It had all come out wrong with Frank today, an ultimatum instead of a conversation. And he hadn’t helped matters. She usually liked the fact that he wasn’t the nervous, gabby type like so many guys these days. They seemed like they needed shrinks more than they needed a woman most of the time. But it was only a positive when things were going well. When things were going badly, Frank’s taciturnity took it all the way to terrible. She shut her mind for the remainder of her freestyle laps, reached for the wall, readjusted her goggles, and started in on backstroke. She’d been a multi-event swimmer back in the day at DePaul, and in high school before that. Her favorite had been individual medley way back when. She’d had all the strokes back in her late teens. By college she’d had to cut down her events to the 400 freestyle relay and the 50 and the 200 fly, due to the level of the competition. Specialization always brings loss.
Now she could have killed herself for letting her training dip to such a horrifying level. Getting it back was always the hardest part. After gutting out a thousand meters of backstroke, she dropped her heart rate and breathing with a medium-paced set of breaststroke. There was a time when a 5,500-meter training session was just her morning, and only one component of her workout. She’d also do dry-land training, core work, the occasional run. She cut through the water, paying attention to her technique, trying to draw on smoothness to minimize effort. Ten more laps of freestyle, moving more quickly through the water now, kicking off each wall, alternating her breath smoothly side to side every fourth stroke, she seemed to be alternating what she should do about her situation. In one moment she was sure she would keep it, have the baby, that Frank would come around, that she’d help him come around and pull him out of the black hole he was in, and even if he didn’t, she’d do it herself. She could do day care, or move nearer to her parents in Chicago. Then after a flip turn, she knew what she had to do, because a child, a family was serious business, and you didn’t toy around with a responsibility like that alone, and certainly not with a brooding dude with major issues.
She felt her heart hammering and gauged that she had another thousand meters left in her, maximum, and transitioned into butterfly. This was her wheelhouse, her dominant stroke. She felt her arms windmilling above the surface, plunging in and carving a keyhole shape beneath her, while her legs thumped as one. She was like a mermaid or some amphibious mammal. She ran down her last laps as fast as she could manage and reached the wall to hang on. She stripped off her goggles and cap and looked over to see Lynn had just wrapped it as well.
“Whew,” Lynn said, “good one.”
“Please, I’m disgusting. Don’t try to make me feel better,” Susan said, pulling herself up onto the pool deck.
“You’re still a fastie,” Lynn said, following.
Dripping, Susan grabbed her towel and realized she’d decided exactly nothing.
Behr walked into Chubby’s, the toasted sandwich joint, and didn’t see the guy he was looking for. Pal Murphy had called and said his nephew knew somebody who knew something that might have gone down in the pea-shake world, and Behr should go meet him and pursue it. But the only customer in the place was a greasy-looking black- haired dude just under thirty with a slightly pointy nose poised over the second half of a delicious-looking toasted sandwich. Behr didn’t have him as a relative of the natty and crisp Pal, but there was no accounting for family, he supposed. He crossed over to the guy.
“You Pal’s nephew?” Behr asked.
“You the PI.?” the guy said, looking up at Behr with shiny black eyes that were a little bit off.
“Yep.”
“Fuck, you are big,” the guy said. “You been scrapping?” Behr ignored both the comment and the question. “I’m Matt McMurphy,” the guy finally said. “Everyone calls me Kid.” Behr sat down and they shook hands.
“You a Murphy or a McMurphy?” Behr wondered.
“McMurphy’s a stage name,” the guy said. “Pal is my dad’s brother.”
“You’re the musician?” Behr asked. He remembered hearing the guy’s roots rock music on local radio, and he thought he saw a flyer a while back about him playing Donohue’s on St. Paddy’s Day, too.
“Yeah,” Kid said, and stuck his nose into the wrapper holding the sandwich half. It looked bigger than he could possibly finish, especially with the nibbling bites he was taking, but he stayed after it until Behr was convinced. After a while, he finally took a break.
“You gonna get something?” he asked.
“Nah,” said Behr. It wasn’t because he didn’t like Chubby’s, but he’d become aware, upon sitting down, of a certain wet mop smell that didn’t make him want to eat. The smell wasn’t coming from the floor either. “Whenever you’re finished.”
Eventually McMurphy wrapped the remains of the sandwich in its paper and took a suck on a large cup of soda and belched. “Okay,” he said, looking nervous.
“So you know something that can help me?” Behr said.
“I know lots of things. Meth scene, E scene, blow scene, vike scene-,” Kid McMurphy stated with some odd pride.
“That’s not a help to me. You know something pea shake?”
“Not really. But I know a guy who used to work at one, and he said he saw some crazy doings go down. It might have just been bar bullshit, but you know…”
“What kind of doings?” Behr asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say,” McMurphy winced. “I mean this guy could really fuck me up.”
“All right,” Behr said. He noticed the kid was getting a little twitchy. The eyes, which looked like they might have been ringed with a coat of black eyeliner several days prior, shot from side to side. He wore a dusty black suit over a burgundy vest, and a black shirt open at the throat revealing several rawhide necklaces and a Celtic crucifix. It was the outfit of a dandy after all, so maybe that did run in the family. But this kid didn’t look too dandy at the moment. He looked like he’d been sleeping in the suit, on a long stagecoach ride.
“So how do you want to do it?” Behr asked. “You want to slide me his name and I’ll bump into him and leave you out of it?”
“Well,” the kid said, sucking on his soda straw but coming up empty and casting a longing eye at the refill machine, “I don’t think that’ll work. But my uncle said to help you. So maybe I should go to this guy, see if he’s willing to tell it to you, then give you a call.”
“Okay,” Behr said, “that sounds good. Offer him money.”
“Uh, I don’t have any money,” McMurphy said.
“I didn’t say give him money. Offer it to him if he’ll talk to me. I’ll give him a little if he’s helpful,” Behr told him.
“Oh, cool. Cool, cool,” McMurphy said. “That’s totally cool, cool, cool-”
Behr, fearing he’d go on indefinitely, slid him a business card. “Call me the minute the guy’s ready to talk.”
Behr stood up and left. This flume ride was going nowhere but down.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Some nights were hurtling locomotive engines, others just wheezed along the tracks. This night at the Tip- Over Tap Room wasn’t going anywhere fast. DJ M.D. was spinning, but they’d just called him down last minute, it wasn’t a night he’d promoted, so the crowd was thin. There were still a few girls worth doing, but Charlie Schlegel wasn’t there for fun. He checked his watch. He had Peanut coming for a meeting, and no doubt that fucked-up, silent, slit-eyed partner of his, Nixie, would be along with him.
Charlie pulled at the corner of the bar across from where M.D. was spinning. He raised his eyes at Pam, who started drawing him a Stroh’s from the tap. She delivered it with the shy smile of the once banged and seemingly forgotten. But he hadn’t forgotten her. They’d had a couple of fun nights after closing, but the way things worked in the family was to ring up the numbers and keep the attachments to a minimum, or a little more neatly put: bros before hos.
“Thanks, Pammy,” Charlie said. Besides, she was a bit of a “butter face,” and his mother would mock the shit
