Electric City, page 10
Jane turned a little in her seat and watched them swaying rather elegantly to the music with serious expressions on their faces. “She didn’t have a family,” she said. “Just some cousins.”
“So who hired you to look for the poor thing?” said Donna.
“Her co-workers. She worked at a clipping service in Seattle.” Jane wondered if Donna knew what that was, so she added, “She sat around all day clipping things out of newspapers, for clients who want to see what the press is saying about certain issues.”
“At least she was off her feet,” said Donna. “But it sounds pretty boring. No people.”
“I guess she got all that second-hand. Through the papers,” said Jane.
“Whatever she was pulling to get her in trouble, maybe it was related to that,” said Donna, narrowing her eyes. “Sounds like she was shaking people down. How many people do you think she was victimizing?”
“I’m not prepared to say just what she was up to,” said Jane, even though she’d have been thrilled to tell Donna everything and she seemed to have figured it out anyway. She was such an appreciative audience. But a private detective surely didn’t blab all about her cases to everyone. It was just that Jane wanted to give people some payoff for helping her—a feeling that they’d done a good deed, perhaps, or in Donna’s case, some juicy inside scoop. Instead she said, “Want another beer?”
“Sure,” said Donna with a shrug. “Why not.” She settled back and said thoughtfully, “I’d love to have your job, figuring out what people are up to. I already do that, but I don’t get paid for it.”
Jane didn’t add that she didn’t get paid either, not until the board reviewed everything and approved it.
“Most of it is pretty boring,” said Jane. “I chase after stuff that doesn’t pan out.”
“Did you come from Seattle today?” said Donna.
“That’s right. And I dropped by Coulee City on the way,” said Jane. “I had a little errand there, then I stuck around for the rodeo.”
“There’s something about a man in chaps,” said Donna thoughtfully, blowing out cigarette smoke, tossing her head back to avoid her own smoke, and rolling her eyes in a knowing way.
“They were pretty cute,” said Jane. “But very young.”
“So?” said Donna, laughing. “What’s wrong with young?”
“Nothing,” said Jane, who felt she and Donna had more in common than she would have liked to admit to just anybody. “Nothing at all.”
Donna leaned forward again and lowered her voice. “Let’s face it, guys get into middle age, a lot of them are kind of set in their ways. And a lot of them are out of shape.”
“Not to mention married,” said Jane.
“Yeah,” said Donna. She warmed to her theme. “And they have bad haircuts and stuff. Younger guys take better care of themselves.” She thought about it for a second. “Now bald, that’s okay. They can’t help that. It’s genetic. Anyway, guys in their early thirties, that’s ideal,” said Donna. “I’m forty,” she said and gave Jane an anticipatory look.
“I’m thirty-eight,” said Jane. “Thirty-eight and holding.”
“You’re holding pretty good,” said Donna, whose attitude toward life and love seemed to be that of a horse breeder. Jane herself, however, often had the same crass thoughts. “You could get a younger guy easy,” said Donna appraisingly.
Jane wondered if Donna intended to recruit her on some kind of double-team stud safari. Trolling for guys was often a two-woman enterprise, and choosing a prowling partner was something a woman did fairly carefully. Ideally, they were at about the same level of attractiveness, discerning enough to evaluate the possibilities properly, trustworthy enough to divide up the spoils fairly, and discreet. Men were more smash-and-grab artists when it came to such things.
“That’s nice of you to say,” said Jane. “Actually, I’m not really looking.” She shrugged. “But I have to admit I can’t help noticing.” She didn’t add that sometimes she noticed to the point of extreme restlessness.
Donna nodded. “You don’t have to be hungry to read the menu, and like I say, those rodeo boys are cute as pie.” She gestured around the room. “We got some Sears and Roebuck cowboys around here. But in a little place like this, the merchandise gets kind of picked over right out of high school. Then it shows up later on the used market, after the divorce.” Donna took another slug of beer and panned the room with her big blue eyes. “So you’re single, I take it. If you’re not, Jane, you’re sure talking like you’d like to be. And I guess you’re on the road a lot with this job.” She winked.
Their second beers arrived and Donna fired up another Salem. The place was getting noisier and smokier. Jane thought about finding herself a motel after this next beer, taking a hot shower to get the driving kinks out, collapsing in front of CNN and getting a good night’s sleep before the drive home tomorrow.
She’d come a long way to get some information she could have gotten over the phone, but she figured her time wasn’t worth all that much. And she was getting a more vivid picture of Irene’s activity.
She also thought about bumming a Salem from Donna. The best defense against barroom smoke was to fall off the wagon. She resisted the temptation. Quitting had been too hard. Donna was now calmly surveying two men by the bar.
Jane followed her gaze and immediately locked her sights on one of the men. Donna’s patter must have been a bad influence, because all Jane could think of was what a perfect example of the classic American hunk this guy was—the kind of guy Jane had missed during all those years in Europe. He appeared to be in Donna’s preferred age range, he had sandy hair and a tan, clean-shaven outdoorsy kind of face, jeans, boots, and a Western shirt with what looked like an Indian motif across the shoulders. He was laughing and pushing one of his companions a little. He had great teeth and he looked like he owned this place and any other place he might happen to be.
Under the table, Donna nudged Jane’s foot with the toe of her boot. “Speaking of heartbreakers,” she said in a low voice, “you’re checking out the guy in the patterned shirt, right?”
Jane smiled. “I guess so,” she said. She found herself seriously distracted. There was something entirely unself-conscious and free about the way he moved that she found tremendously appealing. Her only hope was if the guy had a weasely little voice. Jane was very partial to nice voices.
“He’s a singer,” said Donna. “He’s got a real pretty voice.”
Oh hell, thought Jane. The last thing she needed to be doing now was figuring out how to put some tasteful but effective moves on some good-looking cowboy with great pipes she’d spotted in a bar. Maybe he was really stupid with a dull look in his eye. That could ruin male beauty in an instant, as surely as a weedy voice.
“Him and his band, they’ve played all around,” continued Donna. “They do the Omak Stampede every year ’cause he’s local. His parents are in the apple business.”
“Is that guy with him in the band?” said Jane, who couldn’t care less about the man with him. She watched the heartbreaker run his hand through his hair. It was a nicely shaped hand.
“The guy on the left is named Carl,” said Donna. “He manages the apple packing plant for the family. To tell you the truth, I hoped to run into Carl here.”
Jane gave Carl a cursory glance, then allowed herself a survey up and down the length of the singing cowboy, who was in the act of putting one boot on the brass rail along the bar. As he did, he pulled a little on the leg of his jeans. She could see the side of his boot now, and there, tooled in leather, was a lemon yellow lightning bolt coming out of a cloud, exactly like the one Peggy in Coulee City had described.
Jane looked back up at his face, and discovered, to her horror, that he’d been watching her check him out. He had a quirky little sideways smile and a slightly arrogant, amused expression in his eye that Jane decided was absolutely charming, but he seemed kind of sweet too. He also looked far from stupid. Those eyes had some intelligence flickering behind them. She’d run out of reasons not to make an idiot of herself and she hadn’t even met him yet.
She gave him a mysterious little sidelong half smile, what he’d just given her, but not so direct, and the same expression of amusement with a touch of the blasé. After all, she did need to ask him where he got those boots with the lightning bolts. It might give her some idea where to look for the blonde from Coulee City. This was strictly business.
15.
She realized, however, that if it were simply business, she’d just walk over to him and ask him where he got the boots, without worrying what he thought. The fact that he was the town heartbreaker and they’d exchanged a soulful glance across the room, however, brought her pride into play. She wanted to lure him over to her. She was rather disgusted with herself for acting like life was a high school dance, but maybe it was.
Donna was waving at his companion, Carl, who wore a black cowboy hat. For all her bold talk of young sleek things with washboard stomachs, it was clear she was willing to compromise. The guy she was waggling her fingers at while she goggled at him with her big blue eyes over her beer bottle had seen a good forty-five summers. Carl had the kind of leathery tan associated with hard work out of doors rather than tanning parlors or Club Med. The way he was sucking enthusiastically on his own beer was a vital clue as to how his stomach had blossomed out and over his big silver belt buckle. But there was a rascally sort of charm in the way he smiled back at Donna.
“Carl’s wife left him last week,” she said. Apparently, Donna wasn’t waiting for the corpse of the dead marriage to cool off. A second later, he was over at their table, grabbing a chair and flipping it around so he could sit on it backward and lean on the back of it, a touch Jane found kind of phony. Then he beamed at Donna.
“This is Carl,” she said, pointing at him with the base of her beer bottle as she tilted it back up to her lips. “And this is Jane da Silva. From Seattle.”
From the corner of her eye, Jane watched Carl’s hunky companion leaning against the bar facing the dance floor. They gave each other another look, just a millisecond too long to be accidental.
“Jane, huh. What brings you out here?” said Carl.
Jane was about to tell him she was a private detective. She may as well get used to it, and she supposed it was nice to be able to say something—it had been a while since she could say she was anything in particular. But Donna gave her a warning look, a frown and a barely perceptible shake of the head. Jane supposed the place was a hotbed of gossip.
“Just passing through,” she said with a smile. Great, now she sounded like someone in an old Western picture. Carl didn’t press her.
“I heard about you and Gail,” said Donna, who managed to sound genuinely sympathetic and trampy at the same time.
Carl shrugged. “I guess it wasn’t a big surprise,” he said. “We’ve been struggling for a long time.”
Jane wasn’t in the mood to hear about Carl’s marital problems. “I have to make a phone call,” she said, rising. She’d sashay past the guy with the lightning bolt boots, hit him with a big eye lock, and give herself one more shot at getting him to make a move. Then she’d stop being silly and go up and ask him where he got the boots. He’d think it was a come-on, but she decided not to let herself care.
It happened suddenly, just like in the movies. Suddenly was usually the way it happened for Jane, whether or not it actually turned into anything. As she walked past him she forced herself beyond the bounds of what little natural modesty she seemed to have left after a lifetime of successful flirting and gave him a great big bold stare and a shy, knowing smile.
Another song came on the jukebox—a kind of old-fashioned country waltz with a sweet, sad violin line. He didn’t smile back, which made him somehow more interesting. He just gazed at her, straightened up a little at the bar, and said very politely, “Would you care to dance?”
“Sure,” she said with a phony casual shrug that wasn’t really meant to fool anyone. He put one hand around her waist and she put a hand on his shoulder and then their other hands touched and clasped and they began to dance. He held her decorously in front of him so they could look at each other.
“I noticed something from across the room,” she said.
“Yeah? So did I,” he said smiling now.
“I noticed your boots,” she said. “With those lightning bolts up the side.”
“A little flashy, but I guess they did the trick,” he said. “You hustled right on over.” He pulled her about an inch closer.
“I was on my way to the phone,” she said in mock indignation, giving him the inch and adding a little something to it. He smelled like sweat and Ivory soap. She wished she didn’t have to keep asking about his boots.
“I wondered where you got them. They seemed unusual.”
“They are,” he said. “Custom. I usually wear them onstage. I’m a musician.”
“So you can write them off if you wear them onstage,” said Jane, who had once been a singer and would have written off a series of slinky dresses if she’d made enough income to Shelter.
“Actually, they were a gift,” he said.
“From a grateful fan?” said Jane.
“I suppose you could call her that,” he said politely, but with a kind of firmness that meant he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. “I’ve been on the road,” he said. “I haven’t seen you around here before.”
“I’m from Seattle,” said Jane.
“A friend of Donna’s over there?”
“No,” she said, wondering how much she should say. If she was going to pry out of him where the boots came from, it would be better not to say who she was. “I just met her. So what kind of a musician are you?”
“A little better than average,” he said looking down at her from beneath his lashes. His eyes were kind of green with gold sunbursts around the pupil. Jane had heard eyes like that described as “American eyes.”
She laughed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“We’re what they call in the business a hat act,” he said.
“As in cowboy hat?”
“That’s right. We just kind of stomp and holler and make sure everyone has a good time, and once in a while we sneak in a nice slow ballad so everyone can dance close and sometimes we get a little bluesy.”
Jane imagined herself dancing closer to him after an hour or so of sweaty stomping and hollering, with full frontal body heat transfer and her face against his chest. She tried to put the thought out of her mind, but discovered herself moving her hand from his nice level shoulder a little ways around to the back of his neck. She stopped herself when she felt his hair with her fingertips—it was smooth but kind of crisp— and slid her hand back onto his shoulder, a gesture that came across, she decided, more like a caress than the retreat it was intended to be.
The melody took off, soaring above them, and he took them into a deep spin, twirling her around the empty floor three times until she started to laugh.
When he saw her laugh, he started to laugh too, and twirled her around some more, with bigger, more swooping steps, so she got rather happily dizzy and when the music ended, he had to steady her a little with his hands on her arms, and they just stared at each kind of goofily for an instant.
“That was exhilarating,” she said. “Is that the kind of music you play?”
“No,” he said. “We’re not that sweet. But it’s great stuff. If you listen you can hear old Celtic reels back in there. Kind of haunting like.” He stopped and gave her a look that she thought might cause core meltdown, then he said, “Want a beer?”
She pushed her hair back from her face. “Sure,” she said, looking over at Donna, who seemed to be in animated conversation with Carl.
“Never mind about old Donna,” he said. “She’s fine.” They sat at the bar and he gestured to the waitress. “So tell me about yourself. A new face kind of stands out around here.” Beat. Disarming, confident smile. “Yours does, anyway.”
“I used to be a singer too,” said Jane. “Old standards. Gershwin, Kern, Cole Porter. Not much stomping and hollering.”
“More torchy and swooning, I guess,” he said.
“Something like that,” she answered, repressing the urge to add “studied and corny.” But maybe she was being too hard on herself.
“So where did you do this singing? In Seattle?”
“No, in Europe. I lived there for a long time.” She wrenched herself away from his face to thank the bartender who had set down their beers.
“I spent some time over there,” he said. “But one day I woke up and knew I had to come home. I needed more space. I felt crowded and hemmed in. Too many people.”
“I know,” she said. “But I got used to it. I think after all those years I started moving like them. Smaller, neater steps, you know. But what I liked about it was always being a foreigner. Some people feel more at home when they’re away from home, and I was one of them.”
“But you came back. Still singing?”
She shrugged. “In the shower. I finally figured out it wasn’t a very stable life.”
“And that’s what you want? A stable life?”
“No. But that’s what I think I should want,” she said. “I came home to look after the family business.”
“That’s what I’ll probably end up doing,” he said. “It beats ending up in a trailer park somewhere with a sack of demo tapes and a liver like Swiss cheese. I’m kind of keeping track of things for a week or two now while my parents are in Japan.”
“Japan?” said Jane. It sounded pretty exotic for a couple of farmers. Donna had said his family was in the apple business.
He gave her a sideways little smile. “My Dad’s on a committee of apple growers negotiating with the Japanese to get our apples into their markets,” he said. She hoped he hadn’t guessed why she looked startled. He had.
“I guess you think we go out and pick them and put them in an old pickup and sell them by the side of the road. Apples are a global business. We sell them all over the world. The Japanese have a strong farm lobby of their own, getting good prices from Japanese consumers. They keep our apples out, making up a bunch of excuses about pests. Don’t get my Dad started, or he’ll be likely to grab a sledgehammer and bash in the windshield of some Toyota or Subaru. My mother and sister went along to take a tour of Japanese temple architecture. And I’m hanging out here in Okanogan County with my old friends from Omak High School, which is driving me nuts, to tell you the truth.
