“Hey, O’Brien, quit with the long face. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll find the drug center. The Deacon will explain to those jokers at the Bright Spot that we’d really like to know where that dad-blamed center is,” Sol said, oblivious to the real reason for my sudden shift of mood. “Isn’t that right, Deacon?”
“Right on, boss,” the Deacon answered.
The Deacon, a nickname he acquired when he was an All-American defensive end for USC-named after the great Deacon Jones of the L.A. Rams, whom he emulated-was a powerful black guy about six-two and two-hundred-twenty pounds. He had arms of steel and his shoulders looked like the crossbeams that held up the Vincent Thomas Bridge. After a tour in Vietnam, Special Forces, decorated for valor twice, and a stint in the Secret Service, he joined Sol’s team of talented and formidable agents. It wasn’t long before the Deacon became Sol’s prime operative, often accompanying him on special missions where muscle and diplomacy were needed in equal proportions.
The Deacon wore an expensive Italian-cut business suit with all the accessories, monogrammed dress shirt, Magnum 45, and an Hermes tie, the Magnum being tucked into a designer crocodile holster.
While Sol took another call, I stared out the window at the vast desert wasteland rushing by. I wasn’t focused on the sun-bleached rocks or scorched mountains. I tried to comprehend where and how I’d gone wrong. I thought about the terrible mess I was in: Robbie’s escape, Judge Tobias and his disappointment in me, and now Rita sacrificing her ethics on my behalf. It was too much. Thoughts of quitting the law crossed my mind. Yeah, maybe it would be better if I gave up the law business, got a real job. But quitting the law, canceling my bar card, would probably be a moot point before long anyway.
“By the way, Jimmy,” Sol said, after he hung up the phone. “Mabel had something else to tell you.”
“Yeah, what’d she say this time?”
“Seems she found a goddamn mouse in your office.”
“A mouse in my office?”
“Yeah, imagine that. When she came to work this morning, Rita and you were in your office talking. Mabel left and came back when you two were gone. Later, when she went into your office to get a file, she noticed that someone had moved the filing cabinet. She went to straighten it. And guess what? She found a goddamn mouse. That’s what she said, a goddamn mouse behind the cabinet. She said it’s now in her purse.”
I hadn’t been paying much attention to Sol, but suddenly it dawned on me what he was talking about. “Mabel did what? Rita wasn’t there?”
A mischievous grin appeared on Sol’s face. “Why would Mabel put a goddamn mouse in her purse?” He glanced at the Deacon. “Why would she do that, Deacon?”
“Don’t know, boss.”
“Maybe she didn’t want the cops to notice how untidy a law office can get. Things like that laying around. Disgusting.”
Sol dusted his hands in an exaggerated fashion, mocking my gloom, which now departed at a fast gallop. Rita hadn’t removed the gun after all. She had kept her word.
“Yeah,” the Deacon said. “A goddamn mouse, imagine that.”
“With a goddamn.38 caliber asshole,” Sol said, “that shits bullets.”
Sol and the Deacon broke out laughing. I laughed too, hard. And it felt good.
We roared up to the Bright Spot Cafe, jumped out of the limo, and dashed into the white clapboard building.
“All right, everyone up against the wall!” Sol strutted around the room, walking tall, flashing his P.I. badge. He waved it around at arm’s length. The Deacon stood next to the wall, in front of the window, holding his gun at his side, pointed at the floor. Cubby stayed with the car. I stood by the door.
Sol wanted to make a dramatic entrance, get the people’s attention, he’d explained earlier.
The same group of men slouched in the cafe, but the girl, Jane, was nowhere in sight. Everyone looked up and started moving slowly to the edge of the room. Everyone, that is, except Ben Moran and his buddy, a new guy I hadn’t seen before.
The new guy was a bear of man, a redneck brute of about forty. He wore no shirt and his hairy, ursine back and chest were exposed beneath his bib overalls. Even while he sat, I could see that Moran’s buddy had to be about six-foot-five, and in a weight contest he’d top a black grizzly. He was no Winnie the Pooh.
The redneck and Moran sat calmly at the table drinking coffee, oblivious to the action surrounding them. Finally, the bear looked up. “Hey, gumshoe. Tell your boy to put his peashooter away before I have to get out of my chair and shove it up his ass.” He spoke with a thick cracker accent.
Ben Moran’s eyes flashed and he said, “Shut up, Buddy.” He said it fast, before Sol could react to the redneck’s comment. “We’re going to have a friendly little chat with these gentlemen. Then we’ll ask them to leave, nice and polite like.” He turned to Sol. “C’mon over and sit down. Have some coffee.” He looked at me; there was a hardness in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. “You too, O’Brien. You can tell me about your plan to buy the Harvey House.”
“The Deacon,” Sol swaggered toward the men at the table, “doesn’t like to be called boy. Makes him real upset, no telling what he’ll do.” Sol then charged the table, got up close to Moran’s pal, and said, “I’m a Jew. Wanna make something out of that?”
Buddy the Bear sprang to his feet and roared back, ready to let fly an amazingly huge fist in the direction of Sol’s face.
Moran grabbed Buddy by the straps of his bib overalls. “Calm down, friend,” he said. Then he turned to Sol. “You too, mister gumshoe. Christ said — ”
“I don’t give a damn what Christ said. I wanna know where the girl is.”
“What girl?”
I walked to the table and answered for Sol. “Dark-haired teenager named Jane.”
“Never heard of her.” Moran turned to the customers lining the wall, the men guarded by the Deacon. “Any of you boys know some girl calls herself Jane?”
I watched their dead eyes as they lied, shaking their heads in unison.
Then I marched to the counter, hopped over it, and peered through the food slot into the filthy, drab kitchen behind the wall. No one was back there. I turned to the waitress who stood motionless, taut, next to the cash register. “You know who we’re talking about. She works here, was wiping tables.”
The waitress shook her head vehemently, but her eyes shifted downward. I followed her glance. Her hand was held out open below the counter; hidden from the group in the cafe. In it she held a small scrap of paper. Quickly, I snatched the paper and jammed it into my pocket.
“Where’s the owner of this place? I want to see the employment records,” Sol said.
“I own it,” Moran said. “Ain’t got no records. Don’t believe in them.”
“Government says you gotta keep records.”
“Government’s got no right poking their nose in my businesses.”
“Didn’t Christ say something about rendering unto Caesar?” Sol said.
“Caesar’s dead-and soon all the Hebrews will be dead too, along with the Roman heathens and descendants of Cain. Dead and gone once the day of reckoning is upon us.” Moran raised his head. “Amen, I say, amen!” I thought I noticed a smirk hiding in his dark eyes under those bushy brows.
The men at the wall joined in, chanting amen and waving their arms as they moved closer to the Deacon.
I came out from around the counter. “In the meantime, you can tell us where the drug center is located.”
Moran lowered his arms; the chanting stopped. His eyes shifted from the men lined up at the wall to the Deacon, then to Sol.
Buddy the Bear slowly hoisted his three hundred pounds of flab and attitude out of the chair. He pinned me with a defiant scowl and then focused on the Deacon. His face had the hue of a hot brick. Any minute he’d explode. Tension filled the room; you could squeeze it with your fingers and it would bleed.
“Hey, boy!” Buddy the Bear yelled at the Deacon.