Rafferty's Rules: A Rafferty P.I. Mystery Read online

  They left with the book, still whispering. I went back to sleep. When I work at it, I do great naps.

  At four-thirty, I phoned Ricco. “You,” he said. “After dumping that bullshit on me and Ed yesterday, now you want a favor?”

  “Some favor, Ricco. What’s the big deal about the motorcycles from the Dew Drop?”

  “I don’t know what the big deal is. You're the one who’s asking.”

  “You’re the one who put me onto Fran Rosencrantz and the Dew Drop,” I said. “It occurred to me if bikers shot up the neighborhood, maybe they’re connected to the Mollison snatch.”

  “Yeah, and maybe them old farts in Washington are gonna repeal Miranda. Hold your breath.”

  “Come on, Ricco. What happened to the bikes?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  I tried patience and reason. “Look in the file. You’re up to your ears in paper down there; someone must have written it down.”

  “The file, smart-ass, is in Ed’s desk. In case you don’t remember, certain people here get uptight when they catch certain other people messing around in a lieutenant’s desk without his say-so.”

  “Call Ed, then.”

  “Oh, sure. Call Ed, he says. What’s Ed got to do on a Saturday off? He’d love to be bothered at home because you got some wild-ass idea. All right, look, Rafferty, leave it with me, okay? Where are you? I’ll call you back.”

  Twenty minutes later, he was on the phone again. “You owe me for all this trouble, Rafferty. Remember that.”

  “Hot damn, this must be a biggie. Wait, let me sit down.”

  “Go on, fuck around,” he said. “It won’t do you no good. I don’t know what happened to the motorcycles.” He pronounced the word motor-sickles. “Maybe they’re in the impound yard; maybe they already been claimed. If they wasn’t banged up too bad, maybe the owners rode ’em away that night. I don’t know. All I got here is the original squeal. A uniformed squad worked the traffic part of it. LaFranchi and Hooten. Talk to them.”

  “Hell, Ricco, you must have their report.”

  “Maybe. It could be in the lieutenant’s office with the rest of the crap or it might be in the patrol office waiting for a clerk to file it in the wrong place. Get off my back, Rafferty. Ask LaFranchi or Hooten. That’s the best I can do for you.”

  “Okay, thanks. Uh, you got a number for either of them?”

  “Jesus,” Ricco said. “Hang on.” The phone went dead for six minutes.

  When Ricco came back, he said, “LaFranchi started his vacation today. Hooten’s off, working the evening shift tomorrow. And I can't fart around with you all day. I gotta go look at a teenage stiff in a South Dallas shooting gallery. Fuck off, Rafferty.” The phone went dead again and stayed that way.

  That night, I took Hilda and Fran to hear the Dallas Jazz Orchestra in a bar off Greenville Avenue.

  Some people worry about whales; me, I’d rather keep the big bands alive. If they made Glenn Miller T-shirts, I'd wear one.

  Among other things, the DJO played “MacArthur Park,” their long arrangement, with a searing trumpet solo that made the hair on my arms stand up. It was fantastic.

  During a break, Fran said they weren’t Fleetwood Mac, but they were “kind of nice.”

  Hilda patted my hand and said, “Don’t scowl like that, Rafferty. Look at it this way. You’re not Tom Selleck, but you’re kind of nice, too.”

  It was that kind of a Saturday night. I wondered why I bothered to take them anywhere.

  Chapter 19

  Sunday was a hot, bright day. The sun had a searing, angry look it usually didn’t get until later in the summer. It was a good day for loafing indoors. With the air-conditioner on high.

  We lazed around with the papers, then fixed brunch. Fran had never tried Eggs Benedict before; she said she liked them, but they seemed a lot of trouble to make.

  Around noon, Hilda and Fran went through another antique lesson. Then they wandered into the living room and Hilda looked around with a let’s-rearrange-the-furniture expression on her face.

  I jumped up, kissed her hard, patted her on the backside, and suggested we go for a drive. It worked.

  We took Hilda’s car again, mainly because her air-conditioner worked. After tooling around aimlessly for a half an hour, I drove to White Rock Lake and stopped.

  The girls laughed. From the backseat, Fran said, “You were right. I owe you a dollar.”

  “Cheeky wenches,” I said. “What’s that all about?”

  Fran said, “Hilda bet we would end up here. She says you’re a freak for sailboats.”

  “I just like to look at them, that’s all.”

  There was a dinghy race underway. The leaders rounded an orange marker buoy and three gaudy spinnakers went up, one after another.

  “Ooh,” Fran said. “Pretty.”

  “You see,” I said to Hilda, “some people have good taste.”

  “Don’t get him started, Fran,” Hilda said. “He pretends he knows that sailing jargon. He becomes insufferable.”

  “Go on, Rafferty," said Fran. “Talk me some sailing.”

  “The fleet has rounded the weather mark,” I said. “They’ve hoisted spinnakers and are running with the wind over the starboard quarter. Spindle-sheet the grundle board. Winch in the genoa sheet. Ketch cutter sloop schooner.”

  “Does that make sense?”

  “Not all of it,” I said. “But doesn’t it sound terrific?”

  Fran peered at the dinghies rushing over the lake. “You couldn’t take one of those boats out into the ocean, could you?”

  “No. Too small. And they’re open boats. Although people have sailed around the world in boats that weren’t much larger.”

  “Wow,” Fran said. “That would be scary.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What a kick!”

  “Come on, Walter Mitty,” said Hilda. “Pretend you’re a big spender. Buy us an ice cream cone.”

  “You want me to stop looking at boats and chase around after ice cream?”

  “Yep,” Hilda said. “And I want real ice cream, not that machine junk. Two scoops.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but you better come across tonight baby, or I’ll tell all the guys you’re just a tease.”

  We walked slowly along the shore, racing the heat for the drippy cones. I walked behind the girls, both of whom wore shorts. I even found time to watch the boats occasionally.

  “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, Hilda," Fran said.

  “Thank Rafferty,” said Hilda. “He has a thing about people in trouble. He has to right every wrong, like a kid.” She laughed. “Can’t you just imagine him when he was little with a black eye and a slingshot and a stray puppy?”

  “I’m serious. Okay, lending me a room for a day or two is one thing, but you’ve been extra … friendly. And understanding.” Fran twirled her chocolate cone against her tongue. “Do you really think you can help me find a job?”

  Hilda chased a strawberry rivulet down her hand.

  “Um. Let you know tomorrow night, I hope.”

  “Great. Thanks again. Oh, damn!” Fran dabbed at her sticky fingers with a tissue.

  “You two are sloppy as hell,” I said. “Look at me. Finished the ice cream cone. Still clean and neat. Rule Sixteen: Don’t get any on you.”

  “Ignore him,” said Hilda. “He stopped back there to wash his hands in the lake.”

  I didn’t think she’d seen that.

  The girls and I split up at 3:30. They went to prowl the antique shops that stayed open on Sundays. I went looking for Patrolman Hooten.

  I expected Hooten to be a cornfed bull-rider type. Don’t ask me why; even trained supersleuths can jump to conclusions.

  Patrolman Hooten turned out to be Patrolwoman Hooten. She was, I judged, a quarter-inch over the department’s minimum height requirement. How she made the weight was anyone’s guess; I’ve heard of people gorging on bananas and milkshakes.

  Louise Hooten had fine sandy
hair cut in the style we used to call Duck’s Ass in my misspent youth. She had a narrow face with a marginally oversized nose, pale blue eyes, teeth that had never seen braces, and a uniform so immaculate she could have been trained in only one place.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Marines?”

  Hooten nodded. “They wouldn’t let me go to Lebanon,” she said, “so I didn’t re-up. Hey, the sergeant said you’d be looking for me. Make it quick, will you? We’re due on patrol.”

  Behind her, a muscular officer started to slide behind the wheel of a squad car. He looked at Hooten’s back, shrugged, and walked around to the passenger side.

  I said, “Thursday night, you and LaFranchi worked a hit-and-run at a beer joint off Industrial. A pickup creamed three motorcycles. I'm trying to find the owners of those bikes.”

  She folded her arms. Her leather equipment belt creaked. “What’s your interest?”

  “Last year, five bikers kidnapped a college girl. Drugged her, hauled her around for nine, ten months, then dumped her. Those three bikes may belong to the group.”

  “I heard about that,” she said. “How is she?”

  I shook my head and tapped my temple.

  “Pricks,” said Hooten.

  “I can get the information from Homicide, probably,” I said, “except the grunts on the line usually know what really happened, don’t they?”

  Okay, “grunts on the line” was hokey. So what? Sometimes you play to the audience.

  Hooten said, “I can’t tell you much. Once they got the pickup off those bikes, they weren’t hurt too badly. Owners took them away.”

  “Didn’t Homicide want to talk to the riders?”

  “The owners told us they had been inside having a beer when it happened,” Hooten said. “It was a fender-bender. No injuries. We had no reason to hold the victims, for Chrissake. Dino gave ’em accident report forms. For the insurance, you know.”

  “With a shooting across the street, I’m surprised Homicide wasn’t more interested.”

  “Yeah, well, I think Dino and I might hear about that.” She said it with the resigned indifference of the low-ranking professional.

  “You must have filed a report, though,” I said. “You did take the plate numbers of the bikes?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. She tugged a notebook from her hip pocket, flipped pages, and read out three license numbers. “You got a way to run these?”

  “I can bum a favor from somebody,” I said.

  “Naw,” she said, “don’t bother. I'll slide them in with our routine plate checks tonight. Where can I reach you?”

  I wrote Hilda’s number on the back of a card and gave it to her. She read it, nodded, and said, “You the one who wasted the other two bikers?”

  I spread my hands and raised my eyebrows. “Me? Look at this face. I ask you, would I do that?”

  “I would,” Hooten said. “I’d waste those suckers in a minute, if they gave me a halfway decent excuse.”

  Memo to motorcycle gang PR men: definite image problems with women in the 18-to-30 age group.

  I went to the office, wrote checks for the more urgent bills, then met Hilda and Fran as planned. We went to Denny’s for supper. Hilda told Fran I would kill for a Denny’s patty melt. I denied that and ate three while they nudged each other and laughed.

  We were back at Hilda’s watching a M*A*S*H rerun—an old, old one, with Trapper and Frank and Henry Blake—when Hooten called with the bad news.

  “We both got troubles, Rafferty,” she said. “Those bikes were Harleys. I’d swear to that. But the computer says the plates came from two Hondas and a Yamaha from Dalton County.”

  Chapter 20

  Cowboy and I pulled into Conover at four o’clock the next afternoon. I shook him awake when I stopped at a red light. He took his hat off his face, yawned, and said, “Looks like a purty little town.”

  “Population two thousand six hundred forty-two,” I said. “Rotary Club meets on Wednesday, Lions on Tuesday. Drive Carefully, We Love Our Children. And the Exxon station has a special on batteries.”

  Conover was three hours from Dallas, out I-30 to Mount Pleasant, then down Texas 49 and 11. It was thirteen miles from Daingerfield, just over the Dalton County line and near the eastern edge of the State Park. The surrounding countryside was pretty; hilly, green, and forested, especially in the park.

  Texas 11 went straight through Conover. In passing, it formed one side of the courthouse square. At least it looked like a courthouse square, even though Conover was not a county seat. Maybe it used to be; maybe they planned to bid for it.

  The “courthouse” was a muddy-red stone blockhouse centered in a yellowing lawn. The building looked closed; a sign on the main entrance said something about the Dalton County Historical Society. I couldn’t read the rest of it. There was a black WWI artillery piece in the southeast corner of the square and tired shade trees between the sidewalk and the street.

  I turned left and started around the square.

  There were benches under the trees on the courthouse side and stores with metal awnings on the other side. We passed the hardware store, the bank, a furniture place, a drugstore, and the Odeon Theater, which had a weekends-only look about it. There was also a gift shop, cafe, small-appliance store, video rental place, and another drugstore/magazine stand/soda fountain/you name it. People on the sidewalk stopped and turned and watched us cruise slowly past. Conover was a small town, all right.

  “Don’t see no sign that says This Way to the Bad Guys,” Cowboy said.

  “If it was that easy, I wouldn’t be paying you two-fifty a day.”

  “I know’d there was a reason,” he said.

  I turned down a street leading away from the square. There was a Goodyear dealer in the first block, then three blocks of small frame houses, then we were back in the country. I went back to the square and tried another street. Almost identical.

  “Wonder where William J. Dolan hangs out,” I said.

  “Pull in over there,” said Cowboy. “Let’s find out.”

  “Over there” was in front of a street-side bench where two old men sat. Cowboy got out, stretched, and leaned against the Mustang. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, looked everywhere except directly at the old-timers, and said, “Howdy.”

  One said, “Ha-doo.” The other nodded.

  “Looking for Billy Dolan,” Cowboy said. “Be grateful if you could hep me.”

  “Seen you go past before,” one of the men said. “You a friend of Billy’s?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” said Cowboy. “Friend ast me to look him up, I was ever out this way.” Cowboy’s drawl had thickened.

  The old men nodded, then one spat in the dusty grass, and said, “He works for his daddy. Ford place on the highway. He rides one of them scooters.”

  “Much obliged.”

  “Damfool things, them scooters. Ain’t even Amerkin.”

  The other ancient cackled. “Member when Dusty got him a franchise fer them leetle Jap cars? Went bust in six months. Can’t sell stuff made right here in the U S of A don’t sell nothing, I say.”

  Cowboy got into the Mustang. He touched a finger to his big hat. “Thank ya kindly, gentlemen.”

  In the rearview mirror, I saw them watch us pull away, then stick their heads together secretively.

  I hadn’t noticed a Ford place on the way into town, so we headed east from the square.

  Dolan Ford was a half mile out of town, across the highway from the Conover Cafe and Drive-in. There were more tractors on display than cars. There was a gas pump at one corner of the gray-painted building, so I let a lanky teenager in a Ford cap fill the tank.

  “You Billy Dolan?”

  He pointed around the building. “Inna back. That’ll be $16.93.”

  The rear half of the building was a cavernous workshop. It was cluttered, dim, and relatively cool. There was no-one there except Billy Dolan, who wore once-white coveralls unzipped to the waist. He pol
ished the speed fairing on a metallic-red Honda and listened intently.

  “Sheriff’s office over at Dalton said you reported your license plate stolen Friday.”

  “Right,” he said. “Sure would like to catch whoever took it.” Billy was nineteen, maybe twenty, with shaggy red hair and a round, open face.

  “When and where was it taken, Billy?”

  “You’re not from the sheriff’s office, are you?"

  I showed him my license. That was worth taking a break from the wax job. “Hot damn,” he said. “A private eye! Ain’t that something!”

  “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

  “Man, I’d do it! You bet I would.”

  He didn’t know he was being teased and I was sorry I’d said it. “Billy, I’m working on a case that might be related to your stolen plate. I’d appreciate it if you could help me.”

  “Sure! Hell, yes. Whatcha want to know?”

  “When was the plate taken?”

  “Wish I knew,” he said. “See, I didn’t notice it was gone till Bubba Smith told me somebody took the plate off’n his Yammer. R.L. lost his, too. They gone over to see the sheriff today.”

  “When did this Bubba Smith realize his plate was missing?”

  “Friday morning, but he don’t know when it was took.”

  “You hang around with Bubba and R.L. much?”

  “Hell, yes. We went to school together.”

  “Well, when was the last time you’re certain the plate was still on your bike?”

  He frowned and thought. “It must have been there last Tuesday. ’Cause I washed the bike, see, and I think I’d have missed the plate if it was gone then.”

  “Okay, that helps. Sometime between Tuesday and Friday morning, let’s say. Could your buddies’ plates have been taken the same time as yours?”

  “Could be. We was all out drinkin’ beer Wednesday night. Maybe they was took then.” He grinned proudly. “I mean to tell ya, we sure couldn’t see much after closing time. No way!”

  Cowboy stood in the background, leaning against a huge tractor with tires higher than his hat.