“Obviously too busy to play,” Bear complained. Boldt, who had virtually owned the Headin’ Home happy hour piano slot, had passed it off to Lynette Westendorff, a friend who knew more about jazz than Boldt did police work.
“You don’t like her playing?”
“She’s fine. Better than fine. And she’s better-looking too.”
“And still you’re complaining,” Boldt said, reaching the bar then but not taking a seat on one of the vinyl stools.
Bear shrugged. “Gotta stay in shape,” he said.
Bear’s eyes were bloodshot. He’d been smoking pot already. He used to wait until eight or nine at night, but since the move he started midafternoon and smoked right through until closing. Boldt had tried several times to put him off the habit, but when the friendship seemed threatened he had backed off-he rarely even joked about it anymore. Bear was probably his most consistently loyal friend.
“How long?” Bear asked, meaning the investigation.
It was Boldt’s turn to shrug.
Bear poured his two patrons a drink on the house, locked the cash register, and led Boldt to a far corner table under a large black speaker cabinet from where the owner could keep one eye on the bar. “Afternoon business is really cooking,” he said, gesturing toward his two drunks.
“Lunch?”
“A little better. I don’t know: You like those curlycue fries or good old plank fries?”
“Curlycues.”
“Yeah, me too. You can get an extra quarter for them, but they come frozen, or else you gotta do ’em yourself and they’re time-intensive. The plank fries we can do fresh-simple, easy. I don’t know.”
“Fresh curlycues,” Boldt advised. “They add a touch of class.”
“Probably right. We could use a touch of something around here.”
“New location. It takes time.”
“It takes luck. And advertising. Good talent on stage, and a couple of babes working the floor. I don’t know; I miss downtown.”
“It’s going to work,” Boldt encouraged.
“Not so far it isn’t. People don’t want to part with their money, that’s the thing. It’s not like the eighties. And the stand-up humor has gone into the toilet-it’s all fuck this and fuck that. These kids don’t know anything about structure.”
“There’s always
“Yeah, and opera,” he followed quickly. “The subtitles certainly changed the experience for me.”
Boldt warmed and smiled, realizing that it had been a while since he’d done so, and this was followed by the thought that life is choices, not fated paths, and perhaps his choices had been misguided lately. This was exactly why he stopped to visit with Berenson occasionally: perspective.
“I’ve resorted to backgammon and Monopoly,” the bar owner admitted reluctantly. “Had a Monopoly tournament last Saturday and packed the place with college kids. Sold a lot of beer. The winner gets a free meal.”
“The loser gets two free meals,” Boldt quipped.
They exchanged grins and were silent a moment.
“Is it Liz?” Bear asked.
“You a mind reader?”
“A psychic.”
It reminded Boldt of the case. Of Daphne. The wrong reminders just at that moment.
“I say something,” Bear asked.
“Liz is okay.”
“That means things are fucked.”
“No, they’re okay.”
“Oh, yeah. I know you. Is that why you gave Lynette the gig? Listen, here’s the thing. My take on the problem with adulthood,” began the barroom philosopher who sought to remain as perpetually stoned as possible, as childlike as possible with his bawdy jokes and quick one-liners, “is that you grow up as a kid saying exactly what you’re thinking. You know the way kids do: ‘Hey, look, Uncle Peter’s not bald anymore, but his hair’s a different color in the middle!’ That sort of shit. And as a kid you do basically what you feel like-torture little sisters, take clocks apart. Only over time do you find out what’s acceptable and what’s not. Which is the entire problem; this way, we teach kids to get it wrong. Because as adults it’s just the opposite: We rarely say what we’re honestly feeling or thinking, and we end up doing a lotta stuff we’d just as soon not do. Someone at a dinner party asks how you’re doing, and you answer that everything’s fine, when in fact it might suck big-time but you’re not about to say it; you get up at six every morning, take the trash out, and drag yourself off to a job you hate, all for those three weeks of vacation a year. What’s that all about? How is it we end up getting it all so screwed up?” He added, “As a parent, Monk, you owe it to yourself to think about this.” Wide-eyed, he trained his attention on Boldt. After a moment he asked, “So?”
“Things with Liz are okay.”
“You or her?” Bear asked.
“Her,” Boldt answered.
“Serious?”
“Don’t know.”
Bear said, “It’s work. Your work, not hers. Right? That’s why Lynette; that’s why the long face and the heavy heart. This is the way you get when it starts to eat at you. I know you, Monk. You need to lighten up. You should come by and play a couple of sets. You should have never stopped drinking.”
Boldt laughed, amused that Bear always simplified unhappiness to a lack of appropriate drugs. “My stomach stopped me drinking, not me.” He had never been a serious drinker anyway, and Bear knew this, but the two carried on a constant dialogue centered on Boldt’s taking up a few beers every now and again. Bear couldn’t stand the thought of anyone approaching life entirely sober. It frightened him, like a kid afraid of the dark.
“I’m hunting a guy who’s burning women to death,” Boldt said, using a verb he seldom voiced aloud. It cast him in the light of a predator instead of a protector. He preferred the latter. But the truth was that in an open-ended homicide case the detective often became a hunter, like a rancher trying to identify and trap whatever animal was decimating the herd. Bear looked shocked. He furrowed his brow and squinted across the table. Boldt answered the expression. “What went wrong, Bear? Where did we cross that line, and what drove us there? You know? It’s not the same as it once was. People will tell you it is, but it isn’t.”
“I agree,” Bear said in a soft voice; the comedian had left the room. “The rest of us read the headlines, Monk. You guys live with this shit.”
“I think it’s God,” Boldt said immediately, because he’d been thinking about this for a long time and Bear was the kind of friend he could say this to. “Or, more to the point, a lack thereof. I was raised with church. Sunday school, that sort of thing. You?”
Bear nodded. “Temple.”
Boldt continued. “Yeah, and in all those stories, all those lessons, you had good and evil, God and the Devil- no matter what significance you put in either-but they were there, and you had faith, some sense of faith, some belief in something larger than yourself, no matter how small or on what level. Maybe you look at the night sky a little differently or maybe you go to church twice a week, but it’s there, it’s
“I’ve seen it,” the bar owner said, nodding in agreement and pulling the skin on his cheeks so that his eye
