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

  I got the car out of hock and headed north on Central Expressway, thinking about bikers and how to find them. It didn’t seem likely I’d run them down through the usual public records.

  I found one sooner than I expected, when an ugly black motorcycle rumbled past me on the Lemmon Avenue overpass. The guy riding it looked like a cross between a wino and Attila the Hun. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and a vest made by ripping the sleeves off a denim jacket. There were ornate patches on the back of the denim vest, but I couldn’t read them because a fat, flat-faced woman sat behind the rider. Both bikers’ clothes were as dirty as the motorcycle was clean.

  The bike took the Mockingbird Lane exit a hundred yards before I did, and we both stopped at a red light two blocks later.

  It occurred to me that I could have the names and photographs of the five bikers who bought Vivian Mollison and I would still have trouble picking them out in a crowd. This turkey, for example, was faceless behind a bushy blond beard and mirror sunglasses. He had a cloth headband and a beer gut. And he was twenty years too old to be playing with motorcycles.

  I rolled my window down. The exhaust note of the bike drowned out a truck on the cross street. The biker swiveled his head toward me and blipped the bike’s throttle. The motor revved, then idled down with a curious slapping sound.

  Roar. Slap-slap-slap. Roar. Roar. Slap-slap-slap.

  Big goddamned deal.

  I smiled at him. “How ya doing, pal?” I said to the noise. “Bought any good blondes lately?”

  The light changed and the bike jumped away. As it cut into my lane, the fat woman turned around and flipped me the finger.

  She must have missed the part about making a new friend each and every day.

  Chapter 4

  I went home and waded through the files Mollison had given me. Some of the material was interesting; some of it was garbage, especially a long-winded report by the shrink named Rogerson. He spent six pages bragging about how he toilet-trained Vivian. To me, he seemed overly interested in the details.

  There was also a medical report from a real doctor. It was dry and dusty and I didn’t understand much of the medical jargon, but there seemed no doubt that Vivian had been in bad shape when the bikers dumped her.

  There was a Xerox of a field report by the Morris County deputy sheriff who had found Vivian. There was a letter from the Grayson County sheriff to Mollison. It admitted he had not yet found the “perpetrators,” but promised continued effort.

  There was a handwritten note by Mollison that summarized a meeting with the Dallas cops. The tone of the note was suspicious, but there were two intriguing items in it: the leader of the Dallas bikers was now dead and Ed Durkee had worked the case.

  There was also a ten-page report by AllTex Investigations. The report was neatly assembled in a fake leather binder and held together by those white plastic curlicues. It had been typed on an expensive carbon-ribbon machine. Offhand, I guessed the report had cost the Mollisons at least five hundred bucks a page and all it did was summarize the police and medical files.

  I knew about AllTex. An ex-FBI guy ran it. They were pure hell on paperwork and customer relations, but they hated to get their hands dirty.

  I wondered who else George had tried before he came to me.

  I had planned to distill the pile of official information myself, but the hotshots with their two-thousand-dollar typewriter had already done that. So, I put my pad away, made coffee, ignited the pipe, and settled back with the AllTex contribution to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  Vivian had contacted the Dallas DeathStars, a local motorcycle gang. She traveled with them on a weekend ride to Lake Texoma, a big Corps of Engineers waterway seventy miles north of Dallas on the Oklahoma border. On Monday, the bikers returned to Dallas. Without Vivian.

  The DeathStars leader, a local thug named Guts Holman, was suspected of handing her over to a small group of bikers the DeathStars had met during the weekend. Holman didn’t have any comment about that claim, mostly because he was killed four days later when his Harley-Davidson came out second best in an argument with a loaded cement truck.

  Ten months after that, the Morris County deputy found Vivian near Daingerfield.

  When Vivian had not returned, the Mollisons reported her missing. The various police organizations went to work on it, but they had barely found their carbon paper when Holman went to the big motorcycle shop in the sky. The other DeathStars conveniently developed collective amnesia.

  The case drifted off into that “we’re working on it, but don’t ask us how” limbo found in any busy cop shop. Much later, when Vivian had been found, she had not contributed enough information to induce official enthusiasm.

  All the police letters and reports agreed on one thing: there was no sign of the five men who supposedly bought Vivian. And nobody even knew who they were.

  Putting together Vivian’s incoherent ramblings and the usual collection of blind hopes and wild guesses, it boiled down to this. The men Marge Mollison wanted to see bleeding on her lawn were called Smokey Joe, Bad Bill, Stomper, Frog, and Turk. One of them—no-one knew which—probably had the name Becker on his birth certificate. Another possible last name was Conover, but there was a little town by that name near Daingerfield, so flip a coin on that one.

  By the time I finished digesting the report, it was almost six o’clock. I left a note for Hilda and went out for food. Twenty minutes later, I came back with two pounds of ribs and the extras. Hilda’s red BMW was parked in front of the house.

  She was inside, sipping a tall drink and leafing through the medical report from the Mollison files. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said. “I wondered if you’d gotten a better offer.”

  “Never happen. Ribs okay for supper?”

  “Yumm.” Hilda frowned and waved the report. “Hey, what is this?”

  “Part of the job I got today.” I put the ribs in the oven to stay warm. “You aren’t hungry yet, are you?”

  Hilda smiled. She had changed clothes. Now she wore a white jumpsuit with zippers in every possible location. I tried one at random. It turned out to be a pocket.

  “Cold,” she said. “Very cold. Try again.”

  The next zipper released a pleat built into the side. The jumpsuit billowed loosely. “Whoops,” I said. “Now no-one can tell you’re not wearing underwear.”

  “I can’t understand it,” Hilda said. “The man claims he missed me, but he can’t find one lousy little zipper.”

  As it turned out, all the zippers on the front were wrong. There was a long one down the back, however, that did the job very nicely.

  “Yes,” said Hilda as she stepped out of the jumpsuit, “I think we should let the ribs age for an hour or so.”

  Chapter 5

  I took the ribs out of the oven and put a half dozen on each of our plates.

  Hilda said, “Don’t you want to get dressed first?”

  “No. Ribs should be eaten while naked. Rafferty’s Rule Eighteen.”

  We ate at the kitchen counter, sitting on bar stools, gnawing ribs, dirtying paper napkins by the dozen, and loving it.

  Despite Rule Eighteen, Hilda wore a thin robe. It was bright yellow, which made a nice contrast to her dark hair. She had a soft after-bed look in her eyes and a smear of barbecue sauce on her left cheek.

  “You know,” I said, “despite your advanced age, you are one good-looking broad.”

  “You really know how to treat a lady, don’t you, Ugly? In case you’ve forgotten, you’re two years older than I am.”

  “Ah, but that’s only on the outside. Down deep, I’m nineteen. Maybe twenty on a bad day.”

  “Hmph,” snorted Hilda. She tapped her temple. “In here, you’re about five hundred. Sir Rafferty of Dallas Castle. Dragons slain while you wait.”

  “If you’re going to start that knight crap again, I’ll eat the last of the coleslaw.”

  “What else is new?” she said, “I’m full, anyway. Tell me what you did while I w
as away.”

  “Nothing much. The Cowboys cheerleaders dropped by. Nice girls. It took me three days to get around to all of them.”

  “Three days?” Hilda said. “You must be getting old.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. They kept running cheers. Gimme an R, gimme an A—”

  “Seriously,” she said. “What about this new job you mentioned?”

  I told her about Vivian Mollison and the bikers.

  Hilda shivered. “Ugh! They ought to hang people like that. Slowly. In public.”

  “What the hell is this?” I said. “First, Marge Mollison offers me a bonus for the bodies. I think she plans to cut off their ears or something. Now you want to sell tickets for a lynch mob. Did Margaret Thatcher take over the feminist movement when I wasn’t looking?”

  “You’re not going to kill them? Assuming you catch them, I mean.”

  “Don’t know. It will be up to them, probably. It usually is.”

  “Yes, I know, dear,” Hilda said patiently. “But bikers, after all. They won’t come in peacefully, will they?”

  “No,” I said, “probably not.”

  “So you may have to kill one or more of them. Again, assuming you can find them.”

  “Hil, babe, will you stop this ‘assuming you can find them’ business? I’ll find them. I think.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I just don’t see how— Oh, forget it. I must have the postcoital megrims. You want coffee?”

  “Rafferty’s Rule Twenty-eight: Hot coffee and nudity don’t mix. If you spill, it hurts. I’ll have another beer.”

  “Aha! Got you this time,” said Hilda, grinning. “Two months ago, you told me Rule Twenty-eight was something about demanding recent blood tests from women who didn’t gasp when you got undressed.”

  “No, you’ve got that all wrong. Hell, you didn’t gasp the first time.”

  “Whoops! Slipped up in the maidenly vapors department, did I?"

  “I didn’t say anything because I figured you might teach me some new tricks.”

  “Get your butt back into that bedroom, Ugly. I’ll show you tricks.”

  “Terrific. There’s a fresh can of Redi-Whip around here somewhere, too.”

  “Redi-Whip? And no chopped nuts? Jeez, you are a cheap bastard.”

  Chapter 6

  The next morning, Hilda left to change at her place before meeting one of her Turtle Creek antique customers. She was excited about unloading a Georgian gilt mustache cup. Or some such.

  I drove downtown to the cop shop. Professional courtesy. Besides, I wanted help.

  Ed Durkee looked less like a police lieutenant than anyone else you could imagine. He was a shambling bear of a man with a face like a basset hound. He wore a brown suit. Always. Ed must have had a closetful of those brown suits, each one rumpled and poorly tailored. The only way you could tell Ed ever changed clothes was that some of his brown suits were old enough to have cuffs.

  “Ed,” I said, “you won’t make it in this line of work unless you have the right clothes. Buy yourself a Stetson, a nice pair of lizard-skin boots, maybe a string tie. You’re a Texas cop, pal. You can’t dress like a third-rate soap salesman and expect to make captain.”

  Durkee scrawled his signature on a file, tossed it on top of a ragged stack in his out basket, and frumped. “Look who’s talking,” he said. “Man doesn’t even own a suit.”

  “Sure I do. It’s not brown, though. It’s sort of a muted gray. Very classy.”

  “And when did you last wear it?”

  “1975, I think. Maybe ’76.”

  Ed snorted and signed another file. “What do you want, Rafferty? I’m busy.”

  “Vivian Mollison. Her father got tired of waiting for you guys to get hot. He sought professional help, as it were.”

  Durkee wheezed, “You? Oh, sure, you blew away that junkie when the kid was little. And caught a reprimand, too, as I remember.”

  “So? Some people need blowing away.”

  “Ain’t it the truth? Wait a minute, I’ll get Ricco in here. We might be able to give you something.”

  Ed and I were drinking bitter coffee from dimestore mugs when Sergeant Ricco sauntered in. Ricco, as usual, affected a hippy-dippy walk. It made him look like his underwear was too tight.

  “There, Ed,” I said, gesturing at Ricco, “there’s a man who knows how to dress.”

  Ricco was short, skinny, and overly neat. His clothes were cheap-sharp, but they hadn’t been wrinkled since 1947. Trouble was, Ricco thought he was loaded with street smarts and he worked too hard at maintaining the image. He had never learned to hide the rat-cunning in his face.

  Ricco wasn’t a bad cop, actually. His appearance was the problem. He always seemed ready to offer you a hot deal on a repainted Corvette or a machine gun or his virgin sister. It was hard to take him seriously.

  Ed told Ricco what I wanted. “So let’s give him what we have,” Ed said. “I can’t allocate manpower for a wild goose chase after those no-name bikers, but I wouldn’t mind seeing somebody look around, even if it’s only Rafferty.”

  “That’s it, Ed,” I said. “You are definitely out of the will.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” said Ricco. “He don’t deserve to inherit. So, anyway, how much do you know?”

  “Vivian Mollison went away with a crowd of low-lifes on bikes. She didn’t come back. Her folks claim the bikers sold her. Tell me about this clown Holman.”

  “Best thing about that asshole is he’s dead,” said Ricco. “Though he may not know it yet. Dumb son-of-a-bitch had an IQ about twelve.”

  “You believe this story about Holman selling Vivian to another group of bikers?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Ricco. “It fits. Holman was that speed. He got busted half a dozen times in Houston, all strong back, weak mind stuff. Assault, CCW, a couple of nickel-and-dime dope busts.”

  “That’s a far cry from selling lady sociologists at a swap meet.”

  “Naw, not really. We had Holman fitted for a beef like that before this Mollison thing. That time, he recruited some jailbait from the projects. When he got tired of the bitch, he passed her around to those mouth-breathers in his gang. Well, she thought it had been true love or some fucking thing, so she didn’t like that, see? She told her folks and they all trooped in here one day. The kid was ready to testify Holman was getting paid for her.” Ricco shook his head. “Thought we had the prick that time.”

  “What happened?”

  “You figure it out. The slut’s father suddenly came down with a broken arm, see, and his face looked like a pizza. He fell down the stairs, he says. And chicky-poo lost her memory. Can’t remember nothing, she says. Holman who? Oh, and by the way, she says, we’re moving to San Antonio. Daddy heard about this great job down there lugging garbage cans.” Ricco shrugged. “No witness, no case. But it was close enough to the Mollison deal for me. He sold her.”

  “Where did you hear about the sale part of it?” I asked. “From Vivian?”

  “No way,” said Ricco. “The Mollison girl’s been a fucking zombie ever since she got loose.”

  Ed said, “We picked it up from an informant. Holman bragged about sucking in a woman shrink, then off-loading her to five Oklahoma bikers for four hundred bucks.”

  “How reliable is your snitch? I haven’t heard the part about Oklahoma until now.”

  Ricco shrugged. Ed said “How reliable is any snitch? Maybe seven on a scale of ten.”

  “So you got nothing at all out of Holman?”

  “Come on! If he had admitted anything, we wouldn’t have let him go get killed. The fact is, our timing was lousy. We never talked to Holman about it. The way it happened, while the snitch was telling Ricco about Holman, the quacks at Parkland were pulling a sheet up over his face.”

  “How far did you get with Holman’s biker buddies?”

  “Nowhere,” said Durkee. “Didn’t matter whether Guts Holman was dead or alive, they wouldn’t talk. We did get a tip last week, th
ough. I don’t think it’s much—not enough to put my people on it—but you can have it.”

  “Oh, joy of joys,” I said. “I’ll try to do a good job, Ed, and make you real proud of me.”

  “Jesus Christ, Rafferty. If you ask me, they got rid of you just in time. Go on, Ricco, tell him.”

  Ricco leaned in close to tell me his big secret. He had eaten sausage for breakfast. You can’t fool a sharp investigator like me.

  “Here’s the deal,” Ricco said. “One of the DeathStars split up with his old lady. Way I hear it, she was never really into that grubby Levis and vroom-vroom shit, anyway. And the word is, she’s been bad-mouthing the bikers since she walked out on hubby. You might get something out of her.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What you want?” protested Ricco. “I wouldn’t give you that much, except Ed won’t let me take time to work it myself.”

  “We’ve been through all that, Ricco,” Ed said. “I’m supposed to get my butt chewed so you can go gawk at the strippers?”

  Ricco grinned wickedly. “See, this ginch works at one of them beer joint topless places on Industrial,” he said. “Name’s Fran Zifretti. Well, maybe not Zifretti, ’cause she might not be using her old man’s name now, but Fran, anyway.“

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I see why you’re not willing to use your overtime budget on it, Ed. Now, how about a little more? Like the file on the DeathStars, maybe?”

  Ed looked sad and sour. Normal, in other words.

  “Ricco,” he said, “give Rafferty a list of the gang members. If he doesn’t get his teeth kicked out, he might get somebody to talk about the Mollison girl.”

  “Thanks, Ed. And you may rest assured I will carefully remind them about Miranda and Escobedo and all that. I wouldn’t want to violate their civil rights.”