The Enemy

I kept tight hold on the ten-dollar bill and took her through it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But none of them knew anything. None of them had any information at all, either firsthand or secondhand. There were no rumors going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room. There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before. Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had been stunned by the blows. She hadn’t seen them coming. She sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting hit.

“Tell me again,” I said. “It was the soldier, not the owner.”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“The owner never hits us,” she said. “We’re his meal ticket.”

I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet table.

“What does it mean?” Summer said.

“Everything,” I said.

“How did you know?”

I shrugged. We were back in Kramer’s motel room, folding stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last time.

“I saw it wrong,” I said. “I guess I started to realize in Paris. When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They were watching people coming out and they were kind of half-prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them, depending. That’s how it was in the bar that night. I walked in, I’m a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for a split second. But they didn’t know me and they didn’t like what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn’t shut me out. He turned toward me. I thought it was just random, but it wasn’t. I thought I was selecting him, but he was selecting me just as much.”

“It had to be random. He didn’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw them. He’d been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he was looking at.”

“So why turn toward you?”

“It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to know why I was there.”

“Did you tell him?”

I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”

“Why would he care?”

“Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart. Delta doesn’t hire dumb guys, that’s for sure. He went in and smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything. And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it. He didn’t even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met him before.”

“Why did he want you dead-ended? What was his motive?”

“He didn’t want me to find out who took the briefcase.”

“Why not?”

I sat down on the bed.

“Why did we never find the woman Kramer met in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there never was a woman,” I said. “Kramer met Carbone in here.”

She just stared at me.

“Kramer was gay too,” I said. “He and Carbone were getting it on.”