Fiddle Game (2 page)

“Until now,” I said.

“For your stupid little brother,” said Agnes.

“Yes.” It was a word, but it sounded more like a sob. She stood up, put the case on my desk, and opened it for my inspection.

I leaned over and took a look, not touching the instrument, in case it was ready to crumble into dust. It looked a lot like a violin. Not very shiny, I thought, but after four hundred years, what is? I tried to remember something about a secret varnish formula. Maybe that was Stradivarius.

“You understand that for something like this, with no title, I can’t just attach a lien against it? I’ll have to actually take possession, or have some mutually acceptable third person do it.”

She nodded. “The problem is, I have to have something to play. It’s what I do. I play for the Opera, and sometimes for the Chamber Orchestra, and I teach a little. I have to have an instrument.”

I glanced over at Agnes, and she shot me a look that said “Don’t you dare even think about it.” But I was thinking about a different angle than waiving possession.

“What’s a run-of-the-mill, professional-quality instrument cost?”

“Two, maybe three thousand. I already told you, the eighteen hundred is all…”

I held up my hand. “I’ll have to get somebody else to take a look at the Amati anyway, to tell me if your certificate is really talking about this exact instrument. That’s as good a place as any to do it.” I gestured at the window and the street beyond, towards Nickel Pete’s. “Maybe we can work out something with a loaner, while we’re there.”

She looked, and her face fell. “A pawn shop? My God, have I come to this?”

Trust me, sweetie, there’s lots worse places to come to.
I put on my trenchcoat, grabbed an umbrella, and we headed out into the rain.

***

The streets were empty except for a dark Ford LTD parked at the curb a half block down, so we crossed against the light and hurried down to the emporium of discarded dreams. Pete’s shop was a mixture of traditional and new, with a modern, open sales floor up front, to display all the bulky stuff like exercise machines and huge TVs, and the old-style teller’s cage in the back, guarding the cases of the smaller and more precious goods, as well as the firearms. Pete greeted us the way he greets everybody, sitting owl-faced at his cage with both hands under the counter. I knew that he had one hand poised to push an alarm button, while the other gripped a sawed-off shotgun. When he saw it was me, he folded his hands on top of the counter.

“Herman, old friend.” His ancient troll’s face morphed into what passed for a smile. “How’s business? Mine’s great. You ever get ready to expand, take on a new partner, I got the capital and the disposition for it. All’s I need is the referrals.”

“You’ve got the disposition of an undertaker.”

“Then we’ll get along fine, won’t we?” He laughed, went into a coughing spasm, and finally treated himself to a pink antacid tablet from a bottle that he kept next to the cash register. It was a regular ritual of his. The ball was back in my court.

“This lady,” I said, “needs a professional violin. You got anything of any quality?”

“One or two, I think. The good ones are in the back.”

“Let’s see them. And while she’s checking them out, I want you to take a look at the one she’s carrying, give me your opinion.”

“Is this a professional consultation? Do I get a fee?”

“Yes, it is, and no, you don’t.”

“You always were a cheap sonofabitch, Herman.” It wasn’t true, but I let him get away with it, and he went into the back room and emerged with one violin whose case said it was a Yamaha and another, older-looking one that had no label. He passed them over to Amy Cox, and then proceeded to have a look at the maybe-Amati and the appraisal document. Then he took out his jeweler’s loupe and had a real look, and an attitude of reverence spread across his face.

“I don’t usually deal in goods of this quality, you know. I have no market, no contacts. The best I could do on it…”

“I’m not asking you to do anything on it, Pete. Just tell me if it’s the Amati the paper talks about.”

“Oh, it’s the violin in the appraisal, all right. As to whether it’s a real Amati, that’s not such a simple question.”

“Is it worth twenty-one grand?”

“The paper says sixty, plus inflation.”

“It doesn’t have to be worth sixty. The bond she needs is for eighteen, plus she needs enough to get one of those fiddles you just showed her. Is it worth that much or not?”

“Absolutely. You want I should advance it?”

“No. We’ll do it a little different.”

Amy Cox picked out the Yamaha. Pete said it was worth twenty-seven hundred, Amy said twelve, tops, and we all knew we were eventually going to settle on eighteen, if only for the beautiful irony of the number. Pete put the Amati away somewhere in the back and wrote a pawn ticket for eighteen hundred, made out to me. The deal was that I would issue the bail bond for the wayward, neo-Luddite Jimmy. If he showed up at his trial like a good little boy, and the bond got released, then his sister could come and get the ticket from me and redeem her own violin by bringing back the Yamaha and paying the interest. If little Jimmy reverted to type and took a hike, then I was out eighteen grand to the Sheriff’s office, but the Amati was mine for the eighteen hundred, plus interest. In that case, Amy could keep her substitute, so she wouldn’t have to go to her job at the Chamber Orchestra with a kazoo, but she lost first rights to her heirloom. It was the deal of the century. For somebody, anyway. She took it. We went back to my office to have Agnes draw up the formal papers.

***

The length of time it takes to mortgage all your past dreams to pay for tomorrow’s reduced hopes is heartbreakingly short. Before Amy Cox had time to feel the cold lump in the pit of her stomach spread to the rest of her soul, or to look at her new violin and cry a bit, she was signed, notarized, wished the best of luck, and sent back out into the rain. I stood in the same spot where I had been when I first saw her, looking through the neon letters, watching her go. Once again, she had her shoulders hunched against the rain, but now she held her violin case under one arm, at her side.

“Cute, wasn’t she? In a prickly sort of way.”

I turned around to see Agnes looking disgustingly smug. “Was she?” I said.

“Oh, listen to him. The ice man. This is me you’re talking to, okay? If she’d put her hooks into you any deeper, you’d need sutures.”

Had she? “You are obviously mistaking my professional manner of…”

I was interrupted by the sound of a loud thump, out in the street, and I looked back that way in time to see Amy Cox flying through the air like a rag doll. She hit the wet pavement with a sickening second thud and lay motionless. Behind her, the dark LTD I had noticed earlier was braking to a stop.

“Call 9-1-1!” I screamed over my shoulder. I ran out the door and into the street, where the rain hit me in the face like a slap with a wet towel. The LTD was at the scene ahead of me, and the driver’s door opened to disgorge a large man in a dark overcoat. He bent over the victim briefly, then ran back to the car and got in. He immediately floored it, spinning the tires on the wet pavement, running over the crumpled body, and fleeing into the mist. I couldn’t believe I had seen him do that. I think I screamed again, something obscene, but I’m not sure.

I tried my damnedest, but with the rain spitting in my eyes, I couldn’t read the departing license plate. I kept running until I got to where Amy Cox lay like a pile of broken sticks, one leg bent the wrong way, an arm thrown over her head, blood trailing from her mouth and ears, wide eyes staring at nothing. I bent down and felt for a pulse in her throat, but I was already pretty sure I wasn’t going to find one. She looked as dead as anybody I’ve ever seen. I hunkered down beside her, not sure what to do.

Down the street, Sheriff’s deputies and cops were running out of the courthouse, and I could already hear an ambulance siren. I was surprised to also hear myself moaning. I rocked back on my heels and let somebody pull me up and guide me off to one side. I looked around, dazed. Twenty yards down the road were the shoes that were too low for the wet streets. The speeding car had knocked her right out of them. Closer to me was her small purse, from which she had produced the certificate of appraisal. Here and there were a few scattered papers and what may have been some gouts of blood. I looked all around, scanning the area in progressively widening sweeps, zoning it off, making sure I missed nothing. That seemed important, for some reason.

There was nothing, anywhere, remotely resembling a violin case.

Chapter Two

Picking Up Sticks

Someplace far away, a boom box was playing an odd, slow version of white rap. Or maybe it was a call-in radio show.

“Anybody see the accident?”

“That guy might have. He was the first one on the scene, far as I could tell.”

“The dopey-looking one, standing around with no raincoat? What’s his name?”

“We didn’t talk to him. He was bent over the body when we got there. Groaning, sort of.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t think he got hit or anything. He’s just shook up. But if anybody saw the vehicle, it’d be him.”

“Excuse me? Sir?”

There was a hand on my upper arm, I realized, not pressing hard, but insistent. I guessed the dopey-looking guy they were talking about must have gone someplace else.

“Sir?” Blue and brass, the square bulk of an armored vest showing, even through the uniform jacket. Lots of black leather pouches and snaps, like a bunch of fanny packs from the Harley store. A cop, not a Sheriff’s deputy. Right. That was the way it should be. We weren’t in front of his courthouse, but it was still his street, his case. Only, if it turned into a real case, they would take it away from him and give it to a couple of plainclothes detectives. That made me sad, for some reason. Maybe I just wanted to be sad.

“Are you all right, sir?”

The paramedics had zipped Amy Cox up in a body bag and were taking their time loading her into the meat wagon. I don’t know how long I had been standing there or what I thought I was doing.

“Hey, fella, I asked if you’re all right?”

“I’m not injured, officer.”

“Did you see the accident?”

Was it an accident? What little I saw looked awfully damned cold-blooded and deliberate to me. “I didn’t see the actual impact,” I said. “I saw her flying through the air, and I saw her hit the pavement. Then I saw the bastards run over her a second time. They stole her violin.”

“They?”

I thought for a minute and blinked. “I only saw one, come to think about it. But it was a big car, with blackout glass all around. There could have been a small mob in there.”

A notebook came out of his upper pocket, and he hunched over, trying to keep the rain off it. When he tipped his head down to write, a stream came off the brim of his hat, onto the pages.

“They make waterproof notebooks, you know, officer. Nickel Pete, down the street there, showed me one once. They make them for surveyors. He gets all kinds of strange merchandise, but never the same kind twice. It was his violin, too, come to think of it. He traded it for…”

“I’ll need your name, sir.”

It was as polite a way as anybody had ever told me that I was babbling, and I shifted down a gear or two, and told him my name and what little I knew. I could see his disappointment grow at every key point, like no description of the driver, no license number, and inexact year on the car.

“Did you know the victim, Mr. Jackson?”

“Just met her. She was a customer, came to me to get a bond for her brother.” I told him the gist of the situation, including the name of the yuppie-hating brother. The pencil scribbled on the wet pages, and the cop made a face when it didn’t work right.

“Maybe you should try circling the drops first, so you don’t run into them and get the lead wet,” I said. He didn’t.

“You say she had a violin?”

I nodded. “Carrying it under her right arm. The guy who got out of the car must have taken it.” I noticed that the pencil had stopped moving altogether. Fair enough. Why struggle with wet paper, trying to write a statement that didn’t make any sense? And it didn’t. If somebody’s going to mug you for a lousy violin, they don’t hit you with two tons of metal first. Even if they don’t give a damn about you, they could smash the instrument that way. And if the accident really is just an accident, then they don’t get out and steal the violin, just to have a nice souvenir of the event. And finally, if it was purely a case of opportunistic theft, why hadn’t they also taken her purse, which was right out there in front of God and everybody? I wouldn’t write it down, either.

“Why would this guy stop to steal her violin?” said the cop.

My intellectual peer, obviously. Went right to the key question without even being led. A perceptive fellow, this beat-pounder.

“Because he thought it was valuable. Very valuable. It wasn’t, really, because it wasn’t the right one, but somebody thought it was supposed to be.” Somebody who wasn’t paying attention when Amy Cox and I went in and out of Nickel Pete’s, or who couldn’t see well enough in the rain, or was confused because there were two of us, or was busy taking a leak in a plastic bottle or using his fantastic cell phone technology to argue with his mother or his girlfriend. But by the time Ms. Cox left my office the second time, that somebody was back on the job, with a vengeance. But what was the job, exactly? Killing her?

“That still doesn’t make any sense,” said the cop.

I hate it when people steal my own arguments. But he was right, it didn’t, and I had pushed my thinking as far as I could. I suddenly became aware of being very wet. There was a hissing sound in the back of my head that I gradually realized was a passing car, tires spraying road water. In the front of my head, my mouth was sticky-dry.

“Maybe you should get out of the rain, Mr. Jackson, sit down and collect your thoughts a bit.”

Too damn right I should. But not with him. If I needed a ventriloquist’s dummy, I’d go see what Pete had on hand. I pulled a soggy card from my pocket and gave it to the cop. “You can get me there most of the time if you have any more questions,” I said. I pointed at my office. He looked at the card and nodded, and that was the end of the interview.

***

I have a room in the back of the office with a cot and a kitchenette and a closet with some spare clothes, for times when I’m sweating a round-the-clock skip-recovery case. I went straight there, without talking to Agnes on my way through the front.

I took off my tie and looked at it briefly, holding it out at arm’s length. It used to be maroon, I think. I thanked it for long, if undistinguished, service, and threw it in the trash. I hung my suit coat on a hanger to dry, dumped my wet shirt on the floor, and toweled off my hair. Buttoning up a fresh shirt, I went back out into the reception room and poured myself the last of the toxic waste from the Mr. Coffee in the corner. I think it was a blend called Refried Dreams. After steeping half the day, it tasted the way corroded batteries look, but I barely noticed.

“Is the bond ready yet for Jimmy Cox?”

“All set,” said Agnes. “You want me to take it over? You look like you could use a little down time.”

I shook my head. “I’d rather be moving around a bit, while I’m trying to sort things out. Besides, delivering the bond is the closest thing to a dying request that I’ve ever had laid on me. Seems like I ought to do it myself.”

“I saw the body bag. Did she suffer much?”

That was a very nice way of asking me if I had botched up giving first aid. Suddenly everybody was being nice to me. Did they think that blunt trauma was contagious and I might have caught some? I shook my head again. “Bastards smashed her all to hell, squashed her like a nasty bug. Even a doctor couldn’t have done anything for her.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

“You didn’t have to. I’ll probably do enough accusing for both of us. Just give me the bond.”

I put the document in a zippered vinyl pouch with several others, put on my trenchcoat, grabbed the umbrella, and headed for the door.

“Maybe you ought to comb your hair.”

“What for? The cops think I’m dopey-looking, anyway, and Amy Cox and her brother damn sure won’t care.”

***

Most arrests in the metro area are made by city cops, but the City, as such, has no courts. So the cases are charged and tried in the Ramsey County court system, and bail bonds are delivered to the County Sheriff’s office. It’s in one corner of the County Jail, which is a multi-story affair hung on the face of the stone river bluff. You can enter via a little pill box at street level or through a tunnel from the basement of the courthouse. I usually do pill box. I’m a regular customer there, and a tall, cute brunette deputy named Janice Whitney smiled at me when I came in. She used to be even cuter, before body armor became part of the regular uniform. Now she has no waist, and not much in the way of a bosom, either. Hazards of war, I guess. She logs in the bonds the same, either way, but it’s not as much fun as it used to be. Nothing ever is.

“Hey, it’s the ticket master,” she said. “Neither rain nor sleet, and all that other bullshit.”

“Hey, yourself, Jan. How’s business?”

“Business is good. Maybe we should quit advertising.”

“Maybe you should. Take that budget and use it for an office golf outing or something.”

If I’d suggested a prayer meeting, I’d have gotten the same look. “I’ve been known to do a little swinging with my fellow workers,” she said, “but not with any stupid golf club. What have you got for me?”

I opened the vinyl case, pulled out the stack of bonds, and dropped them on the counter. She took each one in turn, shoved it in a machine that stamped the date and time, then manually logged it into a green, hardcover day book. The Cox bond was the last one in the stack.

“You might be sticking your neck out a bit on this one,” she said. “He only got arraigned this morning, and already I’ve heard about him. If he was any nuttier, they’d chop him up and make Snickers bars.”

“Just a high-spirited kid, Jan. Misunderstood. Doesn’t like Luds. Or maybe he does like them, I forget which way it works.”

“Like Timothy McVeigh didn’t like concrete?”

“McVeigh was a flat-earther, as I recall. Didn’t like anything vertical. But he did like really big bangs. The two guys are nothing alike.”

“You’re right about that. McVeigh knew enough to keep his mouth shut in court. Not Cox.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway. The bond is paid for, and I can’t refund it, so you might as well go ahead and log it in.”

“Your funeral. I’m just saying, watch this one. You want me to have him mustered out through here, so you can meet him, maybe give him a little pep talk?”

Her eyes flashed wickedly. What she really meant was that she would give me a chance to slip a tracer bug into the guy’s pocket. It was something she never officially knew about and I never officially did. Afterwards, I sometimes took her out to a fancy candlelight dinner, just to keep her feeling unofficially rewarded. It pays to have friends in the working end of the power structure. Better than in high places, any day.

“Thanks anyway, Jan, but they’ve probably already pulled him out of the lockup. His sister just got run over by a Ford tank, and they’ll be looking for somebody to ID the body.”

“Are you serious?”

“Happened right out there, less than an hour ago.” I pointed at the now-deserted street.

“Oh, wow, that one? I was outside having a smoke, and I saw the paramedics come. That was the Monkey-boy’s sister, huh? What a funny world. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“It made Amy Cox stop thinking.”

***

It didn’t have that effect on me. The Sheriff’s office was not the place for heavy meditation, though, and neither was my own place. I mumbled some kind of farewell to Deputy Janice and wandered back out into the rain. Five blocks and three corners later, I found myself at the entrance to Lefty’s Billiard Parlor.

Lefty’s is a real, old-fashioned pool hall, where you buy time on the tables from a teller, rather than constantly stuffing coins in a slot. That means you can still play straight pool, and you can abide by the classical rules for scratch shots, whatever game you play. The place is also one long flight of rickety, dark stairs up from street level, a tradition in pool halls that I’ve never understood. A regulation table weighs over a ton, so why put it on the second story, where you have to reinforce the floor and hoist the table in through a skylight, with a crane? Maybe it makes it harder to break the lease, is all I can think. And it damn sure discourages anybody from stealing a table.

Anyhow, Lefty’s is a walkup joint, in strict violation of the federal handicap access laws, and it’s as good a place as I know to go practice on a quiet corner table and let the click of the balls knit your unraveled thoughts back together. Unlike Ames’ in
The Hustler
, it also has a bar and a decent grill, though Lefty will watch you like a hawk and charge you if you spill grease or ketchup on his precious green felt. Beer he doesn’t seem to mind. There’s also a sign by the upper entry that says, “This is a Smoke-Free Establishment. Any Smoke You Find Here is Absolutely Free.” Lefty isn’t real big on regulations, other than his own.

It was late afternoon by the time I walked in, and some guy I didn’t know was tending bar and keeping time on the tables, all by himself. I ordered a shot of vodka and a Guinness. I downed the shot and took just a sip of the stout, to give it a bit of after-flavor. Dark brews, I have always thought, are for sipping and contemplation. If your pint doesn’t get up to room temperature before you finish it, you’re drinking it too fast. White liquor, by contrast, is for impact, to start the negotiating process with the back of your mind. It has no other qualities, and there’s no point in savoring it.

I got a rack of balls for an empty table by the windows and another shot to take with me. I told the bartender to take his time getting me a California burger with extra onions and some lattice fries. Then I laid out the balls on the table, planted my drinks on the window sill, and picked out a house cue from a rack on the wall. It was a bit heavier than I usually like, but it was only warped in one direction and looked like somebody had actually chalked the tip now and then.

Two tables over, Wide Track Wilkie was shooting a game of nine ball with some Asian kid, while the kid’s girlfriend watched. He looked like he was doing some serious hustling and didn’t need any interference, which was fine with me. Wilkie is a three-hundred-plus pound movable barrier of African and Puerto Rican descent, with more in the mix. I was just as glad he was in St. Paul, because I occasionally like to hire him as a bounty hunter. Besides that and hustling pool, I have no idea what he does for a living.