Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
said loftily, a little disappointed. Wrestling sounded interesting. “I’m not into black chicks.”
“Not even black dykes?”
“Well, black dykes. That’s a different thing. Black dykes I can dig.”
“Cool-ee-oh.”
* * *
There were three messages on her phone from Hazel, the needy former cop at Gay-Glo, and she listened and deleted. Sober, in daylight, Hazel was a professional organizer and just a little aggressive in a flirtatious, hinting way. Late nights, Hazel was a different matter: she wailed and cried and declared undying love. She cursed and swung between wishes of suicide and dreams of violence. She promised a velvety tongue and threatened with the vengeance of the betrayed and abandoned.
Djuna Brown stirred together a rum and coke and felt creepy until she smiled, thinking of Ray Tate’s bohemian artist’s pad and the foul gin and taps and the paintings. She’d’ve never, she thought, figured him for having a creative side. She wished she’d turned around the canvases lining the baseboards and seen what lived inside Ray Tate. She laughed at herself and reflected on her flirt. Wrestling, how artless was that clanger? Aloud she said: “What a fucking clunker, you fucking lesbo.”
She sat with her drink at the window overlooking the Intrepid illegally parked in front of her duplex. A very faint dusting of early snow had accumulated on the roof. It wasn’t officially a police car, but it had the red dash light in there, a radio, and probably a switch somewhere to activate the siren. She had a gun and handcuffs and if she wanted she could go out and chain someone up, take away their liberty, put a hinge in their life.
Almost a cop, and somehow because of Ray Tate, artistic gunner of blacks.
* * *
In his apartment the gin and taps glasses were in the sink. He washed them then put on a Miles Davis CD and went on a binge into the night, wiping down surfaces, cleaning dying food from the fridge, scrubbing the bathtub. He thought about painting and realized he almost had a sense for the bright colours but he didn’t trust it and stayed away from the oils and the canvases.
There was a cop lurking in that trim lesbian body, he thought. She had some fear, which was good: awkwardly juggling her gun in the stairwell at the stash house, just nervous enough that she wasn’t a cowboy about it. Or maybe a cowgirl. Or something in between. What did you call a dyke wrangler? And she could generate fear. Watching the skipper’s reaction when she was in firing range was amusing and instructive, both. As Ray Tate dug a wire brush into the toilet and worked it he wondered where she was at that moment. Had she gone down to Erie Road and made a new friend, met up with an old one? Were they already at her place, tangled in sheets and confusion, sorting out who’d do what to who? He felt a bit of envy but also a bit of stirring.
At two o’clock he was still at it, energetically working in an endless cycle of Miles Davis when the phone rang.
“Cocksucker, Ray, they woke me up, I’m waking you up.”
“What’s up, skip?”
“Everyfuckingbody, seems like.” He sounded drunk and sleepy. “Two kids, white kids, OD’d on X. DOA at St. Frankie’s. What’s that shit in the background? You got cats on the stove? You drop my dyke for me?”
“Some jazz shit, skip. My daughter left it on.” He didn’t want to play drop-the-dyke bullshit.
“Sounds like fucking mad cats. Anyway, these kids are white and their families live in the mayor’s ward. We had a game, Ray, but I think we’re gonna lose it.” A glass or bottle clinked against the receiver at the skipper’s end. “Little assholes had double Chucks in their pockets. We’re so fucking fucked.”
Chapter 14
A month after Pious Man Chan’s dep shut down the Captain Cook task force and the Feds set up a bureaucracy operating from the Swamp, Chan told the rumpled mayor it was out of his hands. Pious Chan noticed with satisfaction the smudgy thumbprints of exhaustion pressed under the mayor’s rat’s eyes. Subtle makeup didn’t help. The mayor was in the tubes and losing sleep over it. His hair was dull pewter and the word was he was back to bingeing on fast food and midnight takeout.
“We were making progress, sir,” Chan told him sadly over lunch at City Hall. They sat at a table in the window of the mayor’s den, overlooking the city square where the drab homeless were carrying signs and trudging in a circle. “Our guys were on the edge of penetrating the whole thing, but then.” He shrugged. “Anyway, now we’ve got to move on the Bik-Bigs soon. Winter’s coming on and they’re all going to fly south, back to the Carolinas or Florida, scheme up another season of discontent. Which means a whole new generation of Black Kids Big Guns and dead bodies come springtime.”
“Fuck, Pi.” The mayor shook his dead locks and fired a weak probe. “How’d you let it all get away from you, the Chemical Squad?”
Chan too had aged visibly behind the mahogany desk but he’d grown some hard bark. The long, black, single hair had been plucked and the mole looked like a red small-calibre bullet hole verging on leakage. Somehow, the mayor thought, he’d become even more Asian looking. His eyes were sleepy but ready and predatory. He’d taken on the mantra of an old, disgraced police chief from another dynasty. Politicians come and go but cops will fuck you forever. Pious Man Chan let the mayor wait and affected deep thought and commiseration.
The mayor’s serfs were getting restless. There were growing rumors of corruption among the wardmen. The community groups were wearying of broken campaign promises, of blame being kicked up to other governments, of the mayor and his soaked crying towel. Led by the inscrutable Willy Wong, the Chinese Menu lobbied for a crackdown on the white thugs coming into Chinatown and disrupting the community, torturing the children. Promised bicycle lanes weren’t painted on the downtown streets. The lakefront was a mess of indifferent reconstruction. Building contracts were falling apart because the mayor hadn’t found a way to free up state or federal funding. The unions were howling for the jobs. The homeless were a whole other matter. The sleeping bags the city was handing out to the bums weren’t of Arctic quality and the social groups were calling the mayor a fascist killer who left the needy to freeze in the streets. The sleeping bags, they said, were body bags. You couldn’t, a cheerful dep told Chan, take a shit in Memorial Park without dumping on some shivering bum.
Pious Chan shrugged. “It was those kids, sir. Those kids in your ward who went south on the ecstasy. A little restraint, a little more time, sir, and we could’ve got the cooker, the labs, and wrapped the Bik-Bigs into it all.” He jabbed an asparagus spear and rolled it in a little pot of melted butter.
“Well, what are you guys doing?”
“Us? We’re policing, sir. We’re not arresting homeless people. We’re not arresting those guys down the hall, who, by the way, are getting pretty brazen. Price is back at it, losing tons of money in the Italian gambling clubs over in Stateline. Don’t know how he does it, the salaries the city gives those guys. The wife’s sailing around in a new Lexus. Me, I’d’ve gone broke, killed the wife, and sold the car by now to pay for a lawyer. Ten grand Mr. Price dropped this weekend, but he’s driving a new car too. Some of my guys are wondering why we haven’t started up a project on him, see if there’s a connection between his dough and the building tenders.”
“Pious. Those tenders are for jobs. Union jobs. Union jobs that vote.”
“I know, sir. I’m just letting you know. In case the media gets a hold of it. You might want to send me some backdated paper, asking me to start drilling into corruption. I’ll sit on it and if the newspapers start their shit, we can say we’re on it but can’t talk because it’s active.”
The mayor had no appetite. He looked at the bums stamping a circle in the dirty snow outside his castle, the lights from the camera crews bright in the dim noontime. It was well-organized and destined for the front page, for the tricks at six. They used to love him, the media and the bums and the bum organizers, because he could weep on cue over his heartbreak at their plight.