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The first thing -- in fact, the only thing -- I really fastened onto regarding my two o'clock appointment were the nails. I mean, this woman was flashy enough, but those fingernails -- well, they tended to catch the attention to the exclusion of the rest of her. The urge to whip out a tape measure to check my estimate of a length of three inches, minimum, was almost overwhelming. And they were enameled in the brightest fire-engine red ever seen by the eyes of man, each tip decorated with a chevron of sorts in glittery gold. "They're real," my visitor said. I blinked, trying to fix my focus again on what might have brought her to my office. "Huh? I'm sorry -- you said --" "I said 'they're real' -- the nails, you know? My fans have come to demand these talons, and since I can grow 'em hard enough to drive into a brick wall, why not? Keeps 'em from noticing how my hair seems to get redder each year while my neck gets stringier and my ass wider." "I'm sorry -- I guess I was staring." "Staring? Your baby blues were out about a foot. But don't pay it no nevermind, Mrs. Casey -- I'm used to it. If they didn't stare, I'd be dead, I reckon." After silently lecturing myself on professionalism, adding a fillip of IRS-payment-is-due-next-month, a truism I looked upon as a nightmare created in hell to terminate any mind-wandering on my part, I got down to business. "Mrs. Dalton," I began, only to be interrupted. "Maddy, please, if you will. My mother-in-law is Mrs. Dalton. She positively turned puce whenever she heard anyone call me by that name. To her I'll always be that low-born floozy who stupefied her darling baby boy with her sordid lifestyle, Jezebeled him into her bed of sin, entrapped him into an 'unsuitable union,' which is exactly the way she puts it, and then couldn't even manage to keep track of her own child." Maddy Dalton was a professional, and she tried mightily to give voice to the last phrase of that sentence in an almost flip, offhand manner. But tough cookie or not, as I imagined she had to be, I could hear the pain and anguish behind those words, could see the spots of color under all the pancake on her cheeks, the nervous tics and twitches all through her body. To cover the silence then, I asked, "I take it you want me to look for your child? Is that it?" Maddy was shaking her head, her eyes closed, flapping a hand at me. "No, no -- Butchie's long gone. He's been gone for -- oh, it's nearly six years now. Will be six years, next September." She stopped again, regaining her control with sheer willpower. Six years or not, I could see the wound was still bleeding and wide open. She spoke again, softly. "His name was David Coombs Dalton III -- now, ain't that a hell of a mouthful for a little kid? So to spite Augusta, my mother-in-law, and David Coombs Dalton II, my husband and Butchie's father, I always called him Butch or Butchie. He was only four when we were on what he called a vacation but truthfully was an excuse to visit her, and in the blink of an eye, Butchie just up and disappeared from the camp. Everybody thought somebody else was watching him, and suddenly he just wasn't there any more. I never saw him again." This time her voice was firm and matter-of-fact; the iron control she had over herself was back in operation. She even looked like the country and western singing star she is, the clear-eyed, big-haired and bouncy woman of stage, concert tour, and fairground, even if the wide smile was missing. But she needed another prompt to get to whatever it was that brought her into my office this blustery early spring afternoon. "I guess I'm not following you, Mrs. -- Maddy. If I'm not to look for your son, then what can I do for you?" "Sorry 'bout that. Seems that even after all this time, Butchie so dominates my life that everything seems to involve him. But it really has nothing to do with him." She stopped again, recrossed her legs in their slim twill pants the other direction, and frowned into space while she organized her thoughts. I waited, this time. "Someone seems at the very least to be trying to intimidate me, or better -- as I truly believe -- to do me real harm." I noticed how her folksy jargon turned off and on as if she had her fingers with their horrendous nails on the business end of a spigot, just twisting it this way and that as the situation fit. "How do you mean? Telephone threats? Written ones? Tell me exactly what makes you think someone is after you," I said. "You mind if I record this?" I asked, waggling the microcassette recorder I'd picked up from my desktop. "No, not so long as you'll be the only one to listen to it." "Well, me and my amanuensis, but she's totally trustworthy." I couldn't resist lobbing that two-bit word out to test my theory about her way of "talking the talk," and was rewarded with a quick grin and a flick of her big green eyes. Once in a while I get it right. "Well, as long as you say so, okay." She started to speak, then turned her face towards the small refrigerator to her right. "You got a cold beer in there, maybe?" "Sure enough," I said, rising to get one. "Will a pricey Mexican imported one do for you?" "You bet it will, and thank you kindly." I popped the top of one of the fancy brews I keep on hand for when Whitey shows up, the Lieutenant Morales of the Denver Police Department, my one-time partner on the force and my all-time good friend. I put it along with a chilled glass on a tray in front of her, and returned to my seat. "Am I proving Augusta right when she used to roll her beady little eyes and announce to the world that I'm a tramp -- a déclassé broad who drinks alone?" "Sorry, but beer makes me belch. A lady should at the most admit to burping, but what I do is more than burp; I belch. Ergo, I drink beer only when I'm alone or with someone I've known more than five minutes. So if you don't spread the word that you're a solitary drinker, I certainly won't do so." This wasn't particularly true, of course -- about the beer -- but I don't drink anything when talking to a prospective client, ever; tends to fog the mind. At least it blurs mine. She smiled, poured the golden stream carefully down the side of the tipped glass, watching to be sure no foam formed. Whitey would be appalled. Once she'd sipped and then downed a sizable gulp, she got down to the reason why she was here. "Going in, let me say first thing, I know this sounds mighty paranoid -- you know, some big bad person is out to perforate the hide of poor little ol' me -- I know that already. But just too many things have been happening lately, some of them even to friends of mine and members of my band. Nobody has been seriously injured -- not yet, they haven't! "The first one was in Omaha -- oh, about two years ago. My warm-up act was just exiting, everything smooth as silk. My boys started my theme music, the crowd started clapping and hollering, I let them yell a bit, then pranced out on the stage and -- which is the way I did it then -- grabbed up my mike on the trot. "The next thing I knew, I was flat on my backside halfway across the stage, and damned near fried! One of my guys told me at the hospital he thought I was a goner for sure when all that current hit me. He said he could hear the sizzle across the stage! "Let me tell you, these days I use a cordless microphone and keep it with me at all times. But then since my mike then had about a gajillion feet of wire attached to it so I could dance all over the place, and also since I was used to it that way, that's what I stayed with. Plugging my aging body into that circuit damned near put paid to me!" Aging body, indeed! She must have been all of thirty-five, which made my over-forty self feel positively ancient. Of course, I don't earn my keep strutting and dancing around while singing up a storm in front of fans who've dropped a bundle to be dazzled, either. I guess thirty-five in her racket is aging. I peered at her nearsightedly, deciding I might be shy on the age a few years. She was warming to her subject. "Now, one other thing I should mention about that incident. The kid on my warm-up act had only about two minutes before laid that very same mike down on the stool for me, and nobody could have touched it in the interim. Someone would have had to do it right in front of better than nearly a thousand people, all of 'em watching like hawks and hollering for me to come out and do my thing." "Well, not really, no," I interrupted. "It could have been rigged from behind the scenes someplace, or it could simply have -- you sure they laid it down? Maybe somebody dropped it, jiggling some connection loose?" Sounded lame even to me. "No, I saw the Jesse put it down, nice as you please. I was just waiting for the noise level to get big enough before I high-stepped it out there and started twitching my fanny and exercising my vocal chords." "Okay," I said, "that's the first one -- well, I suppose it is. Anything seem a little off-kilter even before then?" She thought hard for almost a full minute, then shook her head, no. "All right, then; next thing you noticed?" "That was nearly three weeks later, in Chicago. I have still quite a few friends in the Chicago area, people I went to Northwestern University with about a century ago. So after the last set one Saturday night -- well, actually Sunday morning, shortly after the witching hour, I headed off to spend Sunday and Monday with one of them, a widow who lives in one of the fancy residential hotels right along the lake front. "I was about -- I'd rented a car when we got there, and I was just exiting the parking garage under my hotel when suddenly the windshield in front of me just exploded! The cops said the first shot shattered the whole thing, and then the next ones did their damnedest to blow my head off through the big hole from the first shot. Then it was just blam, blam, blam -- three in all before I pulled myself together enough to throw the car into reverse and back the hell out of sight. The police said it must have just been a random shooting, something none too unusual in Chicago, I gather." "Were these shots close together, like from a semi-automatic weapon, or were they spaced apart?" She frowned in thought again before she answered. "You know, they were quite well-spaced, come to think of it. You know, a shot, a wait, another shot, another wait, and then the third blam." "Doesn't sound like a drive-by to me, I'm afraid." "Me neither, and I'm disgusted with myself I didn't think of that then." "Well, you had a bit on your mind at the moment," I said, and did some thinking of my own. "Who knew you were going out at that ungodly hour?" I asked. "Oh, the band knew, my assistant knew, and -- I guess everybody probably knew who was around that night. I was really looking forward to luxuriating in my old friend's fancy digs, and I made sure all my crew were properly envious -- just kidding with them, you know? Anyway, lots of people knew I was going out, and when." "All right, that's two. What's next?" "Right here in Denver, about a year ago. I was doing a stint at the stock show, and at the last minute the organizers were told the fellow who was supposed to sing the Star Spangled Banner had the croup, or something, and they asked me if I could do it. Can you believe it? Could?" "Well, yeah, I can believe it. Most singers can't really manage more than an octave, and that killer is closer to two octaves than one. I take it you can sing it?" "You better believe I can! So standing right out there in the middle of the ring, cordless microphone in hand, singing my Tony Lama boots off, all of a sudden I heard this grinding, ripping noise over my head. I looked up, and I barely had enough time to run like hell when this enormous light bank shattered in a million bits -- lots of glass, crackling wires, and bent metal all over hell and gone, right where I'd been!" Uh-huh. "And what did the authorities say this time? Metal fatigue?" "No, this time they got it right, as much as they actually got at all. Their investigation showed screws had been loosened and even removed altogether, and there was a nylon cord tied onto a single part -- I don't remember what they called it -- that one quick, hard, jerk, the whole thing came down, right where I'd been standing." "But, I'm confused. How did somebody know it would be you standing there rather than some fellow with the croup? Suppose he was involved somehow?" "Well, that's the good part. When they finally found the baritone 'with the croup,' it turned out somebody had hit him on the head the night before, knocking him cold. When he came to, he was way out of town, dumped in a cornfield damned near to Deer Trail, no shoes, socks or pants, laid out nice as you please in his BVDs, and absolutely miles from the nearest phone. He had a lump on his head the size of my fist, and the last thing in the world he gave a particular damn about was singing the national anthem." "Yeah, that does give you pause for thought, all right." "Doesn't it just? So, you want to hear more before you decide whether or not to look into this, or will that do it for now? I haven't gotten around to the ones where one of my kids got in the way of whoever the hell this is, but I've got a gig in about two hours, and it takes all of that to gild this drooping lily." I didn't have to think about it; it already looked interesting. So I told her my fees, my per diem and expenses, and we shook on it. I'd have Barbara Fox type her up an agreement the following day when she came in from her long weekend, and that was fine with Maddy. We spent the next twenty minutes or so getting me up to speed on the names of all the members of her band, the groupies she actually knew, her assistant, the president of her fan club, the owners of the clubs where she had appeared in the last couple of years, and every bit of minutia either of us could think of with no regard to whether or not it would turn out to be relevant. "Well," she said after draining the last of the beer and rising, "I'll be on my way, then." She handed me a card with the telephone number of her local hotel scrawled above the number of her permanent home in Arizona, and I told her I'd contact her in a day or two. "By the way," I said, mentally hitting myself on the head for not thinking of it before, "how is your relationship with your husband? Sorry to ask, but I should have thought of him first." "Oh, Dave? You don't have to worry about him being behind it. He hasn't the guts to do such a thing -- nor the smarts to figure it out. No, good old loyal Dave went back home to mommie when Butchie disappeared. Oh, not that very day; he hung around until he was convinced I was broken in so many pieces all the King's horses couldn't put me back together again, and then he left -- bless his teensy, little heart." "How long ago was it that he left?" "Five years, three months, six weeks, and around fourteen days. But, say? Who's counting?" "Who, indeed? Well, Maddy, if you think of anything you forgot, give me a buzz, any time. And tell your bunch I'll be talking to all of them in the next few days. How long is your stay here this time?" "I'm making the rounds right here for a while, which is why I thought I might be in one place long enough to get some answers. I'll be here for nearly two months, give or take." "Have one of your people call and give me your itinerary while you're here in Denver, will you?" "First thing -- should have thought of that myself." "Take care of yourself, lady," I said as she left. "Always do, and thank you kindly," she answered, smiling and waving, making a grand, head-tossing exit before piling behind the wheel of a silver rental Cougar parked at the curb.. She was a pistol, and I hoped she was just imagining that somebody was out to get her. Somehow, I just didn't think so. From over my head, through the medium of the elevator shaft to my loft on the second floor, I heard the rapid clicking of tiny toenails as Fuzz, the six-pound guard Chihuahua, trotted back and forth. It was nearly an hour past his afternoon pitstop, and Fuzz -- unlike his person, of course -- was seldom patient. "Coming, master," I called, as I walked towards the cage to collect the little rat. "Why can't you learn to operate this thing yourself? After all, you're the smart one in this family, right? Right." He didn't respond to this rhetorical inquiry, just kept dancing frantically around as my head cleared above the floor level and he could see I already had his leash in hand, whereupon he started whirling in spot, gyrating and panting in his anxiety for the great outdoors. As usual, however, no matter how urgent his need, it took quite a careful examination of every twig and rock in the parking area next to my building before pronouncing a particular weed the weed. But I spent that time wisely, concentrating on different approaches to Maddy's problem. That's not to say by wisely that I actually came up with something, only that I was thinking about it at all, a departure from my normal method of getting started which is to charge straight ahead, usually blindly. |