Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
officer” to search a shoplifter.
Being a dyke had served her well during her time up in Indian country, where the farm boys stayed away as though she had a disease they might pass on to their wives. The one guy who’d tried to jump her had been drunk. He smelled of manure and hay and announced he’d never had black ass, especially queer black ass. She’d surprised herself when she went for her stick and started in on him. She had just one partner after that and he never said a word to her. When he wanted a meal break, he burped. When he needed a bathroom break, he tilted and farted.
There was an ease in the Intrepid. She’d heard about cops like Ray Tate. Not the racist gunner stuff, although there was a lot of that, especially inside the Gay-Glo. She’d heard of coppers who were coppers to their core, who passed on lore and knowledge like old alchemists. You felt safe and never alone and always in company with a keeper of secrets. She’d never met one before; they were increasingly rare. The bitter dykes at Gay-Glo said that was all technique. They wanted to be daddies and get into your pants.
Suddenly, Ray Tate asked: “Hey, Djun’, where we at?”
She looked around. “Uh, eastbound … uh …”
“See,” he said, laughing. “When I was first in the suit I was out with an old sergeant. Turn here, he said. Turn there. All the while he’s talking baseball, he’s talking gossip. Then he says, Hey, boy, where we at? I go, Fucked if I know, and I start looking around. He reaches over and grabs me by the ear and twists. Fuck it hurt. He says, If you need help and you go on the radio, what are you going to say when they ask where you at? You’re gonna say, Uh … uh. And you’re going to bleed out. I guaran-fucking-tee it. Always, always know where you’re at.”
She looked at him. He was smiling at the windshield. “You going to twist my ear, Ray? Make me a cop?”
“Ah …” He looked at her ear and seemed about to say something but instead flipped through his notebook. “Anyway, Phil Harvey. State Motor puts two vehicles under him. The black Camaro, registered two months ago, and an old knucklehead Harley. The Harley lapsed out and the address was on a commercial strip over in Stateline. The Camaro’s registered to an apartment in the Beach. Old Harv had a change of status for the better, it seems.”
Ray Tate felt like a working cop. As Djuna Brown drove he watched both sides of the street, counting pedestrians. “The Stateline address is a strip club. The Beach is a condominium. Lake view, tennis courts.”
She steered through a jam-up in Little India, four short blocks decorated with strings of Christmas lights that burned year round. A turbaned man was selling grilled corn on the corner, rubbing the cobs down with a lemon, waving a can of salt over them. A woman in a headscarf modelled a sari in a doorway for another woman, both of them giggling behind shy hands. Ray Tate was in love with every colour and smell and weird sitar note blaring from a speaker. Past the street crowd, Djuna Brown cut south and picked up speed, timing the lights.
Phil Harvey’s condominium was just across a wooden boardwalk from the lake. Djuna Brown cruised the parking lots in case the Camaro had made its way back from the north country. She drove to a Donut Hole and Ray Tate, following the tradition that the shotgun buys, bought two coffees. At Harv’s building she backed into a handicapped slot with a view to the front door of the building and the entrance to the parking lot and they racked their seats back.
“So,” Ray Tate said, “let me ask you one. What’s with the hair?”
“What’s with the painting?”
They were silent. He said, “There’s always Harry Potter. That’s a safe subject.”
“That little fag?”
They sat companionably and didn’t say anything for a long time.
Chapter 12
Connie Cook felt at loose ends. Harv had called and given him a heads-up about the surveillance on Agatha Burns’s stash house. Agatha was gone, someplace, probably not a very nice place, he imagined. He missed yakking with Harv, he missed packing Ag, he missed the slow trails of blood soaking in the fine hairs at the back of her neck.
“There’s heat on Ag’s, Connie,” Harv had said. “Red Intrepid, a black chick with white hair, a white guy with a beard. They might be there for the local spades, but I’m gonna go under for a while. You okay for now?”
Captain Cook went to a gallery opening in the capital with his erect, frozen wife. The artist scented dough on the fat donor with the champagne glass in his hand and made a point of leaning into him as he did the rounds of the walls. She was a tall woman with explosive red hair and a loose-lipped red mouth. “My vision,” she said, “is of angst. But of love, too. That’s why all the red and black.” She read his vibrations and gave him a sad smile. “Love is pain, pain is love. I have to accept that in order to grow. Accept the sacrifices.” She began nattering about the artist’s life, of being born too late, of having missed the golden age of artists and their generous patrons.
The Captain bought three hugely depressing oils. The artist put the red dots under the paintings and stood back pleased. She gave him her card and said she had canvases at her studio on the river, or she would anyway, until the landlord locked her out. She looked mournful at the land sharks who were driving property values through the roof. If ever, she said, the art world needed true patrons, now was it. She actually batted her eyelashes.
Captain Cook felt the hustle and appreciated it. It was his money she was in love with, not somebody else’s. He scoped her ass and looked at the nape of her neck. He felt a rumbling. He was amazed at what people would let him do to them for his money.
When they got off the Interstate, his wife directed him past their house to two adjoining lots. “We can get them both, a million three they’re asking.”
Connie Cook said he’d get his secretary to look into it and she wrote down the developer’s phone number. Connie Cook stopped at the curb in front of his house and walked his wife in, turned on the lights, and said he had to go out for a while.
It was dark. He drove a couple of blocks then rounded on himself and shut off the lights. The lake was off to his right. On his left he could see his own house, the far side overlooking the backyard of the house where Agatha Burns had lived, had done her high kicks, had been a golden girl beyond his reach. The rich young, he thought sadly, didn’t care about money. He wondered if life was satisfying without it. He could have offered her a million dollars to flash him a boob but she’d’ve turned him down and gone to laugh with her little friends. His life had been like that. Cornie the Horny, a girl at school had called him. Fatty Unbuckle. Jabba the Gut. If a man couldn’t get it with money or his looks, then what was left to him? Pillage, that’s what. Pillage was the most successful foreplay.
He watched his house until his wife turned out all the lights upstairs and left the light in the portico lit for him. The door glowed with the hall lamps. To a passerby, he knew, the house was welcoming and homey, clearly a place of expensive textiles and furnishings, fireplaces, chandeliers, staircases. He dreaded going inside. There was nothing for him there.
He didn’t know what to do with himself. Harv was off someplace, gone under. Ag wasn’t around anymore. He thought for a moment that maybe he’d been too quick to sic Harv on her. He should have waited until he had someone else in the bullpen, warming up. The pigpen, Ag had called it, and he recalled with some sadness how that had lifted his heart.
Connie Cook started the Mercedes and rounded the block. He took a long, last look at the old Burns house, almost hidden by new construction hoarding, then continued on and eased through the gates onto his interlocked driveway. He’d been surprised that the Burns couple stayed there so long, after their Agatha had run off or been taken. Old Jerry Burns had been a rich playmaker in the political halls of the state legislature and he’d sat, Connie Cook imagined, for a long time waiting for the call for ransom, waiting to negotiate in his resonant voice, waiting for the call that never came. Or for Agatha to call, regretful, from some roadside phone booth, wanting to come home.
In the foyer