Everything but the Squeal (11 page)

“My godfather,” Jessica said. “He's a detective.”

A hush, the kind they call Angel's Flight, seized the restaurant. Tammy looked up at me, betrayal in her eyes. Donnie took the little girl by the hand as though to protect her.

I tried again. “Can we talk?” It sounded more like the jet stream than it did like English, but the Mountain relaxed enough to let me grab a few cubic centimeters of air. He looked at Jessica, who was nodding faster than a presidential yes-man, and then at me.

“I guess so,” he said. Then, from a height of about two feet, he dropped me.

10 - Solo for Guitar Player

T 
he one you want to talk to is Donnie,” said the Mountain, sitting on the sink.

“Is he the cute one with the guitar?” Jessica asked. She was perched, cross-legged and precarious, on the edge of the urinal. The Mountain had chosen the men's room as the site of our private talk. Since all the seats were taken, I was standing.

“Cute?” I said, massaging my ribs. I felt like a collapsed accordion.

“Sure,” she said. “You don't think he's cute?”

“Cute as a case of crabs,” I said.

“What's crabs?” Jessica asked. “I mean, I know what a crab is, but what's a case of crabs?”

“Little girl,” the Mountain said, “you don't need to know that yet.”

“Or maybe ever,” I added.

“Or maybe ever,” the Mountain agreed. “Anyway, he's the one who was tightest with her. Goddamn, she was pretty. Like to break my heart when she came in. Poor little Dottie.”

“So why do you think she didn't show up today?” I asked.

“Shit,” the Mountain said. “She hasn't come around for weeks. I just put the egg in the basket because I was hoping she was okay. Like magic, you know? If the egg was here, maybe she'd show up.” He made a hopeless gesture with his big hands.

‘‘How do you stand to work here?” I said.

“Well, once in a while I can make one of them call home. Then, maybe, I can make them go home. Anyway, Tommy's teaching me sumo.”

“How often does one of them go home?”

“Never,” he said.

“Why sumo?” Jessica said.

He looked from me to her. “I'm fat,” he said.

“You're big,” Jessica said, qualifying instantly for the United Nations. “Men are supposed to be big.”

The Mountain looked at her sadly. “Honey, I'm not big. I'm fat.” He looked back to me. “Is this joker really your godfather?”

“Ever since I was born.”

The Mountain stared down at the little yearbook picture of Aimee cradled in his enormous hand. It looked like a microchip. “Poor little Dottie,” he repeated.

“So how do I talk to Donnie?”

“I go get him, don't I?” He looked at the picture again, then sighed and hauled himself off the sink, which creaked gratefully. “I'll be back,” he said, giving me the picture as he opened the door.

“You're sweet,” Jessica said. The Mountain was blushing when he left. “I've never been in a men's room before.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“It's pretty seamy.” She leaned forward to see if she could peer under the wall of the stall surrounding the toilet.

“All part of your education.”

“Is this really what you do for a living?”

“I guess so.” At the moment I was wishing that Eleanor weren't in China and trying to figure out what to tell my parents and Roxanne, all of whom had expected me. I had a feeling it was going to be a late night.

“Can we sleep in town?” Jessica said. “I'd love to sleep in town.”

“Jessica,” I said. “I borrowed you. I didn't buy you.”

The door swung violently open, and Jessica lost her perch on the edge of the urinal. She went down, grabbing for support, and her hand splashed in the water. “Oh, no,” she said, sitting on the floor and staring at her wet hand. “Cooties and then some.”

“Wash it,” I said. The Mountain blossomed horribly in the doorway, looking like the Masque of the Fat Death, if there is such a thing. “He's gone,” he said.

“Thanks, Jessica,” I said unsympathetically. “I should have worn a T-shirt that said Detective.”

“I saved your life,” she said, scrubbing her hands vigorously. “This nice man would have killed you.”

“What about the little girl?” I asked the Mountain.

“Gone too.”

“Well, heck,” I said, editing my language unnecessarily for Jessica's benefit. “So what do we do now?”

The Mountain rubbed the back of his neck with the awful-smelling rag and screwed up his eyes. Then he pursed his lips and blew out noisily. He seemed to be undergoing some kind of crisis of conscience. “I guess I break the rules,” he said at last. “I guess I take you to his squat.”

“What's a squat?” Jessica whispered as we walked single file, the Mountain in the lead, down a dark block of Vista. Vista of what? I wondered. The only thing I could see was a tract house and a chain-link fence. “Where a runaway lives,” I said.

“How romantic,” she said. “Isn't there anywhere to lie down?”

“Two houses down,” the Mountain said. “Across the street.”

The house two down and across the street had burned down, some time back, from the look of it. Blackened timbers poked up at irregular angles in the fine mist. The front porch was untouched, but behind it something that had once been a house sagged, black and fractional. The remaining walls of the house were no higher than my shoulder, and the roof would have been something to look at the stars through, if there had been any stars. A little kid's bright plastic pedal car sat forlornly in the middle of the rectangular brown patch that should have been the lawn. A tiny sneaker lay next to it, dead-center in a coiled dog-chain with the collar still attached, as though the dog, deprived of its child, had wasted away into nothing. The entire doleful panorama was surrounded by the ubiquitous chain link, and a sharp smell of charred wood filled the air.

“He lives
there
?” Jessica said, disbelief coloring her voice.

“In the garage,” the Mountain said. “In the back. It didn't burn.”

The fence was eight feet high, topped by a long, lethal, lizardy spiral of razor-wire. “How do we get in?” I asked.

“Yow,” the Mountain said. “You get in. I won't fit.”

“You have an inferiority complex about your weight,” Jessica informed him. “You're a very attractive man, actually.”

“Honey,” the Mountain said, “you have a sweet mouth. At times,” he added after a moment's thought.

He parted some oleanders, poisonous and probably hallucinogenic if you could figure out how to use them; they're related to laurel, which was what the oracle at Delphi chewed before uttering her holy nonsense. From what I'd read of her advice, she was pretty stoned.

“Under there,” the Mountain said.

I squinted into the dark. Hidden from view by the oleanders was a little hole that led under the fence, like the holes dogs dig to escape. Maybe it had been the dog that belonged to the little kid. Jessica could get through it. The Guitar Player, with his twenty-inch waist, could get through it. The Mountain certainly couldn't. For that matter, I wasn't sure I could.

“You're joking,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Jessica said in her steeliest tone. “You're not going to quit now.”

“You're not, are you?” said the Mountain. I might have imagined the menace in his voice, but it wasn't a theory I wanted to test.

“Of course not,” I said immediately. “An involuntary ejaculation, devoid of meaning.”

“I know about
those
,” Jessica said.

“Well,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees, “that's nothing to brag about.”

Feeling fat and middle-aged, I started to wiggle under the fence. The smell of wet dirt was thick and heavy in my nostrils. Then the chain link grazed the back of my scalp, and I ducked. The taste of wet dirt made my nose superfluous. “Pfui,” I said, feeling like Nero Wolfe. Jessica laughed. I found myself on the other side of the fence, looking out at them. “Come on,” I said, looking at her. “If you're so smart, let's see you do it.”

Well, of course, she did. “Piece of cake,” she said, standing up and brushing herself off.

“Back there,” the Mountain said, pointing. “Give him money. He'll tell you anything for money.” He turned away and lumbered back up the street. Halfway up, he began to sing “Melancholy Baby.”

“He's such a cutie,” Jessica said as we skirted the remains of the blackened house. “I don't think all fat guys are unattractive.”

“Oh, shut up,” I whispered, recalling that one of the points of the exercise had been to scare her. She was less scared than I was.

Scraggly junipers lined the driveway on the left. To the right, ghost-ridden and black, was the skeleton of the house. The driveway was washing away from neglect, and I had turned my ankle twice by the time the garage rose in silhouette in front of us. Like the house, it was sagging. Unlike the house, it was intact. It was a two-car garage with a large single door. High in the door, two filthy panes of glass flickered in a jumpy fashion. Candles, I guessed, or maybe a kerosene lantern. Putting my finger to my lips to make sure that Jessica wasn't going to start a chat, I bent down, seized the handle in the center of the door, and yanked up.

The door shuddered, groaned metallically, and then jerked itself upward, almost carrying me with it. “Ouch,” I said, looking down at my scraped knuckle.

Inside the garage something scurried. It resolved itself into Donnie, traveling backward like a crab until his back hit a corner. “What the
fuck
” he said.

“You,” I said, pointing at him. I spoiled some of the impact of the gesture by sucking on my knuckle. “Not a word until I say so. Where's the little girl?”

He sat crouched in the corner, rubbing his left forearm with his right hand. Closer up, his skin was sallow and no cleaner than it absolutely needed to be. There were half-moons of dirt beneath his fingernails. The nails on his right hand were longer than those on his left, and for the first time I realized that maybe he actually did play the guitar. After a moment he said, “Am I supposed to talk now?”

“I asked you a question, didn't I?”

He nodded.

“So talk.”

“She got a trick,” he said. “Some fat citizen in a Buick. He honked at us before we got off Santa Monica.” His left eye had a minuscule twitch that made him look nervous and furtive.

“What's she going to do to him?” Jessica asked in a fascinated tone.

“I don't know,” he said, noticing her for the first time. “Give him a blow-job, I suppose.”

“Is that what the citizens usually want?” I said, closing the door behind us. With the door closed, the candles calmed down, and Donnie's multiple shadows gradually overlapped into one. It was a very skinny shadow.

“The easy ones,” he said resentfully.

“Will he pay her?” Jessica asked.

“What are you, from Mars?” Donnie said. “Why do you think she does it, to keep her mouth in practice?”

“How much?” I said, for Jessica's benefit.

“Twenty, twenty-five. Maybe, if he's really stupid, fifty.” He shifted his eyes from her to me. “You're the cop,” he said accusingly.

“No, Donnie, I'm not a cop. I'm a private detective.”

“Big difference,” he said. But he sat up a little straighter. “How do you know my name?”

“
Twenty
?” Jessica said. Jessica spent twenty on gym shorts.

“It doesn't matter how I know your name,” I said. “As long as you're straight with me, you've got no problem.”

“Straight about what?”

“About her.” I crossed the garage and held out the picture of Aimee. He ducked back as though he thought I was going to hit him, and then he slowly took the picture from my hand. He looked at it and then back at me, and something very much like a cash register clanged in his brain. His eyes slotted. “Never seen her,” he said.

“How about a hundred dollars?” I said.

“How about five?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Five dollars.”

“Hold it,” he said, standing up. “You said a hundred.”

“And you bargained me down to five,” I said. “Sit.”

He sat. “Two hundred,” he said sullenly.

“Fine,” I said.

He looked startled and slightly regretful, as though he wished he'd asked for more. “Let me see the bread.”

I took a couple of hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and waved them around. The garage was lighted by only two candles, but they were bright enough for Donnie to register the denomination of the bills. He'd had practice seeing money in the dark. I handed them to Jessica, who looked vaguely alarmed. “She'll hold it,” I said, “until we're through.”

“Her name is Aimee,” he said grudgingly, “but she calls herself Dorothy. Most of us call her Dottie.”

“Good start,” I said.

He gestured at Jessica. “Who's she?”

“You don't need to worry about that. She's obviously not a cop.”

“She could make a fortune on the Boulevard,” he said speculatively, every inch the young pimp in training.

“No, thanks,” Jessica said at once.

He shrugged. “Up to you,” he said.

I squatted down in front of him. “Listen, Donnie,” I said. “You're going to tell me everything you know about her. If I find out later that anything you told me wasn't true, I'm going to sic the cops on you. After I break your nose and sit on your guitar. Are we clear?”

“Hey,” he said, the picture of affronted innocence, “whatever you say.”

I looked around the garage. It had been spray-painted black, and over the black, designs and graffiti had been sprayed freehand. One large graffito said
fuck the citizens (but not unless you have to)
. Another one said
home is where the check is mailed from
. The ceiling was hazy with cobwebs and the air was sharp with the smell of mice.

The filthy, cracked concrete slab that served as a floor was largely bare, except for a cardboard box on which the candles guttered in motel ashtrays, a sleeping bag, and a rumpled heap of blankets. Donnie's imitation Stratocaster leaned upright in a corner. A plastic trash bag held a few items of girls' clothing and, on top of them, a small hair dryer.

“Tell me about Aimee,” I said. Jessica sat on the sleeping bag, and I folded one of the blankets under me.

“Like what? What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Where'd you meet her? Where is she?”

“Can I smoke?”

“You can shoot speed for all I care.”

“Got any?” He looked eager.

“Have a cigarette.”

He lit up with a disappointed air. “I met her on the street,” he said. “She'd hitched a ride with some truck driver.”

“And?”

“And this faggot named Willie picked her up in the street and steered her to the Oki-Burger. You've seen Willie, he was there tonight. Real big and real black. Very popular with bankers.”