Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (3 page)

“I could use a drink,” she shouted in my ear.

“Wait here,” I shouted back. She smelled like sweat and leather and perfume, and my face was wet where it had touched hers. She winked at me, and I think I winked back.

I threaded my way toward the kitchen. It seemed that a couple of hundred Austinites weren’t worried about getting up and going to work tomorrow morning. Surely one of them could tell me where they were hiding the liquor. After an expedition that took a good ten or fifteen minutes, I came back with a couple of Styrofoam cups of Jack Daniel’s and ice. In the meantime, though, someone had given her a margarita.

I combined the two whiskeys and we toasted. “To the detective business,” I said.

“To the blues,” she said.

We stood in the shadow of a hulk of welded scrap metal. It looked like a dinosaur skeleton mating an oil derrick. She’d been in town a couple of weeks, she told me. “Working on what?” I asked. “You never said.”

“And you never told me what kind of relationship you have with your girlfriend, or,” she said, fingering my lapel, “where you buy sexy suits like this.”

“We’ve gone out for a couple of years. I have trouble discussing our relationship on postcards and long-distance phone calls. It’s no easier doing it now at a loud party with a stranger.” As if to prove my point, the music got louder. It was some sort of decadent dance music, martial drums and synthesized kazoos. Nascent bubble gum vocals. At least they had liquor.

“It must be hard, being on the road, having a girlfriend.”

“Hard? It’s crazy. But I’m crazy about her.”

“She’d be crazy if she didn’t try hard to work things out. You’re very handsome, Martin. The way you handle that bass, so tall and thin in that suit. It’s really cool. Where’d you get it?”

“I got it at Vick’s Vintage,” I said. “There are a couple of other good vintage shops around, if you’re interested.”

I didn’t think she was, actually. But her expression darkened, and she said, “I’ve heard about Vick. I get the impression he’s quite a character. And every time I drive by his store, it looks like it’s full of musicians.”

“This town is full of musicians. And it’s full of characters. Vick happens to keep a good stock of vintage guitars and amps as well as clothes. People go by there to check out the inventory, shoot the bull, be seen. The thing you have to bear in mind is that this is Austin. There are more than seventy-five live music clubs, but there’s no big music business. It’s all cottage industry, a big flea market. Lots of clubs and small record labels. Critics, promoters, singers, bass players, songwriters, guitar players. Lots of guitar players. Any night of the week there’s bound to be a dozen clubs that have a guitar player on stage who could be the next Eric Clapton, but he couldn’t tell you the area code of a major record label. In this town, a guy with an answering service and a fax machine is a mogul. Vick Travis is a big fish in this little pond.”

“That tells me something about Austin,” she said. “But that’s not really what I meant about Vick being a character.”

I didn’t answer her. Someone had just collapsed next to me and knocked my drink into the sculpture, smashing the Styrofoam cup, drenching my suit. The culprit had friends. They helped him get vertical as I gave him my smashed cup. A guy with a Neanderthal face, short black hair, and an oversized head on a small but raw-boned body in a vintage black tuxedo came over and asked them if they needed any help taking him out. They took one look at his leering face and said no. He gave us a backward glance as he disappeared into the crowd.

“Speak of the devil,” I said, “that was Vick Travis’s right- hand man, Ed the Head.”

“I know. He gives me the creeps.” She shivered. It made her breasts jiggle.

I looked her up and down and bit my lower lip. My body was full of road aches and unsatisfied needs. The music didn’t help. The volume and beat combined with the lights demanded that you give in. Nobody just stood and listened to that stuff. It was dance or fuck off.

“Damn,” she said. “I think I lost an earring.”

“Probably happened when that moron fell on you,” I said. “I’ll look for it.” I got down on one knee and scanned the floor.

“Oh, just forget it,” she said. “It’s just a Melrose Avenue trinket.”

Something sparkled down there. I scooped it up just before a heavy-soled boot would have come down on it. As I raised back up, my head hit something.

“Ow!” she exclaimed, cupping her face with her hand. Blood seeped out between her fingers. A giant knot twisted hard in my stomach.

“I’m sorry. Do you have something?”

“Here,” she said, handing me her drink. She dug in her purse and got out a wad of travel-size Kleenex. I put the drink down and helped her as much as I could.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. But in a loud, hot room full of fumes of drugs, smoke, and alcohol,
sorry
was a very small word. She didn’t try to make me feel any worse, though.

“It’s all right. My nose bleeds at the drop of a hat.” She daubed it with the Kleenex and looked up at me. That half smile again. Blood glistened on her jacket and dotted my white shirtfront. The strobe lights made the dots dance and change colors.

“I’m jumpy,” I said. “I need a cigarette. And I still haven’t had a drink.”

“You can have mine,” she said.

I took it and had a gulp. “Would you like to leave?”

She nodded. We started threading our way through the sea of hairdos and elbows and uncertain feet. I didn’t think the tequila and the whiskey would go together on my suit, so I gulped it down before I got slammed again. It was like swallowing a sledgehammer.

I never liked margaritas.

CHAPTER TWO

The ceiling looked familiar.

The view through the sliding glass door out onto the parking lot and the creek that was below it looked familiar too, even though I was seeing it sideways. Sideways and blurry. An ugly haze seemed to cling to the couch I’d slept on, the sideways fat striped snoring tabby, TV, stereo, thrift shop dinette, and refrigerator. This last sideways item was buzzing quite loudly.

Down a short hall and to the left was a small room where I had a desk and guitars and amps, to the right was the bathroom, straight back was the bedroom, which was too hot to sleep in during the hot months. The cat was in the middle of the living room floor, lying on his back, which was how he slept during the hot months.

I was home, and I was a bundle of pain. From my throbbing head and burning eyes and ringing ears to the elephant’s foot on my chest and the bucket of molten lead in my stomach. From the hot steel pincers on the back of my neck to the dull rawness of my gums. I tried to get up but the molten lead sloshed in my stomach and the steel pincers pinched harder and deeper. The phone had been ringing.

Now someone was knocking at the door.

The next thing I knew Lasko was standing over me, shaking his head, rubbing his beard.

“Looks like you all but burned up on reentry,” he said. I was in no condition to look at the large Hawaiian shirt he was wearing. There seemed to be palm trees swaying and waves cresting on it, and that did my nausea no good.

“Go ’way,” I said. “I don’t feel good.”

“You don’t look too hot either, Martin. Where’s your bass?”

“It’s too early for a bass lesson, Lasko. Come back tonight. I know I owe you a couple of sessions, but it’s too damn early.”

“It’s three in the afternoon. And I didn’t come over here as one of your students. Not even as your friend. I came over here as a cop.”

I managed to get one elbow under me and tried to focus on his face. He wore a gimme cap with a beer company insignia on the crown. His curly reddish hair was a little long for a cop but not for a plainclothes homicide detective sergeant. He was frowning.

“I was hoping at least that your bass would be here,” he said.

The nausea was taking on a life of its own. It moved in a wavelike motion, churning, trying to tell me something. I swung my legs off the couch and managed to get up, shakily. Where
was
my bass? “Hang on a minute,” I said.

I stumbled down the hall and leaned inside the office. My spare was in there, but not the Fender. It wasn’t in the bedroom, either. I had a hazy recollection of jamming at a party. But I’d played someone else’s bass. Some Japanese model with computer age electronics and a neck like a two by four. Ugh. Where was my bass? I wouldn’t have left it at the club . . .

Back in the living room, Lasko hadn’t gotten any cheerier.

“Know a girl name of Retha Ann Thomas?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. Things were starting to move around in the fog. At first they were just shapes, then they became people, events, places. “I met her last night. I guess I left it in the trunk of her car.”

Lasko was shaking his head. He used the toe of one of his cowboy boots to pry one of my shoes out from under the couch, then jerked his head at me. “She’s in a coma with a caved-in head down at Brackenridge ICU. Somebody bashed her up good with a P-bass. Looks an awful lot like yours.”

“No.” Now I was going to be sick. The carpet seemed to turn to quicksand under my feet. I might never drink again. “Goddamn, there’s blood on your shirt.”

“I can explain that.”

“Get your shoes on,” he said.

&&&

“We’ve got statements, Mr. Fender,” said the Lieutenant. He looked at me with his bulldog face, twiddling his thumbs over his abdomen. He was flabby and jowl-ridden, old at fifty-five, without an ounce of humor. He was smart as a whip but would act dumb as a rock if that worked better. “Statements that say you really tied one on last night, though I can guess that for myself. Statements that you were with the girl at the bar, that you went with her to the party in Travis Heights. But you can’t say where you went after that party.”

“I wish I could,” I said. “I just can’t remember.”

It was a small room and the blinds were drawn. The Lieutenant manned a desk. Lasko sat in a chair to the side of it. I sat in a hard wooden chair, gulping hot bitter coffee, wishing it were all a dream.

“All right, let’s back up,” said the Lieutenant, looking up from a folder. “It doesn’t say here where you work.”

“I’m a musician.”

“We know that.” There was cruel sarcasm in his voice. The bass had turned out to be mine.

Lasko cleared his throat. “Uh, Lieutenant, Fender here is pretty much a professional musician. Though he does work part- time for a collection agency as a skip tracer.”

“Hmm. That right?”

I nodded.

“Not all that professional, then. What’s the name of the agency?”

“Lone Star Detectives,” I said.

“
Detectives?”
He thought it was grimly humorous.

“Yeah. They have a private investigations part, and then there’s the collection agency, which I work for. When I need the extra money.”

He nodded at Lasko. “That why you’ve been in trouble with the law before? I see we have some notes on you. One of your roadie friends and you were running around town with a guitar full of cocaine, and people seem to have followed you around falling down dead. You have some kind of fascination with crime, Mr. Fender?”

“I’m just a musician, sir. I almost make a living at it. The skip tracing covers the ‘almost’ part. I’ve been in trouble before, but I don’t generally go around looking for it.”

“This guy actually helped bring the guys in that did it, sir,” said Lasko. “A guitarist friend of his had been apparently killed over the coke. It was back—”

“I don’t give a damn about all that, Sergeant,” said the Lieutenant. “A couple of Fender’s roadies cut a swath of terror through the Sixth Street area last night, and his guitar player was up on top of the American Bank building just before dawn howling like a gut-shot dog, so I don’t care to hear any glowing character profiles just now. Let’s concentrate on the business at hand.”

He decreed that there would be a few seconds of silence by slowly turning his head to one side until the bones in his neck popped, then slowly turning the other way, apparently gazing at something somewhere above my head as he pushed a stack of Polaroid pictures across the desk to me and nonchalantly said, “Sure you don’t remember?”

I looked down as the pictures fanned out, at first not realizing what they were. Glazed garish splashes of color in the intervening darkness gradually came into focus as objects my brain could catalog. A black girl on a stretcher, bloodied and swollen.

A motel room, with patches of dark discoloration and huge swashes of blackish red on the sheets. Blood. Wreckage. A candy-apple red Fender Precision bass guitar, the metallic finish smudged and dark, on the bed where her unconscious body had been found.

“Robbery was not a motive, and it appears she was raped,” said the Lieutenant. “We’re not certain if it was before, after, or during the beating. We’ll know more later on this evening.” He looked up as the door behind me opened. He nodded, then motioned to Lasko. The two of them got up to leave. The Lieutenant paused in the doorway and said, “Be back shortly. Try to jog your memory a bit, maybe we can clear this up. Make yourself at home.”

I didn’t like the way he said it.

&&&

When Lasko came back he sat in the same chair and gave the Lieutenant’s desk the same kind of deference as when his superior had been sitting there. Maybe even more so. His face was lined with tension. He said, “Christ, Martin, you really fucked up this time.”

“I just had a couple of drinks to unwind after a gig, like I’ve done a million times. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just can’t remember what I need to remember to get me the hell out of here.”

“Know anybody who can verify that you accidentally bloodied her nose at the party?”