Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (4 page)

H
ere’s what I expected. She had blackmail material, and though I wasn’t involved in the actual ass-whipping, I was there and was part of the deal by proxy, and the way it would come down was all of us on that video, and that included Officer Carroll, were about to get rubbed raw as hamburger meat.

“You think I’m here to blackmail you, don’t you?” she said.

“Never crossed my mind. Why would a nice lady like you blackmail anyone?”

“Shit, boy, you’re a bad liar. If you were a woman you couldn’t fake an orgasm.”

“All right,” I said. “It crossed my mind. And just for the record, I think I could fake an orgasm.”

“Totally,” Brett said.

“I want you to take my case,” said the lady, “if that’s what it’s called. Think that’s what they say on the TV shows, or maybe it’s movies. Are there private eye TV shows anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Those were always kind of fun,” she said. She seemed to be thinking about a favorite episode of something before she shifted to: “Here’s the way I see it.” She patted the tablet. “I want you to find my granddaughter. The cops gave up. For them it’s a cold case, and from what I can tell it’s not getting any warmer. I’ll be honest. I don’t have any illusions. I’m too old to have any. She’s most likely bones by now, but I want her body found, and I want to know what happened to her.”

“You don’t need threats,” Brett said. “We just need payment. Actually, I own this agency now, so it’s me you deal with.”

“Well, that’s the rest of the problem,” she said. “I got some money, but not what it takes to do the deed, cause I presume it’ll take awhile, and usually this stuff is by the hour, right? That’s why I brought the tablet. What’s on it is my down payment. And if you’re thinking of pushing me down the stairs, I got a copy of this elsewhere, somewhere where you can’t get it. I’m pretty tech-savvy for an old geezer.”

“I think you’re a lying bitch,” Brett said. “How much money you got?”

“How much you need?” the old lady said.

They went back and forth with that for a while until it was determined the old lady had about half of what Brett charged for a couple of weeks, having raised her prices from those Marvin used. I guess she was thinking about paying for the paint and the new furniture and a lot of vanilla cookies and the toilet paper for the snazzy bathroom.

When the money talk was done, and an inferior sum was agreed to, the old lady pulled a manila envelope out of her purse. Inside were some papers and photos of her granddaughter. She was a good-looking girl in a short white dress and those Greek lace-up sandals. She had thick red hair like Brett’s and like maybe the old lady’s original hair used to be. The girl was striking a model pose, which was appropriate, because her grandmother said, “She wanted to be a model when she was a kid, then she wanted to be a journalist. Her name is Sandy Buckner.”

“What’s your name?” Brett asked.

“Lilly Buckner.”

“We have a painting of lilies on the bathroom wall,” I said.

“What?” Lilly said.

“Never mind,” I said.

Brett asked her a few questions, and I listened. Five years ago Sandy had gone missing. She had graduated college with a journalism degree and found that the newspapers and magazines that did hard news had gone the way of the dodo bird and drive-in theaters, so she tried being a weather girl, but she was no good at it. She looked wonderful on camera, but she had zip charisma, as her grandmother put it. It’s odd how that works. There are people who in life are beautiful, but on film, beautiful or not, they have all the personality of a ham sandwich without the pickles, and then there are those who look all right, nothing special, a little too thin, but the camera loves them, spruces them up, makes them glow. Sandy didn’t glow. She was just pretty. She ended up taking a job at a used-car lot that only sold high-end used cars—Mercedes, Lincolns, Cadillacs, muscle cars, that kind of thing—mostly old cars that had become rare and classic.

Sandy worked there six months and was making some money, then one day the boss called Lilly Buckner looking for Sandy. Hers was one of the numbers Sandy had left as a contact. She hadn’t come to work, and she never showed up again. She hadn’t been seen for five years. Her car, which wasn’t up to the level of those she sold but was pretty nice, had been found in the parking lot of the apartment complex where she rented. It was a nice complex, and it and the pretty nice car led Lilly to think Sandy was making money that was a little too good.

The whole missing-person business had gone through cop channels without any solution. Lilly hired a private agency that had taken her money and told her what she already knew, then went out of business. The owner of the agency decided being a private eye lacked some of the excitement he had hoped for and had gone into real estate. Ms. Buckner said it made her happy the bottom fell out of the market right after he made that decision.

Then she saw us and the dog. She talked to the cops and got Marvin’s name, and then she researched him, and that led to all of us. She did it, she said, because all she had to do was shit and eat. She discovered Marvin had an agency, and now Brett had it.

She researched us to brag on us saving the dog. She did in fact do that while she was with us, said good things about us, but thought Brett might could use a little less eyeliner, told her she had to watch tight shorts when they got sweaty. “You get a camel toe you’re not careful,” she said. It sounded like a sincere suggestion. Brett gave me a look that said: What the hell?

Ms. Buckner rambled on. She thought Leonard was good-looking for a colored man. Said she always voted against any politician if he smiled too much. She told us a lot about herself, pretty much everything there was to know except her personal laundry tips.

“This granddaughter,” I said. “I take it you two had special feelings about one another.”

That reeled her in a little.

“I understood her,” she said. “I had been the black sheep of the family years before, and now she was. Modeling and journalism, any plan but marriage and being Suzy Homemaker, wasn’t something my daughter Kate understood. Maybe that was my fault. I didn’t set a good example for her. I had this stupid idea when I was younger that art trumped all things, including family. I thought I had great talent and great pride, but what I had was hubris. I still have a substantial dose of it.”

“Oh, you don’t say?” Brett said.

“You are a shit, aren’t you?” Ms. Buckner said.

“Takes one to know one,” Brett said.

“I was a bad mother, no doubt. I was always worried more about me than her. My daughter wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She treated me like gas from a calf’s ass after she left home. Not that I blamed her. She wanted things more conventional. Damn if I didn’t outlive her. Cancer got her. Self-righteous and proper and all that, praying all the time, and she ended up wired up like a spaceman and easing away in inches and shitting in a bag. I saw her right near the time she died. I thought we might at least close our ledger. Kate didn’t even know who I was. Poor thing, she looked then like I look now, and she was middle-aged. That cancer sucked the juice right out of her.

“My granddaughter had done the right things, gone to school, got a degree. Stuff her mother ought to have been proud of. Better than what I’d done by a long shot. But Kate thought Sandy should be going to college not for a BA but instead a MRS. Didn’t matter. The degree didn’t work out, but Sandy took a job. She was like this one.” She nodded at Brett. “A pistol.”

“How was her eyeliner?” Brett asked.

“A little heavy, you want to know the truth. I say go big, but don’t go giant. Look like you’d like some action, but not like you’re ready to pull the train on the local football team.”

“So she was a pistol,” I said. It was an attempt to get things back on track. I knew Brett. Once she decided she didn’t like someone, it was hard to steer her out of a path of hit and run. Or, rather, hit and back over the bleeding corpse.

“Yep. She was indeed a pistol. Had all the chambers loaded, too, just like this one said. I liked her for that. I tried to help her here and there. I think she appreciated it. It was hard to tell. I think somewhere in there she had her own plans and thoughts, and I think she had a hard time expressing love and appreciation. I’m like that. You start showing me affection, I start waiting for the other shoe to drop, the trap to close. I don’t know how to deal with it. Enough maudlin shit. I’ve told you everything but my shoe size.”

“Would be about a man’s ten, wouldn’t it?” Brett said.

“That’s just mean, girl,” Lilly said to Brett. “Weight and shoe size on women is hitting below the belt.”

“I know,” Brett said. “I thought you had it coming.”

“I may have. It was something I would have said for sure. Look. Enough shit. I want you to find out what happened to her, and bring either her or her bones back if you can. I need to know.”

Experience gave me a thought. I said, “Let me ask you something personal. Did you ever loan her any money, give her any money?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“Let me put it another way. Did she ever take any of your money without asking?”

“I suppose you could say that. She took some things from my safe. Some of it was money, some of it was securities, things like that.”

“How much money?”

“About fifty thousand dollars.”

“Damn,” Brett said.

“Yeah,” Ms. Buckner said. “Damn.”

“And the securities?” I asked. “She cash them in?”

“Forged my signature, worked her charms, I guess.”

“You didn’t look at that a little askew?” I asked. “That seems to me to not be doing everything right. A common name for someone like that is goddamn thief.”

“She needed the money. Like I said, she had pride. She didn’t know how to ask for it, so she took it. I think she would have paid it back. I think she meant to, anyway. Hoped she could. But then something happened. I’m guessing she got in some kind of trouble and had to have it and was afraid if I didn’t give it to her things could be really bad. Whatever those things were, she didn’t want to tell me.”

“Sounds like to me it’s what Hap was saying,” Brett said. “She’s a thief who stole your money.”

“Maybe,” Ms. Buckner said. “Maybe she did. I don’t care. I loved her, and I don’t love much, other than animals. I’ve had cats and dogs, and I loved them. Now I don’t have any. Outlived everything I ever loved, it appears, and who the hell wants to get up early to take a dog out to shit? At my age I’m not adding anyone or anything new to the mix. The rest of the world can go to hell. Except for Sandy. Maybe she didn’t always show good sense, even if I think she had it. I still want to find her.”

Then she gave Brett a financial retainer and went down the stairs, doing that elephant walk with the one-tap-shoe sound. She had to struggle down the stairs in the way she struggled up. I think Brett would like to have helped her down by kicking her in the ass. I sort of wanted to give her a piggyback ride myself.

She was salty as a bar nut, but I got to tell you, I appreciated that. I like people with a little spice, even if it gives me a bit of heartburn. I looked out the window and saw her work herself into a vanilla Mercedes and glide it out of the lot, not bothering with the exit. She drove right over the curb with a thump, and then she was on the road. The middle of it. She struggled the car along without running over anyone, though she narrowly missed a parked car and a wandering squirrel.

She got to the end of our street, turned in front of brake-grinding and horn-screeching traffic, and maneuvered away slowly, like a blind turtle, until she was out of sight.

F
or someone who talks tough, I think she was all flatulence and no guts,” Brett said. “Letting her granddaughter off the hook like that.”

“Flatulence?”

“I was trying to class up our conversations.”

“All right,” I said. “But you should have said ‘all flatulence and no intestines.’”

“It’s so rare you’re right,” Brett said. “But when you are, you are.”

We were lying in bed at home and had just finished what Ms. Buckner had called the dirty dog.

“I think she’s tough, all right,” I said. “I just think her granddaughter, Sandy, is her soft spot.”

“Like Leonard is yours?”

“You and Leonard,” I said. “Though maybe I’m Leonard’s soft spot. If he was any tougher he’d be made out of leather and stuffed with nails. He should have been dead several times over, but he’s too tough to die. He’s waiting to get old so he can whip death’s ass.”

“You’ve survived your share of bad moments,” Brett said.

“With Leonard it was toughness, with me it was luck.”

“He’s not always so tough.”

“You mean lately?” I said.

“Yeah, the stuff with John,” Brett said. “How does a gay guy stay a conservative, by the way? John’s brother is a big-ass Republican, and he’s always thumping the Bible and telling John he’s going to go to hell for being gay.”

“Well, Leonard has been hit in the head a few times,” I said. “That could account for something. Frankly, he’s been changing his political affiliation as of late. Thinks Republicans have become assholes, so he moved to the Log Cabin Republicans.”

“That the gay Republicans?”

“Yep. But then he thought that was too much of ‘an elite’ club, so he’s become a Libertarian.”

“Aren’t they just mean-spirited I-got-mine-and-fuck-everyone-else Republicans?”

“A lot of them are. But they’re more like the old Republicans—least that’s the way Leonard aligns himself. Eisenhower without a heart. He fits there.”

“Except when he doesn’t,” she said. “He can have a pretty big heart.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He can. You vote Republican, don’t you?”

“You’ve never asked before.”

“No. But I’ve wondered.”

“I don’t really have a party I like,” she said.

“Who does?”

“I vote mostly Democrat, though I voted for Reagan, to my regret.”

“I don’t fit neatly with either side,” I said. “We’re all like goats if we’re honest. We find our pastures but we love to put our heads through the fence and nibble a bit of the grass on the other side. No one fits anywhere perfectly.”

“I don’t know,” Brett said. “I can think of one place you always fit perfectly.”

“Oh, you flatterer,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I figured I needed to throw in a compliment so you wouldn’t worry too much about me faking an orgasm now and again.”

“Nice,” I said. “The old lady got that on your mind?”

“I guess. Talk about soft spots: now you have a new one. Buffy.”

I turned my head, looked at Buffy resting on one of the doggie beds we had bought her. We had one downstairs, one at the office, and one here, upstairs in our bedroom. She had to be coaxed to come upstairs, and then when she did she stayed there until we invited her outside to go to the bathroom. She seemed frightened to ask for the outdoors, the way a dog will do, poking you with its nose, wagging its tail, and barking. We had to take her out at regular planned intervals so she wouldn’t hold it in. I felt like she’d do that until she burst.

“Stop overfeeding her,” Brett said. “You’re acting like a southern mother.”

“She seemed a little skinny to me,” I said.

“Well, you got her back on track now,” Brett said.

I pulled Brett close to me. “Off topic, but have you been wishing you hadn’t bought Marvin’s business? Nursing was at least regular.”

“I did wake up this morning wishing I could pour shit out of a bedpan, but other than that, and the long hours and the yelling doctors and men trying to put their hands on my ass and up my skirt, I’m not missing it as much as you might think. Besides, I got a nest egg for us. I can afford time off.”

“I don’t want your nest egg,” I said.

“I know that. But it’s there anyway. It’s our nest egg. What’s mine is yours.”

“I found that out just a short while ago.”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“You know what I miss?” I said.

“What?”

“Leonard, damn it.”

“Yeah. Me, too. He’s so cute when he wants his cookies.”

“Family couldn’t afford a lot of extras. He’d go to his uncle’s house, and Uncle Chester always had vanilla cookies and Dr Pepper on hand. I think it’s a comfort food.”

“That explains things.”

“Yeah. You know the hats he likes to wear?”

“Childhood something or other?” she asked.

“No. He’s just an asshole. I thought I should remind you of that before we became too nostalgic for him not being here.”

“He is at that, but you can sure see the kid in him when he wants those cookies.”

“He has eyes like Buffy’s,” I said.

“You’re right. He really does. He was messy, ate all the cookies, drank up all the Dr Peppers, interrupted us during sex by knocking on the door, knowing full well what we were doing in here, and he stayed up and played the TV loud downstairs, left his dirty drawers on the floor between his room and the living room. Left them so I could get them washed.”

“You made me do the wash,” I said.

“I know, but I had to point the drawers out to you,” she said. “Shit, aren’t gays supposed to be neat and listen to show tunes?”

“Just the ones who do,” I said.

“Still, I miss him.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Should I see if he wants to come back?”

“Not on your life,” she said.