It Takes Two (16 page)

“You might better think on it, seems to me.”

“It’s supposed to be gradual and confidential anyway. No reason for Mrs. Norris to know my backstage business. And plenty of places have mixed staffs.”

“Leon Featherstone seemed to think it was something more than that.”

I thought so too. But before I explained, I quietly asked about possible connections between the riverside cross burning and last Saturday’s march on the African Methodist Episcopal church.

“Squeezed him on that too,” Bud answered. “Fucker looked like a rat with his tail in a pencil sharpener. So I quizzed him hard. He swore there wasn’t any link. Said the Saturday operation was what I already knew about, some white race-mixer down from up North, man named Bridge, just stirring up trouble. They marched as a warning.”

“So you think there is a connection?”

“Hard to tell.”

Bud was about to open a package of saltine crackers. Setting it down, he leaned back. “You didn’t have any Mr. Bridge from Philadelphia registered at the Caloosa last weekend, did you?”

Laughing, I said I was pretty sure we didn’t, but I’d check. Then I filled Bud in on the connection I saw.

I told him I’d just talked to Brian Rooney, the club room bouncer, and Cabildo Morales, a.k.a. Carmen Veranda. They’d confirmed my sketchy memory of Hillard Norris’s final solitary visit to the Caloosa Club. The incident happened one afternoon back in December. Norris had pressured both employees to rent him a hotel room for a colored woman. When Norris made it clear he’d be sharing the room, first one and then the other had put him off and consulted me. After checking a list of hypotheticals provided by Admiral Asdeck, I’d told them to say the hotel was full. Norris, a regular card player though not a dues-paying member, had cursed them both and left. He hadn’t returned to the hotel since.

Bud suddenly glanced over my shoulder and I shut up.

Tap-tapping across the terrazzo floor, Slim set down bowls of Cole slaw and tartar sauce, checked our drinks and went away.

Bud grinned, forked a load of slaw onto his butter plate and whistled. “I don’t guess you know the colored woman’s name?”

When I said no, he answered that it didn’t matter. “This might be easier than I thought,” he continued. “Because it just so happens that the dead colored boy in the room with Hillard Norris was married to Mrs. Norris’s former house-maid. Don’t know her name yet either. Funny if it was the same gal.”

“Not funny for her husband,” I said. “Or her fancy man, if that’s what Norris was.”

“Well, I mean to find out,” Bud said quietly, slapping the table with his open hand.

“Something wrong, sweethearts?” Slim said, setting a loaded tray on the service stand near our table. She rapidly set down the fish platters, vegetables and a fresh basket of bread and crackers. “Mean to find out how good this tastes,” Bud answered.

“How’s that, Miss Nichols?”

“You still have our pie under wraps?” I chimed in.

“Don’t you worry, lamb. Be back with more tea in two shakes.”

“That’s another Coke,” I called after her.

Chopping up baked mackerel with his fork, Bud shoved several bites into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Evidently finding the fish acceptable, he started talking again. “Officer Hurston’s report says there was only the one gun found in the room with Norris and the colored boy. Gun was in Norris’s hand. Mrs. Jenkins says she didn’t touch a thing. Says she heard three shots and called the cops. Nobody but her and Hurston went in the room before Doc and I got there, as far as anybody knows.”

I bit into the fish. It was so fresh and sweet it didn’t need tartar sauce. I’d finished half the fillet before I tossed an idea back at Bud. “Easy call. He shot his mistress’s husband to keep the field free for plowing by himself.”

Bud stuffed several pats of butter into a baked potato. “We still ain’t sure who shot who. Doc did manage to salvage a plate showing how the weapon was found—in Norris’s hand. Only Norris’s wrist was already blown to bits. He couldn’t of held on to the piece.”

“Or aimed it?”

Bud salted and peppered the spud. “Or aimed it. Be next to impossible to ding a man right through the ear like that, way he was wounded. And there was blood all over the weapon, the rug and the lady’s jacket.”

When I looked up, Bud had a bearish grin on his face. “Maybe you want a rare steak instead of that fish?” he said.

“Maybe I’ll skip right to the blood-erscotch pie,” I answered.

“Just funning with you,” he said. “Sorry. Don’t mean to turn your stomach. What about a little Bacardi sauce instead of that lemon butter?”

Mock-gagging, I went back to work on the mackerel. When I looked up again, Doc Shepherd was standing two feet behind Bud’s chair. No telling how long he’d been there listening. I replayed the last few sentences in my mind. We sounded goofy, like teenagers, but not queer teenagers.

Shepherd had a tall glass of iced tea in one hand, a sheaf of files in the other. “Detective Wright, Mr. E-e-wing,” he said, bowing slightly. “May I join you? I had an appointment with a colleague. He must be unavoidably detained. Ha ha.” Easing his black-suited bulk onto the chair next to Bud, he picked up Bud’s gag line and ran with it. “Don’t tell me our esteemed Arcade has graduated from sawmill gravy to whiskey sauces? Very continental. Next thing you know we’ll be drinking wine with lunch. I had nothing more in mind than a little cup of soup.”

Setting down the files, he picked up a menu and quickly scanned it. “No pheasant under glass, alas. So I will have the vegetable soup after all. At my place of business, we have actually had a pet parrot on ice since August. He’s being held as evidence in an aggravated rape-homicide. Detective Wright, you may know more about this than I do. The powers that be decided to bury the old lady who owned him. She and Polly-Want-a-Cracker were beaten to death with the same fireplace poker.”

“Case been continued twice,” Bud said. “How long you figure you can keep the bird fresh?”

“He was pretty old to begin with,” Doc answered, pausing to order soup and salad when Slim arrived, then picking up his joking patter again. “But I expect Polly is good for another six months, ha ha.”

Glancing owlishly at Bud, Doc asked, “Or should I go into any of that before you boys have your dessert? Doesn’t bother me, of course.”

Bud answered that we’d been discussing Doc’s skill in saving the photographic evidence of the gun’s original position. And that we were saving room for blood-erscotch pie.

“There was indeed blood all over the place,” Doc said, digging an investigative hand into the bread basket. He selected a package of saltines and unzipped the cellophane wrapper before he continued. “Including a goodly amount soaked into the woman’s jacket we found on the floor.”

Doc popped a cracker into his mouth and chewed once. “Both victims had had something to drink. More than something. Did I tell you that, Bud? And it was a Sunday too. We did establish that they died well after midnight.”

Finished with the  beans, salad and fish, I pushed my plate away. “Don’t tell me they were drinking on Sunday,” I said, hoping Bud and Doc would appreciate the joke. “Thought this town was officially dry on Sunday.”

“Dry as…ha ha, Dutch gin,” Shepherd answered. “Dry as the courthouse.” Then he paused, glanced around the still empty room, picked up his glass of tea and drank off about half the contents. Reaching into an inside coat pocket, he drew out a half-empty pint of whiskey, uncapped the bottle and filled the tumbler to the brim.

“Dry as a Navy ship,” I said, noting Doc’s little secret.

“Dry as the Protestant church,” Bud put in. “Pastor Pucklet once told my grandma that Catholic priests are all sinners because they indulge in altar wine. And Grandma says back to him, ‘Milton, in that case they are sinning with Jesus and the twelve Apostles. Who are you sinning with?’ ”

“Your grandmama sounds like a pistol,” I said.

Doc swigged his spiked tea, then said, “Our two dead men weren’t legally intoxicated, no, no. Just having a little fun.”

“Fun with bullets is a little too much,” I said. “I’ll stick with Regal and be-bop music on the radio.”

Picking up a fork, Doc dug into the remains of the slaw. “That was very spirited dancing you demonstrated last night, by the way. Nice entertainment for the ladies. The jigaboo pianist you employ…ha ha! He’s very talented. But I wasn’t talking about man-woman fun. What I meant was this: Two men alone in a room, bits of women’s clothing on hand, sufficient alcohol consumed for one or both of them to let his behavior get out of hand. One of them does in point of fact get highly and perhaps criminally aroused. What does that sound like to you?”

Though my gut and balls turned cold, that didn’t make me wise enough to keep quiet. “Any blood on the lampshade?” I asked. “That’s how them homos act, isn’t it? Wearing lampshades like a woman’s hat? Either man wearing a bra or panties under his clothes?”

Doc put down his fork. “My, my,” he sniffed. “You are indeed well informed on social deviance.”

He wasn’t going to catch me there. “Not really,” I said. “It just seems like one bloody jacket is hauling a lot of freight.”

Doc looked right and left and sipped more tea. “In a situation like this, one of the homos nearly always plays the woman, the she-male, it’s sometimes called. And with this pair of dead men, ha ha, well, the possibility of sexual highjinks has been bandied about since Sunday afternoon. By people higher up than ourselves. The deviance angle is not my idea, son.”

“Both of those men was married, Doc,” Bud said. “Sounds to me like the higher-ups is bandying up the wrong tree.”

“Remains to be seen,” Doc said. “But it’s disgusting any way you look at it.”

Bud set his fork down. “We identified the laundry mark on the jacket this morning. Manager over at Brooks Dry Cleaning Service looked it up for me. The coat belonged to Mrs. Hillard Norris.”

“Probably too small for Hillard to fit into,” I said. “What size was what’s his name, the colored guy?”

“Here you go, Doctor,” Slim said, setting a bowl of vegetable soup, a plate of mixed salad and a bottle of Milani’s 1890 French Dressing in front of him. She picked up Bud’s empty dishes. “Will there be anything else, gents?”

“Piece of that, ah, pie,” Doc replied without looking up.

Slim nodded and went away.

“Keep talking,” Bud prodded. “Only you want to keep your voice down.”

Doc held up his spoon and wiggled it back and forth over his soup as if deciding how much to say. Then he picked up a second cracker in his free hand and punched it hard with the spoon. Crumbs from the shattered saltine showered down into the soup. “This is in strict confidence,” he began after a glance at me. “You heard me say none of this. You could be called as a witness.” When I shrugged, he continued. “In the best of all possible worlds, I’d have had the time required to perform my duties on both of these unfortunate men. But that wasn’t the case. Still”—he spooned up several bites of soup—“we can be definite about more than one or two highly interesting facts.”

Most of what he said was predictable. Norris’s body was that of a healthy white male of middle years. Examination revealed no particular abnormalities aside from gross trauma to the jaw area and a compound wound with multiple fracturing of the right wrist. Both were consistent with the time of death. The head wound would have been fatal in any case. The injury to the extremity may have resulted from the victim throwing up his arm in surprise or to shield himself or someone else. The victim had not suffered a stroke or heart attack; no blade or other object had entered his body; he had not been poisoned with cyanide or electrocuted; there was no evidence of advanced disease, organic failure or debilitation.

Doc took another swig of tea, winked, then added, “The tree our masters have been bandying up does have some considerable basis in fact, however.”

My balls went cold again. I asked what he meant.

“Norris got plenty overheated just before he died, ha ha.”

Bud stirred his tea without looking at the coroner.

“My examination of the victim’s undergarments and genitalia showed that he engaged in a certain amount of—ha ha—sensual activity shortly before death.”

Keeping a straight face before the coroner’s delicacy of language wasn’t easy. “You think he died in the saddle?” I asked.

Doc crushed a wedge of buttered corn bread into his soup. “Hard to tell about that, precisely. But I’m willing to speculate he rode a darn long way.”

I could feel the blush on Bud’s cheek bloom without even looking his way. “Appears to Doc that Norris was upset for a considerable period of time.”

“Sexually excited? Aroused?”

“Right. Yes. You said it.”

“I read somewhere,” I said, “that hell is a combination of every agonizing about-to-do feeling you can think of—about to eat, about to burp, about to yawn, about to piss, about to fart, about to shoot off. But not doing it.”

Bud exhaled as if he’d suddenly tasted something foul.

“Imagine dying in that condition,” Doc said. “Pure hell, you’re right. But that’s not what I believe happened. No, according to the secretions I found, and what I believe the girls in the lab are going to tell me, our Mr. Norris finished his work before some person or persons unknown finished him.” Doc spooned up more soup. “You know there was a rubber in the john. It had definitely been used.”