“A little bit,” she said. “Austin was sort of a large small town in those days. Everybody knew everybody. And you know I was a little crazy in those days.”
“Someday we’ll have to talk about those days.”
“Someday,” Betty said. “But first, your back. We can’t have a hard-nosed private dick being chauffeured around by his lady friend. Takes some of the glamour out of it.” Then she smiled tiredly.
“That’s for damn sure.” Then my cell phone buzzed in Betty’s purse. She tossed it across the table, and I answered.
“Bueno,” I said.
“Milo, you son of a bitch,” Thursby said, “a fake Mexican accent doesn’t get you off that easy. I’ve got two messages from one of my less esteemed colleagues up in Gatlin County, one Jacky Ryman, who says he’s Richard Wylie Oates’s lawyer and who is threatening to haul me before the bar for client interference. First question, who the hell is Richard Wylie Oates? And two, what should I tell his lawyer?”
“I suspect Oates is doing a lot of hard time because Ryman is a jerk,” I said, “and tell the asshole that you’ve got a client who’s willing to finance a malpractice suit against him. Then tell him to messenger his case files over or you’ll subpoena them.”
After a long silence, Thursby said, “You’ve learned a lot from me, Milo, and I’ve not yet noticed a bulge in my bank account.”
“I’m having trouble with my back,” I said.
“Fix it,” Thursby said, then hung up.
I handed the cell phone to Betty. “Why don’t you see if your friend can work me in this afternoon? It’s bad enough that I’m stupid, I don’t need to be crippled, too.”
* * *
Cathy Scoggins lived in a high-dollar development off Bull Creek Road in a large limestone-and-glass house that sat on the top of a ridge with a view in all directions. “She didn’t get this place practicing alternative medicine,” I suggested as we pulled into the driveway behind a brand-new Lexus. “Or that rig.”
“She’s a witch,” Betty said. “She married well, several times, and divorced even better.”
“But she forgot to get any furniture out of the deal,” I said as we walked in without ringing or knocking. Except for large pillows and small Oriental rugs, the hardwood floors ran unimpeded to the stone-and-glass walls.
“Furniture just gets in the way,” came a voice from behind one of the pillows, then a small woman with a smoky halo of wild dark hair shot with gray and dressed only in a black bodysuit popped up, an agile shadow against the late afternoon sky. “I like to keep my life simple,” the woman said.
She embraced Betty, shook my hand, then led us upstairs, where she not only didn’t have much furniture — a massage table, a wet bar, and a Chinese armoire — she had almost no interior walls. Although I knew Cathy Scoggins was middle-aged, she looked like a hyperactive teenager. She stood under five feet tall, and obviously had the metabolism of a ninety-six-pound hummingbird. She ate like a horse, drank like a sailor, and smoked dope like a stove, but as far as I could tell, nothing had any effect on her. She probably chattered like a monkey when she talked in her sleep. When I hesitated to take off my underwear in front of her, she slapped me on the butt with a tiny hand, and said, “Milo, if I had as many pricks sticking out of me as I had stuck in me, I’d look like a porcupine, so drop your drawers, sailor, and climb on the table.”
I grumbled as a giggling Betty helped me out of my shorts and onto the padded table, where I sat on the side, surly as a hungry bear and terribly aware of the large scar on my abdomen running like a crooked arrow from my bruised chest almost to my limp dick dangling from the gray hair of my crotch.
Cathy touched the scar lightly, the question in her dark eyes.
“Gutshot,” I explained.
Within moments, Cathy had fired up a crystal glass bong, let me have three large tokes of terrific marijuana, rolled me onto my stomach with minimal effort, and with her nimble little fingers found every muscle in my lower back that was as sore as a boil.
“What the hell did they do to you?” Cathy said.
“A stun gun,” I said.
“More than once, I’d say,” she murmured.
“Nazi bastards,” Betty muttered from the corner.
“Let me work out some of the knots first,” Cathy said, then began working at my neck and shoulders with her strong, tiny hands. Minutes after my first sigh and almost so quickly and easily that I didn’t really notice it, she had smoothed the tight muscles of my back and had a dozen needles or more sticking in various parts of my body. Then she stepped back to admire her work. “That should do it,” Cathy said quietly as she rattled in the armoire. “How’s it feel?”
“I can’t feel a thing,” I admitted grudgingly as I suddenly slipped toward a doze, sniffing at some sort of sweet smoke that wasn’t marijuana. If only my hippie ex-partner could see me.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Cathy said, laughing. “Remember. The old jokes are the best.”
“Talk about porcupines,” Betty said from the corner of the room, which was the last thing I remembered until I woke as Cathy removed the needles. I could swear that some of them didn’t seem to want to be pulled out.
“What the hell?” I said as she pulled out the last two, which seemed even more reluctant than the others. I felt some sort of electric pull as my skin tented as Cathy lifted the needles.
“Hold still,” Cathy said once the needles were out, moving her hands in the air over my back. “I’m sweeping your aura clean.”
I probably wouldn’t admit it, even under torture, but I felt something, a rippling of skin, a shifting of muscles as Cathy’s tiny hands swept over my back.
“What color’s his aura?” Betty asked after a stifled laugh.
“You don’t want to know,” Cathy said, then slapped me on the butt lightly.
“I’ll be damned,” I said as I sat up and swung my legs off the side of the table without help, an errant erection poking its wary head out of my crotch.
“You folks want me to leave you alone?” Cathy asked.
“Milo’s on a case,” Betty complained.
As quick as a dragonfly, Cathy’s hand flew at my dick and thumped it with her middle finger as she might a watermelon. It throbbed once, then disappeared. “I hope that’s not permanent,” I said as I hopped off the table. Amazingly, not only was the pain in my back gone, but my chest didn’t hurt much at all either. Even the nagging burn of the spent .25 round’s path through my guts seemed eased. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I said.
“You’ll be a dead son of a bitch,” Cathy said quietly, “if you do too much of that cocaine.”
“What?” I said, reaching for my clothes. Cathy pressed one finger lightly into my back behind the liver. I flinched as if she had stuck a knife in me.
“You haven’t done too much blow, but it’s a bit too close to pure to be completely safe. Where the hell did you get it? I haven’t felt anything like that in years.” I didn’t think it was any of her business, so I didn’t answer. Betty looked worried and started to say something. But Cathy continued quickly, “Doesn’t matter. Just don’t do too much, man, quit when it’s gone, and don’t be buying none of that shit they sell on the street these days. I’ll see you next week. You’ll be okay for a while, but your back’s a real mess. So we need a couple more sessions.”
“What do I owe you?” I asked as I slipped back into my clothes and boots.
“Stop being such a dour son of a bitch,” Cathy said, glancing at Betty. “Life’s too short to be taken that seriously.”
“I’m Slavic,” I said. “I’m supposed to be dour and serious.”
“You feel more like a black Irishman to me,” Cathy said, laughing.
“That’s the American mongrel peeking through,” I said.
“Wear something warm on your back for the next few days. A sweater or a down vest or something like that.” I must have looked confused. Cathy pointed out the glass wall with the northern exposure
. A dark band hovered on the horizon. “Cold rain by dark. Freezing rain by midnight.”
“Thanks for the news.”
“And the next time you want to talk to Sissy Duval,” Cathy said, “call me, and I’ll go along. She owes me big-time.” I assumed that Cathy and Betty had been talking while I had my little nap.
“Owes you?”
“I fixed her orgasms,” Cathy said without a smile.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“So will I,” Betty giggled from the corner.
“It’s happy hour,” Cathy said. “One martini never hurt anybody.”
* * *
By the time we left, my back felt so good I climbed into the driver’s seat without thinking about it. “Are you all right?” Betty asked.
“My back feels like the train wreck never happened.”
“I was thinking about the three martinis,” Betty said.
“Three martinis never hurt anyone my size,” I assured her. “Besides, we’ve got a police escort.” I nodded toward the unmarked car parked down the street from Cathy’s driveway. We hadn’t had any trouble losing the Gatlin County district attorney’s investigator on the way to Huntsville, but as soon as we got back in range, the unmarked car latched on to our tail.
“What’s wrong with your orgasms?” I asked as we drove away.
“Where’d you get the cocaine?” she replied.
“I took it off a dead man,” I said, hoping she would take it as a joke, knowing she started having trouble with her orgasms after she killed the man who raped her.
* * *
The next morning Betty ran out to the ranch to check on her animals, so I slipped into the Lodge’s airport van and rented a car when I got there. I didn’t want Gatlin County following me when I called on Sissy Duval. No sense helping them make a case against me. I thought about picking up Cathy or the dead man’s cocaine, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Eldora answered my ring with a frown, as if she expected someone else.
“Mr. Electrolux. I don’t know what you did to Mrs. Duval,” she chattered nervously, blocking the doorway and making me stand in the cold rain, “but last time you paid her a visit, she spent the next three days in bed. Then decided she needed a vacation. She’s gone away. On a long trip.”
“Where?”
“None of your business,” Eldora answered, an anxious smile flittering across her face. Then she tried to smirk, but that didn’t fit either.
“Thanks,” I grumbled, thinking I should have brought Hangas. Texas wasn’t the South, but some people were still Southern.
“She say when she’s coming back?”
“No, sir.”
I realized that I’d have more luck squeezing gold from a whore’s heart than getting Eldora to talk to me. So I went back to the rented Taurus. I waited in the plain brown sedan until Eldora, just as I expected with Sissy Duval gone, took off before lunch. I followed her new Ford station wagon to the HEB grocery store, then to a small, well-maintained frame house in West Travis Heights.
I called Carver D on my cell phone to leave a message for Hangas, asking him to take a gentle run at Eldora and a brief tour of the black community east of the Interstate for any word of Enos Walker.
“I’ll run her through my machine,” Carver D said, “and in half an hour, we’ll know her whole life story.”
“I don’t need her life story. I just want to know where her boss is.”
“Grist for the mill, Milo,” Carver D sighed, then laughed.
“And if you can handle it,” I said, “lend me fifty K for a couple of weeks. Put it into the Mad Dog’s offshore account.” Even though he lived like a hermit, Carver D was the last surviving member of a Texas family fortune based on those two popular commodities — pussy and politics — so unlike me he wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with fifty K in clean money.
“I thought the fair Phillip had advised you to depart these fair climes,” Carver D said.
“Yeah, but he didn’t mean it.”
“At his prices, man, he never says a word he doesn’t mean.”
“Tell Hangas I’ll call him when I get back tonight.”
“You going anyplace fun?”
“Someplace between Midland and Odessa, actually,” I said. “Wherever that is.”
“I know exactly where it is and I sure hope you enjoy it without hurting yourself,” Carver D said, then hung up.
I sat in the car, watching the cold rain splatter against the windshield, then I tried Betty on her cell phone. But it was busy, and I didn’t bother leaving a message. She was already deep enough in my troubles.
Since I couldn’t find a lead on Sissy Duval, I thought I ought to pay a call on Paper Jack, who had insisted that he knew the Molly McBride woman and who, according to the Lodge desk clerk, lived between Midland and Odessa. I still felt good after Cathy’s treatment, but not good enough to endure three hundred miles in the cold rain, so I went to the airport, dropped the rental car, hopped a shuttle to Dallas, changed planes, and landed at the Midland airport before dark. Just as the last light faded across the rain-dreary plain, I was parked in another rented car down the road from Jack Holbrook’s house when he came home from his oil well supply company. Jack lived alone in a three-thousand-square-foot house setting on five of the barest acres I had ever seen a few miles northwest of the Interstate between Midland and Odessa. I waited long enough for Jack to get a drink in his stomach and a second one in his hand.
“Milo, what the hell are you doing here?” Jack asked when he opened the door to my knock. The old man had changed out of his suit and into a baggy jumpsuit, a tattered sweater, and heel-shot slippers.
“I hear there’s nothing between here and the North Pole but a three-strand barbed wire fence. I want to get out of the cold and ask you a few questions about the other night.”
“Talk to my lawyer, asshole,” Jack growled, “because we’re filing charges.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said as I stepped around Jack’s bulk. “And lead me to a drink.”
Without too much grumbling, Jack led me to a large den at the back of the house. Jack flopped into a broken-backed La-Z-Boy. The room was crammed with fast-food debris and empty Wild Turkey bottles. A fuck movie played silently on a large-screen television standing in front of a gun case rack full of imported shotguns. I found a fairly clean glass and a dusty bottle of cheap Scotch on a battered sideboard.
“Trouble keeping a housekeeper, Jack?” I said as he raised the glass.
“Nobody wants to do a day’s work for a day’s pay anymore,” Jack said without taking his eyes off the screen. “Fuckin’ Meskins steal everything that isn’t nailed down, widow-women want to marry my money, and the women from my wife’s church keep trying to save my soul.”
“How long’s your wife been dead?”
“Since the day she died, asshole,” Jack said.
“You said you knew that young woman at the bar the other night.”
“I was drunk,” Jack said. “Otherwise, I would have broken your back.”
“You’re not drunk now,” I said standing over him. Perhaps the combination of drugs, pain, and legal peril had made my hair-trigger temper even more hairy. “And I’ve just gotten out of a train wreck, too, you old bastard.”
Jack half-rose from the chair, then waved his hand as if it was too much trouble to get on his feet. “You’re sure as hell on the prod,” he said. “But you’re damn near my age, Milo. You’ll find out what it’s like. Maybe it’s time to walk easy.”
“I don’t have time to walk easy, Jack. Talk to me about the woman at the bar.”
“I told you she was a whore,” Jack said. “A fuckin’ thousand-dollar piece of ass.” Then Jack smiled slightly. “Damn near worth it, too, as I remember.”
“Where’d you find her?”
“Not a clue,” Jack said. “But it had to be someplace where they had gambling. Vegas, Lake Charles, Reno, Mobile. Any place but Indian reservation casinos; they’r
e all run by some fucking guy named Guido Running Deer. That’s about all I do these days. Drop five or ten grand at the tables, get drunk, then find a thousand-dollar hooker.”
“How long ago was it?” I asked, thinking that Lake Charles rang some distant chime.
“Old lady’s been gone three years,” Jack whispered. “Had to be since then. After my heart attack, damned Edna wouldn’t let me go to the pisser alone. Always thought I’d go before her… Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? And sometimes you don’t die.” Then Jack sat up straight. “How’s your drink, ol’ buddy? That’s pretty shitty Scotch, ain’t it? Let me get my clothes on, and we’ll drift over to the Petroleum Club. Everything’s top-shelf there.”
I thought it over for at least a second. “Why the hell not? I can’t get a flight out until tomorrow morning, anyway.”
But it turned out to be a late afternoon hangover flight. I kept the lonely old man company through the evening hours in the ghostly climes of the Petroleum Club, then sat up listening to complaints about the oil business long past midnight, hoping he’d either pass out or remember where he’d met the McBride woman before he died. Or I did. But I didn’t learn anything else.
Except to be reminded the next morning once again that hangovers at my age were crippling beasts. And airplanes were no place to endure them.
* * *
Hangas, the solid mass of his body perfectly draped in a tailored black suit that wasn’t quite a chauffeur’s uniform, met me at the gate when my flight arrived about dark-thirty. “You don’t look all that chipper, Milo,” Hangas said. “Can I buy you a couple of these overpriced airport drinks?”
“Let’s go someplace where I can have a cigarette, too.” I had called him before I climbed on the plane to see if he had talked to Eldora. He said he didn’t have much to tell me, but he knew by the sound of my voice that I could use a lift.
Half an hour later, we were bellied up to the lobby bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, a place where we could talk in the anonymous crowd. Hangas, who had never completely recovered from a tour as a Marine guard at the embassy in Paris, had a glass of an estate bottled Haut-Medoc while I went back to the smoky hair of the Scotty dog that had bitten me.