Shadow Files Page 5
Shade threw dirt at his face.
He didn’t flinch.
“I’m pretty sure I know who did it,” he said. “It was a white man at the end of the bar. He was the only one here when I stopped in to check on things an hour before closing.”
He extended a hand to pull Shade up.
She hesitated, then grabbed it and got yanked upright.
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
Mojag frowned.
“I think so,” he said, “but I only looked at him from the side and that was only for a moment. I’m pretty sure he was from Denver.”
“Why?”
“He was wearing a fancy suit. The car in the parking lot was expensive. I never saw him around these parts.”
“Do you remember what it was—the car?”
He frowned.
“It was big and black and shiny under the dust,” he said. “I’m going to Denver to find him. Then I’m going to bring him back here.”
“Are the police doing anything?”
He shook his head.
“It happened on reservation land. No whites got killed. What do you think?”
18
W ilde was halfway out the door, tipping his hat over his left eye, when the phone rang. He hung for a moment, debating, then stepped back and answered.
“This is Earl Johnson,” a man said. “I’m the manager of Mercedes Raine. Have you ever heard of her?”
Wilde shook his head.
“No, I can barely hear you.”
“I’m calling from New York,” Johnson said. “Mercedes has a show in Denver tonight at the Bokaray. We need a drummer. There’s a nasty rumor going around that you’re the best in the area.”
“What happened to your drummer?”
The man grunted.
“He got arrested.”
“For what?”
“For being stupid,” Johnson said.
“How stupid?”
“Murder stupid.”
“He killed someone?”
“That’s what the police say,” Johnson said. “Anyway, it’s not important. What’s important is that I need someone with a pair of drumsticks to step in and save my ass tonight. Will you do it?”
Wilde hesitated.
“Where’d you get my name from?”
“Dexter Dex,” Johnson said.
A beat.
“Sure, why not? What time?”
“The show starts at nine,” Johnson said. “Get there at eight-thirty. Mercedes will go over the play list with you.” A pause, then, “When you see her, you’re going to fall in love. Resist that urge to the extent possible.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re saving my life by stepping in. Now I’m returning the favor.”
Wilde laughed.
“Now you have my curiosity up.”
“Maybe, but don’t forget about the cat,” Johnson said.
“What cat?”
“The dead one. Thanks again for stepping in. I owe you.”
Two minutes later he was walking down Larimer Street to Blondie when someone jumped on his back and wrapped a pair of very nice legs around his waist.
He knew the maneuver all too well.
“Alabama.”
She didn’t get off.
“Say please.”
“Please,” he said.
“Put a cherry on top.”
“No, no cherries.”
“One cherry.”
“Okay already, one cherry.”
She jumped off, linked her arm through his and fell into step. “I got nothing,” she said. “I checked every bar, every restaurant, every nightclub and every hotel in Denver that starts with the letter B. None of them have matchbooks with a red cover.”
Wilde shook his head.
This part was supposed to be easy.
“You must have missed one.”
“I didn’t.” She pulled papers from her back pants pocket. “These are the phone book pages. I checked every single B that was listed. Every one. I even marked them in ink—see? I didn’t miss any. Wherever those matches came from, it wasn’t Denver.” They were at Blondie. The top was down. Alabama jumped over the door and landed in the passenger seat. “Where are we heading?”
Wilde frowned.
“You’re going to break the springs if you keep doing that,” he said.
“No I won’t. Where are we heading?”
He fired up the engine and pulled into traffic.
“Back to the scene,” he said.
“You mean the dead pinup girl?”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where we’re going.”
“Yeah, I know, but why?”
“Because,” he said, “that’s our destination.”
She punched him on the arm.
“Your problem is that you never stop being you,” she said.
A half hour later, when they turned off Santa Fe onto the access road for the switching yard, the noise of the tires and the wind softened. The warmth of the sun increased.
Alabama pointed to the boxcar, looming up ahead.
“Is that it?”
Wilde nodded.
“It gives me the creeps,” she said. “How does someone even find a place like this?”
Wilde stopped twenty yards short of the rusty bulk and killed the engine. Alabama hopped over the door without opening it and landed in the dirt. She immediately headed for the ladder and started to climb.
“Hold up,” Wilde said. “I’m going up first.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
She did as he said.
Wilde watched her face as it came above the top and saw the dead woman. “You had a lot more surprise and shock on your face than Senn-Rae did,” he said.
“So I’m the winner?”
Wilde smiled.
Alabama bent down and studied the woman’s face.
A distant gaze washed over her face.
“Do you know her?” Wilde asked.
“Know her, no. But she looks familiar. I may have seen her someplace.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not even sure that I have.”
Inside Wilde’s pocket was a folded-up page that he tore out of a sleazy men’s magazine called Dames in Danger two hours ago. On that page was a dirty little story called Kiss Me to Death. Half the page was taken up with a painting of a pinup girl in damsel in distress mode.
Wilde unfolded the page and compared it to the body.
It was a perfect match.
The poise was the same, at least the same as it could be given that the woman was dead.
The hair colors matched, the styling was identical.
The makeup was identical.
The clothes were identical.
Everything was identical.
Alabama saw the match and said, “Where’d you get this?”
“I had a feeling there was some kind of inspiration,” he said. “That’s what I was doing while you were out looking for the matchbook, going through old sleaze magazines. I thought this one looked pretty close. It looks like I was right.”
“What magazine did this come from?”
“It’s called Dames in Danger,” he said. “This particular edition came out in April 1948.”
She studied it.
“Maybe the artist killed her.”
Wilde chewed on it.
“That would be too easy.”
He studied the illustration.
“It’s not signed.”
“I wouldn’t sign it either if I was going to kill her later,” Alabama said.
Wilde tilted his head.
“You have a devious mind.”
19
T he drive north was uneventful all the way to Colorado Springs where the Packard ran out of gas a hundred yards short of a Sunoco. Fallon locked the vehicle, threw the keys in the brush and headed for the
station on foot with the gun stuffed in her purse and the briefcase in hand. She bought a pack of Camels, a hotdog and an RC from a coke-bottle glasses kid who’d been busy changing a tire.
He pulled change out of the register, got it greasy and wiped it off before handing it to her.
“Sorry.”
She opened the Camels, tapped out two and extended the pack to him.
He pulled one out, lit it immediately, then hers and said, “Thanks.”
He had a name on his shirt, Mike.
“No problem, Mike.” She blew smoke. “Where’s the bus station?”
He wrinkled his forehead.
“It’s sort of complicated, how to get there,” he said. “I could take you if you want.”
She took a bite out of the hotdog.
“Okay.”
Two hours later she was in Denver, stepping out of a diesel-sooted Greyhound under a cloudless cerulean sky. She closed her eyes and pointed her face up. The sun bounced off her skin like little gold sparkles.
She was out of Santa Fe.
She was alive.
She had a mysterious briefcase.
She had more money than she would have made working six months as a waitress. She hadn’t shot a man even though she should have.
She had a few grease smudges on her left leg, compliments of the coke-bottle guy copping a little feel in exchange for the ride.
Those would wash off.
A REX HOTEL sign two blocks down pulled her in that direction. It turned out to be mid-way between a flophouse and a 5-star, good enough to keep the insects off without breaking the bank.
She took a long shower and combed the tangles out of her hair. The freshness of her skin hi-lighted how grubby her clothes had become. She left them off, sat down naked on the bed and opened the briefcase.
Her hair dripped on the papers.
They were handwritten, unbound, single-sided and consecutively numbered at the bottom. The last one had the number 304.
Some of the writing was narrative but nothing that made sense. The words would mysteriously start, apparently in mid-paragraph, and then cut off several lines later just as mysteriously. Then some type of scientific writing took over, went for several lines, then transformed back into interrupted narrative, which didn’t tie in to the previous narrative.
The writing was script.
It was sloppy.
She could only make out an occasional word.
Very strange.
The man who went off the cliff turned out to be a 52-year-old named Richard Zephyr according to the driver’s license in his wallet.
Other than the license and the money, the wallet was empty except for one thing, a piece of paper with handwriting on it.
There were several columns of numbers.
39, 2-11
129, 24-37
423, 16-17
3, 32-38
Those were the first four entries in the first column on one side of the paper. There were five columns on that side and four on the other side. Altogether, there were two hundred entries give or take.
Very strange.
She put the wallet and single-sheet of paper in the briefcase and slid it under the bed. Then she got dressed, locked the door, jiggled the handle to be sure the lock had caught, and headed outside.
The buildings were taller to the south.
She walked that way.
Her ass swayed.
The concrete sidewalk felt nice under her feet.
20
S hade and Mojag drove north through a never-ending sea of New Mexico sagebrush, not talking much, with the windows down and the air snapping around like a rabid wolf. Soft white cotton-ball clouds hung low in the horizon. The man had his left arm out the window, his head back and his cowboy hat low. With his right hand he chain-smoked, worked the steering wheel and occasionally took a swallow from a whiskey bottle that he kept in place between his thighs. The vehicle, Tehya’s pickup, was all over the road, constantly cutting to the left or right. In fairness to Mojag that was the product of a loose front end.
“I think we should split up when we get to Denver,” Shade said.
Mojag grunted.
“You never did like me,” he said.
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Shade said. “We need to do this smart.”
He cast an eye on her.
“What do you mean?”
“If we find him, you’re going to kill him, right?”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Then what?”
He rolled his eyes.
“Then done deal,” he said.
“Wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Then, you fry in the electric chair.”
Mojag wasn’t impressed.
“That will never happen.”
“Of course it will,” Shade said. “Connect the dots. Tehya gets murdered, scalped even. A few days later you head to Denver. You stand out like an Indian in an ocean of white men, which is exactly what you’ll be. Then one of their own gets killed. Coincidentally, you disappear right after that. What’s your plan, that no one will be smart enough to figure out what happened?”
“You forgot one thing,” he said.
A rattlesnake appeared in the road up ahead, slithering across the asphalt. Mojag crossed the centerline and squashed it with the tires.
“I hate those bastards.”
“You said I forgot one thing,” Shade said.
Right.
He did.
“You forgot that I’m not going to kill him in Denver,” he said. “I’m going to bring him back to the reservation and take him to a place where no one can hear him scream. Then I’m going to bury him so deep that a thousand coyotes couldn’t dig him up.”
Shade shook her head.
“That doesn’t change what I’m saying,” she said. “All it means is that he disappears instead of gets killed.”
“No, it also means they don’t have any proof he’s dead. They have no body.”
“How’s he going to disappear? All it takes is one person to see you take him, or even see you in the vicinity anywhere around the time he disappears. You said yourself he’s big. He’s not going to go quietly.”
Mojag took one last drag and threw the butt out the window.
He lit another.
“So what are you getting at, exactly?”
“What I’m getting at is this,” Shade said. “When we get to Denver, you and I split up so no one can connect us together. When you spot him, assuming you do, you let me know who he is. Then you head back to the reservation. Go to town, make yourself visible to a hundred white people, be three hundred miles away. Then I’ll take care of him.”
Mojag gave her a mean look.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’s going to die at my hand, no one else’s,” he said. “Mine. Only mine. Do you understand?”
Shade exhaled.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Then what I’ll do is bring him to you.”
“How?”
“Trust me, it won’t be hard.”
Mojag slapped the side of the door with his fist.
“If that’s the way you want it to play out, then it better play out exactly that way,” he said. “If he ends up dead before I get my hands on him, I’m not going to be happy.”
Shade reached over, extended her hand and said, “Deal.”
Mojag hesitated.
Then he shook.
“Deal.”
21
F rom the top of the boxcar, Wilde looked around and spotted something he didn’t expect, namely a magpie perched on the top of Blondie’s windshield with the tail end hanging over the interior.
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
Alabama followed his gaze, saw what he was referring to and said, “Two-bits says he poops.”
Wilde hesitated, said “You’re on,” then shouted, “Hey, get out of there.”
The bird cocked a head towards the voice.
It didn’t fly away, though.
Wilde pulled a matchbook out of his pocket and threw it at him. It waffled in the air and didn’t even make it halfway.
The magpie wiggled its tail.
“He’s getting ready,” Alabama said.
“No he’s not.”
Wilde scurried over to the ladder and climbed down with all the speed he had, jumping off halfway and landing with a thud.
The bird looked at him.
Wilde headed for him, waving his arms and shouting. The bird stayed until the last possible second before jumping up and taking off. Wilde checked the interior to find nothing there that shouldn’t be.
He smiled.
Alabama was halfway down the ladder.
“You owe me two-bits,” he said.
She came over and looked.
The interior was clean.
Suddenly the magpie flew overhead.
Something small and wet tumbled from the bird’s tail end and splattered in the middle of the driver’s seat. Wilde wiped it off as fast as he could, as if speed could somehow erase what happened. “You still owe me two-bits,” he said.
Alabama shook her head.
“No way, cowboy, you’re the one who owes me.”
“No. He flew off before he did it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Alabama said. “The bet was, Two-bits says he poops. He pooped. I won.”
Wilde almost retorted but realized he’d lose sooner or later. He pulled a quarter out of his pocket and tossed it over.
Alabama stuffed it in her pocket and said, “Now what? Do you want me to find out who painted that pinup picture?”
Wilde re-wiped the seat, hopped in and turned the key. Blondie started. “Good girl,” he said, patting the dash. He waited for Alabama to jump over the door and land in the seat, which she did, then he turned around and headed down the road, going slow, not needing any underbody damage.
“That sounds good,” he said. “Find out who the artist is. Find out where he lives too, assuming it’s not in Denver, which I kind of doubt. Then find out if the red matchbook came from his city.”