Hooligans (20 page)

“Uh-.-”

Bong!

“Yeah, yeah. Two.”

“That‟s the Mann Act,” I said.

“Look, could we maybe meet somewhere else if we‟re going to keep this up?” Mortimer pleaded. “I

could take a boxcar ride just talking to you guys.”

“How many pimps does O‟Brian have working down here?” I asked.

Mortimer looks at Salvatore wild-eyed and says, “Swear to God, I don‟t know. 1 got the hotel, that‟s

all I know.”

“This is your territory exclusively?” Charlie One Ear asked, and Mortimer nodded vigorously.

“Okay,” I said. “Finish your breakfast. We wanted information; we‟re not going to tell anybody about

our chat. Don‟t screw up and leave town.”

He shakes his head. Salvatore pockets the cue, and we split.

“Can we use this?‟ Charlie One Ear asks on the way out.

“No,” I said, “but it‟s nice to know.

“Coercion, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Now I know why Salvatore carries a pool cue. He calls it his sweet nutcracker.

See what I mean about due process, Cisco?

22

DRIVE-IN

Stick drove intelligently on the way back. Neither one of us had much to
say. About halfway to town

he wheeled into a drive-in and got us each a hamburger and a beer. Re pulled around behind the place

and parked under some palm
trees
in the parking lot and we opened the doors to let the breeze blow

through.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure, why?”

“I figure maybe you got the blues.”

“How come?”

“You got that look in your eye.”

“I‟m doing fine.”

“1 know the blues when I see them.” He looked at me with that crazy sideways smile. “I just thought

I‟d let you know I‟m a good listener and I got an awful memory”

“It‟s nothing you haven‟t heard before,” I said.

“I‟m only thirty-one,” he replied. “You‟d be surprised what I haven‟t heard yet.”

“I‟ll keep that in mind.”

There was a lot of activity in the parking lot; a lot of young girls wearing just about as little as the law

allowed and young men with acne and cutoff jeans making awkward passes at them. The beer was ice

cold and it tickled the tongue and made the mouth feel clean and fresh, and the hamburgers were real

meat and cooked just right. So I hunkered down in the seat, bracing my knees on the dashboard, and

took a long pull on my bottle. It had been a long time since I had spent lunch watching pretty young

girls at play.

“Just look at that, would you,” Stick said wistfully.

“I‟m looking,” I said, just as wistfully.

After a while two girls in a TR-3 pulled in and parked near us. One of them got out and threw

something into the trash can. She was wearing thin white shorts that barely covered her bottom and a

man‟s white shirt tied just under her breasts, which were firm and perilously close to popping out. She

stood by the door of the TR-3 for a minute, flirting with Stick, and then she got in and leaned over and

whispered something to her friend. When she did, the shorts tightened around every curve and into

every crevice and you could see the lines of her skimpy bikini through the cotton cloth and see the

half-circles of her cheeks.

“Holy shit,” Stick muttered, “that‟s damn near criminal.”

“She‟s not a day over fifteen, Stick.”

“1 don‟t remember fifteen-year-olds being stacked like that when I was a kid,” he said somewhat

mournfully. “Do you remember them looking like that?”

I remember Doe at fifteen, coming up to Athens with Chief for homecoming, flirting with me every

time Teddy or Chief looked the other way. She definitely looked like that.

“Seems to me they were all flat-chested and giggled a lot,” Stick went on.

“They‟re giggling,” I pointed out.

“That‟s a different kind of giggling.”

“They‟re just beginning to figure it out,” I said.

“Figure what out?”

“How to drive a man up the wall.”

“She‟s got the angle, all right,” he said, drumming the fingers of one hand on his steering wheel and

staring back at the little cutie, who lowered her sunglasses and stared back.

“Oh my,” Stick moaned. “You just don‟t know where to draw the line.”

“About three years older than that,” I said.

“What a shame.”

He took a long pull on his beer, smacked his lips, and sighed.

“I missed all that,” he said. “They were little girls when I went to Nam and they were grown up and

spoken for when I got back. What a fuckin‟ ripoff.”

The girl in the TR-3 leaned her head way back and shook her long black hair across her face, and then

she leaned forward and flipped it back and smoothed it out with her hands. The shirt came perilously

close to falling completely open.

“She‟s doing that on purpose,” Stick said, watching every move. He looked back over at me. “Fifteen,

huh?”

“At the most.”

“Shit. What a fuckin‟ ripoff.”

The driver of the TR-3 cranked up and pulled around in a tight little arc so they drove past us.

“Love your hat,” the girl in the white cotton shorts purred as they went by. Stick whipped the hat off

and scaled it like a Frisbee in the wake of the TR-3. It hit the parking lot and skipped to a stop as the

sports car vanished around the building. Stick retrieved his hat and got back behind the wheel.

“All bluff,” he muttered, and then added, “I may have to take the night off.”

“I wouldn‟t mind taking the rest of my life off,” I said. “I been on this case too long. Almost six years.

I‟m sick and tired of the Taglianis. They‟re enough to give anybody the blues.”

“Relax. The way things are going there won‟t be any of them left to be sick and tired of,” he said

almost jauntily, staring at another young girl in a bikini bathing suit who was sitting on the back of a

convertible, her face turned up toward the sun. Her long, slender legs were stretched out in front of

her and her breasts bubbled over the skimpy top. The driver, skinny kid in surfing trunks and a cutoff

T-shirt, stared dumbly at her in the rearview mirror.

“Look at that kid in the front seat,” Stick said. “He doesn‟t know what the hell to do about all that.”

“It‟ll come to him,” 1 said.

“They‟re all over the place,” Stick cried lasciviously. “You know what this is? It‟s a plague of young

flesh, Do you get the feeling this is a plague of young flesh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “God‟s throwing the big final at us. He‟s testing our mettle.”

“Mettle, shmettle,” Stick said. “If that little sweetie in the back of the convertible takes a deep breath,

her top‟ll fly off and kill that kid up front.” After a moment he added, “What a way to go.

He finished his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor between his legs. “That‟s all it is then?

You‟re tired of the Tagliani case?”

I wondered whether he was fishing and what he was fishing for. Then I thought, who cares, so he‟s

fishing. Suddenly I had this crazy thought that while Stick was younger than me and newer at the

game, he was protecting me. It was a feeling I had known in the past and it scared me because it made

me think about Teddy.

“I‟ve been chasing Taglianis longer than anything else I‟ve done in my whole life,” I said. “Longer

than college, longer than law school, longer than the army. I know everything there is to know about

the fucking Taglianis.”

“That‟s why you‟re here enjoying the land of sunshine and little honeys,” Stick replied. “Think about

it—you could be back in Cincinnati. Now that‟s something to get the blues over.”

“1 hope you‟re not gonna be one of those jerks who always look on the bright side,” I said caustically.

In a crazy kind of way, I felt a strange sense of kinship with the Taglianis, as if I were the black sheep

of the family. My life had been linked to theirs for nearly six years. I knew more about the Tagliani

clan than I did about the Findleys or any of the hooligans. I knew what their wives and their

girlfriends were like, what they liked to eat, how they dressed, what they watched on television, where

they went on vacation, what they fought about, how often they made love. I even knew when their

children were born.

“You want to hear something really nuts?” I said. “I almost sent one of the Tagliani kids a birthday

card once.”

“I knew a detective in D.C., used to send flowers to the funeral when he wasted somebody. He always

signed the cards „From a friend.”

“That‟s sick,” I said.

“You know what we oughta do, buddy? When this fiasco is all over we ought to take a month‟s leave,

go down to the Keys. I got a couple of buddies live down there, sit around all day smoking dope and

eating shrimp. That‟s the fuckin‟ life. Or maybe get the hell out of the country, hit the islands Aruba,

one of those. Sit around soaking up rays, getting laid, forget all this shit.”

“Wouldn‟t that be nice?” I said.

“We‟ll do it,” he said, slapping the steering wheel with the palm of his hand, and then he said

suddenly, “Hey, you married?”

“No, are you?”

“Hell no. What woman in her right mind would spend more than a weekend at the Holiday Fuckin‟

Inn.”

“That‟s where you‟re staying, the Holiday Inn?”

“Yeah. It‟s kind of like home, y‟know. They‟re all exactly alike, no matter where you are, If you get

one of the inside rooms overlooking the pool, the view doesn‟t even change.”

“I had this little basement apartment when I was in Cincy,” I said. “I took it by the month because I

didn‟t think I‟d be there that long. There weren‟t even any pictures on the wall. Finally I went out and

bought some used books and a couple of cheap prints to try and doll the place up but it didn‟t work. It

always seemed like I was visiting somebody else when I came home.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It‟s been like that since Nam. We‟re disconnected.”

That was the perfect word for it. Disconnected. For years I had worked with other partners but always

at arm‟s length, like two people bumping each other in a crowd. I didn‟t know whether they were

married, divorced; whether they had kids or hobbies. All I knew was whether they were good or bad

cops and that we all suffered from the same anger, frustration, boredom, and loneliness.

“Don‟t you ever wonder why in hell you picked this lousy job?” I asked him.

“That‟s your trouble right there, lake, you think too much. You get in trouble when you think too

much.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Thinking can get you killed. You didn‟t make it through Nam thinking about it. Nob.ody

did. The thinkers are still over there, doing their thinking on Boot Hill.”

There was a lot of truth in what he said. I was thinking too much. There was this thing about Cisco

telling me to forget murder unless it was relevant. That bothered me. Hell, I was a cop and murder is

murder, and part of the job, like it or not, is to keep people alive, like them or not, and keeping them

alive meant finding the killer, no matter what Cisco said. It was all part of the territory. And there was

the lie about Teddy which I hadn‟t thought about for years, because I had stuffed it down deep, along

with the rest of my memories. I had walked away from the past, or thought I had. I had even stopped

dreaming, though dreams are an occupational hazard for anyone who has seen combat. Now the

dreams had started again. You can‟t escape dreams. They sneak up on you in the quiet of the night,

shadow and smoke, reminding you of what has been. You don‟t dream about the war, you dream

about things that are far worse. You dream about what might have been.

“Hell, it‟s very complicated, Stick,” I said finally. “I don‟t think I‟ve got it sorted out enough to talk

about. Sometimes I feel like I‟m juggling with more balls than I can handle.”

“Then throw a couple away.”

“I don‟t know which ones to throw.”

“That‟s what life‟s all about,” he said. “A process of elimination.‟

“I thought I had it all worked out before I got here,” I said. “It was very simple. Very uncomplicated,”

“That‟s the trap,” he replied. “Didn‟t Nam teach you anything, Jake? Life is full of incoming mail.

You get comfortable, you get dead.”

“That‟s what it‟s all about, Alfie?”

“Sure. It‟s also the answer to your question. We‟re cops because we have to keep ducking the

incoming. That‟s what keeps us alive.”

Finally I said, “Yeah, that‟s what we‟ll do, go down to the islands, lay out, and forget it all.”

“That‟s all that‟s bugging you, a little cabin fever then?”

“Right.”

He flashed that crazy smile again.

“1 don‟t believe that for a fuckin‟ minute,” he said as he cranked up the Black Maria.

23

HEY, MR. BAGMAN

Cowboy Lewis was waiting in the Warehouse when we got back. The big, rawboned man was sitting

at a desk, laboriously hunting and pecking out a report on a form supplied by the department. He

didn‟t worry about the little lines or how many there were. He typed over them, under them, through

them, and past them. Getting it down, that was his objective. There were a lot of words x‟d out and in

one or two places he had forgotten to hit the spacer, but I had to give him A for effort. At least he was

doing it. His face lit up like the aurora borealis when he saw me.

“Hey, I was writing you a memo,” he said, ripping it out of the Selectomatic in mid-word. “I‟ll just

tell you.”

I looked at the partially completed report and told him that would be just fine. The thought occurred to

me that I could sign it myself and send it to Cisco. That would probably end his bitching about my