Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
know he exists, right?” He saw the entrance to the cemetery up ahead. “Turn in here, this place is quiet. We can get some work done.”
She shook her head. “No way. You heard of the ju-ju man? Spirits. Mojo. I’ll wind up with steel teeth and your nuts’ll shrivel to raisins. Pass.” She had a wide cat grin on her face but he saw something of hesitation in her eyes.
The rover squawked and Ray Tate grabbed it up.
Gloria, the receptionist, came over. “Skipper says there’s a silent hit on the Camaro you’re looking for. The Staties stopped it for lane change on Interstate northbound, south of Stateline, where it swings west to the badlands. Statie guy said it was a white male, long hair over his face, burns, long leather coat. Solo. An hour ago.”
The Statie doing the traffic stop wouldn’t know about the silent hit. He’d have made a stop, run the driver and plate, laid down his ticket, and taken off, none the wiser. The hit would pop up almost instantly on the main computer and the Chemical Squad notified.
Ray Tate asked Gloria to contact the Staties and have other highway cruisers look out for the Camaro. “Take it off that silent hit shit. We have intell he’s got a gun in the car, the guy doing the stop has to know that. If they see him, grab him for something, call us. They oughta take the Camaro for ident, especially the tires. They should seize the tires off it.” He clicked off. “Phil Harvey’s running around in the woods. We can set up on him later.” He gave her directions to his apartment.
“Your place? What the fuck’s that about? I’m not going there, fuck that.”
“Okay, Djun’, you pick a place. But my place is okay, unless you go all hetero on me.”
She shook her head. “You wish.” But she was smiling. “You just wish them wishes, buddy.”
* * *
The files were scant and while Ray Tate mixed gin and waters Djuna Brown laid them out over the rickety kitchen table that sat in the living room. Feeling home proud for some reason, Ray Tate folded paper towels to use as coasters.
Her nose wrinkled. “Gin and taps? That’s it? Not even fizzy water? No lime?”
“The drink of the people,” he said. “Gin and taps. Lake water and juniper. The beverage of nature.”
She sipped at her drink. “Jeez, I thought I lived like a rat. But you live like a barricaded suspect, Ray.” She looked around, sniffing loudly. “Paint. I thought you said you were painting the place? Why’s it smell like paint? This place is a dump.” She spied, by the sink, a jar with brushes poking up out of it. “Aha. I detect art.” Before he could stop her she went into the kitchen and saw his pallet in the sink. She espied his canvases, face in, under the window. She didn’t turn them. “You really are a beatnik, Ray.” She seemed pleased at this knowledge. “Officer Bongo.” She moved along the wall where he’d hung his daughter’s photographs so they wouldn’t be in the sunlight. She sipped. “You take these?”
“My kid.” He felt a pride. “My daughter’s a photographer.”
“She really likes green, eh? She should come down to my island. The whole thing’s ganja green.” She made a smile. “Except the people of course.” Confidentially she whispered, “They’re black.”
“Well,” he said, feeling his way in the face of this friendliness, “except for that part, it definitely sounds like my kind of place.” He suddenly felt a dread, imagining how the comment would look, typed up on a piece of paper in front of a discipline command.
* * *
There wasn’t much in the files. They were just wasting time until they headed over to Phil Harvey’s place. Mostly they batted ideas back and forth and sipped their gin and taps. Twice she caught him looking at her. The third time she said, “What?”
“I’d like to …” his throat clogged “… ah, paint you.”
She whooped and drained her glass. “Nice. Nice one, Bongo. You do okay with that line?”
He hung his head. “Not really. Not lately anyway.”
Later she said, “There’s an elephant in the room.”
He nodded.
“We should, sometime, talk about the elephant.” She thought for a moment. “No, maybe not.” They were tiptoeing in partner territory but not deep enough to get all confidential.
They went through the statement she’d taken from the black guy who saw Agatha Burns get into Phil Harvey’s Camaro. Ray Tate stood behind her chair, watching her long brown finger trace the lines of handwriting. She had perfect penmanship. Her fingernails were chipped and worried. He thought he smelled a faint spice off her skin then it was burned away by her bleached hair.
She looked up at him. “You reading this? You read dyke?”
“Sure.” He was a little drunk. “Sure. I read all the romance languages.”
She laughed and briefly there was something open and unguarded in her look.
* * *
On the way to Phil Harvey’s place in the east end she drove away from the river into an industrial area and they stopped for dinner at a chicken-and-biscuits joint.
“Maybe we’re going at it wrong, Ray. Maybe we should work from Agatha Burns and go backwards. She left a phone number. Maybe we talk to the family and find out how she got from cradle to grave.”
He shrugged. An anti-gang ghost car, all black with fat blackwalls and whip antennae, pulled up in the lot beside the Intrepid and two chargers got out. They stood huge in their vests and utility belts in the parking lot, like they owned the kingdom. Their sidearms were tied to their thighs by straps, gunslinger-style. Two lanky guys in gold chains sitting across the restaurant headed for the back door. The clerk yelled into the back to make two with extra hot wings, Petey and Gary are here. The chargers came in and looked at everyone. One kept his eyes on Ray Tate, then on Djuna Brown, then back. They were being added up and divided by suspicion. Ray Tate had done it himself a thousand times, reaching conclusions based on what was visible, reading tea leaves. If you asked the cops next week who was in the chicken joint when they went in that night, they’d get it right, right down to Djuna Brown’s slippers and Ray Tate’s scuffed cowboy boots. He thought: a competent cop is the best of creatures if they were caught young and mentored out of their hubris and stupidity. These two, he decided, had benefited from a crusty old duty sergeant, not from some crafty self-guided missile heading for a white shirt at the Swamp.
“We got to shake something up, Djun’,” he said. “Let’s do Harvey’s place and if it washes, we’ll put the chick through.”
“Okay.” She reached over to help herself to his coleslaw. While he watched her concentrate on balancing a wad of ’slaw on her fork he saw her lashes were long, her eyes had a Chinese slant, her skin, even in the fluorescent light, was smooth with tiny pores. There was muscle in her neck, long cords that stood out when she jutted her pointed chin out to let falling coleslaw fall on the plate instead of her horrible jacket. The hair was crazy and he wondered about a cop who wore embroidered slippers. But he did want to paint her. There was a hint of the exotic about her. He felt like he was on a teenage date with absolutely no shot.
She dabbed her lips with a paper napkin and caught him staring. She made a wide smile. “Imagine, Ray, if you were a chick. Where’d you have me right now? In the back seat, that’s where.”
He felt his heart race.
* * *
Djuna Brown drove lightly with the tips of her fingers. Periodically she glanced at them and regretted the worried nails. She drove with one eye on licence plates and the other on the traffic flow. The Staties were taught to drive inside a created bubble, to outfit themselves with a zone of protection as they swooped and whipped up and down highways. Beside her, Ray Tate was quiet, listening to the city dispatchers sing their songs. As they drove across invisible