The Last Bender, Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

          At 9:15 Stronghole kicked the door in. That made it 100%, cause everything else was fucked up too. His shoulders were so big, he had to turn sideways to get in through the door. For two seconds we stared each other down, eye to eye, until he smiled. I didn’t move. I put my face on pause and felt it freeze into place. We were both in white T shirts and faded jeans. I stepped aside and smiled. He pushed past me. “What took you?” I asked, facing him down the hall.

          “Your house is hard to find.”

          “Not that hard. Go on in the living room. It’s straight ahead.”

          He shook his head and looked around. “Ever get lost in this place?”

          “Can it. Sit. Ask me how I am.”

          “Is something wrong?”

          “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my chin and mugging.

          “Was it the car? You went through the glass? Or did you dive through a plate glass window in pursuit of ducks.” He squinted up from the couch, examining me minutely.

          “Boxing match. Now who d’you spose’d wanna rack me up for venison?”

          Now he set cold and fixed his radar on the spot in space we were projected from. “Should I know?” he asked. “Are you saying I should?” A long pause between us. “All right. Who used you for a punching bag?” I didn’t answer. “Why do I walk into a warehouse with a guy who won’t say if his name is bow or wow?”

          “We got things to discuss.”   I leaned against the wall by the t.v. I wore one of the T Dubs in a shoulder holster and carried the other, which he pretended not to notice.

          He stood and said, “Save it for the car,” and headed for the hall. As he brushed past me I asked, “I hope you got bigger guns in the car.”

          “Could be,” he said, turning briefly around, his voice tight. “Just gotta get there.”   He poked his snout into the bedrooms and whistled. “Did they find anything?”

          “Like what?” I asked.

          “Like maybe that piece of paper you had in your wallet.”

          “Why would they want that?” I wanted to know.

          “Evidence,” he said.

          “Evidence of what? It’s a file, right? Who cares? What’s the price on a file? Anyway, no one knew I had it but you.”

          “Don’t forget Juice.”

          “What about Juice?”

          “Tell me you didn’t you say you didn’t like him down in that garage.”

          “Stronghole, Juice is cold. It scares me to be near him. If he’s around where he doesn’t belong, or usually go, then he’s there for a reason. Cause  Juice always has one for what he does. And stooling me ain’t on his list of reasons. That leaves you.”

          Stronghole sat there and took it like gum, getting tougher as I went along. Finally he got sufficiently agitated and started to pace. “I don’t even know what to say to that. I’m on my own side Jack. I get out of this alive. Are you coming or what?”

          I had to accept that. “We have to be careful. Bunuel isn’t taking. If he hits at Laraby, then Laraby lets us fall. It won’t be Juice. You see that don’t you?”

          “Yeah, I see it. But so what. People died in there and we know more than anyone else.”

          I locked up the house. “All the good it’ll do us. Where’s your car?”

          “About a quarter mile that way,” he said, pointing north on Ralph Street, toward Dollar Park and the El.

          “You must be kidding. I hope you don’t drive fancy.”

          “It’s not a problem.”

          We got in my car. “Why isn’t it a problem?” The engine needed some coaxing. I pumped the gas once, turned the key; it turned over and died, so I let it rest. Cheap alcohol. The guts of the engine were gummed up.

          “Cause I got my cat in there.” He looked out the window at the freeway. A semi shifted down delivering a long Doppler belch. He was relaxed. The car coughed up a brown cloud that rose through the tail lights and dispersed through the night like blood in black water. I drove slowly in the direction of his car, through the blowing trash.

          “There it is,” he said. Well, it wasn’t more than two parking spaces long and was painted probably three or four different colors, at least that was all I could make out in the dark: bing cherry and caramel, with blooms of blue-green algae and squash blossom. Plastic sheets were taped across the windows and a whip antenna extended in a delicate parabola from above the driver’s seat all the way back to the left tailfin.

          Spread eagle on the back seat was the biggest house cat I have ever seen.

          “Catch any mice with that thing?” I asked.

          “She, SHE only eats mice when she’s bored.”

          “What about your kid?”

          “Kid doesn’t like mice.”

          He loaded shells into a FLaRCiT shotgun pistol and snapped it shut, stowing it on the floor between his feet. As we drove into town I told him about Clara Turback and Evalyn St. Claude’s weird remark about the wine. Driving freestyle he said, “So according to her they’re doing the same work for us they did at Cornell. Not rat poison or cunt cream.”

          “Yeah,” I said. “What I can’t figure is why they would kill each other. I could see if someone snatched them, something could go wrong.”

          “Maybe they couldn’t agree. Maybe they had broken into factions. One group wants to break and sell, the other stay.”

          “Sort of like a coup?”

          “Or a purge. More like a purge.”

          “I see, yeah. Cause it’s the top killing the bottom. My friend Linda, she said the blood in the warehouse contained some kind of chemical. Whatever it is they’re working on in there, it’s left a trace in their blood. My guess is it’s connected with this wine business. Keeps popping up. You hungry?”

          “I could eat.”

          Maybe Stronghole didn’t stool me. He pulled off the road into a brightly lit brItOmArt. I kicked aside the bags of garbage and made my way to the store while Stronghole watched the car. A tall, sullen woman with long white hair and a nose pierced three times in each nostril slouched against the back wall by the coffee pots. She smoked a hand rolled cigarette of black tobacco. It smelled like burning cow shit. She blew the smoke around as she packed the dozen assorted and two large black coffees into the bag and made change. We drove off.

          “So whudjya find?” I asked, biting into a powdered Bovarian Kreme.

          “Lots. First off–I checked the sign-in sheet for Saturday night again. There’s one guy missing. David Watts. He called in sick all week. He lives with his sister out in Guernsey in a town called Tudor Caravan. She doesn’t answer the phone.”

          “Tudor Caravan, huh? Swank.”

          “He’s no grunt. It’s his first job but he’s a bona fide doc in biophysics. Plus there’s family money–“

          “Of course.”

          “Father owns a chain of steak joints, those all you can eat and drink dives on the interstate, and a nightclub downtown. He’s also got an import/export deal but that part’s so in the shade I can’t get it to grow.”

          “What about the other families?”

          “I talked to a couple. Stanislau’s boyfriend was a no show. I figured you’d want to see him anyway. Then there’s this Kozgazdasagi Szemle.  She lives alone. I tried to break into her apartment but Bunuel was already there.”   He took a deep breath and punched the accelerator. He went on. “But that’s not all, Bartell. They let me have a look around the place when I told them who I was. She’s got photographs of nerve cells on her mantel, in picture frames. And in the kitchen, the cabinets were full of these little jars. In each jar was a nerve preserved in a different colored liquid. It was really nutty. They were all stacked up.

          “Everyone else I saw that day had some nutty thing to report. Like, they only eat raw food. Or this one guy, Shorty McFaddin, who cleaned up around the place. Suddenly he’s into symbolic logic. His mother showed me his room. It’s piled up to here with math books. He has these framed sheets of glass, mounted like blackboards and covered in notation. The notation, it’s written in translucent inks, and he’s got them lit so they look like they’re floating in the air. 

          “Then I saw Pink Smith’s husband. She managed the protocol on all the lab experiments. He showed me her collection of rare shrunken heads. I’m telling you, they were mounted on little shelves in her closets. Each one with a name and label. The eyes were glass. They kinda glowed in the dark.”

          “What about Pine Point.”

          “It’s just a summer house. Some of her things are there but nothing much. There was a fish tank with these weird looking giant hydras.”

          As we headed into town, the people got denser and denser, crowding off the sidewalk. Stronghole had to honk and accelerate to back them off the hood. They faded with the lights and buildings as we passed through the financial district and into the old industrial part of the city.

          “Turback had figurines. She said I was polluting the place with my, I don’t know what. Turbine exhaust or something like that. Excreta in there somewhere. She was yanking my chain to make me think cult. She had so much cock-eye, I left chewing aspirin.”

          He found a spot about a block away from the warehouse. We sat there eating donuts and drinking down the weak jo.

          The streets were unlit and empty. There were no sidewalks. Loading docks hung with heavy chain faced directly on the road. The broken, windowless facades of abandoned buildings rose block after block, against the smoky orange sky. Broken glass glittered in the crushed stone of the unpaved streets and concrete drive-ups. Steam pipes dripped into the gutter. In the distance, tyrannized gears and buckets groaned and squeaked. Trash compactors worked their harsh grind on the foul alley air. Levers hissed. Occasionally, a human shout broke through the cries of harrowed motors.

          “So, what next?” he asked quietly.

          “Linda said the blood from the warehouse job dripped through the floor onto a wine merchant’s stock. The last thing Evalyn St. Claude told me was that if I saw St. Claude I should tell him to pick up his case of Chateau Yquem at McSorley’s. So I go to McSorley’s. The guy who owns the place gives me nine yards of wine lore I need like an asshole in my forehead. He says he doesn’t carry stock like that in the store but keeps it in a warehouse downtown, with his importer. Then he tells me detectives had been in to question him. Then he manages to tell me his importer works out of the Pechardine, same as the murders. I say we have a look around. Cops are gonna turn up something, some link between the two. We gotta know what they know, first. We gotta take care of it.”

          The donuts were gone. We wiped up the crumbs and licked our fingers till the crumbs were done too.

          “Let’s go,” he said.