Читать книгу Klick, the Dick - Milam Smith - Страница 13

“Our affair…started a few weeks ago,” my new client explained. “It just sort of happened and kept going. He knew I was rich, of course. But he didn’t ask for money. Well, at first he didn’t. Later Randy sort of dropped hints and I loaned him some money.” She cleared her throat. I hoped it would make her voice louder. But as she spoke she got quieter.

“Well,” she sighed, “it sort of made things, you know, in bed, better when I one day made a joke of it, you know, like I asked him ‘How much per inch’ and it just went on from there.”

I wanted to ask how much per inch but was too embarrassed. She paused and looked down at her lap. When she started talking again I had to lean halfway across my desk to hear her.

“So anyway, I didn’t mind the money. It really did make it all raunchier. For me, I mean.

“Then Randy—I called him randy Randy sometimes,” she said with that tittering laugh, “—he got rough. You know, when we were doing it.” She looked up at me suddenly and I nearly jerked my eyeballs out of socket trying to look away. I glanced down at the notes I had written on my yellow paper. One column where I had written ‘physical characteristics’ I added ‘horny.’

It was getting tense with the quiet so I said, “Go on, please.” Good, huh?

“Randy got totally out of hand—” she stopped in mid-sentence and laughed out-loud. When she was through she looked at me and said, “Sorry, I just had this image when I said ‘out of hand.’”

I held up a callused hand and said, “Yeah, me too, don’t explain, okay?” I waved for her to continue.

“Well, Randy, he lost control and started doing what he wanted. I mean, he’d come out to the house for—me. And I had to give the maid a little bonus to shut her up.

“The money’s no problem. But it was troublesome, and kind of scary. So I decided this morning, after, to tell Randy that we had to stop. I didn’t want to see him any longer.”

She paused and we stared at each other.

“So you told him to get lost. He got mad and took the car. Okay, okay, I think I got all the background I need”—and then some—“but I have to get more detail, specifics.” Specifics. Sometimes the crappy words I’d picked up in the Army injected themselves into my talking. I flinched every time I used a word like specifics, or inclement.

Ross looked at me in a stupor. “Specifics?” She held her hands up and palm-to-palm began spreading them.

“No,” I almost shouted. “Not that specific. More like what he looks like—with his clothes on. Where he lives, works, like that.” I cleared my throat.

So she told me all that. My columns began to fill up with things better than ‘horny.’ Like: Doesn’t work, disabled Vet, Army, an inch over six feet, skinny. Then his address and car. Ross also told me the motels where they had met starting out, the bars they frequented.

Randy was a black man. Most of the places she named were in the east side of Fort Worth, where most of the city’s blacks lived even though segregation was a thing of the past. Supposedly.

I was puzzled as to why they went to those cheaper hotels. Ross could afford the best, cleanest. But from everything else she had said, I would guess that it was for kicks, a cheap thrill for her.

The snap her purse made when she opened it made me look up. She leaned over again when she reached out to hand me a couple of papers. One was a registration slip for the Mercedes, nearly brand new, I noticed. The other item was a polaroid picture of her(dressed in something even slinkier than what she was wearing) sitting on a black guy’s lap. The background was dark. It was taken in the bar Randy liked to go to, she explained. The name of the bar sounded familiar, but lost somewhere long ago in my head as if it weren’t important. Maybe I had driven by it sometime, because if it were important, I’d have a mental image of it.

“That’s Randy whose lap I’m on,” she said with a bit of pride. Or maybe she was just hoping to see a bigoted look on my face.

I looked at her and there was a wicked sparkle in her large eyes. The sun wasn’t causing the sparkle. Ross wanted me to say something, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.

“This’ll help,” I told her, holding up the car’s registration.

“How soon can you help me?”

“Well, it’s already getting late. I glanced at my Timex. If I get lucky, maybe tonight, but….”

“I’ve told my husband that I loaned the car to my sister. But I’ve got to have it tomorrow night, or the next morning at the earliest. There’s a chance he may run into my sister, or Randy might damage the car, maybe even sell it, I don’t know.”

“What’s your husband do for a living?”

“Ross’s Bric-a-Brac,” she said proudly. “He owns it.” She smiled at me.

I smiled back. Well, I tried to smile. Ross flinched.

Ross’s Bric-a-Brac was a furniture store that catered to the poorest clientele, although he had a couple of upscale stores now. He’d started on the low enders, though. I’d driven by many of them.

“Okay, Mrs. Ross, that’s all I need for now. Should I call you at home when something comes up?”

She tittered at the way I had phrased the question. She gave me her number and address. I gave her a receipt for her money.

The phone rang. Ross stood up and walked over to the door. She stopped and turned back to me with her hand on the doorknob. I jerked my eyes up to her face; she’d caught me looking again.

The phone rang a second time.

“Call me,” she said. “Tonight, after nine.”

The phone rang again.

She opened the door and walked out.

The phone rang a fourth time. Ross had left me with a looker’s look, and she hadn’t been telling me to call if I found something, but to call for something else.

The phone started its fifth ring and I snapped up the receiver and yelled, “What?”

The voice said a few words and then there was a click as the phone went dead. I was still thinking of Ross’s backside as she had walked out. But finally the voice on the phone sunk in.

It had been my dear, loving future ex-wife. And she had said more than six words this time. She had said twenty-five. A speech.

What she had said was, “Hey, Jerk. Your clothes are still in the street and blocking traffic in front of my house. Today’s garbage pick-up day, too, so you better hurry.”

I didn’t want to think of my wife. I didn’t need it. I turned my thoughts back to Ross. Then I leaned back and sighed.