The Devil's Redhead (27 page)

The kid laughed and pointed as though to say, Right, right. The doors came open and he launched into the hall. Reaching the room, he unlocked the door and barged inside, fussed with the bed covers, flipped on the lights and the television. Frank closed the door behind.

“You can check out through the TV,” the bellhop announced. “Hit channel eighty-eight.”

He turned the selector to the pay channels, Sophisticated Viewing. Shortly two women, both naked, engaged in frottage on a red vinyl sofa. There was a prevalence of head shots. The blonde mouthed
Aah
, the brunette
Ooh.
“Come on, come on, we don't need to see their heads,” the bellhop shouted, hitting the side of the television. Turning to Frank, he added, “You can watch five minutes free.”

Frank was looking around the room. It had a soothing blank decor, theft-proof coat hangers, a small table, a lamp suspended by a chain. Something in the anonymity of it all made him hopeful he would be harder to find here. The bedcovers fell back immaculately, the kid could do that much. The pillows were as tidy as headstones.

The bellhop clapped his hands to his head. “Ice, ice,” he shouted.

“Hey,” Frank told him. He held out his hand, a twenty folded between his fingers. Time to regain control. “You really want to help out?”

The kid looked from the money to Frank's face. The grin reappeared.

“I need gin, a fifth. Do what you can do.”

The kid took the bill and affectedly checked it front and back. “Tell you what, skipper. Time me.”

Once he was gone Frank sat down on the bed. He removed the rest of his money from his pockets and spread it out across the covers, counting it twice. He had enough for two days, if that. Bending over, he put his hands to his head and uttered a small and miserable laugh.

There would be no further deals, he realized. No come on in, all's forgiven, let's talk about it. Lyle was dead. Hack was due to be dead. Seven Mexicans, dead. And if they'd had their way, Frank thought, I'd be dead, too. Left lying in the mud inside a junkyard. If they found him now, they'd make him pay, pay just for making them work this hard. And they wouldn't just kill him. They'd tune him first, drag it out, make sure he squirmed and begged and pissed himself because killers like a show.

And then there was Shel. To think she'd had a hand in all that, his shiny white nurse. He realized he was hard to live with at times, nobody's idea of a prince, but even so. He'd gotten even, he supposed. But so had she. His crotch still throbbed, his head throbbed, too. He winced, thinking about it, but at the same time he felt grateful she'd gotten away. At the time he would have killed her, yes, but now, thinking back, that wasn't what he'd wanted at all. He wanted her to see how he felt. See me for who I am, he thought. The whole number. That so much to ask?

A fast hard knocking came at the door. It sent Frank down to his knees beside the bed. He began to retch, thinking: They found me, the fuckers, they're here.

Through the door, the bellhop called out, “Skip, Skip, it's me. Got the fifth. Hey, Skip?”

Frank knelt there, blinking. Street noise filtered in quietly through the window. He rubbed his face, got up one leg at a time and sat on the bed for a second to get his breath, trying to swallow. He collected his money, pocketed it, then worked his way along the wall, chained the door and cracked it open.

“You nod off or what?” the bellhop snapped. His face bristled with Hey Hey Hey. He held up the bottle of gin like it was a chicken.

“Righteous,” Frank murmured. “We're even.” He took the bottle and closed the door.

Within ten minutes he'd drained half the bottle. He patrolled the room, checking under the bed, inside the closet, paranoia ticking in his head. He put his ear to one wall, then the other, detecting sounds. The clarity he'd felt earlier abandoned him. He clutched the gin bottle to his chest. You're lucky to be alive, he told himself. That's why you're scared.

Life is luck and the lucky are scared.

He indulged in a little more crank. Surfaces bristled. Lamplight made sounds. I'm sorry, he thought. There, I said it, I'm sorry. He got up and went to the bathroom. We must, he thought, get a grip on our drugs. He turned on the hot water spigots to warm his hands, found a towel, drank from the gin bottle. Overhead, the fluorescent ceiling light hovered like a little spaceship. He ran his hands down his arms. Shards of glass nestled in each pore. His hair felt tired.

He found his way back to the bed and turned on the television, craving sound, any sound. It had to be better than listening to his own head. The twenty-four-hour news channel rebroadcast a speech the president had made earlier that morning on the East Coast. The president's face, in the constant eruption of a camera flash, looked twitchy and false. Nice suit, Frank thought, drinking. The man in the nice suit sounded the old familiar call: Get tough. Get tough on crime. From a piece of paper in front of him, he recited: “We will not rest until this menace is crushed.”

Abatangelo drove across town to a photomat near the Opera House. The morning rain had created a bristling winter clarity. Buildings shimmered. Windshields flared. Outside the photomat, two secretaries leaned against the brick facade, one enjoying a quick smoke, the other a frozen yogurt, both lifting their faces to the sun. A panhandler stood in the doorway, one hand shading his eyes as the other moved in a constant gimme motion. Abatangelo brushed past him through the door.

With a little financial encouragement he got the girl at the counter to run his prints at once. The girl had the face of a ten-year-old, part of her head was shaved, and she breathed through her mouth. A button on her smock read:
WHY COMPLAIN? THE WORST IS YET TO COME.

Abatangelo moved to the glass wall dividing the waiting room from the developing area to watch the process. He'd shot his frames of Shel in color, and the darkroom he'd rigged up in his apartment was set up only for black and white. Within a minute the color prints emerged on the vertical conveyor, rising one by one. Shel with her back exposed, revealing the bloody gashes, the bruises and welts. A close-up of her battered face. The bloodred eyes. Another close-up, this one of her neck. Now the girl was looking, too. She closed her mouth.

“I wasn't the one who did it,” Abatangelo told her when he paid.

His next stop was within walking distance. Across the street from the I-80 skyway, the words
ANTHONY J. COHN, ESQ., ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
appeared in black Doric lettering upon the frosted glass door pane of a renovated Victorian.

Except for car keys and cash, the only thing in Abatangelo's pocket at the time of his arrest in Oregon ten years earlier had been a slip of paper with Tony Cohn's phone number on it. Cohn, though expensive, earned his fee. For three days at the preliminary hearing, the lawyer badgered the arresting agents into a squall of contradictions. They claimed an Anonymous Tipster had led them to Abatangelo and the others, when in fact one of the mutts on the beach crew had been their informant. The reason for the deceit was that an Anonymous Tipster, if he's not a coconspirator, can remain anonymous forever. They didn't want their snitch burned since he was working another grand jury out of Portland. The more they lied, the more Cohn hounded them. The government fished around for a good excuse, then just pointed fingers down the chain of command. Cohn, arguing fruit of the poisonous tree, managed to quash most of the informant's testimony. But not all. Cohn explained the arbitrary nature of the ruling made for a good appeal issue, but at trial they stood to get hammered. This was, after all, rural Oregon, and rumors of the liberal northwest were greatly exaggerated. The jury pool was righteous and inbred. Worse, the defendants were Californian. Abatangelo didn't need it explained twice. For the sake of reducing the heat on everyone else, he told Cohn to plead out, and Cohn got the best deal he could: a ten-and-five—ten years in prison, with five years probation tagged on because the U.S. Attorney deemed the defendant Of Malignant Character. As bad as it was, it beat risking the twenty-five-year stint he faced at trial, and gave everyone else the break he wanted. Especially Shel. Despite her limited involvement in the Company, the prosecutors were making her out as a full conspirator, using this as leverage against Abatangelo. Through Cohn, he tried to get her a single year, meaning with time served a few more months in prison at best. The feds would hear none of it. She gets three and a half like everybody else, they said, or we go to trial.

Cohn's receptionist did not look up as Abatangelo entered the law office. The woman's name was Joanna, an obese, compulsive woman who'd been fresh from community college when he'd seen her last, accompanying Cohn to hearings. She was adrift in her thirties now, and looking older still. As he recalled, she talked to herself. Conversing With The One Who Ought To Know, she called it.

He stood there several moments until finally, still looking down at her desktop, she said: “If you don't state your business soon, I'm going to ask you to leave.” Her work area reeked of talcum powder. Abatangelo foresaw her developing a passion for cats, cutting her hair just a little bit shorter every year.

“It's Dan,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. I stopped by to tell Tony hello.”

Joanna jumped back in from her seat as though bitten. “Good God.” She tried to compose herself, but an awkward, wincing smile lingered as she eyed him up and down. “Why didn't you call first?” She made a fluttering upward gesture with her hand. The stairs. “Go on up. Tony will want to see you, I'm sure.”

Climbing the stairs, Abatangelo detected a new severity to the decor. The rugs were Persian. Tapestries lined the corridor. The track lighting was soft, discreet. Cohn had disclosed in his last few bits of legal correspondence that he was through with drug cases. The counterculture overtones were gone. No aging hippie élan, no Politics of the Mind, no laughs. Now spooks and professional paranoids were involved, only the small-fry got popped, thugs prevailed. There was a lot of death going around.

The door to his office was open, and Cohn stood in the middle of the room in his stocking feet. He was a short, wiry man to begin with and, shoeless, seemed even smaller, but the lack of size only served to enhance his intensity. The eyes were the same, fanatical and charming and vaguely wicked, but Abatangelo sensed something different, too. Immaculately groomed, meticulously dressed, he looked well-tuned but joyless. A winter tan helped obscure the weariness in his face. He held a fistful of paper, puzzling at another pile of paper on the floor.

Abatangelo announced himself with a knock on the door frame, saying as Cohn glanced up, “Back from the dead.” He came forward, shook the lawyer's hand and smiled, feeling the architecture of thin bones, the ropy muscles, thinking—tennis. True sign of the arriviste; he's taken up tennis.

Cohn stared dumbfounded. In time he managed to say,
“Mirabile visu.
”

Cohn was known to throw the Latin around. Jewish lads of his generation, he'd tell you, primed for a career in medicine or law, had little use for French or Spanish. This particular phrase meant: A wonder to be seen.

Abatangelo glanced around the room. “Same could be said for your digs.”

Buddhist phalluses and other fertility charms littered the shelves of a tea cabinet. A temple dragon, chiseled from sandalwood and large as an Airedale, glared from the corner. Above it hung a wool and burlap thing that looked like a french-fried bedspread.

“Apologize to Joanna for me,” Abatangelo said. “I think I frightened her.”

“You're bigger than you used to be,” Cohn acknowledged, looking him up and down. He gestured as though to convey bulk. “And to be honest, you look a little harder than I remember.”

“Same old me,” Abatangelo assured him.

Cohn smiled. “If that's so, prison ain't what it's cracked up to be.”

They shared a spate of uneasy laughter.

“You busy?” Abatangelo asked, gesturing to the clutter of papers across the floor.

“Labor omnia vincit
,” Cohn replied. Latin again: Work vanquishes all.

Sensing an air of impatience, Abatangelo said, “I've got some pictures here. A bit of business, I guess. Shel Beaudry, you remember?”

Cohn flinched a little. “How could I forget,” he said. “You haven't been in touch with her, of course.” On his desk, a small gold clock chimed discreetly.

“Through an intermediary,” Abatangelo lied. “She took it a little hard the other night.”

Cohn emitted an awkward laugh and sat down. “I suppose I'm going to hear about it.”

Abatangelo took out the pictures of Shel and set them down on the desk. Cohn reached out to collect them, wearing an expression of weary disgust. And yet there was an eagerness about him, too. A curiosity that helped Abatangelo come to a decision.

Driving over, he'd felt half-inclined to give up the notion of making Frank pay for what he'd done to Shel. There were already plenty of hounds out for the kill, though that guaranteed nothing, of course. He'd gathered from what Shel had told him that Frank had an unearthly knack for skating away from his own disasters. But so what? The argument went back and forth in his mind, and as it did he sensed, beneath the abstract moralities at issue, a vaguely sadistic urgency. Seeing Frank suffer, having a hand in it, would feel good. It would scratch a particularly fierce itch. Your motives are hardly pure, he told himself. Think about that.