The Octopus on My Head (6 page)

“Which war?”

“World War II?” I suggested.

“Oh,” she said vaguely.

“He's probably been gone a long time, too, along with this superannuated telephone prefix.”

Having already lost interest, Lavinia got down to business. “If we should accidentally run into any normal people, you're still looking for your brother Stepnowski, okay? If we actually find him, we're working for Sal Kramer, you're the muscle, and I'm the brains. Stay behind me and try to look like a tough guy with an octopus tattooed on his head.”

“Beautiful,” I lied.

She knocked on the door.

“But if it's so beautiful, why am I worried?”

She knocked again. “The only thing you've got to worry about is if Stepnowski really needs a guitarist.”

“What kind of music does he play?”

“Metal.” She knocked again, louder.

“Shit,” I hissed.

“Hey! Step!” Lavinia shouted.

“Lavinia—”

“Look.” She grabbed my arm.

We watched the door open about eight inches, as if by itself.

We waited.

Silence.

Lavinia nudged the door with the toe of her boot.

It creaked on its hinges, of course, until it opened halfway and emitted a draft from beyond, a musty darkness rank with rat scat and transmission fluid, one of my favorite cocktails.

“Hello?” Lavinia called tentatively.

No response.

“Hey,” I whispered, “nobody here. Let's go get married.”

“That landlord guy might have called to warn him.”

“If he didn't give us a bum steer altogether, you mean?”

She pushed the door wide open. Except for a slim parallelogram cast by the streetlight, illuminating a grimed and gouged concrete floor, we saw nothing. Lavinia pushed the door all the way open, until the slats in the roll-up door rattled slightly.

“Well,” I said quietly, “there's nobody behind the door. Now what?”

Lavinia removed the pistol from her belt. “Let's see if they took the PA system with them.” She slipped sideways over the threshold, out of sight.

“Man,” I hissed, “you are tenacity in tight pants.”

“Shut up and find the lights.”

I stepped over the threshold and changed the guitar case to my right hand, so I could pat the sheetrock beyond the door frame with my left. There was a switch plate. As I opened my mouth to speak, Lavinia abruptly gasped, the two actions uncannily simultaneous, as if the gasp had come from my own mouth. I turned to my right. The neck of the guitar case hooked the door and nearly closed it. Now, for sure, nobody could see anything. Lavinia screamed. I threw the case to the right and myself forward, away from the door. Three muzzle flashes strobed the darkness.

Chapter Six

A
LONG PAUSE FOLLOWED THE GUNFIRE.
T
HE ONLY AUDIO WAS
the whine of my brand new tinnitus.

It was too late to get out of the building. The street light would make a target of anything in the doorway.

Crawling was an option. But to where?

I tried to recall what might still be in the guitar case. Strings and picks, for sure. A tuner? A stringwinder? Probably. The completely useless Pocket Chord Dictionary? Maybe. A Derringer? A boomerang? A ninja star? Certainly not. At least the Gibson hadn't been in it. If it had, I might have let myself be gunned down before I'd throw it across a room. On the other hand, while there are a lot of Gibsons in the world, the number of octopus-tattooed bill collectors is assuredly rare. I'd already done the arithmetic. As soon as I got myself out of this mess, there was going to be one less.

The smell of transmission lube slowly overwhelmed that of gunpowder. The sound of labored breathing slowly displaced the tinnitus.

“Curly.”

Since it seemed to me that the business end of a firearm might easily search out the sound of my voice, I remained silent.

“I know that's the glow of your dome in the gloom, Curly. Look up.”

I looked up. A shaft of yellowish street light angled down from a gap near the top of the metal door, right into my eyes. I squinted. “Has that little spot been specially trained on my head since the lights went out?”

“Ever since you hit the floor.”

“So why all the shooting?”

“Somebody tripped me and there was a big crash,” she said, somewhat defensively. “Over there.”

“Somebody else is in here?”

“Was.”

“You mean you shot somebody?”

“No. At least, I don't think so.”

“What's that supposed to mean? Is he still here?”

She ignored this. “Did you find the lights?”

“I found some switches.”

“Let's have a look.”

“What about—?”

“I have a few rounds left.”

“Oh, great.”

“Whoever you are,” Lavinia said loudly, “we're here on business. That's it. No other reason.”

Silence.

“Okay?”

No response.

“Okay,” she said grimly. “Let's get on with it.”

I cautiously stood into a crouch and slid my hand up the sheetrock wall, sweeping the palm back and forth until it hit the switch plate. “There're four of them.”

“What am I, an electrician?” Lavinia barked.

The first switch caused a rectangle of light to appear around the edges of the roll up door.

“That's the outside light,” Lavinia said. “Turn it off.”

The second switch instigated the creak of a belt getting traction on a pulley. A rooftop exhaust fan barely got started before I killed it. The third switch, once thrown, rebounded to its original position. The roll up door emitted a bang and rattled open an inch.

“Back! Down!” Lavinia hissed. “What are you doing?”

I bumped the switch in the opposite direction. The door banged shut.

The fourth switch illuminated the whole place with a ghastly energy-efficient ochre.

A sheetrock partition ran parallel to the garage door, about twenty-five feet inside the building. Lavinia was lying against it. The sheetrock was fire-taped—seams and screws had been hastily mudded, but any topping, smoothing or painting remained undone, which left a floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall hopscotch pattern of white dabs and stripes on a gray background, twenty feet high and maybe forty wide. At the far end of the room in a second fire-taped wall, at right angles to the first, stood a pair of steel doors, gray with no windows. Opposite, to my left, loomed an ancient cinderblock wall.

We were in a box.

Between us, on the floor of the box, a man lay face down.

Five feet beyond the body, Lavinia held her pistol in both hands, trained on it. Her pallor was more wan than usual, and her confidence was mostly gone.

The man wore a yellow pineapple shirt, black jeans, and white athletic socks. His hair was brush-cut and dyed yellow with a few magenta tufts drawn into spikes. A large pool of blood, perhaps a yard across, had spread away from him, toward me. Its surface had taken on a dull sheen, like the skin of a rotten apple. Its color was no longer red, precisely, but it was not yet brown.

“He lost all that blood before we got here,” I guessed aloud.

“I tripped over him. After I fell I heard a crash. I shot three times.” Lavinia moved her eyes to her left, then back. “Over there.”

Further down the box, to my right, the guitar case lay on the floor, its lid sprung open and leaning against the outside wall beyond the far end of the garage door. It had a bullet hole in it.

“Nice shooting.”

“He's dead. Isn't he dead?”

“Looks that way.”

“I didn't shoot him. I shot over there.”

“You shot my guitar case. Not this guy.”

Her eyes darted to her left, then back to me. “What the hell.”

“What was I supposed to do, get shot? The guitar case was a spontaneous distraction. Now that the lights are on, I see that somebody else bought the farm. Somebody I don't know. My friend, Lavinia, is perfectly okay. I'm delighted to see that my good friend Lavinia is okay. The same goes for myself. And I'm sorry that some guy I didn't know is dead. But the sum of the game is, not all that much has changed since five minutes ago.”

She looked at me as if she might shoot me and cry, or vice versa.

“If you'll point that pistol somewhere else, I'll have a look at this guy.”

She didn't move.

“Okay, I'll stay here. From this distance, anyhow, we can call a corpse a corpse. But this isn't some random corpse—right?”

Lavinia's lower lip quivered.

I considered the corpse. When I was an auto mechanic—in another life—there was always some engine reduced to a lump of iron, as inert and even less functional than a boat anchor. After a certain amount of tinkering, however, this configuration of parts might roar to life. No matter how much I learned about how it worked, this little miracle always amazed me.

Tonight, in this obscure warehouse, the opposite effect was at work, and it was no less curious. Not so long ago, this heap of laundry on the floor had been possessed of the free will necessary to dye its hair.

“Is it Stepnowski?”

“Can you see his left forearm?”

I could see it plainly. “There's a tattoo.”

“What's it say?”

I turned my head to read it: “STAGE LEFT.” I righted my head and looked at Lavinia. “You're kidding me.”

“At least it's not an octopus.”

“And on his right arm…?”

She nodded impatiently. “What do you think?”

I shook my head slowly. “He was a drummer, all right.”

“And his name was Stepnowski.”

“Drummer or not, this is getting to be one expensive PA system.”

Both hands still on the pistol, the pistol still trained on Stepnowski, Lavinia sat up against the wall. I saw no blood on her clothes. She must have tripped over Stepnowski's hands, which were flung before him, beyond the pool of blood, as if he were reaching for something. Or someone. Or, it occurred to me, quite as if he'd been dragged by his feet which Lavinia might have tripped over as well. But the pool of blood precluded dragging—didn't it? Or maybe he was knocked on the head, dragged here, and then he was shot…?
Had
he been shot?

“Must have been unpleasant, to trip over that mess in the dark.”

Lavinia's eyes enlarged. “It felt like he grabbed me.”

So maybe it had been the hands.

Clearly, although she'd been screening a notorious splatter video in underground clubs up and down the west coast, nothing about the present experience constituted a matter of relish for Lavinia. It occurred to me that, night after night, Lavinia must have managed one way or another to avoid actually looking at Telltail's demise over and over again. Maybe it was too much. Maybe tonight was forcing Lavinia to re-imagine it. Maybe, on the other hand, I was giving her too much credit for introspection.

In any case, Lavinia seemed on the verge of shock.

“I'm going to approach Stepnowski.”

Lavinia lowered the gun a little.

I stood slowly.

She raised the gun.

“Lavinia
….
”

The gun drooped in her hands.

Stepnowski lay face down. I touched the nape of his neck. No warmth. I pressed a carotid. No pulse. The quick under his fingernails had lost its color. The arms were slightly stiff.

“I think this guy is dead.”

“That's brilliant, Curly. Why don't you go through his pockets?”

So much for introspection. “I think he's been dead for a while, too.”

“Your empiricism is underwhelming,” Lavinia said. “Look in his pockets. Start with that back one.” She pointed the gun.

A large bulge strained the fabric of one of the dead man's hip pockets. I hesitated. “Dead or alive,” I said, “it's been a long time since I touched a guy's ass.”

“What happened to those San Francisco credentials, Curly? Come on,” Lavinia insisted. “Check it out.”

I slipped my fingers under the denim seam, which was tight. The bulge proved not to be a wallet; it was a wad of cash, folded double. As I worked the bundle out of the pocket, the corpse farted.

“Woman,” I winced, “please note that I am earning my keep.”

Lavinia didn't look so well herself, but she perked up when she saw the money. “If I were an actress,” she muttered gamely, “I'd say that's a rôle worth considering.”

There were eighty-seven one-hundred dollar bills, two twenties, one ten, and four ones. It took almost two minutes to count them.

Just like that, I was handling more cash than I'd ever handled in my life.

“He was good for it,” Lavinia marveled.

“There's enough to pay off the sound system,” I puzzled. “So what are we doing here?”

“Stepnowski was sixty days past his most recent payment, which is a month beyond the pale. Sal couldn't get him on the phone, so he called Ivy.”

“Between not being able to get away with it and not wanting to get your guitar-playing fingers broken, let alone get yourself killed,” I gestured at the body, “this doesn't have to happen too often?”

Lavinia shook her head gravely. “Ivy doesn't happen too often. But this,” she blinked toward Stepnowski, “this never happens.”

“Now must be never.”

She pursed her lips. “It's certainly more than I bargained for.”

I held up the money. “What should we do?” Before she could answer, I added, “We should call the cops.”

“If we call the cops,” Lavinia suggested, “they'll try to prove that we did it. They won't look for anybody else.”

“That would be a hasty conclusion. We only came here to collect a bad debt. It's unfortunate, I admit, that you had to bring along a gun—by the way, is it licensed?”

Lavinia rolled her eyes.

“So your pistol could be a little troublesome. Still, that's a long way from a murder rap. By the time they coordinate time of death with our whereabouts today, and get back the ballistics, and talk to Ivy and Kramer, we'll be in the clear. They'll keep your gun and that'll be it.”

Lavinia cleared her throat and recited dully, “I'll be in the clear until they find the inventory of liquor store videos in my apartment. Then they'll start wondering all over again about who was driving the getaway car.”

“What getaway car?” I was taken aback. “You mean for the robbery?” Of course that's what she meant. “Lavinia
….
”

Lavinia looked morose. “Think of it as a youthful indiscretion.”

I didn't like this development at all, even if, ultimately, it had nothing to do with me. What the hell is going on, I wondered. Is this the night I grow up? Reluctantly I said, “I guess you have a point.”

“There's another one. The cops will impound that wad of money. It might show up in the evidence cage; it might not. It might even make it to the exhibit table at the hearing. Either way, we'll never get another chance at it. There will be no dough for Kramer, no cut for Lavinia, no bail for Ivy, and no rent for Curly.”

“Damn it,” I declared, “How come I never see things as clearly as you do?”

“Because I'm a businesswoman,” Lavinia suggested. “And you are only a musician.” She pointed her chin at the corpse. “Like him.”

“That's a drummer,” I said reflexively.

“Curly,” she said, “I still have a couple of rounds in this piece, here. But I don't think I'm going to have to mention them just to help you out with your decision.”

She crossed her arms, leaned against the wall, and watched me.

“You wouldn't
….
” I blinked stupidly. “You would?”

She rubbed the pinky and ring finger of her left hand back and forth above her left eye, as if to ease a headache. “No, but, on the other hand
….
” She dropped her hand and looked at me. “Have I got a choice?”

I scarcely credited that she would actually shoot me. But I said, “Tell you what. Let's count out seventy-five hundred dollars and put the remaining twelve hundred back in the guy's pocket.”

“Whatever happened to in for a penny in for a pound?”

“Whoever killed him didn't do it for the money. If the cops think it was robbery and find us, we'll be in a fix. If they go on the theory that it wasn't robbery because they find a nice piece of change on the guy, who knows, maybe they'll get the real culprit before they get us, and Bob's your uncle.”