Bookman's wake

a first-first, thus more desirable. It’s no big deal, but this was my first catalog and I wanted it to be right. The title page looked pretty damn orange to me, but hot is hot only when you have cold to compare it with. Go away, Slater, I thought.

I took an index card out of my desk, wrote check the color , and stuck it in the book. I told Millie to send the bastard back, and I got ready to blow him off fast if he turned out to be a dealer in snake oil or a pitchman for a lightbulb company. Even when he came in, for a moment I didn’t know him. He was wearing a toupee and he’d had his front teeth pulled. The dentures were perfect: you couldn’t tell the hairpiece from the real thing, unless you’d known him in the days when the tide was going out. His clothes were casual but expensive. He wore alligator shoes and the briefcase he carried looked like the hide of some equally endangered animal. His shirt was open and of course he wore a neckchain. The only missing effect was the diamond in the pierced ear, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d get to that too.

“You fuckhead,” he said. “Lookitcha, sittin‘ there on your damn dead ass with no time to talk to an old comrade-in-arms.”

“Hello, Clydell,” I said without warmth. “I almost didn’t know you.”

He put his thumbs in his lapels and did the strut. On him it was no joke. “Not bad, huh? My gal Tina says I look twenty years younger.”

Tina, yet. An instant picture formed in my mind— young, achingly beautiful, and so totally without brains that she just missed being classified as a new species in the animal kingdom.

“You’re the last guy I’d ever expect to see in a bookstore, Clydell,” I said, trying to keep it friendly.

“I am a doer, not a reader. It’s good of you to remember.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said, sidestepping the gentle dig.

“My deeds of daring have become legends among the boys in blue. I’m still one of their favorite topics of conversation, I hear. So are you, Janeway.”

“I guess I can die now, then. Everything from now on will just be downhill.”

He pretended to browse my shelves. “So how’s the book biz?”

I really didn’t want to talk books with a guy who— you could bet the farm on it—couldn’t care less. “Have a seat,” I said reluctantly, “and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Listen to ‘im,” he said to some attendant god. “Same old fuckin’ Janeway. No time for bullshit, eh, Cliffie? One of these days they’ll make a movie about your life, old buddy, and that’s what they’ll call it: No Time for Bullshit .”

It was all coming back now, all the stuff I’d always found tedious about Slater. His habit of calling people old buddy. The swagger, the arrogance, the tough-guy front. The false hair on the chest, as some critic— probably Max Eastman—had once said about Hemingway. The glitz, the shoes, the bad taste of wearing animal hides and buying them for his wife. Then bragging about it, as if going deep in hock on a cop’s salary for a $4,000 mink was right up there on a scale with winning the Medal of Honor for bravery. Some of us thought it was poetic justice when the Missus took the mink and a fair piece of Slater’s hide and dumped him for a doctor. But there was still light in the world: now there was Tina.

“It’s just that I’m pretty sure you didn’t come in here for a book,” I said. “We sold our last issue of Whips and Chains an hour ago.”

“You kill me, Janeway. Jesus, a guy can’t even stop by for old times’ sake without getting the sarcasm jacked up his ass.”

“To be brutally honest, you and I never ran with the same crowd.”

“I always admired you, though. I really did, Janeway. You were the toughest damn cop I ever knew.”

“I still am,” I said, keeping him at bay.

He made dead-on eye contact. “Present company excepted.”

I just looked at him and let it pass for the moment.

“Hey, you know what we should do?—go a coupla rounds sometime. Go over to my gym, I’ll give you a few pointers and kick your ass around the ring a little.”

“You wouldn’t last thirty seconds,” I said, finally unable to resist the truth.

“You prick,” Slater said in that universal tone of male camaraderie that allows insults up to a point. “Keep talking and one day you’ll really believe that shit.” He decided to take my offer of a chair. “Hey, just between us old warriors, don’tcha ever get a hankering to get back to it?”

“You must be out of your mind. No way on this earth, Clydell.”

He looked unconvinced. “Tell the truth. You’d still be there if it wasn’t for that Jackie Newton mess. You’d go back in a heartbeat if you could.”

“The truth?…Well, what I really miss are the Saturday nights. I hardly ever got through a whole shift without having to wade through guts and pick up the pieces of dead children. It’s pretty hard for something like this”—I made the big gesture with my arms, taking in the whole infinite and unfathomable range of my present world—“to take the place of something like that.”

We looked at each other with no trace of humor or affection. Here, I thought: this’s the first honest moment in this whole bullshit conversation—we’ve got nothing to say to each other. But the fact remained: Slater hadn’t come