Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [2]
The Quarter was a good place to live, a good place to work, if your girlfriend was blind and your clients were even more desperate than you. Denise wasn’t blind but that was only part of the problem. Denise and me, we had issues. I had only one, but Denise, she liked to share.
I made the office around ten, not breaking any records. Picked up the phone to order coffee from downstairs, got Herbie on voicemail. Sounding unusually vital at that early hour, as a rule Herbie was either stoned or asleep and Herbie toked himself into a stupor at least once a day.
“Harry – Harry? Fuck – Harry, get your arse up to Tony Sheridan’s, up at the lake, back of the racecourse. The wife’s spark out, throat slashed. The Dibble are trying to keep it quiet about the coke. Looks good, the shots are in the bag. Ring if you need directions.”
I didn’t need. Everyone knew where Tony Sheridan lived, except maybe Tony on the nights he thought he lived with the brunette who ran Bojangles, an underage dive down near the river, although not so near it might get a proper flushing if the river ever flooded its banks.
I picked up a dictaphone and notepad. Thought about it, sucked air through my lower teeth, shook my head, thought it over some more – Gonzo home and a gory death all in the one morning, it might be a fluke and maybe not. I unlocked the bottom filing-cabinet drawer, pushed aside the false floor, pulled out the snub-nosed .38. Tucked it inside my belt, snug in the small of my back.
I cut down through the alley across from the coffee shop, crossed the footbridge into the car park. Wasted five minutes trying to remember where I might have left the car. Then I crossed the footbridge again, cut a right down towards the quays to the taxi rank.
The fat flushed cabbie didn’t say a word, flicking glances in the rear-view mirror, chewing his bristly moustache, a smirk curling across his chops. I let it fly, no one had to tell me I looked for shit. The black two-piece was rumpled and creased because it was the only suit I owned and I wore it Monday through Friday, rotating the shirts until both went grey. The thin black tie came free with the suit and I unknotted it every New Year’s Eve, for luck. The shoes were Italian and suede because women look at your eyes first, shoes second, and I had eyes that made women take a lingering look at my shoes.
In the business you need to look like shit. I work off people who like labels, who talk louder and not always on purpose when there’s a shabby suit two barstools along, or in the booth behind the dusty plastic plants in the quiet corner of the restaurant. If a punter was desperate enough to come sidling through my door he had enough problems without worrying about why my threads were better than his. He wanted to see a suit and tie that matched. That was enough and not too much.
And they all sidled. Once in a while someone walked through the door, shoulders back and chin up, nothing to hide. They were the ones who wanted a missing dog tracked down.
Mostly, though, I looked like shit because I didn’t care how I looked, couldn’t afford to care. Down in the Old Quarter, two times out of three you flip a double-headed coin, it comes down on its edge.
Last time, it doesn’t come down at all.
Herbie was slouched on his battered moped, elbows draped across the handlebars, the out-of-date tax disc. Bleary-eyed, shivering. A black woollen hat pulled low over his ears, a mop of red curls framing a face the colour of sour milk, chin and forehead a rash of angry pimples.
“What the fuck took you?”
“Your mother wouldn’t give me my shoes back.”
“Better you than me.” He nodded up at the split-level villa. Three pillars supported the upper storey, the front of which was all glass, with a two-door garage below. He said, casual: “They reckon she topped herself.”
“Cut her own throat?” I whistled. “Brave girl.”
“Another theory runs like this. She opens the door and he gores her. Drags her to the living room, heels first, she’s still kicking. So he works