not sure. I wasn’t in on that one, I’ll have to look it up.”
“And Mr. Perez,” Ryan said. “Don’t forget Mr. Perez.”
Dick Speed phoned him that evening. “How’d you make out?”
Ryan was sitting on his fake-leather black couch, his shoes off and his feet on a pillow on the footlocker coffee table.
“I didn’t plan it right,” Ryan said. “I parked near Wayne University and walked south looking in the bars, every bar on Cass down to Temple, then another four or five blocks to be sure.”
“Yeah?”
“I saw a lot of hookers getting their afternoon eye-opener and going to the grocery store, but I didn’t run into anybody named Lee.”
“Who said she was a hooker?”
“No, that’s the way I see her. You know. Then I had to walk all the way back to get my car. How’d you do?” Ryan said. He was thinking of Mr. Perez.
“Well, there’s a little more to it than I thought,” Dick Speed said. “See, everybody
“You mean you arrested them, but you didn’t recover the money?”
“Well, actually, Bobby got about seventeen hundred from the cashiers that was never recovered. He must’ve spent it by now. But see, we had Virgil in the Wayne County Jail at that time waiting trial. So when the prosecutor’s office is talking to him they pretend to let it slip that Bobby got about seventeen grand, not seventeen hundred, and stashed it someplace. See, Virgil
“Jesus,” Ryan said. “You actually do things like that?”
“Yeah, well, if we can’t get to Bobby through channels, you know, and put him away, then we motivate Virgil and maybe he can do it. You think anybody’s going to piss and moan over Bobby Lear?”
“
“Not yet. I didn’t have time this afternoon. Tomorrow, if that’s soon enough.”
“Listen, there’s no hurry. It was just a thought,” Ryan said. “The guy’s probably a virgin and says the rosary every night before he goes to bed. But I wouldn’t mind being sure.”
6
THE GIRL WITH the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?”
Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.”
The girl said, “You like to travel?”
Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?”
She was drunk-two o’clock in the afternoon-but didn’t show it, sitting on the bar stool with her denim legs crossed. Maybe when she got up, if she ever did. She looked washed out and needed some sun, or makeup. Her blond hair was dirty, dull, flat to her head and showed dark roots. She was still a good-looking girl, in her late twenties or maybe thirty. She drank her Sauterne and smoked cigarettes and stayed somewhere inside herself.
“You do know him though, huh?”
“Who?”
“Bobby Lear.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You just said a minute ago, I asked you, you said-you called him something.”
“I called him a cocksucker.”
“So you don’t think too highly of him. But you do know him,” Ryan said. “Didn’t you use to go around with him? I don’t know, maybe you still do. That’s what somebody told me.”
“Who?”
“This guy that knows him.”
“Who? Hoo, hoo. I sound like a fucking owl.”
Ryan was patient. He knew he had no choice; he was talking to a drunk. He could resign himself to it, sip his Tab, or get up and leave.
An old man, a bum, had come out as Ryan approached the place-the Good Times Bar-walked across the sidewalk, leaned against the trunk lid of a car, and begun throwing up in the gutter. The old man was back inside, sitting at the bar with a bottle of beer. A black guy, in a maroon outfit, was at the end of the bar, near the door. The black guy was stylish, like a pro athlete, and didn’t look as though he belonged here. Everyone else was drab, their clothes, their expressions. There were a few others, a man at the bar with a hacking cough, two men and a woman at a table. The woman had a high, irritating laugh. Everybody having a good time at the Good Times Bar, with its stale beer smell and afternoon sunlight showing through the venetian blinds. It was the first sunny day in a week, not a trace of smoke haze, and Ryan was sitting in a Cass Avenue bar drinking a can of Tab.
The girl, Lee, was on the fourth double Sauterne that Ryan had counted, the third one he had paid for. She would finish one with six good sips and two cigarettes. When the level was two-thirds of the way down the glass she’d be thinking of the next one.
“I’ve been looking for you for two days,” Ryan said. “You know that? I started down there a few blocks, near Wayne, went in every bar on Cass. Then today, I came in here, I saw you and I had a hunch, I don’t know why. I said to the bartender, hey, isn’t that Lee down there?”
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“You know Bobby Lear, though. Robert Leary, Jr. What do you call him?”
“Shithead.”
“You seen him lately?”
She finished the wine and brought the glass down hard on the bar.
“Innkeeper!”
The bartender with the bony shoulders took his hand off his thigh and his foot down from something behind the bar and came toward them.
“Same way?”
Ryan nodded. He let the bartender take her glass and walk away before he said, “Lee… you’re not worried I might be a cop, are you?” Ryan waited as she got out a cigarette. He held a match for her. “Believe me, I’m not a cop… You want to know what I am?”
“I know what you are,” the girl said. “I don’t know who-hoo, hoo-but I know
“I didn’t know when I left home it was going to be nice.”
“Bullshit. You take your wang out and put the raincoat on, you see a little kid, little girl, you say, ‘Hi, honey’”-her voice turned oily-“‘want to see the big snake I got in here?’”
“Except on cold days,” Ryan said, “I describe myself.”
She turned and looked at him with sleepy eyes. “You want to show it to me? Go ahead, take it out. Nobody gives a shit, it’s a very friendly place. Art? You don’t care if he takes his wang out, do you?”
“If it makes him happy,” the bartender said. He put down the wine and can of Tab and took a dollar and a quarter from Ryan’s change on the bar.
