WIDOW (19 page)

Dod shrugged. But he was amused. “About that blackboard . . .”

“Dod, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“You never watch TV?”

“Nature shows on PBS.”

“You don't know about that new show they tried, David Lynch thought it up?” When Mitchell just stared at him, Dod continued. “Well, it was called Homicide and they kept a list of the cases on a blackboard in the squad room so they would all know what cases were open, what were closed. We could use that.”

“We're gonna copy a television show, is that what you're saying, Dod?”

“Well, I mean, then we'd be more organized. We'd know at a glance the case status.”

Mitchell shook his head. “You're about nuts, Dod. They ought to call you Edsel.” He found a memo pad in his desk drawer and stuck it in his pocket. “I have to get out there, question the street.”

“Happy hunting.”

“Yeah.” Mitchell got out of the building as fast as he could. He was still burning up about getting the old One-Two-Who're-We-Gonna-Screw from Epstein. The gay coalition had a heavy-hitting voting bloc. Cops didn't look after them, they put on the pressure.

Outside, in the sunlight, Mitchell paused and experienced the heat warming his cold hands. The sun beat down on the top of his head. He wished it could inspire him, but it didn't. He had jackshit on the gay killing. Forensic said the weapon used was probably a wooden baseball bat. There were splinters found in the brain matter. No surprise. No witnesses turned up, but that too was no surprise. People didn't talk unless they had to. He'd go back to the scene, where the dumpster stood, and check out the surrounding buildings, question the people behind every window on every floor. He could send out someone else to do the footwork but, as he had no other leads anyway, he might as well do it himself.

He walked in double-time to the precinct parking lot and took the car assigned to him, a two-year-old Buick that had a loose tappet and a front seat that was stuck so he couldn't stretch out his legs. They were always scrunched under the wheel, causing him cramps.

All day long he knocked on doors and stared into the bored, glazed eyes of potential witnesses. Nothing. They weren't home. They were asleep. They had the stereo up loud. They were deaf, dumb, and blind.

That's how most days went. Into the dumper.

At five-thirty he was starving. He'd been on shift for two and a half hours, and he was getting nowhere on the case. Now that he didn't have a girlfriend (almost a wife!), he didn't have to worry about working the evening shift. He had tried the morning and late-night shifts and they hadn't appealed to him. From three until eleven at night proved the best times for the sort of investigative techniques he employed.

He ordered spaghetti at a cafe in Montrose and drank a Corona with a lime slice. The garlic bread was hard as rock and soaked in enough garlic butter to gag an Italian. Mitchell tried but couldn't eat it. He might break a molar trying. Refusing to pay for inedible food, he made the waiter bring more bread, fresh this time.

A girl in her twenties, blonde hair in a ponytail, trendy over-layered thrift store clothes, gave him the eye, but he wasn't about to fool with teenyboppers. He figured he was about twenty years past that. He hunched over the spaghetti and ordered another beer.

Around eight-thirty, the streets alive with tourists from the suburbs and from out of town, Mitchell saw Big Mac sitting on a curb at Alabama Street. He felt for his wallet, found a twenty.

“Hey, Big Mac, how's it going?”

She shivered although she had on two or three tee shirts and two pairs of running pants. “I feel cold.”

Mitchell raised an eyebrow. He hunkered down to her level, balancing on his heels. “It must be eighty degrees tonight. It's June, for chrissakes. Why you cold?”

“Got the flu or some shit. It's going around.” Mitchell reached over and stuffed the twenty in the shopping bag of her supermarket cart. She watched his hand the way a snake watches a rabbit. “You're good to me,” she said. “I coulda been younger, we might've had a party.”

Mitchell said, “Maybe. What the hell.”

“What you need? Jimmy the Head's moving Ecstasy down two streets.”

“Drugs, I don't care much about, Mac. It's that dead man they found in the dumpster out back of The Hungry Lion.”

“That was what? Two, three weeks ago?”

Big Mac rubbed at her nose, sniffled. She looked like a skinny old witch from an illustrated children's book. Her hair was matted. The corner of her eyes ran with murky water. He began to feel a worry knot form in his stomach.

She said, “Member I told you about them boys from up at the Woodlands? How they cruised through here that time, cussing out the queers?”

“I remember.”

“They had bats.”

“How'd you know the dead man was hit with a bat?”

“I saw something.”

What'd you see?”

She looked down the street at people filling the sidewalks. “I was sleeping back there when they come in.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

She turned her head slowly and squinted at him. He saw there was crust building up in her pale eyelashes. She might have pneumonia. “I knew you'd be around,” she said. “And you know I don't go courting trouble.”

“So who did it?”

“Kids.”

“The same ones? The ones from the Woodlands?”

“Not a doubt in my mind.”

Samson felt his spirits rise considerably. “If I get yearbooks from the high school there, you think you could ID them?”

“I could probably do that.”

What'd they do?” As if he didn't know. If he hated anyone at all, he hated hate groups. They were irrational and hot-headed. Face it, they were out-and-out mental defectives.

“They had him by the arms when I woke up. They didn't see me. They must've brought him from the street. He was pretty pissed so he said some stuff he maybe shouldn't have. There were five or six boys. Big as he was. They all had bats. I never made a move. Nothing I could do about it.”

Mitchell hung his head and stared at the sidewalk. His spirits sank. He might catch the perps now, but the thought of what they'd done and how it had gone down made him feel a thousand years old.

“I wanted to shut my eyes, pretend I was dreaming, but the guy started screaming. Then they hit him real hard. I saw that boy, the one who landed the first blow. It knocked the poor man against the dumpster and put him on his ass. Then it was . . . it was . . . the strangest thing. They were as methodical as a gumball machine. Took turns with their bats, hitting him in the head. One of them kicked him, but most of them stepped up like at a batter's plate and let go a good one.”

“Shit.”

“Ain't it, though? This city can be a turd. Those weren't kids, really.” She glanced up at him. “I mean, they were, they were high-school fluff, but they were old as sin. They knew ‘zakly what they were doing. It wasn't loud either. No whooping and hollering, like you'd think. They took him down in silence, just their bats whistling through the air and the thunking sound when they connected. I nearly messed my britches. I knew if they saw me, I'd be next. Bound for heaven's gates.”

Mitchell put a hand on her shoulder. He stood up, his knee aching. “Come down to the station tomorrow?”

“What time? I have appointments.” She was joking. Feebly.

“Two o'clock. I'll have the yearbooks by then.”

She nodded her head. “Sure is cold,” she said.

He took a folded, moth-eaten, wool army blanket from the cart and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“God love you,” she said. “I'll feel better tomorrow.”

He pivoted and left the street for his car parked blocks away. He heard the thunking sounds in his brain. Thunk. Thunk! He knew the parents of the boys weren't going to believe it. Their kids had it all, why would they blow it on a gay down in Montrose? Just because, he'd tell them. Because they're vipers. And you taught them to hate. All your money didn't keep that hate from curdling their hearts.

That's what he'd tell them.

~*~

He had meant to go home. He even drove in that direction, automatically entering the freeway and watching for the exit sign, but the image of high school kids with so little conscience they could take out a human being by using his head for a baseball kept flooding over into his thoughts.

Jerry Lee Lewis's “Little Queenie” came on the Oldies station on the radio and Mitchell thought of the dark-haired topless dancer. She was one little queenie he'd love to take home with him. And that was an idea almost as crazy as a bunch of kids deliberately killing a man just because of his sex life. You didn't take home topless dancers. Some of them you paid to spend a little time with you in the comfort of a motel that charged by the hour, but you didn't take them home for the night.

He exited the freeway, turned under an overpass, and headed the car back the way he'd come. Back to Montrose. To the club where she danced. To see her again.

And he would not follow her out.

He'd just look. Think about her. Try to see into those veiled eyes, if she'd look at him.

He checked the dash clock. Almost midnight. It was too early. He could drink until the best dancers came on stage. He should celebrate the break in his case, shouldn't he? Wouldn't the lieutenant be happy to get this thing off his desk?

What if Big Mac gets sick and dies?

The thought came unbidden and spooked him. Tomorrow he'd see if she was better. If not, he'd take her to a clinic himself. Dose of penicillin would fix her up. He had to keep Mac healthy—well, breathing anyway—to testify. Maybe the department could take up a collection . . .

Chuck Berry sang, “Nadine, honey, is that you?”

What was his obsession with the dancer? If he could answer that, he should be getting million-dollar grant money from scientific organizations that tried to determine what made people attractive to one another. The curve of her lips, was that it? The way her legs moved? That delicious dip at the base of the spine where her hips began to swell? Her look—tough, hands off, and yet sometimes vulnerable?

“You're lost, man,” he said, twisting the wheel to the right to park the Buick at the curb.

He visited two other clubs before strolling into the one where Shadow danced. He was worried he might have scared her off. He was sure the girls had told her he was the heat. What else might they have told her? That he had this . . . quirk? A taste for nearly nude women he never expected to touch?

He wasn't drunk, not even close, but an effervescence bubbled up through his mind the moment he stepped over the threshold into the room where she would perform. He had it bad. It was a real catastrophe, this thing propelling him across the room to the table that afforded the best view, without being too close to the runway where he'd be expected to play with their G-strings.

“Hey, Chief,” a regular said low over his drink.

Samson recognized Jimmy the Head and stopped, returned to the pusher's table. He leaned down close and said, “Ecstasy, Jimmy? When you gonna learn, man?”

Jimmy never batted an eyelash. His unusual head was shaped like a spade, wide and square in the chin, pointed toward the top, the crown of his floppy mud-brown hair beaten down flat.

“I'm talking to you.”

Jimmy raised a drunken pair of brown eyes to stare at the detective he'd called Chief. “I hear you already,” he said.

“I guess I have to tell Narcotics. Let them put the moves on you. And here you just got outta TDC less than a month ago.”

Jimmy said, “Don't. I'll drop the stuff.”

“In a toilet?”

“Like that,” he said.

Samson nodded and moved on to the table he'd chosen. He heard a blues tune begin to wail and he knew it was her because that was the music she preferred. It was the Shadow.

It was his heart beating hard enough to choke him.

 

Seventeen

 

First thing she saw was the cop. She almost returned to the curtains and left the club. Only B.B. King and the rhythm of his guitar held her grounded in place.

Screw it. She didn't have to look at him. She didn't have to acknowledge his presence. He followed her outside this time, she'd yell harassment. The club manager didn't care you were homicide or the mayor, he didn't allow his girls to be hounded.

She played the opposite side of the club from where the cop sat. She kept her back to him. The place was packed, as it always was lately, and men pushed past one another to get up to the stage to stick money in her elastic wisps of cloth. She smiled. The first time. She had never smiled before. But this was almost like revenge, playing the crowd away from the cop, letting them get close enough to her to stroke the backs of their fingers on her waist as they stuffed the money there.

She moved slow, not with any lewd intent, just working the music, and she could see what it did to the men. They mouthed things to her, the music so loud they couldn't possibly speak over it, and she smiled and smiled.

One man, broader in the shoulders than the others, pushed aside smaller, shorter men, and brushed his gut up against the stage edge. She didn't like his face. It was of a brutal cut, all nose and mouth, small ball-bearing eyes beneath beetling brows. He reached out with a bill folded knife-thin along its length. He waved it at her. But his eyes were saying something she didn't like at all. His stare wasn't playful, it wasn't even sexual. It was the look of a starving dog two seconds away from taking off your hand. She looked from his eyes to the thick moist lips. He might be saying, “You.” Just that. “You.” Then: “C'mere.”

She used the song's ending as an excuse to move to the runway and down toward the front of the room. The lights stayed with her while a rockabilly song by Reba McIntyre came on and she started taking off the costume a piece at a time. To the beat. Exactly to the beat. Avoiding eye contact with both the cop and the big scary guy, watching a spot on the wall behind the crowd where someone might have thrown a beer bottle one time and cracked the plaster. It was necessary that she pretend she wasn't doing a striptease, that she was alone, parading her nakedness before a mirror. That was the only way she'd ever been able to strip in public and many of the other girls had told her it was the same for them.