sends me a smart-ass.”
“Tell you what,” I said evenly. “Let’s start over. I’ll go back to my hotel and dry out, -have a drink, get a good dinner, maybe find myself a friend of the opposite sex to help me pass the time. You sit here in the rain, follow Slater’s girl, and call me when you want to pass the torch. How does two weeks from tomorrow sound?”
“A real smart-ass. You’re getting water all over my car, for Christ’s sake, didn’t your fucking mother teach you anything? Where were you raised, in a back alley behind some Denver whorehouse?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. I seem to’ve missed all the advantages Mrs. Hitler gave you.”
He burned me with his killer eyes. The blonde seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to crawl over the seat and kill me.
“Just for the record,” I said pleasantly, “I’m about this close to pushing what’s left of your face right through that windshield. Do we understand each other yet, Gertrude?…or do I have to take that gun away from you and empty it up your ass?”
We sat and stared. I was ready for him if he came, and I thought he might. The rage simmered in the car and fogged up the windshield. In the end, he had a higher priority than teaching a cowboy from Denver who was boss.
“You want to tell me about this woman?” I said.
“You’ve got her picture. She’s in there, it’s your job now.”
“I’ll tell you when it’s my job. If I have any more trouble with you, I’m out of here, and you and Slater can figure it out by yourselves.”
“Shit.”
I couldn’t improve on that, so I let it ride. We sat in the car for a few minutes without talking. “Go inside,” he said to Olga as if I weren’t there. “See if our pigeon’s getting lonely.” She got out and ran through the rain, disappearing into the bar. Pruitt sat in silence, his collar turned up to his ears, his eyes riveted on the neon lights in the window. He lit a cigarette but put it out without comment when I cracked the window and the rain came in on his seats.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said. He got out in the rain and walked to the bar. I trailed along behind him. He tapped the hood of an old roadster parked at the front door—Rigby’s, I was left to conclude. It was a true jalopy, with current Washington plates and bad tires. We went inside. Pruitt didn’t want to go past the dark aisle that led into the barroom. We stood there a moment in the pitch, trying to adjust our eyes. It was still early, but already the bar was crowded with happy-hour zombies and refugees from various wars. Music was playing loudly on the jukebox: “Sea of Love.” Maybe thirty people were at the bar and at tables scattered around it. The bartender was a fat man who looked like Jackie Gleason. Olga sat on a stool at the far end. Two stools away was Eleanor Rigby.
“There she is,” Pruitt said.
We stood for another moment.
“Is it your job yet, or am I supposed to stand here all night?”
“Go on, blow.”
He motioned to Olga, who left an untouched beer and came toward us. “I’ll probably meet you again sometime,” he said to me. “The circumstances will be different.”
“I’m in the Denver phone book, if you ever get out that way.”
“Maybe I’ll make a point of it.”
I ambled to the bar and sat on the only empty stool, directly across from Rigby. The bartender came; I ordered a beer and sucked the foam off. Ten yards away, Eleanor Rigby had another of whatever she was drinking. I watched her without looking. I looked at two guys having a Seahawks argument and I watched her with peripheral vision. I watched the bartender polishing glasses and I looked at her. She looked bone weary, as if she might fall asleep at the bar. I stole a frontal look. There wasn’t much danger in it, she was just another good-looking girl in a bar and I was a lonely, horny guy. She’d be used to gawkers, she must get them all the time. She was twenty-one, I guessed, with thick hair pinned back and up. “Eleanor Rigby.” I shook my head and tried to clear away the Victorian spinster the song conjured up. I wondered what it does to people, being named after something like that and having to carry that baggage all your life.
I was in it now, committed to the deed. I told myself she was nothing more than a cool five grand, waiting to be picked up. I wasn’t sure yet how to take her—probably later, on the street. I didn’t like the smell of the crowd in the bar. It was a blue-collar crowd, a sports crowd, and there’s always some ditz ready to rise up out of a crowd like that and defend a pretty woman’s honor no matter what. Never mind my court papers, never mind the cheap- looking ID Slater had given me as I left. The ID identified me as an operative of CS Investigations of Denver, but there was no picture of me on it and it gave me no authority beyond what Slater had, what anybody has. What I could use right now was a state-issued license with my kisser plastered all over it. But the state of Colorado doesn’t require its private detectives or its psychotherapists to have special licenses: all a bozo needs is an eight-by-twelve office, the gift of gab, and the power of positive thinking. I was making what amounted to a citizen’s arrest, and I had the law on my side because she had jumped bail and was now a fugitive. But if you have to explain that to a crowd in a bar, you’re already in trouble.
I nursed my beer and waited. She sat across the waterhole, a gazelle unaware of the lion’s approach. The stool had opened to her immediate left. I was tempted, but a shark moved in and filled it. Story of my damn life: the studs make the moves while I sit still and consider the universe, and I go home to a cold and lonely bed. I thought about Rita McKinley and wondered where she was and what she was doing with herself. In a way that was difficult to explain, Eleanor Rigby looked a little like Rita, like a younger model. Actually, she looked nothing like Rita at all. The
