The Death Bird Contract, page 6
I got up and poured us brandies, and we raised the big tulip glasses to each other. She was sitting straight back in her chair now, rolling her glass in her palms and looking at me.
“Let’s make a deal,” I said. “I’ll tell you something about myself, and you decide whether or not to go on with it. If you don’t like the look or smell of the project, one telephone call tomorrow will cancel your contract. Okay?”
She nodded, her dark face serious and intent, like some superb harlequin who might quit the carnival.
I told her who I was, and in doing it I came pretty close to my right name. The wars, the civil revolt, the shattered ankle, two broken marriages, and a sketch around the edge of what I did. My antique Ozark castle, the waterfall with the cavern under it, my mushrooms, the forest of tiny citrus trees, and the accommodating sheriff who furnished me good triple-run moon in return for writing his campaign slogans.
“That sounds wonderful!” she said when I had finished.
“It is. Perhaps you’ll come to visit me there someday.” And after I had said it, I was faintly appalled because it was the first time I had ever invited anybody to see me in ten years. Not counting local milkmaids.
“I’d like that,” she admitted, and she watched as I carried my bag into the far bedroom. Under the shower, I butchered a few arias lustily and slipped with a sigh under the immaculate covers of the big bed. While I was glancing through the obit columns of the San Antonio Light, Jannina tapped on my bedroom door.
“Entre!” I called, and she came in with her tulip glass and sat on the edge of my bed. A splendid, dusky girl, and a slightly troubled human being, wearing pajamas of white silk, buttoned at the throat. I glanced over the top of the newspaper and said that I certainly would like to get integrated, and she smiled into her glass.
“Gets kind of tiresome, being defensive all the time, doesn’t it?” I continued, and she nodded.
“Like apologizing for being bom …”
“Unhunh. Well, it’s time to sack out, princess. Big day tomorrow. But thanks for the Zambezi River stomp.” I threw the paper on the floor, and she leaned over and kissed me, more in emphasis than in passion. But whatever for, I felt the warmth of her generous mouth. Then she switched off the bed light and left in a silken rustle.
Sleep wouldn’t come because I was reviewing the next steps in the operation and remembering the line Dr. Fenton had read me from the medical text on narcotics addiction: “After an addict starts vein-shooting, no other method of taking drugs interests him, and, if possible, he will continue that method as long as he lives, or as long as he is on drugs, which often amounts to the same thing.”
After half an hour of waiting, I realized that I was beginning to sweat, so I got the artillery set from my bag, sat on the edge of the bed, and gave myself a fine big fix of heroin. Euphoria began to flood down my veins with every heartbeat, and all the irritants fled from my mind. The relief was almost sexual in its flood through my body. With detached interest, I noticed that the puncture marks inside my left elbow were causing the veins to go sclerotic. Dr. Fenton had told me that if I didn’t keep my equipment clean, the veins would soon begin to abscess.
9
As I had had a kiss before going to sleep, so now I had another to awaken to. This one was lighter, however, just brushing my mouth, and it was wreathed around with soft matutinal greetings in French. I opened my eyes and saw Jannina leaning toward me.
“Ma cherie,” I whispered as I grabbed her wrist. When I pulled her down she was screaming that I would turn the coffee over, and she fell across me. She was wearing a white dressing gown and towel turban, and I held her across my lap and then parted the collar of her dressing gown and kissed her firm ebony breasts.
When I released her, she struggled upright and gathered the dressing gown around her shapeliness in mock anger. It didn’t work very well, however, because she looked exactly like what she was—a beautiful girl in bedroom disarray. As I sipped at the coffee, she sat on the edge of the bed regarding me; one high-heeled mule with white marabou feathers dangled from a foot.
“You slept well?” I asked, and she nodded. “You washed your hair?”
“Yes.” She patted the towel turban and got up. “Breakfast is in the other room, ready when you are.”
I watched her towering progress as she walked away, and murmured over my coffee cup, “Looks like monkeys fighting in a sack.” For that comment, she did a graceful bump that would have widened Blaze Starr’s eyes, and I got up to brush my teeth, humming.
The breakfast was a proper treat. Orange juice that turned out to have honey and vodka in it, shirred eggs, Canadian bacon, buttered English muffins, and tiny hot cakes with maple syrup. Enough hot coffee in the carafe for eight people. I noted with satisfaction as I worked my way through this repast that Jannina was quite a trencherman herself. Sunlight was flooding the sitting room, through high windows draped in pale green, and we sat there relaxed, two coarse feeders at work.
After a while, we slowed down, sighing mutually, and tailed off with coffee and a reading of the morning paper. She got the back half, and I riffled through the front. The whole scene, lighted by noon sunlight, was so satisfactory that I said as an afterthought while I’ was still reading, “How about calling the valet service and having my dark suit pressed?”
“Okay.” She got up and had taken three steps toward my bedroom before I realized that my tone had been slightly peremptory. I started to get up.
“I’ll get it,” I said, and she laughed and went on into the bedroom. I heard her take the suit from the closet, and she came back in searching the pockets. When she had called the service on the phone, I said, “Need one-hour service, incidentally. And I didn’t mean …”
Jannina sat smiling at me. “I know. Sounded pretty domestic.”
I shrugged and went back to Walter Lippmann. I thought he was wrong in this column, but as always, he was clear and easy to follow. Someone came to the door to pick up the suit, and while Jannina was giving it to him I got up to switch on the Muzak. A tango was playing, and I caught the tall girl as she turned away from the door. Silently, we began to turn in the slow and abandoned intricacies of the dance, our steps whispering over the parquet floor.
She moved, as the poet said, as neat as heat. And there was controlled heat enough under her swinging dressing gown, and enough abandon in the proud tilt of her turbaned head, which was almost as high as mine because of the spiked mules. Jannina was not dancing; she was only an agent of the slow, stirring music. She was so good that I tried a modified lift at the end of the tango (the heel of my hand against her slender hip) and got away with it. Her dark, shapely legs scissored up and settled to the floor lightly.
As I bowed over her outstretched hand, I murmured, “You’ve been practicing, kid,” and she laughed.
“I told you I was a dancer.”
“But not how much of one. If I lived in the old plantation house, Little Eva, I would send for you right quick.”
She was still bowing demurely, and only murmured her reply. “If you lived in the plantation house, Mr. Charley, I would have been living up there for quite a while.”
Laughing, I jerked her up to me. “Do you want to go ahead with this ramble?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her dark eyes were searching my face.
“Not a game, Jannina. Dangerous.”
“I said, I’m with you.”
I released her and stepped back. “Good. You can help me, and I’ll try to take care of you. But remember, one of the reasons you’re in it is that you’re a tempting, exotic dish. You’re the bait.”
She nodded. “I understand that.”
“Okay, so we rehearse a little.” I pointed to the couch, and we went back to sit on it. When I had poured more coffee for both of us, I went through the details of the operation. Several times. That took twenty minutes, and when she was letter-perfect in her answers, I nodded and sat back. She asked a few more questions, some of which I could not, or would not, answer. But I told her she was such a quick study that it would be all right.
“However,” I added wryly, “there’s one thing we probably can’t cure.”
“Oh?” She was quick with it.
“Yes.” I waved at the stereotyped opulence of the hotel suite, at the shafts of sunlight flooding past the expensive pastel drapes. “Everything has a function in life, a primary function. Yours is that you’re a pretty girl. That is principally what you should be. And you know, I like to touch and caress pretty girls … like to frig ’em. But you’re following the bible of Baldwin so hard that if I do anything … anything at all, it has to be on a NAACP basis.”
“I know that,” she said scornfully. “Do you think I like to follow a hate syndrome every time a man admires me?”
“I don’t know what you do,” I said rudely, “but I have had fun in my life, with a lot of petticoat tossings, in places you never even heard of…
“Name one!” she cried, and I gave her a ticker-tape response without really thinking about it.
“Sohrbog, Upper Assam, India; San Miguel, Mexico; Fremantle, Australia; Jimmy Jickle’s Bar, Villefranche, Old Town, Sitjes, Spain; Saba Island, Dutch Windwards; Icod, Canary Islands …”
“All right, all right already!” She threw up her hands, and I went over to turn on the television receiver. It was not a “television,” or a “telly,” or anything useful, but sooner or later if you stay in the Western World, you have to turn the squat piece of unmatched furniture on so that you can avoid thinking.
This day, slightly after noon, was no exception. We got a picture in viscous blue of a frenetic master of ceremonies named Walter Z. Jones. He was being sincere, energetic, and awfully fucking intense about nothing, while four carefully selected mediocrities sat staring at him and braying at the slightest provocation.
Watching Walter Z., I reflected that this is what the greatest electronic miracle of the Twentieth Century had come to. On all networks, this simpering little mustached cretin flung off by Madison Avenue in its implacable greed kept coughing, laughing nervously, and asking his panel guests questions so simple that most morons could guess the answers.
Walter Z. was a tight-clothed little man, and his screaming yips and ill-timed retorts must have embarrassed everybody employed by the networks. He knew this, and was nervous about it, and that only made him call the scrofulous female guests “dear” more often. And yet, long after the Renaissance, he and his more plausible ilk owned all the afternoons of American television, every afternoon. Even the newscasters reached for this same intimate, clownish plausibility.
Jannina was watching me, and I shrugged. “If one of these people,” I said slowly, “walked up to your house in the afternoon, with this puerile game, and stood in front of your television receiver, even without the leaden commercials, wouldn’t you call the police?”
“Yes,” she said. I was still fuming at the coy illiterate on the screen when the door chime to the suite sounded and she went to get my suit. I called and asked if she needed money for a tip, and she said no, so I kept staring at Walter Z., whose image could have been replaced by Shakespeare, an honest travelog, or lessons in Chinese so that those of us who became their prisoners could ask for a bar of soap, or mercy, when the time came.
I took the suit hanger from her hand and walked into my bedroom with it. When I was dressed—a dark tie made me look almost respectable—I walked back through the sitting room, bent to kiss her lightly, and left the suite.
10
It was a lovely afternoon. I walked from the motor lobby at the back of the hotel out into it, and two blocks away I rented a car from the company that was third. This was understandable because the girl who handled my case was a Mexican slattern who didn’t give a damn whether I rented a car or not; the car itself was twenty minutes in arriving and was filthy inside, with its ashtrays jammed.
In fifteen minutes, I was slowing down before a substantial hacienda-type mansion with an acre of yard. The suburb it was in had nothing but such expensive homes, and this one had fake Galician turrets of faded stucco, but the shrubbery was extensive and cared for. I got out of the rented car, walked up the long drive to the romanesque porch, and punched the button.
A stylish-looking lady in black, with matching circles under her patrician eyes, opened the door.
“Mrs. McKissick?” I asked briskly.
“Yes.”
“My name is Thoenborough, Narcotics Bureau of the Treasury Department.” I flourished out my wallet, flipped it open to the engraved I.D. card, and let her read it through the screen door.
“I’m afraid … I don’t understand,” she said hesitantly.
“That’s natural, Mrs. McKissick, and I hate to intrude. But, as I’m sure you know, my bureau of the Treasury Department is required by law to check every doctor’s narcotics records and his current supply immediately after death.”
She stared at me through the screen door. “Oh? I didn’t know…
“Yes, ma’am,” I said gently. “Surely you remember the periodic checks on your husband’s narcotics supply? It’s a federal requirement for every doctor. All I want to do now is check his inventory and seal it. And again, I wish to apologize for intruding in your hour of grief.”
She stared at me through the screen door. Once she must have been a handsome woman, but now she was frozen. Her husband, a prominent urologist, had died yesterday, and while I watched, the balloon went up. She crumpled and began calling in a hoarse voice, “Alma, Alma.”
Alma came and held her up; and I showed her my I.D. card and repeated my request to examine and seal. Alma attempted to talk to the sagging, weeping Mrs. McKissick. Between sobs, the widow said that she knew periodic checks of the doctor’s narcotics cabinet were routine. Alma led her away from me into the interior of the big house, and came back later with a key holder. There must have been fifty keys on it.
Alma said they included the key to Dr. McKissick’s office in the Smith-Young Tower, and also the one that opened his medical cabinet there. Would I bring them back as soon as I had checked and sealed the contents?
“I’m sorry, Mrs …”
“Brewster,” Alma said.
So I told Mrs. Brewster that it was also federal law that I had to have someone designated by the family with me when I checked.
Alma was a big florid woman, but dressed in a Neiman-Marcus dress that must have looked great on the model. On her it was all bulges and sprung angles. While she glowered at me I told her smoothly that she could surely understand the necessity for taking opiate drugs out of circulation after the doctor who had them had expired.
“Oh, yes,” she said militantly. “I’ll just go back and tell Betty, and then go down with you.” And she was gone in acres of tight taffeta. As I waited for Alma to return, I was not apprehensive because I knew she had roared like a lion on a thousand PTA committees, badgered elected officials, and probably been one of the strident Minute Women who would not buy beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea, even from the Iranian side, because the sea touched on Soviet frontiers. And even with twenty-twenty vision, she could not possibly have read my wallet I.D. card from three feet away through the screen door.
She was back in a few minutes, and I flourished her into the rented car. As we rolled downtown, she said that it must not be very pleasant to interrupt normal grief, even for such a good cause, and I told her, with proper humility, that this duty was the most trying we had to go through.
On the sixteenth floor of the Smith-Young Tower, we entered the big suite of offices that had been used by Dr. McKissick in his life to vacuum the trade. Only the receptionist was on duty, gloomily cleaning out files. When Alma, like a known banner with plump arms, explained to the receptionist, we were shown to the late doctor’s private office suite, and while they were chatting about the loss of the poor medico I unlocked the cabinet and loaded my pockets with half of its contents.
Then I turned, and while they watched I placed an official-looking seal across both cabinet doors. Admonishing them sternly that anyone who removed it without a court order would be violating federal law. They nodded solemnly in unison, as if the republic must thus protect itself, even in the hours of its bereavement, and Alma went sniffling at my elbow to the elevator.
When we were back in front of the faded stucco palace, I walked her to the door and handed her damp bulk inside, murmuring thanks. Walking back to the rented car was harder, and I raked the curving drive both ways. The late afternoon vista of a section where privileged people lived behind large sloping lawns seemed tranquil.
It was not until I had made the first sweeping curve around the well-shrubbed drive that the four dark sedans came rolling swiftly out of private driveways and boxed my rented car against the curb. Enough men came pouring out of them to stop a much larger revolt than me. And the leaders were not fooling; their service handguns were well in front.
Simultaneously, both front doors of my car were opened, and a brisk voice said, “Step out, please!”
I stepped out into the afternoon street, into a small army of neatly dressed men, all armed and ready to fire. It was a good, fair catch, the first one I had seen this bureau of the Treasury make.
“Slowly, with your hands free, please,” said the same calm voice. “Then turn around and face the side of the car.”
I did that, aware that people were beginning to come out of the handsome houses. At the order, I leaned over and put my outstretched palms on top of the rented car, and got patted down and frisked from two sides. Then they unloaded my pockets, and I was hustled into the nearest car and driven downtown to the grimy splendor of the federal courthouse.
