'No,' Sapp said.
'So what's the difference?'
'It's important if you're gay, to be gay. Especially me, who was straight so long, my, what would I call it, my, ah, constituency is more at ease if I'm identifiably gay.'
'And the blond hair does it?'
'It's pretty much all I can do. I still look like something from the World Wrestling Federation. But it's better than nothing.'
'Works for me, Blondie,' I said. 'You know anything about the Clive family that you didn't know last time we talked?'
'They seem to be cleaning house,' Sapp said.
'How so?'
'Kicked old Cord out on his ass,' Sapp said.
'Stonie divorcing him?'
'Don't know.'
'Where's Cord now?'
'In town somewhere. I can find out.'
'Be obliged,' I said.
Sapp got up and began to work his way through the room, stopping occasionally to talk with someone. I watched the smoke gather up near the ceiling of the low room. It seemed to me on casual observation that gay men smoked more than straight men. But I was probably working with too small a sample. All I could really say was that a number of these gay men smoked more than I did. The ceiling fan turned slowly in the smoke, moving it about in small eddies, doing nothing to dispel it. The jukebox was very loud. I had a brief third-person vision of myself, sitting alone and alien in a gay bar, a thousand miles from home, with the smoke hanging above me, and music I didn't like pounding in my ears.
Sapp came back and sat down.
'Cord's bunking in with his brother-in-law,' Sapp said.
He handed me a matchbook.
'I wrote down the address for you.'
'Brother-in-law?' I said.
'Yeah, Pud. I guess he got the boot too.'
'Pud and Cord?' I said. 'Getting the boot makes strange bedfellows.'
'I guess it do,' Sapp said. 'Who's your client?'
I shook my head.
'Never get in trouble keeping your mouth shut,' Sapp said.
I nodded. Sapp sipped some of his coffee, holding the cup in both hands, looking over the rim, his gaze moving slowly back and forth across the room.
'You married?' Sapp said.
'Not exactly,' I said.
'Separated?'
'Nope. I'm with somebody. But we're not married.'
'You love her?'
'More than the spoken word can tell,' I said.
'You live together?'
'No.'
'You love her, but you're not married and you don't live together. Why not?'
'Seems to work best for us this way.'
Sapp shrugged.
'You fool around?' he said.
'No. You?'
'No.'
'You think Pud and Cord are a couple,' I said, 'or just orphans of the storm?'
'Far as I know, neither one of them could make a living on his own,' Sapp said. 'Now that they don't have the Clive tit to nurse on, I figure they're splitting the rent.'
Sapp's slow surveillance of the room stopped and focused. I followed his glance. Three men stood inside the door. Two of them were large, the third was tall, high-shouldered, and skinny. The large ones looked fat but not soft. None of them looked like they had come in to dance. Without a word Sapp got up and moved softly toward
