Bloody Martini, page 17
“Yes, pain is to be avoided at all costs.” He looked at me. “You’re Finn’s friend. From the gangster family.” He said it without embarrassment. It was a handy classification. “That must’ve been fun.”
“It had its moments.”
“I’m devoted to fun. Finn was the same way; his parties were marvelous. Everything anyone could want.”
“He called you the Blond Shadow,” said Queenie.
“How perceptive of him.” Reed again pushed blond hair back off his forehead. “I do prefer keeping in the background.”
He was a voyeur of the harmless kind—into drugs, watching the world go by as if it were a streaming movie. His eyes came back to mine, and I saw him dropping into the clouds of memory. He resurfaced. “And you were Finn’s shadow. The protector. Wait, that’s not quite right.” He tickled the air again, just two fingers by his temple. Agitating his memory. “You were his . . . friend.” He said this with a touch of wonder in his voice, as if the concept was totally alien to him—something other people did, just another classification.
“Friends for life,” I said.
“Naturally. I saw that. I’m sorry for your loss. Of a friend.” He floated back down into his chair, and with a little tickling of the air he bade us good night.
Outside the restaurant, Queenie took my arm, pressing her breast against my biceps. “Blame it on the tiramisu.” On her other arm was a huge handbag, containing the many things the female of the species uses, including potions that work on men’s minds.
As we walked around the building to the parking lot, her pressure on my arm increased, but this promise of intimacy died as a car came by, stopped, backed up, and then stopped again. Russian Blondie and Big Red got out.
I gently undid Queenie’s fingers. “Go back to the restaurant.”
“No way.” Her eyes had turned as mean as a Coalville possum.
I whispered to her more urgently, “These guys are bad news. Beat it.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” The curvy little possum, standing her ground.
Big Red came first, steroid madness in his brain. The signs of juicing were there. The muscles that attach to the shoulder joints get so bulked up, it looks like an ox wearing a plow. He was yoked.
Moving slowly toward him, I raised my hands. “How can I make it right?”
“I . . . fuck . . . you . . . up . . . is . . . how.” He wanted to get into it again. Honor must be served. Maybe he was Russian military.
I heard an electrical snapping sound from behind me, followed by something like a swarm of hornets going past me. Big Red’s body convulsed. Two little wires had appeared in his chest, dangling down in metallic coils. He fell at my feet, chest heaving, a strangled gasp in his throat. Then he went completely still, his eyes suddenly staring into the Russian afterlife. Queenie’s voice was climbing wildly. “I picked it up at Dad’s store. It’s for hikers going into bear country.”
Blondie ran to the car. The engine rumbled, the tires screeched, and he sped away.
Queenie was staring down at the guy she’d Tasered. The fiendish instrument in her hand was as big as the one the cops had used on me. She said, voice still climbing, “It’s for stopping a big animal.”
“It stopped one, all right.” My Olympic trainer had lectured me on how steroids can thicken the muscle wall of the heart and screw with its rhythm. Big Red’s heart must have been beating out of time when Queenie’s electrical charge hit him, and fatal arrhythmia had followed. His dead eyes were looking up at the night sky, expressing shock beyond the six quadrillion electrons that had stopped his heart. It was the shock of the great divide he was crossing. I opened the back of the Hummer and heaved his earthly remains inside. Then I got Duke on the phone. “Meet me at Phil’s restaurant. The parking lot. Now.”
As soon as the call ended, the phone rang again. “Duke?”
“Tommy, it’s Veronica. I’m all dressed up and I have nowhere to go.”
“I wish I could help you, Veronica, but I’m busy right now.”
“What about later?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve got things I have to do tonight.”
“Did you eat the cookies I gave you?”
“Every one.”
“Where are you? I want to be able to picture you.”
I looked at the body in the back of the Hummer. “I’m moving some furniture for a friend.”
“Do I know him?”
“He’s a new friend. He’s not part of the old crowd.”
“Bring him around for cookies.”
Big Red’s mouth was open, but he would not be eating cookies.
Duke couldn’t have been far away, because I could hear his big Cadillac approaching. “I have to run now, Veronica. You take care.”
I disconnected as Duke parked and stepped out of the car. “Queenie O’Malley,” he said with a smile. “I’ve known you since you were five years old. I pulled your pigtails and you kicked me in the shins.”
“I just killed the guy in there,” she said, pointing to the back of the Hummer.
“So I got off lightly.” Duke glanced inside, then looked at me. “Who is he?”
“Russian muscle. Works for a pimp.”
Duke saw the dead man’s gun in my hand. “I’ll take that. It’s probably from Little Odessa and certainly hot.” He went to his car and brought a blanket. He looked at Queenie. “I like sleeping underneath the stars.” He covered the body, turned to Queenie again. “Want me to drop you off somewhere?”
She shook her head.
He put his arm around her. “Live for the moment, right? That’s the Irish in you. We’re always ready.”
I asked him where we were going and he said, “The elephants’ graveyard.” We followed him, Queenie in the front seat with me, and the Russian hood taking his last ride in back.
Her eyes were filled with tears. “I just want to have a home and some kids.”
“Sorry, not tonight.”
“A little garden in back, with a wading pool. One of those rubber things you blow up.”
I looked in the rearview mirror, first at the road behind me and then at the blanket beneath which the dead Russian lay. I looked across at Queenie, who, in a white silk blouse and matching skirt, seemed like a female warrior from the moon, the faintly luminous silver straps on her feet having brought her to Earth. I said, “Outside Paloma, Arizona, is a sinkhole. Two hundred feet down is a man’s body. He’s probably just bones by now, but he’s there and I put him there.”
“Did you kill him?”
“I only buried him.”
“Was a woman involved?”
“Why do you ask that?”
She lowered the visor and looked into the mirror attached to it. I thought she was going to re-create her face with the time-honored application of mascara and lipstick, but she just stared at herself as if at a stranger. “I just killed someone else. He’s under a blanket in back of us. Where the child safety seats should be.”
She put away her tissue and took out the big stun gun. “They have little ones that look like a tube of lipstick. Why didn’t I have one of those? But that’s Jack. He’s got a treadmill in his bedroom that’s smarter than he is. It has maps of entire continents. He’s walking around the world on it.”
We followed Duke, not around the world but just across town and then out into the hills that ringed the valley. After twisting and turning through the hills for a while, the Cadillac left the pavement. We were on a dirt road. There were many roads like this outside town, left over from logging and mining days. Hunters used them now, or lovers. On both sides of us, low-lying vegetation grew out of hillsides that had been formed by early mining efforts. As kids, we used to call these man-made mountains, as if the men who’d made them long ago were in some way mysterious. They weren’t mountains really, only high hills of rocks and dirt, created by earthmoving machinery. But a feeling of mystery still emanated from their ugly shapes.
The road became a grassy indentation. I took it slowly, but I could see Duke’s car parked ahead. Beyond it was a dilapidated mining tower that once lowered a cage of miners into the earth. Scattered across the ground were piles of discarded mining equipment. Parked nearby the old machinery was a small Toyota truck. The door opened, and into the headlights stepped Stashu.
We walked to the tower. It had been sealed off with six-foot-high steel plates. These were joined to another steel plate that formed the top, turning the whole thing into a cube of steel. One of the plates was hinged and secured with a heavy-duty chain and padlock. Stashu opened it, after which Duke handed him an envelope. Stashu put it in his pocket, got back in his truck, and drove away.
“I know that guy,” I said.
“No, you don’t. And he doesn’t know you.” Duke and I carried the body to the tower, and Queenie followed.
“Number one torpedo,” said Duke, and we tossed the Russian in. Apart from an initial scraping sound, there was nothing more, the body just falling silently through long darkness. The shaft had to be a deep one, because there was no sound of the body landing. Queenie was behind us, whispering prayers. I added a few of my own and Duke muttered, “Done and fucking done.”
Queenie asked, “Why did you call this the elephants’ graveyard?”
The headlights of the Hummer were still shining on us, and Duke’s eyes reflected the light, giving him the look of a gray-haired old Druid speaking to his apprentices. “There used to be a zoo in town. This was before you were born. It wasn’t much of a zoo, but it had an elephant. Her name was Ella, and she lived a long time. When she finally died, they didn’t know where to bury her.” He pointed into the shaft. “So they dumped her here.” He called down into the darkness. “How’re you doing, Ella?” Then he led us back to his car and the Hummer.
“Show’s over. I’ll see you lovebirds again sometime.”
“We’re not lovebirds,” said Queenie.
“Could’ve fooled me.” He reached out and gave her hair a gentle tug. “Queenie O’Malley, the toughest kid on the block.”
He got into his car and drove away. I didn’t try to catch him.
“We’re not lovebirds,” repeated Queenie.
“I’m not insisting.”
We got in the Hummer and drove back to the road. She said, “I can’t break with Richard.”
“Fine.”
“You’re supposed to ask me why.”
“I know why.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I was raised by a crook, and I’m not much better. How’s that?”
“It’s not a complete picture.”
“What did I leave out?”
“You’re scary.”
“You’re scarier.”
Having just electrocuted somebody, she couldn’t argue the point.
27
“How did you like the arancini?”
“I’ve never tasted better.”
“You ate as a guest at my restaurant. You walked outside with your date and these guys jumped you. I can’t erase what happened. But from here on, you eat free at my restaurant. With a guest.”
So I had free service at a cathouse and free food at a fine restaurant. Life was going my way. I said, “I apologize for bringing you this trouble. The departed worked for a Russian pimp.”
Little Joe was breathing heavily in the corner. “Grisha Volkov. He has good friends in Brighton Beach.”
Good friends, in Little Joe talk, meant that Grisha Volkov was connected to power players in the Russian mafia.
Phil sighed. “It’s not like the old days where we’d to go to war over something like this. I’m running a white-collar operation and I don’t want any heat. You understand?”
“I do.”
“Volkov will recruit somebody to whack you. He has to or he loses face. My advice is, go back to Mexico.”
“I can’t do that, Phil.”
“Fine, but I can’t protect you.”
“I understand.”
Little Joe stood, and I stood with him. He held the door with his massive hand, and once again I went past the Phil Branca photo gallery of grandkids smiling, their grandfather scowling down from above them, cigarette forever stuck behind his ear. And then a photo of Misty in her wedding gown.
The photo came to life as she greeted me from the living room, where she was watching women discussing the ins and outs of a situation beyond their control. “Tommy, come and watch with me.”
I looked back over my shoulder toward Little Joe. He nodded. I took my seat beside Misty on the sofa as directed, and the pressure of my body on the cushion sent her my way, her big warm thigh saying hello. She was in a house coat and curlers. The ladies on the TV seemed to be in the room with us, because I felt an overwhelming female presence.
“So how is our monk today? Saved any souls?”
“He was a real creep from the first and I knew it,” said a TV lady. “But I married him anyway because it was time.”
“Misty, I should be going.”
Her hair was wound up tight, and her curlers were coming closer. “You’re no more a monk than I am. You should come and work for Phil. He’s really a lovely man when you get to know him.”
“I’m sure he is, but I promised Primo I’d stay out of the life.”
“The life is different these days. We’re into legitimate businesses. We own a funeral home. We work with insurance companies; we even run a rehab clinic and straighten people out.”
“I hate to say no, especially to you, but I really am a monk.”
“If you’re a monk, I’m the Mona Lisa.” She adjusted one of her curlers and went back to watching her TV show.
Fuss, a.k.a. Jeffrey Goldfuss, the young nerd who worked for WVIM, was seated beside me in Finn’s old office. In front of us were a computer screen and a glass-topped humidor belonging to Finn. In it were Cuban cigars, four hundred dollars a box. Finn’s vintage Zippo lighter lay beside the humidor. On one side of the lighter, Saint Michael the Archangel brandished his fiery sword. Was that how Finn thought of himself? On the other side was an inscription: I light the way. I lit one of his cigars with the flame of Saint Michael.
For the past hour, Fuss had been showing me through Finn’s computer files, but so far I’d seen nothing that might give me a lead to his killer. The coffee machine was making noises, and Fuss poured two cups. His cup said I’m Attacking the Darkness. Mine said Crypto Man. The coffee was hideously strong. He tempered his with six teaspoons of sugar. I could see the sugar behind his eyeballs, a growing little pile that fed his nervous energy.
He sat back down at the computer and brought up a new file. “This is Ruby.” The screen showed a photograph of a young girl in a tight red miniskirt and blouse. She wore heavy eye makeup, and her hair was red and long. “She calls herself Ruby the Forbidden Fruit.” He magnified the picture, and now it was possible to see through the makeup. Ruby was a very pretty teenager in grown-up clothes. “She saw Finn on TV and came here wanting to tell her story.”
“What kind of story?”
“Underage prostitution. Bridget and Finn took her in. She lived with them for a couple of months, but they tried to reform her, so she left.”
“Where is she now?”
“No idea,” said Fuss, in the deadened affect of a cyber pilot. He had shown me Ruby and now he’d slipped away.
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Like what else is in her file?”
“Oh.” Pause. “This.”
I peered at the screen. On it, standing at a drinks table and slightly out of focus, as if the photograph had been taken surreptitiously, was Brian Fury.
I expressed my surprise. “In the Ruby file?”
“Hanging out.”
I gazed at Fury’s face in profile, his button nose not his best aspect, but he hadn’t been posing. He’d been talking to Ben Sweeney.
I looked at Fuss. “What else?”
He brought back the photo of Ruby. “She’ll never know how much I love her.”
Kip was doing Queenie’s hair under the studio lights. “Nothing serious,” he said, scissors flashing. “Just some nasty ends.”
Queenie’s fabulous look was Kip’s creation—the dead-straight bangs, the slow curve along her cheeks. She reached up to give Kip’s hand a squeeze. “Thanks.”
She turned to me. “What do you think?”
“We’re expected at Phil’s restaurant, compliments of the house.”
She raised her hand. Her engagement ring sparkled under the studio lights. “Dinner with Richard.” She stood. “And I’m already late.”
“Is he picking you up in a pumpkin?”
“Walk me down the hall.” As we reached the reception area, she said, “When I go out with Richard, nobody dies.”
“It was an accident. And that Russian guy was just like the Muldoons. You did the world a favor.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“It’s the only way to see it.”
She looked up at our image in the security monitor. The camera distorted us the way those things always do. She said, “I Tasered that guy because I couldn’t bear the thought of you being hurt.” And then she was gone. A pumpkin did not await her. There might have been pumpkins inside it, because it said Mittleman Produce on the side. I couldn’t see Richard clearly, but I didn’t have to. He was in the driver’s seat tonight.
Kip joined me in the reception area. He said, “The promo for vacuum cleaners is up next. After you watch it a hundred times, you start to see the hidden message.”
I asked him if he knew Ruby.
“Finn was making a movie with her.”
“What about?”
“Child prostitutes.”
“She was on the street?”
“She was.”
