Fiddle Game (11 page)

“Slick,” I said.

“Wow, an unsolicited compliment. Thank you. I had a lot of practice as a kid, chasing jackrabbits over plowed fields in a pickup.”

“Ever catch any?”

“Of course not. Why would I want to catch a jackrabbit?”

Ask a silly question.

“If we want to get clear of this area in a hurry,” she said, “we could go like a bat between two sets of train tracks.” She obviously liked the idea a lot.

“Until we come to a bridge or a switch block.”

“Fuss, fuss. What’s a chase without risks?”

“A successful escape.”

“You know, you really ought to learn to lighten up once in a while, Herman.” Her shoulders slumped and she gave an exaggerated sigh. “Okay. So what’s our plan?”

“Hide someplace in this area for a few hours, until our cop and all the friends he’s calling right now get some other things to think about besides us.”

“Pretty daring. You see a place you like?”

“Not yet. Cruise a bit.” Another jetliner popped out of the sky with a full array of lights, and a block or so away, I saw a flash of what I wanted. “That way,” I said, and she turned into the wake of the jet.

“Who are we, by the way?”

“I said I’d be your guide, not your shrink. If you’re going to do identity crisis, you’re on your own.”

“I mean who are we if we get asked, like by a cop or a desk clerk, okay?”

“We don’t talk to cops. Shoot the bastards on sight.” She took both hands off the wheel and pantomimed mowing down the blue hordes with a machine gun.

“Will you please sober up?”

“Oh, all right. I don’t know what to tell the cops, okay? As far as the hotel is concerned, I’m Ms. Rosemary Wapczech, and you’re none of their damn business.”

“Gee, for some reason, I thought it would be O’Grady.”

“Nope, Rosie the Polack. Sorry. You want it to be O’Grady?”

“For the hotel, I want it to be whatever is on your plastic. But the none-of-their-damned business is no good. They might decide you’re a hooker and toss you out for the sake of their fine reputation.”

“Oh come on, Herman. Do I look like a hooker?”

“The classier ones are hard to tell from real women, you know.”

“Based on your vast experience.”

“Some of my best customers.” Actually, my experience was that the high-tone prostitutes—the society women who got their thrills with a little role-playing and a little walk on the wild side, or the spoiled college girls who didn’t want to wait to cash in on the good life, or even the expensive call girls with their remarkable beauty and penthouse condos and silk-suited lawyers—were among my worst customers. They would stiff me, any chance they got. The real, hard-working street walkers, on the other hand, the ones with too much makeup and too little of everything else, including looks and brains, tended to be rock-solid reliable. I think it has something to do with honor and dignity being more valuable to the people who don’t normally get any of the stuff. I don’t have it all worked out yet. And I didn’t try to tell Rosie about it.

“For the hotel staff, I’ll be Herman—what is it, again?”

“Wapczech. It’s easy to remember: just think, ‘Italian bank draft.’ But you don’t have any ID.”

“They won’t ask, as long as we’re using your credit cards. For the cops, though, we’ll need something else. I have a sort of printing press in my briefcase. Maybe we’ll cook something up when we get to settle down for a bit.”

“Maybe, huh? Meanwhile, maybe we can just be who we are, and you can be taking me back home for jumping bail.”

I thought about it for a minute. “You know, that’s actually not bad. If they have a bulletin on me, we would have to reverse the roles, but it might still work. It would be even better if we had some handcuffs.”

“I have some in my purse.”

“You’re kidding. Why would you…”

“Is that where you want to park?”

“That’s it.”
Handcuffs?

We picked a spot in a steel recycling yard, where a lot of old cars were massed together, waiting to be crushed into bales and then fed into a blast furnace. I picked the padlock on the fence with a paper clip from Kinko’s. After we were inside and re-locked, I took off our wheel covers and license plates and put them in the trunk, stuck a cardboard placard from another car on the windshield, and kicked a little extra dirt on the front end. Then we backed in between two other cars, so close on each side that our doors couldn’t be opened. More to the point, it was also too close for anybody looking us over to walk up to the side of the car. It would do, if anything would.

“Snug,” said Rosie.

“Inconspicuous, anyway. Tilt your seat back, so our heads don’t stick up above the dash.”

“Comfy. Can we call room service now?”

“I have to admit, that sounds good. I have some bagels, if you’re starving.”

“Hey, yeah? I have a bottle of champagne and some fancy chocolate-covered black cherries.”

By now, I knew better than to ask if she was kidding, and I laughed instead. “You’re just a bundle of surprises, Rosie.”

“I am, aren’t I? I want you to realize, by the way, that I booked us a deluxe suite at the Crown Regal Inn, with a Jacuzzi and a kitchenette.”

“You want me to feel guilty?”

“Very, very guilty. Or disappointed, at the least.”

“I can handle both of those.”

“Anyway, I could see you were going to be a hard sell, so I picked up some goodies. I figured if I can’t get laid, at least I can get high.”

If I’d been eating a bagel, I’d have choked on it. Finally I managed to say, “You’re going to get high on chocolate cherries?”

“You take your pleasure where you find it, Herman.”

You do indeed, don’t you?
“Have a bagel, Rosie.” I passed the bag over to her.

“Delighted, Herman. Have a swig of champagne. You have to open it, though. I’m terrible with those things. Also, I don’t want to stain my new dress. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Why would you need my permission not to stain your dress?”

“Just thought I’d ask.” With that, she leaned forward to undo her zipper, then slipped the dress over her head and placed it neatly in the back seat. “I didn’t have time to shop for any underwear,” she said.

I found myself recalling G. B. Feinstein’s line about fine curves:
A subtle variation on a timeless theme
. Hers weren’t all that subtle, maybe, but they were definitely fine.

“You are…”

“‘Irrepressible’ is the word that I always liked.”

“‘Sneaky,’ is what I was going to say.”

“That, too.” She insinuated an arm around the back of my neck, and I didn’t seem to do anything to stop her.

“You know, I never…” I began.

“No, you didn’t. And you don’t have to.”

I was talking about promises. I hoped she was, too, since…

“You know why I never ran down any jackrabbits?”

“Um. Because you’re too kindhearted?”

“Because I prefer the ambush.”

She did good ambush. I have to say, though, handcuffs are not as much fun as people generally suppose. By the time we got around to the champagne, it was warm, and it exploded all over hell. But we didn’t get any on our clothes.

Chapter Eleven

Love Among the Ruins

“Are you awake, Herman?”

“I am, but I’m in the middle of an intense intellectual exercise.” I pulled my coat back up over her shoulder, where she had shaken it off in her sleep, and she snuggled a bit closer, making my left arm, if possible, even more numb. I did not look forward to the time when it quit being numb.

“Trying to figure out how you wound up sleeping in the middle of a junkyard with a strange woman?”

“No, I’m trying to decide which is more boring, the ceiling in a dentist’s office or the head liner in this car.”

“I thought a headliner was an overpaid performer.”

“It’s also the upholstery they put on the bottom of a car roof.”

She rolled partway over and looked up. “You’re right; that’s pretty boring. Does it win?”

“It’s a tough call. My dentist has artsy pictures on his ceiling, but the hygienist doesn’t wrap her leg around my waist.”

“That’s why they need the pictures.” She flexed the aforementioned limb a bit for emphasis and added an arm to the gesture, and the phrase
holding against the night
flashed into my mind. Maybe the holding thing is like the green Volvo: it only shows up when you’re not looking for it. But my mind jumped just as quickly to a vision of a murderous black LTD, and the moment was suddenly gone.

“Do you have a watch, Rosie?”

“Don’t you?”

“I do, but I no longer have the arm it was attached to.”

She sat up, picked up my dead arm, squinted at the wrist, and let it flop back down. The arm woke up just enough to promise me a lifetime of agony.

“Three-thirty,” she said. “You want to leave?”

“Give it another half hour. In a lot of towns, cops change their shifts at four. We’ll slip out in the transition time.”

She stretched and grimaced. “I’d suggest something very nifty to do with that half hour, but I think my back is broken.”

“That’s because you’ve been sleeping on top of a hand brake and a shifting lever.”

“Tell me about it. Your arm helped some, though.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. I’m thinking of having it amputated. Do we have any champagne left?”

She rolled back over to the driver’s seat with a few appropriate groans, grabbed the bottle from under the brake pedal, and shook it.

“A little,” she said. She took a swig and passed it over to me. “Also one bagel. You want?”

“Breakfast of champions,” I said. “But I’ll share.”

She broke the bagel in two and handed me half, and we listened to our jaws work for a while.

“So, why are you on the run, Herman?”

“I bopped a cop.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Put that way, it doesn’t, does it? I bopped a cop who was trying to abduct me. He’s also trying to pin a murder on me.”

“That sounds worse. So you gave him some more ammunition, by running.”

“That I did. Seemed like the thing to do at the time. Still does, for that matter. Are there any more cherries?”

“If there are, they’re all in the cracks between the seats.” She made a “gimme” gesture, and I passed the bottle back to her.

“I thought I was the impulsive one here,” she said. “Why didn’t you just stay where you were and rat this guy out?” She tipped back her head to drain the bottle, making a lovely line that started at her chin and swooped down, graceful and unbroken, all the way to the punctuation of her nipples. I made a heroic effort to return to my other train of thought.

“I can’t do that, exactly.”

“Then do it not exactly. Use a go-between. You want me to do it for you? While I’m at it, I’ll accuse him of rape. You’re staring, by the way.”

“You don’t have any evidence. And of course I’m staring. Don’t you want me to?”

“Sure I do. I have plenty of evidence of sex. Beat me up some, and then I’ll have a rape case, too.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Rosie.”

“You’re not supposed to enjoy it.”

“Staring?”

“No, beating me up. It’s okay to enjoy staring.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” I gave her a very brotherly kiss on the end of her nose.

“That’s me, all right.”

“What happened to admiring good sense?”

“I admire that in you, not in me. Any time I completely quit being crazy, I feel dead.”

“You definitely don’t look dead.”

“Well, I was. Very dead. People like you can be sane and logical and practical without being dead, but I’m not wired that way. That’s why we’re a natural pair.”

“Oh, now we’re a natural pair, no less. Where are you going with that?”

“Not where you think. Tell me why you can’t rat out this cop, directly or indirectly.”

“Because I can’t have people looking into my business too deeply.”

“Too many connections?”

“Too much history.”

“That damn stuff.” She tried to throw the empty bottle out the window, but it bounced off the junker next to us and came back. It bounced around the steering wheel for a while, until she caught it by the neck. “We all get that, don’t we? But I thought a bail bondsman had to have a clean record.”

“They do. And I do. But if you look back enough years, you’ll come to a blank page. I can’t have people trying to fill that page. Sooner or later they’ll find an open arrest warrant. It doesn’t have my name on it, but the file attached to it has my prints. That’s why I can’t ever go back to Detroit.”

“Maybe the statute of limitations has run out.”

“There is no statute of limitations on murder.”

“Wow.” She threw the bottle again, this time reaching an arm out the window to toss it backwards over the roof. It landed someplace behind us with a hollow “plonk” sound and stayed put. “You’re wanted for a lot of murders, for such a sensible type. Some people would say you hang with the wrong crowd.”

“Be careful whom you malign.”

She laughed. I was starting to like that laugh. “Got me,” she said. “I want you to know, though, that you were wrong about the abortion.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Back at the café, you said I went away to Chicago for an abortion.”

I had forgotten it almost as soon as I said it. It’s a common enough reason for a young girl to go running off to the big city, especially if she’s not otherwise stupid.

“It was a guess, that’s all. But I didn’t attach any…”

“You were wrong.” The laugh and the smile were gone now, and she stared intently into my eyes.

“Okay,” I said

“Don’t humor me, Herman. I’m serious.”

“I said, ‘okay.’” I didn’t back away from the stare.

She turned away first, and in the glow from the yard lights, I thought her cheek looked wet. “Tell me about the Gypsies,” she said.

It seemed like a good idea to change the subject, so I told her the salient points, and I hardly lied about any of them. By the time I had finished, it was after four.

“You need to see my friendly bartender,” she said.

“This time of night?”

“Trust me.”

I did. We put our clothes on, put the car back together, and headed into the city.

***

Someplace south of the Loop, we parked at the curb on a narrow street where you wouldn’t want to walk after dark alone and unarmed. Maybe not in the daylight, either. Rosie confirmed that impression by putting a nine-millimeter in her purse before we got out of the car, and I took the hint and pocketed my new three-eighty. We locked the car and headed out, and I felt like John Paul Jones, telling the Congress, “Give me a fast ship, for I intend to take her in harm’s way.” So of course, they gave him an under-gunned, worn out tub that steered like a lumber barge with the anchor dragging. He made history with it. I wasn’t feeling that lucky.

“The street looks deserted,” I said. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“They shut off the lights and pretend they’re closed at two,” she said, “but the show goes on all day and all night. After hours, you just have to go in the back way and don’t act like a cop or a social worker. It’s actually the safest time. No rough crowds, just hardcore drunken oglers and the occasional pimp who’s trying to recruit.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“Nothing around here is wonderful. But if my Gypsy friend still works here, this would be his usual shift.”

With the neon signs off, the street barely had enough light to navigate by. Marquees with names like
The Bronze Beaver
,
Sex City
, and
Hooter Heaven
were all totally dark, as were the smaller banner-panels with their understated headlines like,
“Real, Nude, Naked, Live Girls, On Stage!!!”
That about covered all the possibilities, I guessed. A few glassed-in stage pictures on the walls were still lit, like windows in the night. The photos looked ancient and yellowed, the girls in them, underaged and prematurely tough. They had names like Crystal Bryte, Ginger Snatch, and Betty Boobs. We walked past the front of a place called the New Lost City and turned into a narrow alley, by a picture of a blonde. It was a three-quarter rear shot, fully nude, with the poser looking over her shoulder at the camera. She had a splayed handprint painted on her ass in red. The name scrolled across the photo was “Third Hand Rose.” I started to do a double take, but Rosie pulled me away, saying, “You’ll never know.”

Halfway down the alley, there was a door with a single lightbulb above it and a sign that said SERVICE. I bet.

“What now? Do we peek in a little door and say, ‘Joe sent me’?”

“Nothing that fancy. We just walk in, and if we look like trouble, somebody throws us out again. If not, they collect a cover charge. Funny you should say that, though. Joe is the guy we’re going to see.”

The door was one of those metal-clad bombproof jobs that weighed about half a ton, but it swung away easily enough. We went into a blue-lit corridor, passed some restrooms and empty booze cases, and emerged into a large club room. If it had a decor, it was too dark to tell. Dark enough for the patrons to play with themselves or each other, I guessed, while somebody like Crystal Bryte did her best to inspire them. Mostly, what it had was space. It had a long, glossy bar on one wall that was lit, and a large stage with a runway and a couple of brass fire poles that were bathed in hot red and orange floods.

Some kind of grinding R&B tune was blaring on the PA system, while a young woman on the runway was doing some grinding of her own, getting a lot of mileage out of her ample hips. She was peeling off pieces of wispy costume and tossing them to three middle-aged business types at a front table. Even in the colored light, she looked ghostly pale, and I decided she used a lot of white body powder, accented by very dark eye makeup and lipstick, for a sort of vampire look. Her customers looked more like real vampires. Not pale, but definitely hungry, though a few of them looked barely conscious. Now and then, she would do a gyrating squat by a ringside table, and some of them would get up and stuff money into her g-string.

“She’s running out of places to stick that stuff,” I said.

“She’ll make a pass around the far end of the runway and hand it off to somebody behind the curtain pretty soon,” said Rosie. “Then she’ll come back and give them a little reward. She’ll toss the g-string and hump up to the brass pole a bit. If she likes them, she might even let one of them cop a pinch or a feel.”

“Whaddaya, tourists? Out slumming?” The voice was sandpaper basso, and I turned around to see a figure that would have blotted out the sky, if there had been any sky. I thought of asking if his name was Joe, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be.

Rosie took the lead. “My husband’s bored, thinks I should learn some new moves.”

“Yeah? Well, you wanna watch, you gotta sit down and pay, like everybody else. You gotta buy a drink, too.”

“Okay,” I said. “Anyplace? How about at the bar?”

“You too cheap to tip the waitress? Don’t matter. You still gotta pay the cover. Twenty bucks.”

I reached for my wallet.

“Apiece,” said the monster. Rosie gave me a frown, but I couldn’t tell if it meant the bouncer was lying or that I shouldn’t make trouble.

“That’s crap,” I said, “and we both know it. Tell you what, though: how about if I give you fifty and I don’t see you any more?”

“That’ll work.” It was hard to tell in that light and with his face so high up, but I think he smiled. “Don’t be makin’ no trouble for the artistes, though, or I’ll be on you like holy on the Pope.”

“Hey, you said it first—we’re just out slumming.”

“Yeah, whatever. Just don’t say you wasn’t told.” He moved off into a dark cave somewhere, pausing on his way to whisper in my ear. Up on the stage, the writhing vampiress had ditched her wad of bills, just as Rosie had predicted, and she was working herself up to a finale. I pried my eyes away long enough to look over at the bar, which was being tended by a short, dark guy with a white shirt, black bow tie, and sleeve garters. He had a wedge-shaped face, sort of like Stroud, the phony detective, with a pencil moustache and slicked-back hair. His eyes seemed too big for the rest of his head, and he looked sort of fidgety, as if he were wired too tight for the job. Kevin Kline, trying to do a low-key role.

“Is that our man?”

“That’s Joe, all right. I caught his eye when we came in. If we sit down, he’ll come over. What did the bouncer say to you?”

“Tell you later.” I fondled a chair in the dark to make sure it didn’t already have anybody on it, then motioned to her to sit.

“Tell me now,” she said.

I patted down another chair for myself and sat down opposite her. “Here comes our waitress.”

The waitress looked young and out of place, not sexy enough to be up on the stage or tough enough to be down on the floor, and definitely not comfortable with the skimpy uniform of tight, shiny short-shorts and an abbreviated leather vest with no blouse under it. Susie Sorority, trying to work her way through Sociology 101 at some community college. She took our orders and fled.

“She didn’t seem to recognize you,” I said.

“She’s not an old-timer.”

“Doesn’t look like she’s about to become one, either.”

“That’s for sure. What did the bouncer say to you?”

“You won’t like it.”