Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery
Read Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery Online
Authors: Dallas Murphy
L U S H L I F E
Also by Dallas Murphy
Lover Man
Don’t Explain
Apparent Wind
Rounding the Horn
To Follow the Water
Plain Sailing
To the Denmark Strait
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Dallas Murphy
ISBN: 1941298044
ISBN 13: 9781941298046
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line #253,
Leawood, Kansas 66209
For my folks
M
y thanks to Norman Bloch, Damien Bona, Jane Chelius, Fran Crimi, James Griffith, Douglas Grover, David Konigsberg, Ken Kurtenbach, Wade Leftwich, Myron Schulman, John Thackray, Pat Thackray, the folks at Amsterdam Billiards—Greg Hunt, Ethan Hunt, and David Brenner—my friends at Paperback Discounter Video 83, and as always to Eugenia Leftwich.
A NOTE ON NINE BALL
T
HE OBJECT OF the pool game called nine ball is simple—pocket the nine ball, and you win. The balls must be played in numerical order, one through nine. To make a legal shot (as opposed to a “foul”) all you must do is cause the cue ball to hit the lowest-numbered ball on the table. This is referred to as a “good hit.” Thus, you can win the game at any time by hitting the lowest-numbered ball in such a way as to cause it to sink the nine. This is called a “combination shot.” Since there are so few balls in the game, good players can often “run out,” in other words, sink every ball in numerical order up to and including the nine. But let’s say your opponent runs balls one through eight, playing brilliantly, but he/she misses the nine. If you then make the nine, you win. Sinking that ball is all that matters.
These are the general rules. There are some subtleties. There is, for instance, the “one-foul, ball-in-hand” rule. A foul results when a player scratches or fails to make a good hit. The penalty for a foul is serious, often decisive: the other player gets to place the cue ball
anywhere
on the table before he starts shooting. From that start, even mediocre players often run out.
You can try to cause your opponent to foul by driving the lowest-numbered ball into a strategically disadvantageous position, say, behind a cluster of higher-numbered balls. Since now he cannot hit the lowest ball directly, your opponent must bank the cue ball off one or more rails to make a good hit. Even if he succeeds, you have forced him to make a purely defensive shot.
Nine ball is all about cue-ball control. The point isn’t just to pocket that lowest ball, because doing so means nothing. The point is to pocket it and move the cue ball around the table in such a way as to leave yourself a good shot on the next lowest, and the next, and so on up to the nine or to an easy combination on the nine. It takes several years of experience to learn how to “play position” and many more to execute it consistently.
Finally, a word about the handicapping system in nine ball: in order to give a lesser player a chance against a better player, the lesser is given a “spot.” The spot comes in the form of a second “pay ball.” The spot is agreed upon before the match begins. Say the lesser player gets the seven ball as his spot. He now has two ways of winning, either by sinking the seven ball or the nine ball. From the better player’s perspective, this is called “giving weight.” If no spot is involved—if the players’ ability, or “speed,” is equal—the game is said to be played “head up.”
ONE
O
WNING A WEALTHY dog frees up one’s schedule. While other poor sods who don’t own wealthy dogs must work for the man, I can devote my days to any endeavor that takes my interest.
That was my trouble. None did. I remained uncommitted. I felt guilty about that. I listened to hours of jazz and played a lot of pool. While jazz uplift s the spirit, listening can’t be called doing in the participatory sense, and playing pool can’t be called productive, even if one wins a lot of money. I don’t. I was languid, torpid, depressed.
I had retreated inside my head. That had always been my way. As a child, I had thought of that solipsistic retreat as “going into the tree house.” My father got killed in an airplane crash when I was still an infant, and my mother, as I look back on it, launched herself on a quest to marry, then divorce, as many fighter pilots as possible. They were a swaggering lot, full of certainty and self-confidence. The absence of a shooting war was the most vexing problem in their young lives.
One high-ranking type with whom we shared a year in a sultry southern climate before he got transferred to Goose Bay, Labrador, was called Spider. Spider had brush-cut hair and boozy breath. He lived off base in a decaying mansion surrounded by live oaks already mature when Sherman’s army passed. In one of these, dripping Spanish moss, was a duplex tree house with a rope ladder and complete privacy. Up there, I fashioned my own reality. I’ve been doing that ever since.
But now solitude had degenerated into discontent, an itchy longing for something I didn’t have. What did I long for? I spent many an evening listening to bebop and musing on that question. Did I long for a job of my own?
Job
…
The very sound of the word, its hard monosyllabic poke, filled me with dread. Besides, who would hire me?
I
wouldn’t hire me.
As he lay at my feet dreaming (paws flexing, tail thumping) I wondered whether Jellyroll would miss his career if I decided to retire him. Say I decided to chuck it in and move us to the rural regions, there to take up organic farming, or to the coast of Maine, say, to experiment in mariculture, would he grow dull and dispirited? (Would I?) The limelight’s hard to kick over, even for dogs. Yet lately his career had been making me feel absurd. Take, for example, the day the Space Traveler broke his tibia:
Intergalactic music swelled from out of the cosmic darkness. A pinpoint of light appeared, approaching, enlarging as it spanned imponderable distance at unearthly speed. What could it be? A spaceship, of course. It whooshed overhead.
Saucer-shaped, a stupid-looking dome in the center, the spaceship wheeled, turned, and reappeared, hovering. The engines didn’t roar or whine like you would expect spaceship engines to; they went, “R-r-ruff, r-r-ruff.” Steam and smoke swirled. The intergalactic music built to a crescendo. Red, green, and blue spotlights probed the ground before they converged—on a big yellow bowl of dog food.
Then a disembodied voice reverberated from the spaceship:
“Contact. We have contact-tact-tact. We’re beginning our approach-approach-approach.”
The music was intolerable, of course, the engine noise ludicrous, but the landing effect worked okay, and the lighting disguised the spaceship’s cheesy, cut-corners construction as it appeared to settle
beside the bowl of dog food. “NEW & IMPROVED R-r-ruff” was painted in glossy red letters on the bowl.
The hatch creaked open. A gangplank emerged, but then it wedged in its track and stuck fast. It retracted and tried again. Nope. Again it stuck in the same place, poking out like a vandalized diving board.
“Cut, for chrissake!” Brian Thornbough, our director, bellowed from the control room. “What town is this? Hickberg, Indiana? No? New York City? Oh. You’d think in New York City, the capital of the stinking world, I wouldn’t have to be saddled with a rickety pile of pus for a spaceship!” His words reverberated around the soundstage like the Space Traveler’s.
Work lights came on. Sullen technicians—it wasn’t their fault, it was the budget cutbacks—scurried from the shadows. They braced their boots against the hull of the spaceship and, on three, heaved at the gangplank, but it was no use. The gangplank was stuck.
“It’s stuck,” somebody said.
“No shit?” boomed Brian from the booth.
“The whole frame has shift ed,” said the floor manager, glowering up at the booth, “so the gangplank’s pinched.”
“Grease the slut!”
Chips flew as the floor manager took a hammer and chisel to the gangplank, pretending it was Brian’s brainpan. His crew waited to grease the slut.
“Are we
about
ready?” Brian wanted to know. Brian had tried to make a go of it in Hollywood, but he was pegged as a dog food commercial director, and nobody would give him a smell. That had made Brian bitter.
Work lights went off. Landing lights came back on. “Stand by, steam,” said the floor manager. “Go, steam.” The steam went. Music recrescendoed. They cued the plank. The plank worked perfectly. Its foot settled onto the floor right beside the bowl of New & Improved R-r-ruff.
Then Jellyroll, a cute brown-and-white mutt, ran happily down the gangplank toward the bowl of dog food exactly as rehearsed. (He doesn’t need rehearsal for a move that simple. In fact, I think it bores him.) Jellyroll enjoys everything, except baths and vacuum cleaners, and his delight with life is apparent on his face. That smile has made him a star and me financially, if in no other way, untroubled.
The Space Traveler wore a transparent bubble helmet, like an inverted goldfish bowl, over his head. His gleaming white suit was so bulbous and heavy he had to bounce stiff -legged down the gangplank. He stopped halfway and pretended to look around the landing zone. His helmet fogged up. The techies had drilled holes in the back to alleviate that problem, but apparently they were too small. He tried to do a double take when he spotted the dog food, but the move got lost in the costume. It just looked like someone had goosed him—
“Look, Ruff!” he said. “After all these intergalactic light-years we’ve found a planet that serves
New Improved
R-r-ruff. This must be earth!”
But something was wrong with Jellyroll…
He slunk up to the bowl and wrinkled his muzzle in repulsion. That pause, the silence, was terrible. We held our breaths. I thought for a moment he was going to puke…Jellyroll hated the New & Improved formula! He searched for me with confusion and alarm in his soft brown eyes. Why was I doing this to him, putting this shit in his face after years of loyalty?