When She Was Bad

8

Mick MacAlister worked out of a one-room, second-story walk-up located above a bowling alley only a few blocks from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Pender parked the ’Cuda in front of the bowling alley and walked around to the side of the building, the wall of which had been given over entirely to graffiti-Death to the Ass-Licking Sons of the Dying Regime was the predominant sentiment.

MacAlister amp; Associates

Private Investigations

Discreet and Effective

read the business card taped next to the button marked 2-C, one of three set into the side of the recessed doorway. Pender pressed the buzzer and a few seconds later the door lurched open a few inches.

The smell of urine faded as Pender climbed the stairs, wearing a single-breasted sport jacket of grass green and mustard brown over a lavender polo shirt and plaid slacks; a brown Basque beret, argyle socks, and beige Hush Puppies completed the ensemble. He knocked on the wooden door marked 2-C, then let himself in.

The office walls were covered with Grateful Dead posters, and though there was nothing burning at the moment, the air was still layered with tobacco/cannabis smoke and cheap strawberry incense. MacAlister, seated at a rolltop desk placed sideways to the room like an upright piano on a stage, was a charter member of the gray ponytail brigade; a burgeoning belly strained his tie-dyed KPIG T-shirt. “Sorry, no refunds,” he said. “How about a cigar instead.” Nodding toward a cherrywood humidor.

“Try one of mine.” Pender offered MacAlister one of his Green Iguanas, a mild, stubby Dominican cigar named for its olive-green claro wrapper. He had started smoking cigarettes again during his second wife’s illness. After her death he had switched to cigars in an effort to wean himself from the cigarettes-Pender’s doctors had been promising him a coronary for years if he didn’t lose weight, get more exercise, and give up the gaspers-and wound up hooked on stogies.

Giving the Iguana a dubious glance, MacAlister instead flipped back the top of the humidor and turned it so Pender could see inside. It was full of Macanudos, genuine hecho a mano Havanas, each of which probably cost as much as a twenty-stick box of Pender’s Dominicans. “Gift of a grateful client,” he said.

“Go ahead, twist my arm,” murmured Pender, dragging a wooden chair closer to the desk.

The snip of the cutter, the snick of the lighter, cigar heaven. They smoked wordlessly for close to a minute; then through a haze of blue smoke MacAlister asked Pender what he wanted.

“I need to know more about those bikers.”

“Sorry, trade-”

Pender cut him off. “Not today, Mick-four people died last night.”

MacAlister blew out a perfect smoke ring, waited for it to break up. “Aw, what the hey-why hide my light under a bushel?”

“Why indeed,” agreed Pender, holding the cigar between his teeth while he took out his pocket notebook and a stubby pencil.

“Okay,” MacAlister began. “Second week of the search, I get a credit card hit in Sturgis, South Dakota. That’s where they have the big motorcycle run every summer. I’m there the next day. Nobody at the restaurant where I got the credit card hit remembers anything, so I paper the town and the encampments with flyers, and hook up with the Wharf Rats-that’s a gang of clean-and-sober Deadhead bikers I knew back in Berkeley, in the old days.

“One of the Wharf Rats tells me this story that’s going around, about some girl who bit the nose off some shit-heel during a gang bang. It never occurs to me that it’s our gal from Pebble Beach-I mean, Pebble Beach, gimme a break! — but the next day, the last day of the run, I’m out pounding the pavement, where there is pavement, and two gals who put up a hot dog and loose joint stand in Sturgis every year tell me about a girl who looks “kinda like” the girl on the flyer, and how somebody with her made that old joke about “you don’t want to see laws or hot dogs being made,” and how the girl joked that at least it tastes better than that asswipe’s nose.

“I figure it’s worth a trip to the county hospital, where of course everybody remembers the guy who got his nose bit off. Turns out he gave a phony name and address, but I track down the triage nurse, and she remembers their colors. The Redding Menace. One-percenters out of Shasta County. Head of the gang is a mucho mysterioso figure named Carson. Sumbitch keeps a lower profile than a snake in Death Valley. Dirty as can be, has his fingers in everything from meth to money laundering, and forget about finding him-the local cops don’t even know whether Carson is his first name or his last name. So I decide to let him find me. I rent a motel room in Weed, put the word out in every bar and biker hangout in Shasta County that I’m looking for him.”

Gently, he broke off the silvery, inch-long ash from the Havana into a blackened glass ashtray on his desk. “I tell you, a week in Redding in August is enough to make a man turn religious.”

Pender flicked the ashes off his stogie with his ring finger, George Burns style, and like Burns was quick with the straight line. “How so, Mr. MacAlister?”

“Because after it, Mr. Pender, you’ve had enough hell to last you an eternity. (Thank you, no applause, just throw money.) Anyway, on Saturday I finally get the call I’ve been waiting for. Woman asks me why I’m trying to find Carson. I tell her. She says maybe she knows something, maybe she don’t, what’s it worth? I tell her about the ten-G reward. All of a sudden she’s pretty goddamn sure she can work something out, only the reward’s gotta be in cash-no checks, no money orders, no paper trail. We set up the meet for the motel coffee shop on Monday morning, and the rest is skip-tracer history.”

“Did you get a phone number from her?”

“Negatory-she always called me from a pay phone.”

“License plate on her Harley?”

“Sorry.”

Pender looked down at his notebook, where he’d scribbled Sturgis, Wharf Rats, Man w’out nose, Menace, Redding, and Carson. Not much to go on, but perhaps it would mean more to the Shasta County sheriff. “Thanks, Mick, I appreciate the help.”

“No problemo. Here, take one for the road.” He tilted the humidor toward Pender.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Pender. “You’ll call me if that woman gets in touch with you again?”

“You bet. Drop by anytime.”

MacAlister showed Pender to the door and locked it behind him, then retrieved Alice, the office bong, from her customary hiding place inside a hollowed-out boxed set of Remembrance of Things Past, selected for the honor because nobody but nobody ever browsed Proust. Shaped like a voluptuous nude with a carburetor hole in the side of her headless neck, Alice had been banished from the MacAlister domicile by wife #3.

Mick was on his second toke when the phone rang; he coughed out the hit and answered it as his nonexistent French receptionist. “MacAlister and Associates, zis is Gabrielle, ’ow may I direct your call?”

“Mr. MacAlister, please.”

“’Oo may I say is calling?”

“He wouldn’t recognize my name.”

“What is zis in reference to?”

“Just tell him it’s about Lily DeVries.”

“’Old ze line, please.” MacAlister, a little surprised at how little surprised he was, put the phone down while he filled his KPIG mug with lukewarm black coffee from the thermos on his desk. “The monkey’s got the locomotive under control,” he whispered to Alice before picking up the phone again. “MacAlister here. What can I do you fer?”