State’s Evidence Read online

  It didn’t work. The woman simply uttered her sister’s given name once again, with an antipathy so acidic it ate away my question. “What have you done for Mrs. Blair?” I asked once more, flailing her the way you flail a mule.

  She heard me that time, but she shook her head quickly, casting off the irrelevance. “How much does Mama owe? A lot, I suppose,” she speculated lifelessly.

  “That’s not precisely it,” I replied.

  “I thought you was from the home.”

  “I am. But you see we’re simply trying to locate your sister. Not for monetary reasons, let me assure you, but because there are some forms that need to be signed, formalities really, involving federal assistance programs. Title Nineteen. Since Mrs. Blair is, ah, funding the resident, it’s essential that we get her signature. You understand. Regulations.”

  “You mean she don’t owe nothing?”

  “Nothing at all. And your mother’s doing quite well, I might add. I saw her only yesterday.” I tried to sound like Mrs. Ball.

  “And you’re just looking for Teresa? That’s all there is to it?”

  “That’s all.” I smiled.

  “Well, that’s sure a load off my mind. ’Course, when Ted’s unemployment runs out, the load’ll go right back on, I reckon, and then Mama will get after me again.”

  “After you for what?”

  “Oh, about how Ted ain’t good enough for me, how I married beneath myself, how I could have amounted to something if I’d wanted to. Like Teresa did. Mama thinks people can get anything they want just by wanting it. They can’t, can they?”

  “Not in this world.”

  “Besides, if what Teresa did is how you get to be someone, I’d just as soon stay a nobody like I am.” She shook her head wearily, a classic victim of poverty’s cycle, a descendant of the proud but hapless occupants of Walker Evans’s photos and Erskine Caldwell’s books.

  “Do you have any idea where Teresa is now, Mrs. Quilk?” I was trying to get her mind off her own future and onto her sister’s past.

  “Home, I expect.”

  “She’s not there. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

  She shook her head automatically, unused to being a source of information or of anything.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Let me recollect. About six weeks ago, I think. That is, she was here then. Truth is, I wasn’t home. That was a Sunday night, and they was running Kissing Cousins out at the drive-in. Ted was here, but I guess Teresa didn’t stay more than a minute. She and Ted don’t get along.” The last was an aphorism, universally known, unquestioned.

  “Was there anything special about the visit?”

  “The usual. Teresa is always the same, seems like. She don’t have no feelings, you know. Not about nothing.”

  “Did you and Teresa grow up in this house?”

  “Yep.” She looked around the room as though to confirm her worst suspicions.

  “Your mother told me Mr. Goodrum was dead. Is that right?”

  “Yep. Lost his business and died of it. If Ted don’t find work soon, the same’s going to happen to him. He’s real edgy lately. Says his belly hurts him.”

  “Did Teresa go to college?”

  She laughed, then stifled it after a glance toward the rear of the house. “I guess some might call it that,” she sneered.

  I asked her to explain.

  “Teresa went down to Las Vegas, is where she went. She and that floozy friend of hers.”

  “What friend?”

  “Trudy Valente was her name.”

  “Where is Trudy now?”

  “Lord knows. In jail most likely. Or in hell.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She was a wild one, that’s why. Do anything on a dare. Why, she ran stark naked across the street at the Founders Day Parade one year when she wasn’t but a sophomore in high school. Oh, she was wearing one of those gorilla masks, but everyone knew it was Trudy.” Mrs. Quilk paused and her brow wrinkled with reflection. “Made a business out of running around naked, is what she did. Teresa, too.”

  “In Las Vegas?”

  “Show girls, I guess is what they called themselves. Some would call them other things.” Her eyes pressed her meaning into mine.

  “What club did they work in?”

  She shrugged. “I forget. One of them big ones on what they call the strip. Ted and me went down there once. I like to have died in the heat. We got tickets to the big show and everything, and Ted even slipped the waiter some money so we could sit down front only he didn’t put us down front after all. The curtain came up and Teresa and the rest walked out on stage and would you believe it? I didn’t even recognize her. Ted had to point her out.” She scoffed at the memory. “My own sister. Parading around with a bunch of bird feathers on her head. Then, when we went back after the show to try and see her, there she was, standing around in the middle of all kinds of people, mostly skinny men with hankies around their necks, and she weren’t wearing nothing at all above her waist and precious little below it. Ted hauled me out of there so fast it brought on a hot flash.”

  “How long was Teresa in Las Vegas?”

  “Oh, five years or so, I expect. We didn’t talk much, back then. Don’t talk much now, either. Teresa left me and Mama way behind.”

  “Who were her friends in those days?”

  “Trudy, she’s the only one I know the name of. Except for her husband.”

  “You mean James Blair?”

  “No. The first one.”

  I let that percolate for a minute. The more it bubbled, the more scrumptious it got. “What was her husband’s name?” I asked quickly.

  “Frank something. Frankie, she called him. Like he was Sinatra or someone.”

  “Did she marry him in Las Vegas?”

  “Yep. In one of them little roadside chapels. Mama went down for it, but Ted said I couldn’t go.”

  “Where’s Frankie now?”

  “Who knows? Teresa don’t talk about him anymore. I met him once. He sure was handsome. Kind of reminded me of Elvis, around the mouth.”

  “Were there any other people Teresa was close to?”

  “Not that I know of. Most of the ones from the old days, at least the ones she knew here in El Gordo, have moved on by now. The ones she might have known in Las Vegas, well, I wouldn’t know what happened to them. You could probably see a whole bunch of them in one of those movies Ted takes me to whenever we go down to San Jose to play Lo-Ball.” She paused to wait for her memories to catch up. “There’s just me and Ted and the boy here now. We’re all that’s left, seems like, what with Mama so sick. God, I’m tired of this place. Nothing works, the kitchen smells like dead rats, the walls just seem to squeeze in on me. I choke on the air sometimes.

  Mrs. Quilk stood up and walked to the wall and gazed at the picture of Elvis as though she expected it to counsel her. Maybe it would. Maybe it had. “Why did you and your family meet Teresa in a warehouse on Oswego Street a year or so ago?” I asked abruptly.

  “Who says we did?”

  “Someone who saw you.”

  “I ain’t talking about that, mister. You can just forget it.”

  “Will you let me know if Teresa gets in touch with you again?”

  “Oh, she’ll likely be in touch, sooner or later. But I don’t know if I’ll tell you about it. Why should I, if she don’t owe no money?”

  I took a chance. “Because her husband’s worried about her. He hasn’t seen her in several days.”

  She froze. I’d changed my story and she’d caught me at it. “Well, now, how would you know that, Mr. Old-Age-Home Man?” The discovery of my deception made her giddy.

  “He called me at my office at the Silver Season. Mr. Blair is very worried. I told him I would help if I could.”

  “No, sir. You ask too many questions to be who you say you are. And every time I answer questions, it costs me money.”

  I’d mistaken her ignora
nce for unintelligence and been burned. I tried once to divert her. “Do you know if Mrs. Blair’s first husband is still in Las Vegas?”

  Before she could answer, a loud slam reverberated at the rear of the house. Mrs. Quilk stood up and, with a fierce look in my direction, marched toward the sound and disappeared behind a swinging door at the far end of the room. “Ted best not find you here, mister,” she called back to me as she left.

  While I was waiting for Ted, I walked around the room, inspecting the tattered memorabilia, fingering the dusty surfaces, inhaling the moldy scents. The effort to make the room into something more than a box had been abandoned long ago. When I noticed a telephone on the little table next to the divan, I went over to it and wrote the number in my notebook. When I remembered that there hadn’t been a listing for a Quilk in the El Gordo phone book, I picked up the receiver. The line was as dead as the man on the wall. The El Gordo phone book lay beneath the telephone, pristine and unused, with a picture of a sailboat on the cover. I looked through it. There were a few scratchings, numbers and names written in ink and pencil. One of them was the letter T followed by a number that had been crossed out and another number written above it. I wrote both of the numbers down and replaced the book.

  From behind the swinging door came a voice, male and rasping. “That woman is fucking us over. It’s just like I said it would be, god damn it. Now let me by.”

  I went back to my chair and sat down and waited for him. In a moment the swinging door swung toward me.

  The man burst through the door as though it wasn’t there, as though he was used to charging madly through the house and through his life. His hands were the color of graphite, his balding head as white as gypsum above his cap line and as irregular as a phrenologist’s guide. Strings of muscles snaked up his arms. On the epidermis encasing them was a tattoo of the eagle, globe, and anchor of the Marines. “Who are you, friend?” he asked with excessive mildness.

  There was cunning in his eyes, much like the cunning I had seen earlier on Oswego Street, and because of it I changed my story. “I’m a detective. Private. Name’s Tanner.”

  “That ain’t what you told the wife now, is it?”

  I shook my head. He was holding his cap in his right hand, orange and white polyester. There were words printed above the bill: I Snatch Kisses and Vice Versa.

  “What’s your game? You from her husband, or what?”

  I nodded. “The police and the DA are interested, too. She’s a witness for a trial that starts Monday.”

  “And you lied to the wife and hoped she’d rat on her own sister, is that it?”

  That was close enough, but I didn’t admit to it. I just sat there. Lumps came and went along the line of his jaw. “Get out. Now. We ain’t got time for no more bullshit.” He put his cap in his left hand and reached in his back pocket with his right and pulled out a crescent wrench and swung it, negligently but competently, at his side.

  “I only want some information about Mrs. Blair,” I explained calmly. “I’m willing to pay for anything I can use.”

  “Out.” He halved the distance between us.

  I stood up. “Here’s my card,” I said, and tossed it on the table beside the telephone.

  Quilk looked at it and laughed. “We don’t take money from liars,” he said between the lips of an evil smile. “Now listen up. When you see Teresa, you tell her we threw you out on your ass. Then you tell her we stuck to our part of the bargain, and that she’d best stick to hers. You tell her if she don’t, I’ll come looking for her myself, and when I find her she’ll wish to hell I hadn’t. Now you tell her.” I left without a word.

  12

  I left the Quilks and Winthrop Avenue and gulped a franchised burger and a no-milk shake, then rented a room in an El Gordo motel that lacked a pool and a lounge and consequently, I hoped, lodgers in the market for anything but sleep. When I asked the desk clerk about making a toll call, he looked as though I had asked him to explain the mechanics of necrophilia, but after I flashed my credit card I finally got his permission to use the instrument in my room.

  My first call was to Ray Tolson. “I’d like to report a fire,” I said, when he came on the line.

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” Tolson groused. “Dial nine-one-one for the fire department.”

  I chuckled. “This is Tanner. The fire was in my office building. Someone rubbed two sticks together under my window. I thought you’d like to know.”

  Tolson swore under his breath. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Only some antiques and the sensibilities of the man who owns them. But the fire did come complete with a suggestion. Delivered by phone.”

  “What kind of suggestion? As if I didn’t know.”

  “A suggestion that I come up short on the Blair case.”

  “Well, there it is.”

  “There it is,” I agreed. “Except this piece of advice was supposedly unconnected with the similar piece of advice I received the day before. Assuming Fluto’s people set the fire and warned me off right after, then who the hell stopped me yesterday?”

  “No idea,” Tolson said.

  “I get the feeling I’m in the middle of something a lot bigger than Tony Fluto’s hit-and-run.”

  “If you are, I don’t know what it is.”

  “That better be true,” I said.

  “Trust me, Tanner.”

  “I don’t trust anyone with a retirement plan, Tolson. Let’s just get on with it.”

  “Okay. Any progress?”

  “Not much. How about you?”

  “Fluto’s still missing,” Tolson said sourly. “There’s no sign of him or Mrs. Blair at any of his haunts. His people don’t seem particularly worried at his departure, though. Business as usual.” Tolson paused, then made the noises of firing up a cigar. “The trial starts in five days,” he said when he was ready.

  “Any chance for a postponement?” I said.

  “None. Fluto has a right to a speedy trial. You can bet he won’t waive it.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time the main witness against a man like Fluto got scared off.”

  “Hell, it won’t be the first time I’ve had to ask for a dismissal against Fluto himself. I did it once in an extortion case and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. God damn it, I’ll try the bastard if only to make him pay an attorney’s fee.”

  Tolson’s voice boiled with anger at intangible obstacles. “I got the owner of that warehouse for you,” he went on.

  “Who?”

  “Some outfit called the Columbus Development Company.”

  The name was familiar. In the next instant I remembered why—the same company owned the Silver Season. “Who’s behind it?” I asked.

  “Still checking on that. Apparently it’s buried beneath about three layers of corporate shells.”

  “Mob?”

  “Could be.”

  I thought it over, then asked if he’d heard from the Vegas police about Teresa Blair.

  “They called about an hour ago,” he said. “It’s hard to see how what they gave me can help, though.”

  “What is it?”

  “A woman named Teresa Goodrum was married in Vegas in June of sixty-three. To a guy named Frank Zelko. Roadside Chapel of the Blessed Virgin.”

  “I already know all that,” I said.

  “Yeah? Then excuse me all to hell for wasting your time.” Tolson was on edge. I didn’t blame him. In five days he was going to have to watch Tony Fluto walk away scot-free from a crime everyone in town knew he’d committed, a crime that Tolson had publicly vowed to redress.

  “What I need to know is where Zelko is now,” I said. “Did the Vegas cops mention anything about him?”

  “No, and I’d just as soon not call them back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Vegas is like a sewer, Tanner. Sooner or later all the swill in the country ends up there, everyone from the mob chieftains to the small-time grifter out to impress a broad by throwing mon
ey around at the tables. The Vegas cops get lots of inquiries about visitors to their fair city, and they get real tired of responding to small-timers like me. I try to hold it down when I can.”

  “I’ll get it on my own,” I told him.

  “Oh, hell,” Tolson said. “I’ll handle it. Check back tomorrow.”

  I was about to hang up when Tolson coughed and then spoke. “You remember what you said about this office the first day we met?”

  I told him I did.

  “This morning my boss, the DA himself, allowed as how it might be a good idea to drop the prosecution against Mr. Fluto. So as not to embarrass the office by coming up empty.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said he could fuck himself.”

  “And he said?”

  “He said I was being unprofessional.”

  Tolson started to laugh and I laughed with him. A second later it didn’t seem funny anymore. “There’s one more thing,” Tolson said softly. “I got a phone call this morning.”

  “From whom?”

  “From someone who said she was Teresa Blair.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. She told me not to worry. That she would be in court Monday morning, ready to testify against Fluto. Nice of her, huh?”

  “Very. You want me off the case?”

  “What if she wasn’t Teresa Blair at all? What if I stopped looking for Mrs. Blair because of what she said?”

  “That’d be real nice for Tony.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” Tolson coughed. “Keep on it, Tanner. I want the woman on ice. I want to put a subpoena in her lovely little hand and waltz into court with her on my arm, like we were on our way to the Policeman’s Ball.”

  My next call was to an attorney I’ve used from time to time, when what I need is information and not more active forms of inquiry. I wasn’t going to entrust the only solid lead I had solely to Tolson and the Vegas police.

  Les Anders was in law school with me, my roommate until he got married during his second year. After school he’d clerked for a justice on the Nevada Supreme Court, and after that he became assistant counsel to the Nevada Gaming Commission. Les knows exactly how the state runs, since to know gambling is to know Nevada, and he dispenses his knowledge to a few select clients who either own casinos or want to. Les knows I don’t entirely approve of the beneficiaries of his expertise, and I know he scoffs at the futile insignificance of my line of work, but if we can put all that aside, we still enjoy each other when we get together, which hadn’t happened in more than two years.