“There’s a man in a motel wants to talk to me about her. He called this morning. Says she’s in trouble and I should talk to him.”
“He didn’t tell you what about over the phone?”
Brett shook her head. “He wants money.”
“To tell you what kind of trouble she’s in?”
“I’m supposed to go over there around one o’clock and bring five hundred dollars. I told him I had to have someone drive me. I didn’t want to go there by myself.”
“That’s a smart idea.”
“He said that was okay.”
“I don’t like the sound of it,” I said.
“Neither do I, but he said Tillie was in deep shit and I ought to know about it. He said Tillie paid him some to tell me she was and that I’m supposed to pay him some before he tells me what the problem is, and he said if cops come he won’t tell me anything and everything is off. But I come with one person and five hundred dollars, he’ll tell me what I need to know.”
“A real Good Samaritan.”
“I got a gun,” Brett said. “I can use it, and it’s legal. But I still don’t like going over there by myself, gun or not. Me with all that money. I don’t know he’s got someone with him or not. But him talking about Tillie like he knows her, I got to go see.”
“No problem. We’ll both go.”
3
My wreck was iffy just driving into town, so we went in Brett’s blue Plymouth Fury. Like me, she had recently traded cars, and though this one was many years old and not exactly a road racer, it had been regularly serviced, and could get up to seventy miles an hour without the assistance of a tow truck. It’s also nice to be driven around town by a good-looking redhead, even if you’re on a bicycle built for two.
On the way over to the motel the lovebugs pelleted the windshield and collected beneath the motionless wipers like dead soldiers in trenches, left greasy yellow and green spots all over the glass.
We got to the LaBorde Motor Inn about ten minutes before one and parked in front of a row of doors. I had brought the pistol from my glove box, and I stuck it under my shirt against my spine.
Brett has a thigh holster, and she wore a skirt so she could wear the holster and the snub-nose .38 she owns. It’s not that she goes around wearing a thigh holster and a .38, but recent events had led to this, and she has a license. In Texas, with the right training and certification you’re allowed to carry a concealed handgun. It’s a law Leonard loves and I hate, but I’m a hypocrite, because I keep a revolver in my glove box, and from time to time on my person. I’m even more of a hypocrite because, unlike Brett, I never bothered to get a license.
We walked to the metal stairs, went up and found the number the caller had given Brett, and knocked. Thirty seconds didn’t pass before the door opened and a face showed over the chain inside the door, and it was some face. It looked like first base after a hot season in the Astrodome: pocked and beaten and not too clean. He stuck the face out enough so I could see his nose had been broken and some teeth with it, and recently. Behind the face I could see a body that looked as if it ought to be used to hold up something heavy. He took the chain off for a better look at us, and we got a better look at him. He wore a dirty white dress shirt and black pants with gray pinstripes and shiny black dress shoes, except for the toe tips, which looked to have been dipped in shit.
“You Brett?” he said.
Brett nodded.
“We told you not to bring nobody,” he said.
“You, or whoever I spoke to, said I could have someone drive me,” Brett said.
“We thought you meant some other woman,” the face said.
“I didn’t say that,” Brett said. “What’s it matter?”
“I don’t know it matters,” said the man, “but we didn’t think you’d bring no man.”
“Well,” Brett said. “I don’t know why you shouldn’t have thought it.”
“Hey,” I said, “do I look dangerous to you?”
“Naw, you don’t look dangerous,” he said, and he walked away from the door and we followed inside.
The first thing I noticed was a midget sitting on the bed. I think that’s normal, noticing a midget first. He had on a tailored blue Western suit and shiny blue cowboy boots and a gold cowboy shirt with silver snaps and a string tie with a silver cow head clasp holding it together. The suit looked as if it had once been expensive and nice, but now it was covered in filth and so was the shirt. The steer horns leaned a little too far left and somehow gave the midget an unbalanced look, as if he had been laid out without the use of a plumb line. I figured originally a hat had gone with the outfit, but now his blazing red hair was scattered over his head in such a way if you took a photo of it, it might look like a man with his head on fire, a la Brett’s ex-husband. He had a big thick cigar in his mouth, but it wasn’t lit, and his feet dangled off the side of the bed almost two feet from the ground. He had a face I couldn’t judge for age. He might have been thirty or forty or fifty. For all I knew, he was twenty-one and constipated or had just previously passed a kidney stone.
Second thing I noticed was the big guy had drawn a little silver automatic out from behind his back. The rest of the room sort of lost interest for me after that.
The big guy sat down in a chair with his automatic and held it against his thigh. Next to his chair was a table lamp, and on the table was a glass containing a clear liquid that I guessed from the smell in the room wasn’t water. And considering how rank our hosts smelled, this meant some goddamn serious drinking had been going on.
