Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (15 page)

There was a lot of frogs. Frogs! What did that asshole Rufus say about the frogs? He said he’d called about the frog problem. He mentioned a name, something pools. What was it? It was alliterative, I remembered that. What
was
it?

Posh! Posh Pools.

I told Jellyroll we weren’t going to the park, that this was “a hurry-up,” and though disappointed, he pissed in the gutter. I was touched nearly to tears by his desire to please. We walked around to Riverside Drive. Crystal’s car was still there. The effects of the fiscal cutbacks were beginning to bite. They seldom swept the streets these days, so her car wouldn’t have been towed, but I was surprised it hadn’t been stolen, especially since the keys were still in the ignition. This time I peeked in the window before I hopped behind the wheel. Jellyroll wagged with excitement. We
were going somewhere—I gasped when I saw the bloody wig on the passenger seat. Maybe that was the reason nobody had stolen the car—“Forget that Toyota, man, somebody got scalped in that Toyota.” As we drove away, I picked it up by a single strand of hair and dropped it out the window.

One reason I hang around the Upscale Poolroom is for the comforting sense of solidity it affords, the feel of timelessness. Nothing changes in the Upscale Poolroom. Change scours the outside world like a glacier, but in here you can’t tell whether it’s day or night unless you open the door and look.

The regulars were lined up on the bench in the back. I didn’t see Thumper, one of the people I’d come to see, but I was fairly certain he’d show up. Jellyroll went off to work the room. I sat on the bench. Chinese Gordon was playing a serious-looking game of one-pocket with a big fleshy fellow I didn’t know, so I asked Outta-Town Brown who he was.

“You don’t know who
that
is?”

“Would I have asked?”

“That’s Ed the Greek.”

“He’s good. Where’s he from?”

“Greece.”

Thumper hobbled over from somewhere and sat down. “Hey, Artie.”

“Hey, Thumper.”

“Artie, would you be interested in a nice outdoor gas grill complete with accessories and built-in rotisserie? I can get you eighty-five percent off wholesale.”

“Thumper, you have a mistaken impression of my lifestyle.”

“Everybody can use a good gas grill. Who’s that guy?”

“That’s Ed the Greek.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Greece.”

“Yeah? Where in Greece?”

“I don’t know, Thumper.”

“That’s where my father was from, Greece, the rotten son of a bitch. You could put your gas grill right beside your aboveground swimming pool with trouble-free filtration system.”

“I might be interested in some other things.”

“You might?” That seemed to delight Thumper. “Like what? I got everything, and what I don’t have, I can get. It’d be my pleasure to fulfill your needs with no questions asked.”

“I’m not sure what I’ll need.”

“Feel free to browse. I’m conveniently located in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.”

Burns was the other person I’d come to see. Burns was one of the straight-pool intellectuals, real students of the game who played nothing else, looked down on nine ball because luck figured into the outcome of nine-ball games. Luck was not a factor in straight pool. I don’t really know how to play straight pool. I don’t know which ball to shoot when, and I don’t have enough cue-ball control. Now Burns was playing an intensely serious game (the straight-pool intellectuals never gambled) with Lenny, a Federal Express deliveryman. I hung around watching them do a safety seesaw that seemed to go on for two days. They nodded cordially at me, but, concentrating, they didn’t want to talk. I waited for a break in the inaction.

Burns worked as a computer operator for a securities firm on Wall Street. I don’t know how he managed his workday, because he played straight pool all night. On many days, I’ll bet, he got by on looks alone. He looked like a sixteen-year-old choirboy with a peaches-and-cream complexion and blue, seemingly guileless eyes. But Burns lived on the fringes of the law.

The SEC had been asking questions about Burns around the Upscale Poolroom in the mid-eighties. Something about insider trading. Everybody was very close-mouthed about it, but rumor held that Outta-Town Brown, Chinese Gordon, and a couple of the straight-pool intellectuals were buying stock
for Burns and taking a percentage of the profits. For a while, well-thumbed copies of the
Wall Street Journal
could be found on the benches, guys were talking about stock splits, leveraged buyouts, and mergers and acquisitions. Play would almost cease entirely when the Nightly Business Report came on NPR stations. I don’t know what happened to the SEC’s investigation. Since I didn’t want any of the action, I wasn’t privy to the upshot.

Burns screwed up a safety, leaving Lenny a break shot. Lenny made it, spread the balls. While Lenny, one of the slowest players in the room, stood staring at the table, Burns came over and stood beside me.

“What say, Artie? How’s show-biz life?”

“Grueling, Burns, grueling. How are you hitting them?”

“There’s nothing I can’t miss.”

“I know that feeling. Say, Burns, if I had two phone numbers, could you get me addresses to go with them?”

He flashed a suspicious glance at me, but I pretended not to notice. “Local?”

“Yes.”

“We’re all connected,” he sang. “I’ll have to charge you a fee.”

“Goes without saying.”

“Something cooking?”

“No, just curious.”

“Curious, right. I can call into the system from here—if fucking Lenny ever
shoots
.”

“I’ll be around for a while.” I gave him Tiny Archibald’s and DiPietro’s numbers with my own number written below them in case I left before Lenny shot. “Thanks, Burns.”

I went to the john.

“The R-r-ruff Dog. My, my, my. Must be something owning the R-r-ruff Dog.” He was a short, heavily bearded man I’d never seen before. He had appeared at the adjacent urinal, but he didn’t look at me, stared instead at the chrome flush handle.

“Yeah,” I said dryly.

“I bet. Yes, I do, uh-huh, I’d take that bet.” He was short, not taller than five foot six, but he was built solidly, like a tallish fire hydrant, with great bulging forearms, as if he’d had somebody else’s forearms grafted on, somebody like Popeye. The coarse hair of his beard ascended almost to his eye sockets. The beard didn’t look real to me, and that made me nervous.

I flushed and went to the sink, where I could see the man’s back in the mirror. He wore sockless boat shoes and khaki shorts that dropped baggily below his knees. A neat, round bald spot, about the diameter of an orange, rose at the back of his skull. The bald spot was encircled by a jagged purple scar. It looked as though sometime in the past someone had tried to scalp him with a rusty spoon. His shoulder muscles bulged beneath his white T-shirt. His face looked sixty, but his body looked much younger. Aw, I was being paranoid. There was no reason to assume anything scary about this guy. A stranger in a phony beard making chitchat in a pool-hall rest room.

“They kidnapped your girlfriend,” he said without turning around. “Maybe you aren’t aware of that, but I think you are.”

I froze. I didn’t reply, just watched him in the mirror. He didn’t turn around. I didn’t like the confined quarters. “Shit happens,” I said. I turned and walked out the swinging door. I figured he wouldn’t leave it at that, so I sought out a seat near but not on the regulars’ bench.

I watched him approach. He walked in a jerky, stiff -legged fashion, as if on a ship’s deck in a seaway. He sat down beside me. “We can’t talk here.”

“This is the only place we
can
talk.”

“Security.”

“Yes.”

He giggled. He had strange powder-blue eyes that seemed genuinely amused. “If I was out to do you, you’d never have seen
me. I’m Norm Armbrister.” I couldn’t see his mouth move under his beard. He stood up to pull a folded news clipping from his hip pocket. He unfolded and presented it to me.

It was the obituary page from the
New York Times
, dated six months earlier:

Spengler—Captain Adam R., who will be fondly remembered by his shipmates, was declared missing and presumed drowned after he was washed from the deck of his trimaran Raven in high seas 400 miles southeast of New York en route to Bermuda. Captain Spengler served with distinction aboard the light cruiser USS
Thurgood
in the Tonkin Gulf and aboard the destroyer USS
Ranger
in the Arabian Sea. “Oh, hear us when we call to Thee/For those in peril on the sea.”

“You’re dead, huh?”

He grinned and nodded with boyish delight.

“Didn’t you just say your name was Norman Armbrister?”

“Most people call me Norm. What do you think of the style?”

“What style?”

“The obituary style. I wrote it myself. You don’t think it’s too stark, do you? I hate flowery obits, but I didn’t want to go too far in the other extreme.”

“You drowned, huh?”

“Just like Trammell Weems. Nice thing about drowning is there’s not necessarily a body. Did you get my message about that cop?”

“Yes.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m right about your girlfriend, too.”

“You know a lot.”

“I used to be in intelligence.” I couldn’t see any teeth, but his eyes still seemed amused.

“Naval intelligence?”

“Army. Also the National Security Organization, Department of Defense, and Central Intelligence Agency—I’ve been in them all. I served my country with distinction, like in my obit.” He grinned at me. “I’m retired.” His eyes seemed full of jollity and goodwill, but he probably learned that in spook school. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Do about what?”

“Crystal. Aren’t you going to get her out? Are you a man or a mouse?”

“That’s not the question here. You’re the question. Even if I was going to do something, why would I tell you, a man who fell off his own boat under an assumed name?”

“Because I’m offering my services. Men, weapons, vehicles. What do you need? You need an Apache gunship? Depends on how you want to go in. Do you want to go in hard, or do you want to go in soft?”

“Why would you want to help?”

“Let’s say personal reasons, for now. Our relationship is still young. Candidness may follow. Depends.”

“On what?”

“Mutual trust.”

“How do you know so much about Crystal and me?”

“I told you, I used—”

“More specifically.”

He paused, giving that some thought, leaning forward to place his elbows on his knees. He motioned with his head for me to join him. I leaned down. “How many of these guys do you know, the guys around us?” he whispered.

“All of them.”

“How long?”

“Years.”

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell you something further as a basis for a mutual trust-type relationship. Remember that no-neck cretin you stuck with the ice pick?”

“Well, gee, I’ve stabbed quite a few cretins lately. They tend to blur.”

“I’d have done the same, the only difference is Barry’d be dead. That’s his name, Barry. Barry was working for me. Kind of a double agent I planted in Tiny’s camp, but Barry’s got no brains. Additionally, he’s an unstable acid freak with psychopathic proclivities. It’s tough for dead guys like Captain Spengler to hire reliable, top-rank help. Barry won’t be of any further use to me as an inside man. You see, all he wants to do now is go after you.”

“What!”

“Because you stabbed him.”

“He was trying to kidnap me!” I hissed.

“Of course. I know that. You know that. On some certain level even Barry knows that. But Barry’s not a rational adult. You can’t reason with Barry. No, he’ll be coming after you, if I know my Barry.”

I felt like moaning out loud, but I suppressed it.

“I respect you for it. It takes a certain kind of individual to use an ice pick. Get right up close and
stick
it in, close enough to smell a man’s after-shave, but you’ll probably have to do it again. If you don’t mind a word of advice about technique, go for an upper thrust to the thoracic region. Then twist it up and down and all around. Takes a special sort. I respect that. That’s why I figured you’d have the nerve to go after your girlfriend. Maybe I was wrong.”

“You were.” There was a revenge-crazed acid freak on my ass…

“Okay, I hear you. Why trust me, right? Let’s see what I can give you as another sign of goodwill. William Spivey. You know him? Crystal’s uncle.”

“What about him?”

“He knows about the money.”

“…What money?”

“Trammell robbed a bank before he left. Not your average bank, but, like most, it kept money. Now it’s gone. Being dead, I know how hard it is to even get a checking account. Trammell would have that same problem. Even your crookedest banker would shy away from the dead guy who ripped off Tiny Archibald. Trammell’d have to make some arrangements for a cover. He’d need another person who was alive.”

“He used Billy?”

“I’m not certain yet, but if I had to say yes or no right now, I’d say yes.”

“Is Billy in danger?”

“Sure. But he’s got one thing going for him. He’s retarded. His actions won’t be predictable. Another thing. What are you going to do after you break her out? I mean, you can’t come back here and play pool with these bums like nothing happened.”

I had recognized that. “You got a lot of guts calling these guys bums.”

“I take your point. My apologies.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I have a boat, the one I drowned off of, but don’t let that bother you. She’s intrinsically sound. She’s docked out in the Bronx, place called Cuban Ledge Marina. East-chester Bay. My wife and I live aboard. We’re about to get in the wind for tropical climes.”

“I still don’t see why I should trust you. How do I know this isn’t a setup? How do I know you aren’t working with the people who kidnapped Crystal?”

“You don’t need to trust me for us to work together. Who can trust anybody? Our interests intersect. That’s more important than any abstraction like trust. Spheres of intersecting interests make the world go round.”