Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (8 page)

W
e have this friend named Cason Statler. He works for a dying newspaper in Camp Rapture, which isn’t far from LaBorde. He’s one of those dark-haired guys that looks like an underwear model but is tough as sandpaper. Been in the military. Been to war. I don’t know all the details, but he’s done some things that have given him hard bark, even if it doesn’t show right away. I like him.

Brett, on the other hand, thinks Cason’s a little too free with the ladies, plays the field too much, but my take is if he’s not making any promises to anyone, then so be it. Make it clear, and everyone knows the lay of the land, then it’s all good if everyone is in agreement. Doesn’t matter in whose garage he’s parking the car.

We drove over to Camp Rapture and caught him at the newspaper. He didn’t even ask for time off, just came with us. We wheeled over to a coffee shop downtown, where a very nice-looking, bouncy blond waitress wearing a short dress with barber-pole-striped stockings up to her knees put the hustle on Cason. Me and Leonard might as well have been extra chairs. Cason was polite with his smile, gave it to her freely, then ordered all of us coffee, and when she went for it, he said, “So you want me to be an operative of sorts?”

We had explained a bit of it to him as we drove him from the paper to the coffee shop.

“That’s about the size of it,” Leonard said. “Thing is, man, we don’t know what’s going on. It might be a legitimate car lot that sells expensive cars and we just looked like old biscuits, not new bread, so she was willing to let us pass. Then again, maybe Frankie was hiding something.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “Frankie used to be Frank, but now she looks like a retired movie star planning a comeback. I don’t know which way she swings. Men, women, zebras, or moose. But we think if you put on some nice duds, you got the look that says money, and you got the look she’d like if she likes men. I can’t tell you which end of the farm she works. I don’t know if she’s hoeing potatoes or corn.”

“What am I getting out of this?” he asked.

“The satisfaction of finding out if the place is actually a front for a call-girl service or something else nefarious. It’s got a stink all over it. You could write a damn good article or two or three on that. We think that’s what Sandy was trying to do—write an article.”

Cason thought that over. He sipped his coffee, thought it over some more. “I could use a good article. I could make a series out of it if it’s any good. Last piece I wrote was about the blueberry festival. Bad year. Lots of rot.”

“There’s always the cabbage festival next year,” Leonard said.

Cason nodded. “Might be something there, except we don’t have a cabbage festival.”

“You could write like there’s one,” Leonard said. “Like it was a huge event, and everyone reading will think, shit, I missed the goddamn cabbage festival.”

“No,” Cason said. “I don’t think so.”

The waitress came with the coffee. She made some small talk, and we tried to make some with her, Leonard and I being witty and all, but she didn’t think so. On the other hand, there wasn’t anything Cason said that wasn’t interesting to her. He asked for some Sweet’N Low. She went away and got it and was back faster than I could pour cream in my coffee.

Cason managed to end their conversation politely. When she left we noticed one of the artificial-sweetener packs had her name and phone number on it. This did not seem to take Cason by surprise. He stuck the packet in his shirt pocket without so much as blinking.

Okay. Maybe Brett was right, and he was a little bit too much of a player. Or maybe I was jealous he was so attractive to women. Leonard, of course, just thought it was funny. Hell, I think he had a mild crush on the guy.

“What we’ll do is set you up with a rental,” Leonard said. “Nice car, a bit of spending money. But please don’t spend it.”

“I may have to,” he said.

“Only if you have to.” I said. “Brett’s money.”

I took a moment to tell him that we weren’t working for Marvin, how things had changed.

“How much money?” he said.

“A thousand,” I said. “Plus the rental. You may have to get that in Tyler. That’s what we did. But she might check the license plate.”

He nodded. “I won’t need a rental. I know a brunette lady who has a very nice old Jag. She’ll loan it to me.”

“All you have to do is wash it when you finish,” I said.

“Maybe a little more than that,” he said. “Still something that will get me wet, but nothing that hurts my feelings.”

C
ason told us he would start the next day, as he had a loose rein at the newspaper, could pretty much come and go as he pleased. He was the only one who worked there who at one point had been short-listed for the Pulitzer, so he was kind of their pet.

Since there was nothing for us to do but wait, we drove over to see Ms. Buckner. I had a few questions for her. It was a simple house with the grass grown up and a mailbox at the curb on a post that leaned a little. The garage was closed up tight where the Mercedes would be resting, ready to threaten cars and dogs and people on bicycles.

Once upon a time there had been a flower bed next to the house. Now it was weeds, and even they looked as if they were hoping for death. There was a stone Negro lawn jockey between the flower bed and the door. I thought he looked very hot and a lot insulted.

“Nice,” Leonard said, studying the jockey.

I laughed at him and rang the bell.

It was hot outside, and it took her about the time it took for a roast to cook in a slow oven before she answered the door. She was wearing a loose white shirt with food stains on it and some yellow stretch pants that fit her a little too well, causing the bones in her hips to stand out. She had on fluffy brown house shoes. She studied us for a long moment.

“Found her?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Then what the hell are you here for?”

“She is so endearing,” Leonard said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Ms. Buckner said, glaring at Leonard with two watery eyeballs.

“And her verbal skills are delightful,” he said.

“Kiss my ass,” she said.

“We just need to ask a few questions,” I said.

“I hired you to find my granddaughter, not ask me a bunch of questions,” she said to me. “What’s he doing here, anyway?”

“She liked you better when you kicked the dog abuser,” I said.

“I still like that part,” she said. “But why is he here?”

“Just to be clear, Leonard works with me and the lady you met at the office.”

“She’s kind of a bitch,” the old lady said.

“Wow, that is something,” Leonard said. “If you weren’t old and a woman, I’d punch you in the mouth. Brett’s like my sister.”

“Don’t let the age stop you,” she said. “I can still bounce a little.”

Leonard actually laughed.

“Tell you something,” she said. “I can use a cell phone, take photos with it, work a computer, and I can research on it. I don’t need to call someone to change my TV channels, neither.”

“No one asked you about your technical ability,” Leonard said.

“Just thought I’d throw it out there,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m past it.”

“You know, I actually have trouble with the TV-channel part,” I said.

“Of course you do,” she said. “The trick is to actually read and study the goddamn instructions.”

“That’s true. I should do that. The questions I want to ask have to do with your granddaughter. I might get some tips on the remote later, but for now, it’s her I want to talk about.”

“I told you what I know.”

“Okay,” I said. “But would it be okay to ask just a few questions? There’s some things you said that have got me to thinking.”

“Don’t hurt yourself, child.”

“It does strain me a bit now and then, but if I lie down I get all perky again.”

“All right, bring your happy asses inside.”

We escorted our happy asses inside. The place smelled like old people. Or, in this case, an old person. I guess it comes with the territory. The room was way too warm for this time of year, at least for anyone with any skin on them. It was dark except for a crack of light from a split in the curtains, and in that light dust motes were spinning.

She poked a skeletal finger at the couch, and we sat down there. It was a couch so seldom used it was hard. Maybe we were the first ones to ever sit on it. I wouldn’t think Ms. Buckner was the sort that attracted a lot of social visits. Any kind of visits, for that matter. So if Frank did know her, it was no surprise she knew she wasn’t the party kind and that’s why my cover was blown. And then Leonard had that whole servicing-the-old-folks bit going. Sometimes I really did want to throttle him. A lot of people wanted to do that. Only thing was, you had to bring reinforcements if you wanted to make that happen.

“You boys want something to drink?” she said.

“No, thanks,” I said. “We’re fine.”

“Look, I’m trying to be a hostess. I’m going to have something.”

“Sure,” Leonard said. “Anything.”

“You people like orange pop, don’t you?” She said this to Leonard.

“We people sho’ do likes us an orange, and you got some peanuts to po’ in them, that makes it right special.”

“Oh, go to hell. I drink them. Good enough for me, good enough for you. What about you, dipshit?”

“Dipshit will have an orange,” I said.

She shuffled out of the room, the friction from her house shoes building up enough static electricity on the carpet she might be able to light her stove with nothing more than a touch of her finger.

“Goddamn,” Leonard said. “She is just one big ole double-sweet sugar tit.”

“Ain’t she?”

We waited there in the smelly room with the slit of light and the spinning dust motes for a long time. This would be the crack of light at the window where she looked out and saw what was going on across the street, where she used her cell phone and transferred the video to her tablet with her high level of technical skill. She was probably drinking an orange soda while she did it, like Leonard’s “people.”

Finally she came back. She had three orange sodas in bottles on a tray she was holding with wobbly hands. When she came over, Leonard and I rescued our drinks, and she took hold of hers with one hand and just let the tray drop to the floor with a clang and a clatter.

“They make those damn bottles too heavy,” she said.

She collapsed in a chair. She was breathing hard, and gradually she started breathing slower. Damn if I didn’t think she was going to quit on us right there. But she finally came to herself, took a swig of the orange, said, “What’s the questions?”

“You said Sandy had done good, gone to school, all that, but then you said something that kind of stuck with me. About her maybe living too high on the hog and having too much money. Did you let something out you didn’t mean to?”

“I don’t know I meant to or not,” she said. “I say most anything comes to my mind these days. I thought I was pretty clear I suspected shenanigans. Damn. This orange is tangy, isn’t it?”

“Quite tangy,” Leonard said.

“So was there something?” I asked again.

“I know she was doing a bit of leg spreading for someone, making some money from it. You know, had a sugar daddy.” She paused. “Maybe more than one. I’m not judging her. When I was younger I could do more tricks with a good long dick than a cowboy could with a waxed lasso.”

I was feeling a little ill.

She saw it on my face. “Oh, hell, don’t be such a prude. Look here.” She got up and took her sweet time picking up a thick photo album on one of the end tables by a stuffed chair. She brought it over as if she were carrying the Ten Commandments down from the mountain, put it in my lap, went back to her seat, and did the whole breathing thing again. While she regrouped, I opened it.

After I had been looking a few minutes, Leonard leaned over to look, too. She said, “That’s me. Nearly all those photos. I did some modeling. All we were showing back then in public was some leg and shoulders. In private men got to see a little more if I was in the mood. I was in the mood a lot. I liked pecker the way a chicken likes corn. When you get my age, look back, you got to wonder what that was all about. When the juices dry up the brain works better, at least in some ways. You know, I was actually in Hollywood. Believe that shit? In the old days. It was too vulgar for me, and I gave it up.”

“That must have been some seriously nasty shit out there, then,” Leonard said.

“What I’m trying to tell you.”

I flipped through the photos. My God, even with the fashions then, the hairdos, she was one hot number. Considering the level of the photography at that time, she probably looked even better. She actually did look like a movie star, though a little short for a model. Still, she was the kind back then who would stop a man in his tracks the way a brick schoolhouse will stop a semi.

“I was in some movies,” she said, as if she were reading my mind. “Some of those photos I’m a teenager. Some of the other shots, my twenties, then my thirties. I tried to settle down later, when the bit parts in the pictures played out for me. I was mostly the girl second to the left in a film with a couch audition on Sunday afternoons. I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag, but I was hell on that couch. That kept me working, if not in any big way.”

“And settling down didn’t work?” I asked.

“Couldn’t keep my legs crossed. I was with every Tom, Dick, and Harry that had pants, and I would have been fine with a man in a kilt. Couldn’t help myself. I liked the men. Now not so much. Nobody too much. Except Sandy.”

“So you’re saying Sandy couldn’t keep her legs crossed, either?” Leonard asked.

“I couldn’t because I greatly loved sex, and I think Sandy did, too. But unlike her, I didn’t do it for money. Oh, I got a coat and some diamonds now and then, a dinner, a play or a movie. A job. But hell. I was going to screw them anyway, so no big deal. By the time I did settle down and get married and had a child, I was almost too tired to fuck.”

“I think that’s a very modern way to look at things,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Dontcha know it,” she said, pushing her false teeth forward with her tongue. When she relaxed they jumped back into her mouth like a free throw. “Sandy, though, she might have been doing a little of the other, fucking for the buck. I got that impression. Then suddenly she didn’t have money, and then my money went missing. I know she got it.”

“You think this had to do with the car lot?” I asked.

“Expensive cars like those don’t bring the cheapies around. So I figure that’s how she started selling the old hairy triangle for the big bucks, and then somewhere along the way she either got greedy or got broke, because she played it stupid, took money from me. I like to think she didn’t mean to take it forever, that she would have paid me back.”

I could see the old woman thinking about that. I believe she decided it was too sentimental. She added, “I don’t really give a damn. I can’t spend money in hell.”

“Did you ever meet someone named Frank?” I asked. “A woman?”

“Named Frank?”

“She goes by Frank or Frankie.”

“No,” she said. “I never met her, but I think Sandy mentioned her once or twice. The name Frank rings a bell. But then at my age everything seems slightly familiar and at the same time unfamiliar.”

I looked back at the book of photos, closed it up, looked up to say something but didn’t. Leonard looked at me. I looked at him. I placed the book on the couch beside me.

I drank the orange pop. I was hot, and it was good. Leonard swigged his. We wouldn’t want to walk out and leave the bottles full—didn’t want her to think we didn’t appreciate it, the old witch. The clock on the wall beat out the minutes. We got up to leave and went out quietly, because she had gone to sleep in her chair.