bar, drinking tequila since that’s what the guy buying was drinking, and talking about his days as a Navy SEAL. I doubt he was ever a SEAL, but he’d probably spent a few hours with one sometime in a bar much like this one. That’s what he did with all that conversation, why he collected all those stories. They were his stock in trade, the product he traded for drinks and companionship of a sort.
“Big guy,” he said as I came in, looking into a mirror so silvered that it turned the whole world into an antique photograph. “Long time.” He was wearing high-top black tennis shoes laced halfway up, a purplish gabardine suit, plaid sport shirt with thin black tie.
“Too long.” I signaled the barkeep, who shuffled over and simply stared at me till I said, “Two more tequilas for these gentlemen and whatever’s on draft for me.”
“No draft.”
“An Abita, then.”
“No Abita.”
“Dixie?”
He nodded and shuffled toward the bend in the bar, sliding his feet along stiffly as though on skis.
“Big guy, this’s …”
We both waited a moment.
“Newman,” his companion said.
“From Missoula, Montana.” Doo-Wop hurriedly threw back what remained of his old drink before the new one got there. He didn’t like things in life getting ahead of him. “Has him a little ranch up there, breeds horses.” He nodded toward Newman in the mirror. “Next time we run into each other, remind me to tell you about that Arabian stable I worked at down in Waco.”
Since he’d finished the drink Newman bought him, the subtle morality of Doo-Wop’s enterprise allowed him now to cut Newman loose in my favor, and he motioned toward a booth in one corner. We waited at the bar for our drinks, then settled in there.
“So what’s up, big guy? Who you looking for?”
“How do you know I’m looking for someone?”
“Big guy. You ever come see me just to have a quiet drink? You got your business, I got mine, right? And sometimes they kind of fetch up against one another. Way the world works. Damn glass empty again.”
I motioned for the barkeep to refill it and showed Doo-Wop the snapshot Dean Treadwell had given me.
“Twice. Once at the Cajun Bar on Tulane, the other time over on Magazine, the Greek’s place.”
It wouldn’t do any good to ask when; time didn’t exist for Doo-Wop.
“From Washington. Near Seattle, he said. Did a stretch or two up there. Not very interesting. Didn’t have any stories that amounted to anything, didn’t pay much attention to mine.”
“I don’t suppose he wrote his address on a matchbook and gave it to you?”
“Not as I recall.”
“That was a joke, Doo-Wop.”
He thought about it a minute. “Never did quite get the hang of that joke thing.”
“What I meant was, did he happen to say anything about where he was staying.”
“Not a word. Said he had a couple of things going. Usually means a man’s right next to eating rats off the street.”
“Okay. Thanks, guy. You see him again, and remember to, you call me?” I laid a ten-dollar bill and a business card on the table.
He picked up the bill, leaving the card. “I already got one of those from last time.”
I stood to leave, Doo-Wop to move back to the bar.
“Ask the Greek,” he said. “Guy did some work for him. Heard that, anyway.”
I got a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to him. He stuck it down in his shoe with the other bill.
“You come have a drink with me sometime when it ain’t business. I’ll buy,” he said. “You know where to find me.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Greek wasn’t Greek, but Puerto Rican. He
The weekend after papers were signed, an army of uncles, brothers and cousins had appeared from nowhere and set about shoring the place up. It was as though they converged on a derelict grocery store, swarmed briefly and stepped back from a bar; and not much had changed since. The beams and supports they’d fashioned from two-by-twos, still bare wood but now gone green with mildew and mold, still propped up corners and ceiling. Cracks in the plaster troweled over with little or no effort to match the color of new plaster to old now looked like skin grafts long since rejected.
Living in a third-floor apartment across the street at the time, with nothing much to do on weekends till seven o’clock rolled over and I allowed myself to begin the night’s drinking, I’d watched the whole thing. The Greek’s was on my parade route, the place I started and more often than not ended my nights. It was also one of the few bars in the city I’d never been thrown out of. There had been a name on the window at one point, but no one ever paid any attention to it, and when the name faded away, it was never replaced.
Carlos was sitting on a footstool behind the bar, one hand gently swirling ice around the bottom of what remained of a glass of lemonade, the other holding open a paperback book. I might have been gone twenty minutes, instead of twenty years.
Carlos wanted to know about me, so I gave him a two-minute version. I asked the same in return, and he shrugged and moved his head to indicate the bar.
“Get you a drink?”
“Not today, Carlos, I’m in a hurry. Let me come back when I have more time.”
He smiled and nodded, waiting for me to say what I’d come for.
I showed him the snapshot of Treadwell’s son. “He been around?”
“Last I heard, you’d quit doing detective work.”
“I have. This is more like a favor. You know him?”
“Teaching, I heard. Always thought that was something I’d be good at, if things had turned out a lot different.”
“The picture, Carlos.”
“He in trouble?”
“Not yet.”
“But he’s planning something.”
“I don’t know if he’s planning it or not, but he’s about to break an old man’s heart.”
“Old man?”
“His father.”
Carlos shook his head. “That’s bad. What can I tell you?”
“Where he’s staying would be a good start.”
“Couple weeks ago, he was staying with a guy named Tito, over on Baronne a block off Louisiana. I don’t know if he’s still there. Or the address, but it’s this huge blue monster, textured plaster, at the edge of an open lot. Tito’s place is upstairs on the left. There’s a separate staircase up to it.”
“This Tito a salesman?”
