Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  Oof. A little hard to imagine. I’d even rather be in New Jersey. But I knew the answer was: “Yes.”

  “Good. Do we have a meeting of the minds?”

  I was in hog heaven—but I was also a professional. I turned my fingernail another way and inspected it again to see how it looked from that angle. “Not quite. I haven’t told you my rates.”

  “I burn to know.”

  “Two hundred a day plus expenses.”

  He flashed his famous grin for the first time. “Rockford Files. James Garner. At least you follow good trash.”

  He had me cold. “The best,” I agreed. “Just like with him, it’s not negotiable.” I tried for Garner’s I’m-not-budging expression. “And I also get medical expenses for job-related injuries. After all, we’re using smaller dollars these days.”

  “I seem to remember Rockford almost never gets paid.”

  I shrugged. “Is it a deal or not?”

  To my surprise, he hesitated. “It’s not that I’d have the slightest difficulty making it drop off the books,” he mused. “Partly I’m curious to see what you’d do if I said no, you gotta work for free on this one. And mostly it goes against my grain to pay an overgrown adolescent who’s built like a linebacker two hundred dollars a day to hang out in Lady Sally’s House.”

  I had to work to control my face.

  Lady Sally McGee’s House? Not maybe the most famous, but surely the most legendary whorehouse in the greater New York area? I’d heard of it for years, but always very quiet, and third-hand at least. They said you had to know Somebody, real well, to get invited there. Until today, I hadn’t known anybody who knew anybody who knew Somebody. I opened my mouth to say I could manage to pay him two hundred dollars, and absorb my own expenses—

  “Oh screw it, it’s a deal,” he said.

  “What’s the situation?”

  He pursed his lips, and shook his head. “I need backup on my judgment. You go see the Lady, and if she decides to fill you in, then nobody can blame me. If she doesn’t, you get one day’s pay and a hearty handclasp—for something that never happened.”

  “Can you give me a hint? What sort of beef are we talking? Do I bring a fingerprint kit, or a bazooka? Or a dozen condoms?”

  He steepled his fingertips. “I would say you should bring along all of that garbage you dumped on my carpet outside. And if you know where you could borrow a brain for a while, bring that by all means. But mostly bring your luck, Quigley. And…” He sighed. “…your best judgment, such as it is.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know if I can make you understand. I want you to be absolutely candid with me in this matter…up to a point.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “You are not going to get cute with this, like a TV detective. You will share with me fully any relevant information you learn. But it is possible—” He paused, and twisted his face up so badly that I wanted to offer him some Metamucil. “—that in the course of your investigation you will turn up information I do not have a need to know. And the hell of it is, by and large you’re the one who’ll have to decide when that is. I can only say: don’t screw up.”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell he was talking about. But he looked so uncomfortable that I got the idea he must have just done something noble. And maybe given me some kind of backhanded compliment at the same time. “I’ll do my best.” I said simply.

  “Exactly what I’m afraid of. Any more questions?”

  “Yeah. Why me?”

  “Because every once in a while you’re so dumb, you’re a genius. That Favila case, for example. Most people can only see the obvious if it makes sense. You proved you can see the obvious even when it’s stupid. That may turn out to be what’s called for here.”

  I was a little stung. The Favila case had been one of my professional high points to date, had come this close to being a triumph. “I see,” I said stiffly. “You need me, so you treat me like shit.”

  “I only do that for two reasons,” he said. “First, of course, because you are shit…and second because you look like that moron on the tube, what’s-his-name.”

  “Hey,” I said, stung again, “that’s not my fault.”

  “I know. No one would look like him that could help it. Forget it. You know where Sally’s is?”

  “I don’t need to. The cabbie will know.”

  “True. Use the north entrance—and for God’s sake don’t use my name at the door if there’s anyone else in earshot. Report to me, verbally, here, when you’ve cracked it. Not before. If there’s anything you need, at all, the Lady will provide. And nothing goes in writing.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Not yet. Look at me, Quigley. I know I’ve succeeded in hiring you. I think I’ve even succeeded in engaging your attention. But before I let you leave here, I want to be sure I’ve succeeded in scaring the living shit out of you. I want you to throw away whatever smart-aleck closing line you’ve got prepared, and just say these words: say, ‘I’m going to be a good boy, sir,’ and then get the hell out of here. Will you do that for me, Joe?”

  I wanted this job more than I wanted a nymphomaniac secretary with legs up to here, but there are some kinds of shit a man just can’t eat. “Screw yourself, sir,” I said. Besides I’d been polishing an exit line since I’d first gotten the call, and it was going to be a beaut.

  He smiled faintly. “You think the worst I could do is have you ruined, disgraced, raped and beaten to death. It’s much worse than that.” The smile broadened into that oddly telegenic grin again. “If your performance in this assignment is not satisfactory, I will put your real first name out on the street.”

  —and on the other hand, certain other kinds of shit are quite palatable with a little necessity sprinkled on them. I could always save my exit line for the next time a major VIP wanted to hire me. “I’m going to be a good boy, sir.”

  “I know you are, ‘Joe.’” The grin vanished. “I’m counting on it.”

  I left, and found my own way out.

  I collected my hardware from the butler on the way out the main door. He wouldn’t give it to me until I put my shoes back on. I stepped out into the cool muggy night, stuck a Lucky in my mouth, and heard imaginary music swell in the background.

  On my way past the black-and-white I decided I had to do something, make some kind of move, a scene-closer to redeem my pride and get us to the commercial. I leaned into the passenger’s window and stared the fat cop in the eye. “Your mother wears combat boots,” I stated, and blew smoke in his face.

  He looked me over, thought about where I had just come from and how confident I seemed now. “And shoulder-pads,” he agreed finally. “Why? You want to meet her?”

  “Hee…hee…hee!” said the skinny one.

  I gave up and walked away. At the foot of the driveway I turned around and looked at the mansion. What do you say when you haven’t got a good way to end a scene? Say good night, Gracie.

  “Good night, Gracie,” I said, and hailed a cab.

  MENTIONING the Favila case had been a low blow, I thought as the hack headed over the bridge into Brooklyn. Except for that one little flaw at the end, it had been a classic of sheer mystery-solving. Who could have guessed a man could spend his entire life in New York City, and end up…well, at least partly unsophisticated?

  With my luck, you’ll remember the case. It started when a janitor found a corpsicle floating in a rooftop swimming pool next to Central Park one August morning. A stiff, but I mean stiff. Frozen solid, just beginning to defrost around the edges from being in the pool. In August. He was in a funny half-crouch position, with his hands up in front of his face and the fingers spread, as if he’d been examining a crystal ball underwater when he froze. No ID at all, wearing frozen jeans and shards of a frozen tee shirt, nothing else on or with him at all. The janitor swore he’d had to unlock the door to enter the area, the lock hadn’t been tampered with, and t
he only other access to that roof was by helicopter. Fingerprints and dental charts went through all the computers without a match, and he didn’t fit any Missing Persons reports. The local cryogenics outfit took some hard questioning, but they were able to prove they had no corpsicles missing. Every meat locker within a ten-block radius got combed, but nothing turned up.

  A friend of mine, a gold shield named Murphy, caught the case. It just about drove him nuts. One day I happened to be standing with him on the roof of the building in question. I was there because I’d been following him around for over an hour, trying to borrow money from him. All he wanted to talk about was the Frozen Stiff.

  “It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense, Joe,” he said. He turned around in a slow circle, looking at the city laid out around us. “Where is the nearest place to this spot where you could freeze a guy solid as a leg of lamb without anybody noticing?”

  Without thinking, I pointed straight up.

  “Right,” he said, snorting. “I’m about ready to believe it was some outer space monster. He was planning to drink the pool for the chlorine and wanted to chill it properly first. Hell, it doesn’t even matter where it was done. Wherever they froze the son of a bitch, how did they get him all the way here without being seen—and why?”

  I started to get very excited. “Murph—”

  “Why take all that risk?” Murphy went on, talking more than half to himself. “You got a corpsicle, bust him up with a hammer and leave him in the shower. This is like something out of a fuckin’ comic book. You know the weirdest part of all? The Coroner says he was suffocated—without a mark on him, for Christ’s—”

  “Murph, listen, this is important to both of us,” I said. “Can you let me hold a twenty for a couple of days?”

  “Things are hot just now,” he said absently, “This Knapp Commission crap, I practically been living on my salary for months. I tell you, it’s gotta be some kind of radicals. The guy looks like he could be some kind of spic—Central America, maybe, some kind of CIA shit—”

  I tried one more time for the twenty, but he pretended not to hear me. So screw him. I left him there on the roof, went straight to my office, borrowed a fistful of plane schedules from the porno distributor down the hall, and called a press conference.

  It was great, at first. Everybody looked bored and dubious when they first saw the office, then sat up straight when I outlined my deductions. I had them spellbound, and when I was done they actually applauded. I was on all the news that night, and the next morning’s editions all gave prominent coverage to my confident prediction that the victim would turn out to be a poor peasant from Belize, tragically killed by his own ignorance and his hunger to live in America.

  It seemed so simple. My kneejerk wisecrack answers to Murphy’s questions had suddenly made a twisted kind of sense. Where’s the nearest place to freeze a man solid? A mile or two away—straight up. How do you get him to a rooftop without being seen? Easy. A skyhook.

  Freeze him in the stratosphere, and then let him fall…

  Looked at from that angle, it was obvious. A starving peasant, let’s call him Juan Valdez, burns to live in El Norte, whatever it costs him in discomfort. He sneaks out onto an airport tarmac, and worms his way up into the wheelwell of a big brute on a nonstop run to New York, gambling that when those huge wheels come up, there will still be room for him in there. He expects to arrive cramped and sore and half dead with hunger and fatigue, but so what? Sure enough, the wheel fails to crush him after takeoff. He begins to rejoice. He knows even less about the stratosphere than he does about America.

  By the time the stewardesses are thawing out frozen dinners for the paying customers inside, Valdez is a frozen dinner himself, his suffocated corpse clinging to the huge tire like an ice sculpture of a monkey.

  The plane is circling over Manhattan when it lowers its wheels and drops Valdez, a cryonic bomb. By the kind of cosmic luck that recently caused a woman in Ohio to be hit by a meteorite for the second time, he makes a perfect landing in an empty pool.

  If he hadn’t landed in water, maybe somebody might have figured out the huge treadmarks on his face and clothes. But then, if he hadn’t landed in water, nobody would have found anything but a couple of buckets’ worth of crushed ice, I guess.

  The major airline schedules showed that only one big direct flight from anywhere in Central or South America would have been over Manhattan that night, a 707 from Belize. Voilà: Quigley Solves Mystery. The story was a natural for the media sobsuckers, and it got a lot of play.

  But not as much as the follow-up got.

  Well, how was I to know? Try this experiment yourself—I’ve tried it dozens of times in bars, and as long as they don’t know the Favila story it always works. Walk up to any person in New York, any race, color or creed, and ask him to show you where Hispanics come from. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars he points south.

  I don’t know, maybe nothing newsworthy ever happens there, or maybe there’s some big secret conspiracy of silence, but unless the conversation is about conquistadores, you just don’t hear anybody talk about Spain.

  So when it turned out that Hidalgo Favila was a half-mad freebase addict from Barcelona who had crawled up into that wheelwell because everybody said the best coke got transshipped to America, I looked pretty stupid. And mentioning that was the only way the media wolves could sneak out of looking stupid themselves. Get it right, you’re a star. Get it half-right, you’re a gas giant. I took a lot of ribbing, and business went down so sharply that I thought seriously about slipping off the straight and narrow and becoming a cop.

  The only thing that saved me is that reputation doesn’t really mean as much as it used to once. There is so much yammer-yammer on the air and in print these days that nobody could keep up with it, much less remember it. I mean, look at Richard Nixon. There’s always somebody who didn’t get the word. Before long, business was right back up to putrid again.

  But to make a long story short, every time somebody reminds me of the Favila case, it drives me crazy. I keep replaying the memory in my mind, right up to the moment when I say “…from Belize…” to the reporters, and then trying to make my memory-mouth add, “…or possibly from Spain.” It never works, and it takes at least ten minutes to derail my mind once I start doing it.

  And it drives me just as crazy when somebody points out my resemblance to that jerk on TV. I never asked him to steal my face…

  So I was only a few blocks from Lady Sally’s House when I finally managed to get my mind back on the job at hand.

  I knew the general location of the place, but the actual neighborhood surprised me a little. It was a kind of a dumpy, run-down warehouse-y area…but it didn’t have the hardcore funky sleaze to it that you’d expect around a really first-class whorehouse. No bombed-out abandoned buildings, or burned-out cars, or roving packs of bull fruits looking for gay-bashers to chain-whip, or dull-eyed junkies nodding around a trash can fire. It looked like the kind of neighborhood you could walk with the safety catch on.

  The hack jockey pulled up in front of an enormous mausoleum that filled an entire block. Seven stone steps led to a huge front door with an elaborately carved marble frame and a stained-glass transom. On either side of it were a pair of red globe lights, a classical touch I admired. There were tall windows on either side of the door, but their heavy curtains were drawn and very little light from inside escaped.

  “Here you are, cap,” the cabbie said.

  I consulted the mental map everybody creates the moment they get in a cab. “I want the north entrance,” I said.

  He turned around to look me over. “You’ll never carry it off,” he decided. “You can’t wear the clothes.”

  “Huh?” I said. I hate it when I say that. Even “Excuse me?” is better.

  “That’s the VIP entrance. You’re the wrong type.”

  They’re all out-of-work actors these days. “Just take me to the north entrance, okay, pal?”

  “
Everybody’s got the right to audition,” he agreed, and drove me around the block.

  It was a lot darker around the back. As I was paying the jockey I asked him if I’d have any trouble getting another cab around there at night. “Maybe if you were on fire,” he said, “or carrying a machine gun.” I got out and he drove away.

  The north wall of that building at ground level was a featureless expanse of interleaved stone blocks, with a single entrance right in the middle of the block. The door was recessed back in a sheltered, roofed doorway whose walls projected out a few feet onto the sidewalk. There was a single low-wattage light (not red) above the door. I looked closer and saw the sliding peephole in the door. I turned around and looked across the street, and saw another featureless wall, this one of brick. I realized that no one could photograph you standing at this door without being seen. At worst they could snap you ducking into the doorway recess, which a man might do to get out of the rain or light a cigarette out of the wind. This was the VIP entrance, all right.

  I reached for the doorknob. There wasn’t any. There wasn’t any place to put a secret key I didn’t have. There was no electronic lock keypad to try and crack the combo for. No buzzer or intercom panel. No room between door and frame to slip in a credit card, or even a scalpel blade. Even Jim Rockford would have had trouble with that door. Maybe the Seventh Armored would have too.

  I lifted a fist to knock, and the door swung open noiselessly.

  Most of being cool is in training your face never to look surprised. The rest of it is, when you are surprised, walk forward at once. I entered, and the door shut behind me. It was street-dark inside, and I interpreted the shadowy figure before me as a naked courtesan.

  A dimmer switch was turned up slowly, and I found myself staring at a smiling grandmother in a silk robe. Possibly a great grandmother, and certainly a good one. Seventy-five if she was a day, the kind of sweet-featured chipper old lady you see in the After of laxative commercials. I liked her on sight. Not just her face, either, I realized with surprise. It wasn’t a granny-type robe, and she wore it damned well…