fair…”

Zimmer’s eyes darted toward the door at the discreet knock. His face looked flayed down to the bone. Maxton came in wearing
an elegant summer-weight suit and open-throat raw-silk sport shirt. He looked a question at Nicky, who shook his head. Trask
came out of the bathroom. Like Nicky, he wore thin surgical gloves. He also shook his head.

“Indeed.” Maxton dragged a straight chair in front of the door, sat down in it backward so he faced the room with his arms
on the back, said to Zimmer, “James, take off your clothes.”

“
No!
” cried Zimmer in a terrified voice.

The phone rang. Zimmer jerked galvanically toward it. Maxton shook his head and said soothingly, “Just to make sure you aren’t
hiding some significant other in your shorts, James.”

The phone kept on ringing, but it was now much too late for anything outside this room to affect events inside it. Zimmer
began to unbutton his shirt with leaden fingers.

Vangie was buttoning her last button with one hand while slamming the receiver back on the hook with the other. She grabbed
her purse from the dressing table, her high heels clattered down the hallway on her way to the alley door.

Maxton was out of his chair, leaning against the inside of the door with his arms folded on his chest, staring at Zimmer nude
and shivering in the middle of the floor. Zimmer had thin arms and a sunken chest with a single scraggly tuft of brown hair
growing over the breastbone. Nicky dropped the last of Zimmer’s clothes on the floor.

“Nothing significant, Mr. Maxton.” He snapped Zimmer’s flaccid organ with a finger, chuckled, “Especially not in his shorts.”

“So she
does
have the bonds. Dain was right.” Maxton
spoke almost to himself. He turned an icy eye on Zimmer. “James? Talk to me.”

“A key,” said Zimmer eagerly. “Vangie has it. It was all her idea to take the bonds, Mr. Maxton. I… I didn’t think until…
until it was too late…” Maxton was silent. Zimmer cried, “Dain! Dain knows she has the key!”

Maxton’s voice was a whip. “You spoke with Dain?”

“Vangie did.”

“Key to what?”

“To a locker. At the bus depot.”

Maxton was silent, then smiled and nodded. “Yes. I see. Thank you, James. You’ve been a great help.”

“Can… can I get dressed now, Mr. Maxton?”

Maxton gestured to his men. “Goodbye, James,” he said.

He turned away as Nicky and Trask began crowding Jimmy back toward the open bathroom door like driving a steer into the slaughterhouse
chute. He clung to the door frame with despairing strength; their big athletes’ hands tore his soft deskman’s hands free like
wet blotting paper. They shut the bathroom door behind them. Maxton could hear the muffled sound of water being run into the
tub as he departed the hotel room.

Vangie came through the open street door at almost a run, slowed abruptly to a walk, trying to look casual and not making
it. As she put out a finger to press the elevator button, it started down from the sixth floor. She ducked into the doorway
of the emergency stairwell beside the elevator. Nicky and Trask left the elevator glancing around the lobby, seeing nothing
of interest, strutting toward the street. Trask was telling Nicky a dirty joke, and they were guffawing.

Vangie cautiously opened the stairwell door to peek out into the hallway. Empty. She shut the door behind her, trying to stifle
her panting from the six-floor all-out stair climb. The elevator descending from this floor didn’t have to have anything to
do with her and Jimmy. He probably had gone out just to bug her, and hadn’t come back yet. That was all.

Still she hesitated before keying the lock with exaggerated caution. She let the door drift open on its own. The dim overhead
was on, the bed still looked freshly made.

“Jimmy?” It was little more than a whisper. She moved in, shut the door behind her. “Jimmy?”

The closet was empty except for their clothes; she edged toward the bathroom door, cautious as a doe at the edge of a clearing.
Turned the knob, feathered the door open, stuck her head in. The very narrow wedge of light let her see Jimmy’s bent knees
rising above the water in the nearly full tub. One arm, resting against the edge of the tub, was also above-water.

Vangie pushed the door wider and fumbled along the wall for the light switch. Relief made her voice buoyant.

“Why in heaven’s name are you taking a bath in the dark?”

The room sprang into view. The water filling the tub was rosy with diluted blood, with Zimmer’s bent knees islands above this
pastel surface. Brighter, richer red had run down the forearm above the water from his slashed wrist.

Vangie reeled against the sink, gripping the sides with her hands, face contorted, mouth working. Somehow she kept from screaming,
though she clapped a hand over her mouth as if to physically hold in the sound. She ran from the room.

The Delta’s only bellboy, an aged man in his seventies with little hair and one cloudy lens in his eyeglasses, was leading
an equally aged couple down the hallway outside with their suitcase in his hand. Vangie erupted from her room and knocked
him down, bounced off the wall, eyes vague and unfocused, a hand still across her mouth. She lowered it to speak.

“Ex…excuseme…”

She ran away down the hall, careening from side to side like a car driven by a drunk. The bellboy braced one hand on the wall
and with the help of the couple got shakily to his feet. He stared after Vangie, then turned and looked at the open door of
the room. Back down the hall. To the room.

He started shakily through the open doorway.

The gypsy cab driver lit his cigarette, shook the match out and dropped it into the street. Vangie, after being handed a wig
box by the woman behind the counter, came out of the exotic underwear shop in her very short skintight skirt and blouse with
the top four buttons undone. She opened the rear door of the cab but the cabbie patted the seat beside him insinuatingly.

“Plenty of room up here, baby.”

“Bus depot,” she said, getting in the back.

He slammed the cab into gear, left rubber pulling away from the curb. He found her face in the rearview mirror. She had her
head back against the seat with her eyes closed, Jimmy dead in their bathtub vivid against her eyelids.

“Stuck-up bitch,” the cabbie muttered to himself.

The cabin door crashed back against the wall. Two bulky men, silhouetted by moonlight, charged in with sawed-off
shotguns in their hands. Heavy boots grated on bare plank floor. Silver ring glinted on a finger. One, sunglasses, curly hair.
The other, ski mask.

“Doesn’t it bother you… that we might be killed?”

Vangie went back and up, her mouth strained impossibly wide, her eyes wild, her hair an underwater slow-motionswirl…

A fist pounded on the door. Coming up out of nightmare, he thought,
Vangie?

Zimmer’s tub was only half-filled with pink water because his corpse had been removed and laid beside it. Inverness crouched
beside him, jerked back the wet-grayed sheet to let Dain, crowded into the doorway behind him, see the face.

“The murderer, confronted with evidence of his crimes, broke down and confessed,” said Dain in a toneless voice.

“No, nothing like that,” protested Inverness.