2 Grand Delusion (16 page)

Terrific. Mister Macho Man, trying to take on the entire Saratoga Springs Police Department, and I couldn't even get my damn bike lock open.

18

After my embarrassment with the bike lock, I needed some java to steady my nerves. So I headed over to Starbucks, which I normally avoid like the plague. But how could I go to Madeline's and casually ask her for a cup of coffee, please, while suspecting her boyfriend of murder?

Not that I was so sure Dave had done it. For one thing, I couldn't let Manny Cole off the hook. It was odd that he wasn't partnered up on the Grand Hotel deal with all of his cop buddies. Was there some hidden animosity there . . . and was he jealous of Pop's wealth?

If only there were some way to get behind that blue wall, I thought, as I paid for my coffee with a handful of lint-covered change. I had to find out what was really going on between these cops, but without a good connection—

As if in answer to my prayer, I suddenly spotted Hal Starette sitting over in the back corner with Lia Kalmus. True, Hal wasn't a cop, but he'd negotiated with them, and that was something.

I swallowed my pride and walked over. They saw me coming and threw each other panicky looks. Well, I've crashed parties before. "Guys, let's play pretend," I said as I joined them. "Let’s pretend I'm not the man who killed Pop."

The way they screwed up their faces and moved their chairs as far away from me as they could, you'd have thought I was a dangerous foreign terrorist with a bad case of halitosis.

"Look, all I want to know is this. When you were buying that building, Hal, did you see any tension between the cops themselves?"

They just looked at each other, hoping I'd magically disappear. Hal's nose started getting shiny right before my eyes. Lia's bad eye blinked furiously.

"Lia, we've known each other for a long time," I said, calling in every chit I might have earned over the years as an S.O.S. volunteer. "Have you heard of any fighting between Pop and Dave Mackerel, or between Pop and Manny Cole?"

Finally she spoke. "I haven't heard of anything like that."

"Me, neither," Hal added.

"You sure? Did anyone ever complain about getting ripped off in any way?"

"No," Hal said. Lia didn't bother to answer. She excused herself and went off to the bathroom. Meanwhile Hal gave me an apologetic half-smile.

I mumbled a useless "Okay, well, let me know if you hear anything," and shuffled off. When you're an accused murderer, good help is hard to find. I gulped down my coffee and got the hell out of there.

Fortunately, I didn't need Hal or Lia or anyone else to help me with my research into Pop's and Cole's payoff scams. That I could do by myself. The first stop on my itinerary was scenic 46 Beekman Street, home to another one of Pop's drug dealer tenants.

I knocked on the rotten, splintery door, still unsure what approach to take. How about: "Good morning, I'm conducting a research survey for the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce. We were wondering, have you bribed any policemen lately?"

I waited, then knocked again, then waited some more. I was about to leave when the door finally opened. Standing behind it was a shrimpy little white guy who was naked except for a pair of torn and dirty white underwear—actually, grayish-yellow underwear. He was five feet tall and looked about as tough as my four-year-old. He had an odd face: His mouth was wide, his skull was flat, and his eyes were sunken in. He looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.

I gave him my warmest smile. "Hi, my name is Jacob Burns—"

"Oh, God!" Mr. Dirty Underwear jumped back in fear.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God!"

Yet another bad entrance.

"What's wrong?" I asked, smiling even harder, but that just seemed to unnerve Dirty Underwear all the more. He was so rattled he forgot to close the door on me, and when he retreated he tripped and fell to the floor. Maybe he was on some mood-altering substance. If he was, I hoped he wasn't selling much; it was bad stuff.

He scrambled to his feet, then backed up against a wall that was covered by torn and dirty grayish-yellow wallpaper. It blended in well with his underwear. "Y-y-you're the guy whacked Zapper!"

I started to say no, but then stopped. Instead I put on my fiercest prison scowl and swaggered up to him. I felt a little guilty terrorizing a guy this small and this wasted, but hey, a man's life was at stake. Mine. "Yo, muthafucka," I growled at him, "you paying money to Cole?"

Dirty Underwear blinked. "Cole?"

"Yeah, prick lips, Cole. This man," I said, and showed him a photograph.

Dirty Underwear looked distraught. "Sure, I'm paying him just like he said. I don't want no trouble. He send you here?"

"You paying him the same amount you paid Pop?"

"Yeah."

"How much?"

"A hundred dollars." A dim light of intelligence flared up in his bleary eyes. Interestingly, the whites of his eyes were grayish-yellow, too. "Hey, if Cole sent you, then how come you don't know how much I pay him?"

His eyebrows beetled together as he tried to puzzle it out, and I suddenly knew where I recognized him from. He looked exactly like a picture I'd seen in the newspaper recently of what fetal alcohol syndrome does to a person's face.

All that booze he drank in the womb seemed to have done a number on his brain, too. How did he manage to make a living at a difficult entrepreneurial business like street-level drug dealing? Maybe his secret was that he looked so wimpy and stupid, everyone trusted him.

I must have been staring hard at him, because he gave me an anxious smile and put his hands up. "Yo, I didn't mean nothing by it, dude. I'm sorry."

He looked so pathetic I didn't have the heart to give him any more shit. I just walked out.

The truth was, most of the criminals I'd met during the past week at the city and county jails weren't arrogant jerks like Zapper. Most of them, I reflected as I walked up to the house where Pop's prostitute tenants lived, were the most miserable, sorry-ass people you ever saw.

That certainly was true of the greasy-haired, pallid-faced, forty-something woman who opened the door at the prostitutes' house wearing a shapeless nightgown with what looked like moth holes. She yawned in my face. "Kind of early, ain't it?"

"Yeah," I said uncertainly, feeling my way.

"I don't usually work mornings."

"I don't blame you," I said, trying to be agreeable.

"It'll cost you double," she said, lazily scratching her crotch as she sized me up. Maybe that was supposed to be sexy, I don't know. "Fifty for a jiffy lube."
Jiffy lube?
"Hundred for a new muffler."
New muffler?

"Forty's all I got." I reached in my wallet and handed it over. Credit card debt, here I come.

She stuck out her hand and felt my crotch. "Come on in, big boy," she said.

Jiffy lube? New muffler?

"Actually, I was wondering if you recognize this man," I said, showing her the photograph of Cole. She looked down at it and up at me. Then she took her hand off my crotch, swiftly stepped back, and started to shut the door in my face.

I threw my foot in the way. "Whoa. You don't have to answer, but give me back the forty."

She brought out the money. I reached out to take it, but then she stuffed it right back in her pocket. "Get your ass in here," she said.

So I did. Meanwhile she went out on her porch, looked both ways to make sure no one was watching, and came back in and closed the door.

I looked around me. This was no high-class New Orleans-style bordello. The most romantic thing in the place was a box of rubbers sitting next to some Band-Aids on top of a grimy old bureau. I wondered what the Band-Aids were for, then quickly realized I didn't want to know.

The prostitute faced me with her hands on her hips. "Why you want to know about Cole?" she asked. Her lips were big and pouting and her eyes were open wide. She still had a good body, and in this dark hallway, where I couldn't see the pallor in her face or the grease in her hair, she actually looked attractive. I was so surprised, I stood there with my mouth open.

"What you staring at?" she said angrily.

I couldn't think of any answers that would be better than the truth. "I'm sorry, it's just I hadn't noticed it before, but you're very pretty."

She stared at me incredulously, then burst out laughing, a surprisingly hearty sound rising from deep inside her. "Man's sweet-talking me," she gasped between guffaws, "sweet-talking the old neighborhood whore.
Shit,
now there's a gentleman for you. Sit down. What you want?"

I told her, and she gave it to me. She explained that Pop used to take his payoff in trade, not money. He'd come to the whorehouse twice a week.

Then, two days after he died, Cole showed up. Since then, he'd been coming over every night at the end of his shift. "He hurts too," she said, wincing. "I ain't saying he's big, 'cause he ain't, but he just jams into you, know what I'm saying? I told him, and the other girls did too, but he just thought that was funny. Started doing it even harder." She shook her head. "Man's fucked up. You figure out some way to get him out of our short hairs, we'd sure as hell appreciate it, but you better not let him know I ratted on him."

"I won't," I promised. "By the way, what was Pop like? He seemed like a pretty sadistic guy, too."

The prostitute laughed again, but harshly this time. "Pop wasn't a problem. All you had to do was piss on him, and he'd be happy."

I shook my head, amazed. "Gee, I wish I'd known. I'd have been glad to piss on him myself, free of charge."

She wagged a finger at me. "Hey, don't be cutting in on our business now."

On my way out the door, I asked her, "By the way, I'm dying to know. What
is
a jiffy lube, anyway?"

She winked. "Pay me another forty and find out."

After spending most of my adult life at a computer, wrestling with words and feelings, it felt good to explore the Sam Spade in me. Acting like a hardass, I was learning, was fun. No wonder so many guys do it.

And not only was it fun, it was productive. I now had evidence that Cole had strong economic incentive to kill Pop. Come to think of it, he had strong sexual incentive, too. I mean, unlimited access to free jiffy lubes—what a deal!

There was only one problem with all of this. It didn't prove that Cole was the killer. The killer could conceivably be any one of the many drug dealers, prostitutes, and thieves that Pop was extorting money from.

It could even be Dennis.

As I headed up Beekman toward Arcturus, I tried to picture Dennis getting into a crazed, one a.m. fight with Pop and killing him. Once again, I found myself almost rooting for a friend of mine to be unmasked as a murderer. I opened the door to Arcturus and walked in.

The place smelled of incense, candle wax, and all the other ingredients of a teen arts center and hangout spot. "Hi, Dennis!" I called out cheerfully, like I was his best buddy.

"Hi, Mr. Burns!" Tony called back as he ran in from the other room. His T-shirt was covered with splotches of paint. I was glad to see that he didn't look like he had suffered any under Dennis's care.

I hugged him, being careful not to get any paint on me. "How you doing, Tony? Everything okay?"

"Yeah," he said solemnly. "I heard about Zapper. Do you know who did it?"

"No, I'm trying to find out."

"You need some help? I went by your house this morning but you weren't there."

I didn't want Tony to be any more involved in all of the recent carnage than he already was, so I changed the subject. "Wait a minute. It's Tuesday. How come you're not in school?"

"Mr. O'Keefe said I don't have to go to school if I don't want."

"He said
what?"

"Mr. O'Keefe is so
cool."
I felt a sharp twinge of ... what was it exactly?
Jealousy,
that's what, jealousy that another man was replacing me in Tony's affections. As he talked about Dennis, his face filled with adoration. "He says school is just a propaganda tool of the imperialist ruling classes."

I closed my eyes. "Oh, no."

"He says school is a ridiculous waste, and I should use my time more wisely—"

"Look, let me tell you something. You can't take everything Dennis says seriously. He's a great guy and everything, but he's stuck in time to about 1967, and—"

"Hey, but I'm right, aren't I?" Dennis broke in. He was standing in the doorway, filling it with his belly. Today's T-shirt carried my favorite slogan from the 60s,
eschew obfuscation
. It struck me that if his beard and long hair suddenly turned white, he'd look exactly like a radical left-wing Santa Claus. "Name one thing you learned in elementary school that you couldn't have learned a lot easier somewhere else. All school really teaches you is how to raise your hand and wait in line."

"And a few other minor details, like how to read and write."

"School didn't teach those things to Tony, did it?" Dennis was standing close to me, and he peered into my eyes. There was an edginess to him today; he was talking even faster than usual. "So what happened last night with Zapper? You have anything to do with it?"