It Takes Two (30 page)

Bud and I crossed paths at Rexall Drugs late Saturday afternoon. We were both buying aspirin.

“You want to go for a walk?” Bud asked. “Take soda bottles with us? It’s my treat.”

After we paid the clerk, I followed him out onto First Street. We headed east, glancing into shop windows as we strolled.

“Felt like creamed cat shit this morning,” Bud said after a while. “Got it under control around noon. Then I ran outta aspirin. You?”

Despite the complaint, he sounded breezy and relaxed, almost impersonal. “Been working all day,” he continued before I could answer. “Checked on my girl first thing. She was headed out to Estero Beach with some gal pals, packed a picnic, won’t be home till late. So I figured I’d put in extra time at the office, try to wrap up that little shooting match—you know the one.”

I said I sure did.

He said he’d cleared off a spare desk and laid out the signed statements from Mary Davis, Willene Norris, motor lodge manager Claudette Marie Jenkins, Officer Walter Hurston and the neighbors on Tamiami Trail. After drawing up a time chart, he’d set up a work table and spread out Doc’s medical reports, the on-scene photos, the cellophane evidence bags and his own diagrams of the hotel room.

“Every jot and iota suggests,” he said, “that Wash Davis walked in on his wife and Hillard Norris while they was together at the Royal Plaza. Together, but not naked. Doc says he’s sure Norris had already been intimate with somebody right soon before he died—counting the condition of his body and his stained shorts and the scumbag in the commode and all. But Norris wasn’t dressed funny, like he’d buttoned his pants with a gun to his head. Looks like he and Mary had already mixed it up. They’d gotten mostly dressed when Wash busted in. Which could be why Willene’s cast-off jacket ended up underfoot.”

I suggested that maybe Mary dropped it while pleading for her lover’s life—or for her husband’s—before being shoved out the door.

“Wasn’t time for much pleading or shoving, far as my witnesses are concerned. Had to put the Lee switchboard log together with the neighbors’ statements to see why. Was two shots fired right close together, followed by a third shot within eight to 10 seconds. Three separate accounts confirm that.”

I sucked on my Nehi and made the appropriate Holy Christ noises. The meaning was plain: Contrary to what Mary Davis had sworn, no extensive series of between-shots pleas had taken place.

“Could be Mary saw the whole damn thing, and that Wash wanted her to. Wanted to punish her. Maybe it shocked her so bad she forgot what she saw, then made up a version that’s easier to live with.”

“Could be,” I said. “Watching your husband mow down your lover’d be a helluva thing—no matter which side of the hotel door she was on when her husband shot himself.”

“Oh, most of the details is like reading the morning paper. Norris must of put his hand up to protect himself—or maybe her—when he spotted Wash coming in with the pistol. First shot caught him in the wrist, that’s according to the way Doc says the bones is shattered. Shot to the head killed him, maybe caught him as he turned. That’s according to the blood spatters on the wall. He was close to dead when he hit the floor. And Wash put himself down no more than ten seconds after that.”

“And the sight of the whole thing,” I said, “turned Mary crazy.”

“Right. Yes. But no more than half crazy, I’d say. Looks like she stayed cool enough to try to cut her losses.”

I stopped to inspect a display of men’s loafers in a shoe store window. “Umm?”

Bud finished his Dr. Pepper. “Gal didn’t gain nothing but trouble from Hillard’s death, did she? My guess is she was trying to recast the blame a little. Looks to me like she used the jacket to shift the gun from where it fell to Hillard’s hand, and do it without gettin’ a lot of blood on herself.”

“Thus making it appear that Hillard shot Wash?”

“Only it didn’t. Not when we look at the powder and smoke marks on Wash’s body. And the lack of ’em on Hillard. The colored boy shot himself, no question about it.”

“But,” I asked, “Can you prove that Mary rearranged the evidence? And how did Wash discover the love nest? Who tipped him?”

“You know my suspicions, Dan. Ain’t proved nothing, though. Not yet. Have to talk to Mary again.”

“Might find her at the Caloosa,” I said. “Remember? She’s one of our housekeepers.”

“That’s right. I was so drunk when you told me—plus what happened after—I forgot. Jesus Christ. Is Mrs. Roosevelt coming down to be your social secretary next?”

That was fair. I laughed, but he didn’t. After fifteen or twenty seconds, I moved on and he followed. We crossed an intersection, I deposited the empty bottle in a trash can, then I stopped and turned to face him.

“I’m not much good at compliments,” I said. “But I’d like to praise you some. If I was writing a performance evaluation, I’d cite you for professional care and dedication in working out the facts and for attempting to be fair and honest to all concerned. OK?”

“Well, Lieutenant,” he answered. “Since we’re bein’ honest, isn’t that the kind of sweet talk that would tend to get me and you mixing it up again?”

I denied having anything like that in mind. And I wasn’t lying. Bud replied, “That’s good because we can’t let it happen anymore.”

We were sparring about where we were going again, what might happen and when. I knew it was important this time.

I said, “Maybe so, maybe we can’t, but we aren’t finished talking about all this.”

Bud agreed. “But no more naked fishing trips,” he said. To which I countered, “And no more sore jaws.”

I went to bed early. The phone in my room rang a little after two A.M. It was Emma Mae on the house phone, calling from the lobby. “Drop your cock and get your fucking ass in gear,” she barked. But her voice shook when she explained why. “Carmen got beat up. The little cocksucker’s hurt real bad. Switchboard got a call from the hospital. We got to head over to the emergency room
now
.”

I pulled on some clothes and was downstairs in four minutes. We arrived at the hospital in another five.

Emergency rooms are always more fun in the middle of the night. An ambulance blocked the door. A forty-ish white woman and a clerk were negotiating the admittance of a very pregnant adolescent. The tearful girl held her stomach and was muttering, “Oh, Jesus, help me…oh, Jesus…not yet, not yet.” Beyond the desk, a policeman attempted to interview a leather-faced Seminole. The Indian was slumped on a gurney, shaking his head. The front of his red striped shirt and blue jeans were bloody. One arm was in a sling. A very old cracker couple had sacked out at the end of a long, battered sofa. Propped against each other, their lined pink faces relaxed, they looked as if they’d been waiting all day.

Carmen lay on a table in one of the cubicles. Snooping, Emma Mae recognized his Texas elevator heels right off. Flinging the white cotton curtains aside, she said, “Fucking fried frogs! Look at this shit farm.”

Two nurses were sponging Carmen down with disinfectant. “You can’t come in here, Miss,” the younger one called out, pointing back to the entrance hall with her elbow. “It’s the rules. Not allowed.”

“You his wife?” the other nurse asked. “We need some history on this man. Who’s his doctor? We don’t even know what shots he’s had.”

“’Scuse my French, ladies,” Emma Mae said, moving in. “But we’re as close to family as this little spick’s got. Can he hear me? His name’s Morales, born in south Texas. Smells like a barn in here. Did he piss himself?”

“More like somebody pissed on him,” the older nurse answered, nodding. “Bruised and contused from asshole to appetite. No broken bones so far as we can tell. Got some crud on his eyelids. Couldn’t be mascara, but that’s what it looks like. Doctor’s on his way; ought to be here pretty quick. Mr. Morales gonna have to see a dentist too.”

Introducing myself as the man’s boss, I asked the nurses what happened. They didn’t know much. A tramp foraging garbage cans had found Mr. Morales in an alley behind a tire-recapping dealership downtown. Whoever’d gotten ahold of him beat the living shit out of him, ripped off half his clothes, tied his hands with his shirt, bound his ankles with his belt, then urinated on him. The Samaritan tramp begged a passerby to call an ambulance, then disappeared, along with Carmen’s rings, wristwatch and wallet. The passerby gave a description of the tramp to a policeman who arrived just after the ambulance.

“This here’s a Army vet,” Emma Mae cautioned the nurses. “Some kind of hero. So you treat him right.”

A young man wearing a white coat, mirror and stethoscope arrived. The older nurse moved to shoo us away but neither of us budged. When the doc shone his lamp into Carmen’s eye, then gently touched his nose and jaw, Carmen shifted, moaned and tried to look around. “Hurts,” he whispered. “Pain my ear, bad. Want Tommy. Where Tommy go?”

The doc and Emma Mae both leaned closer. “We know,” the doc answered. “Relax. We’re taking care of you.” Glancing at the nurses, he added, “He’s coming around. Good work.”

“What’s his name?” the doc asked us.

“Cabildo Morales,” Emma Mae responded. “He also answers to Carmen.”

“Mexicans sure can be funny,” the younger nurse remarked.

“You want Tommy?” Emma Mae asked, bending over Carmen and keeping her voice in neutral.

“Did they kill me?” Carmen whispered. “No want to go die.”

“Don’t you worry, hon.” Emma Mae patted the bed next to Carmen’s leg. “Think I know where to find your buddy. We’ll have him here in two shakes.” Pushing me toward the door, she added, “Let’s get outta here, Kimosabe. Fucking time’s a-wastin’.”

We found Tommy in a juke joint on the river road a couple of miles east of town. The concrete-block building was set a hundred yards back from the pavement in the middle of a dirt and gravel parking lot. The lot contained a dozen elderly cars and pickup trucks, two retired school buses, one flashy gold Cadillac convertible with the top down and a grove of dying orange trees.

Parking her DeSoto sedan near the neon-lined front door, Emma Mae told me the place was called Portia’s Paradise. The only sign visible from outside read NO LOITERING. NO FIGHTS.

A large black man wearing an emerald-green suit and fedora lounged behind a table inside the door. He was obliged to charge us a dollar minimum, he said. Each. “Whiskey drinks is fifty cents,” he explained. “Beer’s twenty.”

Emma Mae countered that we were just looking for Tommy Trouble and didn’t want to drink anything.

“You and who else, Ma’am?” the man answered, curling his upper lip and flashing a jeweled front tooth that matched his suit. “Step right up.”

Tommy who?
I thought as I paid the man two dollars, pocketed the drink tickets and followed Emma Mae into the long, shadowy room. The place smelled like sewing machine oil.
Must have been a mill or warehouse
, I figured. There was a bar to the right, about two dozen tables in the center—maybe half of them occupied—and an empty dance floor on the left. We didn’t slip in unnoticed. Expressions ranging from open surprise to unmasked hostility followed us across the room. We were the only white people present.

“Do you be seeing a ghost, brother?” one of the men at the bar asked his pal. “Redheaded ghost?”

“Be the ghost that gets in Doc’s way,” the pal answered. “Follows a cop around so he don’t get hisself killed.”

I looked around. Mose and Drackett, the coroner’s trusty assistants, were either recently paroled or sprung from jail for the weekend. They waved and bowed as if aware that the majority was theirs inside Portia’s Paradise.

Tommy Carpenter, a.k.a. Tommy Trouble, was seated at a battered, tinny, upright piano. His back was to the room and at first I didn’t recognize him. Two men worked beside him, one plucking a blue guitar, the other massaging a bass fiddle. A kid who looked all of fourteen was trying to beat a snare drum to death. All four wore white sharkskin suits with striped lapels, yellow felt hats with turned-down bills, gold-plated watch chains and patent-leather pumps.

Tommy was bridging into a lyric when I started paying attention. His voice was pitched lower than club level. The words were nothing like those of Cole Porter or Noel Coward, the world-weary songwriters he’d assured me he adored. The music sounded like blues, only much faster, more rhythmic, with a heartbeat to match the energetic feet of a bebop dancer. Tommy sang over his dropped left shoulder, eyes hidden behind enormous, white-rimmed shades.

I set fire to my woman, I set her alight.

She sparked when I touched her

’Cause I heated her up right.

I put my black candle to her tight wick

And we burned through the night.

Hoots and shouts greeted each double meaning. When Tommy Trouble bawled out the phrase “black candle to her tight wick,” a woman somewhere behind me shrilled, “Come on home, come on home.”

Lemme tell you, I poured gas on my woman

I set her aflame.

It was high-test from my twin tanks