The Last Bender, Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

          Wet wind blew against the windshield. We got out and walked, hands deep in P coats, through the smell of boat fuel and tar and the distressed cries of cattle punched to their knees in the abattoirs. Then more machinery, then the bells and horns of freighters cutting the rain and fog.   

          The first floor of The Pechardine was two stories high, windowless, with armour-plated, remote-driven grates rolled down over the massive truck bays. Pink police tape marked off the whole block and the doors were padlocked. Stronghole walked the block to see if we were being watched and to look for an entry point. I went back to the car for rope and tools.

          We met up at the entrance. The first level was like a graphite cliff brooding over the abyss. Above that was an abandoned floor with missing windows. It was possible to scale the grate, roll up on the ledge and drop in. In theory at least. Every part of my body was broken or bruised and my stomach felt like I’d just eaten a plate of dead clams.

          “What do we do?”   I asked. There were cars driving around out there. Headlights crossed in the distance.

          “We could climb up and go through the windows.”

          “Why don’t you just flap your wings and fly there.”

          “You don’t think I can climb that?”

          “I know I can’t. I feel like puking if I take too deep a breath.”

          “That’s o.k. Jack. You wait here and I’ll open the doors.”

          Stronghole made it look like throwing pizza the way he climbed the forty feet with a rope strapped to his back. At the top he reached his hand over the ledge, paused, and lifted his knee up over it, dragging the rest of his body behind. In the same smooth motion he rolled into the black window frame. For a second I thought maybe there was no floor and then no Stronghole but his face quickly bobbed into place and he threw down the rope, which I tied to the tool box. It swayed and clanked, echoing up and down the street. He pulled it in and I sat on the curb to wait.

          I could not help but look at the streets. They were flat, jaded, harsh. One mistake and it would wear me.

Down here, a duck wouldn’t even have to squeal the tires driving off. It must get lonely. And the ease of the job over time would erode your sanity. Only the lazy sadists would lap it up. One duck goes by and I’m gunned into the big indifferent stain the street held up to the world. I lost my concentration and didn’t realize that I was no longer seated on the curb but was standing up against the building, clinging to the grate, fingers numb and whitened, like they were about to snap.

          That was when I lost my footing. My feet scrambled on the sidewalk but could not catch hold. I hung into the air, banging against the cold metal, vainly trying to breathe and not let loose. I felt like I was a hundred feet off the ground.

          Stronghole whispered loudly but I couldn’t make out what he was saying–all I heard was the air rushing in my ears. There was only one thing to do. I had to find the rope. I reached with one hand and missed. I let go and reached out into nothing and fell. I did cartwheels in space. The world opened up beneath me and my bowels pitched.

          The rope went eee-ugh eee-ugh as I swung back and forth. “Stronghole!”   I shouted. Something flashed. I thought it was a flash light. All his heart was focused in his face and beamed to me.

          “Bartell,” he shouted. “What’s wrong?”

          “Stronghole, I can’t hold on. Pull me in.”

          “What’s going on?” he asked.

          “Pull me in,”   I said. The emptiness swallowed me like a rip tide.

          It started to drizzle again.

          “Where am I?” I asked, and saw Stronghole. I was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. He had raised the gate enough to roll under. “Before I go in there with you, I have to ask. Did you stool me or not?”

          “It’s not like you think, Bartell. Laraby put me on you, that’s true. He said you had your own agenda and I had to look out. He said you’d try to set me up to get me off the case cause you were in with St. Claude. He wanted to work you to get to him. I never squawked about the paper.”

          “How’d they know I’d be out if you didn’t tell them?”

          “What the fuck you talking about?” he asked. I couldn’t think what the fuck I was talking about. Drizzle and sweat ran down his forehead and back. His words burst out with rain and droplets. “I’m working with you now or I’m cutting you loose. Your choice.”

          “But I’ve got to know what side you’re on,”   I said.

          “Don’t I have to know the same? Let’s go to work.”

          I rolled on the cold, slimy concrete. We were in a dark hallway lit by emergency lights. There was a metal stair and an elevator. A cop car drove up. We walked up the stair slowly. The car was stopped out front, headlights shining on the grate, and nobody coming in.

          The ninth floor had fifteen foot ceilings and was subdivided. At the end of the hall we found Barker’s Wine and Spirits, the name painted in gold on the pebbled glass door. Stronghole jammed in the crowbar and tried to wrench the door off its frame. Then he went at it with sledge hammer for a while and got it off with the crowbar. The room was warm and smelled of cardboard and pine cleaner. Boxes wrapped in plastic, stacked on pallets to the ceiling. Signs hung from rope over head. Bordeaux. Loire. Single Malts. In the back was a windowed office.

          “Man,” Stronghole said, “look at all this booze. I’ve got an aunt who would’ve shot her nut here.”

          “I got an aunt who’d think she’d died and gone to the Ancient Thebes to get her brains pulled through her nose. So what. Let’s throw the office.”

          On the back wall was a freight elevator and a couple of parked fork lifts. Next to that was a shipping and receiving area. Spiked bills of lading and invoices were neatly arranged at the rear of a long workbench. There were postage scales and meters, an adding machine, rolls of tape and orange sponges for wetting the back, mat knives, folded boxes and a small calendar with an off-registered picture of a Pekinese dog, the company logo crookedly stamped above it. I picked up one of the mat knives and thunked it into the table top; it was the kind with a retractable blade, but long enough to slit open boxes, a couple of inches. I slid it into my pocket and continued checking out the pit of the flunkies. Various safety notices were tacked to the cork board, decorated with crudely drawn genitalia and guffawish comments on comments. There was a blow up pair of puckered red lips about three inches wide and a photo of the Pope blessing a crowd of dock workers with hairy backs. Further on was a photo of a nude man from the nipples to the knees, in profile, with the longest semi-erect penis I have ever seen.

          “There’s gotta be a rolodex,” I said.

          “Maybe in the boss’s office.”

          Part of the ceiling was damaged where the blood had puddled before leaking. A whole pallet had been moved and the wooden floor was stained. Stronghole shined the light on the ceiling. There was a wire hanging down. “What do you think?” he asked.

          “You mean the wire?”

          “Yeah.”

          “I don’t know what the fuck to do. It’s not attached to anything.”

          “So what. It’s got to be a blow job.”

          “We’d better hope not. Let’s go in and out fast.”

          We broke into the office and started going through the files, folder by folder and through the rolodex. McSorley’s wine shop was in both places as well as a hundred other little shops. He had standing orders and special orders. There was St. Claude’s Chateau Yquem, stamped canceled. Also in McSorley’s name and also canceled were standing orders from Burgundy and Bordeaux, each with a local shipping company.

          Stronghole spoke. His voice was like ice in my neck. I turned to him and blinked, scared out of my wits. “Look,” he said, holding up a loose leaf binder. “Look here. It’s the shipping and receiving log.”   He held the light over a page divided into columns. “These look like Watt’s companies. Steak and Bake is his budget line and Baron DeBoeff the high end. All highway joints.”   He flipped to the receiving part. “This guy Barker gives to receive. He got a bunch of packages from these Watts owned restaurants. And the dates are right around when St. Claude was shipping out his lab. Looks like we got a suspect.”

          “Yeah, I’m just dying to tangle with the Baron DeBoeff.” I poked around the office some. It was a small room, with glass walls and Venetian blinds, but big enough for two metal desks, a bunch of filing cabinets and a water bubbler with funnel shaped paper cups. Next to the bubbler was a Bean of Araby automatic drip coffee maker with some coffee cups and wooden stirrers, an urn of CreaMate, sugar packs and some liquid cyclamate, all arranged on a stained doily. One of the desks had a plaque that said ‘The Butt Squats Here’, a day calendar and some pictures of a woman in various stages of life, stuck in a discolored plastic cube.

          “Nice braces,” I said waving the picture at Stronghole.

          He grunted at me over the file. “She’s cute now, but later, watch out. Now, look at this. Watts businesses buy their booze from Barker. And Barker imports his wine on Watts owned tankers registered in the Republic of Champa. “

          “That old gimmick,” I said. “Like a string of pearls. You stick ’em up your ass and pull ’em out one by one.”  

          “I thought a string of pearls was drops of semen around the neckline.”

          “Jesuitical sophistry now?” After the braces she’s in a green stretch convertible with a silk scarf over her head and oval sunglasses. Next to her is a tweedy looking guy crumpled against the white upholstery. She’s flashing tooth like a howler monkey and he looks about as lively as a spent condom. “If you were riding in that boat with her, would you look like that?” I asked.

          “All depends,” he said without looking up.

          “On what?”

          “How much sleep I’d gotten the night before. Whether we were friends; things like that.”   He continued to flip through files and notebooks clucking and exclaiming.

          “Hey Stronghole, don’t you even want to see what I’m talking about?”

          “Maybe they’ve been up all night fucking and snorting MDA. Maybe he just felched her Bartell. How do I know?”

          “At least look and tell me you don’t think this punk has shit for brains.”

          He sighed and let me know in twelve different ways how exasperated he was and how I was wasting his time and breaking his concentration. Finally he put down the dogeared, shopworn tomes of commerce and deigned to look. “Those two are in high school. He’s been up all night spilling his little pee pee out into some high art diary and drinking instant coffee. She’s just had a swim and is dragging him to the country club for a dance. They’ve been going out for two years and he’s beginning to hate her guts cause she’s still a part of the tennis and sailing set while he wants to rip the world’s head off and drink its blood. He’s– David Watts.” He stared at it and then at me. “These families go way back.”

          I took it for a walk. So Barker’s daughter dated David Watts in high school. Barker distributes hooch to the highway Baron DeBoeff. He imports said hooch from gay Paree using Watts owned freighters registered in Champa. How does a warehouse dog who works from a steel desk on the ninth floor with a bubbler and tit shots on the wall rub buns with a big shot like Hubble Watts? Maybe Watts starts small. Maybe Barker sinks some cash into Watts. Maybe they come up together. Mowing lawns and such. So he’s the Marquis de Sod before taking over the world with his rusty buckets. I thought of Evalyn St. Claude. I looked at the picture. Behind the oval glasses and blue hair and scarf, the jaw, the mouth were the same and the attitude was all there, sitting in that $40,000 eight cylinder cream puff just like it was her couch, without the stogy and bad scotch and no six years of bad marriage. “I think that’s Evalyn St. Claude stretched out behind the wheel. And my bet is that David Watts is her mole.”

          Stronghole could barely contain himself. I could smell it. “What mole is that?”

          “Clara Turback said that Evalyn St. Claude had a mole. At first I thought she meant like a spot on her ass or something. But then I realized she meant spy. David Watts was dogging her then, maybe he’s dogging her now. Maybe that’s why people are winding up dead everywhere.”

          “We’ve got to find out who leases the upstairs,” he said. We returned the files and folders and books and tried to make it look straight and headed for the elevator, both fairly busting. The boxes were like walls and formed tight corridors. We stood there for a second in silence, looking at each other. All the ambient noise became magnified.  

          Then it happened. PINK. And then, pink-pink. Three spouts opened up on a box to the right, above my head, splashing me with a thick sweet liqueur. I fell flat to the floor and Stronghole dove around the corner. We had to see by exit signs and fire lights on the floor. Stronghole had the automatic in the tool box. I held my breath and listened. About two pallets down someone was breathing. I backed down the aisle on my stomach, pistol drawn, till I could crouch behind a pallet. He knew where we were. It was time to split up and stalk him.

          I went right and Stronghole went left. Just to stir things up I fired off three shots. They roared through the warehouse and ripped apart a case of Chambertain. The man didn’t move. I crept closer. PINK PINK. This time chest high, into a case of Gewurtztraminer. Stronghole had moved farther over and now we closed in. I faked right, knocking a box quietly and then moved silently back left. The exit signs clicked off. That was the moment, the long black quiet. No one moved. There were no sounds, just the lingering click of the switch. Then Stronghole knocked out a whole junction box with the automatic. The light exploded into sparks. The compressor coughed and cut out. Sulfur drifted through the falling dark. Footsteps headed rapidly away. I took off in their direction, shining the light as best I could.

          Stronghole yelled for me to cover him. He climbed to the top of the pallets and ran while I fired at the man’s echo, reloading and shooting again and again.

          “Jack, the stairs!”  

          We ran to the stairs. The gunman was just out of range, going down through the zig zag shadows. Down we ran, sticky with booze, hair matted, ringing on the cat walk metal, danka-danka-danka. The eyes shrink; Stronghole flies through the flickers down after him. I let go and fell down. I had to catch my breath to make the beating and pounding stop.  I waited till the air was still and black enough to drop down right behind them, on the stair. Stronghole looked like a beetle on its back. The man stood over him with his canon pointed at his head. They were both huffing hard, both scared.

          “Who do you work for?” the man asked.

          They didn’t know how close I was. I could almost push him face first down the stairs.

          Stronghole refused to answer. He just stared. But the duck was acting fearless now. His cheeks and forehead were pocked and the bones around his eyes had been broken once and badly set. On each finger was a ring with a different colored rock.  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on and we walk. Otherwise, it’s smoke. Who sent you?” A drop of sweat rolled down Stronghole’s forehead.

          Stronghole asked, “How does a piece of shit like you stay alive?”

          I took out the mat knife.

          “When my pals come, that’s it. I’m giving you an only out,” he said.

          I Stepped into the air towards him. He dropped his arm slightly as he started to turn and I reached my hand around his eyes and nose and pulled him to me. Then I pushed the mat knife into his neck and cut his throat. He bled hot against my arms and I prayed he wasn’t diseased, but I held on till he stopped kicking. Then I let him drop to the floor. Stronghole had the gun. There were footsteps coming up the stairs. We lifted off the body like disturbed flies and turned. Two men in long grey coats with sad faces stepped into the door. Everyone was surprised, them more than us, and it cost them three pints each against the walls.

          We ran out the front door and to the car. As we drove ioff, The Pechardine blew. The air, the buildings and the street shuddered. We were engulfed in light and heat. A fire ball rose in the rear view.

          It was past midnight when I got home. Mrs. Stantborg’s head was slumped on her chest, snoring and soaking up the test pattern. Over all, I felt good. We were getting somewhere. But I needed a drink. Every cell in my body was a little pair of puckered lips, screaming for a jane.