button. We agreed on a time the next day.
I made it to the Spot after the lun saft had predich rush had subsided. Mai was behind the bar, bent into the soak sink with a glass load, and Phil Saylor stood at the register counting checks. Anna was by the service bar, arranging her tip change in dollar stacks on the green netting. I spoke to Mai briefly, thanked her for what we had arranged over the phone the day before.
“Hey, Phil,” I said, speaking to his back. “I’m taking some time off. Mai and I set it up. That okay by you?”
“I need the shifts, Phil,” Mai interjected.
“She told me already,” Phil said without raising his head. He didn’t add anything, so I went down to the service end of the bar and rubbed the top of Anna Wang’s head.
“Hey, Nick.”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Got a cigarette?”
“Sure.”
I gave her one, lit it for her. She leaned her back against the wall, dragged sharply on the smoke, exhaled just as sharply. “Some woman called you,” she said. “Said your uncle wants to see you.”
“Costa,” I said. “The woman would be his nurse.”
“He sick?”
“Cancer,” I said. Anna looked at the cigarette in her hand, thought about it, took another drag.
“That’s rough.”
I nodded. “How’d your date go with LaDuke?”
“Okay, I guess.”
I reached out and Anna passed me the cigarette. I took a puff, handed it back. “Just okay?”
“It was fun.” Her eyes smiled. “He took me to the Jefferson Memorial last night. We sat on the steps, split a bottle of wine. Or rather, I drank most of it. No guy’s ever tried anything so obvious with me. I know it’s a corny move, but I got the feeling he didn’t think it was, if you know what I mean.”
“He’s strictly from L-Seven, but genuine.”
“Exactly. Most of the guys I meet still in their twenties, they’re so ironic, so cynical, you know, I just get tired of it sometimes. Jack’s cute, and he’s funny, and all those good things, but he’s also really square. In some weird way, that’s refreshing.”
“So why was the night ‘just okay’?”
“It always comes down to the big finish, doesn’t it?” Anna butted the smoke in an ashtray, looked up. “Well, at the end of the night, I wanted to kiss him, you know? And I’m pretty sure he wanted to kiss me, too. So I took the initiative.” Anna grinned. “I gave it to him pretty good, I think. But he was shaking, Nick. I mean, shaking real deep. It’s like, I don’t know, he was scared to death. And then he just pulled away, and it was like something just seemed to go out of him.”
“Maybe it’s been awhile for him.”
“I guess.”
“You gonna see him again?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. The guy’s carrying something serious around on his back. I’m not sure if I need that right now.”
I touched her arm. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Take it easy,” she said.
I poked my head into the kitchen, hooked Darnell up as the driver for my appointment the next day. Then I phoned LaDuke from the bar, got him in on it, too. On the way out the door, Phil Saylor grabbed my arm.
“What’s your hurry?” he said.
“I’m off to the ball game with a friend of mine. Got to pick him up where he works.”
“Don’t stay away too long, hear? Mai, she’s okay, but after she works a few days straight, she starts jumping all into the customers’ shit.”
“I thought you were mad at me, Phil.”
“You made a mistake. You’re allowed one or two.”
I moved to shake his hand, but he turned away. The two of us were square again, I guess.
When I walked into Goode’s White Goods in Beltsville, the first thing I saw was Johnny McGinnes, bent into an open refrigerator, blowing pot smoke into the box. During working hours, McGinnes’s pants pocket always contained a film canister and a one-hit pipe, which he lit at regular intervals right on the sales floor. After the exhale, he would tap the ashes out against his open palm and drop the pipe back into his pocket in one quick movement. I had worked with him for many years, and to my knowledge, no one, customer or management type, had ever caught him in the act of getting high.
McGinnes saw my entrance, pulled a six of Colt 45 tall boys from the fridge, held them up, winked, and put them back inside. He shut the door and goose-stepped down the aisle back to his customer, a middle-aged woman looking at a dishwasher. As usual, McGinnes was done up synthetic-crisp: navy blue slacks, poly/cotton oxford, and a plain red tie with a knot as pretty as a fist. His thinning black hair slashed down across his high forehead, with only his silver sideburns betraying his age. McGinnes managed to throw me a mental patient’s grin as he spoke to the woman; even across the showroom, I could see that he was half-cooked.
Goode’s White Goods, one of the few major appliance independents left in the D.C. area since brand-name retailing came to Sears, had managed to carve out a niche for itself as a full-service operation. White goods was the industry term for big-ticket appliances, and the company’s owner, Nolan Goode-it was inevitable that McGinnes would dub him “No Damn Good”-mistakenly overcalculated the public’s comprehension of the wordplay in the store’s name. Confusion notwithstanding, Goode’s White Goods had managed to survive. And after McGinnes had joined the team, it had actually begun to thrive. ing, Got='0em'›
In contrast to the noise common on an electronics’ floor, No Damn Good’s appliance shop seemed quiet as a museum, orderly rows of silent, shiny, inanimate porcelain aligned beneath wall-to-wall banners. In the center aisle, a young man used an unwieldy buffer to wax the floor, solemnly repeating the phrase “Slippery, slippery,” though there were no customers anywhere near him. A man I pegged as the manager-prematurely bald, prematurely overweight-stood behind the counter, hiking his pants up sharply, as if that was the most aggressive act he would attempt all day. On the other side of the counter stood a young, square-jawed guy, smiling broadly, arranging point-of-purchase promotional materials. He had the too-handsome, dim-bulb look of a factory rep, Triumph of the Will in a navy blue suit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little guy shoot out of the stockroom and head in my direction, his hand extended all the way out, his hip-on-the-cheap clothing drooping everywhere on his skinny frame.
“And how are we doin’ today?” he said as he reached me, his hand still out.
I shook it and said, “Waiting on McGinnes.”
“Anything I can do for you while you’re waiting?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, if you have any questions about a major appliance-”
“The name is Donny,” I said.
Donny smiled a little strangely and I smiled back. He scratched his ratty ’fro and walked back down the aisle, slinking behind the counter. I checked McGinnes: He had removed the dishwasher’s wash tower-it looked exactly like a vibrator-and was making little jabbing movements with it behind the customer’s back, pitching the merits of the machine to her all the while. This was for my benefit, I supposed, or maybe he was just bored. Then a young couple came through the door with buy signs practically tattooed on their foreheads-any salesman worth his salt can tell-and McGinnes excused himself to greet them.
Donny yelled across the sales floor, “Hey, Johnny, you got a call on line one. Guy wants to give you an order,” and he pointed to a wall-mounted phone where a yellow light blinked clear as a beacon. McGinnes hesitated, went to take the call. Donny racewalked toward his new customers. Even before I saw McGinnes pick up the phone and make a bitter face, I knew what Donny Boy had done: gotten a dial tone and put it on hold, then used the phony bait to draw McGinnes away from the live ones coming through the door. Johnny should have known; in fact, it was one of the very first tricks he had played on me years ago.
McGinnes closed his deal, though, and Donny did not. Afterward, when I had been introduced to the boys and
