Nick's Trip (22 page)

“Well?” Billy said.

“Nothing,” I said as the sow’s scream ripped the air. “Close your window, okay?”

Billy hit the toggle and the window closed tight, sealing out the death cry from the sty. “What about in the house? You find anything?”

“Nothing,” I said, touching the jewelry through the pocket of my jeans. “Come on, man, let’s get out of here. Let’s go.”

Billy started the engine. As we neared the trees I heard the dull thump of a pistol shot, then tasted the bilious remains of alcohol and breakfast surge up in my throat. I swallowed it and shut my eyes. There was only the hum of the engine then, and the steady sob of Maybelle from the backseat. I pushed the lighter into the dash and fumbled in my jacket for a smoke. We followed the gravel road back through the trees, heading west for the highway.

H
IGH GRAY CLOUDS
chased us into D.C. Billy and I didn’t speak much on the way in. An hour and a half after we left Crane’s property, we parked the Maxima in front of my apartment in Shepherd Park and cut the engine.

Billy looked out at my yard and exhaled with control. “So what’s next?”

“You tell me. You want me to keep going, I’ll do it.”

Billy’s said, “You gotta push Crane, is what you gotta do. You know that, don’t you?”

I shifted in my seat. “Maybe just pushing a guy like him won’t do much. I need something on him.”

“You see anything in his house?”

“I saw a lot of things. But I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

“What did you see?” When I didn’t answer, Billy raised his
voice. “Come on, man, I’m paying you…. I’m paying you to tell me.”

“All right, Billy,” I said evenly. “Here it is. Crane’s a greenhead. He’s also into porn—rough trade. April’s doctor told me there was evidence she’d been tied up—that wasn’t you, right?” Billy shook his head and opened his mouth stupidly. “So it was Crane that was giving it to her the hard way. Want me to keep going?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“I found some clothing in his dresser, maybe all belonging to the same woman. And I saw some jewelry. April wear much?”

“Jewelry?” Billy pushed some blond hair off his forehead and thought it over. “Well, her wedding ring.”

“What else?”

“A cross. A gold cross on a gold chain, with a small diamond in the center of it.” He paused. “And a ring on her other hand, on her pinky finger. A ruby in a silver antique setting.”

“She wear that stuff all the time?” I said.

“Most of the time, yeah.” Billy looked in my eyes. “You find any of that at Crane’s?”

I shook my head and looked away as I did it. “No.”

Billy put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Nicky…”

I pulled away from him, opened my door, and put a foot to the curb. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t drop it.”

“Call me,” he said.

“I will.”

I watched his car turn off my street. Then I walked around the side of my landlord’s house and picked up the mail off the stoop that was my entrance. I called for my cat as I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The red light on the answering machine blinked next to the phone on the table that end-capped my sofa. I moved to the machine and pushed down on the bar, then listened to my messages as I looked over the general solicitation that was my mail.

The first message was from Jackie Kahn. She called to remind me about Sunday night, and to “bring a bottle of red, and not that cheap Spanish shit.” Dinner was at 7:30, she said, adding, “Be here by seven.” The second message was from a collection agency. I finished glancing at the mail during that. The third message was from the security guard, James Thomas.

Thomas’s confession was rambling, soaked in the moaning self-pity that comes only at the final inch of a deep night of whiskey. I got what I could from the quiet pauses and the long, low sobs that followed. The sound of a man gone to the bottom is more frightening than the tears of any woman, and I was only thankful that I wasn’t there to see it, to see his cubbish head lowered into his thick hands and the spasmodic, infantile shake of his broad, round shoulders. “I did what you said I did…. I took the money, and… now I’m fixin’ to take more…. I’ll be gone after that…. I want you to know I didn’t kill that boy…. That boy sure didn’t deserve to die…. The man from the orange and red—”

The tape ran out. When it did, my apartment went silent. Then, through the silence, I heard the faint cry of my cat.

I followed the sound out into the backyard. She called out weakly once more when she felt me near, and that’s when I saw her. She was caught in the latticework, where I had found her years before, after the cat fight that had taken her right eye. This time some thick wire my landlord had used as patch had done it; a piece of it had entered her paw and gone deeper as she had moved into it, trying to get away. Now she was lying in the dirt next to the lattice, breathing rapidly and staring ahead glassily. I bent down and tickled the scar tissue of her lost eye and stroked behind her ear. As I did that I pulled the wire from her paw. She stiffened and stopped breathing as one rooted yellow toenail came out with it.

I tore a piece off the tail of my shirt with one hand while I stroked her with the other. Then I wrapped that around her paw and cradled her up into my arms. I ran with her to my Dart and
got behind the driver’s seat and cursed the engine when it failed to start. When it did start I gunned it to the animal hospital at the District line on Georgia Avenue, landing on my horn several times to clear traffic along the way. My cat felt cool and hard in my arms. I talked to her all the way in, but she never once looked up in my direction.

Two hours later a young attendant wearing jodhpurs and a flannel shirt brought her out. I signed some papers and then the young woman put my cat into my arms. She was limp but warm now. Her paw was bandaged and her head drooped off my forearm.

“What do I do?” I asked the young woman.

“Just take care of her,” she said coldly. She stared me down and I let her do it.

“For the paw, I mean.”

“Change the bandage and put Neosporin on the puncture before you do it.” She gave me the long face again. “The paw’s not the problem. How long was she out there, without food or water?”

I looked away. A row of animal lovers sat against the wall and stared collectively with pursed lips in my direction. “About a day, I guess,” I mumbled.

“She was dehydrated, and near frozen. You’re lucky her heart didn’t burst.”

I felt my own heart jump. “Sorry,” I whispered to the young attendant, then put an edge on it. “Want to spank me?”

She blinked and sighed. “Just take care of your cat, okay?”

I thanked her and turned. Someone called me a dick as I slinked out the front door.

THAT NIGHT I HAD
a slow bourbon and listened to the message from James Thomas. Occasionally I checked on my cat—I had placed her in a cardboard box, on a white blanket next to her blue foam ball—who remained awake and calm but pointedly
uninterested in my presence. Later I laid Gil Scott Heron’s
Winter in America
on the turntable and had another bourbon. “A Very Precious Time” came on, and with it a heavy melancholic buzz. A third bourbon didn’t change that. I picked up the cardboard box that held my cat, put it at the foot of my bed, and went to sleep.

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON I
drove out to Laurel with the heater of my Dart blowing cool air toward my numb face. The temperature had dropped severely overnight and remained somewhere in the high teens. I passed through a studentless College Park and then into the warehouse district of Beltsville. As I neared Laurel, the thick traffic reflected the last shopping weekend before Christmas. At a tree stand, a fire burned in an iron barrel. Near that a father tied a Douglas fir to the roof of his station wagon while his kids chased each other around the car. Loudspeakers were lashed to poles, and through the speakers came the echo of canned carols.

I parked the Dart near Laurel Mall and walked to a place called Bernardo O’Reilly’s that stood in the mall’s lot. Once inside I was greeted by a young brunet hostess. She was wearing shorts and a white oxford with green suspenders over the oxford. The suspenders had buttons pinned on them from top to bottom, and on the buttons were “wacky” sayings redundantly punctuated with exclamation points.

“Welcome to Bernardo O’Reilly’s,” the hostess said with a cheerfully glued-up smile, but her eyes had no depth. “One for lunch?”

“One for the bar.”

“All righty,” she said.

“Okeydokey,” I said.

“Right this way.”

I followed her, dodging baby carriages, shopping bags, and perky waiters and waitresses dressed the same way as the hostess.
There was the hood of a ’50 Chevy mounted on the wall and next to that antique Coca-Cola ads and Moxie signs, and the mounted heads of wooden Indians. Bernardo O’Reilly’s looked less like a bar than it did a garage sale run by Keebler elves.

I nodded my hostess off as I removed my overcoat, but she was already skipping toward a table where the entire wait staff had gathered to sing “Happy Birthday” to a woman in a pink jogging suit. I had a seat at the empty bar.

There were two young bartenders. Both wore green suspenders, and both had green bow ties to match. The larger of the two stood in front of me. He was heavyset, leaning to fat, and he had a modified crew cut that seemed to be the Laurel rage. The little tuft of hair that remained on the top of his head had been gelled up.

“What can I get you?” he said. A button on his suspender said
HAVE A REAL COOL YULE
.

“Just a Coke, please.”

“Would you like to see a menu?”

“No, thanks.”

He pointed to a machine behind him that had a tap protruding from the front of a clear plastic plate. Behind the plate something swirled like a brown and white pinwheel. “How ’bout a Coke-a-Doke?” the bartender said.

“What the hell’s that?”

He looked at me through a sour smile. “Rum and Coke. You know, frozen.”

“A regular Coke’ll do it,” I said. “And don’t do anything cute to it, hear?”

He nodded and came back with my drink. I placed my card next to the coaster (which advertised
COKE-A-DOKE
) where he set the glass. He picked up the card and looked it over. His mouth dropped open and his lips moved as he did it.

“You wanna talk to the manager?” he said. “Is that it?”

“No. I can talk to you if it’s all right.”

“What about?”

I reached inside my overcoat and pulled out the photo of April that Billy had sent me and placed it on the bar. The bartender glanced down but didn’t touch the photo. “She was in here about a week and a half ago,” I said, “on a Tuesday night. Drinking at this bar, I think.”

“I don’t work Tuesday nights.”

“Who does?”

The bartender jerked his thumb toward the service area, where his partner was garnishing some frozen drinks on a tray. “He does. He works the main bar at night and service bar on the weekends.”

“Ask him to come over here for a second, will you?” I pulled my wallet and from that a five. I placed the five on the bar and pushed it into my friend’s hand. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing.”

Bartender Number One walked over to Bartender Number Two to talk things over. As they talked, Bartender Number One dropped the five into an empty pitcher that was their mutual tip jar. I listened to the Beach Boys’ pathetic “Little Saint Nick” on the house stereo while some whistles screamed and boingers boinged in the background, probably signaling someone else’s birthday. The place made me want to puke something, preferably Coke-a-Doke, directly on the bar.

Bartender Number Two walked my way. He puffed out his narrow chest and lowered his voice. “How’s it goin?”

“Good.” I tapped the photo once on the bar. “She was in here Tuesday night last week, with a friend of mine.”

“What’s this all about?”

“It’s about another five, for you and your buddy.”

Number Two looked around and leaned over the bar. “You’re talkin’ about a ten then, am I not right?”

“If ten can make you remember.”

He looked over the photo and back at me. “What’d your friend look like?”

“My age and size. Blond hair.”

“Drinkers, right?”

“You tell me.” I put the ten on the bar and kept my hand on it. He studied the photograph.

“Okay. They were in that night. The reason I remember is ’cause Tuesday’s rum night. You know, we do a special on it, get a premium back from the local distributor. Anyway, it doesn’t draw much of a crowd, but this particular lady”—he touched his finger to the photo—“she put away almost a liter of Bacardi Dark herself that night. Man, she could really pound it.”

I took my hand off the bill. Number Two pulled it off the bar, folded it, and slipped it into the breast pocket of his oxford shirt. “How much for the Coke?” I said.

“On the house,” he said, and winked as I put on my overcoat. “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you after those two? They done anything wrong?”