subtleties while overlooking the obvious.”
“I can also walk down the street while chewing gum.”
“I’ll accept your word on that.” He turned around again and put his feet up, dammit. “Of course you’ll go see our client perform tonight.”
“All right. If you’re determined that she’s still our client—”
“I am.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“And you’ll interview Miss Bounce after the performance.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. With whom is Miss Wolinski dining tonight?”
“I don’t know. Someone who’s luckier than I am.
“Why?”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Sure I asked. She said it wasn’t one of the names in the notebook, so I—”
“But she didn’t give the name.”
“No.”
He closed his eyes. I was still there when he opened them, and I don’t think the fact delighted him. “You may leave,” he said. “I want to read. Could you get me that new Bill Pronzini mystery?” He pointed and I fetched. I asked politely if the book was part of Pronzini’s series in which the detective does not have a name.
“He has a name,” Haig said. “The name is not revealed to the reader, but clearly the man has a name.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“What Pronzini’s detective does not have,” he said, “is an assistant.” He glared at me, then lowered his eyes to the book. I thought about wishing him goodnight and decided against it.
I went out and killed time. I had a beer at Dominick’s and watched the Mets. They were playing the Padres and they lost anyhow. It took some doing. They went into the ninth two runs ahead. Then Sadecki struck out the first two batters and it looked hard to lose. He hit the next batter, and this rattled him so that he walked the next two, at which point Berra yanked him and sent in Harry Parker, who got the batter to hit a slow grounder to Garrett. Garrett fielded it cleanly but didn’t throw to first because he couldn’t find the ball. It was lost somewhere in his glove. That loaded the bases and upset Parker, who threw the next pitch six feet over Grote’s head, cutting the lead to one. That was it for Parker. Berra brought in somebody just up from Tidewater, who made his major league debut by promptly hanging a curve for Nate Colbert. I think the ball’s still in the air somewhere over Queens. That made it 5 to 3, and we went down in order in our half of the ninth, and that, to coin a phrase, was the ballgame.
“Jeez, they stink,” Dominick said.
I couldn’t argue with that. I walked around for a while, and then I went to Treasure Chest, and I guess that brings you up to date, because there I was on the stage and there was a beautiful girl named Cherry Bounce on the stage next to me and she was a hundred percent dead and this was something my ingenuity and intelligence and experience had not prepared me for.
Four
I JUMPED DOWN from the stage, and then I vaulted up onto the bar and slid on the residue of someone’s drink. I landed somewhat imperfectly on the customers’ side of the bar. A lot of people were moving toward the stage, curious to know what was happening, and a lot of other people were moving toward the door, and the second group were the ones I was concerned with. I did some fancy broken-field running and got to the door ahead of most of them. I planted myself in the doorway with my arms and legs wide and tried to look as substantial as possible.
“Nobody leaves,” I said. “A girl has been killed. Nobody leaves until the cops get here.”
A couple of men took my word and turned away. I was on the point of congratulating myself on my menacing snarl when a few other guys headed toward me and looked prepared to walk right through me.
“Nobody leaves,” I said again, terrified that my voice would crack. They kept right on walking.
Then someone moved up against me from my right, and I turned my head, and it was my friend the doortender, plaid pants and striped jacket and sky blue shirt and all. He moved into the doorway and I moved over to give him room, and he planted himself there in the identical stance I had taken, but he looked as though he meant it.
“Everybody stay where you are,” he said. He didn’t speak as loudly as I had. Then again, he didn’t have to. The people milled a little, but then they turned back and resigned themselves to the fact that they weren’t going anywhere.
“I gotta hand it to you, kid,” the doorstop grunted. “You got moxie.”
I beamed idiotically for a moment, then ducked back into the club myself. A lot of people were behaving pretty hysterically at this point and I can’t say I blamed them much. I hadn’t noticed any women in the club—except for Tulip and Cherry and the barmaid, obviously—but evidently there had been women at some of the back tables, or else someone had hired a batch of women to run into the club and scream when Cherry’s body hit the stage. There was plenty of screaming, that’s for sure.
I managed to find Tulip, who was not contributing to the screaming one bit. At first she looked oddly calm, but then I took a second look and recognized her expression as the kind of calm you get when someone has recently hit you over the head with a mallet.
She said, “She’s—”
I was going to let her finish the sentence herself but she just plain stopped. So I finished it for her. “Dead,” I said.
“What was it? A heart attack?”
“It was murder.”
“But—”
“There’s no time,” I said. “This must be tied in with the scats and it proves Leo Haig is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be but I already knew that. Listen to me. Are you listening?”
She nodded.
“All right. You and I don’t know each other. No, the barmaid knows we do. Shit. All right.”
“Chip?”
“You don’t know anything about Haig. You don’t mention anything about fish. You don’t even know Cherry was murdered except that’s what people have been saying. Are you a good liar?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Well, do the best you can. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to get the hell out of here.” I looked at the door, and my friend the gorilla was still in place; now that I had taught him not to let anybody out, it was a cinch he wasn’t going to let
“You!”
He was looking at me, and he was pointing at me, but the expression of absolute fury and indignation on the face of a man I had never seen before in my life convinced me that he had someone else in mind. I figured maybe he was a little cockeyed, and I looked over my shoulder to see who it was that he was furious with, but there was nobody there. Then he was standing right in front of me and his finger would have been touching my nose if either the finger or the nose had been half an inch longer.
“You!”
Tulip said, “Mr. Leemy—”
“Shut up,” Leemy said, and my trained memory remembered that one Gus Leemy was the owner of record of Treasure Chest, and it stood to reason, Leemy being in another class entirely from Smith and Jones, that the Leemy with his finger in my face was Gus himself. Tulip said his name again, and he told her brusquely to shut up again,
