Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (10 page)

“So you were fucked like us?”

“No. Lady owns it shifted it into my name, and we messed with the dates of purchase. You’re not the only one who knows people. It’ll only be that way for a few hours, then it goes back to the way it really is, so we don’t get caught, but I was hoping that was enough.”

“Does this lady of yours work at Motor Vehicles?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “But she’s got some inherited money. We take vacations now and again, on her dime.”

Figures, I thought.

“But it doesn’t matter,” Cason said. “Frank has contacts, too, I figure. Some blackmail victims, perhaps, or someone on their payroll. Might be dropping a few dollars at places where she can get things done, including the DMV. She figured it out pretty quick. She didn’t say anything, but I could see it in her eyes. I had been squealed out, or something or other had gone wrong, because she knew from whatever she saw on the computer—whatever that guy in the lot saw and posted when he went back inside. She’s getting information in real time while you sit there. Next thing I knew the catalog was closed, I had her card and a promise to call, and I was out the door. It was done so smooth I hardly realized it until I was standing on the lot.”

“How it worked for us, too,” I said.

“Actually,” Leonard said, “our exit was less smooth.”

“Thanks to you and the goddamn petunias,” I said.

“I fucked it up,” Cason said. “I should have spent a few days building a backstory, setting some things up with friends, contacts. I could have made it work better, but I was thinking it might all just be bullshit. It wasn’t. Now I’ve got my radar up, and I want to find out more about the place. It’s quite the scam, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a lot more to it than what we think. I’ve got the nose for this kind of stuff, and I smell a big story here.” He tapped his nose to assure us he did indeed have the equipment with which to smell a story. “I don’t know what’s making it smell, but I want to find out. None of that helps you with Sandy, but maybe she’s in the mix somewhere.”

“She was a journalist,” I said. “Graduate in that profession without a job. What if she got wind of what was going on there and, being a looker herself, she thought she’d slip in, get a job as a car accessory, and find out the true story? She got past all the hurdles for what she wanted to do, slipped in and planned to write about it, and got caught.”

“Maybe she just liked the idea of money from high-class hooking,” Leonard said.

“Also a possibility,” I said. “And some journalists go the whole hog, invest right down to the skin.”

“That would be me,” Cason said. “At least it has been me.”

“All that is interesting,” Leonard said, “but what we got to think about is Sandy, even if her grandmother ought to be run over by a truck.”

“And after she gave you an orange soda,” I said.

“I’m ungrateful sometimes,” Leonard said.

I looked at Cason. “We owe you one.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “I’m still on this. You promised me the story if there was a story. I said I smelled one. I plan on keeping the nostrils wide open. I got contacts all over East Texas and elsewhere. There’s this guy here in town called Weasel. He might be able to find me something. He’s into everything, here and within two or three hundred miles of here. For all he’s done he’s only spent five years in the slammer. So he’s pretty connected and pretty sneaky. Weasel may be our guy.”

“Weasel?” Leonard said. “Now, that sounds trustworthy.”

“I don’t know his mother actually named him that,” Cason said. “He’s about five feet tall and slippery without being wet. He doesn’t act dangerous, but I suspect he is, at least to some degree. He’ll do most anything for a buck, and probably has.”

“Can you trust him?” I asked.

“Not entirely, but enough to get what I want if I pay him a little. Out of the money you gave me, of course.”

“So you’re hanging on to that?”

“I’ll give you half back now, but the rest I’m keeping for expenses and Weasel money.”

“All right,” I said. “For now, keep it all.”

We talked a bit more about things, but it was just the same thing we had discussed recycled, and so we quickly called it a night. Cason walked across the yard and drove away.

Leonard said, “Is it a problem I sleep in my old room?”

“Of course not,” I said.

Inside, Leonard headed to his room, the one we had built onto the house for him, and I went upstairs. Brett was lying in bed with the lamp on, reading a book. Buffy was lying beside her with her head in Brett’s lap. I told her Leonard was staying the night in his old room.

“Okay,” she said. “How’d it go with Mr. Slick?”

“A little of something and a lot of nothing,” I said and told her some of what he told us, because as the owner of the business she needed to know.

“So Weasel’s our next step.”

“Unless we can find more steps,” I said.

“This is turning out to be harder than I thought,” Brett said. “This private-eye crap.”

“Sorry you quit the nursing job now?” I said.

“Still not missing wiping asses,” she said, “though now and again I long to change a colostomy bag. As for the detective business, what I’m feeling is I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with two sets of teeth. Now I’m worrying about paying the building payment, the lights, water, Internet.”

“I always feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew,” I said. “And usually I have.”

“But it works out?”

“Mostly. I have to chew some of it for a long time, though. Sometimes a little of it slops out of my mouth.”

I took off my clothes and put on my pajamas and crawled under the covers. Brett turned out the light. “No alarm tomorrow,” she said.

“Suits me,” I said, and we held one another. Buffy started pushing in between us, trying to find her spot.

It was very nice, very homey, and very comfortable. Why can’t things stay comfy like that?

M
e and Brett got to the office about ten. It beat going into the chicken-processing plant at 6:00 a.m. or working in the fields from daylight to dark, but the idea of being an office man hadn’t quite taken hold of me. I had also given Cason our advance from Ms. Buckner, and that made me a poor office man and might require a bit of explanation to Brett later.

When Leonard came we went to the house to exercise. Out in the carport we lifted light free weights, then worked on a score of self-defense techniques, sparred lightly with boxing for a while, then switched to kickboxing. There was no way to do ground work comfortably, which is one reason it can be overrated. You fall down on cement or the hard ground, it’s different than if you’re working a mat or fighting someone whose basic approach you know, someone who doesn’t have a knife or pistol in their pocket or a buddy around the corner, or doesn’t have ring rules about gouging out your eyes. Going to the ground is not a choice I’d make on purpose. Still, it was a weakness in our game, because you don’t always get to choose if you stand or go down.

Leonard and I went at it for a while, making light contact, not anything brutal, just keeping ourselves loose, but it was hot already and nearly lunchtime, and we weren’t kids anymore, so we gave it up, went in the house. Leonard took a shower downstairs, and I took one upstairs. Leonard still had some clothes in a drawer in his room, and he had those on when I came down. I had changed into something loose and comfortable. I decided to make sandwiches for all of us to have at the office. While I was opening a can of tuna and putting it into a bowl to mix, Leonard said, “Seems we’re on to something, way Cason talked.”

“Yeah,” I said, spooning the right amount of mayonnaise into the bowl. “They’re careful. Once they get their hooks in someone, they’ve got them in deep, and the cash cow just keeps supplying the milk until it can’t anymore. Or they sense their victim is worn out enough to say, ‘Get me some popcorn and I’ll show the film myself.’ Maybe then they back off. It could become a standoff. You don’t care anymore, but now neither do they. So you don’t speak up about it, and they don’t show it to anyone. Everything stays even. I think it’s a careful con. They’ve done it enough to know when they can’t do it anymore, and I figure there’s some law involvement.”

“Some palms greased?”

“Yep. That way, say it’s a guy, he keeps his mouth shut because he can’t get any relief from either side, the law or the blackmailers. By just taking it in the ass, he keeps the wife, job, or both, or his civic pride, and they’ve made a healthy amount of money before whoever being blackmailed gets to the point where he, or she, doesn’t give a flying fuck anymore.”

“Thing is, our job isn’t to worry about the whores or the blackmail, it’s to find Sandy.”

“But can we actually leave the blackmail part alone?”

“Probably not,” Leonard said. “And they are most likely entwined.”

We wrapped the sandwiches in plastic, put them in a paper bag, got some cans of diet soda out of the refrigerator, including a Diet Dr Pepper, which Leonard cursed but would still drink in spite of the lack of sugar, and headed out to Leonard’s truck.

As he drove us over there, I said, “I’ll just mention this once, and then you can do with it what you want. How is it with you and John? Done?”

“I hope so, but then when it gets late, I hope not. I miss him then. I keep thinking if I had said this or that, or done this or that, it might be different. But I know deep down I wouldn’t do those things. I’m not going to ask a god I don’t believe in for forgiveness before I suck John’s dick or he sucks mine. But sometimes, when it’s late, I think I can do it for him. But a minute passes, and I know I can’t do it for anyone. I guess I’m selfish.”

“Just honest with yourself. After midnight everything is important, until about three or four in the morning, and then it’s still important, but less so. And then when you wake up in the morning most of it isn’t important at all.”

“I appreciate your letting me stay with you and Brett again.”

“You’re my brother. You’re always welcome, even when I don’t want you around.”

“It makes me feel better to know someone else is in the house, even if it’s not my house. That I’m not all alone.”

“And if John was at your apartment? How would that feel?”

“That wouldn’t feel so good, either. I think I’d try again, long as I didn’t have to play the games. I’d try until I pissed him off or threw him out. I’m actually thinking of buying a blow-up fuck doll. They have some very nice male ones.”

“Please promise me you will keep it clean,” I said.

“You have my word,” Leonard said.

“And that you will keep it at your place. For all that is holy, I do not want to wake up in the middle of the night and hear you making plastic squeak in our house.”

W
easel came by the office the next day with Cason. He was well named. He was small with a large nose and no chin and quick eyes and a wiry muscularity. He looked like he could squeeze through a hole smaller than he was. He was dark-skinned and maybe Hispanic, maybe black, maybe a whole gumbo of all kinds of folks. He wore a black shirt way too big for him. You could have housed two of him in it.

Even coming out of the heat and wearing black, he didn’t seem to sweat much. He was as cool a customer as a corpse. He came in ahead of Cason, gave the room a sweep. He moved like a guy who was used to checking his surroundings, watching for predators or prey.

Cason looked his usual dapper self, though he had a sweaty glow about him, and the front of his blue shirt and the underarms of it were wet with sweat. No deodorant in existence could defeat the onslaught of East Texas heat and humidity. Unless you were Weasel.

Cason nodded at Brett. Brett nodded back. Neither seemed comfortable with the other.

Weasel’s eyes continued to drift over all of us, then held on Buffy, who was holding down the couch. His eyes moved again, finally settled on Brett, who was sitting on the edge of the desk wearing white shorts and a loose green top.

Weasel said in a kind of Yankee voice with vowels so hard you could have used them to crack ice, “Oh, hell, lady, you are one sleek model.”

“Yes, I am,” Brett said. “Thanks for noticing.”

Introductions were made. Weasel had a last name. Rolf.

Cason said, “Weasel’s got some information. It’s sweeter than we thought; not as sweet as we’d like. And I’m going to say it right up front. Maybe questionable.”

“That hurts,” Weasel said. “After all we’ve meant to each other you got to go on and say something like that.”

“I can live with it,” Cason said.

Weasel grinned, took a client chair, and crossed his legs carefully, as if he were a girl in a short skirt and had to be careful about giving a free show. “You let people smoke in here?”

“Only if they’re on fire,” Brett said.

“Fair enough. I got some chew. You got a bottle I can spit in?”

“I can give you a bottle, and you can take it home with you to spit in,” Brett said. “There’ll be no spitting in anything in here.”

“You’re a ballbreaker, lady,” Weasel said.

“Just sanitary,” Brett said.

“Tell them, Weasel,” Cason said.

“I know a little about all this, cause there’s lots of us off the grid, so to speak, who do know some stuff. Know what I’m saying?”

We didn’t respond. He wasn’t waiting for us to. It was just his way of talking.

“I ask around, and I say, what’s the deal here, you know? Not that blunt, but that’s what it finally got to, cause I know some people know Frank, and they think she’s hot, but they don’t know what I know, that she’s an ex-con, a man that got his goober trimmed.”

“So far,” Leonard said, “you haven’t told us anything we don’t already know.”

“All right, then,” he said. “I’m coming to the good part, part worth the money Statler here is paying me. Some of this stuff I asked about, to my contacts, see, some I already knew. Intimately, you might say.”

“By the way,” Cason said to me. “When he says ‘money’ he means your money.”

Brett looked at me.

“Takes money to make money,” I said.

“Or it just takes money to lose money,” she said.

“Hey, you going to let me say my say here or what?” Weasel said. “You paid for it, so let me give it to you. Otherwise I got things I can do.”

“Go on,” I said.

“There’s a fellow I know, said he knows a fellow named Ron Bantor, and Bantor bought a car from Frank’s place. This was, I guess, five years ago. In fact, this information is five years old, and the fella told me about it, he can’t tell me anything now. But I remember the story.”

“And how did this fellow know about Bantor?” I asked. “And why can’t he tell you anything? Though I have an idea.”

“Coming to that. So this Ron Bantor, he finds out with the car comes some A-one hole. Sorry, lady.”

“Tell it however you will,” she said. “There’s nothing you can say that will cause me to like you less than I already do.”

“So the snatch comes with the car, and the car costs more than it ought to, even with the snatch that comes with it, cause, hell, ain’t none of that snatch made of platinum. And at some point, way I see it, a car is just a car. But more to the point, rumor was the snatch was named Sandy.”

“You know that for a fact?” Brett said. “That her name was Sandy?”

“Heard this whole story from a guy what knew, and I’ve checked with some outside sources, got pretty much the same story.”

“Pretty much?” Brett said.

“Not like this stuff gets written down, lady. It’s a kind of story might grow some hair as it rolls downhill. I can only tell you what I know, hair and all. So Ron, he’s got the car and the girl, this Sandy, but then he finds out it’s got a trip goes with it to Italy, and he wants to take it. Nice trip. Nice tail. Figures then he can come home and ride around in a nice car.”

“So far, so good,” Cason said.

Weasel sucked on his teeth, continued. “He does the trio. Car, girl, and trip to Italy. Hear what I’m saying? Then he finds there’s a fourth thing. They set him up in some nice Italian hotel, and they got a hidden camera and they got a movie, minus previews, of him putting the sausage in the grinder, you know. He finds this out when he gets home with the wife and the kids. Gets the bad news there’s a film of his shiny, dimpled ass filmed by his automobile-and-poontang dealers. You following me?”

“Quite easily,” Brett said.

“This Ron cat, he works for a big law firm here in town. Got a trophy wife and a lot of good connections. Plays golf with the right people. He’s pulled the right dicks and pinched the right tits, if you know what I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “We’re with you.”

“They start stretching those car payments, this car company,” Weasel said. “He paid in cash, he was that flush, but now it’s not enough. There’s some side money they want for not showing the nice little film of him to the wife, film of him lowering the helicopter into the canyon with this Sandy bimbo in Italy. He was supposed to be on a business trip, and there he is on film, bare-ass, in living color. They send it to him on an e-mail, take a chance, see. Something to really scare him. He checks that e-mail, opens that video, sees himself swinging his pecker, shits enough bricks to build a cathedral, e-mails back with a what-the-fuck’s-up comment. That’s when the serious contact starts. Frank—she, he, it, whatever the fuck she is—starts having him come by and drop off little packages with sizable money in it. He don’t even go home with coupons. Ron goes to this fellow I know, cause being a lawyer in a big law firm he knows some guys not quite on the straight and narrow.”

“Like yourself?” Leonard said.

“Like me, and my guess is like you two,” Weasel said, nodding at me and Leonard. “I hear some things here and there. You seem like a couple guys been around the block, and not walking around all of it on a direct path. Taking a few alleys here and there, climbing through a few windows.”

“Go on,” Leonard said.

“Ron goes to this guy he knows, one he got off a prison sentence for murder. He knows the guy was as guilty as O. J. Simpson, asks if he can help him out cause he don’t want to keep paying. He don’t want his naked skin on his wife’s or boss’s e-mail, spread around town, then on the Facebook thing, twittered or twatted or some such shit. I don’t know how all that crap works.”

I had a feeling he knew exactly how that stuff worked.

“Bring it back on topic,” Cason said. “You’re starting to break gravitational pull, getting way out there.”

“So Ron asks this old client of his who is not a straight citizen, asks does he know a guy can whack someone, and he’ll pay some serious jack to get it done so that he won’t have to keep paying serious jack for the rest of his life, and, too, he’s just mad, you know. This guy I know tells him no, cause he thinks the money, good as it is, is light in the pants for killing folks, but says he might know someone, and he puts me on it, asks me to see if I can find someone, cause I know the kind of crowd he needs. And Ron, because he has a big mouth, lays out to me exactly why he wants Frank dead. Here he is dealing with blackmail, worried about people knowing his business, and him a lying piece-of-shit lawyer, but he don’t know enough to keep his trap shut. What he’s doing is telling people he shouldn’t all his business he’s worried about keeping secret. I guess he figures he tells the slum crowd, he’s all right, but when you get right down to it, that’s not the crowd to tell. But hey, saying something and having a film of it is not the same thing. I mean, he knows that film gets shown, that’s more than talk. That’s the shine on the baby’s ass. You with me still?”

“In the neighborhood,” Leonard said.

“Got to be honest. Thought I could whack Frank for the dough Bantor was paying. I don’t know why he decided on Frank, cause I figure Frank is just the figurehead, not the top of the heap, but hell, who knows? And money is money, and who is who in all this is not important when that stuff is being waved under your nose. Pussy and money can get a man to do most anything but clean a sink after shaving.

“Sandy was on his list, too, cause she set him up, least that’s how he figures it. Don’t matter. It was some serious jack he was slinging around. Even thought I might could find this Sandy and do her, too, you know, if all expenses are paid and there’s a good fee for the final job. Thought I did good on Frank, I’d be willing to do Sandy, you see. Pop. She’s gone. That’s how I was thinking when the offer was laid out there. Gave it some serious goddamn consideration. Stayed up a night or two thinking on it, decided maybe it’s not my line of work. So I tell this other guy I know might like the job, and finally Ron has his man. Thing is, the man, this hired killer, ends up whacked himself.”

“Frank got on to the game?” I asked. “Beat him to the killing?”

Weasel shrugged. “Can’t say. Could have been like that. I doubt it, though. Frank’s not that tough, with a dick or without. Not a pushover or nothing, but killing like that, I don’t think so. Like I said, I don’t think Frank is the top of the heap. Bottom line is someone finds the would-be assassin Ron hired, this fellow I know and put him on to, finds him some miles from here in the Sabine River, or maybe it was the Trinity—shit, I don’t remember. Finds him with no shoes and an engine block tied around his ankles. He’s got a cut throat and no balls, and word around is the cuts on his throat and balls are from a sharp wire, not a knife. Imagine that. Snapping off a man’s goodies with a wire. That’s the rumor, anyhow.”

“Lots of rumors around,” Brett said.

“I’m going to believe it, myself,” Weasel said. “You should, too. Guy did this knew what he was doing. You might call him a throat-cutting goddamn deballing expert. Cut the balls off cause maybe that was just part of the fun. Maybe he took them back to lay on the doorstep of whoever wanted it done, like a cat will bring you a mouse. I don’t know. But the balls weren’t found. I guess they could be in the river, eat up by a catfish someone caught later and deep-fried, but I don’t think so. The shoes. I think they just come off in the water, the current, you know?”

“This guy that was murdered,” Leonard said. “He got a name?”

“Slide is what I knew him as. Black guy. Tough guy with muscles like you, had a shaved head, had that kind of look you got, except he was missing a light in his eyes. Kind of motherfucker makes a man nervous. Looked like he could spank a cougar and send it to bed without its supper. What he caught was meaner than a cougar. He put up a fight. I got word from a guy I know at the hospital that he had broken fingers, scratches, and one eye near torn out. So he fought back. They scraped under his nails, all that shit, but they didn’t find anything but more of him. And he had been in the water and all, maybe a week. Fucks with the DNA, that water does.”

“You sure know a lot of guys,” Leonard said. “On the street, in the hospital. Lawyers.”

“That’s what ole slick-ass Cason likes about me. I’m connected with the shit on the shoes. That’s why he came to me and how I’ve ended up here brightening your otherwise dreary day.”

“Slide have a last name?” I asked.

“Don’t know it,” Weasel said. “Me and him knew each other pretty good, but last names didn’t come up. We didn’t discuss pork-belly futures none, either.”

“You know all this and you don’t know the guy’s last name?” Leonard said.

“You just got to have it, I can find out, but who cares? This guy’s deader than dirt. Now what happens is the guy Ron asked first, guy told me about it…and you need a name I got it. Thurgood Small. White dude. He’d have made about four of me, some of it fat. Everyone called him Red Mop on account of this toupee he wore and didn’t think anyone knew it wasn’t real hair. Looked like someone froze a fucking flame on his head is what it looked like. Whatever it was made out of, it wasn’t hair. He done a little time, and it was rumored he’d done some murders for hire and got away with it. But Ron, he asks Red Mop again, and this time he puts some blocks under the money, adds in some more stuff with zeros, and Red Mop decides this time he’ll do it. He’ll go in and kill Frank, and then he’ll put the pop on Sandy for another slice of the pie, and anyone else Ron needs killing long as the money keeps climbing. Shit, them two killings was probably more than the first two or three blackmail checks ole Ron paid, but Ron, he’s mad now, feels like he got his asshole reamed, and he don’t like it. Matter of pride, I figure, not so much the money.

“So Ron’s guy, Red Mop, goes after Frank, and then next thing I hear, he’s not doing so hot, either. Died same kind of way. Second smile under his chin, propped him up down by a railroad track somewhere in our small world, pants down around his knees, dick hanging out of his shirt pocket, balls whacked off and gone, along with his toupee. Now two of the guys I knew was in on the deal were whacked. That got the hair on my balls to stand up, so me, I went quiet as a mute mouse in house shoes. Looked over my shoulder for a while. Two, three years go by, and no one comes to kill me. So I’m thinking I’m sliding. They, being whoever hired this deballing fellow, don’t know it was me that was the middle guy, or so it seems. I fell through the cracks. Two more years or so slip on, and I’m still here because I kept my big mouth shut.”