Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
in his office. Her ghastly pantsuit was wrinkled and stained with coffee. Much of her black bra was exposed. She slept with her mouth open and he saw she had perfect, little white rodent’s teeth. The explosion of white frizz on her head was matted and some of it had stuck to her cheek where she’d drooled in her sleep.
He thought of kicking her to death but something stopped him. He had a moment that rocked him. Back in the days when he’d been a young policeman, a real policeman, he’d been part of a search team looking for a missing eleven-year-old. He’d been the one to find her, folded into a frozen curve under a tarpaulin, in a garage two blocks from a halfway house for degenerate losers. That girl had been blond and she too had stuff dribbling out of her dead mouth. Her clothing had also been in disarray. The effect on him had been profound: he spoke to the corpse and apologized to her for not finding her in time. He decided only sick bastards would want to look at that kind of stuff endlessly, and that very day he set himself on a career arc that would lift him from the streets, fast and far, no matter what it took.
Djuna Brown looked the same size as the eleven-year-old. A glimmer of realization sparked in the skipper’s mind but he smothered it. He kicked the edge of the couch. She stirred and opened her eyes slowly, in a way he momentarily found sleepy and seductive, as though she’d awakened under the eyes of a lover. When she focused on him, first he saw fear, that widening of shock. Then she grabbed at her open blouse and when she looked up again he experienced her pure hatred. Wordless, he stepped back and away. She got up and hurried out the door in her slippers, wiping slick from the corner of her mouth, muttering.
As she crossed the office in the direction of the ladies’ room, Ray Tate came through the door juggling paper cups of coffee with newspapers crammed under his arm. He looked bedraggled, as though his clothes had gone through a wash cycle while he was still wearing them. There were heavy streaks of black, dark blue, and blood red paint on his shirtsleeves and on the tail of the denim shirt hanging under his jacket.
“Ray, when your buddy there gets back from her tampon break, c’mon in. Conference time.”
* * *
Inside the skipper’s office Ray Tate, Djuna Brown, and the reclining skipper were kicking the shit. Djuna Brown had taken water to the coffee stains on her clothes and there were patches of wet on her pants. She’d clearly made efforts to smooth out the wrinkles. Her face was grey and dark circles were pressed under her cat’s eyes. The skipper had the feeling he’d somehow insulted her by finding her crashed on his couch, having seen her defenceless in sleep.
“Okay,” he said to Ray Tate, “run down for me this stuff from last night.”
Ray Tate shrugged. “Djuna ran it. I was just a road rat.”
She surprised him by lying for the team. “Bernie and Wally were set up downtown and Bernie spotted Phil Harvey. He voiced it out. We put together a moving box and went down there. He got away, left the rental jammed in a lot, and phhhhht, gonzo, Alonzo. The sector guys, a ghost car, found the G6 dumped. That’s it.”
“So, Ray, what’ve we got that we didn’t have yesterday? How are we closer to getting my pills?”
“Well, skip, we know the boys are back in town. We know Phil Harvey’s got something going someplace, probably in the woods, in Indian country, or in the badlands. That’s maybe where the lab’s set up. Isolated. No worry about neighbours complaining about the smell. He bought fishing gear and a sleeping bag so we can assume he’s bunking in for a while, cooking something for Captain Cook. We know he’s got to be heated up, the way he dumped out the rental and evaded our box.”
Djuna Brown studied him. The office smelled of artist’s chemicals and paints. She wondered about his night. It couldn’t have been worse, she thought, than waking up with your boobs hanging out and seeing the fat, red Irish mug leering at them.
The skipper sat and gazed out the window. He wasn’t looking for avian life. He was exhibiting the deep posture of a master investigator, determining where next to deploy his troops. Djuna Brown googled her eyes at Ray Tate. She held her nose and looked him over. He shrugged and mimed painting. She gave him a wide, sad smile and shook her head. She said, “Beatnik.” Her anger and fear were gone. Her partner was here and she began to comprehend partners.
The skipper missed all this. The telephone rang and in relief he scooped it up and made notes as he listened. “Okay, our guys are on it. Who’s running things over there? Tell them my guys are on the way.” He hung up and forgot Djuna Brown was a dyke and Ray Tate was a gunner. “Okay, kids. Showtime. We got some Chinamen down over in Gastown. Two are minor gun whips but it looks like the third one’s been shot up pretty good and he’s going for the egg roll special. The hammers are standing by. We’re working.”
“What’s up with it? Why do we care?” Ray Tate looked at the skipper’s grinning face and waited.
“Well, Ray, my boy, the shootout was at a chemical importing company. Owned by Willy Wong.”
“I heard of that guy. The mayor’s pal.” Ray Tate stood up. “The Wrong Wong. The mayor of Chinatown. Mr. Presto!”
“Yep. And preliminaries from the scene say four or five white guys were rolling drums onto a big black pickup truck. They bailed out there. One of them looked like a big ugly woman.”
“Phil Harvey.”
“Sounds like.”
“Any fat cowpokes dashing about, branding the citizens?”
“Nope. Just fast white guys.” The skipper made a genuine rare smile. “Go get ’em, kids. Get me my super lab.”
* * *
Willy Wong’s warehouse was on the outer northern edge of Gastown, where the muddy sky was held up by tilting chimneys and squat fuel tanks. Willy Wong operated from a row of units with roll-up metal doors at the rear of an industrial strip. A pair of chargers were at the front of the place drinking coffee. One saw the red ball on the dash of the Intrepid as it rolled into the parking area and he waved and hooked his thumb around the back. Djuna Brown piloted the car carefully through a half dozen police cars and parked where she wouldn’t get blocked in.
On the drive across the highway Ray Tate had flipped through his notebooks until he found the licence number for the black F-250 pickup that had rolled into their surveillance on Phil Harvey’s condo. Using the rover he dialed to the Chem Squad channel and asked Gloria to put the plate through. He asked her to have the city run the owner, as well as Agatha Burns, with various spellings, aged in her twenties.
Djuna Brown swooped around a transit bus. “Housekeeping, Ray?”
“Just stuff we would’ve done a month ago if we’d been left on the case. This black F-250 is everyfuckingplace. It was at Harvey’s place, it went to Burns’s old place in the projects, it might’ve at the Wrong Wong’s warehouse shooting last night. Maybe we can put it under Phil Harvey.”
Djuna Brown wasn’t into talking about work. “Ray, let me ask you one, no prejudice, no nothing. Straight, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Gloria? On the reception?”
Ray Tate dragged it out, “Yeeaaaah?”
“What do you think? You think she’s okay?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I barely notice her. Why, you and her …?” He laughed. “Another Chicago deep-dish of disappointment for the skipper.”
“No, no. Jeez, Ray.” She smoothly braked at a backlog and put the gumball on the dash and found the siren switch. She swooped onto the shoulder. Ray Tate grabbed the dash with one hand and the overhead grip with the other. “No, she was asking stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah. What’re you like. Are you married? That kind of thing.”
Ray Tate was pleased. Even at speed her fingers curled around the steering wheel. He liked the look of her fingers and noticed