Читать книгу Picasso Blues - Lee Lamothe - Страница 11

The city had taken a block of rooms at the Whistler Hotel in Stonetown. The lobby was frigid and none of the doormen or bellhops wore masks. The two women manning the check-in desk were clad in blue uniforms that resembled flight attendants’ outfits. They were chic and cheery and wore scarves knotted at the collars of their white blouses. Neither had masks. The check-in desk was three feet deep and the air conditioning had been set to send a strong sheet of arctic air laterally across the marble top. There was little activity in the lobby. Staff inspected each other’s tunics and brass buttons beside the antique wooden revolving doors.

“Good afternoon,” Djuna Brown said softly to the nearest woman, showing her badge. “I’m Djuna Brown, with the State. They have a block?”

“Welcome to the Whistler,” the woman said. Her name tag said “Front Desk. Gail.” She didn’t lean away, but she didn’t get too close, either. She was pleasant but seemed to be examining Djuna Brown with curiosity. “The city has several rooms and suites on reservation for the State.” She tapped into her computer. “Room, or suite? The suites, with mini-bars, full hotel facilities, are for, hmm, let me see … oh, Inspector or above.”

“Oh, that’s me.” Djuna Brown made a confident smile. “I was told a suite. I’m an inspector.”

“Certainly, Inspector. We have a suite on the twelfth floor with a view of Stonetown. Will that be all right?”

“Perfect. How many of my people are here?”

The woman made a humming sound and scrolled on the computer screen. “Just you, so far.” She continued tapping. “Will you need help with your bags?”

Djuna Brown shook her head. She dug into her purse. “Do you need an imprint?”

“No, Inspector. You’re a guest of the city. No credit card required. You’re all set.”

“Yes.” Djuna Brown smiled brightly. “I am.”

The suite had a sitting room of deep red paint that looked like it had been lacquered on repeatedly and then buffed flat. The ceilings and wainscotting were thick cream. The lights were in sconces and there was a chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. On the floor was a woven carpet of intricate Middle Eastern or Asian design, and Djuna Brown thought she saw some Native symbols in the gold border. The pale window curtains were pulled back and tied with thick red ribbons; they sagged and glowed with heavy sunlight.

Bordello chic, Paris, 1920, she thought. “Not,” she said aloud, “that that’s a bad thing.”

In the bedroom were framed reproductions of French paintings. The one above the bed was Whistler’s Mother. The bed was wide with a vast engraved headboard and a telephone console on each side. French doors faced out onto a tiny Rapunzel balcony overlooking Stonetown. Far away, toward Canada, the green river wended north. A basket of fruit that looked like it was waiting for Matisse to drop by was on the dresser with a card welcoming her, in script, to the Whistler.

Djuna Brown felt excitement as though she was having a rendezvous in a country she’d never been to before. This could be Paris. She dumped her bag on the bed and went into the bathroom. There were gold fixtures, a frosted glass shower stall, a triangular-shaped tub with jets, another telephone, a space-age hair dryer, and a woven basket of several bars of fragrant soap and bottles of high-end shampoos and lotions. Two bleached-white bathrobes with WH entwined over the pocket hung from the back of the door.

After she poured a bottle of bath salts into the tub and adjusted the jets, she unclipped her clamshell holster, stripped out of her travelling clothes, and went out naked into the living room. The mini-bar was in a faux Looie Katorz hutch. It was crammed. She selected two little bottles of Bombay gin, dumped them into a glass, and, ignoring the cans of tonic, added tap water. Halfway to the bathroom, she went back to the bar and added another bottle of Bombay. She carried the drink and her holster into the bathroom.

In the tub, with her drink balancing on the edge, she drank and told the ceiling, “Raymundo, you don’t get away this time, not from me, bucko.” She cackled, but felt a stirring of uncertainty. She should have called him, found out what his scene was before she came down to the city. What if he’d hooked up with some tall, blonde, helmeted traffic chick, a vanilla motorcycle rider in bug goggles, jodhpurs, and boots, who rode him like a Harley in a headwind? What if some headquarters clerk with massive knockers had detected the beatnik artist hidden inside Ray Tate and played to it, oohing and ahhing over a killer cop who carried a paintbrush in his holster and acrylics in his handcuff case?

Djuna Brown leaned out of the tub and picked up the phone.

“Yes, Inspector. How may I help you?”

“Is that Gail? Gail, is there a spa in the hotel?”

“Yes, Inspector, the salon is on the second mezzanine. Shall I make you an appointment?”

“Please. The whole nine yards, top to bottom. Say, in a half-hour?”

After getting a genteel pounding and pulling in the massage suite, Djuna Brown sat beside Gail from the check-in desk, who was wearing street clothes in the salon. A masked Vietnamese stylist hummed softly as she buffed. The salon had windows that overlooked the park behind the hotel. The park was abandoned. The salon smelled of emollients and creams. Two women in glowing robes slipped past in slippers, talking in hushed tones. Djuna Brown had only been in a salon once since she left the city the year before, a trip down to Chicago to pick up a Native felon. Before scooping him up, she’d window-shopped at the boutiques along Oak Street, then headed to the Fairmont and had her hair re-spiked and a full body massage. The next morning, the felon, chained to the bar across the backseat, had asked her to crack a window in the truck, saying she smelled like a white woman.

Gail the receptionist looked at the bulge in Djuna Brown’s robe pocket and asked, “Do you have to wear that everywhere?”

“The gun? Yep. Regulations.”

“Did, ah …” The woman seemed fascinated. Djuna Brown thought she was going to ask to see it, to hold it. But she didn’t. “Have you …”

“Used it?” Djuna Brown lied: “No.” Gail seemed disappointed, so she said, “I’ve pulled it a couple of times.”

“Could you? Use it? I mean …”

“Well,” Djuna Brown smiled, “you never know until you need to know.” She resisted the impulse to put Gail on. “How’s it here? You guys busy?”

Gail shook her head. “No. Usually there are five of us working on the desk. Two of them are … They started coughing? There’s the bug, so management transferred them to Minneapolis. You’ve heard about that? The bug?”

“Yep. Some scary shit.”

“And the other girl was … She died?”

“The bug?”

“No.” Gail looked around. “Some guy murdered her. She … He beat her … to … until she was …”

Djuna Brown was going to make a quip, but saw the woman was becoming distraught. She had been going to say, Men, you can’t kill ’em and you can’t use their bones for soup. She wasn’t much of a cook, but she knew you could kill them. Ray Tate had said reassurance was one of the tools in the toolbox. She patted Gail’s hand. “It’ll be okay. He’ll get dropped.” To change the subject, she looked around and said, “You get to use this place much?”

“We’re running about twenty percent, and those checked in are the guests who pre-paid.” She seemed on safer, more stable ground discussing concrete facts. “Management want us all to dress civilian and use the facilities, eat in the dining room, make the place look normal, busy.” Then she licked her lips and she leaned over and whispered. “Is that why you’re here? The bug? They say it’s a Chinese person, smuggled over from Canada, maybe.”

“I don’t know about that. They said, head down to the city, help them carry the water.” She stood up when the manicurist finished her nails. They were perfect. In her arctic robe she was led down a hallway and ushered into to a quiet dark room. It reminded her of the sweat lodge. She wondered if the entire spa experience was based on Native healing culture, a rip-off of a sacred rite by a society that resold it as a frill for rich women at three hundred bucks a pop. Why not, she thought, we’ve taken every other fucking thing.

After the silent attendant massaged oils into her face, adjusted the temperature, dimmed the lights, and set a small pot of potpourri on a heating pad, she closed the door, leaving Djuna Brown alone and naked to decide if she should feel guilty. She lay on the softest of beds wrapped in the thickest of towels in the faintest of wave sounds and wondered if she was wasting State money, dolling herself up like a ga-ga high-school student laying a trap for the football captain.

Ray Tate had probably moved on, she decided. He was a keeper, if you could get past the crusted paint on his hands, his still angst about losing his wife, the absence of his travelling daughter, his bullet scars, and, of course, that he’d killed two black men and a dyke. She herself had never thought she could get past dead black men. They were good shoots, but the optics and the resulting riots had shaken the police brass and the mayor to their core. Ray Tate had been sidelined.

Near the end of the X-men case, a jealous ex-cop dyke had put a few rounds into her Raymundo. “You made me a cop,” she’d told Ray Tate as she lay with him on his futon, careful of the tubes in his body. “Now I have to go back up there. They need policing, those folk. They need a gentle hand.”

But the city did, too. Ray Tate loved his young cops, and feared for them operating in a police culture run by oily sharks, where experienced mentors had been retired off the streets early, leaving insurance adjusters with slide rules and spreadsheets to make life-and-death decisions for cops barely out of their teens.

So she went and he stayed. Both did, separately, what they needed to do, she thought. Neither did, together, what they wanted to do.

Back in her room she felt half her age. Boneless from the working-over she’d had, she lay on the bed, pulling half the duvet up over herself, cocooning. She would, she decided, have to be careful about how she approached Ray Tate. If he was into something with someone, she’d have to determine if their time the year before was a transient situation or something that had a life of its own. Worst case, she decided with a lack of enthusiasm or belief, was she’d snag some hot young charger, bang him stupid, and head back up north to Indian country where she knew love would wither dry like one of the arid pods the grim elders rattled at the hopeful sky.

The phone purred as she was nodding off.