“About time, too,” Hammond said. “Next time I’ll have my parrot make it.” Peppi gave me a concerned look and headed for the relative security of the bar.
Hammond hoisted his drink and knocked back half of it. I drank most of mine and put the rest closer to him. He’d drink it eventually. The whiskey sang off-key in my veins. He hunched his massive shoulders up around his ears, making his neck disappear completely, and said, “A moving van. She hired a fucking moving van. All that was left was my chair, the stuff in my den, and a couple guns. Hazel never liked the guns. Also my bed. Did I tell you we slept in twin beds?”
“Better that way,” I said. “Women have cold feet.”
“Hazel has feet like the polar ice cap. It was like sleeping with Greenland.” He finished his drink and stared at what was left of mine. I put it into his hand.
“Not drinking?” he said. He didn’t really care.
“I already had a few.”
“Who was buying?”
“Client.”
“Anything for the cops?”
“Yeah. About this pyromaniac who’s torching the homeless.”
I might as well have been Demosthenes at the seaside, waiting for applause from the waves. Hammond’s kerchief had slipped down over his left eye, and he tugged it upward. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, looking up at it.
“Al the Red,” I said, abandoning the topic. “Scourge of the Caribbean.”
“Bet your ass,” he said. “There’s not a palm tree safe.”
“Well, what are they good for anyway?”
“Target practice.” He made a pistol out of his hand, sighted over it, and said, “KABOOM!” People gave us nervous looks. It takes a lot to make a roomful of drunk cops nervous, but whatever it takes, Hammond had it.
He blew on his fingers to disperse the smoke. “She took the kids, of course,” he said.
“She would,” I said. “She’s their mother.”
“Yeah?” he said. “What’m I, an unindicted coconspirator?” He drained the drink and signaled for two more.
We’d had this discussion before. “You said something about paper plates,” I said.
“Wrapped in cellophane.” He closed his eyes for a long time, and I hoped he’d gone to sleep. “With little blue flowers on them,” he added, eyes still shut. “On the sink, right where the real plates would have been if she hadn’t taken them. My mother gave us those plates. Did I tell you my mother’s on Hazel’s side?”
Peppi clunked a couple of drinks onto the table, and Hammond opened his eyes and put four ounces of whiskey into the realm of memory. I took a whack off the other one. I was getting drunk.
“So what was I supposed to think?” he asked me.
I’m not a guesser. I wouldn’t guess my own weight if I were standing on a scale. So I just said, “What?”
“I figured it was like she was tipping me a wink,” he said, sighting me through the bottom of the whiskey tumbler and looking like a middle-aged pirate with a truncated spyglass. “It was like she was saying, Hey, I’ve taken the kids and the furniture, but I’m still worried about what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to eat it off of. You can still get us back. I was alone in the house, it was the middle of the night and the house was empty, but there were these paper plates, and I looked at them like they were the fucking Holy Grail and figured she’s pissed off but we can straighten it out. We always did before.”
“Good for her,” I said. It was my turn to wave for Peppi. Peppi shook her head meaningfully and looked away. “That’s a woman for you,” I added, flagging Peppi again. “Sentimental.”
Peppi poured and trudged grudgingly toward us. She didn’t look sentimental. She looked like a woman with a rattlesnake in her hip pocket.
“Except it wasn’t,” Hammond said as the drinks landed loudly on the table.
“What wasn’t?” I asked. To Peppi, I said, “Two more.” I was tired of waving.
“You’re driving,” Peppi said unpleasantly. Peppi had unpleasant down cold.
“Aren’t you listening?” Hammond said to me. “Plates. We’re talking about paper plates. I sit around for eight days going out of my mind. I’m trying to pick the tattoos off my arms. There’s no note, no phone number, no nothing. I go to the assholes in Missing Persons and they laugh in my face. Guys I know, for Christ’s sake. Every morning I wait for the mailman, catch hell because I’m coming in late. No letter. No birthday card, even.”
“Happy Birthday” didn’t seem like the right thing to say. I drank instead.
“And then her sister calls me,” he said as Peppi plunked the full glasses on the table. For once, Hammond didn’t give them a glance. He still had half a belt in his hand. “Her sister. Zora, for Christ’s sake. I’ve only called the bitch forty or fifty times since Hazel left, and it’s always ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about it. How terrible for you.’ So Hazel finally lets go of her sister’s leash, and the bitch calls me and says everybody’s okay.
“ ‘Everybody who?’ I say. ‘I’m not okay. I seen DOAs who are more okay than I am.’ And she laughs this pissy little laugh and says, honest to Christ, Simeon, she says, ‘Oh, you men. You don’t know when you’re well off.’
“ ‘Well off,’ I say. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
“ ‘Hazel told me how you swore,’ she says. ‘I must say, it’s not very becoming. Not in a grown man, anyway.’ ” Hammond finally registered the new drinks. He finished the one in his hand.
“Drink, me hearty,” said Al the Red, hoisting the fuller of the two new ones.
I drank. The room was beginning to waver as though I were seeing it over an active radiator.
“Well off?” I asked.
“Sure,” Hammond said in a voice that would have straightened the hair on a sheep. “After I apologized for my French and asked her real polite and genteel where they all were and she said she couldn’t tell me, then she said, and listening to it would have given Liberace diabetes, she said, ‘Wasn’t it sweet of little Al to go out and buy you those paper plates? He wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.’ ” He lowered his head onto his bulging forearms. “Little Al,” he repeated. “Holy Jesus, little Al.”
Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on top of his head. Sober, he’d have killed me. “Hey, Al the Red,” I said, “let’s go home.”
He straightened up and looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. I yanked my hand back. Three feet from my nose, it smelled of hair oil.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said. He threw the half-full glass to the floor. It splintered and splashed. Still no one looked at us. We were invisible.
Hammond lurched to his feet. “To the ship,” he said, adjusting his kerchief. “And damn the torpedoes. Full fucking speed ahead. Whatever way ahead is.”
After I drained my glass, I guided him unsteadily to the street, my arm around his Mount Rushmore shoulders, and steered him into Alice, my car. He snored all the way to his empty house and then refused help getting inside. I watched Al the Red go, and waited until the door was slammed shut and locked. A hot wind blew, and the air smelled of smoke. I had to make a detour on the way back to Topanga to avoid a fire area, a long- familiar profile of mountains now enveloped in flame.
Between the beer and the whiskey, it took me only a few minutes to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was famous.
4
The phone started in at eight o’clock. It rang several times, penetrating a rather large region of murky pain that turned out to be the inside of my head. When it became apparent that the phone had more stamina than I did, I rolled over and picked the damn thing up.
“Hang up and call me tomorrow,” were my first words of the bright new day. I’d sweated into the sheets, and they were damp and wadded. They stank of whiskey and smoke and the Red Dog and something even ranker,
