Strip Search (26 page)

“You’re William Frank Clinton,” Wager said.

“And you’re an officer of the law.”

Wager lifted his badge case from his coat pocket and dangled the shield’s weight over his forefinger. “Detective Wager, DPD, Homicide.” He flipped it away again. “I hear you’re telling people you walked on the Goddard killing.”

“Why not? I’m innocent.”

“And Jimmy King took the fall for you.”

“Why not? He’s guilty.” Clinton had a grin that drew back along one side of his face, showing a glint of molars in the yellow light. It reminded Wager of a dog’s jaw and he wondered if the man lolled his tongue when he was hot. “That’s justice, right?”

“Yeah, it is.” Wager looked up at the waitress who asked him if he wanted to order anything, and shook his head. “Tell me about King. What kind of deal was he working with Goddard?”

The cold humor remained. “I got no idea.”

“You’re listed as a known associate of the victim and the perpetrator.”

“So what? You can list me however you want to. I still got no idea.”

There were a few times when you could bluff somebody, and a lot of times when you couldn’t. This was one of the times you couldn’t, and Wager had no leverage at all. Clinton knew it. “All right. What’s between you and King will come out sooner or later. But here’s something that’s a little more important for you: you tell Whitey I’m going to waste him.”

Any humor was gone. “Who?”

“The dude with the white hair—Whitey. You tell him what I said.”

“I don’t—”

“Right, Clinton, you don’t. I understand.” Wager rose. “But you tell him anyway. Tell him I’m getting close, and I’m going to get him all by myself. For the pure pleasure of it.”

He felt Clinton’s eyes aimed at the back of his neck as he walked out. Pausing outside the door, he glanced up and down the brightly colored street and half-listened to the tangled rhythms of loudspeakers bouncing through open doors. Maybe Whitey would bite, maybe not; that’s what fishing was all about. Right now, Detective Sergeant Wager had to find a quick-change phone booth to become the Taco Kid.

This time, Little Ray came to Wager. Clarissa had greeted Wager when he walked into the Cinnamon Club, and, seating him at a table away from the runway, gave him one of those puzzled looks that said she should remember him in some other context.

“Is Little Ray here yet?”

“Haven’t seen him. What can I get you?”

He told her. “When he comes in, let him know where I am, okay?” He handed her ten dollars, which quickly disappeared.

“Sure!”

He sat with his bottle of Killian’s and ran the brim of his leather hat slowly up the naked girl’s pulsating body. First came the long, almost skinny calves, then the equally long thighs, shadowed with stretching muscles that led to rounded hips which seemed too large and too mature for the girlish legs. It was as if that part had developed and left the rest lagging at the edge of childhood. Above the dark triangle that bumped twice each way and then fooled him with a shift to a circular motion, the curving belly stretched taut and shiny in the crimson glow, and the tiny dark spot of her navel bounced with the music like one of those balls over the words of the singalong films at the old Saturday matinees. This was another new girl—Blanche—and Wager’s hat brim had moved up to her rib cage, where the pattern of shadows was like the grip of long fingers, when the stage was blotted out by a torso, and Little Ray sat down quickly and leaned toward him.

“All right. I got something for you.”

“Good. I been waiting. Let’s have it.”

“Yeah, well, you can wait a little more. I want to talk something over first.”

The dimness that protected Wager also sheltered Little Ray’s face. “Like what?”

Little Ray looked down a moment to where his fingers tugged pieces from a wet napkin and rolled them nervously into pale wads. “You know, I really don’t know a thing about you.”

“You know I talk for people who have clout.”

Little Ray pulled another thin shred from the napkin and began rolling it between thumb and finger.

“And you know I’ve got some son of a bitch worried enough to try and whack me.”

“Yeah,” said Little Ray. “There is that….”

“So what’s your problem?”

The man’s gathered hair quivered as he looked over his shoulder at the applauding men stuffing bills into the straps of the girl’s sandals. “My problem’s this: you keep talking about how big your fucking ‘associates’ are, you keep talking about how much you can supply. You keep talking about this humongous distribution system—but you haven’t given me a gram of anything to sell!”

Wager tipped the shadow of his hat over his face as Cal, the bouncer, squeezed between tables like a looming whale and headed for the stairs to the disc jockey’s booth. “You told me you had a good supplier. The guy in the black van.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Lazlo’s getting the word somewhere that I’m going to quit him. Maybe he’s starting to act like a real shit.”

So Little Ray’s big mouth had caught up with him, and now his supplier was going to cut him off for his disloyalty. “Where do you think he got that word, Little Ray?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“You know. You farted around about how you’re going to be the main man at this end of the strip. You think that idea makes Lazlo happy? You didn’t keep it a big secret, man.”

“How could I? How the hell could I recruit street people and not tell them something? Answer me that!”

“Maybe you started too early. Maybe you were supposed to organize, not recruit.” Wager sipped his beer. “So what’s Lazlo saying to you?”

“He’s upped my price. If I don’t like it, I can find another connection. Shit, you know how hard that is when you’re dealing big? I mean, I’m not exactly nickels-and-dimes, you know? It takes time to set up a big deal!”

“I’ve heard.”

“Right, yeah, you’ve heard. All I’ve heard is promises, and now my supplier says it’s double the price or he’s cutting me off. Some choice: I work for nothing or I lose my fucking customers! Now how are you going to cover that? What kind of goddamned clout are you going to show me now, man!”

“Raise the price to your street people.”

“It’s me he’s squeezing—the price is the same to Lazlo’s other buyers. But double to me. I raise the price to my people, they just laugh and go to one of the others!”

“So pay it.”

“What?”

“The price. Pay it. Use his stuff for one more week. My associates will be ready to move by then.”

“A week? You’re sure?”

“One week and you’ll be able to tell Lazlo to stick it.” Wager took a long drink. “Where’s your next buy from him?”

“Why?”

“I want a look at him. He’s competition.”

“Oh—” He tugged more shreds from the napkin.

“He’s already trying to keep you from splitting. Maybe he’s the one who tried something on me, too.”

“Like what?”

“Christ, do I have to spell it out for you? The white-haired man, Little Ray—the one I told you to find out about. Maybe Lazlo put him on me because I’m going to bring in competition.”

“Naw, he wouldn’t—”

“He’s got reason to. You think he’s going to just say ‘Okay, I quit—it’s all yours’? I want a look at him. The next time he comes at me, I want to know him!”

Little Ray scratched uncertainly at his headband.

“You think about how much you owe him. And then you think if you’re with me or against me. That’s the choice, Little Ray—right here, right now. You choose.” He leaned back and watched the man sweat.

“… On the corner of Emerson and Thirteenth. There’s a school there—it’s dark and nobody’s around. Ten-forty-five Thursday night. Lazlo’ll set up near the corner so we can see anybody coming. You’ll have a hard time getting close enough to eyeball him.”

“I’ll worry about that. You just be there like always. Now tell me about Whitey.”

“I really got nothing to tie him to Lazlo, that’s a fact. One of my people—Watchdog—said the guy’s not into dope at all. It’s something else, something that smells like big bucks, but he’s not sure what.”

“How’s he figure that?”

“He says the guy has some kind of route. Not the same days or times, but the same four or five places. Watchdog’s got a lot of curiosity, you know? That’s how he got his name. Someday it’s going to get him in trouble, but he’s good.”

“What kind of route?”

“Clubs—discos. Watchdog followed him two, three times when he saw him on the street. He goes into a place, sits down and orders a drink, and then a little later he leaves. He goes to the same places and most of the time he doesn’t touch his drink. That’s what caught Watchdog’s eye—he saw him get up and leave a full one at Barnum’s and then do the same thing at The Corral. So he tailed him.”

“He didn’t meet anybody?”

“Didn’t talk to nobody, didn’t deliver nothing, didn’t pick up nothing. Just ordered his drink, sat and looked at it awhile, and then left to do it again. The guy’s either nuts or he’s working some scam that I can’t figure. But it’s got nothing to do with Lazlo. I’ll swear to that.”

“What places did he go to?”

“Barnum’s, and The Corral. And here. I never noticed the guy, though. You can’t see for shit in this place.”

“Where else?”

“The Palm Room. And Mickey Finn’s.”

“Not Foxy Dick’s?”

“Watchdog didn’t say so. He goes out to the Turkish Delights, too, a couple times a week.”

“Who does he talk to out there?”

“A couple people. Watchdog didn’t see much out there, though. The guy’s a regular or something; he goes into a back room.”

“What about the Eveready Lounge? Did he go there?”

“Not while Watchdog followed him.”

It was corroboration, and it was a pattern. But as yet it didn’t mean much. Wager tore off a dry corner of his paper napkin and wrote his unlisted home number. “You hang onto this—you only. You tell Watchdog and anybody else you got working for you to check those places and to let you know right away if they see Whitey. Then you call this number and tell me where and when.”

“You gonna go after him?”

“You don’t really want to know that, do you?”

“No, I guess not.” Squinting through the dark at the scrap of paper, he said, “One more week? I mean, my ass is really on the line. One more week, for sure?”

Wager stood and smiled. “Count on it.” He left a bill beside his half-empty glass and started out. On the way, Clarissa’s face caught the dim red glow from the stage as she stared at him with a puzzled frown.

He was tired. His eyes burned from long hours without sleep and the cigarette smoke and the glare of headlights that had splintered on the dusty windshield of his Trans Am when he drove home. But he still could not convince his body to relax enough to let him sleep. The feeling of pent-up energy kept tightening the muscles in his shoulders and back and legs, and even a series of savagely quick push-ups and sit-ups followed by a long, hot shower failed to drain off the tension. So he lay in his worn robe in the thin light that spilled across his couch from the city outside. There, hung over a chair on the balcony, were his vest and hat and Levi’s placed to air out the musty stink of tobacco smoke. Half-illuminated, they looked like a crouching figure peering in through the glass doors, and it didn’t take much squinting for that shine off the leather crown to look like white hair.

He closed his eyes and massaged them until he felt moisture press between the lids. Try as he might, he could picture nothing more than a shadow behind the arm that aimed that pistol at him. No dim oval of face, no color for coat or shirt, no glimmer of hair. The glare of the headlights had partially blinded him, and the blackness inside the car under that viaduct had completed it. The only knowledge Wager had of who the attacker might be was the sure feeling in the center of his chest. There were too many parallels, too many things that happened together not to have some meaning. It wasn’t proof, but there was a solid feel to it, and that feeling not only persisted, it grew.

In following the trail of the killer of Annette Sheldon and Angela Williams, Wager had picked up the trail of Whitey. Doc’s death was the point where they crossed, and that, too, was at the Cinnamon Club. So was Annette Sheldon. But not Angela. And Whitey didn’t go to Foxy Dick’s. But he did go to the Turkish Delights. And now Douglas MacArthur Woodcock wouldn’t be going there anymore. That had been Whitey’s trail, too.

There had to be a tie-in. It had to be lying there as plain as a dead rat on a kitchen table. But Wager couldn’t see it. He dragged his thumb along the bullet crease on his cheek, feeling the burned flesh that had dried and was now beginning to crack and lift. He’d noticed when he shaved that those whiskers that weren’t seared had begun to punch up against the scab and break through. In the hard glare of the bathroom light, the bristles had looked white. Another sign of Whitey, and this one in the middle of his own face. The downward twist at the corner of Wager’s mouth said there was something almost funny in that. Ironic, anyway, and that was good enough for humor. A police reporter once told Wager that instead of a sense of humor, he had a sense of irony. Whatever the hell reporter Gargan meant by that.

Should he put out a police call for Whitey? There wasn’t a thing that would stick in court. No fingerprints. No weapon. No witnesses. Circumstantial at best, and not much of that. Circumstantial hunch. There should be a booking charge called circumstantial hunch. It was good enough for the Code Napoleon. Wager had read somewhere about that: you lock up the suspect and the burden’s on him to prove his innocence. Here, it was the other way round: you lock the police behind procedural restrictions and it’s up to them to prove the suspect’s guilt. And, sometimes, even that wasn’t enough, not if the procedure hadn’t been followed to the last detail. No, he couldn’t have Whitey picked up, not even on a seventy-two-hour hold. What good would it do? Wager had to keep the man worried enough to fight but not so scared that he ran. And to do that, he had to offer him another chance. He had to make Whitey think that his problem was getting bigger, but not so big that one more bullet wouldn’t solve it.

Yawning, he felt the weight of weariness press his eyelids down, and the couch, with its configurations different from that of his bed, began to offer his body fresh avenues to sleep. On a rising surge of darkness, his half-open eyes once more caught the shape of his hat beyond the glass and from it the faint gleam of pale light.