“You’re not even a player,” the Butcher said to Jimmy. “You just run down people who are.”
The matchup between the Butcher and the Waiter got off to a fast start, the Waiter bringing the ball into play, hip-faking the Butcher, then blowing past him for a slam dunk. The backboard hummed with the force of it. The crowd was silent. No cheers, no jeers. Silence. The Butcher took in the ball, bullied the Waiter aside, and dove for the basket, but as he went for a lay-up, the Waiter plucked the ball from his grasp and buried it. The crowd stirred. The Butcher took the ball in again and swung an elbow at the Waiter’s head, but the Waiter ducked under the blow, stole the ball again, and hit a fall-away from almost midcourt. The crowd shouted their approval, whooping it up now.
The game continued like that for the next twenty minutes, the Waiter scoring from all areas of the court, outjumping, outrebounding, outplaying the Butcher, just
scorching
him. In response, the Butcher became increasingly violent, tripping the Waiter when he went up to dunk, flagrantly fouling him, cursing and arguing with him. The Waiter stayed cool, even as the knees of his pants were torn; he just quietly kept making shot after shot. When he won the first game, the Butcher insisted on making it two out of three, and when he won the second game, the Butcher said he meant best of five. When the Waiter won the third game, the crowd booed the Butcher off the court, catcalling, mocking him. Jimmy had written it up just that way.
“I used to be somebody,” said the Butcher. “People respected me. You took it away. It wasn’t losing to that Waiter, that was a fluke, but you turned it into something important.”
“I just wrote an article—”
“You and your fancy job. People listen to you, even if you get it all wrong. Well, I got a nothing job and nobody cares what I think. I clock in five minutes late, I get docked a half-hour. I got to ask permission to take a crap. That’s
my
job.” Tears rolled down the Butcher’s cheeks. “You fuck. You fucking fuck. The only place people paid attention to me was on the court.”
Jimmy heard whistling, turned around, and saw Leonard Brimley approaching.
“Local cops should be here soon,” Brimley said. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.” Jimmy stared at the Butcher, remembering the near misses, the basketball slamming into the soft drink machine inches from his head. Most of all he remembered the indecision on the Butcher’s face. He turned to Brimley. “Why don’t you call the cops. Tell them we don’t need them.”
The Butcher’s head jerked up.
Brimley rubbed his jaw. “Assault and battery. That’s a serious charge.”
Jimmy pulled himself up hand over hand and hung on to the fence to support himself. “Darryl and I—we were just practicing our b-ball moves. I guess we got a little out of hand.”
“I saw the whole thing,” said Brimley, as if he were in on the joke. “You weren’t practicing for anything other than getting your brains beat out.”
“Let him go, Mr. Brimley,” said Jimmy. “I’ll talk to the cops. Darryl and I just had a little misunderstanding, but we got it straightened out. Right,
Darryl
?”
The Butcher nodded slowly. “Yeah, we’re all straightened out.”
Brimley shook his head, stepped over to the fencepost, and lifted the Butcher down. He checked with Jimmy one more time, then unhooked the cuffs.
The Butcher stood there, rubbing his raw wrists.
Brimley waved the Butcher away with the back of his hand. “Go and sin no more.”
Jimmy watched as the Butcher picked up his basketball and slowly dribbled back to the parking lot. He kept waiting for him to look back, but he didn’t.
Brimley put an arm around him. “Let’s go to my boat. I’ll call off the locals and clean you up. You better get some ice on that eye, or it’s going to swell shut on you.”
Jimmy was going to argue, but it sounded like a good idea. Besides, he still wanted to talk to Brimley about Garrett Walsh. “Thanks, detective.”
“No need to call me detective,” said Brimley, helping him. “I’m retired and glad of it.”
“Leonard, then.”
Brimley chuckled. “The last person to call me that was Miss Hobbes in eighth grade, and I hated it then too. Leonard sounds like someone who starches his underwear. You’re probably the same way—that’s why you go by Jimmy instead of James.”
Jimmy gasped as they went down a step. “What do you want me to call you?”
“Call me what my friends do.” Brimley nestled Jimmy closer. “Call me Sugar.”
Chapter 20
Jimmy leaned against Sugar as he hobbled down the dock, his ribs throbbing with every step. Seagulls floated overhead, screaming, and the sound cut right through Jimmy’s skull.
“You doing okay, son?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy gasped, and kept walking, the gray concrete dock stretching out before him. He focused on the next few steps, one foot after the other. The yachts bobbed gently on either side of him, the blue water shimmering with pools of oil and gasoline. Dizzy again, he clutched at Sugar and felt hard muscle underneath a cushion of blubber. The big man smelled of suntan oil, reassuring him somehow. He stared at the nautical flags patterned across Sugar’s pink shirt, wondering what they meant—clear skies or storm warnings. “Thanks for what you did back there with . . . Darryl.” He still had to work to remember the Butcher’s real name.
“No problem.” Sugar supported him, fitting his pace to Jimmy’s. “That boy sure wanted to get your attention.”
“It was my own fault.”
Sugar chuckled. “Usually it’s the man that got the worst of it who throws the blame.”
“Darryl
did
get the worst of it.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble with the police. I’ll make sure they know it was my idea to cut him loose.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Sugar shifted his weight and drew Jimmy closer. “Besides, I like a guy who doesn’t run to the cops with every little cut and scrape. Most cops won’t admit that, but I’m retired, I can tell the truth. When I was in uniform, half the calls I used to get were strictly nuisance beefs:
He hit me, she hit me, he called me
names, his stereo is too loud.
Total waste of time. Even when I became a detective, you’d be amazed at the cases I had to blue-sheet.”
“Not Heather Grimm, though. That one wasn’t a waste of time.”
“No.” Sugar shook his head. “That one broke my heart.” He cradled Jimmy against his chest. “I
thought
that’s why you were here.”
“I’m doing a piece on Garrett Walsh. Sorry, I’m messing you up.” Jimmy’s nose had opened up again, and blood was dripping onto Sugar’s Bermuda shorts.
“Heck, I been bled on before.” Sugar brushed off his shorts, grinning as Jimmy disengaged himself, walking on his own now. “Besides, plaid hides everything.”
“How—how much farther?”
“Almost there.”
Jimmy glanced around at the sleek ocean cruisers on either side of the pier, waxed teakwood and chrome gleaming in the sun. “Nice neighborhood. Yacht city.”
Sugar laid a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and caught him as he stumbled. “
Yachts—
that’s a term only we commoners use. The people who pay the luxury taxes call them boats.” He had a good laugh, deep and resonant; hearing it made you feel as if you were in on the joke with him, just a couple of old friends out for a stroll. “Here we are,” he said, indicating a thirty-foot cabin cruiser, a solid but slightly shabby vessel, paint peeling, the chrome rails flecked with rust. He took Jimmy’s arm, guiding him up the gangplank. “Careful. You trip, I’m going to get sued.”
“
Hello,
Sugar!”
Jimmy looked over, saw three girls in bikinis stretched out on the deck of a large yacht—boat, whatever. It was at least an eighty-footer, with three decks and enough electronics gear to signal the Mars lander.
“What happened to your friend?” called a redhead in a polka-dot bikini, her sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead.
“Sports injury.” Sugar gave Jimmy a wink.
Seeing the redhead’s sunglasses, Jimmy thought of Walsh . . . remembered the last time he had seen him, the director floating face-down, maggots wriggling in his hair . . .
Sugar caught Jimmy as he fell and carried him up the gangplank in his arms while Jimmy mumbled apologies. Sugar told him it was no bother at all and laid him down in an aluminum chaise longue. “You rest. I’ll be right back.”
Jimmy closed his eyes, drifting . . . then jerked alert and saw Brimley hovering over him.
“Take it easy, I’m not going to hurt you.” Brimley’s eyes twinkled as he bent down beside Jimmy carrying a basin of water and an ice bucket, a clean white cloth slung over one shoulder, a couple of long-neck beer bottles poking out of his pockets. He pulled up a chaise, ignoring Jimmy’s protestations, and began cleaning his face, gently working the edges of the cloth against Jimmy’s nose, dabbing at his split lip. The water in the basin reddened as he wrung the cloth out over and over, his movements tender. When he was finished, Brimley emptied the basin over the side, then filled the cloth with ice cubes and handed it to Jimmy. “Keep that against your eye, otherwise it’s going to swell shut on you.” He opened one of the beers and gave it to Jimmy, then opened the other. He toasted Jimmy with the bottle and stretched out in the warm sunshine on his own chaise, the nylon webbing groaning with his weight. “Life is sweet, huh?”
Jimmy took a tentative sip. The beer burned his torn lip, but it was cold and soothing and he finished half of it in one long swallow. The taste of blood lingered.
“Those are the Whitmore girls,” Sugar said, nodding toward the nearby yacht. “They just moved into Daddy’s boat for spring break.”
Jimmy looked around at the other boats, the sunlight shimmering off the water.
“Not bad for a retired cop, eh?” Sugar grinned at Jimmy, reading his mind. “Like I said, the marina cuts me a deal. Everybody hates to see a cop in their review mirror, but they love living next door to one.” He sipped his beer. “What newspaper you work for?”
“Magazine,” Jimmy corrected him. “SLAP.”
Sugar lifted an eyebrow. “Never heard of it.”
“We do lifestyle coverage mostly. Movies and movie stars, TV, fashion.”
Sugar puffed out his chest, his teats jiggling slightly against his shirt. “You want to do a fashion spread on me? You should have warned me—I would have gone on a diet.”
“Keep eating. I’m doing a retrospective on Garrett Walsh. I thought I’d look you up and see if I could get a new angle. You were—”
“A new angle? Like what? You going to write a happy ending for the son of a seacook?”
“Little late for that.” Jimmy squinted in the sun, trying to keep Sugar in focus. “I’ve read through Walsh’s bio, but there’s not much information on the crime itself. His plea bargain short-circuited the coverage, so I thought I’d ask you about—”
“How did you find me?” Sugar scratched his belly. “I’m not trying to hide, but I keep a low profile. You must be a real bloodhound.”
“Not
me.
We have people at the magazine who specialize in locating subjects. I don’t know how they do it—I just put in a request.”
“Wow . . . put in a request for something, and there you have it.” Sugar worked on the beer, smacking his lips. “I thought you might have needed some stitches under that eye, but it doesn’t look too bad. You take a pretty good punch.”
“I think the idea is to
throw
a pretty good punch, not take one.”
“That’s the idea all right.” Sugar pulled out an aspirin bottle from his Bermudas and shook a few into his hand. “Four enough? I’ll get you some water.”
“No, thanks.” Jimmy chewed the aspirin, careful to keep them away from his swollen lip. “How did you get the name Sugar? You have a sweet tooth?”
“I
do
have a sweet tooth, but my mama was the one who gave me the name.” Sugar’s gaze shifted to the surrounding boats, the distant walkways—not as a series of jumpy glances but as a steady scan of the surroundings, barely moving his head. Brimley might have retired, but he still had cop eyes. “Mama always said you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar, and she was right about that, like she was right about everything else.” He grinned at Jimmy, but Jimmy was drifting on the soft rhythms of Sugar’s voice, the boat rolling under them. “Most instructors at the Academy didn’t think I had what it took to be a cop—too easygoing, they told me, not aggressive enough. But I knew it wasn’t a matter of being a tough guy, throwing your authority around. I got better results with a friendly smile and a sympathetic ear than most of the other uniforms did with a billy. ’Course, me being the large economy size helped, but—” He suddenly grabbed Jimmy’s sore shoulder, making him howl. “Hey, stay awake.”
Jimmy shook him off and sat up, blinking.
“Falling asleep with a head injury can be fatal. I should take you to the emergency room.”
“I’m fine.”
“You could have a concussion. I’m a damn fool for giving you alcohol.”
Jimmy put down the ice pack. “Why don’t we just get out of the sun? That way I could drop dead in the shade.” Sugar tried to help, but Jimmy waved him away and followed him into the cabin. Jimmy looked around the main cabin before sitting down on one of the two armchairs. He wanted to get out of the sun, but he also wanted to get into Sugar’s living space. He needed the retired cop’s cooperation, and for that he needed to get inside the man’s head.
The main room was small and compact—if Sugar stood on tiptoes, his head would graze the ceiling. But it was clean and neat, with recessed lamps, hardwood floors, and a flat-screen television. The small galley contained a stainless-steel two-burner and a built-in mini-fridge, an espresso maker, and a microwave. A bowl of ripe mangoes was on the counter, next to a half-eaten, store-bought apple pie with a fork resting inside the aluminum pie plate.
He had expected to see the usual career memorabilia on the walls: badges and commendations, framed news clips and photographs of himself taken with the chief or the mayor, maybe a movie star, but there wasn’t anything like that. Either Sugar didn’t have much of an ego, or he wanted to forget all about his former career. Or maybe he had simply moved on to better things. The decor confirmed that impression. The walls were covered with framed photographs of Brimley holding up fish: bone-fishing near Key West, standing with a near-record tarpon off the Gulf Coast, small fish, large fish. His grin remained goofy and thrilled, and his nose was perpetually peeling. The biggest photo showed him standing beside a nine-foot sailfish hanging off a yardarm.
“Nice-looking black marlin,” said Jimmy. “Baja?”
“You know your fish and your fishing holes,” said Sugar, pleased. “Seven hundred and eight pounds.” He tapped the photo with a thick forefinger. “Hooked him at dusk, and it was nearly midnight before I landed him. A real fighter. Thought I was going to have a heart attack out there on the Sea of Cortez.”
Jimmy looked toward the interior of the boat, wondering if Sugar had a wall big enough to mount the marlin.
Sugar shook his head. “Taxidermist lost it,” he said, reading Jimmy’s mind again. “You believe that? I kept calling and calling for three months, and all I got was ‘Sorry,
señor,
next week,
por favor.
’ Maybe I
am
too easygoing for my own good. Probably sold it to some rich
norteamericano
who wouldn’t know a marlin from a mackerel.”
“Every fisherman has a story about the one who got away. At least you have proof.”
“Never thought of it that way. I
like
that.” Sugar sat down in the other armchair and turned it to face Jimmy. His skin was ruddy from the sun, his shanks freckled—he was one of those big white guys who would never tan, only blister, but loved the outdoors anyway. “You ever been to Brazil? I hear the fishing’s great down there.”
“Never had the pleasure.”
“They say you can live off the land—fish in the ocean and fruit on the trees.” Sugar nodded. “With my pension . . . a man can dream, I guess. You sure your head’s okay?”
“I read that Walsh actually answered the door when you rang the bell. Did you identify yourself as a police officer first?”
“I guess you’re well enough to ask questions.”
Jimmy smiled back at him, a couple of grinny-Guses knowing how the game was played. “I’m doing okay. It feels good in here, Sugar. Cozy.”
“Thanks. I don’t get many visitors, but it suits me. By the way, I did ID myself to Walsh. Standard procedure. I may not be smart, but I know enough to follow the rules.”
Jimmy stretched out, his feet almost touching Sugar’s well-worn deck shoes. “Walsh opened the door anyway? Covered with blood—”
“He was a mess. Blood . . . everywhere.”
“But he opened the door to a cop. You didn’t find that odd?”
Sugar beamed. “I’ll tell you a story. True story. My first month on traffic duty, fresh on the job, I make a stop on Pier Street, Mustang convertible driving erratically. It was a Thursday night, streetlights just coming on. I walk up to the car, ticket book in my hand, the full weight and authority of the city of Hermosa Beach behind me, and I see that the driver is . . . well, he’s having a sex act performed on him by the young lady in the passenger seat. Driver just hands me his license. The lady—she doesn’t even come up for air. I fill out the ticket, my hand shaking I’m writing so fast. The young lady is sitting up now, checking her lipstick in the mirror like I’m not even there. I tell the driver to watch where he’s going in the future, and he promises me he will. Then he drives off.” Sugar shook his head. “I learned right there that some people don’t have the same respect for the law that police officers do. The night I came knocking on Walsh’s door, he was messed up pretty bad on drugs. I think he was in a state of shock, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been cold sober opening the door for me, showing me what he had done. That’s just the way it is. If people act the way you expect them to act, there wouldn’t be any need for police.” He winked at Jimmy. “
Or
reporters.”