Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  “I imagine so,” Lady Sally said, still laughing.

  “Sooner or later he just had tell somebody. Somebody he trusted not to screw things up, not to get himself caught on the outside, or stay out and miss head-check, or brag on the inside. Then one day there were three of them. A secret club, like.

  “And one day they all came back at dawn and found the tunnel collapsed…

  “What could they do? They broke into jail, with civilian coats over their grays. When the cons went into a huddle, they dumped the coats.”

  A fresh wave of laughter shook the Lady. “And they had the sheer unadulterated crust to unseal the tunnel again and clear the cave-in, and go right back to business? My God, you must have done yourself a bit of good solving that one, Joe!”

  My smile went away, and I sighed. About one time in three they say something like that. “Well, no.” My head was hurting a lot now.

  Her laughter tapered off. “Why on earth not?”

  “Well, you see,” I said, “it’s like I told somebody recently: I’m a genius…but I’ve got the worst luck in the world.”

  “What went wrong?” she asked, locking sympathetic.

  “Well, I told Murph my idea, and he got excited, and we took it to the Warden. He’s very impressed, very excited. So he asks, how do I figure out which three cons, and how do I prove it on them? So I say, no problem: the one thing we know is that Murph’s booze-bandit perp is one of them; just confront him about the tunnel and sweat him and the job is done. He’s in his sixties, how hard could it be?”

  “He wouldn’t break?” Sally said.

  “Worse. He was able to prove that at the time of the robbery, and for twelve hours in either direction, he was under constant observation in the prison hospital. Coronary. So they checked, and the goddam tunnel was still blocked. Murph did get a bad set of prints. But there was no way to shut the old guy’s mouth after they told him about the tunnel, and about forty seconds after they sent him back to his cell, the whole joint knew about it. They never did nail the three guys, and the Warden decided it was all my fault.”

  Lady Sally looked stricken, “Oh, how ghastly for you.”

  Now my head hurt and I was getting depressed. “It just keeps turning out like that. Over and over. Ninety-five percent of my work is the most boring shit in the world, rent-paying stuff…and when the other five percent comes along, the interesting stuff, I wince. Because I know I’ll solve it, and I won’t make a dime. Once in a while, something really special like the Favila business comes along, and I get to be a laughingstock. A laughingstock, broker. It’s like I was a TV private eye, and the scriptwriters have to keep me broke enough to stay in the stupid job without making me an idiot.”

  “That sounds maddening,” Lady Sally said. “To have your life run by scriptwriters—ugh!” She shuddered.

  I got up and paced the room. “And the damn thing is, it isn’t necessary. I love the good parts of my job so much I’d stay in it if I was rich.” I lit a smoke. “I’d just cut down on the part that involves Polaroids. And the insurance work. And the skip tracing. Well, most of it, actually.”

  Lady Sally’s voice was soft. “To enjoy as much as five percent of your work makes you an unusually fortunate man for this time and place.”

  “I know,” I said, pacing and smoking.

  She nodded. “But the figure, however much above average, is unacceptably low, I know. That’s why I opened this menagerie, as you called it.” She stroked her chin meditatively. “Well, if things work out, perhaps you could work here part-time. Ninety-five percent of the time.”

  I snorted. “A PI working out of a whorehouse? Give me a break. They’d pull it after three episodes and replace it with a sitcom. Besides, if Arethusa is a fair sample, I’m not sure I could qualify to fold the towels around here.”

  “In terms of mechanical skills, on a scale of ten, Arethusa rates about an eight,” she said. “On her best day, with her best body.”

  I stopped pacing.

  “But I employ ones and twos here, too, Joe. Mechanical skills aren’t all that important. In terms of attitude, Arethusa is at least a nine, and nobody here is below seven.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “If you’ve got a ten-ten in the House, I hope you require a preliminary physical for all his or her clients.”

  “Regardless, I’m sure we could find a place for you here. Possibly even some work involving the skills you already have. Never mind; give it time. We’ll talk again after…after the events of this evening.”

  I nodded sourly. “After the terrific buildup I just gave you, you must be really looking forward to having me around tonight. Just what you need on a caper like this: a jinx.”

  “Stop that!” Lady Sally snapped.

  “Stop what?”

  “Belittling yourself. If it truly needs doing, let someone else do it. I could call Cynthia if you like, she’s quite good at it.”

  My shoulders slumped. I went back to the bed and sat down to stub out my cigarette. When I had mashed it dead, I said, more to myself than to her, “I just get so tired of giving people five pounds of coffee…”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Sorry. My expression for, ‘a gift that turns out to be a pain in the ass.’ Somebody gave me five pounds of coffee once. Terrific coffee; that was the worst part. You can’t drink more than a pound before it goes stale, but four pounds isn’t enough to be worth selling. I figured out later, the time I spent giving it away, half a pound or so at a time, I could have bought myself two pounds of great coffee. But I just couldn’t make myself throw it away…” I lit another Lucky and started pacing again. “Look, Lady, I want to give you a gift. You gave me a gift, you gave me a chance to meet Arethusa, and I want to give you back a closed case, you see? But the thing is, I keep going over it in my head, and I can’t come up with any way my jinx could possibly screw this up where I’m the only one who gets screwed. Do you understand?”

  “No,” she said.

  “On the Favila case, the only one who ended up suffering was me. With that prison-break thing, the Warden got shafted too. Not to mention the three guys who lost a perfectly good tunnel—don’t think I don’t feel guilty sometimes about what I did to them, just so I could try to look clever. But you see, if this goes sour tonight, we’re all screwed: me, you, Arethusa…both Arethusas…Pris, Tim, everybody. Once he knows we’re on to him, I don’t see any way he can let us live. We’ll know his name, what he looks like, and what he can do. He couldn’t even be sure how many of us know—his smart move would be to torch the whole place, clients and all.”

  “You’re not scaring me,” she said. “You’re impressing me, but I’ve handled dangerous snakes before.”

  “Not with my luck around,” I said sourly, spraying smoke.

  She snatched the cigarette from my hand and made it go away somehow. I was so startled I let her get away with it. “Is it something about the muscles themselves that does it?” she wondered. “Some side effect of all that tugging at the base of the brain?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are so many large, muscular men superstitious? You’d think a strong man wouldn’t need to be. In many cases, of course, stupidity is a reasonable theory…but you’re not stupid.”

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly.

  “Joe, listen to me. I have been forced to believe in a watch that makes time stop when you twist the stem. If you’ll produce one and let me test it, I shall undertake to believe in a ghost or a flying saucer. I am even willing to imagine, for purposes of theoretical discussion, a presidential candidate suited for the job—but the day I concede the existence of such a thing as a ‘jinx,’ a scarlet chap with a beard, a tail and a pitchfork will place an order for twenty billion pairs of ice skates! If you are feeble-minded enough to want to believe in good and bad joss, the Constitution so entitles you—but have the decency not to try and spread the virus. I’d rather go into this fight with one foot in a bucket than with a hoodoo on my back�
��and if you really do think that Bad Luck has nothing better to do then follow you around, perhaps you should just leave this to the rest of us.”

  I flinched as if she had hit me. No, actually: if she had hit me, I wouldn’t have flinched. I flinched as if she had wounded me.

  Which she had. Instead of shooting back, I did something unusual for me. I sat down, and rubbed at the back of my aching head…and tried to think. She gave me as long as I needed.

  Did I believe in Bad Luck?

  I certainly had a lot of evidence. My career history to date was an unbroken succession of spectacular failures. Time and again, I had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, often by only a hair’s breadth. Everybody agreed it wasn’t my fault: just consistently bad breaks. Lately it had been getting to the point where if somebody mentioned my name, they were as likely as not to add, “…poor bastard,” after it. There goes Joke Wiggly, the impotent dick.

  Well, was I going to accept that?

  How many times had I heard other guys, other PIs especially, complain about their bad luck…and known what they really meant by that was their stupidity or poor preparedness?

  I remembered my friend Murph telling me about a squeal he caught one time on the West Side. Neighbors had complained about an apartment that literally smelled like shit, so of course he arrived expecting to find one or more stiffs. Instead he found an old retired guy who was in the habit of keeping a couple of open buckets of his own shit around the house. “The guy spent forty years of his life workin’ in the sewer,” Murph explained to me, “and it got good to him.”

  Had I reached the point where I was making my own bad luck, because being in the shit had gotten good to me?

  All at once I remembered what I had just told Lady Sally about invisible scriptwriters plotting my life for me. Could it be that I was manufacturing bad luck for the same reason TV detectives did: so I wouldn’t become too successful to remain in the third-rate low-rent job I loved so much?

  Had I fallen in love with the romantic image of myself as a loser, a perennial fall-guy, because it gave me an excuse to be as fatalistic and weary and cynical as Sam Spade or Philip Marlow?

  I don’t usually dig that deep into myself. I think I might not have, the night before. Before I made love with Arethusa…

  I stopped rubbing at my head, and looked Lady Sally square in the eye.

  “You are looking at a walking disaster,” I said.

  She waited.

  “And tonight, it is going to fall, like an express train from a great height, onto the testicles of…what is his name, anyway? I can’t keep calling him ‘that scumbag.’”

  She smiled, and the room became prettier. “Yes, you may. But his name is Christian Raffalli. And I have just come as close as I ever shall to feeling sorry for him.”

  “Don’t commit yourself,” I advised. “You haven’t seen what I’m going to do to him yet.”

  “Whatever it is, I shall not pity him,” she said positively. “I’m not keen on rapists in general—but to rape, here, calls for a specially twisted mind. By my lights, creatures who hurt my friends are not human beings.”

  “Uh…listen,” I said. “Just how tight are you wired with the man across the river? I mean, do we have to give this Raffalli to the cops? And does he have to be healthy at the time?”

  “What guy?” she asked.

  I smiled. She smiled. We smiled together.

  “Impotent dick,” my ass! Just ask Arethusa; she’d tell you…

  From there on, the day improved again for a while.

  8. Black Spot

  …and if ye mingle your affairs with theirs, then they are your brethren (and sistren)…

  —the Quran (parentheses added)

  WHILE I was heading for the employees’ cafeteria in the basement, I suddenly heard an odd sound. Series of sounds. My first wild thought was that I had been transplanted into a Warner Brothers cartoon. I spun on my heel and saw a client coming toward me, from a Studio whose door was just closing. The bearded longhair with the carpenter’s tool belt I had seen the night before. No crutch this time. Now he was on a pogo stick…

  He boinged past, flashing me a quick wide smile, and took the spiral staircase without hesitating. The way he looked as he disappeared down and around the stairs made me think of a kangaroo melting as it circled Little Black Sambo.

  After a few seconds I started breathing again.

  I’m like Lady Sally too, I guess. There are some things I won’t believe even if I see them with my own eyes. No way could he have really had a faint shimmering glow around his head. It must have been a trick of the light.

  That reminded me that I’d been meaning to investigate how they managed to conceal the light sources in this place so cleverly. It was a neat trick. I looked around the hallway, windowless and bright as day.

  After five full minutes I had failed to locate a single bulb, except for the tiny red peanut bulbs. I gave up and continued on my way to breakfast.

  Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all available on demand, as the staff worked three—not two—shifts, providing round-the-clock art. The House coffee wasn’t Mike Callahan’s, but it was damned good for normal coffee. Tanzania Peaberry, a blend very high in caffeine without being sour: fresh ground and dripped. Over huevos rancheros I met more of the staff. A stacked short-haired blonde babe called Cat, stunning in a mauve bodysuit that fit her like a sheen of psychedelic perspiration. A quiet, darkly handsome guy in his twenties named Tony, who wore dark slacks, a net shirt and a single earring, and looked like the young De Niro. A sweet Chinese girl named Mei-ling, unselfconsciously naked and built like a three-quarter-scale model of Marilyn Monroe. A happy-go-lucky gal in a jogging suit whom everybody called Juicy Lucy, who never stopped telling jokes, good ones. (I recalled that she was one of Raffalli’s victims.) A tall greying gent named Phillip, with the best body I ever saw on a guy in his fifties. He was dressed in only brief denim shorts and slippers, and most of the other artists, male and female, seemed to find reason to touch him a lot as the afternoon wore on. A pleasantly dignified bald old coot named Reggie, a good forty years older than Phillip, wearing a splendid silk robe; he spoke (seldom) with a British accent, even more refined than Lady Sally’s, and had an odd knack of seeming to walk without moving his feet, sort of shimmering along as if he were on greased wheels despite his advanced years. I kind of wondered how much use he could be in a whorehouse, but I guess it’s like they say: if you can’t stir it, you can always lick it. And experience must count for something.

  And most memorable of all, the ubiquitous but seldom seen Mary. From her voice I had pictured her as young, blonde and athletic. She was in her late thirties, dark-haired, and had to run well over two hundred pounds. I think she was the sexiest woman in the room. Can you picture a sexy sumo? If not, there’s no point in my trying to describe her to you—and if you can, I just did. Her voice was so powerful, without being strident, that I wondered if she could get a man off with it alone. Even more than anyone else there, she made me feel included, at home, working me into conversations and explaining insider references and so on. At the same time she flirted with Phillip and gently jollied Cat out of a mild depression and demolished Juicy Lucy in a puntest and played mental chess with Reggie (losing valiantly and blasphemously, which latter he ignored) and demolished a six-egg omelet she rustled up herself. Figure out a way to rig a power takeoff on her and you could shut down the Big Allis plant over in Ravenswood. I noticed a wedding band on her hand and hoped for his sake that her old man was at least half machine.

  The American Indian whom Tim had introduced as “Many Hands” yesterday came in at a trot, grabbed a cup of coffee, and headed for the door again. For the life of me I couldn’t remember his real name. As he went by me I caught his eye and asked him. “What’s your name again, friend?”

  “I’m Running Behind,” he said, and was gone.

  Half a dozen whole and partially eaten biscuits hit the door in a cluster as
it closed behind him. One of them was mine. Robin, the client who apparently never went home, came scurrying out of the kitchen and cleaned them up almost before they hit the floor. I don’t think he was in view for more than three seconds. He was still wearing his Tarzan in Bondage outfit, in which he looked like a short potbellied accountant.

  The food was good, the conversation better, and nobody seemed to be in any kind of hurry. I felt strength and contentment flow into me. I didn’t even mind much that both Arethusas were elsewhere.

  At some point I mentioned to Mary how surprised I’d been the night before to see Priscilla eighty-six a cop with two other buttons standing right there. She smiled and nodded. “Sally can even afford to offend cops.” She paused, and did something subtly satanic with her eyebrows. “Lady zings the blues.”

  A piece of toast bounced off the side of her head. She ignored it magnificently.

  “Yeah,” Juicy Lucy said, “and sometimes when Cynthia’s sick or on vacation, Lady stings the bruised…” Mary stirred her coffee sharply, and a spoonful departed in Lucy’s direction.

  “And whenever she uses that damned iron bobsled…” Phillip began, and waited until we’d all turned to look at him before finishing, “…Lady dings the slews.”

  About a meal’s worth of various foods accumulated on him. I got him in the chest hair with the eggs and salsa myself.

  “And every Monday after the clients go home,” Mary said, over a growing murmur of protest and warning, “Lady springs for brews.” Before anyone could react, she turned to me and explained, “Sally figures spending a whole week with a bunch of do-ers, we’re entitled to relax with a few be-ers.”

  She might as well have stepped under a running shower. Of grapefruit and orange and apple juice, mostly, but there seemed to be a bit of skimmed milk in there. It converged from all sides like a water-balloon explosion filmed in reverse, and I would swear she never flinched.

  The softest, most gentle, motherly, fondly indulgent voice I ever heard in my life said, “All right, children, that’ll do,” and everyone but me froze. I turned to look—