Double Whammy (11 page)

“You're probably right,” Decker said, “but I'd like to be sure.”

“Haven't you been listening? Christ, don't tell me I've hired a complete moron.”

“I met your sister,” Decker said. He liked to save the best for last.

“Elaine?” Gault said. He looked most uncomfortable, just as Decker had expected. It was worth the wait.

“We had a nice chat,” Decker said. He wanted Gault to be the one who finished the conversation. He didn't want to be the one to take it any further, but he had to. He needed to find out if Gault knew everything.

“You didn't tell me a couple important things. You didn't tell me about Clinch and you didn't tell me you had a sister up in Harney.” Decker's voice had the slightest sting of irritation.

“She gets around, my sister.” Gault drained his glass. His face was getting red.

Stubborn bastard, Decker thought, have it your way.

“You knew she was having an affair with Bobby Clinch,” he said evenly.

“Says who?” Gault snapped. The red became deeper.

“Lanie.”

“That's what they call her.”

“Oh, is it now?”

“Personally, I don't care if she's screwing the entire American Legion post,” Decker said, “but I need to know what you know.”

“You better shut your mouth, ace!” Gault's face was actually purple now.

Decker thought: We really hit a nerve here. But from the murderous looks he was getting, he figured now wasn't the time to pursue it. He got up and headed for the door but Gault grabbed his arm and snarled, “Wait just a minute.” Decker shook free and—rather gently, he thought—guided Gault backward until his butt hit the sofa.

“Good-bye now,” Decker said.

But Gault had lost it. He lunged and got Decker by the throat. Gagging, Decker felt manicured fingernails digging into the meat of his neck. He stared up the length of Gault's brown arms and saw every vein and tendon swollen. The man's cheeks were flushed but his lips twitched like bloodless worms.

The two men toppled across the low sofa with Gault on top, amber eyeglasses askew. He was spitting and hollering about what a shiteating punk Decker was, while Decker was trying to squirm free from the neckhold before he passed out. His vision bloomed kaleidoscopic and his skull roared. The blood in his head was trying to go south but Dennis Gault wouldn't let it.

A cardinal rule of being a successful private investigator is: Don't slug your own clients. But sometimes exceptions had to be made. Decker made one. He released his fruitless grip on Gault's wrists and, in a clumsy but effective pincer motion, hammered him in the ribs with both fists. As the wind exploded from Gault's lungs, Decker bucked him over and jumped on top.

Dennis Gault had figured R. J. Decker to be strong, but he was unprepared for the force now planted on his sternum. As his own foolish rage subsided, he fearfully began to wonder if Decker was just getting warmed up.

Gault felt but never saw the two sharp punches that flattened his nose, shattered his designer frames, and closed one eye. Later, when he awoke and dragged himself to the bathroom, he would marvel in the mirror that only two punches could have done so much damage. He found a pail of ice cubes waiting on the nightstand, next to a bottle of aspirin.

And a handwritten note from R. J. Decker: “The fee is now one hundred, asshole.”

 

Harney was such a small county that it was difficult to mount a serious high-school athletic program. There was, after all, only one high school. The enrollment fluctuated from about one hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and ten, so the pool of sports talent was relatively limited. In those rare and precious years when Harney High fielded a winning team, the star athletes were encouraged to flunk a year or two in order to delay graduation and prolong the school's victory streak. A few idealistic teachers spoke out against this unorthodox display of school spirit, but the truth was that many of the top jocks were D students anyway and had fully intended to spend six or seven years in high school.

Football was the sport that Harney loved most; unfonunately, the football team of Harney High had never compiled a winning record. One season, in desperation, they even scheduled three games against the wimpiest parochial schools in Duval County. Harney lost every game. The coach was fired, and moved out of town.

Consequently the Harney High athletic department decided to concentrate on another sport, basketball. The first order of business was to build a gymnasium with a basketball court and some portable bleachers. The second move was to send a cautious delegation of coaches and teachers into the black neighborhood to recruit some good basketball players. A few old crackers in Harney huffed and swore about having to watch a bunch of skinny spooks tear up and down the court, and about how it wasn't fair to the good Christian white kids, but then it was pointed out that the good Christian white kids were mostly slow and fat and couldn't make a lay-up from a trampoline.

Once the basketball program was established, the team performed better than anyone had expected. The first year it made it to the regionals, the next to the state playoffs in the Class Four-A division. True, the star center of the Harney team was twenty-seven years old, but he looked much younger. No one raised a peep. As the team kept winning, basketball eventually captured Harney Country's heart.

The Harney High basketball team was called the Armadillos. It was not the first choice of names. Originally the school had wanted its team to be the Rattlers, but a Class AA team in Orlando already claimed that nickname. Second choice was the Bobcats, except that a Bible college in Leesburg had dibs on that one. It went on like this for several months—the Tigers, the Hawks, the Panthers; all taken, the good names—until finally it came down to either the Owls or the Armadillos. The school board voted to name the team the Owls since it had six fewer letters and the uniforms would be much less expensive, but the student body rebelled and gathered hundreds of signatures on a typed petition declaring that the Harney Owls was “a pussy name and nobody'll ever go to any of the damn games.” Without comment the school board reversed its vote.

Once the Harney Armadillos started kicking ass on the basketball court, the local alumnae decided that the school needed an actual mascot, something on the order of the famous San Diego Chicken, only cheaper. Ideas were submitted in a local contest sponsored by the
Sentinel,
and a winner was chosen from sixteen entries. Working on commission, one of the matrons from the Sewing Club stitched together an incredible costume out of old automobile seat covers and floormats.

It was a six-foot armadillo, complete with glossy armored haunches, a long anteater nose (salvaged from a Hoover canister vacuum), and a scaly tail.

The mascot was to be known as Davey Dillo, and he would perform at each of the home games. By custom he would appear before the opening tipoff, breakdancing to a tape of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean.” Then at halftime Davey Dillo would stage a series of clumsy stunts on a skateboard, to whatever music the band had learned that week.

Davey Dillo's was not a polished act, but the youngsters (at least those under four) thought it was the funniest thing ever to hit the Harney gymnasium. The grown-ups thought the man inside the armadillo costume had a lot of guts.

On the evening of January 12 the Harney Armadillos were all set to play the Valencia Cropdusters in a battle for first place in the midstate Four-A division. Inside the gymnasium sat two hundred fans, more than the coaches and cheerleaders had ever seen; so many fans that, when the national anthem was sung, it actually sounded on key.

The last words—“home of the brave!”—were Davey Dillo's regular cue to prance onto the basketball court and wave a single sequined glove on one of his armadillo paws. Then he would start the dance.

But on this night the popular mascot did not appear.

After a few awkward moments somebody cut off the Michael Jackson tape and put on Ricky Scaggs, while the coaches ordered the players to search the gym. In all two years of his existence, Davey Dillo had never missed a sporting event at Harney High (even the track and field), so nobody knew what to think. Soon the crowd, even the Valencia High fans, began to chant, “We want the Dillo! We want the Dillo!”

But Davey Dillo was not in the locker room suiting up. He wasn't oiling the wheels on his skateboard. He wasn't mending the pink-washcloth tongue of his armadillo costume.

Davey Dillo—rather, the man who created and portrayed Davey Dillo—was missing.

His identity was the worst-kept secret in Harney County. It was Ott Pickney, of course.

R. J. Decker lived in a trailer court about a mile off the Palmetto Expressway. The trailer was forty feet long and ten feet wide, and made of the finest sheet aluminum. Inside the walls were covered with cheap paneling that had warped in the tropical humidity; the threadbare carpet was the color of liver. For amenities the trailer featured a badly wired kitchenette, a drip of a shower, and a decrepit air conditioner that leaked gray fluid all over the place. Decker had converted the master closet to a darkroom, and it was all the space he needed; it was a busy week if he used it more than once or twice.

He didn't want to live in a trailer park, hated the very idea, but it was all he could afford after the divorce. Not that his wife had cleaned him out, she hadn't; she had merely taken what was hers, which amounted to practically everything of value in the marriage. Except for the cameras. In aggregate, R. J. Decker's camera equipment was worth twice as much as the trailer where he lived. He took no special steps to protect or conceal the cameras because virtually all his trailer-park neighbors owned free-running pit bulldogs, canine psychopaths that no burglar dared to challenge.

For some reason the neighbors' dogs never bothered Catherine. Decker was printing film when she dropped by. As soon as he let her in the door, she wrinkled her nose. “Yuk! Hypo.” She knew the smell of the fixer.

“I'll be done in a second,” he said, and slipped back into the darkroom. He wondered what was up. He wondered where James was. James was the chiropractor she had married less than two weeks after the divorce.

The day Catherine had married Dr. James was also the day Decker had clobbered the burglar. Catherine had always felt guilty, as if she'd lighted the fuse. She'd written him two or three times a month when he was at Apalachee; once she'd even mailed a Polaroid of herself in a black bra and panties. Somehow it got by the prison censor. “For old times,” she'd printed on the back of the snapshot, as a joke. Decker was sure Dr. James had no idea. Years after the marriage Catherine still called or stopped by, but only at night and never on weekends. Decker always felt good for a little while afterward.

He washed a couple of eight-by-tens and hung the prints from a clothesline strung across the darkroom. He could have turned on the overheads without harm to the photographs, but he preferred to work in the red glow of the safelight. Catherine tapped twice and came in, shutting the door quickly. She knew the routine.

“Where's the mister?” Decker asked.

“Tampa,” Catherine said. “Big convention. Every other weekend is a big convention. What've we got here?” She stood on her toes and studied the prints. “Who's the weight-lifter?”

“Fireman out on ninety-percent disability.”

“So what's he doing hulking out at Vic Tanny?”

“That's what the insurance company wants to know,” Decker said.

“Pretty dull stuff, Rage.” Sometimes she called him Rage instead of R. J. It was a pet name that had something to do with his temper. Decker didn't mind it, coming from Catherine.

“I've got a good one cooking,” he said.

“Yeah? Like what?”

She looked great in the warm red light. Catherine was a knockout. Was, is, always will be. An expensive knockout.

“I'm investigating a professional fisherman,” Decker said, “for cheating in tournaments. Allegedly.”

“Come on, Rage.”

“I'm serious.”

Catherine folded her arms and gave him a motherly look. “Why don't you ask the paper for your old job back?”

“Because the paper won't pay me a hundred large to go fishing.”

Catherine said, “Wow.”

She smelled wonderful. She knew Decker liked a certain perfume so she always wore it for him—what was the name? He couldn't remember. Something fashionably neurotic. Compulsion, that was it. A scent that probably wouldn't appeal to Dr. James, at least Decker hoped not. He wondered if Catherine was still on the same four-ounce bottle he'd bought for her birthday three years ago.

Decker tweezered another black-and-white of the goldbrick fireman out of the fixer and rinsed it down.

“No pictures of fish?” Catherine asked.

“Not yet.”

“Somebody is really gonna pay you a hundred thousand?”

“Well, at least fifty. That's if I get what he wants.”

She said, “What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Try to buy you back.”

Catherine's laugh died in her throat. She looked hurt. “That's not really funny, R.J.”

“I guess not.”

“You didn't mean it, did you?”

“No, I didn't mean it.”

“You've got a nasty streak.”

“I was beaten as a child,” Decker said.

“Can we get out of here? I'm getting high on your darn chemicals.”

Decker took her to a barbecue joint on South Dixie Highway. Catherine ordered half a chicken and iced tea, he had beer and ribs. They talked about a thousand little things, and Decker thought about how much fun it was to be with her, still. It wasn't a sad feeling, just wistful; he knew it would go away. The best feelings always did.