Life's Work (19 page)

It had been clear all along that Bill wasn't a very bright man. What I hadn't recognized before was that he was also a naive and crudely sentimental one. C.W. had seemed to have little trouble, at first, manipulating him, presumably using her pregnancy, her sex appeal, a little old-time religion, and what small guilt Parks himself must have felt for the death of Barb Melcher to bring him to hand. He had foolishly given her his loyalty. Nor was she the only person in whom Bill had placed a misbegotten confidence. By anyone's standards, he didn't owe Kaplan a thing following the bust -not after the financial screwing that the Professor had given him. And yet Parks had refused to testify against his agent or anyone else. At least, he had refused at first. Unlike Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene, he'd been ready to go to jail for the rest of his life to protect his so-called friends.

I didn't pretend to fully understand Bill's thinking, but from what I'd learned over the last few days, it seemed to me that he must have been a man guided chiefly, and stubbornly, by impulse. And whose instincts, in so far as they were governed, weren't governed by reason but by the myths of the clubhouse. Stick by your buddies no matter what and they'll stick by you. Although Bluerock was a much smarter man, I could see bits of the same psychology in him, just as I could see bits of C.W. and Barb in Laurel and her friend Stacey. I still had trouble seeing Parks as a victim -after what I'd found in that ranch house, I could never see him only as that. But it was becoming apparent that a lot of people had been jerking his lead, and that in the matter of the drug arrest at least, he had behaved more honorably than most of his friends.
 

I called Bluerock from a phone in the courthouse lobby and arranged to pick him up on my way back to the Delores. At ten sharp I pulled up in front of his house. Otto was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of the front porch overhang, staring placidly at the quiet Sunday street, a case of beer lying at his feet like the family dog. Six or seven of the cans had been opened, and dead soldiers were scattered like cigarette butts on the porch slats.

"Nothing like a good breakfast," I said to him as I came up the walk.

Bluerock grunted, then belched. "Yep," he said. "Most important meal of the day." He reached down, pulled a can of beer out of the carton, and tossed it over to me. "You look a little beat."

I opened the beer and took a sip. It was warm and flat, but it was wet. "It's been a busy morning." I sat down on one of the porch steps and drank the rest of the beer.

"I've been doing some figuring, sport," Bluerock said, as I drank his beer. "Whose idea was it to bring me in on this thing? Yours or Petrie's?"

"Mine," I said.

"And whose idea was it to dangle that carrot in front of my nose?"

"You mean the extra year of playing time?" I said.

He nodded.

"I came up with the idea," I said. "Petrie agreed to it."

"Just like that, huh?" Bluerock said.

"Just like that."

He stared at me with a disturbing smile. "I called Petrie this morning and told him his part of the deal was off. I don't take pay for being a friend to Bill or anyone else."

It took me a second to realize that he was offended. I'd offended him, by arranging for a payoff. If I'd thought about it the day before, I would have known better.

"I didn't mean any insult, Blue," I said to him. "It's just that it's likely to be risky. I thought you deserved to be paid for that risk."

He took a deep, noisy breath through his nostrils. "I'm not going to get pissed at you, Harry," he said, although he sounded plenty pissed. "But I want you to understand something. And I'm only going to say it once. I never did anything in my life that mattered to me just for money. And football matters to me. So do my friends. Got it?"

"I got it," I said.

"All right then," he said, blowing all the air he'd taken in through his nostrils out through his mouth. "Let's get started."

He got to his feet and stepped out into the sunlight. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with gaudily painted parrots on it, khaki safari shorts, gym socks, and sneakers. As big as he was, he looked like a hood on holiday.

As soon as he stepped off the porch, his bulldog face turned mean. It wasn't a meanness that had a direct object, either. It was an all-purpose mean. His huge brow furrowed, his gray eyes closed down to slits, his mouth shut like a car door being slammed. He was wearing his game face, and it couldn't have been more impressive if he were holding a sign that said, Don't Mess With Me.

"Are we going to kick some ass?" he growled.

"Well, not right this minute."

He shot me a dark look. "You better get ready to kick ass, sport," he said ominously. "Because trouble is coming. Don't you think for a minute that Walt doesn't know what you're doing, 'cause he does. From what I read in the papers, he dodged a bullet with Bill. And he knows it. He doesn't want you stirring up the waters. He doesn't want you finding Bill. He wants Bill good and dead. And that guy, Clayton, you told me about last night, you gotta figure he'd be just as happy if Bill were out of the way. Less trouble. Less embarrassment. Easier to explain things."

"Blue," I said. "We're not on a rescue mission."

"Maybe you're not," he said. "But nobody's proved Bill's guilty of anything, yet -doing drugs or killing the girl."

It was true enough. Perhaps it was a testament to my prejudices, but the thought hadn't even entered my mind.

"I think you better accept the fact that he murdered her," I said.

"And you'd better accept the fact that if you want to find out the truth, sooner or later you're going to have to talk to Bill. He's the only one who knows, sport. Nobody else was there."

I nodded grudgingly. "What if he doesn't want to talk?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Bluerock said. "There's still a lot of ground between us and it."
 
 

To my surprise, Laurel wasn't there when Bluerock and I stepped into the apartment at ten fifteen. She showed up about twenty minutes later, with a Pogue's shopping bag under her arm. She took one look at Bluerock -all six feet three inches, two hundred sixty pounds of him stuffed into that Hawaiian shirt and those khaki shorts- and her mouth fell open.

Bluerock gave her his cold, dismissive sneer. "Who's the chippy?" he said to me.

"You're a rude dude, aren't you?" Laurel said, dropping the shopping bag on the floor.

"Fuck you, lady," Bluerock answered, staring at her icily. "I don't have time for you."

Laurel put her hands on her hips. "Fuck you, too!" she snapped.

I stepped between them before they could come to blows.

"Laurel, this is Otto Bluerock. Otto, this is Laurel Jones. Laurel was a friend of C.W.'s."

"It figures," Bluerock said. "They travel in packs."

"At least my friends don't butcher pregnant women," Laurel said indignantly.

I told both of them to shut up. "You've got to get ready to leave," I said to Laurel. "And you ..." I stared at Bluerock.

He glared back at me. "And me-what?" he growled.
"Just cool it," I said. "Okay?"

"Just don't forget to say please," Otto said.
 
 

Trying to keep two prima donnas in an apartment the size of mine was no easy task. And I spent the next thirty minutes guarding the space between them. Around eleven thirty Laurel came out of the bedroom, a valise in one hand, a straw beach hat in the other.

"I guess I'm ready," she said, fitting the hat on her pretty blond head.

I checked her over, like a mother examining her child on the first day of school. She'd put on her Waterhole makeup -bright red lipstick, black eyeliner, rouge on her cheeks- and she was wearing a thin linen jumper with no underwear underneath. That was going to get her noticed long before she stepped out on the beach at Waikiki.

She smiled at me nervously. "Am I presentable?"

"Just barely," I said.

"This could be the last time we see each other," she said, with a sudden pout.

"I'll survive, Laurel."

"So will I," she said blithely. "Maybe I'll find me one of them rich, good-lookin' Hawaiian boys. Get married and raise sugarcane. They gotta be an improvement over some of the football players that you meet." She said it loudly enough so that Otto could hear her in the living room. I heard him grunt.

"Take care of yourself, baby," she said, giving me a peck on the cheek. "Don't think badly of me when I'm gone."

"Laurel, about last night . . .

She put a finger to my lips and shook her head. "Don't give it a second thought," she whispered. "That's just the way life goes. Like the song says -I gotta be me." She petted my cheek. "You look after yourself, hear?"

She picked up her suitcase and walked into the living room. Around twelve a taxi pulled up on Burnet outside the Delores. I helped Laurel take her bag down to the cab. Stacey was already sitting in the back seat, squirming with excitement.

"Stace!" Laurel squealed. "Can you believe it?" Stacey bounced up and down.

"No!" she shrieked. "Oh, God, it's just too much! Totally bosco!"

Laurel gave her a withering look. "You're going to have to watch your language when we get over there," she said as she got into the back seat beside Stacey. "You don't want those rich plantation owners thinking we're rubes, do you?"

I handed Laurel her bag and closed the door. She waved at me through the window. "Bye, Harry," she said. "I'll phone you when we get there!"

The last I saw of her, as the cab sped off, she was lecturing Stacey again on some fine point of etiquette.
 

When I got back upstairs I found Otto reading through the Candy Kane arrest sheet that had been lying on the rolltop desk.

"Did you know her?" I said.

He nodded. "I met her a couple of times. She was a sweet kid. Not much upstairs, but reasonably honest. I could never fathom why she hung around with that bitch C.W." He put the sheet back down on the desk and asked, "What did Barb have to do with Bill?"

I explained to him about the assault arrest, and the bearing it had on Parks's troubles with the law. I also gave him my theories on what had actually happened that night in Barb's apartment.

When I'd finished, he said, "If Bill was set up, I don't think Barb knew about it. She wasn't the conspiratorial type, and she was too stupid to keep all the details straight anyway. I think it was C.W.'s show from the start. She knew what would happen when she sprang that pregnancy bullshit on Bill. She knew he'd come out swinging. And when he took a poke at her, Barb must have gotten in the way." He shook his head. "Looks like she got in the way in a big way. The poor, dumb cunt."

I sat back on the couch and stared at him for a moment. "You know, Clayton couldn't have brought the bust off if he hadn't known that Bill would be holding. Isn't it about time that you came clean with me about his drug habits?"

"What do you want me to say?" Bluerock said, slapping his knees. "Yeah, he did some cocaine. So did the whole defensive line. So did most of the offense. So what?"

"I'm not passing judgment," I said. "I'm just checking the facts."

"Well, check this out, then," Bluerock said. "There are all sorts of reasons why guys do coke. And one of them is that it gives you an edge on the field. It doesn't make you think you perform better, you do perform better -at least, physically. Of course, the shit also distorts your judgment. But when you play nose guard, judgment isn't what counts. Reaction is what counts. I'm not saying Bill didn't also get high on the stuff. I'm just saying that when he started taking it it was to improve his game. Anyway, coke wasn't Bill's drug of choice."

"What was?" I said.

"The shit he got from Walt," Bluerock said bitterly.

"I thought he got his cocaine from Walt," I said.

"He did, but you can get that anywhere. From carpenters and bankers and deejays. From just about every other guy you run into at the Waterhole. Hell, they have a special room upstairs to get high in. What I'm saying is that you don't have to go to Kaplan's club to get flake. But you do have to go there if you want to get juice. At least, you do if you want to get it without a 'scrip."

"What's juice?" I said. I

"To a guy like Bill," Otto said with a grim look, "it was life itself."

"And what does that mean?"

"Juice is the musclebuilders' name for anabolic steroids, sport. For Dianabol and half a dozen other brands of injectable testosterone. It's what you take to get that ripped look. It's what you take to get superstrong."

"Bill took steroids on top of cocaine?" I said.

"Bill took steroids before he took cocaine. He's been doing them as long as I've known him."

Of course, I'd heard about anabolic steroids. There had been a number of recent articles on their abuse in amateur and professional sports. I knew they were an artificial form of male hormone, and I knew that athletes took them to build muscle. Most of the articles I'd read seemed to agree that they were effective, that a bodybuilder couldn't put on the same kind of bulk without using them. But you paid a hell of a price for getting big. At the very least, they screwed up your endocrine system, and at worst, they could outright kill you.