Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery #1: The Killing Circle (A Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery) (22 page)

Earl laughed into the mouthpiece. “You boys got so much work you gotta hire private dicks?” The smile vanished. “Yes, sir,” he said seriously, “we can do that.” Uncle Roddy was still excited. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I could hear his voice buzzing. “We'll get right on it,” Earl said and dropped the phone back on the hook. I got a steady, efficient gaze. “How long ago did that aunt die?”

“That's not certain. You might have to check all the way back to the first of the year.” I stood up. “It's not certain the aunt's named was McDermott either.”

Earl looked disgusted. “You better know damn well what you're talking about, Rafferty. I'm gonna have to pull one of those records boys away from dinner and a nice night at home to do this. You just better know what you're talking about.”

“I already told you it's a shot in the dark.”

“A shot in the dark worth more than a couple of hours of work,” he said glumly. I've never figured yet why it takes the bureaucrats twice as much time as it would take a grammar school kid to do the same thing.

“It'll be appreciated,” I said.

“Not if we don't find anything, it won't.”

“I'll appreciate it anyway,” I told him. He leered at me. “By the way, do you mind if I take my hardware back now?”

“You'll get it back when you leave town,” he snarled.

I could have told him that was unconstitutional and done a lot of squawking. But he was doing the favors so I told him I'd check back with him in a couple of hours instead. Also, I was foolish enough to think I wouldn't need a gun.

His hand was moving toward the telephone as I left.

31

The Bartender

Shark drove me back to my car, which was still parked across the street from George McDermott's house. I was in no mood for light conversation, so it didn't particularly bother me that he was being antisocial. He drove the car like he was sitting in an easy chair, one hand loosely attached to the top of the steering wheel and an elbow hanging out of the window. His eyes never deviated from the road even when he stopped beside my car. Never having had anything against being polite, I thanked him for the ride. His head turned like it was on a stick, the muscles in his jaw flexed, and he showed me the finest in a whole line of contempt. He watched me while I got in the car and then he did a U-turn in George's driveway and followed me down the street. And he kept following me. I didn't know where I was going, but it wasn't in the direction we had come from. I made a few unnecessary turns and even went around a block just for the hell of it, and there he was—right behind me the whole time. He didn't even make an effort to pretend he wasn't there. I drove in a straight line for a while and then on a whim made a right. When I straightened out I noticed with surprise that there were no headlights in the rearview mirror. An eighth of a mile later I found out why. I was on a dead-end street. After a difficult turnaround, I headed back to the adjacent avenue. He had pulled up to the curb and was waiting for me. I turned and pulled to the side of the street and got out of the car and walked back to where he was sitting. He had the same look of contempt plastered on his dumb features. I nonchalantly put my forearm on the top of the car and assumed a stance.

“Shark,” I said, “I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm going to do in case we get separated. There's a little seafood restaurant at the end of Santa Rosa Island next to the Navarre Beach Motel. I'm going to have dinner there and then I'm going to find a bar and have a few drinks. It's been a lousy few days and I need them. After that I figure I should have killed enough time that I can head back to Milton and see what the records man has come up with. What I do after that depends on what he's got. I'll invite you to dinner, but only with the understanding that we go dutch. The same with the drinks if you don't think Deputy Slade will mind that you have a few in the line of duty. How does that sound to you?”

“Up yours, dick,” he snarled.

“I'm open for suggestions, but that wasn't exactly what I had in mind.”

“That's tough,” he said and spit with perfect aim so that the wad landed right in front of my left shoe.

“Personality and good looks,” I said, stepping back from the wet spot. “You must really charm ‘em all.”

I walked away from him and back to my car. There wasn't a peep out of him. He must have expended his entire vocabulary. I decided that the evening I had outlined to him sounded okay, and I tried to put it out of my mind that I had acquired a second shadow while in Milton. The Escambia McDermotts would have to wait until the next day unless Shark decided that I was harmless after all.

I thought about the past four days and where they had got me. Something felt wrong. I reviewed the case as I saw it. First, hot-stuff detective is hired by hot-stuff man-about-town to find the missing rare, expensive books. High intrigue. Hot-stuff detective finds a body first. Promising. Only to find out that the man's son took the books. So the detective gets paid a nice fat fee for kicking around in the family dirt. At least he finds out, though, that he isn't the only one who has problems with his old man. But he can't forget about the body, so he kicks around in a few more families’ dirt, meets some fascinating people, and gets told a few sheltered facts. Once again it looks promising, but where does it all lead? To a wild goose chase in Florida, which would have been okay if it had remained his own private wild goose chase. Instead it becomes the business of the New Orleans Police Department, his Uncle Roddy, and a hostile deputy who doesn't like to work and who sics a shadow on him that would make Buster Brown look like a beauty queen. And the deputy is probably going to get downright nasty when he finds out that he did a few finger exercises on the telephone for nothing.

Shark didn't quite tailgate me all the way to the restaurant. I went up the paved area between two expanses of sand to the front of the place. He parked across the road unobtrusively and cut his lights. I couldn't tell if he had cut the motor because of the pounding of the surf. I took a seat by a window facing the water so I wouldn't have to look at his mug if he decided to come in. I ordered beer and a large seafood platter and spent a lot of time over it all. But Shark wasn't likely to get discouraged; his type isn't familiar with impatience.

That's why it turned me around a bit when I went out and discovered that he was gone. I strolled down the beach in the darkness and breathed in the salty air and tossed a few memories around, all the while expecting to see the car sandwiched in between a couple of dunes. It wasn't and it didn't pop out behind me as I drove down the road to the other end of the island. I started breathing easier but I still wasn't sure.

There is only one main highway on the narrow island called Santa Rosa, and it runs parallel with the Gulf of Mexico only a couple of hundred yards from it. Sand dunes dot both sides of the road and every once in a while light from a beach house will wink at you from among the dunes. The scarce street lights are saved for prominent corners in the tiny web of sandy, lettered avenues.

I had been the only car on the road for a long while, but as I neared the end of the island where a bridge connects it to Gulf Breeze there was more activity. Then the lights from the small shopping center and group of stores, gas stations, restaurants, and bars all built near the public beach loomed ahead. As I approached the noise got louder and the activity increased. This part of Santa Rosa is where the college set congregates during the summer. They yell to each other above a din created by the sounds of rock music and revving engines. I got stuck in a pint-sized traffic jam caused by a stalled car. The guy behind pushed the car out of the parking lot in front of the bar while a line of horn honkers eagerly waited for their empty spaces. I waited too, having decided that, to be on the safe side, I'd go have a few drinks instead of bounding over to Escambia.

The guy in the stalled car finally managed to peel out, which is apparently the only acceptable way to leave the parking lot. I spotted a place across the street on the side of a restaurant and parked there instead of spending the rest of the night trying to get a slot in front of the bar. I was in definite need of a drink by the time I waded through the contest of who could look best coming and going.

The inside of the bar was typical: small, smoky, crowded, and noisy. There was the usual absence of enough tables and bar stools, but plenty of posters set at weird angles of the ever-current favorites, like James Dean and Marlon Brando. Brando appeared twice—on a motorcycle and with his heavy jowls. Standing around the bar in front were tight- jeaned guys and giggling girls who looked like they had spent their lives on the beach and could stand up forever. As I made my way through them, getting a few snickers for my suit, a roar went up in the back where the game tables were grouped and a big bruiser lifted a Foosball table above his head and shook it. He'd probably been doing that to the waves all day. When he dropped it back down to the floor, the building shook and a cry sounded for more beer. The atypical bartender in a white apron and with all forty-five years or so showing on his face started sliding pitchers of the stuff down to the end of the bar nearest the games. I went down to a lone stool against the wall.

The bartender came wringing his hands on his apron. He wiped off the scarred piece of wood in front of me.

“You must mix a mean brew,” I said.

“Ha!” He flourished the cloth. “I got—how do they call it?—charisma.” He leaned one arm on the bar and took me in. “And you. You must need a drink bad or you just escaped from a loony bin.” He surveyed the room.

“And
you
?” I countered.

“I ain't here for my health—I own the joint. What'll it be?”

I ordered bourbon, since it was hard to find these days in New Orleans. While he poured it a guy with enormous biceps banged on the bar for attention. “Hey, Al, we need a pitcher down here. We're thirsty,” he explained. The group around him gave a raucous laugh in appreciation of his little joke.

The bartender tossed his head. “In a minute, Harry—if you can hold on to your DTs that long.” Everyone within hearing laughed at that. I could see what Al meant about his having charisma.

He put my bourbon in front of me. “The name of the game is tolerance, who can drink the most,” he said as he picked my money up. “They're in here proving their manhood.”

“It must be good for business.”

“That's the other reason I'm here.” He picked up a pitcher and drew beer into it, not bothering to cut the clouds. Harry and his gang were past the point of noticing things like that.

Al came back to the sink underneath me and started washing pitchers on a couple of brushes sticking up out of sudsy water.

“Is it like this every night?” I asked.

“Only in the summer and never on Sundays, thank God.”

“Ever thought about getting some help?”

“You applying for the job?” He snorted a laugh. “Naw, they'll rob you blind. Couple of summers back I hired this nice young guy spending the summer down here from Harvard. Clean cut; none of this bearded weirdo stuff. Funny thing, though, the take got cut almost in half the first two weeks he's here. Harvard tells me business is slow. This I find hard to believe, so I says to this friend of mine, I says, ‘Look, I'll front you and you go spend a couple of nights down at the bar and tell me what goes.’ So he does. Meanwhile, I lie low. See? Anyway, I talk to my friend a few nights later and he says business looks good to him. I can't figure it. I tell him to spend a couple more nights, just to make sure, but he says the same. I'm baffled but I figure Harvard's on the take and somehow my friend just ain't catching him stashing the stuff. So, much as I'm under the weather that year and it's a twenty-mile drive from my house to here, I decide I better drop in on Harvard. You know, a little surprise. I tell my friend the plan of attack over a game of gin rummy and he says it sounds like a good plan to him. Then he says, ‘By the way, Al, where'd you get that fancy new cash register?’

“'What fancy new cash register?’ I says. ‘That's the same cash register that's always been there.’

“'Naw,’ he says, ‘I mean the antique job with the carved inlays.’

“Well, there ain't no antique job with the carved inlays. Get the picture? Harvard brought his own cash register It was one for him and one for me.”

“Well, they say you've got to have brains to get into Harvard.” I thought about my first case. One of Maurice's clients, a bar owner, had a bartender who brought his own bottles.

“Yeah. And this guy's in the law school yet.” I laughed. “If that kind of stuff don't tell you why this country's going to pot. . . . You ready for another one?”

I was ready and so was everyone else in the joint. Al slapped another bourbon in front of me and then slaved over the tap for a while. Then he was back to the sink and the dirty glasses with a sigh. It wasn't necessary with a dish drainer on the side, but he polished glass briskly with a towel as if he had to keep his hands busy. “What parts you from?” he asked. His manner of speaking was as clipped as his rubbing was brisk. I told him. “That's a ways to come to have a drink in this dump. And you don't look like the fun-in-the-sun type.”

“True. You might say I was on a little business, but the lady doesn't seem to be around.”

A contemptuous laugh. “Women,” he said. “You might as well of been out in the sun for three days straight if you got one of ‘em on your mind. You got to be with ‘em every second or they run off with the first thing that shows up in a pair of pants. Then if you bother to catch up with ‘em, they pull hysterics on you about how they can't stand to be alone. Don't think I don't know, what with being in the bar business all these years and having my nights taken up. They come in and they all got eyes for the bartender. You make eyes back at one and two days later she's telling you that you don't spend enough time with her. Hell, she knew what business you were in. I guess that's why I stick with this joint. At least you don't get that brand of trouble with the teeny-bops. Anyway, you got my sympathies, bud.”