Stories (2011) (17 page)

She touched her
hair. “I’m a mess.”

“I’ve seen you
messy before.”

“So you have,
and fresh out of bed, too.”

“I saw you while
you were in bed,” he said.

She didn’t look
directly at him when she said, “You know my husband, Harris, died, don’t you?”

“Old as he was
when you married him,” Coats said, “I didn’t expect him to outlive you. Of
course, he had a lot of young friends and they liked you, too.”

“Don’t talk that
way, baby,” she said.

As he thought
back on it all, bitterness churned inside Coats for a moment, then settled.
They had had something together, but there had been one major holdup. His bank
account was lower than a snake’s belly, and the best he wanted out of life was
to be a cop. The old man she married was well-heeled and well connected to some
rich people and a lot of bad people; he knew a lot of young men with money,
too, and Ali, she saw it as an all-around win, no matter how those people made
their money.

In the end,
looks like they both got what they wanted.

“This isn’t a
personal call, Ali,” Coats said. “It’s about Meg.”

And then he told
her.

When he finished
telling her, Ali looked stunned for a long moment, got up, walked around the
table as if she were searching for something, then sat back down. She crossed
her legs. A slipper fell off. She got up again, but Coats reached up and took
her hand and gently pulled her back to the chair.

“I’m sorry,”
Coats said.

“You’re sure?”
she asked.

“The dog paw, like
you have.”

“Oh,” she said.
“Oh.”

They sat for a
long time, Coats holding her hand, telling her about the block of ice, the boy
finding it.

“Any idea who
might have wanted her dead?” Coats asked.

“She had slipped
a little,” Ali said. “That’s all I know.”

“Slipped?”

“Guess it was my
fault. I tried to help her, but I didn’t know how. I married Harris and I had
money, and I gave her a lot of it, but it didn’t help. It wasn’t money she
needed, but what she needed I didn’t know how to give. The only thing I ever
taught her was how to make the best of an opportunity.”

Coats looked
around the room and had to agree about Ali knowing about opportunity. The joint
wasn’t quite as fancy as the queen of England’s place, but it would damn sure
do.

“I couldn’t
replace Mother and Father,” she said. “Them dying while she was so young. I
didn’t know what to do.”

“You can’t blame
yourself,” Coats said. “You weren’t much more than a kid.”

“I think I can
blame myself,” she said. “And I will.”

Coats patted her
hand. “Anyone have something against her?”

“She had gotten
into dope, and she had gotten into the life,” Ali said. “I tried to pull her
out, but she wasn’t coming. I might as well have been tugging on an elephant’s
trunk, trying to drag the beast uphill. She just wouldn’t come out.”

“By the life,
you mean prostitute?” Phillip asked.

Tears leaked out
of Ali’s eyes. She nodded.

“Where’d she do
her work?”

“I couldn’t
say,” she said. “She was high-dollar, that’s all I know.”

Coats comforted
her some more. When he was ready to leave, he picked up his hat and she walked
him to the door, clutching his arm like a life preserver, her head on his
shoulder.

“I can’t believe
it, and I can,” she said. “Does that make any sense?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You got
married, I heard.”

“Yeah,” he said.
“It was great. For about six days.”

When Coats
opened the front door the hot wind wrapped around them like a blanket. Coats
put on his hat.

“It’s just awful
out there,” Ali said.

When he stepped
down the first step, Ali said, “You could come back and stay here, you know.
There’s plenty of room. You could stay as long as you like. You could stay
forever.”

He turned and
looked at her. He looked at the house. It was one hell of a place and she was
one hell of a woman. But it was too much of either one.

“I don’t think
so, Ali.”

____________________

The upscale part
didn’t tell Coats much about Meg’s work habits. She could have worked anywhere.
The only thing it told him is she gave sexual favors to people with money.
Coats didn’t like to think it, but she and Ali weren’t really all that
different. It’s just that Ali made her deal the legal way.

On the way back
to his apartment, Coats drove by the now-defunct Polar Bear Ice Company. It was
just another reminder of what he had found in the alley, and it made his head
hurt. He drove a little farther and an idea hit him. He turned around and went
back.

He parked out
front of the ice company in a no-parking zone and walked around back. There was
a chain through the sliding back door and there were boards over the windows.
The boards over one of the windows were easy to pull loose, and Coats did just
that. He crawled inside and looked around.

Before today,
last time he had seen Ali was through the prism of a polar bear made of ice.
She had decided he was a bad prospect, and started seeing Old Man Harris from
way uptown. He heard she was at a party and he went over to see her, thinking
maybe he’d make a scene; went inside like he belonged there. And then it hit
him. Everyone there had an air about them that spoke of privilege and
entitlement. They were everything he was not. Suddenly, what he was wearing,
what he had thought was a nice-enough jacket, nice-enough shoes, felt like rags
and animal hides. He saw Ali across the way, her head thrown back, and above
the music from the orchestra in the background he heard her laugh. A deep
chortle of pleasure that went with the music and the light. She was laughing
with a man who wasn’t the man she married. She was laughing with Johnny Ditto;
a gangster, drug seller, and prostitute wrangler. He was known for handling the
best girls, high-end stuff. Johnny was tall, dark, and handsome, splendid in a
powder-blue suit with hair that was afraid to do anything but lay down tight
and hold its part.

Coats stepped
aside so that he was between them and a table mounted with a big ice sculpture
of a polar bear on an ice floe. Below the ice was a ring of shrimp, tight up
against the sawlike cut at the bottom. Through the sculpture he could see Ali,
made jagged by the cuts and imperfections in the carving. He lowered his head,
feeling as out of place as a goat at the ballet. He slipped out quick. Until
today, it was the last time he had seen Ali.

What he realized
now was that the sawlike cut at the bottom of the ice that night was locked in
his head, and it was the same jagged cut he had seen on the ice block in the
alley. And that polar bear on the table—was that the ice company’s emblem? It
made sense, connected up like bees and honey.

Coats walked
around and found a room in the back with a bed and camera and some pull-down
backdrops. He toured all over, came to the ice freezers with faucets and hoses
and frames for shaping the ice. One of the frames was about the size of the big
block of ice in the alley. The kind of block an ice sculptor might chop into a
polar bear, or use to house a cold, dead angel.

Coats drove
along Sunset, and for a moment he thought he was being followed, but the car, a
big blue sedan, turned right, and he decided against it.

Downtown he
stopped at the morgue to see Bowen.

“What we got is
her belly was full of water, and so were her lungs,” Bowen said.

“So she
drowned?” Coats asked.

“Yeah, but the
way her throat looks, I think someone ran a hose into her mouth, pumped her up.
Figure they squirted it in her nose, too. Unpleasant business.”

“When did she
die?” Coats asked.

“The ice throws
that off. It’s hard to know body temperature to figure how long she was laying
there, messes up rigor—” He stopped in midsentence.

Coats was
nodding all the time Bowen was talking.

“Oh, I get it,”
Bowen said. “That was the point. Harder to know when she died, harder to break
an alibi someone might use. They could kill her and walk away, and the ice
melts, body’s found, it doesn’t show signs of being dead as long. They could
kill her, one, two, three days before and keep her frozen, drop her off when
they wanted.”

“If the boy
hadn’t gone through the alley, she’d just be a dead prostitute,” Coats said.

“It kind of
figures now,” Bowen said. “We found, let me see, three other girls in the past week
in alleys. All of them stripped and lying on the bricks. One of them, she was
in a pool of water. It wasn’t urine. We couldn’t figure it. Now it makes sense.
She melted out of her block.”

“I think they
may have killed them all at the same time,” Coats said. “Kept them frozen, put
them out when they wanted to, made it look like a string of nut murders. But
this time the ice didn’t melt soon enough before she was found.”

“And all this
means…what?”

“I’ll get back
to you on it,” Coats said.

____________________

At the Hall of
Records a snooty woman with her hair in knot so tight it pulled her cheeks up
under her ears showed Coats where he could look up what he wanted. What he
wanted was to know who owned the Polar Bear Ice Company. When he saw who it
was, his stomach ached.

He went home and
called in sick for his shift, took off all his clothes, sprinkled the bed with
water, and lay there with the window open listening to traffic. The sunlight
went deep pink and hit the buildings across the way, made them look as if they
were being set on fire by celestial arsonists. He thought about what he had
found out at the Hall of Records and decided it didn’t necessarily mean
anything, but he could never quite come to the conclusion that it meant
nothing. He was thinking about what he should do, how he should go about it
all. He eventually decided whatever it was, tomorrow was soon enough, after he
got some rest.

In the middle of
the night he came awake to a click like someone snapping a knife blade open. He
slogged out of his dreams and got up and picked his gun off the nightstand.
Naked as a jaybird, he walked into the kitchen and looked at the front door,
which is where the snicking sound was coming from. Someone was working the
lock.

The door slipped
open a crack and when it did, Coats lifted his pistol. Then the door went
wider. Framed by the outside streetlights was a woman.

“Come on in,”
Coats said.

“It’s me, Ali,”
the woman said.

“All right,” he
said.

She came in and
closed the door and they stood in the dark. Coats said, “You always work men’s
locks at night?”

“I was going to
surprise you.”

“I thought you
might be someone else,” he said, and turned on a small light over the kitchen
sink. She looked at him and smiled.

“Who would you
be expecting?”

“Oh, someone about
Warren’s size. Maybe drove you over in a big blue sedan. Maybe he’s standing
out there right now with a lock pick in his hand.”

“I didn’t know
you liked Warren that much,” she said.

“I don’t like
Warren at all.”

“It’s just me,”
she said. “Don’t be silly.” She smiled and looked Coats over good. “I certainly
like your lack of dress, though a hat and tie might spruce it some.”

“Your husband,
he never owned the Polar Bear Ice Company.”

“What?” she
said.

“That means you
didn’t inherit it.”

“Make some sense,
baby,” she said. “I didn’t come here to talk ice. I came to see you and make
some heat.”

“That’s all
right,” Coats said. “It’s plenty hot enough.”

“I don’t know,”
Ali said. “I’m starting to feel a little chilly.”

“You own the
Polar Bear Ice Company. You bought it. And it’s not out of business. It’s just
closed off and secret and the only time they make ice now they put someone in
it. And you got a partner. Johnny Ditto. He’s on the books with you, honey.
That doesn’t bode well. He’s not what you’d call your stand-up businessman.”

“In business,
you have all kinds of partners. You can’t know them all. Is that a gun?”

“It is,” Coats
said. “You know what I think, Ali? I think you’re just what you’ve always been,
only more so. Your sister, you were running her with your high-end stable. You
were her madam, her and the other girls. Somewhere along the line, you and her,
you got sideways, and you had to have her wings clipped.”

“Me? That’s
ridiculous.”

“You got a good
act,” Coats said. “I believed it. That walking around the table bit, that was
good. And I didn’t tell you my address. So how’d you come here?”