"Tommy Mack, I didn't hear you come in, sweetheart."
Turning, I chuckled at the salutation. Esquire (he went by just the single name a la Bono, Shaq, Beyonce, or most notably, Oprah) never physically changed. Swearing he was of Castilian lineage, he looked ripped on steroids, but he also swore he only ingested multi-vitamins, raw eggs, and wheat germ. I was a dolt at guessing weights and heights, but I'd always tap him—like now—to be my wingman.
We'd palled around since Old Yvor High, and then in his early 20s, Esquire had taken it into his head that he was a gay man. Don't ask me why. I just don't know. Perhaps the closet had grown too small for his physical bulk. His coming out was fine by me as long as he bore in mind that I flew straight as an arrow. He did, and our friendship hadn't taken a dent.
"Where have you been lately?" he asked me.
I shrugged a shoulder. "Taking care of business. What else?"
"Is that the secret business I shouldn't delve into?"
Right off, I regretted broaching the old topic. "Yes, it is."
He set the magnetized tack hammer on the work bench. His face lost its humor lines. He stared at me slit-eyed and grim-jawed while he torched a cigarette. The ubiquitous
Blue
Castle
, I saw. "You know that I know what your actual business is, right?"
"Uh-huh, but I'll never say it aloud. Such an admission will bring me major repercussions."
He sent a nifty smoke ring wafting toward the ceiling, then smiled. "Did you sign a confidentiality waiver?"
"You can see it that way."
"Okay, what's happening?"
I hesitated, not because he wasn't a solid enough friend, but I'd just told him I didn't want to discuss my job with him. What the hell? I needed his help, so it was unavoidable. "Some chump has framed me for killing a lady."
His hand almost reaching his lips for a second puff didn't make it, and he lowered the smoldering
Blue
Castle
. "Who got it?"
"Do you remember my employer—Watson Ogg?"
"As little as possible."
"I don't blame you there. Well, earlier this morning I found his niece Gwen in her townhouse's bedroom. She'd been shot dead from a pair of .22 slugs behind her ear."
"That's the fatal dose of lead poisoning."
I didn't react to his wisecrack. "Her conniving killer fixed the scene to point at me as the triggerman."
"All right, simmer down. Maybe it's not as bad as you think. Go back to square one. Had her door or windows been pried open?"
My head wagged. "No, the door wasn't locked."
"So either her killer loided the lock, or she knew him to let into her townhouse." After discarding his
Blue
Castle
to mash it underfoot, Esquire looked at his cell phone to get the time. "Why don't you let me finish up doing a rush job on an SUV out back? Then I'll pitch in and lend you a sleuthing hand."
"Sounds like a plan. What time?"
"I should wind it up around sevenish."
"Good. Meantime I’ll fire up a cigarette."
"When did you take up the nasty habit?"
"All hunted desperados smoke cigarettes."
"Of course they do. See you at sevenish. Ta-ta, sweetheart."
Esquire returned to his upholstery makeover of a client's SUV, and I thought of heading on home, but if Mr. Ogg had sent his welcoming committee, I'd be smart to boycott their welcome. Up in the air on how to burn some time until seven with no lead slug splattering my brains out on my shirt, I left in the coupé. A steak house with no hungry line out front came up, and after stopping, I went into its old-school elegance highlighted by the mahogany wall panels. Wynton Marsalis trumpeting Bird on the jukebox was the next promising sign that I was in the right pitstop.
I claimed a window table, and the menu looked easy on the wallet, as did the server on the eyes. Their BLT down was exceptional, she said, but I wasn't all that hungry. A club beer arrived in a hobnail-bottom tumbler, and sipping it, I watched out the front window the three ladies—young professionals in their crisp but sexy suits—at the bus stop across the street.
Everybody but me, it seemed, was going green by using public transport. They had their backs to me, and none used a cell phone. Instead they chattered, gestured, and laughed with enthusiasm. They were some family's sisters and wives. I'd no sister, wife, or even real family, and I carried no photos in my wallet. I never felt the profound loss any heavier than I did now.
My roving eyes alit on the public phone in the alcove by the cashier's nook. My server made change, and I tabbed in my 50¢. This newer phone featured a push button to amplify your voice. I dialed a number by rote, and an older lady's chirpy lilt coming on was Amanda.
"Happy belated Easter, Mom."
"Same to you. It's about time you called. I thought you'd forgotten me."
"Not a chance in a million."
"It's good to hear your voice. How's life in
Old
Yvor
City
?"
"I stay busy as the dickens, and I don't see any let up coming."
"You're blessed in this recession."
Yeah: blessed, that's me, all right.
"Have you heard from Kathy?"
"No, I guess your sister has the same leaky memory you do."
That was the real blessing here. The prickly, bossy Kathy was a bit much. "Hey, do you remember D. Noble Yeatman?"
"Oh him. Isn't he in the federal penitentiary?"
"Where did you hear that? He's a little reckless, but he's never run afoul of the law. Anyways, he's coming to town."
"I never liked D. Noble."
Moving right along
. "I saw Esquire today."
Her tenor grew snippy and disapproving. "Is he still gay?"
"Of course. That part of you doesn't change."
"Esquire isn't my favorite person either."
"Sorry to keep bringing up sore topics."
"Speaking of which, have you spoken to your father lately?"
"No, so please don't pump me. I've got nothing on Phil."
"Oh, quit it, will you? We're still friends, sort of. While I've got you on the phone, I found a notebook of your poems up in the attic. Should I keep them?"
"Yeah, I'll be picking them up. How's the bed-and-breakfast doing?"
"The reservations are coming in. It's been a brisk spring, and we'll get busier once school lets out, and the summer vacations crank up."
"Buzz me if you need an extra hand." I really wanted to ask her why she just didn’t retire like her friends had done.
"Can you afford to take off the time?"
"My boss is pretty flexible."
"So it would seem."
"I'm an old timer there."
"Who are you with again?"
"Right. I better get back to it. Nice talking."
"Likewise. Be well. Love you."
"You too, Mom. Bye."
I hung up the phone receiver, a simple but elegant social ritual all but extinct from our popular culture. It was heartbreaking. Cell phones weren't just a passing fad. They were long past that stage and here to stay. They kept shrinking in size, so what evolved next? Some world zealot in the name of God, love, or whatever embedded his microscopic thought-control microchips in our brainstems.
I was getting to be a bughouse case. Did my anti-progress rants cast me as a Luddite or curmudgeon? I liked to think not, but in my profession, cell phones enabling fast, easy links could bring disastrous results. They doubled my challenge to do a clean, neat hit where stealth and surprise made it go my way.
When I returned to my window table Wynton's trumpet had gone mute, and the three young ladies had departed on the city bus. I polished off my beer and left as well. My phone conversation with Amanda had stirred up my latent brooding of my earliest boyhood spent in boondocks
Texas
, and I dreaded how the old, gut-wrenching memories would be tumbling to the fore if I let down my guard.
A
few minutes before seven o'clock sent me back to Esquire who was waiting at his auto upholstery shop. On the way there I pit-stopped at an Afghan bodega I liked to patronize and stocked up on a carton of Blue Castles. Tearing off the filter and lighting up might repair my raked over nerves. As I turned from the checkout lane my peripheral vision keyed on a pint-sized man with the flamboyant neck tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon. He came chuffing through the double glass doors.
Arky and I were acquaintances who returned nods if we passed on the street. Here we crossed paths at the bodega, but we didn't exchange nods. I knew he moonlighted as a gopher in Mr. Ogg's outfit. Arky's hooded eyes enlarged at seeing me, and his face ashened to an unhealthy hue. Gwen's hit was no longer a secret, and the fear had petrified him. I was a deranged killer in the middle of a blood spree, and he'd no weapon to use except his pudgy bare hands.
He puffed up a blustery bravado. "Tommy Mack, you must've grown some bigger balls."
We squared off just inside the double glass doors out of earshot.
"Come again?"
"Mr. Ogg wants your head on a silver platter."
"The hell you say."
"You whacked his niece Gwen."
"Bullshit, I never touched her. Did you hear me?" I swallowed my rage to pummel him until he believed me. "Why are they saying I did it?"
Arky rubbed at his missing digit. "I ain't putting words in their mouths. It's just what I heard around is all."
"Then give me what you heard."
"Gwen and you argued, and the bad blood made you go ballistic, and you took her out the way you pros like to do it."
"Then I must've lost my brains, not grown bigger balls. Why would I off Gwen with my signature MO? Who told you this stupid bullshit? Mr. Ogg?"
"I don't work for Mr. Ogg. He owes me a wad of money, and I've never seen a red cent of it. No sir, we're strictly on the outs."
"Uh-huh." My hard eyes latched to Arky. "Maybe he pays you back, plus he kicks in a bonus for a finder's fee on your talking to me in here."
"Hey, if I meet Mr. Ogg, and if he asks me, I'll say I ran into Tommy Mack Zane." Arky tried a crooked smile on me. "But we're talking two, maybe three years from now, and that's no time soon."
I coined my own crooked smile. "I'm not carrying, a lucky break for you. If I was, I'd jack two caps behind your ear." An obese lady, who'd struggled to climb out of her land yacht she'd just parked beside the coupé, waddled toward us. "All right, I'm gone, Arky. When you see Mr. Ogg, give him a message. Tell him I said I did not kill Gwen. Tell him she was a stiff on her mattress when I went in and found her."
"Sure, Tommy Mack. Nice seeing you again."
"Remember what I said." I poked my forefinger in Arky's chest to emphasize each word. "
I.
Did. Not. Kill. Gwen. Ogg."
The lady shoved in the bodega's door, and I sidestepped her and then left the bodega. Arky was a punk ass, but I'd never get away with popping him in the entrance to a bodega with the security cameras filming us. I considered why Mr. Ogg had a reason to off Gwen, and it didn't tally up. He'd coddled, spoiled, and pampered her. She was his princess, his world.
Hold on, I thought. Wait a minute. Don't get hung up on the avuncular sentiments he wanted us to see him lavishing on her. What if he had some covert grievance? The ruthless bastard didn't hesitate to rub out his foes from as far back as the rich socialite I'd killed in
New
Yvor
City
for him on my debut hit.
Now he'd picked me for his patsy after he riddled Gwen's brains with two bullets. That part of his scheme fit. Who else did he keep around to throw to the wolves? Say law enforcement got in an anonymous tip, Homicide investigated it, and I moved to top their suspects list. That put me in peril. Pent up fury flamed through me, burning on a half-dozen levels.