Red Grass River (28 page)

Roy required no supplication. His mouth was a wicked thing and he loved to use it on her. He’d suck her breast tips to hard puckers. He’d roll the hood of her clitoris under his tongue. He’d lap expertly at the little pearl within until she’d shriek her pleasure. Her neighbor had more than once pounded on the wall and made threat to call the cops. Roy thought she should get another tattoo, a snake tail curling out of her public patch. “Could call it your snake in the grass,” he said. Like somebody else I could name, she’d thought, but kept it to herself.

On those occasions when the Ashley bunch would come to Miami for a good time at the Elser Pier and at whichever hotel they were staying, she would of course be with Hanford. Roy came with a different girl every time, and every one of them a looker. She would tell herself that she wasnt jealous, she wasnt, yet she’d be all the more suggestive in the way she’d press against him as they danced. Hanford Mobley of course loved it when she was so ardent. He’d sometimes question her with a grin about what had gotten into her and she’d kiss him and then whisper, “That’s for me to know and you to enjoy,” which was good enough for Hanford. As she’d insinuate herself against him on the dancefloor or tickle his ear with her tongue or grope him under the table, she’d now and then glance Roy’s way to see his reaction. Sometimes he would be smiling at her antics—but usually he was too absorbed in his girl of the moment to even take notice.

“We’ve been told John Ashley himself is the one going to make the drop,” the pockmarked one said, the one calling himself Baxter. “It’s a fishcamp, a one-man drop, but it’s their first time there and they aint bought any police protection there, not yet anyway, and so maybe he’ll have a backup. It’s not likely there’ll be more than two of them if there’s that many.” The man’s smile was a brown ruin of skewed teeth.

The big blond called himself Williams. He rarely spoke but his eyes were quick and didnt seem to miss much.

The waitress came to the booth and asked if anybody cared for more coffee and they all shook their heads. They were in the Cove Cafe in West Palm Beach. Bob Baker had agreed to meet them here after one of them called him on the telephone and said they had information about John Ashley he might be interested to know.

Freddie Baker had come along with Sheriff Bob and had been observing Baxter and Williams carefully. Now he said. “Where you all get this information?”

“We have our sources,” the pockmarked one said.

“Name one.”

The pockmark showed his bad teeth.

“Dont matter the source,” the blond one said. “I guarantee you he didnt lie.”

“Listen,” the pockmark said, “we thought you’d be interested, thats all. We heard you been wanting to catch this particular fella for a while and we thought the information might be of use to you, thats all. If you’re not interested, well, all right. We’ll be one our way.”

Freddie Baker said: “Maybe we’ll just lock up both your big-city asses for withholding information pertainin to a criminal investigation.

The pockmarked man and the blond one stared at him.

Bob Baker laughed lowly. “Hell, Freddie, these boys dont want to withhold nothin. They come to make a deal. So get to it, boys. What is it
you
want?”

The pockmark cleared his throat and looked about. Then said: “We heard you’re putting together a special squad to stop runners through Palm Beach. That would cause problems for us. What we want is for you to let our whiskey trucks slide. Let our boats unload on the beaches.”

Bob Baker regarded them for a moment. Then looked at Freddie Baker who pursed his lips in order to disguise his smile. Freddie knew Bobby had no intention of interfering with the booze supply coming through Palm Beach County. Certain interested parties in Broward County, which lay just south of the Palm Beach line, had recently advanced to him some sizable “campaign contributions” in exchange for his assurance that the Palm Beach portion of the booze pipeline would not be shut down.

“How much you givin the Ashleys?” Bob Baker said.

The pockmark regarded him intently for a moment before answering. “Who says we’re giving the Ashleys anything?”

Bob Baker smiled thinly. “Hell, boys, I know that family bettern you know the feel of your own peckers. Only way you could be runnin booze through Palm Beach is they’re lettin you—and if they’re lettin you it’s because you’re payin them.”

“If thats true—
if
—why aint you done something about it?” the pockmark said. “Sounds like they’re shaking people down. That’s against the law, aint it? Why aint you pinched the bunch of them?” He was smiling too, and as humorlessly.

“Because if they shakin anybody down it’s only people like you,” Bob Baker said. “I aint never felt it ought be illegal to steal from a thief.” He grinned.

“And we never felt it should be illegal to make a buck selling the public what it wants,” the pockmark said. “We aint crooks, we’re businessmen. If you dont like booze, Sheriff, take it up with the folks who voted you into office. I’ll give you two-to-one most of them like a drink now and then and are doing their part to keep us in business.”

“I never said I didnt like booze,” Bob Baker said. “I just dont much care for crooks. And what I said in the first place was, how much are you givin the Ashleys?”

The pockmark looked at the blond man as if he could read some meaning in his neutral aspect. Then turned to Bob Baker and said, “What the hell, we’re payin em, yeah, so what? They get seven percent of every load that comes through. It’s worth it to avoid the headaches they can give us.”

“Bullshit,” Bob Baker said. “You aint gettin by for no seven, not past them. They gettin ten if they gettin a dime. Come on, boy, tell the truth and shame the devil.”

The pockmark looked away and heaved a huge sigh, then looked back at Bob Baker and shrugged, “It burns our ass that they get ten. They had us over a barrel.”

“Eleven,” Bob Baker said.

“Huh?” the pockmark said.

“They get ten percent, I want eleven.”

The pockmark laughed and looked away again. Then nodded and said, “Well hell, I guess you got us over a barrel too.”

Bob Baker went through the careful ritual of lighting a cigar. Why not, he thought. Grab him and put him away for good. He wouldnt be cutting off Ashley whiskey to the local businesses who needed it, not if he put the arm on John but let the old man’s business be. And
it would be good publicity for a crime-fighting sheriff sworn to keep the county safe. So do it. He could give himself a half-dozen reasons to do it. Practical reasons. Not that he didnt heave plenty of personal reasons too. The humiliations. Julie.
Julie
. Hell yes, he had reasons to put the man away. Damn good reasons. And never mind anything else. Never mind he sometimes woke in the night from the vision of an eyeball under his thumb and the sound of screaming. Or from the dream of posing with a dead man in ways that now seemed more shameful than he could bear to think about. What happened happened and was done with. Never mind that sometimes, right in the middle of the day, he’d feel a sudden inexplicable surge in his heartbeat, an abrupt dryness of mouth and tightness of chest that had nothing to do with ill health. Never mind his suspicion that he had to put the man away soon because he was only biding his time before seeking his own retribution.

Now he had the cigar burning evenly and took a few puffs and then looked at the pockmarked man and said, “All right, Tell me.”

Laura Upthegrove had a sense for things amiss. Raised from childhood in the Devil’s Garden she possessed a wildland creature’s acute sensitivity to the surrounding world and all things in it. She could intuit trouble in a subtle tightening of her skin, in the altered hum of her blood.

It was commonplace for John Ashley to take his leave of her every so often on an early evening with the explanation that he had to pick up a load or deliver one, and she’d never questioned his need to do it. Bootlegging was mainly a nighttime business, after all. One evening as they lay in a tangle of arms and legs and both of them still breathing hard from the thrash and tumble of their coupling, he told her he had to make a late delivery in Riviera, and he slid out of bed and began to get dressed. But as she watched him from the bed she quite suddenly knew he was lying. There was nothing in his manner to rouse her suspicions. There had been no abatement at all in his ardor for her when they made love (they’d learned to grip sticks between their teeth to mute their mating sounds when they coupled in the sidehouse at Twin Oaks). And yet she knew he was lying, knew it just as surely as she’d always known when a moccasin was nearby or a panther was watching from the shadows or Indians were in proximity of her house. She could
feel
it. And her feeling at this moment—her inexplicable but utterly certain feeling—was that he was off to see another woman.

He checked the magazine in his .45 and then snicked it back into
the pistol butt and slipped the gun into his waistband at the small of his back and pulled his shirttail over it. He put on his hat and gave her a wink and went out the door. She listened to him crank the truck and heard the motor catch and then stutter until he was behind the wheel and adjusted the levers and the engine’s idling became smoother. Then the gears chunked into action and the truck clattered away toward the pinewoods trail leading to the highway.

She flew into her overalls and pulled on her brogans without lacing them and went out hatless into the moonlight-dappled yard just as his headlamp beams disappeared into the trees. She jogged to the Ford roadster and cranked it up and got behind the wheel and set out after him without turning on her lights.

Sipping bush lightning and smoking in the recessed darkness of the front porch, Old Joe Ashley and his boys Frank and Ed watched the truck and then the roadster depart. Ed spat out into the moonlight and said, “Looks like ole Johnny might could be in for more excitement tonight than he bargained for,” and they all laughed lowly. Ma Ashley came to the door and looked at them and then out to the woods where the Ford chugged away faintly in the dark. She sighed tiredly and said, “Kids,” and shook her head and went back inside.

Laura kept a quarter-mile back from the single red taillight of his truck as they bore south under a white crescent moon and a sky so think with stars she thought she might reach up and swirl them with her hand and they’d trail sparks of every color. They’d been driving for almost an hour when they reached Riviera and when he didnt stop there she knew her hunch had been right. She almost shouted her anger into the night. Goddamn him! Goddamn all men and their stupid hankering dicks!

At West Palm Beach he slowed and turned off on a side street. She followed at a distance. A few blocks farther on he turned onto a muddy street where the air assumed the smell of brackish water. He drove past a row of darkened boathouses and then pulled into a weedy half-full parking lot near a three-story building with a small front porch illuminated bright orange by a lamp over the door. The building stood at the edge of a towering pinewoods and was flanked on both sides by areca palms and clusters of bamboo standing in high black silhouette against tall openshuttered windows ablaze with yellow light. The truck’s headlamps cut off and he got out and went past a pump shed at the edge of the lot and through the shadow of a large umbrella tree and up to a lighted screendoor that she guessed opened to a kitchen. She knew what the place was without knowing how she knew. Her
fury swelled in her breast. Bad enough another woman—but a whore! God
damn
him!

She parked at the end of the street and reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 revolver he always kept under there. She checked the loads and then tucked the pistol in the deep sidepocket of her overalls and got out of the car and stood there for a moment with fireflies blinking greenly all about her. She wondered what she was going to do. The front door was out of the question. The idea of simply leaving and confronting him later made her want to curse out loud. Whatever she was going to do about this she was going to do it now.

She crossed the parking lot and headed for the screendoor. She went up the low wooden steps and stood in the shadow of the eaves’ wide overhang and looked in through the screen. In a kitchen spacious and bright a young Negro girl was taking a cut-glass bowl out of a cupboard. There was a wide door at the far end of the room, a narrower one near the pantry. Muttering to herself the girl went out through the larger door.

Laura eased the door open against a softly creaking spring and stepped inside. The air held the mingled aromas of bread and perfume, pipe and cigar smoke, sex and whiskey. She paused and glanced nervously from one door to the other, expecting somebody to come in at any moment and demand to know what she was doing here. What could she say? She was suddenly quite conscious of her nakedness under the overalls.

Plinking piano music carried faintly through the wider door—“Frankie and Johnny”—and she felt like both laughing and crying at this tune so perfect to the circumstance. Now the muffled laughter of men and women came through the wider door and she guessed a parlor lay that way. She went to the narrower door and saw a shadowy hall with a stairway at the far end. Her mouth was dry and she felt her heartbeat throbbing in her throat. She touched the pistol for courage and then went down the hall and slowly ascended the stairs and came to a landing and yet another door, this one shut. She turned the knob and the door opened onto a red-carpeted hallway with a half-dozen doors to either side and another closed door at its far end and she knew this was there the whores would be.

Gripping the pistol in the pocket she stepped into the hall. She could think of nothing to do but put her ear to each door in turn. At the first one on her left she heard nothing. She opened it silently to reveal a man and woman lying naked and is spooned fashion, their eyes closed, the man idly fondling one of the woman’s breasts. For a
moment she stood and stared, and then eased the door shut. In the next room an unfamiliar male voice was talking about Australia. From the room on the other side of the hall came a low urgent chanting, “Yes-yes-yes,” but she did not know this voice either. The next door to her left was open and she saw there was no one inside. The room after that was also deserted. The following door was closed and silent and she opened it and saw a thin naked brunette with pear-shaped breasts sitting astraddle a man so hairy he seemed of another species. They looked at her and the man grinned through his beard but the girl scowled and said, “The
hell
you want?” She quickly closed the door and stood there for a long moment with her heart hammering. The man was laughing, the girl cursing that you couldnt get any privacy in this business anymore, just anydamnbody could come walking in on you.