Taming a Sea Horse (7 page)

"Balls," I said, and put the gun back on the counter.

"Balls?" Susan said.

"Frank Belson," I said. "I gotta let him in."

"Of course," Susan said, and got up and went into my bedroom and closed the door. I opened the front door and Belson came in. He glanced at Susan's clothing in a small pile on the living room floor and didn't change expression.

"You want some champagne?" I said.

"What else you got?" Belson said. He wore his summer straw with the big blue band and his seersucker suit, very recently pressed.

"Got some Black Bush a guy brought back to me from Ireland," I said.

His thin face softened slightly. He nodded. I went to the kitchen and poured the whiskey neat into a lowball glass and handed it to him. He took a sip and tipped his head back and let it slide down his throat. He smiled in a satisfied way.

"New York cops want to talk with you," he said.

"They looking for crime-stopper tips?" I said.

He shook his head and sipped the whiskey again. "They found a dead hooker with your card in her purse."

"Shit," I said.

"You know her?"

"Ginger Buckey," I said.

Belson nodded. "Detective second grade named Corsetti caught the squeal, found the card, called us to see if we knew you."

"She murdered?"

"You think they're going to call us on somebody hit by a cab in Queens?"

"No. How was she killed?"

"Gunshot, Corsetti didn't say much."

"Am I a suspect?"

Belson shook his head. "Naw, they just want to know if you got anything would help. I told them I knew you, I'd swing by and ask."

"I was looking for another whore, kid named April Kyle. Ginger Buckey had the same pimp and I asked her if she knew about April and she said no."

"What's the pimp's name?"

"Rambeaux," I said. "Robert Rambeaux, lives on Seventy-seventh Street." I gave him the number.

"Any thoughts on who done it?"

"No, but it's sour," I said. "I found April and then she disappeared. So I went to see Rambeaux and somebody had beat him up and scared him gray. He said I was going to get him killed. Then I went to ask Ginger Buckey some more questions and I couldn't find her and now she's dead."

"Anything else?" Belson said. He walked to my kitchen and poured another shot of whiskey.

"April worked out of a house called Tiger Lilies."

"Elegant," Belson said. He drank some whiskey and shook his head with respect. "New York ain't going to put people on overtime," he said. "Hookers get aced, you know."

"Tell them to check Rambeaux," I said.

"Sure," Belson said. "They sit around waiting for me to call and tell them what to do. They're grateful as hell when I do."

"Drink the Black Bush," I said.

"Sure, but not fast. It's a waste to drink it fast."

"Take the glass," I said. "Sip it in the car."

Belson grinned for the first time. "Okay," he said. He glanced at the tangle of clothes on the floor. "My love to Susan," he said.

Maine is much bigger than any of the other New England states and large stretches of it are, to put it kindly, rural. Lindell is more rural than most of Maine. If three people left, it would be more rural than the moon. The center of town appeared around a curve in a road that ran through scrub forest. There was a cinder block store with a green translucent plastic portico in front and two gas pumps. Next to it was a gray-shingled bungalow with a white sign out front that said in black letters LINDELL, MAINE, and below it U.S. POST OFFICE. Across the street was a bowling alley with a sign in the window that said Coors in red neon script. Beyond the three buildings the road continued its curve back into the scrub forest. Some years back there had been a timbering industry, but when the forest got depleted, the timber companies moved on while Lindell sat around and waited for the new trees to grow. I parked in front of the Lindell sign and went into the building. Half of it was post office, one window and a bank of post office boxes along the wall. The other half .of the building was the site of town government in Lindell. Town government appeared to be a fat woman in a shapeless dress sitting at a yellow pine table with two file cabinets behind her. I smiled at her. She nodded.

"Hello," I said. "I'm looking for a man named Vern Buckey."

The fat woman said, "Why?"

"I need to talk with him about his daughter.

"Vern don't like to talk to people," the woman said. There was a gap in her upper front teeth about four teeth wide.

I smiled at her again. She didn't swoon. Was I losing it? Of course not. She was just obdurate.

"Sure, ma'am. I don't blame him. I respect a person's privacy. But this might be important to Vern." If the smile didn't work, the silver tongue would.

"Vern don't like people talking about him neither," she said.

"Well, sure," I said. I was smiling and talking. "Nobody does, but why don't you just tell me where he is and I'm sure I can explain it to him."

"Vern don't like people telling other people where he lives."

"Lady," I said, "I don't actually give a rat's ass what Vern likes, if you really want to know. I drove seven hours to talk with him and I want to know where he is."

The woman laughed a wheezy laugh. "A rat's ass," she said, and laughed some more. "By God."

She fumbled around in the litter on the table and found a tired-looking pack of Camels and got one out and lit it with a kitchen match that she scratched on the underside of the table. She inhaled some smoke and blew it out with a kind of snort.

"Well," she said, "you're a pretty good-sized fella."

"But fun-loving," I said, "and kind to my mother."

She smoked some more of her Camel. "Let me tell you something for your own good," she said. She was squinting through the smoke from the cigarette, which she left in the corner of her mouth while she talked. "If you go bothering Vern Buckey he'll knock you down and kick you like a dog."

"Even if I object?"

She laughed again, wheezing, and choked a little on the smoke of her cigarette and laughed and choked and wheezed at the same time.

"Object," she gasped. "You can object like a… like a rat's ass," and she laughed and wheezed so hard she couldn't talk for a minute. She stopped laughing and wheezed a little longer and got her breath back and squinted at me some more.

"You are a by-God big one," she said. "Might be sorta interesting."

I was gaining ground, so I shut up and smiled and listened. Susan said it was a technique I might consider polishing.

The fat woman pointed with her chin. "Vern's truck is parked 'cross the street in front of the bowling alley. He'll be inside drinking beer."

"Thank you," I said.

She inhaled, coughed, and chuckled in her wheezy way. "Rat's ass," she said.

I was wearing jeans and running shoes and a gray sleeveless T-shirt and a gray silk tweed summer jacket and a gun. I took off the jacket, and unclipped the gun from my belt and folded the jacket on top of the gun and put them on the front seat of my car. Then I walked across the street and into the bowling alley. The bowling alley was one of those round-topped corrugated buildings that look like a big Quonset hut or a small airplane hangar. There were only three lanes inside, and a snack bar that sold beer and sandwiches. No one was bowling. A short dark-haired man with a bald spot and tattooed arms was behind the bar. He had on a sleeveless undershirt with a spot of ketchup on it. Sitting on a barstool drinking Budweiser beer from a longnecked bottle was a guy with a round red face and a big hard belly. He was entirely bald and his head seemed to swell out of his thick shoulders without benefit of neck. He had small piggy eyes under scant eyebrows that were blond or white and barely visible and his thick flared short nose looked like a snout. The eyes and nose gave his face a swinish cast. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and baggy blue overalls and work boots. He hadn't shaved recently, but his beard, like his eyebrows, was so pale that it only gave a shabby glint to his red skin. He wasn't talking to the bartender, and he wasn't looking at the soap opera on television. He was staring straight ahead and drinking the beer. When I came in he shifted his stare at me and in its meanness it was nearly tangible. The hand wrapped around the beer bottle was thick and hammy with big knuckles. There was no air-conditioning in the place but a big floor fan hummed near the bar, pushing the hot air around the dim room.

I said, "Vern Buckey?"

He unhooked his bootheels from the lower rung of the barstool and let his feet drop to the floor and stood up. He was at least six feet four, which gave him three inches on me, and he must have weighed eighty pounds more than my two hundred. A lot of it was stomach but what he lacked in conditioning he probably made up in meanness.

"What did you say?" He spoke in a hoarse kind of whisper.

"Vern Buckey."

"I don't like you saying that," he rasped.

"I don't blame you," I said. "Sounds like an asshole name to me, too, but I want to talk with you about your daughter."

Buckey put the beer bottle down on the counter and stepped toward me.

"Get the fuck out of here," he said.

"Your daughter's dead," I said.

"I told you to get out," he said, and took another step. "People round here do what I say."

"I need to know about Ginger, Vern."

"Then I'm going to rack your ass," he said.

I shrugged. "Sure. In the parking lot. No point messing up this slick amusement complex."

I turned and went out the door. In the parking lot cars and pickup trucks and two motorcycles had arrived. People sat in the cars and trucks and on the bikes in a kind of expectant semicircle. The fat woman from the town office was there with a group of other citizens in a cluster, near Buckey's green Ford truck. I gave her a short thumbs-up gesture. She poked an elbow into the man next to her and pointed at me with her chin. I could hear her wheeze. Buckey came out of the bowling alley squinting with his little pig eyes in the glare of the summer. He looked around at the circle of onlookers and hunched his shoulders as if to get a kink out and came straight at me.

"Talked with a sheriff's deputy on the phone before I came up," I said. "Said you were crazy. Said everyone in this part of the state was afraid of you."

Bucky tried to kick me in the groin and I turned and he missed and grunted and turned toward me again.

"Said even the cops are afraid of you because you're nuts." He kicked at me again and missed again. I was moving around him. He was massive and relentless but he wasn't very fast. If I didn't let my mind wander, I could probably avoid him. It was why I'd come out. I didn't want the fight confined in a small space.

"Said you'd get on someone's case and maybe they'd be driving along at night and someone would backshoot them with a deer rifle at an intersection."

Buckey rushed at me and I slipped aside and slapped him across the face. The sound of it made several onlookers gasp.

"They know it's you but they can't catch you."

Buckey hit me a roundhouse right-hand punch on the upper left arm and numbness set in at once. He followed with a left but I rolled away from it.

"I can see why you're a backshooter, Vern," I said. "You can't hit shit with your fists."

Buckey was a little quicker than he looked and got hold of my shirtfront, and as I tried to yank away he hit me with his right hand again, this time on the side of my head just in front of my left ear. Bells rang. I brought both fists down on his hand where it held my shirt. I didn't loosen his grip, but the shirt tore and I pulled away.

"Best punch you've got, Vern?"

He kept coming. I don't even know if he heard my chatter. His eyes pinched nearly shut. His face a fiery red, sweat running down his cheeks, a froth of saliva at the corner of his mouth, he kept at me like a Cape buffalo: stupid, implacable, brutish and mad.

Fighting is hard work. Big as he was and mean as he was, Buckey was not in training. Most of his fights were one- or two-punch affairs. Knock the victim down and then kick him awhile. Not taxing, except on the kickee. But Vern was having trouble getting me to stay still and in a while he was going to get tired: It wasn't going to be a very long while. I stepped in quick, smacked Buckey on the snout, and moved back away. Blood started down over his lips and chin. He rubbed the back of his left hand over his mouth and looked at the smear of blood and made a sort of growl and rushed at me. I spun aside and kicked him on the side of the left knee and it buckled under him and he went down. Behind me I heard a man say, "Jesus Christ."

Buckey scrambled to his feet. He limped slightly on the knee I'd kicked and he moved more slowly. The blood from his nose was reddening his T-shirt, mixing with the sweat that had already soaked it. Where he'd fallen some of the parking lot gravel stuck to the moisture. He was breathing hard. He lunged at me again and threw a handful of gravel at my face. It didn't have much effect. But it distracted me for half a second and Vern hit me on the left side of the jaw and knocked me two staggering steps and down flat on my back. My head echoed with hollow distance and my vision blurred. He jumped through the blur, kicking at my head, and, mostly on instinct, I half rolled and got my hands up and the kick hit my upper arm. I kept rolling and crab-scrambled away from the next kick and got my feet under me and was up. I felt dizzy. Vern hit me again on the upper left arm, and then on the right forearm as I covered up and deflected the punches. The ringing in my head was clearing. I could hear Vern's breath rasping in and out. He tried to get his arms around me in a bear hug and when he did I kneed him in the groin and butted him under the chin and broke away. He was gasping and shaking his head, half doubled over in pain. But his eyes were fixed on me with the same red intensity they had when he stepped out of the bowling alley. He was drooling a little and bleeding and soaked with sweat and filthy with dust and gravel. He was breathing like a bellows, oxygen heaving into his chest. But he had stopped coming at me. He stood still, swaying slightly, his head shaking slightly.