The Wrong Case Read online

  “They catch the kid?”

  “Naw. All them long-haired kids look alike. Dynamite had a look at him but he couldn’t catch him,” Leo said, looking like the sad father of too many wild children. “Freddy said it was probably a junkie, but what the hell does he know.”

  “Well,” I said, “if he’s seen one street junkie, he knows more than any of us.” There had always been lots of dope in Meriwether. It came in from the West Coast in large and frequent lots. But there had never been much heroin in town. The only addicts I knew were either doctors or nurses or rich old women. “Maybe the kid was just freaking on speed or acid.”

  “Maybe,” Leo said.

  “Sorry about the colonel.”

  “Yeah. Say, Milo, who’s the lady?”

  “What lady?”

  “The one Dick said he’d call about.”

  “Just a client,” I said.

  “Sure, Milo, sure.”

  “Cynic,” I said as I headed for the street.

  “Fool,” he muttered behind me.

  As I went out, thinking to drop by Muffin’s, I found myself hoping that Helen Duffy would forgive me if I found her little brother, but I knew better than to think that she would fall into my arms in appreciation. Not many women like to feel beholden to a man. But at least it was a way to get to talk to her again, and I was sober and had nothing else to do, so I got my old Toyota four-wheel rig out of the bank parking lot and went looking for my adopted son, Muffin, who was the local electronic fence. As I drove across town, I tried to avoid being crushed by the summer horde of lumbering campers plying the hot streets like large, tired animals searching for a place to lie down.

  Three

  “Don’t ask me, man,” Muffin said for the tenth time. “You don’t need to know where that dude lives, man, you don’t need that kinda trouble.”

  “Muffin, you owe me.”

  “What the hell I owe you, man? I don’t owe you shit,” he muttered, stopping behind one of the four stereo color television consoles that divided his large one-room apartment. As he stood there glaring at me, his small black face nearly lost beneath the spread of his huge Afro, he looked like a gnome hiding under a giant black mushroom. He had a bottle of Ripple in one hand and a joint in the other and he took alternate hits of each, still trying to come down from two years of amphetamine frenzy, which had left his veins and nerves humming like wires in the wind. “Don’t owe you nothing, man,” he said.

  “Four years’ room and board, nearly three thousand in hospital bills, a shitload of grief—”

  “Didn’t ask for nonna that shit, man.”

  “You took it, Muffin.”

  “What the fuck, man. Just money. Shit, I got plenty a money. Pay you cash right now, man. Just tell me how much.”

  “How much you reckon Terri’s worth?” I asked. She was my second wife, who moved out when Muffin moved in. The marriage hadn’t been made in heaven—she was a lady bartender, and I was her best customer—but it gave both of us somebody to drink and fight with. Three weeks and a day after the divorce decree was final, she and an airman from Nellis were killed in an automobile accident outside Tonopah, Nevada, leaving me the support payments for two children of hers from a previous marriage. “Come on, Muffin. How much you gonna pay for Terri?”

  “That’s low, man, mean.”

  “You’re the man with the money.”

  “Yeah. What the hell you want with that Lawrence dude. Man, he’s bad. And I don’t mean good.”

  “Business,” I said.

  “You ain’t got no business no more, Milo, and the only business that Lawrence got is dealing dope and handing dudes’ asses to them. Which you looking for, man?” he asked, then skittered away through the maze of stereo gear.

  “You owe me.”

  “Fuck off, man.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Damn, you must be getting old, Milo. Never heard you say no ‘please’ before,” he said, then began to laugh and flap his arms. He stopped long enough to switch on one of his sound systems, the music blasting so loud that the walls of his apartment began to shake. Muffin hit the bottle, then the joint, dancing to ignore me.

  It was more habit than anger that sent me after him, the habit of making people talk to me because they were somehow guilty, and I was somehow the law. I walked around the consoles, slapped the joint and the wine bottle out of his hands, grabbed his loose sweat shirt, and slammed him against the shelf of receivers and tape players and record changers until the music stopped.

  “You owe me,” I said, then dropped him to the floor. Before he got kicked off the team for coming to practice stoned and started shooting speed, Muffin had been a first-string defensive halfback for the MSC Vandals, but now he neither weighed any more nor felt any stronger than he had when I’d jerked him out of a wrecked, stolen Corvette when he was fourteen. He hadn’t touched the speed in nearly four years, but his body had never recovered. I felt as if I’d been roughing up a mummy, and the dust of decay tickled my throat.

  “Go ahead, Milo,” Muffin said from the floor, “you the man. You just ain’t the bad man. You might hurt me but you ain’t gonna kill nobody. That faggot’ll kill me, man, if he finds out I had my mouth on him. So go ahead.”

  For a moment my head filled with familial rage, and I started to kick him. But I stopped myself. I told him I was sorry.

  “What’s the matter with you, man?” he asked, standing up. “You gone crazy? What the hell’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. I’ll see you around,” I said, starting for the door.

  “You ain’t gonna see my ass, man, you just stay off my case for good, you hear, off it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m still sorry.”

  “That’s for sure, Milo. You one sorry mother,” he said to my back, then added, “And one sorry father too.”

  When I looked back from the door, he was grinning.

  “See you around,” I said again, grinning too.

  “Right,” he said. “But don’t be looking for my ass over on the north side, not on Lincoln Street, man, not two houses west of that abandoned church house.”

  “Okay. I won’t look there,” I said. “Take care.”

  “You take care, Milo. You the man with the trouble.”

  “What’s new,” I said, and he laughed.

  —

  Most of Meriwether’s freaks, dopers, hippies and assorted young folk lived on the north side of town in an old blue-collar neighborhood, which the earlier residents had deserted in favor of tacky developments on the south side of town, but the neighborhood was still pleasant in a small-town way—inexpensive but fairly well-built houses that aged nicely, like a handsome woman, the yards shaded by old trees and overgrown with evergreen shrubbery and flowering bushes. Except for the psychedelic glare of an occasional headshop and the studied humility of several natural-food stores and the long hair and bright clothing, it could have been a working-class neighborhood of twenty or thirty years before. And in its own way, it was still working-class, since most of the freaks had manual-labor or service jobs, living quietly except for the occasional too-loud party or family fight, living peacefully with the few original residents who had stayed to grow old with the neighborhood.

  In the past few years, as more houses with possibilities of elegant restoration came on the market, young professionals moved into the neighborhood, which made the police careful about hassling long-hairs, so they patrolled it just like any other neighborhood, and unless they saw somebody balling on the front porch or smoking a joint in the street, they left the young people alone to live whatever life they chose, as long as they lived it inside their houses.

  After two years and three months as an infantryman in the Korean War and ten years as a deputy sheriff, I knew how to be scared. It took a long afternoon and about five whiskeys for me to find the nerve to go over to the north side to ask questions about the whereabouts of one Raymond Duffy. I didn’t have any foolish ideas that I co
uld make Lawrence Reese talk to me if he didn’t want to, which he probably wouldn’t, but along with the drinks, I took large doses of the memory of the lady. The way her trim hips moved beneath the knit dress, the sound of her hose as she crossed her legs, the eyes so easily hurt. Then I drove over to the north side, just as afternoon eased into dusk.

  The house that Muffin said Reese lived in was slightly more dilapidated than most of the others around it, and some former tenant had added a large porch, which looked like a heavy afterthought about to collapse in the light of reason. On that porch, Simon was standing, gesticulating madly at a slim, young girl wearing cut-offs and a gray T-shirt that claimed to be the property of the athletic department of the University of Connecticut. I didn’t know they had either a university or an athletic department, but then my only vision of the East had come from the phony gentility of my mother.

  I parked my rig in front of the house, locked it, and set the alarm. I always carried about a thousand dollars’ worth of crap clattering around in the back. Two rifles and a shotgun and a .38 revolver, a tape deck and a toolbox, fishing rods and gear, a pint of brandy and a partial lid of Mexican grass, and assorted junk. As ready as I’d ever be, I turned around and walked up the buckled sidewalk.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked Simon as I stepped onto the rickety porch and leaned against one of the fake frame pillars.

  “I live here, motherfucker. What the hell are you doing here?” the young girl asked angrily, switching her hollow eyes across me like a curse.

  “Not you, honey,” I replied. “Him.” And jerked my thumb at Simon, who was locked in a paroxysm of flying arms and spittle.

  Her anger passed as quickly as it had come, and she was stoned again, sinking gracefully to her rump on the wooden floor, where she sat, smiling happily and chipping the tired brown paint with her fingernails.

  “Him?” she asked in a small, concerned voice. “I don’t know what he’s doing here. He don’t make much sense. I think he thinks he lives here, but I’ve been crashed here for weeks, and I don’t think he lives here.” Then she giggled. “But I don’t know why not. Every other crazy mother in this creepy town thinks he lives here, so maybe he does. Who knows? You gotta cigarette?”

  As I searched Simon for my pack, I whispered, “What the hell are you doing here?” But he was trapped between roles, struggling like a man caught halfway into his pants and trying to explain to an angry husband why he was halfway out of them. He finally gave up, shrugged vaguely as he muttered to himself.

  “Go away,” I said to Simon as I lit the girl’s cigarette.

  He didn’t move, but she answered me again, pleasantly this time. “Sorry, man, but I live here.”

  “Not you, goddammit. Him.”

  “Oh, him. He doesn’t live here,” she reminded me, hitting the cigarette so hard that she flashed deeper into her stone.

  “Does Raymond Duffy live here?” I asked quickly, hoping to catch her before she faded out of my reality.

  “Who?” she asked, moving away.

  “Raymond Duffy. A tall skinny kid. Black hair, big beard. Dresses like a gunslinger.”

  “Oh, him. You mean El Creepo,” she answered, giggling again.

  “Is he here?”

  “Who?”

  “Raymond Duffy.”

  “Oh, him. Haven’t seen El Creepo in a long time.” Long time sounded like forever.

  “How long?”

  “Who knows? Just a long time.”

  “A week? Two weeks? A month?” I asked, leaning over her, pressing.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit,” I said, standing back up. Simon looked like a man doing his income tax on his fingers. “That long, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling up at me prettily. She had a narrow, ordinary face, but when she smiled she was pretty. “Want to go inside? We’re doing some bad hash, man.”

  “No thanks,” I said, smiling back with a dry mouth. “How do you know I’m not the man?” I asked, nearly giggling.

  “I’m fucked up, man, but I ain’t crazy,” she said by way of explanation, then touched me on the calf with her small hand as our smiles turned into grins. “The man don’t get contact highs,” she said, and we giggled.

  “Is Lawrence Reese here?”

  “Lawrence?”

  “You know Lawrence?” I asked.

  “Man, everybody knows Lawrence. It’s his hash. Do you know Lawrence?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure,” I said, grinning with her.

  “It ain’t always a pleasure,” a voice said through the screen door. Then Lawrence followed it outside, strolling across the porch, his bare, heavily callused feet gliding across the warped floorboards, his large body all muscle and fluid motion and threat.

  “What’s happening?” he asked the girl, ignoring whatever wisecrack I might have made.

  But he was large enough to ignore anybody, broader and taller than I remembered, harder and older, nearer forty than thirty. His face seemed to hang off his skull in a hard, grainy mask, as if it were all scar tissue. The lavender eyeshadow didn’t make his eyes look a bit feminine or soft. They just looked bruised and wary. Shoulders ax-handle-broad and arms like logs jutted out of his black leather vest, and in the tight leather pants his legs rippled and flexed as he raised his right foot, the toes pointed like a dancer’s, to touch the girl’s bare arm. His foot stroked her arm very lightly.

  “What’s happening, Mindy?” he asked again.

  “Jesus,” she said, “I don’t know.” She stood up, wandered back to the front door, her slim hand drifting, intimately casual, across Lawrence’s groin and hip.

  As she slipped through the door I caught a glimpse of the Arabian nightmare within the room. Oriental rugs covered with plush pillows and slight bodies hid the floor, carelessly circled around a brass water pipe. The bodies were caught in the tender mold of pan-sexual adolescence, the faces blank, waiting to be formed out of youth, but the eyes were as dark and empty as burial caves etched into chalk bluffs. A ringlet of smoke curled slowly above the pipe, and the sharp, bittersweet stink of blond Lebanese hash hovered in the cool, heavy air.

  “Having a party?” I asked, trying to be pleasant.

  “Do I know you?” he asked in a slow, hard voice that went more with the ball-point pen and needle tattoo, which had faded into a blue smudge on his right forearm, than with the eyeshadow and the tailor-made leather clothes.

  “Milton Milodragovitch,” I answered, holding my hand carefully toward him. “I’m a private investigator and—”

  “I know damn well I don’t know him,” he said softly, disregarding my hand and introduction. He spun slowly on the ball of his left foot toward Simon, who hadn’t moved since Lawrence came outside. Lawrence lifted and cocked and extended his right leg so quickly that I only saw a black blur. The foot stopped so close to Simon’s nose, quivering like an arrow shaft driven deeply into a tree, that Simon must have been able to smell it. Simon didn’t have time to move, but his viscera flinched, and a loud fart escaped him, and the stench quickly filled the porch.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting,” Lawrence said, putting his foot down. “Get outa here.” Simon went.

  “Are you still here?” Lawrence asked.

  “My name is Milton Milodragovitch,” I said, “and I’m a—” But I couldn’t finish because I was stumbling down the porch steps. Lawrence’s right hand had snaked out and shoved me lightly off the porch.

  Though I carry fifteen or twenty pounds of whiskey flab, I don’t look like the sort of guy most men would casually shove off their front porch, but Lawrence didn’t seem too worried about it. As I got up off my butt, he sat down on the steps and began rolling a huge joint.

  “Get your dander up, cunt?” he asked pleasantly, then licked the number and stuffed the makings back in his vest pocket.

  “I think so,” I said, rubbing my hands together.

  He lit the joint and took a hit off it large
enough to paralyze an elephant. “Flake off,” he said, holding the hit.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m a private investigator and I’m looking—”

  But he laughed so loudly that the smoke came roiling out of his lungs. “Don’t do that, man. Made me lose the hit. Just get the fuck outa here, okay?”

  We stared at each other for a few seconds, then I looked around the yard for a big stick, relieved that I couldn’t find one among the tangled high grass and blooming weeds. Lawrence smiled; I tried. In the house to the right, an old woman with gleaming white hair and a faded black lace dress stood at her side window, waving coyly at me. The dress belonged to another time, as did the neatly marcelled hair. Her cheeks bloomed hopefully with rouge, her mouth smiled beneath a contusion of dark red lipstick.

  “Listen,” I repeated as I walked toward him. He stopped smiling.

  “You want more, man. I got more than you can handle.”

  “I’ve had plenty, thanks. You can throw me off your porch all night long, but it’s no big deal. I just want to ask you a few questions about a friend of yours,” I said, still walking.

  He kicked the inside of my right thigh, and when I turned sideways the foot hit me again, on the left shoulder, and I hit the sidewalk. I kept most of my face off the sidewalk by getting my hands in front of me, but the heels of my palms didn’t feel too good about it.

  “Hit the road, cunt.”

  When I stood up, my left arm felt like it had been hit with a billy club, and there was blood and gravel in my hands.

  “I never hit anybody wearing purple eyeshadow,” I said, picking at some of the smaller stones embedded in my flesh.

  “Don’t start now, friend,” he said, holding the joint in front of his mouth. “Not now.”

  We smiled at each other again, but I quit when my face started hurting.

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  “You know I’m right, cunt.”