Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 19

A month after Pious Man Chan’s dep shut down the Captain Cook task force and the Feds set up a bureaucracy operating from the Swamp, Chan told the rumpled mayor it was out of his hands. Pious Chan noticed with satisfaction the smudgy thumbprints of exhaustion pressed under the mayor’s rat’s eyes. Subtle makeup didn’t help. The mayor was in the tubes and losing sleep over it. His hair was dull pewter and the word was he was back to bingeing on fast food and midnight takeout.

“We were making progress, sir,” Chan told him sadly over lunch at City Hall. They sat at a table in the window of the mayor’s den, overlooking the city square where the drab homeless were carrying signs and trudging in a circle. “Our guys were on the edge of penetrating the whole thing, but then.” He shrugged. “Anyway, now we’ve got to move on the Bik-Bigs soon. Winter’s coming on and they’re all going to fly south, back to the Carolinas or Florida, scheme up another season of discontent. Which means a whole new generation of Black Kids Big Guns and dead bodies come springtime.”

“Fuck, Pi.” The mayor shook his dead locks and fired a weak probe. “How’d you let it all get away from you, the Chemical Squad?”

Chan too had aged visibly behind the mahogany desk but he’d grown some hard bark. The long, black, single hair had been plucked and the mole looked like a red small-calibre bullet hole verging on leakage. Somehow, the mayor thought, he’d become even more Asian looking. His eyes were sleepy but ready and predatory. He’d taken on the mantra of an old, disgraced police chief from another dynasty. Politicians come and go but cops will fuck you forever. Pious Man Chan let the mayor wait and affected deep thought and commiseration.

The mayor’s serfs were getting restless. There were growing rumors of corruption among the wardmen. The community groups were wearying of broken campaign promises, of blame being kicked up to other governments, of the mayor and his soaked crying towel. Led by the inscrutable Willy Wong, the Chinese Menu lobbied for a crackdown on the white thugs coming into Chinatown and disrupting the community, torturing the children. Promised bicycle lanes weren’t painted on the downtown streets. The lakefront was a mess of indifferent reconstruction. Building contracts were falling apart because the mayor hadn’t found a way to free up state or federal funding. The unions were howling for the jobs. The homeless were a whole other matter. The sleeping bags the city was handing out to the bums weren’t of Arctic quality and the social groups were calling the mayor a fascist killer who left the needy to freeze in the streets. The sleeping bags, they said, were body bags. You couldn’t, a cheerful dep told Chan, take a shit in Memorial Park without dumping on some shivering bum.

Pious Chan shrugged. “It was those kids, sir. Those kids in your ward who went south on the ecstasy. A little restraint, a little more time, sir, and we could’ve got the cooker, the labs, and wrapped the Bik-Bigs into it all.” He jabbed an asparagus spear and rolled it in a little pot of melted butter.

“Well, what are you guys doing?”

“Us? We’re policing, sir. We’re not arresting homeless people. We’re not arresting those guys down the hall, who, by the way, are getting pretty brazen. Price is back at it, losing tons of money in the Italian gambling clubs over in Stateline. Don’t know how he does it, the salaries the city gives those guys. The wife’s sailing around in a new Lexus. Me, I’d’ve gone broke, killed the wife, and sold the car by now to pay for a lawyer. Ten grand Mr. Price dropped this weekend, but he’s driving a new car too. Some of my guys are wondering why we haven’t started up a project on him, see if there’s a connection between his dough and the building tenders.”

“Pious. Those tenders are for jobs. Union jobs. Union jobs that vote.”

“I know, sir. I’m just letting you know. In case the media gets a hold of it. You might want to send me some backdated paper, asking me to start drilling into corruption. I’ll sit on it and if the newspapers start their shit, we can say we’re on it but can’t talk because it’s active.”

The mayor had no appetite. He looked at the bums stamping a circle in the dirty snow outside his castle, the lights from the camera crews bright in the dim noontime. It was well-organized and destined for the front page, for the tricks at six. They used to love him, the media and the bums and the bum organizers, because he could weep on cue over his heartbreak at their plight. “I need something big, Pi. What’ve you got?”

“Bik-Bigs. We can take them down anytime. Seven homicides, statewide trafficking, smuggling shit down from Canada.”

“No. Not yet. Unless you got some white guys we can put with them?”

Pious Chan nodded at the mayor’s asparagus and raised his eyebrows. The mayor nodded and Chan started spearing with gusto. “Only white guys I can think of are Mr. Price and his guys down the hall at Planning. Don’t think we want that. Not yet anyway. There’s some Chinese guys gambling in the caverns under east Chinatown.”

The mayor knew what was going on. Pious Chan had already revealed his oriental hand at the Swamp: cops who’d pissed him off over the past twenty years were riding marked scout cars in the dark, piloting the prisoner wagons, adding up paper clips in obscure offices. The mayor had ten years of superior private schooling in Boston and Paris. Chan had two patient decades of accumulated personal slights and centuries of bloody revenge. A hundred generations of time were to the Chinamen as they were to a rock: imperceptible.

“I can’t see a chain gang of young black kids and old Chinese gamblers doing it for us, Pious.”

“Well, sir, we can go back after the cookers. The Feds haven’t got this Captain Cook guy, whose pills killed the kids. Or the cowboy who went nuts with the branding iron last month, on the exchange students. Or the super lab everybody’s talking about. Our special unit is still up, although it isn’t running too well.”

“That where Ray Tate is still? The Chemical Squad? What’s going on with him? I’m still paying his salary?”

Pious Chan nodded. “The gunner’s still with Gordie Weeks’s bunch. They’re doing nothing, sir. Some raids, little stuff. Nothing heavy that Tate can trip over, lose his way. At least he hasn’t killed anyone of the black persuasion. We’ve given the new Fed task force some space and some manpower, but if they ever somehow take down this Cook guy and get his lab the headlines are going to be Federal, out of Washington, how they saved the children because we couldn’t.”

The mayor shook his head, frustrated. “Take it back, Pious. Can you find a way to work around the Feds? Nail this Captain cocksucker, make him ours?”

“No problem, sir. Just send me the paper and I’ll kick Gordie and his gang into gear.” Chan was sick of the buttery asparagus but he asked, “You going to finish that, sir?” He wanted to eat the mayor’s lunch for him, literally and figuratively.

* * *

Gordie Weeks spent the month trying to figure out what was going on with Ray Tate’s scheme to spike Djuna Brown. The pair showed up separately each morning, drudged their way through paperwork, and seemed to get along all right. When the brainiacs down the hall had a fix on a lab they called the skipper and he put together a raiding party. The most likely time for reactive violence on lab raid was the go-in. The skipper mandated that Wally Brodski and the dyed dyke hit the door first, followed by whatever slobs were working. Ray Tate was the keeper of the keys, a fancy clerk who took down the names and numbers of the detectives, technicians, State Haz-Mat, and fire officials who went through the place. Ray Tate was swimming in boredom and seemed to be going downhill quickly under his matted hair and behind his thickening beard. He smelled sharply of paint and linseed oil, his fingertips were crusted with shades from the unhappy end of the rainbow. The raids yielded little mom-and-poppers, chemistry sets in basements, bathrooms, attics. None of the bust-ins had yielded a single double Charlie.

The dep had stopped calling. Gordie Weeks’s calls to Intelligence for intell coming out of the raids were unreturned.

Almost daily, the skipper cornered Ray Tate. “Hey, Ray, what’s going on with the dyke? She dropping today?”

“My partner, skip. She’s my partner.”

The skipper wasn’t sure if Ray Tate was being devious and arch. “You’re not gonna get her for me, are you, Ray? You were fucking me all along.”

Ray Tate just smiled at him and shrugged. “She’s clever, skip. She’s one diabolical dyke, that one.”

The skipper wasn’t sure but he was hopeful. “But, maybe? Maybe soon?”

Ray Tate had enshrouded himself in the safe cloud of non sequitur and had taken to talking about birds. “You ever notice, skip, that there’s a lot of fucking Canada geese in town? All those homeless people starving and there’s a fucking shitload of geese, waiting to be cooked up? How come nobody ever put the equation together? We got skinny folks starving in the streets and we got, like, a million fat fucking geese strutting around like they pay taxes.”

“Ray, Ray.”

* * *

When the call came from Pious Chan, via the dep, the skipper was in his office with his feet up, thinking idly about Gloria the receptionist and the .45s. He’d seen Djuna Brown and Gloria in deep chitchat a couple of times and wondered if the dyke had lured her over to the other team. The concept destroyed his dozing dreams. Something was different with the dyke. She made effort to keep her unruly white hair in some kind of shaped ’do. The exhaustion that had slumped her bones inside her body had evaporated, as though she’d had some kind of marrow work done on her skeleton. Djuna Brown still looked at him with her bitter eyes spitting hate, but when he wasn’t noticeably around she seemed to bustle with efficiency. She and Ray Tate laughed a lot.

The dep called, his voice jocular, “Gordo, you douchebag. Where you been? I call and I call and you’re never home. Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Hey, hey, dep.” The skipper knew he’d been swinging on a hook in the wind since the Feds had set up their own task force with the Staties. He played it low. “I been busy. Sorry I haven’t got back to you.”

“No matter. I know you guys been busy.” The dep said it without laughing. “What’d you get last night? Thousand pills?”

“Well, eight hundred.” The skipper had been disappointed. The tip from the local sector had suggested hundreds of thousands, based on the anxious rap of a strung out speeder.

“Wow, great. A little here and a little there, eh, Gordo? Chip away at the criminal infrastructure, it’ll collapse.”

“How’s the Fed task force working out, dep?” The skipper didn’t laugh but he took his shot. “They knocking down the double Chucks yet, got Captain Cook in the chain gang?”

“Well, Gordo, my boy, that’s why I’m calling you.”

* * *

The month for Ray Tate and Djuna Brown had been a cycle of rote. Raids on cookers had been amusing for a while but the media lost interest in minor takedowns and didn’t show up for the photo op. Ray Tate noticed that Wally the boozer and Djuna Brown were first through the doors. There were some scuffles but none of the speeders or cookers had much muscle tone or firepower. Wally Brodski took an elbow in the face while subduing an inside keeper and got two weeks off. Djuna Brown got into a tussle with a landlord who thought it was a home invasion and Wally stood watching her get her shit handed to her until Ray Tate climbed over him and put the chains on the guy. Djuna restrained him from going after Wally.

Afterwards, alone at the satellite, Ray Tate took Wally aside. “Don’t let them do this to you, Wally. We go into a place, we’re all one gang. You fucking know that.”

“She’s a fucking dyke, Ray. C’mon.”

“Right now she’s my partner. My dyke partner, sure, but she’s got the yellow letters on her back same as you, same as me, and the rest of us. What happens in here, that’s one thing. Out there, that’s another.” Ray Tate laid on some bullshit. “My father-in-law told me you were a good cop, you’d never watch another cop get his shit shuffled. Don’t you fucking do this, man.”

“Ah, fuck you, Ray.” But he had to listen: Ray Tate had the authority of dead bodies. Wally took the next door ahead of Djuna Brown and got his nose broken.

Djuna Brown somehow heard about it. “Don’t do that to me, Ray, okay?”

“It isn’t about you, Djun’,” he told her. “Wally forgot something, that’s all. I reminded him. I don’t care if it’s the fucking skipper on the floor: if he goes under them and you stand by and let them do it, well, we won’t be partnering at all, you and me. The tribe comes first.”

In the evenings they sometimes had drinks at out of the way bars on the river unless there was a door kick on the go. No one else wanted to socialize with them. Ray Tate wouldn’t let his partner be excluded. She didn’t offer to wrestle him and he didn’t offer to paint her. They talked endlessly. They drove to Chicago to listen to a bunch of white college kids do imitation Junior Wells tunes. One night in the cold they sat by the river beyond the lights of Gastown and she came to know about his dreams of becoming a painter, of his girlfriend’s father luring him into the cops, of his wife booting him. He came to know about her father, a taxi driver down in the capital, who finally accepted that she was going to be a miniature cop and signed her up for jiu-jitsu lessons. Ray Tate never spoke about the dead black guys and she never spoke about her dyke jacket.

The skipper avoided her when he could and buttonholed Ray Tate about the progress of the conspiracy to spike her into the ground. Ray Tate pulled on a shroud and wrapped himself in bird life and blank stares.

One morning, the skipper bounded out of his office. “Okay, Ray, we’re back in business.”