Easy Street Page 5

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Did you expect them to call the crime lab to dust for fingerprints? For the apparently accidental death of an unemployed bum? You want every cop to treat every report with the same level of urgency? Come on, Lillian, even you know that's not real."

  "I know it, but I don't want to know it."

  A line from The Grapes of Wrath ran through my head: "Vagrant foun' dead." Yeah, I thought, who cares? Helplessly, I said, "But once they start the investigation—"

  "Lillian, I'm trying to tell you the investigation is over! They investigated! They came and looked around and asked questions and wrote it down and left."

  I sighed.

  Porrocks said in a gentler tone, "Why don't you get back to work out there, get started on that kitchen tile?"

  I rose to go.

  She said, "I'm going back over to my condo for a couple of hours now. I'm almost ready for the movers tomorrow." She picked up her purse and keys. "I'll be back before dark. I'll stop at the ATM and bring you some pay. How about that?"

  "Sounds good, Erm. See you later."

  "Oh, wait," she said. "I forgot to ask you something: Are you handy with things like computers and stereos?"

  "Uh, well, not very. I mean, if you need somebody to hook up your stereo system for you, I'm sure I could do that. But computers and me: bad medicine. I don't know why—maybe an adding machine tried to attack my mother while she was pregnant with me or something. What do you need?"

  "Well, the stereo system, but it's kind of tricky because I want it to connect with a new TV I'm buying, one of those plasma screens."

  "Wow, cool."

  "And then, yes, my computer. And I have to decide on connectivity. Do you know anything about DSL and satellite and all that?"

  "No, but I know somebody who'd love to handle all of it for you. 'Member Lou, my friend the animal control officer?"

  "Lou?"

  "Big hefty gal, she's the one who saved my bacon when I got shot by that—"

  "Oh, yeah!"

  "She's an electronics genius. She's the one who put that radio beacon on my car, you know, so she knew where to find me when—"

  "Yeah!"

  "And she's got a serious PC and stuff. She links into all this esoteric NASA stuff and all this complicated shit, and I know she's savvy about satellite TV and all that. Want me to call her?"

  "Please. Could she just stop in when I start to unpack?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Ask her to come by tomorrow evening, if she can. I'll pay her for her time, of course."

  "OK."

  My palms started to sweat the moment I began walking to the boathouse. I'm not usually hen-hearted, but I had to force myself to open the door. My mind started up the whole movie of me finding Rick and getting help and him lying sopping on the floor.

  The boathouse was empty and silent, of course, but for the lapping of the water beneath. I'd brought my tools. I took a deep breath.

  "Well, Rick," I said, "if your ghost is here, give me a clue as to what happened. Like, what I really need is reassurance. Porrocks is acting strange, don't you think? I mean, the way she doesn't seem to be all that shook up about this. Well, maybe that's just a cop for you." I set my stuff down and turned to the kitchenette, where my tile demolition job awaited.

  And, oh, dear God, there he was. If I'd been the fainting type, I'd still be out cold.

  Yes, there was Rick, on the floor there in the kitchenette, exactly as the cops had placed him when they pulled him out of the boat well.

  All right. It wasn't the body—it was the silhouette of the body, imprinted there in the layer of black mold on the plank subfloor. The wood itself was hard and intact, but when the cops laid Rick's body down, his wet heavy body made a grayish imprint that stayed after the river water had dried. His torso, head, his arms and legs—the one cocked up at the knee—were very clearly marked. Evidently the floor had sagged over time; the water that streamed from him had collected near an outer wall.

  I heard Porrocks's car leaving.

  The picture on the floor looked as if a man had been shot or stabbed. He'd fallen, and his blood had flowed away. The cops' footprints were visible as well, as they stepped in and out of the wet places.

  I wondered if the imprints could be cleaned away. I scuffed one of the cop marks with my sneaker; it remained.

  Someday Porrocks would put new vinyl down on that floor, covering over the impression of Rick. Or she'd have the planks sanded and treated with urethane, and the man's last mark on the world would be gone.

  I turned away, not wanting to work in the kitchenette just yet. I remembered that Rick and I hadn't broken out the tile floor of the bathroom, so I picked up my wrecking bar and started down the little passageway to it. I stopped.

  The wall that Drooly Rick had torn into looked so bad, like the ragged mouth of a bomb hole. Of course I couldn't fix it, but I thought maybe I could even up the job somehow, at least bring down the last bits of plaster to the floor. Then a carpenter could drywall it up again in no time.

  I worked my pry bar into the plaster between the laths. Satisfyingly large chunks popped off, raising the same kind of dust I'd coughed on just before I found Rick. My ears liked the cracking sounds better than the silence. I watched the dust settle.

  "Rick," I said, "you must have bashed your ass off here and then run out to that boat well to die. Because the dust hadn't settled when I walked in."

  I pried more plaster off, working now in the very bottom corner. My bar struck something that softly went chink. I stopped and peered into the dark space. I put my hand in and felt around. My fingers closed on something hard and cold, resting on what felt like a bed of leaves, papery and rustly.

  I pulled the cold object out, set it on the floor, and looked at it.

  It was metal, four bars about two inches long by one inch wide and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. The bars were drilled at the ends and connected by round links.

  The bars and links were unmistakably gold.

  The color was right, but most of all the weight was right. I picked them up again—yes—that remarkable heaviness of solid gold—and saw a rough clasp, and realized it was a bracelet. It was crude and heavy, too big for a woman's wrist, it seemed. My hand passed through it easily. There was nothing fashionable about it. I reached into the wall again and grabbed the rustly stuff. It was currency, of course, and I brought it out in one, two, three handfuls.

  "Holy hell," I murmured. "Loot." Reflexively, I glanced over my shoulder toward the window and door. I got up and peered out. I was alone.

  I knelt and thrust my hand in again, feeling the sill board of the wall. There was no more. I popped off the last few inches of plaster just to make sure.

  In the pearly wash of light coming through the window I inspected the bills, and saw that some were American and some Canadian, which was momentarily exciting: bootlegger loot! But there was Queen Elizabeth's picture on the Canadian, and none of the dates on the U.S. stuff were older than twelve years ago, so they couldn't have been put there by a Prohibition rumrunner. All the bills were at least three years old, which narrowed down the time frame a bit, not that I knew the time frame of what. There were twenties and a few hundreds with the newer Ben Franklin picture.

  I straightened the money and counted it: $120 Canadian and $560 American. Not a fortune, but more money than I'd seen in a while, boy.

  Kneeling there with my hands on my thighs I blew out a stream of breath. I picked up the bracelet again. A distant bell was ringing in my head.

  My mind wandered around all the outlaws I'd known. It free-associated through my life, pausing at the murderers and thugs: a woman who liked to kill women she liked, a guy who tried to get even with his old girlfriend by throwing acid at her, a trio of insurance fraudsters and arsonists, a kid who stole hubcaps and saved the hock money for college. My mind wandered farther still, away from criminals, to a friend who imported handmade art papers from Oaxaca—rolling papers, mariju
ana—a stanza from "Singin' in the Rain," then a rainbow, then Judy Garland's oddly thick eyebrows as she leaned against the hay bales and sang before the twister came, Mrs. Gulch trying to smuggle Toto in her basket to the sheriff, smuggling, contraband, drugs, marijuana again, a girl I hitchhiked to Galveston with one time in the hope that romance might lie south of everything else. A Tex-Mex bar there where I got happily drunk on Dos Equis with a bunch of strangers who didn't try anything on me.

  One guy that night was wearing a bracelet just like this one. I hadn't thought about that guy or that bracelet in all the years since. Another guy at the table told me it was a drug smuggler's bracelet. I looked at the guy wearing the bracelet: He seemed mean and smart, so I believed it. The other guy, more of a weenie type, a groupie-type guy, whispered to me, "Each bar weighs an ounce, see? And there's four of them, which makes a quarter-pound of gold on your wrist. The pilots carry money this way. So if you have to bail out or run, you've got your money on you. Down in South America that's how they do it. I had one of those for a while, but I—I gave it to a girl." He watched for my reaction hopefully.

  "How did you get it?" I asked, intrigued.

  He winked. "I can't tell you."

  "I see." I sat back and sipped my beer.

  "Because I'm with the CIA."

  "Oh."

  "So I can't tell you."

  This guy looked dense enough to have joined the CIA—I mean, he had a GATLINBURG IS FOR LOVERS T-shirt on—but my bullshit meter was squawking, so I dismissed everything he said. I forgot the guy, and I forgot the bracelet.

  Whenever a guy in a bar tells you he's with the CIA, it's automatic bullshit. Automatic.

  The bracelet in my hand looked just like the one that the mean-looking guy had been wearing. I perceived that a great many of these bracelets, cached with a great many handfuls or bundles of currency could have fit into the space inside that wall. A stash of drug money? Yes, indeed. For that matter, bundles of drugs could have been hidden in the wall. Robbery loot too, maybe. I'd come across the mere residue of whatever had been there.

  I leaned into the broken wall and sniffed, but did not detect the heavy fragrance of marijuana. It wouldn't have made sense to stuff pot in there anyway, no matter how well-wrapped: Pot's pretty bulky and more or less perishable, losing potency with age. A bolt of cleverness shot into my mind: I licked my finger, touched it to the dust that had settled all over everything, then to my tongue, as Jack Lord used to do on Hawaii Five-O. It tasted like dust. Not knowing what cocaine or heroin was supposed to taste like was a drawback here.

  "OK, now," I said to the imprint of Rick, "the question is, did you find the loot or did somebody else? After we figure that one out, we want to know who has it now."

  Rick remained silent, and I began one of my Lillian-to-Lillian discussions.

  Me: The next step is to show this stuff to Porrocks, right?

  Me: Um, well …

  Me: What is it?

  Me: Porrocks acted funny about Rick. She didn't wonder what happened, like cops are supposed to do.

  Me: How do you know what she wondered?

  Me: Well, when she flipped up his coat and said he could have hit his head falling in, that was just adopting the easiest explanation.

  Me: Well, he could have.

  Me: I know, but plus she didn't really respond today when I talked about Rick. Then she gave me that speech about how busy cops are.

  Me: Well, cops do have to prioritize, like everybody else.

  Me: All I'm saying is she ought to be upset about this and at least somewhat open to the possibility of a crime here.

  Me: Would you be eager to have a murder investigation going on in your house?

  Me: That's hardly the point. Cops are supposed to want to get at the truth.

  Me: What if Porrocks already knows the truth?

  I paused.

  Me: Go on.

  Me: What if Porrocks did Drooly Rick in?

  Me: Oh, my God.

  Me: Remember she said there were two guys who came and broke down that one wall, then left?

  Me: Yeah?

  Me: There were no two guys! That was Porrocks breaking up walls in her own house to find the drug loot she knew was there!

  Me: How did she know?

  Me: That's what I'll have to find out. Rick got drunk when I went out, forgot that we weren't supposed to break the wall down, then Porrocks walked in and found him looking at all this booty that spilled out, and killed him! She wanted to do me a favor, but then she wound up having to kill this guy to keep things quiet.

  Me: Wow.

  Me: So really, should I show Porrocks this little bit of stuff I just found? Given what she said to me about cops being busy, should I tell the police about it?

  Me: No and no.

  Me: Not yet, anyway.

  Chapter 8

  I gathered the money and tucked it and the bracelet into the zip pocket of my windbreaker, then rolled up the jacket and set it next to the canvas tote bag I'd carried my tools in.

  I began demolition on the bathroom tile and strategized about how I would conduct my investigation of Porrocks. One or two ideas came to me, centered on learning the history of the house. When you start poking around in other people's business, one thing invariably leads to another. You don't have to have a thorough plan in advance. This is good.

  I imagined myself as Calico Jones—zooming about the expressways of Motown in my turbocharged sports car, checking in with my contacts in the underworld, arranging dates via satellite phone with several incredibly attractive women all in one weekend, respectfully consulting with local law enforcement yet far surpassing them in courage and ruthlessness, gently helping downtrodden people gain vengeance and self-esteem, reluctantly but graciously accepting public recognition in the form of medals, framed certificates, and reward money.

  Calico Jones doesn't have to spend days on her knees chipping out broken tile with a wrecking bar for fifteen bucks an hour. She has people for that.

  Over the course of the morning I got tremendously absorbed in my work. I figured out how to leverage my pry bar in the small spaces around the toilet and under the sink. In the absence of my excellent portable AM-FM radio which I'd long ago hocked, I began humming. I hummed this tune I'd heard two street guys playing on accordion and drums, this punkified German folk song. It was dottily energetic and I hummed it twice. I hummed "Blue Skies" and "Standing at the Crossroads of Love" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

  I tried to prevent myself from wondering how much that gold bracelet was worth, but wonder I did. What was an ounce of gold going for these days? What carat gold was the bracelet? I became lost in a cocoon of fantasy and rhythmic work. I got down on my side to reach a shard of tile that had flown into a crevice next to a vent. I was stretched out full length, my feet sticking into the passageway, my arms over my head, reaching, humming "Dance Ten, Looks Three," when someone touched my waist and said, "That's a familiar tune. What is it?"

  "Whuff!" I cried, and bashed my elbow on the toilet. "Ow!"

  "Whoa there, slim girl," Audrey Knox said as I scrambled to my knees, then to my feet. I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror: I needed more than a haircut. My ordinarily smooth bob was sticking out in sweaty quills, my overly long jaw was thrust forward tensely, my eyes were panicked, and my nose looked pointier than ever.

  "Hey, beautiful," Audrey said.

  "Goddamn," I said.

  "Did I scare the hell out of you, Lillian? A little ticklish there?"

  "Yes! No! What are you doing here?"

  She smiled as if she'd just been painted by Rubens, her cheeks gathering like buds. "Thought I'd see if you were all right."

  "I was," I said, rubbing my elbow and eating her up with my eyes.

  My visitor was wearing a butt-hugging black-and-gold wool plaid skirt with a black velour turtleneck that outlined her plump arms and swelling chest, little soft-soled black shoes, sparkly fishnet hose, pink lipstick, and that incredi
ble smile.

  I said, "It's a song from A Chorus Line: 'Dance Ten, Looks Three.' Known informally as 'Tits and Ass.'"

  "That's it!" Audrey licked her lips.

  I waited.

  Eagerly, she said, "Quite a bit of activity over here yesterday!"

  "Yes," I said. There was this awkward moment when I tried to figure out what to do. My nerves were zinging. I set my wrecking bar on the toilet tank. "Uh …"

  "Well, can you take a break for a few minutes?"

  "Yes, of course."

  We went out to the front room. My rolled-up windbreaker with the cash and the gold bracelet glowed with a guilty brown aura. It was only this simple bundle sitting on the floor but I glanced at it as if it might shout something.

  Audrey strode across the imprint of Rick and hopped up on the kitchenette counter. She perched there, legs crossed, little shoes swinging.

  "Did you," I wondered, "watch the cop cars and everything from your window?"

  "Yeah, I've got a great view of this place."

  Audrey Knox was a femme for sure, with the soft curls and the clothes, but underlying all that was something a touch hard-bitten. She was young, in her twenties—late twenties, I supposed—but there were these very faint stress lines around her mouth, curving downward. Maybe early thirties. And there was a little counteracting upward tilt to her chin that wasn't saucy; it was a fighting-the-dark tilt. I wondered when we would kiss.

  She said, "They took a body out, didn't they?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, what happened? Do tell!"

  I felt horrible all over again about Rick.

  "You can tell me," she urged. "Oh, you poor thing, you're still upset. I'm sorry." She hopped down and came to sit cross-legged with me on the floor. I began talking, and she stroked my back as I told her most of it: being broke, Porrocks's generosity, the street people in my life.