Lucifer's Weekend (Digger) (7 page)

"Sorry, pal. I just don’t see anything yet to find out."

"Sorry to have wasted your time," Lord said stiffly. He got up from the bench.

"I’m at Gus’s LaGrande Inn," Digger said. "Anytime you feel like telling me the whole truth, you can reach me there."

The thin sandy-haired man looked at Digger for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to say something or not. Instead, he just nodded and walked toward the door. Digger noticed that he had not taken even a sip from his beer.

Dolly approached the table.

"Would you like another drink?" She hesitated a moment, then added, "Clem. Traveling does make a soul thirsty."

"Come on," Digger said. "You know my name’s not Clem. You read my card. And I know your IQ is higher than your bust size, so you can get off the Mammy Yokum routine and save it for the locals."

"Fair enough," she said. "It gets to be a pain in the ass after a while anyway," she said.

"Can you sit down and join me for a drink?"

"Afraid not. Eddie doesn’t like it if I drink with customers during working hours. They might get the wrong idea."

"How about not during working hours?"

"Eddie employs me. He doesn’t own me," she said.

"Anybody own you?"

"A lot of people, but it’s too complicated to tell you about now. Maybe sometime when we’ve got more time."

"Well, if your path ever takes you to the bar in Gus’s LaGrande Inn, you’ll find me there."

"I’ll keep it in mind. What are you in town for?"

"Insurance on a guy named Gillette," Digger said. "Your name’s not really Dolly, is it?"

"Sorry, that part’s authentic. It’s Dolly," she said.

"Well," Digger said and smiled at her, "hello, Dolly."

"Hi, Koko."

"Oh, hello, Digger. How goes the insurance business in Belton?"

"Stupid," he said. "I’m trying to convince some woman to take an extra half a million dollars of our company money. He died in an accident. She thinks he had a heart attack. His daughter thinks he was murdered. It’s all very strange. How is it with you?"

"I’m not sure yet."

"What’s wrong?" Digger asked.

"My sister needs a couple more tests. We won’t know for a while about that operation."

"I should be there with you in your moment of need."

"No, Digger, not now."

"Why not?"

"It’s my mother. She doesn’t deal with pressure all that well and she’s a wreck. I’ve got to nursemaid her every minute."

"I’ll come out there and hold her hand," Digger said.

"The last time you got together with her in Las Vegas, you got her all liquored up, and you know she’s like me, she can’t drink. Then you bought her three cameras so she’d look like all the other Japanese in Las Vegas. I’ve never forgiven you for that."

"I won’t do it this time. She’s already got her three cameras out of me."

"No, Dig. We should know something soon. Tell me about your day."

"Terrific. I met a lunatic, and a genius, and a guy who’d have to take a poll to decide if it was raining out, and a Dolly Parton look-alike."

"Knowing you, any one of those four things could keep you busy for another day anyway," Koko said.

"I don’t want to be busy with one of those things. I want to be busy with you. I thought we’d have a nice weekend. Koko’s weekend."

"Digger, don’t whine. You get very nasal and it’s unbecoming. Did you convince that woman to take the money?"

"No. She rejected me too."

"Oh, poor baby. Nobody wants you."

"That’s about the size of it," Digger said. "Here I am, looking out my window at this corral full of lalapaloozas, just yearning to be ridden, and I’ve got nobody to share it with." He glanced out his window. There was not a horse as far as the eye could see.

"I’d like to be there riding them," she said.

"I think I’m going back to Las Vegas soon," Digger said.

"Don’t do that. I really want to be with you. Really. But I want everything here resolved first. Is that so hard to understand?"

"No, I understand very well," Digger said. "You don’t want me around until things are right. Are they right when Hucko Slaphammer leaves town? Is that when they’re going to be right?"

"Hugo Stockelbrinner," Koko corrected. "I can’t believe this. Are you jealous of what I did when I was seventeen?"

"Yes," Digger said.

"Digger, go get drunk and call me tomorrow."

"That’s two things I’ll never forget," he said.

"What’s that?" asked Koko.

"This and Pearl Harbor. Good-bye forever."

Digger hung up.

Chapter Four

DIGGER’S LOG:

Tape recording Number One and Only, 9:00 P.M., Thursday, Julian Burroughs in the matter of Tamiko Fanucci, roommate and worthless ingrate, and coincidentally in the matter of Louise Gillette, whose mind shall ever hereafter be known as The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven.

I hate it when I can’t get over on women with my charm. Why doesn’t Koko want me to come and see her in Emporium? What the hell kind of name for a town is Emporium anyway? Why won’t she come here? What is she up to? Does she think it’s any fun for me to be sitting in this room, drinking alone, looking up at the crimson dot in the chandelier that marks the very spot where Huckleberry Hackenberger deflowered her? This is fun? This is how she welcomes me to Pennsylvania?

What did I expect from a woman who’s a blackjack dealer among other things? When I left my wife, Bruno, and the two kids, What’s-his-name and the girl, a million years ago and I moved to Las Vegas, somebody told me never to trust a blackjack dealer. I should have listened.

Who told me that? Oh. Koko told me that. Well, she should know. If I ever open my apartment door again and find a beautiful young Eurasian naked in my hall, hysterical, never again will I invite her in. Never again will I go retrieve her clothes and purse. Oh, no. That was my mistake last time. Never again. The next time I will call the local vice squad and have her arrested for soliciting.

I’ll perjure myself on the witness stand. I’ll tell how she came scratching at my door. How when I wouldn’t let her in, she slid her tongue under my door and licked the tips of my boots. How she made all kinds of vile propositions that I, as a decent, God-fearing American, would have nothing to do with. I’ll nail her ass. Tamiko Fanucci, I sentence you to be taken from this place to another place and thence to a place where you shall be hanged by your gorgeous Oriental-Sicilian neck until you are dead, dead, dead.

And then, Koko, when I see them cut your body down, I’m going to go out and get drunk for a week in celebration.

On sake.

I will make a special occasion of it and drink your rotten warm Japanese rice wine and let you know just what I think of you. So how do you like them pomegranates?

What the hell is she doing in Emporium anyway? If I read that one Hucko Hangleglider has died of sexual exhaustion in Emporium, she is in deep and rich trouble.

Well, who cares? To hell with her.

And while I’m at it, to hell with Louise Gillette. There are two tapes in the master file. There will not be any more tapes in the master file.

But I did my master’s bidding. I came to Belton, PA, to talk to Louise and convince her to take a million dollars.

Kwash will ask me. The head of the claims department will say to me, what kind of person is she, Digger, and I will say, Kwash, the lights are on but nobody is home. This woman is bat shit. She plays with trains. Not just trains but the New York subway system, complete with muggings and fire bombings.

But I think I impressed her. At least she said I was better than the last insipid cretin Old Benevolent and Saintly sent to see her. I think that’s a compliment. She offered me a drink and I took it. I like taking drinks. This is because there has been so much pain in my life.

She doesn’t believe her husband could have died in an electrical accident. What was it she said? She carefully picked a man who was perfectly formed. It sounds like she bought him at a livestock auction. Anyway, she doesn’t want her daughter to think her father was a fool. If it were me and I had children who were not Cro-Magnon, I would rather that they thought I left them a millionaire. I mean, how many fools leave their kids a million bucks?

Anyway, we blahed and blahed and she agreed to sign a document freeing the company from liability. She told the other cretin that too. The one with the teeth.

Ardath, the daughter, is another case. She is brilliant even if she does read mysteries. She says her father was murdered. I know where she got that idea from.

And that brings us to Tape Number Two.

This tape was recorded in Eddie’s Roadside Sandwich Heaven between me and a Cody Lord who said he was Vernon Gillette’s friend and who followed me from the Gillette house. Very clumsily.

He thinks Gillette was murdered too because a bed was slept in. This is where Ardath got her stupid idea from. Cody Lord was up there at the cabin with Gillette but went home for undisclosed personal reasons. I know that today’s rejection by Koko has aged me but I am not yet senile. When Cody Lord told Gillette that he wouldn’t be spending Saturday night at the cabin, Gillette arranged for somebody, presumably of the female persuasion, to sleep over. That seems reasonable and likely.

But I would still like to know why Cody Lord went home. And, come to think of it, I’d like to know how Cody Lord knew so much about my talk with Louise Gillette. First of all, how’d he get into the house and know I was there? That brass door knocker sounds like an ax smashing against the door. I guess so that Louise can hear it over the
huffa-huffa-puffa
of the subway system.

But I didn’t hear anybody knock on the door when I was there. Does Cody Lord just walk into the Gillette house unannounced? Or does he sneak in the back?

I don’t know. I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll ask Ardath.

I also met Dolly today. Usually I censor these tapes so that Koko doesn’t hear any of my worst moments, but this one I won’t. I hope you hear this, you treacherous Nipponese. Dolly has a wonderful large set of pneumatics and she is available for the rolling-around-on. You hear that, Fanucci? She also acts like somebody without brain one, but the operative word there is "act." I suspect she sees what’s going on and knows this town pretty well and if I had any intention at all of hanging around here, I could do a lot worse than talk to her and find out what is really going on in Belton. I’m sure that woman knows, and it would be pure research, chargeable to the company and about which you couldn’t bitch.

Hah. Her bitch? While she’s up there rutting with Hackney Hamburglar? Fat chance.

I may just hang out here another day. Not because of Koko, mind you, but because two people, at least one of them sane, have told me they think Gillette was murdered. Maybe I owe Frank Stevens a fast pass at that theory. Maybe I'll run into Dolly again. Maybe I’ll have somebody take a picture of her and me dancing at the Saturday night stomping grounds and I’ll have it blown up to wall-size and show it to Koko. I’ll hang it over our bed in Las Vegas. That’ll fix her rickshaw.

Time out. Expenses. Yesterday. Lunch on the road to Belton, nine dollars. Tips to waitresses and bellboys at Gus’s LaGrande Inn—it’s a fabulous place, Kwash, with a big staff—fifteen dollars. Dinner, twenty-one dollars including tip, and thirty-one dollars at the bar, interviewing town residents. Total, seventy-six dollars.

Today. Breakfast. Four dollars. Money to pump Cody Lord with booze, twenty-five dollars. He drinks like a fish. I’m going to eat dinner soon and I’ll keep it under twenty dollars. So call it twenty dollars. Then I’m going to interview more townsfolk. I know more of them today than I did yesterday, so it’ll cost more. Say forty dollars. Total, eighty-nine dollars. Two-day total, one hundred and sixty-five dollars.

I’m making this one sixty-six, Kwash, rounding it off to the next highest dollar because I’m tired of eating all the change.

Room, car rental and gas by credit card.

Chapter Five

Digger had once taken Koko and her mother to a fancy Italian restaurant just off the Las Vegas strip. The main dining room was coliseum-sized; there were a full dozen waiters and another dozen busboys hovering about; a piano-violin duo played softly, and the three of them were the only customers in the entire place.

Mrs. Fanucci had observed this silently, enjoyed her dinner, then leaned over to Digger and said, "This place doing no business."

"No, it isn’t," he had agreed.

"Must be is a Mafia dry cleaner."

"What?"

"Must be is a Mafia dry cleaner," she repeated word for word.

Digger had looked to Koko in bewilderment.

"She means it’s a Mafia laundry. Where they wash dirty money," Koko explained.

"Exactly," Mrs. Fanucci said. "Is washing money."

She then turned to Koko and said "Tamiko" and followed it with a soft babble of Japanese.

"What’d she say?" Digger asked.

"She wanted to know why anybody wanted to wash money."

"Tell her that’s why they call it filthy lucre," Digger had said.

He had occasion to think about that as he sat alone in the barroom of Gus’s LaGrande Inn. All those dining rooms, all the bar space, all the acreage. What paid for it? Not one solitary drinker, even if he was of Digger’s world-class category. Not eight guest rooms at thirty-five dollars a night. Not even a reasonably good lunch and dinner trade. Digger suspected that young Gus LaGrande’s books might not bear too much inspection.

It was eleven o’clock and Digger had been drinking for almost two hours. Gus had mixed up a few rounds of drinks for his late-dinner trade, but since that time had spent most of his time going through stacks of bills. He seemed to break the large stack into smaller stacks, then go through the smaller stacks to make substacks. And when he was done, and the large pile of bills was in twelve different little piles, he put them all together again and started over.

A young woman wearing a loose fluffy sweater came into the bar and sat across from Digger. In the dim light, Digger could see little more than the woman’s wavy brown hair and her smooth unlined face. It was a pretty, warm face.