Джо Горес - Cases

Dunc had the suddenly almost paralyzing realization that he actually didn’t have a problem with what Drinker had said. What did that say about who he was becoming?

“Oh, what the hell? Tea”

Christmas Eve. Dunc was lying on his bed, drinking canned beer and eating pretzel sticks and pretending he was going to catch up on his notebook, or walk up to the office to start a short story. Instead, he sat up.

“Mickey, how about some poetry?” Mickey eyed the pretzels. Dunc began mashing two of them in one palm with the other thumb.

He got silently to his feet, holding the crumbs and his beer can.

“That’s from a Red Skelton movie, and my gal ain’t here to give any garters to.”

Mickey sat up, nose wiggling, when Dunc crossed to the kitchen counter. Mouse-gray — his native color — and less than two inches long if you didn’t count his tail. He lived in the kitchen walls and occasionally emerged for these one-way chats.

“She’s holding high wassail with her mom and her sister’s family in Dubuque, so for Christmas I mailed her a half month’s pay. And my mom can’t understand why I didn’t go home for the holidays.” He stretched out his hand, very slowly, to dribble a little salt-glinting mound of crunched-up pretzel sticks onto the aged linoleum countertop. “I also have four rosaries to finish”

Mickey gave two sudden hops to snatch up pretzel morsels with delicate busy front paws and nibbled at them with tiny incisors. He seemed to especially favor the salt crystals.

“How can I do penance when everybody I know gets killed? Is it me? Is that what the priest was trying to tell me?”

Mickey nibbled. Dunc looked at his watch: 12:03 A.M. He toasted Mickey and drained his beer.

“I am now twenty-two years old, mouse,” he said.

Heavy knuckles hit the door. Mickey vanished. Drinker Cope strolled in as if things were not still strained between them. He stopped at the foot of the bed to take it all in.

“Great place you got here, spacious, elegant — but where’s your ten-foot spruce? Eggnog? Hot buttered rum? Mistletoe? Get your fucking shoes on, I’m taking you out to dinner for your birthday. Afterwards we’ll listen to some jazz.”

Cypress-shaded St. Francis Yacht Club was expensively ablaze, hordes of people visible behind big bay windows. Sleek sports cars and luxury sedans big enough to live in jammed its parking lots. The rigging of the snailboats was hung with colored Christmas lights; the stinkpots were similarly festooned.

Two men came up a private landing quay on synapse-silent deck shoes. The quay was unlighted, the moon in its first quarter. The larger man checked his luminous wristwatch.

“Twelve-fifteen, Lee. Home for the holidays.”

Lee Fong was diminutive, not over five-three, 130 pounds. “I leave the car in left-hand lot, Mr. Wham.”

Harry Wham was six-six, wide as a barge. He went past a De Soto parked facing the water in a spot favored by lovers on moonlit nights. This was not such a night. A man wearing a hat and brown overcoat came erect from behind the fender to swing a rubber truncheon at the back of Wham’s head.

But Wham had spun down and away, landing on his hands, scissoring with his legs. His assailant’s head struck the blacktop to rebound into a fist as hard as a thrown rock.

The blackjack of the other man, coming very fast around the front of the car, also missed, even as Lee Fong’s right foot sank sideways into his gut nearly to the ankle. He bounced off the De Soto making a noise like a car with a faulty starter.

“Pigeons,” Wham said. “I’m pretty sure who sent them.”

Their attackers’ car keys made a little splash far out in the channel. Also, in the spirit of Christmas, their shoes.

It was 2:00 A.M. Drinker Cope was eating waffles with a double side of sausage at the counter of Jimbo’s Waffleshop on the corner of Post and Buchanan. Dunc ate chicken in a basket because the marquee read Chicken Hot or Cold, Good as Gold.

“I thought you said we were going to a jazz club?”

“What can I tell you? There’s Club Alabam, Wally’s Soulville, Elsie’s Breakfast Club — but we’re staying right here at Jimbo’s Bop City. When the clubs close in the Tenderloin and North Beach and Nob Hill, half the musicians come here to jam.”

At the cash register was a slim cool fortyish Negro with a porkpie hat and a cigarette sticking straight out from the middle of his mouth. “Drinker my man! How’s the sleuthin’ business?”

“Everybody’s sinnin’, nobody’s winnin’, Jimbo.”

The walls of Bop City’s back room were crowded with bigger-than-life photographs of some of the greats who had performed or sat in there — Duke Ellington, teenaged Johnny Coltrane, Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis, and of course the Bird. Drinker grabbed them a table and ordered setups.

“Jimbo Edwards got this place when Slim Gaillard tried to stiff the police.” He poured a pitiful dribble of Coke into each glass, added ice and booze. “The cops somehow found a pint of liquor on the premises so they closed him down. Slim gave Jimbo the keys, took a cab to L.A., and nobody’s seen him since.”

By the Art Deco foyer’s indirect lighting, Harry Wham was too hawk-nosed to be handsome, with thick blond hair dissheveled from the roughhouse outside the St. Francis Yacht Club. Beyond the Moorish archway into the living room, his wife was swizzling two cocktails at the marble-topped wet bar.

He began, “I see I caught you and Ferris...” and when she whirled, alarmed, added, “just getting back from midnight Mass.”

April was five-nine and elegant as crystal in a Christmas-red I. Magnin original. Coiling black hair shot with rich bluish highlights danced around a flawless oval face. A jade pendant glowed sullenly at her throat. Her long-lashed gray eyes had turned merry.

“Mass? Hardly, darling. There’s a new comic at the Purple Onion, she’s very funny, she calls her husband Fang. A Gibson?”

“Sure. Three onions. Pearl, not purple.”

“Find your galleon this time?”

Crossing to the hallway, Harry chuckled. “You think I’m nuts but I’ll fool you yet.”

Ferris Besner drifted out of the kitchen. He called himself an art dealer, was ferret-slim in a $300 hand-tailored suit and $20 silk foulard she had bought him with Harry’s money.

She handed him a Gibson, said in a low vicious voice, “I thought you told me he’d be laid up for hours while they went through the boat. Even Harry isn’t entirely stupid, you know!”

Wham reappeared in a white sport coat that would have fit a Shetland pony. He downed the proffered Gibson like a spoonful of cough syrup, set the glass on an inlaid hardwood sideboard.

“Ferris, could you keep April company for an hour or so? When I get back, we’ll mull wine and the meaning of Christmas.”

He kissed April on the forehead and was gone. Ferris was already at the pink telephone dialing a GRaystone number. He stared bleakly out the bay window at the lights of the International Settlement and Chinatown while he talked, listened, swore, and hung up.

“Harry and the Chink used them for batting practice and threw their car keys and their shoes into the harbor.”

“That’s Harry’s weird sense of humor, all right.” April tapped her cocktail glass absently against her small dazzling teeth. “Ferris, I must find out what sort of game he’s playing.”