Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 18

Nothing happened at Harv’s condominium. They chatted and played the tag game. Ray Tate had evens and Djuna Brown had odds. Personalized licence plates didn’t count, neither did taxis or commercial vehicles. Of the first twelve cars to roll through the parking lot eight had even numbers at the end and Djuna Brown was going to buy the drinks after.

They took turns dozing and doing feel-outs.

She started speaking in soft patois. “Hey, Ray, mon, what’s wit’ de painting? Be you some kind of closet artist?”

“Naw,” he said, a little embarrassed. “No. Just fooling around.”

“You like the dark colours, eh?”

He didn’t answer that. “You always lived alone, Djun’?”

“I lived with someone, for a while, before I got recruited.”

“How’d that go?”

“Well, I’m sitting in a shitty car with a beatnik. You tell me.”

After a while he asked, “Why’d you sign up?”

“My dad wanted me to be a nurse, like my mom. When I got accepted at the Staties he was pretty mad. He said I was too small.” She glanced at him. “He was mad as a Chinaman with no thumbs.”

“Chinaman. What the fuck? Why not, say, a Macedonian with no thumbs. Or, say, a pygmy?”

“Ray, Ray, get a grip, mon. What’s a Macedonian or a pygmy want thumbs for?”

He smiled. “Nice one, Djun’.”

She looked pleased with herself. “What about you, Ray? You a single dude on the make?”

“Well, I’m married, I guess. We’re not together right now.”

“How old’s your kid? The photographer?”

“Seventeen.”

“You a cool dad, Ray?”

“Not lately.”

At nine o’clock Ray Tate tried to raise the skipper on the rover. Walter Brodski came back. There were party noises in the background and someone yelled, “Seven, you cocksucker.”

“He’s gone hours, Ray. Where you at?”

“We’re sitting on a place in the Beach. We’re looking for the guy that boiled out of the projects this afternoon. Anybody on the air, can spell us off?”

The radio was silent. Brodski came back. “I would, Ray, but my ulcer’s acting up again.” The background noise was gone.

A black F-250 pickup dripping with chrome rolled in off the street and did a turn through the parking lot. It slowed passing in front of the Intrepid. Ray Tate saw a young guy with blond hair behind the wheel, scooping them. It rolled off, cut a wide U, and dribbled out of the parking lot. When it was out of sight there was a peel of rubber.

“A mutt.” Ray Tate noted down the plate. “I think this is a wash, Djun’. We should pack it in. Even if Harvey and the Captain came and went, we’ve only got this one vehicle and that got burned off this afternoon. We’re going to need more bodies, more cars.”

She started the engine. “Who gets this one for the night? Let’s go someplace and have a few drinks and wrestle for it.” She gave him a bland look. “No, don’t answer that. I’ll drop you and take it home.”

“Just as well,” he said loftily, a little disappointed. Wrestling sounded interesting. “I’m not into black chicks.”

“Not even black dykes?”

“Well, black dykes. That’s a different thing. Black dykes I can dig.”

“Cool-ee-oh.”

* * *

There were three messages on her phone from Hazel, the needy former cop at Gay-Glo, and she listened and deleted. Sober, in daylight, Hazel was a professional organizer and just a little aggressive in a flirtatious, hinting way. Late nights, Hazel was a different matter: she wailed and cried and declared undying love. She cursed and swung between wishes of suicide and dreams of violence. She promised a velvety tongue and threatened with the vengeance of the betrayed and abandoned.

Djuna Brown stirred together a rum and coke and felt creepy until she smiled, thinking of Ray Tate’s bohemian artist’s pad and the foul gin and taps and the paintings. She’d’ve never, she thought, figured him for having a creative side. She wished she’d turned around the canvases lining the baseboards and seen what lived inside Ray Tate. She laughed at herself and reflected on her flirt. Wrestling, how artless was that clanger? Aloud she said: “What a fucking clunker, you fucking lesbo.”

She sat with her drink at the window overlooking the Intrepid illegally parked in front of her duplex. A very faint dusting of early snow had accumulated on the roof. It wasn’t officially a police car, but it had the red dash light in there, a radio, and probably a switch somewhere to activate the siren. She had a gun and handcuffs and if she wanted she could go out and chain someone up, take away their liberty, put a hinge in their life.

Almost a cop, and somehow because of Ray Tate, artistic gunner of blacks.

* * *

In his apartment the gin and taps glasses were in the sink. He washed them then put on a Miles Davis CD and went on a binge into the night, wiping down surfaces, cleaning dying food from the fridge, scrubbing the bathtub. He thought about painting and realized he almost had a sense for the bright colours but he didn’t trust it and stayed away from the oils and the canvases.

There was a cop lurking in that trim lesbian body, he thought. She had some fear, which was good: awkwardly juggling her gun in the stairwell at the stash house, just nervous enough that she wasn’t a cowboy about it. Or maybe a cowgirl. Or something in between. What did you call a dyke wrangler? And she could generate fear. Watching the skipper’s reaction when she was in firing range was amusing and instructive, both. As Ray Tate dug a wire brush into the toilet and worked it he wondered where she was at that moment. Had she gone down to Erie Road and made a new friend, met up with an old one? Were they already at her place, tangled in sheets and confusion, sorting out who’d do what to who? He felt a bit of envy but also a bit of stirring.

At two o’clock he was still at it, energetically working in an endless cycle of Miles Davis when the phone rang.

“Cocksucker, Ray, they woke me up, I’m waking you up.”

“What’s up, skip?”

“Everyfuckingbody, seems like.” He sounded drunk and sleepy. “Two kids, white kids, OD’d on X. DOA at St. Frankie’s. What’s that shit in the background? You got cats on the stove? You drop my dyke for me?”

“Some jazz shit, skip. My daughter left it on.” He didn’t want to play drop-the-dyke bullshit.

“Sounds like fucking mad cats. Anyway, these kids are white and their families live in the mayor’s ward. We had a game, Ray, but I think we’re gonna lose it.” A glass or bottle clinked against the receiver at the skipper’s end. “Little assholes had double Chucks in their pockets. We’re so fucking fucked.”