Baby Face, page 9
part #2 of Bubba Mabry Series
It was a rare and wonderful thing for Felicia to offer to cook. Her Indiana farm-girl upbringing shone through in the kitchen. I even put on some pounds when she was living with me and we were writing the Book. But she hadn't cooked for me lately. Most of the time, she survives on doughnuts and carry-out Chinese.
I agreed, and we set a time, and she released me from the telephone line. I eased back onto the bed and closed my eyes.
The telephone rang. I clenched my teeth and growled unintelligible curses and snatched it up.
"What?!"
"Meestah Bubba. This is Bongo speaking. Your telephone has been busy a very long time."
"Tell me about it."
"What?"
"Just an expression, Bongo. What's up?"
"Two officers of the police came around asking about you. I am of the opinion that this is something you would want very much to know."
"You bet I do." I sat up, looked around for a pen. "Who were they? What did they want?"
"It was those two tough guys from Vice. You know the ones of which I speak? One of them has an eye that looks everywhere?"
"Borkum and Bates."
"Yes, yes. They asked me many, many questions about you, how long you have lived here, do you receive a lot of visitors, that nature of thing."
"Anything else?"
"They asked me about some dates, whether I'd seen you on certain particular days. One in the month of March, one in the month of April, I believe. I told them, to me, all days seem the same. I am here every day, doing the same things."
"Good answer." I could guess which dates they'd asked about. The ones I'd written in my notebook when I went to see Romero, the days the hookers were killed.
"Then they went away. But I saw them around here later, just driving through the parking lot, then away. I found that exceedingly strange."
"Me, too, pal. But don't worry. I'll keep an eye out."
"Okay, Meestah Bubba. I will be seeing you later, aggravator."
I can never tell whether Bongo is pulling my leg.
I hung up and slowly lay back against the pillows, glaring at the telephone, daring it to ring again. I must've put the mojo on it, because it sat silent, cowed. I closed my eyes and exhaled loudly and went to sleep so fast it was like I'd blown my consciousness toward the ceiling instead of more hot air.
It was dark when the telephone rang next. I'd slept just long enough for my battered body to become stiff as an autopsy table. I grated to an upright position and fumbled for the receiver.
"Hullo?"
"Bubba Mabry?"
"Yeah?"
"This is Ralph Wartkin."
"Ralph .. . ?"
"You should know me. You seem to know my wife well enough."
"Your wife?"
"Belinda. She used to be Belinda Melville."
Belinda Wartkin? Whew.
"Yeah, I know Belinda, but I don't know what that has to do with you, or why you're calling me up in the middle of the night."
"I'll tell you why, smart guy. I want you to stay away from her."
I thought I could hear a woman's voice in the background. Belinda, probably, pleading with Ralph to hang up the phone.
"I just asked her some questions."
"I don't care what you did. I know your kind, buddy boy. You'd be all over her in a minute if she let down her guard. I may be retired, but I can still take care of what's mine—"
"Take it easy, Ralph. You're getting all bent out of shape over nothing."
"Don't tell me what's nothing. You just stay away from her."
The connection broke with a clatter, and I hung up the phone and flopped back on the bed. Just what I need, I thought. I've got a pimp and a few murders and some missing dolls and a girlfriend who stays mad at me most of the time. I was due a jealous husband.
I drifted off, splayed across the bed beside a jumble of sheets and blankets. I dreamt of answering services and car phones and a real office somewhere across town. In my dream I finally found some peace at home. My bedside table was empty, the ugly black phone gone. And I slept the sleep of the innocents.
The phone rang once more, late. It was too dark to see my clock, but I could somehow tell it was after midnight. I started to let the answering machine get it, but a phone call late at night sometimes means somebody died, and you have to answer.
"I'm gonna say this once." The voice was low, gruff, menacing. "Drop your investigation, or you'll be the next one who turns up dead."
The phone clicked to a dial tone. I held the humming receiver in my hand a long time, trying to identify the voice, telling myself I'd really heard it. It would've been reassuring for the call to have been a nightmare. But it was real.
I had trouble getting back to sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
I stood under the shower a long time the next morning. I needed a three-day soak and a stout-fingered masseuse, but a shower would have to do.
I creaked around my room, drinking coffee and putting Band-Aids around each of my fingers, which were scratched and purple from the fence wire. My thumbs were okay. If any hitchhiking came up, I was ready.
It had been more than a week since I'd done laundry, and the pickings were slim in my closet. Yesterday's jeans were wearable, once I beat the dust out of them, and I found a plaid shirt that didn't reek too strongly. I threw the dog-ripped blue shirt in the wastebasket. Let the maid wonder about that one.
As I stood before the mirror, combing my hair over the thin spots, I wondered whether Felicia had more than breakfast in mind. I hoped not. Too sore to do anything more than lie there.
Outside, a few clouds drifted low in an endless blue sky, and the sunlight bounced brightly off the chrome in the parking lot I immediately went back inside for my sunglasses. I hadn't drunk enough the night before for a hangover, but the sun gave me that same kind of dull ache in my forehead. It hurt to squint.
Avoiding the freeway, I poked along surface roads to Felicia's place in the Heights, past plastic signs and parking lots and lawn sprinklers dancing in the sunshine.
Felicia's apartment is in one of those four-hundred-unit stucco monstrosities surrounded by baby trees and acres of asphalt. All the units look the same, which always makes me wonder how the drunks find their way home at night.
Felicia looked like she was dressed for bowling when she answered the door. Baggy pants topped by an oversized Hawaiian shirt splashed with impossibly orange orchids. But her hair was freshly brushed and she'd put on a little eye makeup and she smiled prettily when she saw me.
She ushered me in with a quick kiss. I trailed her to the apartment's tiny kitchen, which looked like the aftermath of a Three Stooges pie fight.
When Felicia's in a cooking frenzy, she manages to drag out every pan and spoon and sack of flour in the kitchen, piling them up on the countertops until the room's a dizzy, teetering maze of dirty dishes and steaming skillets and empty egg cartons. To her, a kitchen is like an artist's studio, where the creative process flows. You worry about cleaning up some other time.
When I cook, which isn't often, I put away everything as soon as I'm done with it, so there's very little cleanup after I've filled my belly. That's all the close quarters of my tiny kitchenette allow. This difference had been a point of contention when Felicia and I shared my room. One of many.
Felicia's kitchen connects to the dining room with the standard waist-high counter, and I sat on a bar stool so I could watch her play whirling dervish.
She appeared to be making omelets, though what was in the skillet was bubbling and viscous and dotted with bright red and green chunks. From a distance, it looked like a molten Christmas cookie.
Felicia poured me a mug of hot coffee and located the sugar bowl among the countertop clutter. I dumped in some sugar, saw she was occupied with the stove, and gave the coffee a quick stir with my finger rather than go into that kitchen to find a spoon.
"So, how are you doing?" she said over her shoulder.
"I'm pretty beat up. I had to outrun a big dog and jump over a fence high as this ceiling."
She turned to look me over, a dripping spatula in her hand.
"This morning?"
"Yesterday. That's why I was so weird when you called. I was still sort of in shock."
"Did this dog bite you somewhere?"
"No, I just fell a long way and landed on my ass. My vertebrae probably look like a train wreck."
"Poor baby." She turned to the stove and did some sort of martial arts move with the spatula. "Did you take some aspirin?"
"Lots."
"Good. Now we'll fill you up with some of Mama Felicia's gourmet omelets and some French toast with strawberries and powdered sugar and you'll be just fine."
"I feel better already."
Something went bing in the kitchen, a timer hidden somewhere among the battered bowls and stacked pans. She whipped open the oven and reached in with a mitt for a pan of croissants that looked crispy and light as paper lamp shades.
Felicia dumped them onto a plate, whirled to set it on the counter. She located the butter dish and a knife and said, "Dig in. They're store-bought, but they're warm."
She turned back to her cooking while I tore bread and buttered it and popped it into my mouth.
"So where did you encounter this dog?"
"It belongs to Rosie Corona."
"Rosie Corona? What were you seeing her about?"
"Oh, no, you don't. I know what you're up to."
"What?"
"You're pumping me for information. You're trying to see what I'm doing in my investigation, see if there's anything you can use. I haven't forgotten our little wager."
"Oh, yeah." She turned to me, holding greasy fingers out away from her clothes. She pushed up her glasses with the back of her wrist. "I wanted to talk to you about that."
"Backing out, eh?" It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. She gave me a hard look.
"Not exactly. If you want to keep it up, that's fine with me. But I was thinking it certainly is silly for us to be competing when we could be helping each other."
"I was thinking that, too," I lied. I'd been downright panicky about beating her in the investigation game.
"That idiot Whitworth won't let me pursue all the angles anyway. I might as well help you."
I knew better than to get her started on her fire-breathing city editor.
"So what have you got?"
She had her back to me, her elbows winging away as she performed some hocus-pocus over the stove. She slid the hot, quivering omelet from the pan onto a plate, set it in front of me, and turned immediately back to some other emergency in a skillet.
"I'm busy with this," she said. "You tell first."
A tiny aha! of distrust whispered in my head. A truce was going to be tough. I'd already gotten used to the idea of competitive secrecy.
"You'll show me yours if I show you mine?" I said. Just making sure.
She shot me a grin over her shoulder. "Right."
I began hesitantly, still awkward with sharing. But I soon warmed to the task, and told her about my conversations with Steve Romero and Belinda Melville. I told her about Borkum and Bates. I told her about Rosie Corona and her big dog and her pistol.
"There's something going on between Sultan Sweeney and Rosie Corona," I concluded. "They hate each other. Apparently, Rosie helped some of Sultan's girls get out of the business."
Felicia finished arranging her own plate, and came around the counter to sit on the other stool.
"Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Sweeney's threatened her," she said. "Rosie Corona and her ideas could end up making pimps an endangered species. Didn't you read my stories about her?"
"Sure. But it's been a while. Refresh my memory."
Felicia gulped a forkful of French toast and got powdered sugar on her chin. The food, as expected, was wonderful.
"Let's see. Rosie's a local girl, from an old family in the valley. She fell in with the wrong crowd, dropped out of school, and started working the streets. She probably would've ended up like that girl you found dead at your motel—"
I winced.
"—but she's tough, as you found out, and she survived. She enrolled in vocational school and turned tricks at night and on weekends until she was able to get a day job. She could've abandoned that whole scene, but instead she kept in contact with the other women and began spreading the word it was possible to escape. That's how SCORE was formed."
"So she doesn't turn tricks anymore?"
Felicia gave me a withering look and turned to her plate. We ate in silence for a while, her pissed and me unsure what to say next. Finally, she set down her fork.
"Forgive the dog reference, but you're barking up the wrong tree. Rosie Corona wouldn't have anything to do with these murders. What would be her motive? She's trying to save the prostitutes, not kill them."
I had to admit she had a point.
"Most likely," she said, "you're working for the guy who killed them."
"That's what people keep telling me."
I mopped up powdered sugar with the last bite of my toast.
"I've been working an altogether different angle," Felicia announced. "I think our friends the fundamentalists have something to do with the killings."
I nodded encouragingly, a smile frozen on my face, doubt singing high notes in my head. Felicia has a tendency to see whoever she's covering as villains, spinning their dark conspiracies. It's up to her to shine the limelight on it. Everything else, she always says, is puffery.
"They're hiding something," she continued, and, click, my suspicions were confirmed, "and that idiot Whitworth won't let me confront them with it."
I wanted to slow this train before it got rolling.
"You know, Belinda Melville said something about that. She said the killer could be some holy roller gone bad. I hope that's not the case. It'll take forever for me to track him down."
"I'm not talking about some lone killer," Felicia said. "I think they're all involved. At least in the cover-up."
"There's a cover-up?" I didn't like the way this was going at all.
"It goes all the way to the very top."
"Aw, I don't know, sweetie. That seems a little far-fetched. I don't think the Bible-thumpers would break their own Commandments just to clean up the Cruise."
"Maybe not. But what if one of their own did it? Wouldn't they try to keep it a secret? Especially if the one who did it is a big name?"
Reverend Skip Jericho flashed into my mind, with his sweaty forehead and his hollow cheeks. That powerful voice mesmerizing his flock. Could there be something more than faith burning behind those black eyes?
"Rumors are flying," Felicia said. "Lot of people around City Hall are snickering about Dudley's crusade against prostitution. Seems old Quentin used to consort with a few whores."
"Dudley?" I had to adjust my thinking. Dudley's square-jawed face swam up from my memory like I'd changed channels on the TV. "I don't know, Felicia. He seemed awfully uptight to me. I can't imagine Quentin Dudley going to an all-night party."
"Uptight is right. That's the kind who fly off the handle."
"But you said he 'used to' visit hookers. What does that have to do with the murders now?"
"What if he took it up again? Say he's cracked under the pressure of campaigning and crusading. He goes to the Cruise for some firsthand 'research.' Someone as repressed as Dudley could flip out and off a hooker or three."
I didn't know what to say. There seemed to be some question here about just who was flipping out. Felicia was flushed and her hands danced as she spun out her crazy theory.
"So, you think a city councilman—who gets his picture in the paper twice a week—could go down to the Cruise unnoticed, pick up a girl, and kill her. Not once, but three times?"
"I know it sounds odd, but they're hiding something, Bubba. I can feel it. There's something wrong with the dynamic there."
"The dynamic."
"Yeah, between Dudley and his wife and Jericho and some of the others. It all looks fervent and righteous, but there's something bubbling under the surface."
"You know, it's a long jump from something bubbling under the surface to a city councilman killing hookers with his bare hands."
"Maybe he didn't do it himself, but he knows something about it. Maybe Marilyn did it. She seems nutzoid enough to kill somebody if she found out Quentin was sleeping around and maybe bringing AIDS home to her and the kiddies."
"Two of the women were raped, Felicia. I doubt she's nutzoid enough for that."
"She could've had some man do it. Some crazy follower of Jericho's. Like those thugs who hustled that drunk away from the rally."
"Hey, I was going to ask you about that. How come you didn't mention that in your story?"
She scowled, but there was some underlying pleasure at me asking her about something she'd written. I'd scored a few points.
"I put it in, and that idiot Whitworth took it out. He's always doing stuff like that. And now he says I can't approach Dudley about my suspicions."
"You told your boss about this?"
"Yeah, a big mistake. I should've just gone straight to Dudley without telling Whitworth first. Like they say, 'It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.'"
I could imagine Whitworth's reaction, even though I'd never met him. Conspiracy-hunters like Felicia are the ones who get newspapers into legal battles.
"That's why I want you to do it," she said.
"Do what?"
"Go see Dudley. Feel around. See what you can turn up."
"Me?"
"Yeah, you. I can't do it, but you could."
"Oh, I don't know, hon. I don't even know the man. I'm just going to go into his office and accuse him of murder?"
"Not accuse. Just talk to him. See if he knows anything. You can poke around the edges without getting him stirred up."
"You think so?" This was perhaps the first time she'd attributed any sort of prowess to me, other than the obligatory compliments in bed. I wasn't nearly so flattered this time.
"Sure. Why don't you give him a call? I've got his number."
She got up to fetch the phone, and I wondered how long she'd had this planned. When the breakfast offer occurred to her? Maybe earlier, when she first cooked up the idea of us racing the case to a conclusion? I didn't like it one bit.
