A stunning green-eyed blonde was sitting at the bar next to Tony. She had been listening to the conversation. She said, 'Go on, Otto. Show them your trick.'
'You're a magician?' Tony asked Otto. 'What do you do--make unruly customers disappear?'
'He scares them,' the blonde said. 'It's neat. Go on, Otto. Show them your stuff.'
Otto shrugged and reached under the bar and took a tall beer glass from a rack. He held it up so they could look at it, as if they had never seen a beer glass before. Then he bit off a piece of it. He clamped his teeth on the rim and snapped a chunk out of it, turned, spat the sharp fragment into a garbage can behind him.
The band exploded through the last chorus of the song and gifted the audience with merciful silence.
In the sudden quiet between the last note and the burst of scattered applause, Tony heard the beer glass crack as Otto took another bite out of it.
'Jesus,' Frank said.
The blonde giggled.
Otto chomped on the glass and spat out a mouthful and chomped some more until he had reduced it to an inch-thick base too heavy to succumb to human teeth and jaws. He threw the remaining hunk in the can and smiled. 'I chew up the glass right in front of the guy who's making trouble. Then I look mean as a snake, and I tell him to settle down. I tell him that if he doesn't settle down I'll bite his goddamned nose off.'
Frank Howard gaped at him, amazed. 'Have you ever done it?'
'What? Bitten off someone's nose? Nah. Just the threat's enough to make them behave.'
'You get many hard cases here?' Frank asked.
'Nah. This is a class place. We have trouble maybe once a week. No more than that.'
'How do you do that trick?' Tony asked.
'Biting the glass? There's a little secret to it. But it's not really hard to learn.'
The band broke into Bob Seeger's Still the Same as if they were a bunch of juvenile delinquents breaking into a nice house with the intention of trashing it.
'Ever cut yourself?' Tony shouted to Otto.
'Every once in a while. Not often. And I've never cut my tongue. The sign of someone who can do the stunt well is the condition of his tongue,' Otto said. 'My tongue has never been cut.'
'But you have injured yourself.'
'Sure. My lips a few times. Not often.'
'But that only makes the trick more effective,' the blonde said. 'You should see him when he cuts himself. Otto stands there in front of the jerk who's been causing all the trouble, and he just pretends like he doesn't know he's hurt himself. He lets the blood run.' Her green eyes shone with delight and with a hard little spark of animal passion that made Tony squirm uneasily on his barstool. 'He stands there with bloody teeth and with the blood oozing down into his beard, and he warns the guy to stop making a ruckus. You wouldn't believe how fast they settle down.'
'I believe,' Tony said. He felt queasy.
Frank Howard shook his head and said, 'Well....'
'Yeah,' Tony said, unable to find words of his own.
Frank said, 'Okay ... let's get back to Bobby Valdez.' He tapped the mug shots that were lying on the bar.
'Oh. Well, like I told you, he hasn't been in for at least a month.'
'That night, after he got angry with you, after you settled him down with the glass trick, did he stick around for a drink?'
'I served him a couple.'
'So you saw his ID.'
'Yeah.'
'What was it--driver's license?'
'Yeah. He was thirty, for God's sake. He looked like he was in maybe eleventh grade, a high school junior, maybe at most a senior, but he was thirty.'
Frank said, 'Do you remember what the name was on the driver's license?'
Otto fingered his shark's tooth necklace. 'Name? You already know his name.'
'What I'm wondering,' Frank said, 'is whether or not he showed you a phony driver's license.'
'His picture was on it,' Otto said.
'That doesn't mean it was genuine.'
'But you can't change pictures on a California license. Doesn't the card self-destruct or something if you mess around with it?'
'I'm saying the whole card might be a fake.'
'Forged credentials,' Otto said, intrigued. 'Forged credentials....' Clearly, he had watched a couple of hundred old espionage movies on television. 'What is this, some sort of spy thing?'
'I think we've gotten turned around here,' Frank said impatiently.
