Dead on the Island (7 page)

"From Terry Shelton, I think. Before the
cops came."

Dino grinned. He had big, square teeth, like
tombstones. "He wanted you to have it, right?"

"Something like that," I said.

"I hope the cops don't find out you lifted
it."

"I hope you're not planning to tell
them."

He grinned again but didn't say anything. He
and his uncles would have gotten along pretty well, I think, had
their business still been thriving and had he been a part of it. As
far as I knew, he was a clean, upright citizen, but he had the
makings of a first-rate criminal.

Ray came back into the room on little cat
feet. I felt that he was there, but I didn't hear him return. I
turned to look, and there he was.

"You saw the address on the matchbook?" he
said.

"Somewhere on Telephone Road. I don't
remember the number."

"You been down Telephone lately?" Dino
said.

I turned back to him. "Not lately. It's part
of Highway 35, isn't? Comes into Houston from Pearland and runs
under the Gulf Freeway?"

"That's right," Dino said. "From the numbers
on that matchbook, I'd guess The Sidepocket isn't in one of the
classier areas of town. What about it, Ray?"

"You'd be guessing right."

Although I hadn't been in that part of
Houston recently, I recalled that there were parts of Telephone
Road, after you passed Hobby Airport and got closer to the part of
Interstate 45 that Houstonians call the Gulf Freeway, where there
were some fairly sleazy areas. Motels that hadn't been painted in
years, with gravel drives and signs offering rooms by the hour, and
probably a few clubs like The Sidepocket.

"Who owns it?" Dino said.

"Somebody named Ferguson runs the place,"
Ray said. "I wouldn't say for sure that he owns it. It's one of
those places that have a lot of struggling local bands playing
there because they're cheap. Goes for the chains and leather crowd.
I took the liberty of asking the friend I called to tip the word to
Ferguson that Tru might be dropping in this afternoon late for a
chat. I didn't say why, but I made it out to be a favor to us."

"You going up there?" Dino said.

"I might as well," I said.

There were other things I would rather have
done, but if Terry Shelton was tied to Sharon Matthews, The
Sidepocket was as good a place as any to start. Maybe Sharon had
been there with Terry, and maybe someone had seen her. You never
knew where something might lead you in one of these cases.

I had put my glass down on the floor, and I
bent down to pick it up and drink what was left of the Big Red.
"Are you interested at all in who killed this Shelton, if his
murder doesn't have anything to do with Sharon?"

I didn't think that Dino was going in for
humanitarianism these days, and I was right. "No," he said. "Unless
it involves Sharon, stay out of it completely. If you can find out
something about her at the club, fine. If you can't, drop it."

"Suits me," I said. I wasn't going in for
humanitarianism, either. I hoped that I could just forget all about
Shelton and that his death was just a side issue, but I wasn't
counting on it. "How about my matchbook?"

Ray tossed it to me, and I grabbed it out of
the air. I slipped it back in my pocket with the package of
cigarettes. Then I stood up. "I guess I'll be going."

"You going to be doing any dancing at this
club?" Dino said, glancing at my knee.

"Depends on the band," I said.

"OK," he said. "Ray'll let you out."

By the time I was out of the room, I heard
the TV set come to life again.

I wanted to go by the house to check on
Nameless and have a quick sandwich before my trip into Houston, and
as I drove I thought about Dino. It was hard to believe that his
whole life now was bounded by a television screen, but I supposed
it was possible. He had all the money he would ever need, and he
could keep up his old contacts by telephone. It seemed that he had
no desire to enter the world his uncles had been so fond of and
found so profitable.

Of course, at the end of things, his uncles
hadn't found their world to be such an ideal one. Hundreds, if not
thousands, of slot machines littered the bottom of Galveston Bay,
the big clubs were closed forever, and the Hollywood stars didn't
come to the Island anymore. Neither, for that matter, did the
Houston highrollers, and many BOIs traced the decline of the
Island's economy to that ill-fated day when a certain Texas
Attorney General thought he might get elected Governor if he could
clean up the most notable den of iniquity. That he was completely
and absolutely wrong, that most people both on the Island and
elsewhere actually resented what he did, came as a huge surprise to
him, though not to anyone else in the state.

Galveston had tried recently to vote
gambling's legal return to the Island, but the referendum had
failed. The churches, of course, were strongly opposed, and some of
the rich and powerful, such of them as were left, thought that
gambling would be bad for the city's newly-created image of
historical browsing ground. There were, however, two cruise ships
that took happy gamblers out beyond the twelve-mile limit every
weekend to relieve them of some of their money at the blackjack
tables, the poker tables, and the slots.

I didn't know what Dino thought about all of
this. He'd been a roistering youth, but apparently all that kind of
thing was behind him now.

And Ray seemed quite content to pass his
time sticking by Dino in a weird sort of Old Family Retainer way.
Maybe it was his way of repaying the uncles, who'd after all pulled
him literally out of the whorehouse. It's possible that for the
merest second a suspicion of the nature of Ray's relationship with
Dino may have crossed my mind, but if it did I dismissed it
instantly. I'd known both of them too well and too long to think
that they were gay; they certainly hadn't been when they were
younger.

I pulled up in back of the house and just
managed to get out of the car before Nameless zipped up to the
steps in an orange streak. I guess he wanted another package of cat
food, which I promptly doled out to him. He began purring as soon
as he stuck his nose in the bowl. I wasn't sure how it was possible
for a cat to purr and eat at the same time, but it was a trick that
Nameless managed with easy regularity.

I went on up to the second floor, leaving
the door open in case Nameless wanted to pay me a visit. It was up
to him.

It was time for me to outfit myself for the
trip to The Sidepocket. I'm not a member of the Heavy Metal crowd,
or any crowd at all for that matter. I have several different
outfits that I once wore to visit various kinds of night spots, but
I didn't think any of them would be appropriate for The
Sidepocket.

For a C&W club, I could have worn my
kicker outfit, complete with boots, starched blue Levi's, and white
shirt. For a singles bar, I had a very nice natural fiber
double-breasted suit in which, if I'd had a haircut lately, which I
hadn't, I could pass for a rising executive. Not a young executive,
but an executive nevertheless. But for the Heavy Metal crew, I'd
just have to get by with my usual sweatshirt and faded jeans. At my
age, I was going to look out of place anyway.

While I was eating cold bread spread with
cold peanut butter, Nameless deigned to come up and poke his head
in the door. What he saw was of so little interest to him that he
turned almost immediately and went back down, his tail held high.
It was a fairly attractive tail, if you liked cats’ tails, with
dark orange rings around the lighter orange fur that covered it. He
was too polite to sit at the downstairs door and howl, so I went to
let him out.

After the sandwich I had a couple of
swallows of nearly flat Big Red from the two liter bottle and left
the rest, probably another two swallows, for when I came home. I
watched the news on one of the Houston channels, and the
anchorwoman told me that times were steadily getting better for the
Gulf Coast Area. The media had been saying that at least once a
month for the last two years, though I hadn't noticed any real
improvement. I don't know why they kept repeating it unless they
hoped that saying it would make it so.

After the news report I went downstairs, got
in the Subaru, and headed for the Gulf Freeway.

~ * ~

Broadway actually runs right into the
Freeway, or becomes the Freeway, whichever you prefer. By the time
you pass the Island's only shopping mall, you're pretty well aware
that you aren't on a city street any longer. Cars are speeding
along in three or four lanes, and you're headed for the tall bridge
with its truly superfluous "MINIMUM SPEED 40 MPH" sign. Anyone
driving 40 mph on a Texas highway is taking his life in his hands.
In spite of the fact that 55 is the maximum you can drive on that
part of the Interstate, most drivers figure that they can get by
with 65, which can easily be upped to 75 if they think no one is
watching. And most of the drivers on the Gulf Freeway seem
thoroughly convinced that no one is watching.

All of this makes life pretty tough if
you're the driver of a 1979 Subaru. I mashed the accelerator to the
floor and tried to keep up with the traffic flow, hoping that no
one in a monstrous old Pontiac or Buick from the early '80s would
flatten me without noticing.

At the top of the bridge I glanced over to
my right, as I almost always do, at the dark hulk of the old
drawbridge. I can recall having waited for what seemed like hours
for it to be lowered when I was coming back home from some trip
with my family when I was a kid.

It was full dark by now, and farther off to
the right the oil refineries and petro-chemical plants of Texas
City lit up the night like the set of the most expensive science
fiction movie ever filmed. The industry wasn't what it had once
been, however. It had not been so very long ago that a lot of Texas
were driving cars with bumper stickers that said, "DRIVE 75, FREEZE
A YANKEE," but now you were more likely to see something like,
"JUST GIVE US ONE MORE OIL BOOM, LORD. WE PROMISE WE WON'T PISS IT
AWAY THIS TIME."

The Gulf Freeway, perennially under
construction in one part of it or another, runs straight as an
arrow from Galveston into Houston. Past La Marque, past Texas City,
past Dickinson (a place that was once as wide-open as Galveston had
been), past League City. You can see their lights if you watch and
don't drive too fast. At night the lanes of the Freeway seem to be
a solid streak of red in front of you, with a solid streak of white
headlights coming at you from the other direction. I've often
wondered where all those people are going, and it's the same at any
hour of the day or night. Maybe they were all heading to one
version or another of The Sidepocket. Or maybe they were all just
going home. I suppose anything is possible.

I'd traveled the Freeway a lot, stopping in
all the little towns along the way, when I was looking for Jan. I
hadn't found a trace of her in any of them.

When I started seeing the first shopping
malls, the traffic increased, if that was possible, but I was still
a long way from downtown. After I passed the turn-off to NASA at
Webster, I counted four malls before I came to the Telephone Road
exit.

I slowed for the exit, turned back to the
left under the Freeway, and started looking for addresses. Hardly
any were posted, but The Sidepocket turned out to be easy to find.
It was practically next door to one of the ten-dollar-an-hour
motels with "FREE IN-ROOM MOVIES." The sign did not add my favorite
line from the ads I'd read in the men's magazines when I was a kid:
"The kind men like!" They might as well have added it, though. I
had a feeling they wouldn't be showing
Bambi
.

The Sidepocket was a rambling building with
about a fifty-foot front. Half of it was one story, but on the
other half there was an additional level with what might have been
an office, or living quarters, or both. The building was painted a
medium pink, and the roof was green. Or at least that's the way it
looked in the light from the parking lot, what little light there
was. Near the only entrance there was an enormous 8-ball painted on
the wall. Peering over the ball was a strange-looking individual
who appeared to be gripping the ball and hanging his nose over the
top like Kilroy. Only his hands, eyes, nose, and spiky black hair
were visible. The eyes were wide and staring.

In front of the parking lot was that bane of
the Gulf Coast, the portable sign. No one seems to care that every
little wind blows the things all over town, smashing into cars,
heads, and show windows. This one was lit up from the inside, a
bright yellow with black letters stating that tonight's band was
"AMYL NITRATE AND THE WHIPPETS."

I could see that I was in for a real treat.
I could also see that the extension cord from the sign ran right
across the white gravel parking lot to an outlet on the wall of the
building. I wondered how frayed the cord would get from the cars
driving over it and what would happen in a good rainstorm, or if
someone picked it up to move it. Oh well. It wasn't my sign.

For a Tuesday night, the crowd wasn't bad.
There were quite a few cars in the parking lot, and while there
weren't any BMWs, there weren't any '62 Falcons, either. And only
one '79 Subaru.

I parked as close to the building as I could
get and stepped out of the car. The walls weren't vibrating,
exactly, but I swear I could feel the vibrations in the ground
through the soles of my Nikes. It was only then that I thought of
ear plugs, and by then it was much too late. I told myself that I
was a tough P. I. on a case and that ear plugs were for wimps. I
didn't convince myself, but I went on inside.