Outside, a little pissed, he said to Marshall, “That wasn’t real cool, the way you jumped in there with the threats.”
“Just being the asshole,” Marshall said mildly. “Didn’t mean nothing by it—and we got what we came for.”
“You sounded like you meant it,” Lucas said.
“I’m good at that,” Marshall said.
Very good at it, Lucas thought.
They were in the truck when Stans appeared at the door and pointed at Lucas. Lucas ran the window down and said, “What?”
“Come talk to me a minute. Just you.”
Lucas turned to Del, said, “Hold the fort,” got out, and walked over to Stans, who held the door for him. They both stepped inside, and Stans said, “You gonna keep Deputy Dog away from me?”
“He was just being a hardass so I could be the nice guy,” Lucas said. “You know how that works.”
“So keep him off me,” Stans said. Then: “I remembered one other thing about this white boy.”
“Yeah?”
“He talked like a brother. I mean, you always running into white boys who see you’re black and so they talk a little black, that’s just bullshit. Fuckin’ bigots. This boy, he talked like a brother like he didn’t even know he was doing it. Sounded to me like he grew up in one of the projects.”
“White.”
“He was definitely white,” Stans said.
“Did he look like he might’ve had a couple of fights? Fucked-up eyebrows, maybe a little loose in the nose?”
Stans thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, you know . . . he did,” Stans said. “You know him? What happened to him?”
“I happened to him,” Lucas said.
“Okay, forget Deputy Dog,” Stans said, showing a grin. “You stay away from me.”
When he got back into the truck, Del looked at Lucas’s face and said, “What?”
“It’s that fuckin’ Randy Whitcomb,” he said. “The fancy man.”
“You know him?” Marshall asked.
Lucas nodded and said, “Yeah . . . it’s not really that big a town. You hang around here long enough, and you get to know a lot of the characters.”
“You think he could . . . ?”
Lucas shrugged. “Randy could do almost anything. He’s a fuckin’ pimp, we know he beats the shit out of his girls from time to time, and he’s cut up a couple of them. Probably has killed somebody, or even a couple of people.”
“Crazy motherfucker,” Del agreed from the back. “But . . .”
“Yeah. Not really his style. The guy we’re looking for is nuts, but he’s under control, deliberate. Randy’s completely out of control,” Lucas said. “The other thing is, he would have been too young when your niece was taken. Randy’s still gotta be in his early twenties. Twenty-one, twenty-two.”
“So maybe he was just passing the jewelry along.”
“If he only took three hundred for it, for the necklace and the ring, then he probably got it for free, or the next thing to it. If Randy didn’t do it, the guy who gave him the jewelry knows who did.”
“So we look up this Randy,” Marshall said comfortably. “We find him, we’re right there.”
“Trouble is, the word was going around that Randy moved to L.A.,” Del said. “He’s supposedly been gone for a couple of months.”
“Gotta find him,” Lucas said. “He’s a key.”
“Somebody’s gotta find him,” Del said. “Not you.”
Lucas nodded. “Okay.”
Marshall picked up the interplay. “What happened?”
“I once arrested Randy a little too enthusiastically,” Lucas said. “It created a situation.”
Del snorted. “Shit. It got your ass fired, is what it did. Randy looked like a carpet that had been beat with an ax.”
“But you’re back,” said Marshall. “You got unfired.”
“Just about took an act of God,” Del said. To Lucas: “But I’ll get him. I’ll look up some of his pals tonight and confer with them.”
“I’m coming,” said Marshall.
“You don’t have any—”
“I don’t give a shit,” Marshall said. “I’m coming.”
Del nodded. “Okay. You can watch. Gonna catch us a fancy man.”
14
RANDY WHITCOMB, HIS clothes aside, resembled a photograph of a Civil War soldier: pale, rawboned, head slightly misshapen—not distorted, exactly, but simply lopsided—thin nose, broken a time or two, thin lips, crooked teeth, the skin of his face touched with pocks, the result of an early and violent encounter with acne.
He looked like a mean white hillbilly. He didn’t let that stop him.
Randy Whitcomb was a fancy man. He liked blackthorn walking sticks with gold-nugget heads, big broad-rimmed llama-felt hats, gold chains, and red sport coats with black collars spiked with gold threads. Tall boots made of alligator skin, with three-inch heels. Moleskin pants. Not just cars: motorcars.
He’d driven a crimson Jaguar for a while in L.A.—a short while, before both the car and L.A. got too hot—and carefully called it a “Jag-u-war,” a pronunciation he picked up from a radio advertisement. Randy thought he was a black pimp, though he was, in fact, a white boy from the suburbs of Minneapolis. His background didn’t keep him from talking ghetto-black and laying down lines of hip-hop when he had a little crack rolling through his veins.
Randy was twenty-two but looked forty-two, with lines in his forehead, at his eyes, slashing down his cheeks. Cocaine, speed, PCP, all that shit will make you old. Randy sold dope, ran an occasional whore, and was James Qatar’s fence.
Through some process that Qatar didn’t totally understand, Randy would exchange jewelry and other high-value stolen goods—handguns, mostly—for dope out of Chicago. He would peddle some of the dope and eat the rest.
The stolen jewelry sold in Chicago for half of what it was worth, Randy said, and the Chicago people gave Randy only half of what they could get for it. So Randy could only give Qatar half of what he could get from the Chicago people—an eighth of the real value. But that was crime, Qatar thought. That’s the way things worked.
“You get me guns instead of this other shit, I get you real money,” he said. “None of this half-and-half-and-half shit with a good nine-millimeter.” But Qatar wouldn’t touch handguns: Handguns could be traced with minute precision.
Qatar had met Randy through an improbable accident: A hip marketing professor who did a little cocaine had put them together on the back porch of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue, dropping a broad hint that Randy was a criminal friend. Then Randy and Qatar had embarked on a complicated, circumspect conversation, which ended with Qatar asking about underground jewelry sales.
“I can do that,” Randy said. “I got the connection down to Chicago.”
“Chicago.”
“That’s where the boys are,” Randy said.
“Okay. . . . Do you have a card?”
Randy’s forehead furrowed, and Qatar thought he might have blushed. “You think I should?”
“Well, I’d like to get in touch with you, maybe,” Qatar said. “Nothing stolen, but I would like to get rid of it quietly.”
“If it ain’t stolen, you’d be stupid to sell it to me. You could just take it to a jewel store. Get a lot more for it.”
“I need to keep it very quiet. If a jeweler up here ever put it in an estate sale, and my in-laws ever saw it, I’d be in real trouble.”
Randy saw through it—the stuff was stolen—but if Qatar wanted to bullshit, that was his problem. “I give you my cell phone number,” he said. “By the by . . . where would I go to get a card?”
The next time they met, Randy had business cards, and Qatar had gotten $1,500 for what he supposed was ten or twelve thousand dollars’ worth of mediocre jewelry he’d taken off a woman from Iowa.
What Qatar didn’t know was that Randy really didn’t have a fencing connection in Chicago; he sold it on the street in Minneapolis, to whoever would
take it. What Qatar didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, Randy thought. Besides, why should he give a shit about Qatar?
QATAR HAD CALLED Randy’s beeper in the afternoon and had gotten an address in St. Paul, on Selby. He wouldn’t be home until late, Randy said. After midnight.
Qatar looked at his watch when he arrived outside Randy’s. Ten past twelve. Randy lived in a yuppie-looking town house, gray and white, in a long line of town houses that looked like they’d had government design input. The place was not what Qatar expected.
But Randy answered the door. He was wearing a red silk dressing robe and had a brown-tinted joint stuck in an onyx cigarette holder. His mouth was an angry slash. “Who d’fuck are you?” he asked.
“Uh, Randy, I called . . .” Qatar stepped back, half turned.
“Shit you called. What’d you call about?” Randy’s eyes seemed fogged; he was wrong, and it was more than a little hash. Qatar backed away another step.
Randy took a step after him, and Qatar looked quickly up and down the street. He didn’t need this. “This afternoon I called. I’ve got some jewelry.”
The fog seemed to lift an inch. “Jim,” he said. “You’re Jim.”
“I better go. . . . You look like you need some sleep.”
Randy suddenly laughed, a long, deep rolling peal, as though he were an aged blues singer doing a cameo in a white movie. “Don’t need no sleep. I don’t need no sleep.” He turned angry. “You sayin’ I need sleep?”
“Listen . . .”
“C’mon. In.” Randy had stepped close, and he caught Qatar’s arm just above the elbow. His hand felt like a mechanical claw. “Got the slick crib. Wait’ll you see inside. You’re Jim, Jim.”
Qatar was dragged along, afraid to protest, into the town house and up a flight of stairs. “Mostly garage down there,” Randy said. At the top of the stairs, he said, “Check it out.”
Qatar whistled, genuinely amazed.
Scarlet flocked-wallpapered walls were punctuated by three faux-antique mirrors with foam-plastic frames painted to resemble gilded wood. A fifty-two-inch widescreen TV was pushed against one wall, sitting on a black furry rug in front of a white furry couch. On the wall to the left of the TV was a fireplace with a steel surround. Erté graphics hung everywhere.
Randy must have found a frame shop, Qatar thought. One that was big with faux everything. “Pretty amazing, Randy.”
Randy backed up to the railing next to the stairs, steadied himself, and studied the room as if suddenly puzzled. Something missing? He took it in for another few seconds, then shouted, “Hey, bitch, get out here.”
A minute later, a too-thin blond girl padded out of a back hallway. She might have been sixteen, Qatar thought. She was round-shouldered with defeat, and barefoot, and said apologetically, “I just had to pee, Randy.”
“Yeah, well, get me and my friend a beer. Make it fuckin’ quick. And wash your hands first.”
“You want it in glasses?” The question came out as a whine.
“Of course we want it in fuckin’ glasses. And they best be clean.” He said to Qatar, “I ain’t got her fully broke yet.”
Qatar nodded and tried not to look embarrassed; and in fact, he wasn’t much. “I’ve got some stuff for you.”
“Let’s see it . . . Jim.” Qatar handed him the little bag of jewelry, and Randy shook it out into his hand; the hand was suddenly steady. “What’s it worth?”
“I’ve been checking the jewelry stores. I should get three thousand. You should get six from Chicago. Both the diamond and the emerald are real.”
“Okay. I got no cash right now. I get it to you day after tomorrow.” He put the jewelry back in the bag, slipped the bag into his pocket, and said, “Hey, look at this.” He picked up a T-shaped remote control and pointed it at the fireplace. A fire sprang up. “Just like TV: real fire. Even looks like real logs in there, but it’s gas. But it looks like real logs. You can get some shit that you sprinkle in there, and it smells like burning wood.”
The woman came out of the kitchen with two glasses of beer and two bottles balanced on a round tray. She did it well enough that Qatar thought she must’ve worked as a waitress somewhere, though she looked too young.
“Beers,” she said.
“Look at this,” Randy said. He turned one of the bottles. “ ‘Special Export.’ ”
“You’re doing well, my friend,” Qatar said.
“I am doin’ well.” Randy looked at the woman and said, “Sit on the floor.” She sat, and Randy and Qatar both had a sip of beer, and then Randy said, “You got any cash on you?”
Qatar’s eyebrows went up. “A little, not much.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars, maybe.”
“Got a cash card?”
“Well . . .”
“What’s your limit?”
“Four hundred,” Qatar said, mentally kicking himself the moment the words were out of his mouth.
Randy looked at him for a moment, then said, “I tell you what happened. I started partying at six o’clock and I run out of cash. So I went to a cash machine and I partied some more and then I run out of cash again, and I was at my daily limit. So then I borrowed some, and pretty soon I ran out of that, and then nobody would give me no more even though I just gotta wait until tomorrow before my cash card works again.”
“Hmm,” Qatar said. He thought about asking for the jewelry back, but Randy was pretty coked and had a tendency to get excited.
“So . . . I ain’t asking for a loan. I want to sell you something,” Randy said.
“What? I mean, I really don’t need—”
“Her,” Randy said, nodding at the woman on the floor. She looked at Qatar but said nothing.
Qatar said, “I don’t fool around with prostitutes. I mean, I’ve got nothing against it, but I worry about AIDS and syphilis and gonorrhea and herpes.”
Randy put a hand to his chest, offended. “Randy ain’t gonna give you the clap, man. Randy ain’t gonna give you the clap. You ain’t gonna get the clap sticking your dick down her throat. No way you’re gonna get the clap from doing that.”
“Well, I . . .” Qatar looked at the woman again and shook his head. She was his type, he couldn’t deny that—although a little dirty-looking, like she should use some cleanser on her feet. The thing was, Barstad was wearing him out. He hadn’t had a random sexual thought in days.
“She’ll do anything you want, Dick.” When Qatar turned to look at Randy, Randy nodded and said, “Anything.”
“Man, I appreciate it. . . .”
Randy couldn’t believe he was being turned down. He turned to the woman and said, “Stand up, bitch. Take off the clothes and show the man what you got.”
The woman stood up and started shedding her clothes. Pulled her sweatshirt over her head, pulled off her jeans, popped off her bra, peeled off her underpants, and then stood in front of Randy, looking at his face. Said nothing. All her pubic hair had been shaved off, and Qatar noticed that she was developing a rash. Ingrown hair, he thought, almost sympathetically. Something about that part—the rash—stirred him. She seemed so helpless. Unformed.
“She do anything,” Randy said again.
Qatar noticed that Randy now had a sheen of sweat on his face. His physical condition seemed to change from minute to minute, and when he picked up his beer again, he picked it up with both hands. “I’ll make you a deal,” Qatar said. “You may not like it.”
“What is it?” Randy asked.
“If you give me give five thousand for the jewelry, plus my four hundred dollars back—five thousand, four hundred dollars total, next week—I’ll get the money out of the machine right now.”
“You fuckin’ kike,” Randy shouted. He laughed, excited, and jumped up. “You got it, Dick. You got it.”
“But you gotta get me the money, Randy,” Qatar said. “Honest to God, it’d really hurt me if I didn’t get it. I’m in a jam, too.”
“You’ll get it, baby,” R
andy brayed. Spit flew out of his mouth. “I never let you down. You a fuckin’ client. Five thousand, four hundred dollars. You get it in two days, soon as the delivery boy comes from St. Louis.”
St. Louis? They looked at each other for a moment, then Qatar shrugged. “All right.”
“Yes,” Randy shouted, pumping a fist. He didn’t seem to notice that he was shouting.