False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (17 page)

“Ever talk to Etta again?”

“She called when she got home. I can’t sleep till I know my girls are all right. I’m a father to ’em.”

“And?”

“I didn’t hear nothing I didn’t hear a million times before. She made a new fan, who was gonna take it on himself to promote her career, didn’t want nothing but the pleasure of seeing her a star—the colored Dinah Shore, the Negro Patti Page, the sepia singing rage. The situation in this country’s changing. America don’t need to be short-changed on talent like hers.”

“She didn’t laugh in his face?”

“She reads men like Cherise does, figures there’s nobody don’t come wrapped around her little finger. If trouble finds her, she’ll send the devil packing, that’s how fucking cute she is.”

“Any idea about the fan?”

“A nothing,” Beach said. “A hanger-on.”

“How do you know?”

Beach spoke like a white man with a few Negro affectations, but Jordan had never heard anyone of either race laugh with his mirthless howl.

“It wasn’t the customer. He had the cancelled check to remind him she was bought and paid for. The guests knew why she was there, didn’t have to hand her a line. Who’s that leave? A barman, a bouncer, the cabbie that took her home? Might even’ve just been Etta wanting me scared I’d lose her if I didn’t give her personal attention.”

“The customer probably can tell us.”

“Drag him into it, I’ll lose him for a customer. My other customers’ll drop me ’cause I ain’t discreet. My girls’ll be reduced to peddling their ass on the street, ’stead of being the center of attention at high-class smokers where Sir Fucking Galahad wants to rescue ’em from the tragic life they’re leading in my
employ, and all on account of you bothering the wrong people with questions.”

“You’ll have to give up his name to the cops.”

“Go home, get outta here,” Beach said. “Police don’t know nothing from nothing about a colored girl that might be dead. Anybody hurt Etta, he did it with a get outta jail free card in his pocket.”

“Your girls know they’re on their own if things get out of hand?”

“Ain’t the case at all. They got
me
looking out for ’em.”

“The way you looked out for Etta? Looking the other way?”

“What’re you getting at?”

“You have a sweet racket pimping colored girls to weirdos, freaks, voyeurs, God knows who else. One goes missing—that’s the cost of doing business. They should teach your profit model at Wharton. Unlimited inventory with free replacement in case of theft, damage, depreciation, or death.”

“Take a look at a map of the United States, you’ll see Atlantic City’s below the Mason-Dixon line,” Beach said. “Nobody cares about those girls like I do.” He put another record on the turntable, Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’.”

“Ever see your girls in action, Beach? Sorry, I forgot, the customer wouldn’t invite a black man.” Rage flooding the shaved head darkened it, and left Jordan with the idea that for Beach anger delineated race. “I’ve been to parties like those. One of the regulars was a girl built like a young Lana Turner, but with needle tracks up and down her arms, who’d show up with a German Shepherd to entertain. Her pimp was also a humanitarian. He’d slip booties on the Shepherd’s paws so the animal didn’t claw the girl’s back when it got excited.”

“That vileness amuses you,” Beach said. “Who’s the real freak?”

“I did an exposé that embarrassed the state police into shutting the parties down. That much I could do. The girl was white.”

Beach turned up the volume. Jordan was talking to himself, and to Tiny Bradshaw.

The curtains billowed as a door opened. Before Jordan could turn around he was hoisted out of his chair with an arm bent behind his back, and his head pressed down, concentrating his vision on the tan-and-white uppers of gunboat-size wingtips. Pain came with the understanding that the arm would be wrenched out of its socket if he struggled. The pain lessened, and he had a notion of taking a swipe at his abductor, but realized that he was being baited into something that wouldn’t end well. He let himself be prodded out of the office, didn’t lock his knees till he was staring down a long flight of stairs.

He had a solid grip on the banister when he was released with a kick in the pants. Over his shoulder he watched a man in a chalk-stripe suit walk toward Beach’s office past a woman holding the hand of a boy about ten.

“Don’t be afraid, mister,” the boy said. “Go back, it’ll make you feel better.”

“What?”

The boy put a finger to his mouth, and lifted his upper lip. An incisor was missing from the top row of teeth.

“They give you gas,” the boy said. “It doesn’t hurt even a little.”

Jordan went down the stairs clutching the handrail. He called Cherise from the corner.

“You saw Mr. Beach?” she said.

“I just left.”

“Get anything out of him you can use?”

“If I was a blackmailer...”

“You don’t sound right.”

He didn’t. Not to himself. He sounded like he’d had a whiff of the gas, and the pain hadn’t gone away.

“Meet me at the Excelsior,” he said.

“That dump? I got a better place. Be at my corner in ten minutes.”

She was there first, wearing furry earmuffs and tight dungarees with the cuffs turned up. It was the first time he’d seen her in pants, and he came up on her slowly, giving her the onceover while she frowned.

“Field clothes,” she said.

“I don’t get you.”

“I’m from South Carolina originally, on the coast, worked rice till we come north when I was thirteen. Everybody went around in jeans ’cause we couldn’t afford better. Makes me laugh, seeing white girls here fuss over ’em like they from Mr. Dior. Don’t need you droolin’ all over yourself to know how I look in ’em, but they ain’t my idea of high fashion.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ain’t far.” She tucked her arm inside his. “Where you parked?”

An elderly white couple stepping out of a cab had a disgusted look for them. A colored woman averted her head.

“Know what they’re thinking, do you?” Cherise said.

“I can imagine.”

“You’d be wrong. It’s worse than I’m your good-time gal. They think we’re in love.”

Someone had left a religious tract under the Hornet’s wiper blade. Jordan sailed it toward a trash can as Cherise let herself into the front seat. “Drive to Massachusetts Avenue,” she said. “Take it all the way back to Clam Creek.”

Jordan turned the car north, then west, away from the boardwalk. “How did you get Beach to see me?”

“Said you were a big cheese on your newspaper. You’d write nice things about him, and he wouldn’t get in trouble over Etta.”

“He told me what a solid citizen he is for a whoremaster.”

“Gonna clear his name anyway?”

“He isn’t charged with anything.”

“Get him charged, can’t you dear? Then clear it.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Something in it for everyone,” she said.

“Don’t do me any favors.”

“Got no cause to talk to me like that,” she said. “Ain’t my fault you couldn’t get what you want out of him. You’re a reporter. I figured you can squeeze truth from a stone.”

A light changed to red. They were through the intersection before Jordan brought the car to a stop.

“Pay some mind to your driving,” Cherise said.

They rode in silence to Clam Creek, a tidal inlet edged by boat yards and marine repair shops. The smell of cooking oil, not fresh, blew from a cedar shack in the shell lot.

“The fried scallops,” Cherise said. “That’s all I got to say to you now.”

They ordered from the take-out window, sat down at a picnic table on a grit beach. The wind swirled sand into the food, and chased them back into the car.

“There’s a pier on the next street with a view,” Cherise said. “Park there, and we won’t have to look at each other.”

Jordan’s first date in Atlantic City had brought him to nearby Absecon Inlet to watch the submarine races before pulling him into the back seat. Cherise had nothing else on her agenda but scallops.

He balanced a bottle of Pepsi against his crotch as he backed out of the lot. After investigating a couple of dead ends they found a concrete dock that was home to a fleet of rustbucket trawlers. The Hornet spun its wheels in a sandy windrow, and stalled. Jordan re-started the engine, and the heavy car bounced onto the pier past a small ice house.

“You’re not paying attention again,” Cherise said. “Slow down.”

Jordan hit the brakes. The pedal went to the floor, and he pumped it with the same result. Then he wrenched the emergency brake. The car slowed, but not by much. Cherise pressed her foot against the mat. That didn’t help either.

An old man crabbing at the end of the pier stared down the speeding Hornet, then dropped a rotten chicken breast and
jumped out of the way. Jordan slammed the transmission into reverse. The wheels locked to the tune of shrieking gears, and the rear end drifted. He steered into the skid, and the car fish-tailed, straightened, crashed through a railing, and snagged on a piling with the front wheels dangling over the water. Jordan took a deep breath. Before he could let it out, the car nosed into the sea.

Flung against the steering wheel, he bit his tongue. A crack zigzagged across the windshield from a starburst where Cherise struck it with her jaw. The car dipped under the chop, came level, and bobbed up like a rubber duck in a tub, thin streams entering through the dashboard vents. Looking out at water lapping against the window, Jordan remembered the salesman boasting of what reliable vehicles Hudsons were. But he hadn’t thought to ask if they were seaworthy. He tasted blood in his mouth, which wasn’t the worst thing. Then the front end began to sink, which was.

“Do something,” Cherise said.

Jordan swallowed blood, open to all suggestions.

The car went belly up. It settled hard on the bottom, and Cherise moaned as she was thrown against the roof.

They had air. No need to panic, Jordan told himself, and kept repeating it until his door refused to open. His hand was on the window crank when Cherise caught him.

“Roll yours, too,” he said, “so you’re not pushing against the ocean.”

“Don’t go without me.”

“You plan on staying?”

“I heard worse ideas.” She winced as she rubbed her chin. Blood ran up her arm, and she took time to decide whether to become hysterical. “I can’t swim.”

Jordan cracked open the window, eased himself down to the roof. Cherise began to mutter. He thought she was cursing, but decided it was a prayer. The door still wouldn’t move. He
cranked the window all the way down, shivering in blackness as icy water rushed over him. Then he tried the door again, heaved his shoulder against it, lay back and kicked.

“The frame’s bent,” he said. “It’s stuck.”

Cherise gobbled up air, gorged on it.

Jordan slipped off his shoes. He put his head out the window, squeezed his shoulders through, and swam free. Fifteen feet above, or a little less, sunlight dissolved against the surface of the bay.

Using the driveshaft, the transmission, the oil pan, he pulled himself over the undercarriage. Cherise hadn’t opened her door. The window remained sealed. He tugged at the handle, and the door swung easily.

She tackled him as he reached inside. He was in a no-holds-barred wrestling match that scorched his lungs and made him regret each of the tens of thousands of Luckys he’d lit since the first one when he was twelve. He got an arm around her throat (a submission hold; wasn’t that what the pro wrestlers called it?) and was adjusting his grip when he lost her. Clinging to his legs, she anchored him to the bottom while he calculated his responsibility to keep her alive.

He kicked her away, and exhausted himself going after her. When she’d almost quit struggling he took her again. Scissoring his legs, he started for the surface, marking time until he switched to a frog kick that brought him into the sun and the frigid salt air he couldn’t get enough of.

A wave caught him in a trough that funneled the horizon. On the back side was the dock. He paddled with one hand, the other inching Cherise’s face out of the water. The old man tossed a line, nearly skulling him with the crab pot. He kicked as the old man reeled him in, but the cold took his remaining strength, and it was all he could do to hang on.

Cherise was wracked by a fit of coughing that threatened to sink them. The old man shouted something in Spanish that
Jordan didn’t understand, pointing to rungs at the side of the dock. Jordan let the tide carry him, and the old man went down to the water, and took Cherise. Climbing after them, Jordan saw her on her side with her eyes rolled back, not breathing. Her skin was ashy. The old man drew a cross over his heart.

Jordan zipped open her jacket, pressed the heel of his hand below her ribs, and tried to force life back into her body. All he knew about artificial respiration was what it looked like in the movies. Water belched from her mouth with every push. More spilled from her nose. Still she wasn’t drained.

He pushed, released, pushed again, assumed the rhythm of breaths that refused to come. The old man sighed, rolled the lids over Cherise’s eyes, and put his hand on Jordan’s arm. Jordan didn’t let up. An eye fluttered—he thought it did—and he pushed harder, then spread her lips apart and blew air into her lungs while he pinched her nose. Cherise gagged. She shoved him away, and the old man cradled her head through another coughing bout. “You broke my ribs,” she said when she could talk.

“That’s the thanks I get for nearly killing myself saving you?”

“You’d’ve slowed down like I told you, we wouldn’t’ve gone in the water in the first place.”

Her eyes shut. Jordan collapsed beside her, and would have frozen, he thought, if a couple in a forest green Nash hadn’t stopped to see what the commotion was about. The couple loaded them into the back seat wrapped in blankets, and ran the engine with the heater on high. The man said, “Hospital’s not far. I can bring you, if you want.”

“I don’t need a hospital,” Cherise said, “just a bowl of hot soup, and to lie under a hundred covers near my radiator.”

“What about you?” the man said to Jordan.