I said, 'Now I want you to tell me about your daughter, Ginger.'
'I ain't telling you fucking shit,' he said. But it was weak.
'You've been doing that,' I said. 'And look what it got you. I want to know about the whorehouse you sold your kid to.'
'She's dead,' he said.
'Yeah, she was a street hooker in New York City and somebody shot her.'
'So what's the fucking difference?' Buckey said.
'Fatherhood rests but lightly on you, Vern,' I said. And I thumbed the hammer back on my gun. It made the cylinder turn one notch and Vern could see the copper-jacketed slug go under the hammer. 'What whorehouse?'
Buckey shrugged. 'Place called Magic Massage in Portland. I didn't sell her. It was a finder's fee.'
'Place still there?' I said.
'Was last time I was down to Portland, on Congress Street, around the corner from Franklin.'
I smiled, and turned the gun away from his face and let the hammer down gently. Then I flipped the cylinder out, turned it so there was an empty chamber under the hammer, closed the gun and put it back on my hip. Vern watched me.
'You had a fucking gun why didn't you use it,' he said. 'How come you come on to me without it, if you had one?'
'Wanted to see if you really were the toughest guy in Lindell,' I said. I stood up. 'See you around, Vern.'
'That's all?' Buckey said. 'You come up here all this way to fight me and find out about a whorehouse in Portland?'
'Un huh.'
'You're fucking crazy, man. What do you care about a whorehouse in Portland? What the fuck you care about some dead whore in New York?'
'Vern,' I said, 'it was a pleasure to punch your lights out. It was such a pleasure that I may come up sometime and do it again.'
I turned and left him sitting slumped against the wall and headed for my car and drove away, back south. Toward Portland.
15
The sky over Portland is like the sky above San Francisco, unusually blue and high, suggestive of the ocean that surrounds the city on most sides. The buildings were low and that emphasized the high of the sky and the silent presence of the ocean.
I parked along the restored waterfront on Commercial Street and walked up through the Old Port Exchange area to Congress Street. The Old Port Exchange was urban renewal at its chichiest. The nineteenth-century granite buildings restored and full of restaurants and dress shops and places with names like The Elegant Elephant. The people walking about in the area could have been from Boston or Chicago. It was startling when they spoke in the Titus Moody accent that had persisted even here among the bleached oak and hanging plants.
I passed a shop called Gazelle, and a bookstore that displayed the complete works of Thomas Merton in the window, and turned east on Congress Street. The Holiday Inn where I'd spent the night had a map of downtown Portland in its lobby and I had spent a minute in front of it after breakfast. Like Boston, Portland was a red-brick city. There were occasional granite and brownstone buildings and the usual ugly newer ones, but mostly it was red brick. Past Franklin Street, at the east end of Portland, the Magic Massage Parlor, Massages by Women, stood across the street from a store that sold scuba gear.
The storefront display windows were discreetly curtained on the first floor, but a small card in the lower left- hand corner of the biggest window said OPEN. I crossed the street and leaned against the front wall of the dive shop and scoped things out.
Magic Massage was in a three-story brick building. In addition to the massage parlor entrance there was another door. A sign in gilt lettering on the door said LONGFELLOW HOUSE, ROOMS. The two floors above the massage parlor had small balconies. The trim was neatly painted white. The neighborhood was good, the place was neat. Looked like a better deal than Lindell. A brown Chevy van went by with a couple of Cumberland County sheriffs deputies in it. They paid no attention to me or Magic Massage. I shifted position a little and felt the stiffness from yesterday's fight. I looked at myself in the window'of the dive shop. The left side of my face was puffy. I hadn't shaved this morning to spare the puffiness and I had a small dark stubble beginning to show. I looked sort of sinister.
Across the street a customer appeared at Magic Massage. He had a crew cut. He wore a red-and-white-striped short-sleeved knit shirt that was stretched tight over his bulging stomach. He had on new jeans with the bottoms rolled a couple of turns to feature his new shiny brown shoes with three lace-eyelets and thick soles. Nineteen fifty-two grown old. He opened the door with the confidence of an old customer and went in and closed it behind him.
I flexed my hands. They were sore and stiff and the knuckles were swollen. Maybe I should rely more on sweet reason.
I crossed Congress Street again and went in the door of Magic Massage. A small sticker above the doorknob said that MasterCard and Visa were welcome. Inside there was a short high counter to the right. A middle-aged woman with purplish red hair sat behind it. There was a cash register on the counter, and a phone, and one of those little devices that take a credit card imprint. The room was small. Against the far wall was a sofa covered in tan Naugahyde. The arms and legs were dark oak. There were two matching chairs against the left wall and a low coffee table with an assortment of magazines. In the angle of the wall opposite the counter a small color television set was showing a talk show in which the host and audience were debating sex-change operations with an intensity that suggested almost everyone might have one.
Leaning against the end of the counter was a tall guy wearing a beige gaberdine suit and black cowboy boots.
