Death Bed Page 5

  “Don’t expense it.”

  “Come on, Marsh. Client Development. Research. Entertainment. It must fit somewhere.”

  “They haven’t made friendship deductible yet. Forget it.”

  Peggy shook her head. “You must be the only man on this earth who doesn’t cheat the tax man.”

  I looked at the roses again, then back at Peggy. The flowers were pretty and so was she. As a result I made my second mistake of the day. “You know,” I said half-seriously, “sometimes I wonder why we haven’t become more intimate, Mrs. Nettleton.”

  “You know why, Mr. Tanner,” she said stiffly.

  I knew, but I asked anyway. She deserved the chance to tell me.

  “Because then it would stop being fun and start being love. I need fun a lot more.”

  I nodded and got up and poured myself a cup of coffee from the machine across the room. It took me longer than it usually did. When I went back to my desk I said, “Here,” and handed her the paper Shelley Withers had given me. “Call this number every half hour until someone comes on, then give it to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Peggy got up without looking at me again and marched to the outer office, leaving only the roses behind. It was the first pass I’d ever made at her, and if it wasn’t the last I would lose her. Someday soon I’d have to make up for my insult, as soon as I finished recovering from hers.

  It was after three when Peggy buzzed and told me someone had finally answered the phone at Amber’s place. But the voice on the line wasn’t Amber’s, it was male and it was thick and shapeless, as though its owner had just emerged from a lengthy stupor, artificially induced. He grunted and groaned and swore and hacked, but after filling my ear with his refuse he finally muttered something I interpreted to mean that Amber had gone to work and that the place she worked was on Broadway and was called “Magic” something or other.

  I hung up in the middle of an effort to form a coherent clause and looked under the listings for “Magic” in the white pages. There were some Magic Pan restaurants and a Magic Touch Beauty Salon and the Magic Theater, but none of them were on Broadway. I was going to have to go up there and look around.

  A couple of decades ago I used to spend a lot of time around Broadway. I was still in law school when I saw it for the first time. The Famous Door and the Destination Bagel Shop and the Coffee Gallery sheltered poets and chess players and jazz groups and men with beards and sandals and women with black eye makeup and straight hair and for a boy just off the Zephyr from Iowa it was an awesome and wondrous place. But the Beatniks foundered on the approximation of their own ideals, and a few years later the place went Topless.

  Even that was nice, at first. The women were mostly pretty and the breasts were mostly firm and they both seemed to enjoy being looked at. You could alternate a glimpse of Carol Doda’s augmented aureoles at Big Al’s with a set from Thelonius Monk at the Jazz Workshop and one from Stan Getz at Basin Street West, then catch the Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion or comics at the hungry i, then slip down and watch Yvonne d’Angers roll around on a rug and wrap it all up with some late-night pasta at Vanessi’s and a later-night B&B at Enrico’s.

  All of it was only mildly pathetic: the customers weren’t dirty old men but only slightly soiled and the air of illicit adventure and saucy liberation was infectious and therapeutic. But sex sucked up everything around it, the i and the Onion included, and the jazz clubs folded and the dancers went from Topless Schoolteachers to the Topless Mother of Six to the Topless Grandmother to the Topless Lady Wrestlers, and now it’s the Topless Psychotic versus the Bottomless Autistic and there’s nothing fun about any of it. No one smiles at anything, not even themselves, and the customers are even more desperate than the club owners. I wasn’t looking forward to wandering up and down Broadway in the rain, looking for a girl named Amber who probably didn’t know anything I wanted to hear voiced in the daylight.

  Broadway is a night street, at its best when the neon stripes and flashing bulbs high on the marquees lift your eyes away from the trash in the gutter and the vomit on the sidewalk and the urine on the doorways and the vacant, life-numbed eyes of the people on the street. But I took a deep breath and plunged ahead, listening to the patter of raindrops on my umbrella, as irregularly insistent as the knock of salvation on the door of my soul.

  I missed it the first time around. I’d started at Montgomery and walked west to Stockton on the north side of Broadway, looking across at the business signs on the other side, then turned around and did the opposite on the way back. There were a lot of signs to read—House of Ecstasy, Swedish Massage, Tunnel of Love—but I didn’t see what I was looking for. The rain soaked me in anatomical increments: ankles, then knees; wrists, then elbows. The tires that rolled past me made sounds of mirth.

  My mistake was in assuming “Magic” was the first word in the name. What I finally spotted was a sign that said “Encounter with Magic—2nd Floor.” It was tacked above a dank doorway just east of Columbus, between a Bank of America branch and a place called the Garden of Eden. At street level the building was something called the Penthouse Cinema. The feature that week was Steel Lips.

  I crossed the street and tried the door beneath the sign. It opened easily. I took the stairs two at a time, climbing over the bottle of J.W. Dant that lay on the fifth step, broken and jagged, in a pool of its own blood.

  At the top of the stairs a dilapidated door repeated the information contained on the sign outside. As further enticement the management had added the word “Naked.” Someone other than the management had added something, too. The word “Whores” had been painted on the sign with an aerosol can. The word reminded me of Shelley Withers’ friend Randy and his rage at the bare-bottomed daughter.

  A frizzy-haired girl with narrow black eyes and oily olive skin sat stiff-backed behind a tiny wooden desk. The sign outside must have referred to the décor—there was nothing on the desk and nothing on the floor and nothing on the walls. There was something on the girl, though, a purple leotard with a rip above one shoulder that created a single, pearly epaulet. Neither the leotard nor the flesh beneath it was thick enough to hide her ribs.

  She looked up when I walked in, but she didn’t speak. I went up to the desk and stood as close as I could, looking down into her bristly hair. That made me nervous so I looked at the desk. There was something on it after all, a worn paperback sheltered beneath her palm. Ouspensky.

  “First room on the right,” she said mechanically. Her eyes didn’t even try to find mine.

  “Amber there?” I asked.

  “Who else?”

  “What’s Amber’s last name?”

  “You don’t need to know her name, Charley; just her price.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ask her. You don’t have scabs, or spit on your chin. Maybe she’ll give you a rate.”

  The first door on the right was closed. I knocked but didn’t get a response. The wood was soft, almost mushy. Flecks of gray paint attached themselves to my knuckles. I knocked again, then turned the knob. The door swung into the room and so did I.

  The place had all the cheer of the catacombs. There was only one window, and it had been painted black. Lines of light leaked through where the paint had been thinned by the brushstrokes. The effect made it seem as though someone was on the outside, scratching madly to get in.

  A single bulb hung from the center of the room, forty watts at most. The rice paper globe that covered it hung too low to be an effective screen. The top of the globe was scorched the color of an overfried egg. A small table, spattered with white and blue paint, sat in the corner by the window. On it were a box of Kleenex and an alarm clock and a pile of clothes or rags. The clock ticked loudly—time marching by in hobnailed boots.

  Along the left wall was a narrow cot, the kind I’d slept on during basic training at Fort Lewis, the kind that people buy for the same reason they buy used shoes. The thin mattress was covered with a white sheet that
had once been whiter. On the mattress was a girl, also thin.

  She was sleeping, one arm flung over her eyes, the other stretched straight out from her side and toward me, as though she beseeched my help. Her wraparound skirt was unwrapped enough to show she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it. Her breaths were deep and irregular and more audible than they should have been. She was blond and had been attractive not very long ago.

  I gave the room a quick once-over and didn’t find anything that didn’t relate to sex or squalor, so I walked over and put my hand on the girl’s shoulder. She didn’t move. I tried a couple of other things, but she didn’t come out of it until I put my hand over her nose and mouth and held it there.

  When she couldn’t breathe she jerked twice, then sat up and rubbed her eyes and shook her head. The gold cross hanging from the chain around her neck swung wildly, like a crashing kite. Her yellow hair caught the yellow light and improved it. She saw me and smiled sleepily. “Whew,” she sighed. “I was really out of it.”

  Then she remembered where she was. Her brow knit. A lip curled. “Hey. You shouldn’t have come in here without knocking, you bastard.” I liked her better asleep.

  “I knocked,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, okay. Let’s get going. You want to take pictures or what?”

  “No pictures.”

  “You can rent a camera out front. Five bucks. Two more for the film. If you want to use film.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You bring clothes?”

  “What?”

  Her lips flattened in exasperation. “Did you bring some clothes? You know, something you want me to put on, dress up in. Lots of guys do that.”

  “I didn’t bring anything.”

  “Well, I’ve got some lingerie on the table over there, stuff that other guys have left behind. You can look through it and see if anything turns you on. But no crotchless panties. Those things are sick.”

  I could only look as foolish as I felt. “I’ll skip the clothes,” I muttered. “I just …”

  “Hold it,” she demanded, and stuck out her hand. “It’s ten for the encounter. That’s with me naked. Ten more if you’re gonna be naked, too. And I gotta notify the front.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because we got some real strange guys coming up here, mister. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  I knew that already. “I just want to talk.” The cliché sounded ridiculous, like a nursery rhyme from the lips of a Roller Derby queen.

  “Sure, sure. Just talk. Ten bucks, buddy, or out you go.”

  It seemed easier to do it that way, so I handed her the money. She got off the bed and told me she would be back in a minute and left the room. I found myself hoping that when she came back she’d say that she was surprised that someone like me would need to come to a place like this. She didn’t.

  When she returned her hair was combed and her lips were orange and she was fumbling with the strings that held the skirt around her. “You don’t need to do that,” I said quickly.

  Her hands stopped moving and she eyed me carefully. “That ten doesn’t get you anything but a peek, mister. No fuck, no suck. House rules. This isn’t like some of the joints along here.”

  I motioned toward the bed. “Sit down for a second. Save the tough talk for the creeps who get off on it. I want to talk about Karl Kottle.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  The word came out easily and immediately, as though she used it often, to describe her world and to describe herself.

  EIGHT

  From the look on her face Amber had been prepared to encounter every kind of magic in that dismal room except the black magic of her past. Her features, once diffuse in the slack of apathy, now congealed into a series of emotional tableaux—surprise, embarrassment, shame, apprehension. Her hands kept pace, masking first her pubis and then her breasts, as though they were naked to my eyes and vulnerable because of it. Her own eyes swelled with an impulse that seemed less a vague disquietude than the anticipation of a specific, horrific fate.

  “Are you a cop?” she asked. The question came the way it always comes, wrapped in a bag of air, to shield it from the answer.

  I had answered that question a hundred times; I answered it again.

  “Then who are you?”

  Her right hand ascended from her pubis to her lips. She began to gnaw the flesh around the first knuckle of her middle finger as though it were her first food of the day.

  “I’m a private detective,” I said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tanner.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to find Karl Kottle. I’m here because you can help me do it.”

  She took a moment to decide what parts of my story to believe. From the look of it she was used to making that decision, used to being lied to.

  “What do you want with Karl?” she asked finally.

  I shook my head. “Not yet. First you tell me why you want him.”

  She shook her head in return and dropped her eyes. In a place where so little was previously refused, it seemed ludicrous that we were now erecting standards.

  I suddenly became conscious of the smells in the room, the smell of fluids gone bad, of slow and damp decomposition, of cheap thrills offered on a bed of artifice and deception. Amber retreated from me slowly, until the backs of her knees came up against the cot and she sat down on it. The bedsprings ached audibly, then were silent. I loomed over Amber like the ghost of perverts past.

  “I’m looking for Karl,” I repeated. “I’ve been hired to find him. It’s nothing to do with the law. Mrs. Withers told me you were looking for Karl, too. She gave me your number. There’s no reason for you not to help me. You must know things I don’t; if you help me you’ll be helping yourself. I’m a professional. My job is finding people. I don’t need much to go on, but I need something. So far I haven’t got it.”

  Amber sat silently during all this, a specimen afloat in a jar of indecision. I decided to treat her as someone half her age.

  “You’ve known Karl a long time, haven’t you, Amber?”

  She nodded, once.

  “You like him a lot, don’t you?

  “You want to see him again?

  “Have you seen him recently?

  “Have you seen him this year—this month—this week?

  “Here in San Francisco?

  “Did you talk to him?

  “Was he all right?

  “Did he tell you what he’d been doing?

  “Did he tell you how to reach him?”

  For the first time I got a negative response. Like the others, it was in the language of the body, not the tongue, but it was definite enough.

  During my questioning Amber seemed to age, to metamorphose into the adult she was. She stood and began to pace. Her legs were thin and straight and long. With every other step her wraparound skirt surrendered a glimpse of thighs as smooth as tallow. She moved with a dancer’s grace within a dancer’s body. I was enjoying watching her when I had a sudden image of all the photographs of her that had been tucked into tattered wallets and then extracted by trembling fingers to perform vicarious therapies that Amber would never know of.

  Although her body was lithe and free, her face was not. Her cheeks were dull and sallow, the flesh lacking the sheen of either cleanliness or hope. There were too many hollows in her face and elsewhere, voids which needed filling.

  Her eyes seemed to need an extra urge to move; they lagged like a Garner melody behind the tempo of her surroundings. Only her hair had been regularly attended. It was long and straight and hung like a golden tapestry down the tapering slat of her back. It was exquisite and I told her so.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled absently. “I brush it four hundred strokes every morning.”

  “I thought you did that just before bed.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not in shape to brush it most nights, you know what I mean?”

  “Dru
gs?”

  “That. Other things. What difference does it make?”

  “It makes the most important difference there is, Amber. There are better ways to live.”

  “Yeah? Name one, P.I.”

  Her sneer brought me up short. If I began to preach I would lose her and whatever information she might have about young Kottle. It was tempting to try my hand anyway, but my job wasn’t to rescue Amber.

  “Why don’t we talk about Karl?” I suggested softly.

  She stopped pacing and rested her hands in the curves of her hips and examined me closely. Under a load of suspicion one of her eyes canted sharply. “What’s Karl to you?” she challenged.

  “A job.”

  She snorted. “You’re honest about it, at least.”

  “What’s Karl to you?”

  “Simple,” she said firmly. “Karl can get me out of here. Karl and only Karl.” As an afterthought her arm swept around the room in an awkward and silly gesture. “Karl can get me out,” she repeated. “I know he can. Karl can do anything.” There was a dream in her voice, one that had been reassembled so many times the cracks had vanished and it seemed like reality.

  “Why do you think Karl will get you out?”

  “Because I love him. Because I know what he needs. Because I know who he is.”

  “What does he need?”

  “Me, mister. He needs me.”

  She had toughened again, and it was time to ease up. “Why don’t you get out of here yourself?” I asked.

  “I can’t. I owe too much.”

  “Money?”

  “That, and other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I just owe, that’s all. They’re good at getting people to owe them. Real good.”

  “What makes you think Karl can get you out even if he wants too? The people you’re into sound pretty rough.”

  “Karl can do it. He’s got money. He’s got friends. His old man’s a big wheel. They wouldn’t mess with Karl. No one messes with Karl. Just like the old days.”

  “Karl can’t get you out of here if you don’t find him,” I pointed out, not altogether accurately.