“We need to go,” Valerie said.
“Hang on, little lady,” Atlas said. “We’ve got to dance. Nobody will believe a story like this. I meet Aaron, get my eye put out, then dance with his girl. I mean, provided he doesn’t mind. You’re simpatico with that, aren’t you, Val?”
“Why did you ask about Saber?” I said.
“He’s a fascinating guy. I heard a lot of the parts on his heap are stolen. A guy who steals car parts is probably one jump away from boosting the whole car. But you probably wouldn’t hang with a guy like that. Give me an answer on this dancing situation, will you? My lady is waiting over there. You know her.”
I followed his eyes across the dance floor. At a long table in the corner, Cisco Napolitano was sitting with a group of people who looked like they’d just arrived from Miami. She was wearing a strapless black evening gown and a pink corsage. For just a second I thought she was looking back at me.
“So what’s it going to be, Aaron?” Atlas said. “I’m not talking about slow dancing. We’ll wait for a fast number. I dig the bop. Jitterbug is out, the bop is in. There’s even a dirty bop, did you know that? We can do it, Val, you and me. I mean the regular bop.”
“I don’t want to dance with you,” Valerie said. “Do we have that settled now? Please leave our table.”
“The lady is direct. I respect that. Too bad you didn’t step up to the plate on that, Aaron.” He leaned closer to me. I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Doesn’t matter, though. We’re buds. Right? Talk to me. The right kind of bud is a bud for life.” He grinned at Valerie and put his arm across my shoulder. Unconsciously I put my hand on the steak knife that lay by my plate. He jiggled his arm. I could smell the staleness in his armpit. “Friends?”
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes straight ahead.
“That’s the way to talk, Jack.”
He removed his arm. I thought he was done. I should have known better. He wet his finger and reached around the side of my head and put his saliva inside my ear.
I had never experienced a greater sense of revulsion and violation. I drove my elbow into Atlas’s face and, at the same time, pressed my napkin into my ear. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself tearing him apart, stomping his face into jelly, breaking his jawbone, snapping ribs like Popsicle sticks. But I didn’t do it. I doubt I drew blood. The orchestra was blowing down the walls with “One O’Clock Jump”; few if any people seemed to notice a problem at our table.
Valerie handed me her napkin. I dipped it in my water glass and cleaned my ear with it. Atlas was pressing his fingers against his cheekbone, otherwise unruffled. Then I realized he had paid a price he hadn’t anticipated. His patch had popped up from his eye, exposing the true nature of the injury. The eye was a blue orb the size of a dime, oozing liquid, either infection or medication or both, but the surrounding tissue was not cut or bruised or stitched; the tissue was puckered, the eyelid seared. Atlas’s eye had been burned, not hit with a brick.
“It was a firecracker,” I said.
“Firecracker? What are you talking about?” he said, popping the patch back in place.
“Y’all were throwing firecrackers,” I said. “Maybe Baby Giants or M-80s. A firecracker blew up in your face. You and Grady framed us, Vick.”
“You just admitted you were in the park, smart guy.”
“Get away from our table. If you don’t, I’m going to do something that will embarrass you for the rest of your life.”
There was a beat. His good eye was watering. His bottom lip had started to puff where my elbow had hit him. “You’re going to do what?”
“You don’t want to know. Nobody watching will forget it.”
The band finished “The One O’Clock Jump.” Vick looked over his shoulder at the orchestra as though somehow it contained the solution to his problem. “I’m going to write this off for now. But I’m coming for you.”
“No, you’ll send somebody else. All you guys are the same. You never go it on your own.”
He rose from his chair and looked around casually. “Good night, Miss Val. You got class. I’m a big respecter of that. Anything I can do for you, let me know. It’s an honor to have sat at your table.”
He waited for her to speak. She looked at her plate.
“So be it,” he said. “Good night to both of you. Maybe I’ll see Aaron again. Maybe not. Who knows? It’s a big universe out there.”
“Not big enough,” I said.
“We’ll see, smart guy.”
The band started playing again. He walked through the dancers to his table rather than around the dance floor.
Valerie lifted her face and opened her eyes. “I never saw anything like that in my life. What was the embarrassing thing you were going to do?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at me a long time. “You’re the best boy I’ve ever known.”
There are compliments you never forget and you never tell anyone about; instead, you hide them in an invisible place, and for the rest of your life, when the world about you is in tatters, you take them out and read them to relearn who you are.
Chapter
15
AFTER I PAID THE check, Valerie and I walked out the front door into the warmth of the evening and the wind blowing the palm trees on Seawall Boulevard. A minute earlier I had seen Cisco Napolitano go out the door by herself, while Atlas was still talking with his friends at the table in the corner. As Valerie and I walked toward my car, Cisco drove a dark blue Buick out of the parking lot and pulled to the curb across the street, waiting for Atlas, I figured.
“Is that the woman you told me about, the one who knew Bugsy Siegel?” Valerie asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Why is she staring at us?”
“I think she’s messed up. Maybe her life would have been different if she hadn’t gotten mixed up with some bad guys. You want to meet her?”
“No.”
But Cisco didn’t give us an option. As we passed the Buick, she opened the door and got out. Her sun-browned skin and black evening dress and pink orchid corsage were marbled with the reflection of the neon; her hair was twisted like snakes around her throat. “Is Shit-for-Brains coming?”
“I didn’t pay him any mind. What are you doing with a creep like that, Miss Cisco?” I said.
“Doing penance for being born. Tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen, kid. Now fuck off.”
How’s that for getting the message across?
But it wasn’t over. Atlas came out of the club just as we were walking away. When he saw us, he opened the trunk of the Buick and took something out, then got into the passenger seat with it and closed the door. Cisco Napolitano made a U-turn so she could drive past us. Atlas hung a chain out the window. Four rope loops were threaded through the links. He shook the chain as he passed us. “Meet your future, asshole.”
I CALLED SABER THE next morning. No one answered. I called that night and Mr. Bledsoe hung up on me. I tried again the next morning and Mrs. Bledsoe answered. “He’s not with you?” she said.
Two days later Saber came by the house in his heap. The windows were filmed with dirt, the fenders and hubcaps caked. My parents were at work. He didn’t cut the engine until he was in the porte cochere. When he got out, he looked back at the street, even though there was no traffic nor anyone in the yards. An envelope protruded from his back pocket, rounded to the shape of his buttocks. He was chewing gum, smacking it; his eyes were behaving like Mexican jumping beans. “My mom said you were looking for me.”
“I had a run-in with Vick Atlas at the Balinese Club in Galveston. His eyepatch came loose. Remember the firecrackers those guys were throwing? His eye was burned. That brick might have hit the windshield, but it’s not what did the damage to his face.”
“The cops never knew that?”
“They probably didn’t look at the medical report. Or maybe they don’t care.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“We’re off th
e hook,” I said. “All they’ve got is that bogus charge on the Krauser break-in.”
He began chewing more rapidly, his eyes burning holes in the air.
“The charge is bogus, right?” I said.
“Who cares? Krauser and those pinheads who knocked me around are going to hang it on us anyway.”
“My father talked to my boss at the filling station,” I said. “My boss saw the detective examine my shoes. He said there wasn’t any paint on them. The detective rubbed paint on them at Krauser’s house.”
“It doesn’t matter. If they cain’t get us one way, they’ll get us another. Nothing has changed.” He pulled the envelope from his back pocket and handed it to me. The flap was glued down. “Open it in the house.”
“What’s in it?”
“Eight hundred spendolies.”
“How much?”
“For your bail and for your car getting pissed in and for any legal fees your dad had to pay. If you need more, I got it.”
“Where’d this come from?”
“Midnight auto supply. Houston is lighter one pink Caddy convertible, formerly owned by Grady Harrelson.”
“That’s what Vick Atlas said. I thought he was crazy. You boosted Grady’s car?”
“The Mexican guys from the jail gave me a little help. A police chief in Nuevo León loves his new car.”
“I can’t believe you’ve done this. How much did you get for it?”
“Not a lot. It was a three-way split, and we had to pay off some guys at the border. So we pooled resources and made another business connection. This one was a real score. My cut was twenty-eight hundred.”
“Doing what?” I said, my heart tripping.
“Transporting a little laughing grass and a shitload of yellow jackets and redwings across the Rio Grande.”
I put the envelope back in his hand. “I don’t want to hear this, Saber. Leave the money in a church. Throw it out the window in the Fifth Ward. Don’t bring it here.”
“That’s the way you feel?” he said.
“In spades.”
He took the gum out of his mouth and tossed it into my mother’s hydrangea bed. “What are we supposed to do? Keep squatting down for our daily nose lube?”
“Stay away from those Mexican guys.”
“Manny and Cholo are my friends. They were both in Gatesville. Manny did a one-bit in Huntsville. They don’t take shit off anybody.”
“Listen to yourself,” I said.
“Take the money.”
“Not on your life.”
He got into his car and shut the door, then fired up the engine, revving it, filling the porte cochere with oil smoke. I walked around to his window. His shoulder was pointed into the door, the way teenage hoods drove. He looked up into my face, his T-shirt rolled into his armpits, an unlit cigarette hanging off his lip, the carefree Saber of old.
“Grady Harrelson told me Vick Atlas made a threat about chain-dragging the pair of us,” I said. “When I saw him in Galveston, he hung a chain out of his car window and said, ‘Meet your future, asshole.’ ”
“And I’m the guy whose life is screwed up? That’s a howl.”
He backed into the street and drove away, his stolen loudspeakers blasting out Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”
I WENT TO POLICE headquarters downtown and asked to speak with Detective Merton Jenks.
The officer at the reception desk didn’t look up. “He’s at lunch.”
“It’s eleven o’clock.”
“He eats five times a day.”
“What time will he be back?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where does he eat lunch?”
The officer looked up. “Two blocks down the street. It’s the place with the gurney and the stomach pump by the door.”
I thought he was kidding until I got to a poolroom with a lunch counter and saw Jenks through the window. There was also a wood booth where customers could cash welfare checks and process bail bonds. Jenks sat hunched over a meatball sandwich and a bowl of pinto beans he was eating with a spoon. I had to go to the restroom badly. I walked the length of the poolroom through smoke that was as thick and toxic as cotton poison, and used the toilet and washed my hands and dried them on my pants. Then I waited for somebody to push open the door so I wouldn’t have to touch the knob. I went out and sat down next to Jenks without being invited. “Have you seen that washroom?”
“You ought to see the kitchen,” he replied.
“Why do you eat here?”
“The philosophic insight.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “What do you want?”
“You heard about the medical information on Vick Atlas, right?”
“Your old man’s lawyer did a good job on that. So what do you want?”
“My dad found a witness who can prove Saber and I are innocent of the break-in at Mr. Krauser’s house.”
“Correct. You still haven’t told me what you want.”
The last time I had seen him, he had acted in a friendly manner, and I didn’t understand his irritability. I told him that.
“I’m a homicide detective, son,” he said. “I have more on my mind than this teenage bullshit.”
“Vick Atlas is threatening to chain-drag me and Saber behind his car. Tell me what we have to do to get clear of all this.”
“What you have to do? You ask me a question like that?”
“Who else can I ask? What’s with this Detective Hopkins, the guy who tried to frame us for the break-in at Mr. Krauser’s house?”
Two loud, unshaven men in unironed clothes stacked their pool cues and sat down beside us. They picked up menus and started to order.
“These seats are taken,” Jenks said.
“By who?” one man said.
“Me,” Jenks said.
They got up, one of them spinning the seat on the stool, looking back at us.
“Hopkins worked vice in Galveston,” Jenks said.
“Yeah?”
He looked straight ahead, widening his eyes in mock dismay. “I’ll have a run at it another way. Hopkins has the same fascist politics as your metal-shop teacher. He also has chewing tobacco for brains. Put that together with his background in Galveston and you have your answer.” He bit into his sandwich.
“I’m lost.”
“Jesus.” He put down his sandwich. “There’s a fortune going out of Galveston to the casinos and hotels in Vegas and Reno. The greaseballs are becoming respectable. Clint Harrelson is a big player, but he’s not going to keep financing greaseballs till they clean up the mess you started. The issue is the dead Mexican girl. Did you kill her?”
“No, of course not.”
“If you didn’t, who did?”
“Grady Harrelson and his friends?”
“I knew you’d work it out.”
“I saw Grady at my church. He went into the confessional. He’s not a Catholic.”
Jenks had started in on his sandwich again. He replaced it on the plate. “He told you something?”
“Not directly. He was afraid the priest would inform on him.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“The confession is sealed, whether the person is Catholic or not,” I said.
“Tell me exactly what Grady Harrelson said to you.”
I told Jenks every detail I could remember. He was shaking his head before I finished. “That’s not going to do it.”
“I think he was admitting he killed the girl,” I said.
His sleeves were rolled, his coat folded on the counter. He pinched his temples. I could see the tattoo of the red parachute on his arm, a green vein running through it.
“My girlfriend said you and her father were in the OSS together,” I said.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“Valerie Epstein.”
I saw the recognition in his eyes. “Her father is Goldie Epstein?”
“I don’t know his first name. She’s right? You were i
n the OSS?”
He stared into space, his thumb working up and down on the shaft of the spoon.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.
“What’s Mr. Epstein’s attitude on all this?”
“I know he doesn’t like Grady Harrelson’s father. He told Mr. Harrelson that he’d kill him if Mr. Harrelson tried to hurt Valerie or him.”
“Those were his words?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jenks picked up his coffee cup but didn’t drink from it.
“You think Mr. Epstein was exaggerating?” I said.
The two loud pool shooters had grown louder. “You boys shut up before I come down there,” Jenks said. He turned back to me. He was breathing through his nose, obviously thinking about how much he should say. “Here’s the short version: Mr. Harrelson should make sure his life insurance policies are up to date.”
“You never answered my question, sir.”
“What question, for God’s sake? I swear, my heart goes out to your parents.”
“How do I get clear of all this?”
“I’ll ask you a question: Where’s your buddy Bledsoe? For some reason, you haven’t mentioned a word about him.”
“I’m worried about him.”
“Worry about yourself. That kid is a born brig rat.”
“I think I know how to get out of this, sir. I need you to help me.”
“You’re seventeen years old and you’ve got the magic solution? Does that strike you as a little vain?”
“The dead Mexican girl was Loren Nichols’s cousin.”
“So?”
“He knows who did it, but he’s scared. I want to talk to him. I’ll have to give him some assurances.”
“Why do you think a kid like Nichols is going to do anything for a kid like you?”
“I know what it’s like to be him.”
Jenks signaled the waiter. “Wrap up my sandwich and get my check, will you?”
AFTER WORK, I FOUND Loren Nichols’s number in the city directory. When I called, he picked up on the second ring.
“I need to talk. Can I come to your house?” I said.