Life's Work (11 page)

"Who's he?"
"Rev Jim? He's the dildo who says the team prayer."

Bluerock opened the door and went back inside. I followed him in. The downstairs was dark and swelteringly hot. Bluerock walked into the darkness and clicked on a lamp, lighting up a small, surprisingly neat living room. The furniture wasn't fancy, but it wasn't the hodgepodge I'd half expected. There were even drapes on the windows and two teak bookshelves on either side of the mantel. If I hadn't noticed the stack of comics by one of the couch legs and the chrome snout of a barbell peeking out from behind an upholstered chair, I would have thought I was in a rented room.

"Who did the decorating in here?" I asked him.

"My old lady," he said.

"You're married?" I said with surprise.

"I used to be," Bluerock said in a voice that indicated that that was all he had to say on the subject. But from the condition of the house, it was pretty clear that he'd lost interest in the place once his wife had left him. I tried to picture the woman who would have tried to domesticate Otto and drew a blank.

Bluerock dropped heavily onto the couch and propped his feet on a walnut coffee table. He was wearing a sleeveless sweatshirt, and in the lamplight I could see that the armholes were stained with sweat. Sweat covered his forehead too. Otto propped his hands behind his head and stared at me.

"Do me a favor, Stoner," he said. "Next time, call before you show up. This isn't a fraternity house."

"You told me to get in touch after I'd talked to Professor Walt."

"I said to call, not invite yourself over. What did that douche bag have to say, anyway?"

"According to Walt, your boy Billy has turned over a new leaf. He's settled down, made peace with his past, and plans to get married to a wonderful girl named C. W. Something. I don't know her last name."

"O'Hara," Bluerock said dully. "C. W. O'Hara. And, believe me, the W doesn't stand for Wonderful."

"C. W. O'Hara -that's a help," I said, and eyed him balefully. "You might have told me about her last night, Blue."

"C.W. and I aren't exactly what you'd call pals," he said.

"Well, she's pals with Parks. And according to Kaplan, the only reason Bill left camp was over a contract dispute."

"That's bullshit," Bluerock said with a sneer.

"The contract dispute?"

"Yeah, the contract dispute," he said, giving me a long-suffering look. "What the hell did you think I was talking about?"

To be honest, I was happy -and a little perplexed by the fact that he was talking at all. "How do you know that he didn't leave because of his contract?" I asked. "That's what Petrie gave as the reason. Bill's apparently got some money problems to go along with his legal hassles."

"Petrie!" Bluerock snorted. "What does that putz know about what's going on in the locker room? The night before Bill ducked out of camp we went out drinking together, and he didn't say a word about contracts, money, or the law."

"What did he talk about?"

"His mother, jewel. A Mormon bitch who lives out in Missoula, Montana. I met her once, when she came through here with Bill's old man. The only things she had on her mind were the end of time and who was going to hell and who was going to be a saint. It was pretty goddamn depressing."

"What did Parks say about her?"

"Not much really," Bluerock said. "Talking to Bill is like opening a new bottle of ketchup -you gotta wait a while before anything comes out. Sometimes you wait and nothing happens. That's the way it was on Monday. Of course, he was stewed to the gills and so was I, so that might have had a bearing on it. I think maybe Jewel had been lecturing him about C.W. again. C.W.'s a Baptist, and they're goddamn heathens to the Mormons. Bill doesn't usually talk about jewel unless she's giving him some kind of grief. She made him pay a lot of dues when he was a kid."

I thought about what Laurel had said about C.W.'s attempts to "convert" Bill. Apparently that was part of an old and somewhat surprising pattern in Parks's life, although I could have guessed that his past had been pretty damn strange. It just turned out to be strange in an unexpected way. It occurred to me that marrying a pregnant girlfriend -and a Baptist, at that- probably wouldn't sit too well with his strict Mormon mother. Though it seemed absurd in a tough cookie like Parks, it was just possible that he'd left camp in order to run home and explain things to Mom.

"Did Parks's mother know that he was going to marry C.W.? Or that she was seven months pregnant?"

"I didn't know that they were going to get married or that she was pregnant," Bluerock said. "But then, like I said, C.W. and I didn't get along, and Bill knew that. I haven't seen her since last December. In fact, I didn't see Billy until the minicamp in May."

"What is it you don't like about C.W.?" I said, out of curiosity.

"She's another version of Bill's batty mother," Bluerock said grimly, "full of the same crooked crap. An amen sister with a streak of self-righteousness a mile wide and the morals of a whore. I knew she'd sunk her hooks into Bill last fall. I guess I just didn't know how deep. I always thought he put up with her Christian bullshit to score some steady ass. But if she reminded me of Jewel, I guess she must have reminded Bill of her too. A lot of football players end up marrying their mothers. Hell, did you ever take a good look at the wives' section? It's like staring at a shelf of bread."

I laughed. "Well, this loaf has some bruises on it. From what I hear, Bill beats her up pretty regularly."

"Yeah, and she loves it," Bluerock said with contempt. "It gives her an excuse to tattle with the other players' girlfriends. C.W.'s a shrewd little bitch. The way she looks at it getting slapped around gets her to heaven faster. Not to mention giving her a leg up on the other football wives. C.W. is always looking for an edge, a way to boost herself into the main ring. Self-pity and Jesus are her stepladder to glory. She's just another cunt, looking to score a football player and to get respectable all at once. I used to think Bill had enough on the ball not to get caught up in her game. But maybe I was wrong."

"Do you think C.W. was why Parks left camp?" I asked. "Do you think he went back to Missoula, to settle things with jewel?"

Bluerock chewed on his lower lip. "I don't know, sport. I'm beginning to wonder about why he left, myself."

Chewing his lip was about as close as I'd seen Bluerock get to expressing a doubt. And I was certain that his doubts went a lot deeper than he was letting on. I had the feeling that that was why he'd suddenly decided to talk to me about Bill. Of course, he hadn't really said anything that could get Bill in hot water-nothing about the drugs that Laurel said Parks had been abusing. And nothing about Kaplan's part in supplying them. While Parks might have left camp to visit home, I couldn't see Bluerock getting worked up about it. But if he thought his friend was in some cocaine trouble, that would be a damn good reason to get worried. And he had shown a special interest in my conversation with Walt Kaplan. I had nothing to lose by bringing the subject up.

"Bill didn't mention Kaplan on Monday night, did he?"

Bluerock shook his head. "Just Jewel."

"That kind of surprises me," I said. "Kaplan implied that he'd been in constant contact with Bill. And from what I hear, Bill had good reasons to stay in touch with him."

"What did you hear?" Bluerock asked ominously.

"That Bill had a nose problem -at least, before he met C.W. And that Kaplan or somebody at the gym was his supplier."

Bluerock pulled himself up on the couch with a jerk and stared at me for a long, unsettling moment. "You know, sport, guys can get killed for spreading rumors like that."

"I know that," I said. "Is it true?"

"I'm not one of Walt's disciples. How the hell should I know if it's true?" he said defensively.

I took that as a probable yes. "You know, I'm not going to arrest Parks, Blue. I'm just trying to find him."

"Then what do you care whether Bill has a nose problem or not?"

"Because if he does, Kaplan's going to care -a lot. Walt has already made it pretty clear that he doesn't want me on this case. Of course, he didn't tell me why. He just said I was butting in where I didn't belong."

"You are, sport," Bluerock said. "You really are. Look, Harry, I don't think you have any idea of what you're getting into. Three of my teammates have already been busted for possession of cocaine, and a lot of other people are getting mighty goddamn paranoid. You're not dealing with school kids, sport, snotty college punks who do a line or two on the weekends. The guys you're talking about are big, dangerous cats. Believe me when I tell you that you would not stand a chance against either one of them. Kaplan would eat you alive and spit out the parts he didn't like. And Bill -Bill is the toughest son-ofa-bitch I've ever met."

"I'm thin, but I'm wiry," I said meekly.

Bluerock laughed at me. "I'm going to do you a favor, Harry. I guess I owe you one. You go ahead and find Bill, if you can. Maybe he did go to Missoula. Or maybe he's shacked up with C.W. You're better positioned to find out than I am. But when you do find him, you call me. Understand? You don't try to talk things over with Bill, you don't call Petrie, and you sure as hell don't call Walt. You call me. Maybe I can keep you from getting killed."

"You think it's that serious, then?"

"I don't know for sure," he said, shaking his head. "But the way people are worked up, it fucking well could be."
 

It was a little past two thirty when I got back to the Delores. By then, I was too damned tired to care about the summer heat, which had moved into my apartment for the month of July, or about C. W. O'Hara, Bill Parks, and Walt Kaplan. I sat down on the couch, thinking that I would make the trip to the bedroom in easy stages, unbuttoned my shirt, and fell asleep where I was.sitting. At three A.M. the ringing of the telephone woke me with a start.

Even hard-boiled detectives associate late-night phone calls with catastrophic news, and I could feel my heart pounding as I walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver. In the back of my mind, I was wondering who had died.

I didn't even have a chance to say hello. The woman on the other end was too perturbed to exchange courtesies. In fact, she was close to hysteria. It took me almost a minute to realize that the voice belonged to Laurel Jones. A minute later, I was out the door and on my way to Newport.
 
 

She hadn't been collected enough to make good sense. It had to do with Parks and with CM. and with our conversation earlier that night. The gist of it was that Laurel had talked to C.W. that evening. She'd paid her a visit, in spite of the fact that I'd asked her to wait. And on that visit, something had gone very badly wrong, so wrong that it had virtually unhinged Laurel. I was afraid that Parks or Kaplan had beat her up or threatened to beat her up, and that that was what had terrified her. I cursed myself for giving the girl any encouragement to act as a go-between.

I was so furious with myself, that I was a hazard behind the wheel, making it over the river and into Newport in less than six minutes. I caromed through Newport's maze of decrepit, one-way streets to the red-light district on York. At that hour the legitimate shops were locked and lit for the night. The rest of them -the strip-and-clip joints- were wide open. I shot down York, and eventually the neon storefronts gave way to gaslights and maple-shaded tenements. Two twenty-five was just one more brick apartment house in a long row of apartments, three blocks south of the unmarked dividing line that ran like a part in Newport's hair, separating the respectable side of town from the unkempt one. I double-parked on the street and ran up a short flight of steps to a courtyard with a mass of hollyhocks in its center. A U-shaped building rather like the Delores surrounded the court, with a lobby door in each of the wings. I tried the wing on the right and got lucky. Laurel Jones/Number Six was written in neat script on a card in one of the brass mailboxes. There were two apartments per floor and two flights to each landing, which meant that it was six flights to Laurel Jones. By the time I finished bounding to the top landing, my lungs were on fire and my face was pouring sweat.

I pounded on Laurel's shiny mahogany door. A frightened little voice that sounded like Laurel with all the gumption let out asked, "Who's there?"

"Harry!" I shouted. "For chrissake, open the door!" I heard chains sliding in locks, then the door opened and Laurel ran out -straight into my arms.

She came flying toward me so quickly that I didn't get a chance to examine her face. And then she wouldn't let go for a minute -head buried in my chest, arms wrapped around my neck.

I held her for a long moment then gently pushed her away and tilted her face up to the light. I'd been sure that she'd been worked over by Parks or by Kaplan, but there were no marks on her face or her forearms.

I thanked God for big favors and asked her what had happened.

"I couldn't ..." Her voice failed, and she took a couple of deep breaths. "I couldn't get hold of you." She stared at me, her blue eyes wet with tears. "I tried calling, at one and one thirty and two and two thirty. Where were you?"

Her voice was so plaintive, her pretty doll-like face so full of disappointment, that I felt as if I'd truly let her down -as if I should have been around to look after her. As if I'd contracted to do so earlier that night.