State’s Evidence Page 22

  “Your Honor,” he began, getting to his feet with mammoth effort. “Detective Grinder’s squad car has just been located. Mr. Grinder is dead. A gunshot to the head. The witness he was bringing in is missing.”

  Voices made the sound of motors. The judge closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair and shook her head from side to side, to evade thoughts that were trying to nest there. Loggins leaned over and whispered to Fluto and Fluto nodded. Loggins stood up. “We are, of course, chagrined to hear of the events of the morning, Your Honor. However, I must again insist that all charges against my client be dismissed without further delay.”

  Tolson and the judge both started to speak, and then both stopped, lacking for the moment the focus that words require. Tolson’s assistant looked at him, and whispered a question, and stood after Tolson shrugged absently. “A detective will be here in a minute, Your Honor,” she said. “To question Mr. Fluto about the murder of Detective Grinder. I ask that you order Mr. Fluto held by the bailiff. Also, we request a further continuance, until tomorrow, so that we may inform the court more, ah, more in detail about the, ah, apparent criminal abduction of the key witness in this case and the assault upon Detective Grinder.”

  Loggins exploded. “The suggestion that Mr. Fluto has knowledge concerning the alleged murder of the officer and the supposed kidnap of the witness is outrageous and slanderous, Your Honor. For my part I doubt that any such witness ever existed. In any event, the motion is renewed.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Loggins,” the judge ordered sharply. “The State’s motion for a brief continuance is granted, given the circumstances. You may do what you wish concerning the imminent arrival of a detective, however, Mr. Loggins. I have no power to hold Mr. Fluto.” The gavel banged. “The bailiff will proceed to the jury room and once again excuse the jury for the day, with instructions to report back at nine tomorrow. Court is adjourned.” When she left the bench, she was talking to her clerk about scheduling a hearing in another matter for later in the morning. Loggins and his assistants hurried Fluto out of the room as though it were ablaze.

  I guessed that Tolson was exerting every ounce of his will to keep from taking a swing at someone, anyone, as Fluto and his people swept past him. The growing realization that I had been a major cause in the events of the morning was working on me as well. A drop of sweat trickled down my side. I loosened my tie.

  Tolson seemed to make a decision of some sort. He scooped up his papers and marched out of the courtroom, his assistant in his wake. Although he didn’t look or speak to me, I followed him anyway. As I was about to push my way through the door a hand gripped my arm and stopped me. The hand was trembling. It belonged to Colin Lufkin. “What do I do now?” he asked. The question seemed to encompass more than hours or days.

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “Is the case over?”

  “Not quite.”

  “It isn’t going well, is it?”

  “No.”

  Lufkin’s bleery eyes found mine. “I’m not stupid, Mr. Tanner. A witness, a boy, has been kidnapped, hasn’t he?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “To prevent him from testifying in this case.”

  “So it seems.”

  “I’m leaving,” Lufkin said firmly.

  “Where will you be?”

  “Inside the nearest bottle.”

  “Tolson may need you tomorrow,” I said.

  “What Mr. Tolson needs I no longer have,” Lufkin answered. His face drooped with apology. I patted him on the back and we walked in opposite directions, each of us something less than the world thought we should be.

  Tolson was pacing his office when I arrived, a beast in a cage of circumstance. His assistant sat on the chair in the corner, the same one James Blair had been sitting on when I first entered the office a very long week before. The poor woman was waiting, like all acolytes, for the least sign from her master.

  I coughed and Tolson looked at me. The sight didn’t ebb his fury. “Well? What do you want, Tanner? To gloat?”

  “I want to know exactly what happened to the kid I touted you onto yesterday, Tolson. I want to know what the fuck went wrong.”

  My own anger served to neutralize some of Tolson’s, to make us allies once again. “Grinder was bringing in the kid,” he said stiffly. “Along the way Grinder got his brain blown out. It was a hit, and it was Fluto’s boys who hit him. Ten to one we never prove it.”

  “Anything at all on the kid?”

  Tolson shook his head. “We’ll find him in a culvert somewhere. He’ll be nice and ripe.”

  “If they wanted to kill the kid, why didn’t they just leave him there with Grinder?” I asked.

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe they wanted to bugger him first.” Tolson shook his head. “You know, ten years ago the mob would never have hit a cop, even an El Gordo cop. Now they don’t give a damn about anything.”

  I stood up. “I’m going to be in the middle of this one, Tolson. I don’t like remembering how Gus Quilk came to be in Grinder’s car.”

  Tolson slammed his hand on the desk. “You’re out of it completely, Tanner. As of now. I never should have brought you in in the first place.”

  “I’m in, Tolson, whether you like it or not. I’ve gotten used to sleeping nights; I want to keep the habit. If Gus Quilk dies, it’s going to be hard to do.”

  We exchanged glares. Then because I knew Tolson was feeling the same things I was I started to grin and Tolson matched me and we stood there a minute, amazed at our raging impotence. “One thing that occurred to me is that they’re holding the kid in order to make a trade of some kind,” I said when we got calmed down.

  “Trade for what?” Tolson asked.

  “Who knows? But I’m telling you that if they do make an offer, whatever it is they want you’re going to give it to them.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  We drew our glares again, but this time the phone rang before damage was done. Tolson looked at the receiver and then at his assistant. She hurried over and picked it up and listened. “Just a minute,” she said, and held the phone out to Tolson. “Loggins.”

  “That pimp,” Tolson grumbled, and took the phone. “Loggins? Whatever you’ve got to say can wait till morning. I don’t want to talk to you without a judge present.”

  Loggins’s answer made Tolson frown, then look at me, then hang up without another word. “Loggins just gave me a message, Tanner,” Tolson said grimly. “His client, Mr. Fluto, would like to speak with Mr. John Marshall Tanner. At Mr. Loggins’s law office. As soon as it would be convenient for Mr. Tanner to be there.”

  “Well, well,” I said.

  “Well, well,” Tolson mocked. “I didn’t realize you and Fluto were intimate, Tanner.”

  I just smiled.

  “You’d better get going, hadn’t you?” Tolson sneered. “Tony won’t want to be kept waiting.”

  “I guess I had,” I said, and walked to the door.

  “Tanner?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You willing to wear a wire?”

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  Tolson swore. The last thing I saw before I left his office were the eyes of Ms. Epley. They were as big as buoys and they bobbed on tears.

  19

  I was eager to talk with Fluto, but there was one thing I had to do first. I got to Winthrop Avenue in ten minutes, by driving recklessly beneath a cloudless sky.

  Ted Quilk had his head buried beneath the raised hood of the pickup. His feet were still bare and black. I watched him work for a moment, impressed by both his epithets and his knowledge of what went on in there. When he finally heard me walking up the drive, he lifted his head and squinted, then directed a curse at me instead of at the engine. We glowered at each other like professionals. When his left hand emerged, it was brandishing the wrench I’d seen inside his house. The chrome cast the morning
sunlight at me in quick, darting sparks.

  “You again?” His mouth ejected the words like rancid food. “Ain’t you done enough already, sicking the law on the boy?”

  “You didn’t seem so worried about the boy yesterday, when you were threatening to beat him to a pulp.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way I handle him.”

  “How are you going to handle him when he learns he’s tougher than you are?”

  Quilk grinned thinly. “When he learns that, he’ll be gone.”

  Quilk placed the wrench on the fender of the truck and reached into his hip pocket for a rag and started to blow his nose on it. When he saw the rag was soaked with oil, he replaced it and pressed a thumb to a nostril and blew a plug of snot into the dirt. I asked him if his wife was home.

  “What business is that of yours? You got no truck with her.”

  “I came to apologize for what happened to your son. I wanted her to hear it.”

  “She’s in church, praying to some statues. Tossin’ good money into the basket as well, ’less I miss my guess. The woman still figures the Lord will smile on us if we stay poor. I never seen that to be true, myself. Not in this life. And I wouldn’t take bets about the next.” Quilk snorted again, then swallowed. “They find any trace of him yet?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’m gonna start a lawsuit against you if he turns up dead. I swear I am. You and the city, both. I been talking to people. Them cops should have looked after the boy better.”

  I laughed. “You do that, Mr. Quilk, but when you talk to a lawyer about it, keep your hand on your wallet. An attorney who’d take a case like that needs money worse than you do, and he’ll know a hell of a lot of ways to get it out of your pocket and into his.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “I guess we will.”

  Quilk scowled and slapped his hand against his thigh, loosing a cloud of brown dust. I wondered what the man had been like before he realized nothing in his life would ever be better than it had been the day before.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Quilk ordered suddenly. “I got to get the timing set on this clunker by five.” Quilk snarled, showing frosted teeth.

  “Tell Mrs. Quilk I’m sorry about what happened to Gus,” I said. “Tell her I’m looking for him now. Tell her I’ll call if I find out anything.”

  “I’ll tell her what I please,” Quilk muttered. “You just be sure if you do find him alive you bring him straight back here, where he belongs. No matter what the cops or his mother or anyone else says,” He could have been talking about the return of a borrowed lawn mower.

  “One more thing,” I said. “Did you see anyone suspicious around here last night? Anyone looking the house over, or parked for a long time in the neighborhood? Anything at all?”

  “If I saw anything, why would I tell you?”

  “Because it might help get your boy back.”

  Quilk frowned with the effort of thought. “Between the time you left and the time the cops came there’s only one thing that happened, that I recollect, except for the usual racket I put up with.”

  “What racket is that?”

  “Elvis the Pelvis.”

  “What happened?”

  “The wife got a call from her sister.”

  “Mrs. Blair?”

  “That’s the only one she’s got.”

  “But you don’t have a phone.”

  “She calls the neighbor lady and she comes to fetch the wife.” Quilk smiled crookedly. “Pisses the hell out of her too. I wouldn’t get a phone put in now even if I had the money.”

  “What did Mrs. Blair want?”

  “Said she was coming for the boy. Said she wanted to take him to a movie show. Said she’d be here in an hour.”

  “Did she show up?”

  “Yeah, but the law beat her to it.”

  “When the police came, did they drive a black-and-white?”

  “The first ones did, the ones in the little blue suits. One was that bastard Doolittle. He busted up a game on me down on Rutland Avenue last month.”

  “The Lo-Ball parlor?”

  “Yep. You play?”

  “I don’t like to waste my luck on cards.”

  “Hell, I don’t see luck any other time,” Quilk said. “Now move. I got to make a living. If that’s what you call this.”

  I left, careful to avoid the snot and the grease on the way out of the yard.

  The Yellow Pages that dangled from a chain at a pay phone two blocks down told me Lafcadio Loggins’s law office was on Mission Boulevard, in the center of the city. The ad for his firm said Loggins specialized in divorces, criminal defense, civil rights, bankruptcy, personal injuries, and evictions. It might as well have said he specialized in the law of the misguided and the desperate.

  When I got there, I thought for a minute I’d looked at the wrong street number in the book, but after a couple of laps around the block I finally figured out that Loggins’s office was on the top floor of the Hotel El Gordo, which preserved a rather musty version of gold rush opulence in its lobby and adjoining bar. The elevator took me to the top without stopping, further confirmation of my impression that there weren’t many, if any, guests in the place. The only reason I could think of for Loggins to be there was that he owned it. The hotel had probably been taken in lieu of a fee from someone who’d spent his years subsequent to Loggins’s services in an institution.

  There were eight names painted on the office door, and the remains of two more that had been scraped off not long ago. Behind the door was a windowless waiting room with a parquet floor, a soundproofed ceiling, a pink plastic couch, and a Wyeth reproduction curling behind its matting. At the far end of the room a buxom woman sat behind a sliding glass partition with the doubtful expression of a quiz show contestant who had been asked the wrong question. When I tapped on the window, she slid back the panel. “Yes?” She was as regal as the Queen Mother.

  “My name’s Tanner. I’m here to see Mr. Loggins and his friend Fluto. We’re starting a new chapter of the Sons of Garibaldi.”

  She had been inoculated at birth against mirth. “Have you an appointment?”

  “I do.”

  She wrinkled her lips and inflated her thickly swathed chest. “I don’t have you in my book.”

  “And I don’t have you in mine.”

  “I see. I’m afraid Mr. Loggins is occupied for the remainder of the day, Mr., ah, Tanner. Perhaps you will call ahead next time.”

  I put some fingerprints on the glass. “I came down here because Loggins asked me to. Now you’re asking me to leave. You two should rehearse before you perform in public.” I made a quarter turn.

  The woman inhaled half the room and edged reluctantly off her chair. “I shall try to locate Mr. Loggins.”

  “Try to locate some civility, as long as you’re up,” I said, my sarcasm only a little warranted. I was still upset about what had happened to Gus Quilk.

  The receptionist was gone long enough for me to smoke half a Camel. Her reappearance was preceded by the groans of floorboards. I wondered how long the Hotel El Gordo had been with us, and whether it would last an hour more. “Mr. Loggins is in the library. The third door on the right.”

  She was about to give directions when the outer door opened and a man hopped through it on his one good leg. The other was stiff and temporarily useless, wrapped from groin to calf in a thick, white bandage. He stood there, one hand on the doorknob, the other around a pair of aluminum crutches, while he estimated his chances of making it to the couch without falling over. His face was round, molded from thick and florid flesh. He needed a shave and a diet. His lips were far too red.

  “Good morning, Mr. Fluto,” the receptionist cooed. “Do you need some help?”

  “Naw. I got this thing figured out.” Simultaneously with the utterance of the final word, the crutches dropped to the floor. He swore bitterly. The receptionist hurried over and picked them up and handed them back. S
ince I knew who he was I stayed put.

  “The old man still here, Gladys?” the man asked.

  “Yes he is. He’ll be a while, though. This gentleman has an appointment to see him.”

  “Yeah?” He looked at me for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “Tanner. The guy you called on the phone the other night. The guy you decided needed a little extra heat and a bit of advice to go with it.”

  “Yeah?” His eyes widened with ridiculous innocence. “What makes you think that?”

  “Your voice and your ancestry.”

  “You gonna try to make something of it with the cops?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You gonna tell my old man about it?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I assumed he knew.”

  Young Fluto shook his head. “Sometimes I help him out on my own. Sometimes he don’t like the way I help him. So you keep quiet.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Fluto stuck the crutches beneath his arm and hopped to the couch and eased himself down onto it, careful that his bad leg remained well away from the cushions. The movement caused him pain, which caused me pleasure. I had an impulse to kick the exact center of his bandage.

  He saw me looking. “You know, Tanner,” he said, his voice thick with artificial menace. “I been giving some thought to who it was had the nerve to take a shot at me. I couldn’t figure anyone in this town had the guts, knowing who I am. But you’re from the big city. Maybe you don’t know exactly what it means to be a Fluto. Maybe you didn’t get the point the other night, maybe you decided to act tough. So I’m telling you, pal. I find out it was you who shot me, I’m gonna come looking. And when I look, I find. And when I find, I leave them begging me to stop, you get what I mean?”

  I put his threat in the quiver of threats I carry on my back. “Oh, I get it, Little Tony. Now you get this. You better not come after me unless you’ve developed a real strong attachment to those crutches.”