“What do you want me to do?”
“Do? Well, like I said, you’re the strategist. Maybe you can put up that barbecue pit we talked about?”
1959 September 30 Wednesday 16:21
“Front!” Carl’s waspish voice rang more sharply than the desk bell.
Rufus materialized. Despite his overwhelmingly intrusive curiosity about everything that went on within the borders of his domain, Carl had long since abandoned his efforts at discovering how Rufus never seemed to be around, yet was always present.
“Mr. Travis will be staying with us, Rufus,” Carl said, indicating a chubby man in a madras sport jacket.
Good thing you told me, faggot, Rufus thought to himself. I never would have figured out why a man comes into a fucking hotel carrying a suitcase. He smiled at the guest, said, “I’ll take that for you, sir.”
“Mr. Travis will be in 412,” Carl said to Rufus, thinking fat men shouldn’t wear madras plaid, never mind with a tab-collar shirt. He had already sized up-No pun intended, he thought to himself, smugly-the guest as a salesman even before he had seen his business card. A cut above a traveler who carried samples in his suitcase, but a step below the “detail men” who hawked new pharmaceutical products to local doctors and druggists.
Rufus had done his own quick evaluation, and was later rewarded with a quarter for providing the directions to a “high-class” house of prostitution. You that kind of big spender, good thing you don’t be trying your luck picking up a woman on your own, Porky, Rufus thought behind his dazzling smile and grateful bow.
“You seen Rosa Mae around?” he asked Moses, as he climbed into the elevator car for the return trip.
“She be working somewhere, one of the rooms,” was the noncommittal response.
“What’s up with you, man?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“With the attitude, man. I just asked you a simple question, you get all huffy with me.”
“Rufus, you know Rosa Mae. Her shift starts, she starts. That’s a hardworking young gal.”
“Too good for the likes of me, huh? Just because she call you ‘Daddy Moses’ like the young girls here do, that don’t make you her father for real.”
“Might be lucky for your sorry ass that I’m not,” Moses said, unperturbed.
Rufus burst out laughing. “Our people need more men like you, brother. Square business.”
1959 September 30 Wednesday 17:28
“I just want to talk,” Procter said into a telephone receiver.
“No, you don’t,” a man’s voice answered. “What you want, you want to listen.”
“That’s my business, Chet. Listening.”
“Mine, too. Only you, you get a paycheck for it.”
“And you get cash. That’s nicer. No taxes.”
“Paycheck’s better. Regular is always better. Something you can count on.”
“There was a time when you counted on me,” Procter said.
“You don’t forget nothing, do you?”
“I don’t tear up IOUs, either,” Procter said. “I’ll see you tonight. By the water tower.”
1959 September 30 Wednesday 17:31
“Rosa Mae, what is wrong with you, girl? You look like you seen a ghost.”
“Not a ghost, Rufus. A mojo. A powerful one.”
“What you-?”
“In the gentleman’s room.”
“Eight oh nine?”
“Yes! I finished cleaning his room, just like I’m supposed to. And then, like the fool you made me be, I opened his big suitcase. It wasn’t locked or anything. And the second I opened it, I could see why. You know what a mojo is, Rufus?”
“Yeah. Hoodoo nonsense is what it is.”
“No, it’s not,” the young woman said, vehemently, almost hissing the words. “It’s like one of those conjure bags you wear around your neck, to keep evil spirits off you. Only this one, it was real powerful. I could tell.”
“I thought you was a Christian woman, Rosa Mae,” Rufus scoffed, trying to soften her fear.
“I am,” she said, staunchly. “I have been baptized, and I have been saved. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know things. Things my granny told me when I was just a little girl, before I ever come up here. I never saw one myself, not before. But I know about the barbed wire around the hands. That’s a protection mojo, Rufus.”
“So you saw this thing and-”
“And? And I slammed down the lid so quick I scared myself! I got my cleaning things and I got out of there.”
“You didn’t put it back where you-?”
“Rufus, are you crazy? I never touch it.”
“Probably just some souvenir the man picked up somewhere. He’s a traveling man, could have been anywhere.”
“I never heard of a white man having anything like that. You could only get them way down in the Delta, my granny said. Or over to Louisiana. Special places, where they know how to work roots. Places like that, they wouldn’t be selling no souvenirs, Rufus.”
“Maybe he stole it, then.”
“You can’t steal a mojo! You know what happens if you do that?”
“What?”
“I… I don’t know, exactly. But I know you can’t do it.”
“Rosa Mae, did you find out anything?”
“I done told you what I found,” Rosa Mae said. “And I promise you, Rufus Hightower, I’m never doing nothing like that again, not ever.”
1959 September 30 Wednesday 18:29
Dett circled the block three times, marking the pattern of the streets, weighing the odds. He was in his shirtsleeves, suit jacket next to him on the front seat; his heavily armed coat was locked in the trunk. Full darkness was a couple of hours off, and Beaumont had told him the man he wanted only showed up much later in the evenings, in the seam between the dinner crowd and the nighthawks.
Dett turned onto Fourteenth Street, a black asphalt four-lane, divided by a double white line. As he pulled up to a light, a candy-apple ’55 Chevy slid alongside. The driver revved his engine in neutral, a challenge. Dett nodded in satisfaction at the assumption that the Ford he was driving belonged to some kid. He pressed down the clutch, slipped the floor shift to the left and down, and accepted the offer.
The Chevy took off a split second before the light turned green, but Dett’s Ford caught up before the first-to-second shift… which Dett deliberately missed, his engine roaring impotently as the Chevy went through the next light on the green.
To avoid having the Chevy’s driver offer him a rematch, Dett quickly turned off the main drag and made his way back to the pawnshop.
Just like the man promised, Dett said to himself, absently patting the dashboard of the Ford.
1959 September 30 Wednesday 19:31
“Good evening, Mr. Dett,” Carl greeted him an hour later. “It’s been amazingly warm for this time of year, don’t you think?”
“Well, I couldn’t say,” Dett replied. “I’m not from around here. Were there any messages while I was out?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” Carl said, lying. “Let me check.” He retrieved the key to 809, said, “Were you expecting anything in particular, sir?”
Dett answered with a negative shake of his head.
“Well, if there’s anything you want me to keep an eye out for…”
“I don’t think so,” Dett said. “Thanks, anyway.”
“Is there anything I can tell you about our town, Mr. Dett? I’ve often said that an establishment like the Claremont should have a proper concierge, but our manager always says he could never find anyone who knows Locke City the way I do,” Carl said, permitting himself a self-deprecating little laugh. “Of course, we have a wonderful kitchen, quite first-class, but the menu isn’t as… varied as some more sophisticated travelers seem to prefer. Especially if you’re going to be with us for-”
“Do you have any Korean restaurants in town?”