"Callahan 05 - Lady Sally's House 02 - Lady Slings the Booze v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

I tried one more time for the twenty, but he pretended not to hear me. So screw him. I left him there on the roof, went straight to my office, borrowed a fistful of plane schedules from the porno distributor down the hail, and called a press conference.
It was great, at first. Everybody looked bored and dubious when they first saw the office, then sat up straight when I outlined my deductions. I had them spellbound, and when I was done they actually applauded. I was on all the news that night, and the next morning's editions all gave prominent coverage to my confident prediction that the victim would turn out to be a poor peasant from Belize, tragically killed by his own ignorance and his hunger to live in America.
It seemed so simple. My kneejerk wisecrack answers to Murphy's questions had suddenly made a twisted kind of sense. Where's the nearest place to freeze a man solid? A mile or two away-straight up. How do you get him to a rooftop without being seen? Easy. A skyhook.
Freeze him in the stratosphere, and then let him fall.
Looked at from that angle, it was obvious. A starving peasant, let's call him Juan Valdez, burns to live in El Norte, whatever it costs him in discomfort. He sneaks out onto an, airport tatmac, and worms his way up into the wheelwell of a big brute on a nonstopr run to New York, gambling that when those huge wheels come up, there will still be room for him in there. He expects to arrive cramped and sore and half dead with hunger and fatigue, but so what? Sure enough, the wheel fails to crush him after takeoff. He begins to rejoice. He knows even less about the stratosphere than he does about America.
By the time the stewardesses are thawing out frozen dinners for the paying customers inside, Valdez is a frozen dinner himself, his suffocated corpse clinging to the huge tire like an ice sculpture of a monkey.
The plane is circling over Manhattan when it lowers its wheels and drops Valdez, a cryonic bomb. By the kind of cosmic luck that recently caused a woman in Ohio to be hit by a meteorite for the second time, he makes a perfect landing in an empty pool.
If he hadn't landed in water, maybe somebody might have figured out the huge treadmarks on his face and clothes. But then, if he hadn't landed in water, nobody would have found anything but a couple of buckets' worth of crushed ice, I guess.
The major airline schedules showed that only one big direct flight from anywhere in Central or South America would have been over Manhattan that night, a 707 from Belize. Voilр: Quigley Solves Mystery. The story was a natural for the media sobsuckers, and it got a lot of play.
But not as much as the follow-up got.
Well, how was I to know? Try this experiment yourself- I've tried it dozens of times in bars, and as long as they don't know the Favila story it always works. Walk up to any person in New York, any race, color or creed, and ask him to show you where Hispanics come from. I'll bet you a hundred dollars he points south.
I don't know, maybe nothing newsworthy ever happens there, or maybe there's some big secret conspiracy of silence, but unless the conversation is about conquistaчlores, you just don't ever hear anybody talk about Spain.
So when it turned out that Hidalgo Favila was a half-mad freebase addict from Barcelona who had crawled up into that wheelwell because everybody said the best coke got transshipped to America, I looked pretty stupid. And mentioning that was the only way the media wolves could sneak out of looking stupid themselves. Get it right, you're a star. Get it half-right, you're a gas giant. I took a lot of ribbing, and business went down so sharply that I thought seriously about slipping off the straight and narrow and becoming a cop.
The only thing that saved me is that reputation doesn't really mean as much as it used to once. There is so much yammeryammer on the air and in print these days that nobody could keep up with it, much less remember it. I mean, look at Richard Nixon. There's always somebody who didn't get the word. Before long, business was right back up to putrid again.
But to make a long story short, every time somebody reminds me of the Favila case, it drives me crazy. I keep replaying the memory in my mind, right up to the moment when I say "...from Belize..." to the reporters, and then trying to make my memory-mouth add, "...or possibly from Spain." It never works, and it takes at least ten minutes to derail my mind once I start doing it.
And it drives me just as crazy when somebody points out my resemblance to that jerk on TV. I never asked him to steal my face...
So I was only a few blocks from Lady Sally's House when I finally managed to get my mind back on the job at hand.

I knew the general location of the place, but the actual neighborhood surprised me a little. It was a kind of a dumpy, run-down warehouse-y area...but it didn't have the hardcore funky sleaze to it that you'd expect around a really first-class whorehouse. No bombed-out abandoned buildings, or burned-out cars, or roving packs of bull fruits looking for gay-bashers to chain-whip, or dull-eyed junkies nodding around a trash can fire. It looked like the kind of neighborhood you could walk with the safety catch on.
The hack jockey pulled up in front of an enormous mausoleum that filled an entire block. Seven stone steps led to a huge front door with an elaborately carved marble frame and a stained-glass transom. On either side of it were a parr of red globe lights, a classical touch I admired. There were tall windows on either side of the door, but their heavy curtains were drawn and very little light from inside escaped.
"Here you are, cap," the cabbie said.
I consulted the mental map everybody creates the moment they get in a cab. "I want the north entrance," I said.
He turned around to look me over. "You'll never carry it off," he decided. "You can't wear the clothes."
"Huh?" I said. I hate it when I say that. Even "Excuse me?" is better.
"That's the VIP entrance. You're. the wrong type."
They're all out-of-work actors these days. "Just take me to the north entrance, okay, pal?"
"Everybody's got the right to audition," he agreed, and drove me around the block.
It was a lot darker around the back. As I was paying the jockey I asked him if I'd have any trouble getting another cab around there at night. "Maybe if you were on fire," he said, "or carrying a machine gun." I got out and he drove away.
The north wall of that building at ground level was a featureless expanse of interleaved stone blocks, with a single entrance right in the middle of the block. The door was recessed back in a sheltered, roofed doorway whose walls projected out a few feet onto the sidewalk. There was a single low-wattage light (not red) above the door. I looked closer and saw the sliding peephole in the door. I turned around and looked across the street, and saw another featureless wall, this one of brick. I realized that no one could photograph you standing at this door without being seen. At worst they could snap you ducking into the doorway recess, which a man might do to get out of the rain or light a cigarette out of the wind. This was the VIP entrance, all right.
I reached for the doorknob. There wasn't any. There wasn't any place to put a secret key I didn't have. There was no electronic lock keypad to try and crack the combo for. No buzzer or intercom panel. No room between door and frame to slip in a credit card, or even a scalpel blade. Even Jim Rockford would have had trouble with that door. Maybe the Seventh Armored would have too.
I lifted a fist to knock, and the door swung open noiselessly.
Most of being cool is training your face never to look surprised. The rest of it is, when you are surprised, walk forward at once. I entered, and the door shut behind me. It was street-dark inside, and I interpreted the shadowy figure before me as a naked courtesan.
A dimmer switch was turned up slowly, and I found myself staring at a smiling grandmother in a silk robe. Possibly a great grandmother, and certainly a good one. Seventy-five if she was a day, the kind of sweet-featured chipper old lady you see in the After of laxative commercials. I liked her on sight. Not just her face, either, I realized with surprise. It wasn't a granny-type robe, and she wore it damned well...
I controlled my face and walked forward again, sticking out my hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Your Ladyship," I said. And I was going to add, "My name's Joe Quigley," and kiss her hand, but she spoiled it by taking my hand in both of hers and bursting into very girlish laughter.
"Bless your heart, grandson," she said. "Flattery like that will get you a hell of a lot."
I started to say, "Excuse me?" but decided I had done enough of that tonight. "Ma'am?"
"Let's start over, dear. I'm Ruth?"
"Oh. I need to see Lady Sally McGee."
"Who doesn't? Pardon me, dear, but are you a member?"
"Not yet." She started to look sad, so I tried, "Uh...I was sent by the most hated man in New York."
It worked. "Of course. We've been expecting you." She took my trench coat off me and made it disappear. I never noticed her take my hat, but a while later I didn't have it. "This way."
Do you know how strange it feels to follow a senior citizen- and realize you're watching her butt? She was some granny. I found myself thinking maybe I'd buy her a drink on the way out.
Go ahead, laugh. You've never met her.
We went through another door-just as tough as the outside door; I don't know how she got it to open for her-and down a long hail. The carpet was expensive, but didn't overdo it like the other one. The lighting was so indirect I couldn't spot the source. The air smelled funny. Kind of nice. Halfway down the hall, corridors branched off to left and right. I glanced to either side as we passed and saw two doors-with knobs-in each wing, numbered D-1 through D-4. They were set far apart from each other: big rooms. Next to each door was a tiny peanut bulb, and two of them glowed like rubies. Except for them, the place felt like a pricey hotel in midtown Manhattan. There was even a room service tray outside one of the doors. As I passed, a hand and bare arm came out of that door at low level and deposited a teacup on the tray; I heard someone speaking in what sounded like Russian.
At the end of the hall was an elevator-which did have an electronic lock keypad. Ruth tapped out a code, and the doors slid apart. I failed to catch the code: she had fast hands for an old woman.
"Her Ladyship will receive you in-" Ruth began, then pressed a finger to what I had taken for a hearing aid. "-the Boys' Bedroom, thank you, Mary. I have to stay here, Mr. Quigley, but you'll find it: the second door on the left," she finished. She held the doors for me.
I hadn't told her my name. "Thank you, Ruth."
"You're welcome. Has anybody ever told you you look a little bit like-"
"Yeah."
"Oh. Sorry. Enjoy your stay."