Джо Горес - Dead Man

Suddenly Zeke started to laugh, a big deep man’s laugh though he was still just a teenager.

“Blonde in a red Porsche,” he said. “Parked in the alley. Car was a beater, real muddy, she took a lot better care of herself than she did of that car. I’m doin’ the store windows, all of a sudden she come outten there like she be drivin’ the Batmobile. Was a cat with her but I couldn’t see him ‘cause he was on the other side of the car, y’dig?”

“Sure,” said Dain.

“Dude put his hands on her down where I couldn’t see, an’ she slam on the brakes so hard he hit his head on the dash.” He gave his booming laugh again. “Man, she tell him, You put yo hands on me again I don’t want you to, you gonna need a plastic dick t’piss.”

The woman? Really blonde, platinum like, man, with a really pretty face messed up with too much eyeliner an’ mascara, real red lipstick, didn’t really need it all, sure, it made her sexy, but also made her sorta... cheap like. Which she wasn’t.

“She winked at me, man, when she said ‘bout him pissin’. She call him sweet thing, but she doan really mean it.”

Another $50 for Zeke. He was worth it.

So... a blonde in a beat-up old Porsche almost certainly had been waiting in the alley to pick Zimmer up after the theft of Adelle Lorimer’s bonds. Like the Wizard of Oz with the cowardly lion, she’d given Zimmer his courage.

Jeri Pearson? Platinum didn’t fit her hair color, exotic didn’t fit her face. But she might know the exotic blonde — probably her successor with Jimmy Zimmer, maybe the one-night stand at his apartment before the bluenose had gone to the cops.

Meanwhile, it was Friday. Dain flew back to San Francisco for the weekend. He was missing Shenzie and the summer fog, and he had to analyze all of the data he had gathered.

Wearing only an old pair of blue cotton workout briefs, Dain was using a coiled spring exerciser with all five stainless- steel coiled springs in place. Through the open loft windows came cold wet foggy night air, the wash of small oily waves against the pilings beneath the pier, at intervals the far sad cry of the Alcatraz foghorn.

For the twentieth time without pause, Dain brought his arms down from straight overhead with agonizing slowness against the tension of the opening springs. When the arms were straight out from his shoulders at either side, the fully extended springs were stretched across the back of his shoulders and neck.

Dain gasped out, “What... do you think... cat?”

Shenzie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him, said meowr and batted Dain’s hand lightly with one paw.

Dain’s arms started slowly back up. His face was contorted with effort, his torso flushed with blood. The pale pock scars on his shoulder, chest and neck were very visible. As the spring contracted above his head, his lats sprang out on the sides of his body in a tremendous V-shape spread.

When the springs were finally closed, he let out a gasping breath that carried “Twenty” with it.

He lay down on the floor parallel to the bed, his head to ward the head of it, his feet pointed toward an artist’s portable easel with a 19-inch by 24-inch sketching pad open on it. The hand-lettering in Sharpie permanent marker on it said:

LAW SCHOOL

former profs

former students

APARTMENT

landlady

tenants

OFFICE

exec secretary

receptionist

other secretaries

BANK

teller

meter maid

postman

doughnut truck

delivery boy

short-order cook

window washer

secretaries

old woman

flower truck

Dain, still panting, began to do twisting crunches, hands locked behind his head, shoulders off the floor, bicycling with his legs, twisting to touch each elbow to each opposite raised knee. He did fifty on each side without stopping, letting his eyes sweep across the drawing pad open on the easel with each rep.

When he was finished he bounced to his feet, went to the board, with the Sharpie drew a line through every item under each of the headings, save one. Sweat formed a wet circle around his bare feet as he stood there on the plank floor.

“Cat, we have to find out who the peroxide blonde is.”

Shenzie yawned prodigiously, but had nothing to say. He began giving himself a professional wash job on the edge of the bed. Dain tapped the unlined item on the drawing pad — exec secretary under OFFICE.

“Only one easy shot left, Shenz.”

He phoned an airline, made a reservation for Chicago, then got down to do clap-hand push-ups, giving a sharp shove as he came up off the floor at each rep so he could clap his hands twice before his body started down again. Despite his grunts and the sweat rolling off him, they looked effortless. The only other sounds were the waves breaking against the pilings fifty feet below, and the occasional muffled bellow of foghorns.

Shenzie padded the length of the bed to the bedside table, curled himself around the telephone as if Dain’s call had made it warm, and went to sleep.

Chicago, like San Francisco, is a town where umbrellas routinely get turned inside out when it rains. Monday evening was blustery and Dain was relying on a rain slicker and rain hat as he entered the Sign of the Trader, just inside the West Jackson Boulevard entrance to the Board of Trade Building. He went through the heavy wood and glass door, the noise hitting him like a subdued echo from the trading pits that had closed several hours before. He tossed his rain-wet slicker over one of the coatracks lining the coatroom.

The bar/restaurant was dark-lit, richly appointed, with deep carpets and leather-lined booths and heavy wooden chairs and tables for the diners. Indirect pastel lighting enhanced the look of a never-never land where no opening bell ever rang — an effect negated by the strip of green electronic futures quotations running endlessly around the room just below the ceiling. Snatches of conversation flowed around him as he tried to pick Jeri Pearson out of the traders, runners, and company people crammed three-deep at the bar.

“I hear you sucked some gas this morning,” said a sandy-haired man to a beautiful brunette in her early twenties.

“I didn’t give much back,” she objected. “Maybe a K.”

“I made twenty-three K today,” said sandy-hair. He still wore his sweat-soaked trading jacket.

She chuckled. “Good. You can pay for the drinks.”

Dain spotted Jeri at one of the tables set back from the bar. The tide of milling humanity swirled him that way; he slid in opposite her. She had a lush body and a dissatisfied face. She caught the sleeve of a passing waitress.

“Bloody bull for the gentleman!” she yelled over the din.

The waitress nodded and moved on.

“Thanks for meeting me!” Dain boomed.

She shouted something back that contained “... mystery man...” and “... intrigued” in it.

He nodded as if he had understood. She stood, leaned down so her face was close to his ear and she could speak normally.

“Now you’re here to hold the table, I’m going to the little girls’. I’ll be right back.”

It was interesting that Jeri had chosen this place when he had called her for a meeting. Very public, very noisy, both of which would discourage not only intimacy, but questioning as well. Interesting, too, the trip to the ladies’: a chance to report to Maxton by phone that Dain had arrived?

“Seven-twenty a bushel?” said a twangy voice above him. “The guy is nuts. Me, I’m dreaming of beans in the teens, like the drought year of eighty.”

The voices moved off. “Dream on. The bottom’s going out of soybeans when the new Ag report comes out.”