Damn. That was bad. He was a laugher-somebody for whom getting high was an intensification of life’s absurdities. Which meant he would let out a peal of laughter at just about anything, everything.
“Listen,” I said. “Listen to me. Are you so high you don’t care whether or not you get busted? You best talk things over with me or I’ll have the sheriff on your butt so fast you’ll think you’re hallucinating.”
The cackle turned into a more or less normal laugh, which kept going as he said, “Call him… go ahead, ya stupid jerk, go ahead and call the Man.”
That stopped me.
“You talked to him already?” I said.
His smile flickered yes.
“Gave him permission for the autopsy?”
His smile again said yes and he laughed some more.
I didn’t know how much of this to buy, so I asked him, “What’s the sheriff’s name, since you know him so well?”
He then did a very bad impression of Walter Brennan that was just good enough to make his point.
I said, “Brennan knows you’re a user?”
“‘Just be out of town by sunrise,’ is all he says. ‘Yessir, Mister Dillon,’ I says.”
“What about Janet? Doesn’t it mean anything to you she’s dead?”
He stopped cold for a moment, no laughter, no smile, but his eyes still fixed on some remote fleck of dust. He said, “Man, you and me we’re dyin’ right now. You’re born and then you start dyin’. Big fuckin’ deal.”
“What about your son? Any feelings about him?”
He shifted his focus of attention to the right corner of the room. He smiled again, this time not at me. It was neither yes or no.
“What about your son?” I repeated.
“What son? I don’t have a son… son… sunrise… out of town… ‘Yessir, Mister Dillon,’ I says. Get outta’ my karma, man.”
I released my hold on him but he stayed put anyway. I got up and roamed restlessly around the room. I looked in his suitcase: one newly purchased, now-wrinkled dark dress suit; some soiled underwear; no heavy dope, other than a lid or so of that admittedly strong grass; a rental slip for the Javelin outside; and the last half of a round trip ticket in a Pan Am envelope. On the outside of the latter was his time of arrivaclass="underline" eleven that morning; he’d come in from Chicago. That pretty well ruled out any thoughts I might’ve had, after his spirited attack on me, about him being a possible suspect in the beating of Janet’s mother and the burning of the house. The only other item in the suitcase was a recently bought shiny black leather billfold. The only identification in it was a crinkled-up, dirty driver’s license-Illinois, expired-and there was some cash in it. Five crisp, new bills.
Five thousand dollars.
I rushed over and grabbed one of his skinny arms and said, “Where the hell did you get money like this?”
He grinned at the ceiling.
“Answer me!”
He kept grinning. “One of my paintings, man.”
“Yeah, I heard you were an artist.” I shook him. “What did you do for this kind of cash? Who’d you rip off?”
He said, “Turn on th’ music.”
A thought came to me from out of left field.
“Norman,” I said.
Somewhere in the glazed, dilated eyes a small light seemed to go on.
I grabbed a thin arm. “Norman-what’s that name mean to you? Norman? Norman!”
He started back in on a laughing jag and I got in the way of the stale warmth of his musky breath. Another whiff and I’d get a contact high. He said, “Turn on th’ music. Get outta’ my karma.”
I let go of him. Got out of his karma. Threw the billfold on the nightstand, by the stick of melting incense.
On my way out I turned his cassette player back up; Deep Purple was playing an instrumental called “Hard Road.”
Taber and I liked the same music. For some reason that made me feel a little sick.
Or maybe I just wasn’t used to the smell of pot smoke anymore.
PART THREE
THIRTEEN
I knew where the Filet O’Soul Club was, but I’d never been inside. In my mind there still lingered, from impressionable high school days, the nasty stories that filtered down from the Quad Cities, stories that collectively formed the legend of the Filet O’Soul.
The club was in Moline (which is on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities), up on the Fifteenth Street hill where it starts to level out, just at the point where you can’t see the cars coming up over, and crossing the street becomes a jaywalker’s Russian Roulette. A lot of people drove top-speed through that little two block section, where the Filet O’Soul was just one of a cluster of small businesses that shared little in common outside of a general lack of respectability. Nice folks resented the fact that this accumulative eyesore was on a main drag like it was, but there wasn’t much a person could do about it except roar up over the hill now and then and scare hell out of pedestrians.
But the Filet O’Soul, unlike some pedestrians, was anything but run-down. The outside was shiny black pseudo-marble-a smooth glassy dark front with no windows, with a big shiny steel door recessed in its center and a little neon sign above the door spelling out the club’s name in red against black. The Filet O’Soul was said to be an extremely clean bar, with excellent food, beautiful, efficient waitresses, the best bartenders around, solid entertainment and reasonably low prices. The only dent in a reputation otherwise as solid as the club’s steel door was its legend: nobody white who went in ever came out in one piece.
When I was in high school, every month or so John and I and a carload of guys would go up to see the skin flicks at the Roxy Theater, which was a couple doors down from the Filet O’Soul. I can remember the butterflies in my stomach as I’d walk past the place with my buddies, heading for the safety of the Roxy’s hard seats and stale air, trying to ignore the milling blacks smoking out front of the Filet, hoping they wouldn’t say anything, hoping they wouldn’t kill us or worse, paying dearly for the sin of the Roxy.
Such was the feeling I had Thanksgiving morning when Jack Masters called to tell me he’d arranged a meeting for me with Rita Washington at the Filet O’Soul.
But after a second the feeling went away, and I hadn’t, I hoped, let any of it show over the receiver to Jack. Great, I said to him, what had he told her?
Just that I was an okay guy, he said, and that all I wanted was talk. That I was a writer, but not a reporter-just a mystery writer researching something for a story. And, since she was a part-time schoolteacher who could use the money, that there was twenty bucks in it for her.
I told him he was awful free with my money and he said nothing’s free, son; then I asked him what time he’d set it for.
Eleven o’clock this morning, he told me, and nobody’d be there but the bartenders, getting ready for the crowd that’d be in to watch the football games on TV. Rita knew one of the bartenders pretty good and he’d given the okay, Jack said.
I thanked him for all the trouble, and he said, well, he wasn’t going to let me go up there myself night before a holiday. Hadn’t I heard what they said about the Filet O’Soul?
The door’s steel was cold on my knuckles as I knocked. I stopped knocking and waited a few moments, was getting ready to knock again when the door opened. The man who answered was tall and lean and wore a black satin long-sleeved shirt with a red patent leather vest and black brushed corduroy pants. Skin coal black, nostrils wide, eyes dark and alert, forehead, cheekbones and chin chiselled, smile white, slow, careful and amused-he looked like a charcoal drawing, and a good one.
“You’d be Mallory,” he said.
I nodded, smiled liberally.
“Rita isn’t here yet,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.