Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (18 page)

"I think you have to seem a tad warmer, Stockman. Try kneeling down to his level."

"Kneeling?"

"Sure, try it."

He kneeled. You could hear the poor bastard's knees click all the way to Queens. But he kept his fist cocked! Jellyroll turned away.

"I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable. Mr. Fleckton, are you out there?"

"Right here, Stockman." Fleckton was the account exec, whom I believed cultivated consciously his obsequious exterior to mask a heart like a crushed beer can.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Fleckton, but this cur is impossible to work with. I've been in this business for forty years."

"But Stockman, that's our spokesdog."

Now we were down to it. It was that simple, and that's what stuck in Billingsly's craw. The
dog
was irreplaceable. Momentarily I felt sorry for the old man. But I didn't want to temper my anger with sadness, so I pinched it off.

"Then I think you should consider finding a competent handler, I really do, Mr. Fleckton. Okay, let's run it." And he charged to his place. Maybe Jellyroll thought Billingsly was charging him, maybe he was more generally confused, but he stepped directly in front of the charging has-been. Billingsly tripped over Jellyroll and would have fallen had he not caught himself on the phony breakfast nook, which broke. He stood still and collected himself. Then he drew back his boot to kick my dog.

"Halt, motherfucker!" It was me. Every mouth in the room gaped open, and I heard on the fringes of my awareness a collective gasp.

"What! How dare you—?"

"You were about to kick my dog!"

"How dare you? I was not! My shin! I injured my shin! I was rubbing it!"

"Bullshit!"

"Artie, drop it."

"I'll sue you, Deemer! Barbarian! I'll sue you for damages!"

"Damages? Damages!" I bellowed. "You haven't seen damages yet, you wooden fuck! I'll show you damages." And I moved on him. Did I really intend to hurt Stockman Billingsly? Kevin, face contorted, moved to shield my victim, Jellyroll bolted, the camera people seemed to converge on me, but I only took a step and a half before being enfolded in black tree trunks. Calabash carried me away, my shoes two feet off the ground, and before he put me down, he said quietly in my ear, "Good ting you got a bodyguard. You a very hostile fellow."

"That's all for today," I heard Kevin announce. Then, pointing to Fleckton, he said, "I'll meet you gentlemen in the conference room."

"Kevin," I said as he passed, "he was going to kick Jellyroll."

"That's not how it looked to me." He walked away.

Phyllis gently took my forearm and led me into the hall near the restrooms. "Artie," she said, "you're having some kind of crisis here. You're in some kind of a rage. Are you in therapy?"

"I was."

"Get back. I have names if you don't. After that you need someone else to love. I'll call you." She patted my shoulder and returned to the studio. People glanced my way as they buttoned their raincoats at the street door. They looked at me as if I had been fiddling with myself on the IRT, that mixture of revulsion and fear.

"I guess people in the arts," said Sybel, "tend to be a little high-strung."

"The Theater of Cruelty."

Sybel seemed more concerned than repulsed or frightened. I thought she'd walk out on me again.

Jellyroll sat down at my knees and looked up. "Are you in therapy?" his eyes seemed to ask.

He must have been watching my building. Sybel, Calabash, Jellyroll, and I weren't inside five minutes when the phone rang. "You watchin' it?" he asked.

Leon Palomino. They
all
had my number. "Watching what?"

"The news. Go turn it on."

We stood around in a clot, watching. Sybel caught on first and gasped.

Renaissance Antiques was engulfed in flames. LIVE said a sign at the bottom of the screen. The roof caved in with an enormous cough, and the flickering red reflected on our faces in the darkened bedroom. Fire-fighting equipment covered Eleventh Street. From the Broadway side, pumpers arced jets of water, but the fire didn't blink. "No, we can't rule out arson at this time," intoned the Fire Department spokesman.

"Did you do that?" I asked Leon.

"What, you think I'm callin' you to admire another guy's torch job? Look, I've been doin' some thinking about the night Billie and my brother got killed. Maybe you want to hear what I saw the next night. Maybe you want to pass it on to Pine, maybe not, I don't know."

"What?"

"Not on the phone. I got two tickets to the Mets tomorrow. Me and Freddy were hopin' to attend, but hell, he can't make it. Gooden's pitching."

"What time?"

"One-thirty start, but let's get there for BP. I'll leave your ticket at the booth." He was giggling, maniacally, I thought, when he hung up.

I told Sybel and Calabash.

"Jesus," said Sybel, "you didn't accept!"

"We're off the hook!" I said. "We don't even need to tip them off!"

"What?"

"They're going to
find
Freddy in that fire!" What a beautiful prospect that seemed to me. I was so far gone that the exquisite irony—Freddy found in Billie's refrigerator after a conflagration in the building she'd been spying on—made me giggle, a lot like
Leon's giggle. "We're in the clear!" Events had leapfrogged over us and our photographs. We and they were now obsolete and, therefore, my logic went, safe from the cops and crazies.

"Do you think there would be anything left of him?" said Sybel.

"Refrigerators don't burn up! That's the beauty of it," I actually enthused. "This writer friend of mine keeps all his originals in the fridge. We never even
heard
of any photos or any note from Billie. Nothing. Innocent bystanders."

"I'm going home," Sybel said. "Will you watch me home, Calabash?"

"Be my pleasure."

"They're going to question you about the fire, Sybel."

"No kidding."

"But you're an innocent bystander employee. You didn't see a thing. No corpse in the vault, as far as you know."

"Will you shut up!"

"Yes."

"What about that poor Stockman Billingsly?"

"Huh?"

"He's going to lose his job, isn't he?"

SEVENTEEN

C
ALABASH WAS UP early, sitting in my morris chair, loading guns, examining chambers, peering into barrels. Jellyroll lay across his feet. Every now and then Calabash would raise one foot playfully, then the other, causing Jellyroll's body to rollercoaster. He wagged his tail after each trip and growled for the next. Ignore the munitions and this would have seemed a sweet domestic moment. I pretended not to notice when, as we left to walk Jellyroll, Calabash stuck a gun into his waistband and covered it with rain gear.

The rain had slowed the city. Pedestrians had given up. That head-down urban gait had devolved to a primitive, melancholy plod. Even the Jersey car commuters had lost all hope, sitting in five-mile lines, indifference and lassitude painted on their faces. Riverside Park at a glance could pass for a rice paddy in Laos. Jellyroll loves to wade.

Calabash clutched my forearm and I froze. "Look at dat!"

A decapitated chicken, wings unfolded, lay at our feet in the mud. A penny had been placed on its breast, and the carcass was surrounded by candle nubs. Propitiatory rites. I had seen this before.

"Dey got dat here?"

"Everything." My bodyguard had gone rigid on me. "You're, uh, familiar with Santeria?"

"It runs in de family."

Rivulets of rainwater had separated the feathers on the chicken's breast, leaving channels of pink flesh, and Calabash seemed to be sinking into a private funk.

A wan, emaciated wino sat in the rain on a nearby bench. His clothes were saturated. He held the bare metal skeleton of an umbrella over his head, and in a chilling squawk he sang, "No, no, they can't take that away from me."

On the way home, I bought a
Post
from Akmed's newsstand on Broadway: ARSON, in filthy two-inch type. Calabash and I hunkered under the awning to read while Akmed crouched to cuddle Jellyroll. This was a daily ritual, Jellyroll licking Akmed's face, whining with affection, while Akmed mutters sweet nothings in an ancient language. Too bad he had no English; Akmed would be a natural for Stockman B.'s spot. "Two gas cans were discovered on the scene, typical in cases of arson by amateurs," said an FDNY heavy. But there was no mention of poor Freddy. At least a day of cooling, I proclaimed to Calabash, would be needed before they could search the debris. "How do you know dat?" he asked reasonably. But, clearly, if they'd found him, the headlines would have been different, FRIED FROZEN...A CORPSE IN THE CRISPER. The
Post
would have had a field day. On the way home, Jellyroll did a second round of business in the gutter, and I picked it up with the
Post
, a perfect mating of tool to task.

Calabash sat in my Morris chair like Queequeg, brooding on the implications of that sacrificial chicken. When with distracted strokes he began to clean his guns, I went into the bedroom to call Sybel. No answer.

I tried to listen. I chose Ben Webster and Art Tatum for their sumptuous, lucid tones. That's what I needed, lucidity. Any bit of sumptuousness would be a bonus. Jellyroll sighed, stretched, and flopped across Calabash's feet. I heard "All the Things You Are" and "Where or When," but I couldn't concentrate.

The air reeked of gun oil, but that's not what blocked concentration. It was Billie, haunting me. I saw her in that sweet organdy dress at the foot of the stairs as her infant brother bounced down them. "Like Dolly's neck." The stairs had a red runner, and the banister was white. There was a wood-framed mirror on the wall
at the first landing where Billie stood and where Gordon died, and a half-round table beneath the mirror. The image was clear and sharp, but the setting was incongruous for a desert airbase cabin, too frilly, too suburban colonial. Then I realized that out of my own youth I had called up the set from
Dad's Home!
, Stockman Billingsly's paean to domesticity. Billie, young Billie, in that setting, her brother dead at her feet, made me feel like breaking something. I phoned Buzz at the Big Eighth.

They hadn't found Harry Pine's file despite their top-to-bottom search. Bessie, however, had remembered one thing: Harry Pine's last address. Moxie, Florida. "Bessie only remembered," said Buzz, "because the name's odd. Moxie." I looked it up in the atlas. Moxie was a couple of bean fields on Route 441, running east-west between West Palm Beach and Belle Glade on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. Near Lion Safari Land. Then I tried Sybel again. No answer.

I phoned Jellyroll's agent. "What a dog, what a dog," Shelly exclaimed before I stated my business. "I told them straight out, there will be a delay. Canine immunization. You know what they said? They said, 'You take all precautions with our star.' What a dog! I told them ten days. How's that? Ten. You'll
definitely
be ready in ten days, right, Artie?"

"Right, Shelly." I was certain he had heard about last night's fracas. News travels fast around the small world that cared, at least enough to gossip, that the R-r-ruff Dog's owner was cracking up, and I wondered how Shelly would handle it. Discreetly, apparently. We chatted for a few minutes about Samoa. "Lotta fine twat in the tropical regions" was Shelly's view. Shelly was frightened for his livelihood.

"I'd like you to do me a personal favor, Shelly."

"You just name it, Artie boy."

"Do you know Stockman Billingsly?"

"The famous lush? Sure."

"I'd like you to help him out if you can."

"Stockman Billingsly," he said, pretending to write it down. "Check."

"Thanks, Shelly."

"No prob. Let me just say two words to you, Artie:
ten days."

"Right, Shelly." In ten days I could be awaiting trial. Or burial.

I tried Sybel again. No answer.

Then, before noon, I asked Calabash if he had ever seen the Mets play.

"I'll bring de heat," he said packing up. "She's gettin' to dose reefy shores, don't you tink?"

Gary Carter swung in his distinctive fashion from inside the BP cage and drove two ropes over second base, then another deep to the opposite field, catchable, two strides in from the wall. I reminded myself that I wasn't there to study baseball. Before Carter's next swing, at a cue I didn't see given, the Mets jogged off the field, and the ground crew rolled out the tarp. Sheltering from the rain in the runway entrance to the third-base-line box seats, I scanned the spectators through binoculars. There weren't many. I saw no one I recognized, except Leon. Calabash jumped when a 747 from La Guardia cranked on full boost over left field. That goddam voodoo chicken!

Leon Palomino sat alone ten rows above the dugout. He was eating a hot dog. I pointed him out to Calabash, who found him with the binocs, then went to take a seat twenty rows behind him. It was too early and too wet for the ushers to care where we sat. Then I scanned the nearby seats in search of someone who seemed to be watching Leon, but I saw nothing suspect. Leon and I were probably the only suspects in Shea Stadium that day.