He gave me the half-grin again and lowered the flame. “Scram, pussy,” he said.
I passed him as widely as possible, feeling like the Guitar Player being tossed out of the Oki-Burger. When I passed the fat man, he nodded at me, and I said, “You can put the knife away.” I sounded shaky even to me.
“When you're all the way out,” he said.
Muhammad was assiduously stacking cups and saucers as I passed the counter. Neon was blinking on up and down the Boulevard. When I reached the door the fat man stepped to one side and Junko sagged forward, all the way to the table.
“Listen, you guys,” I said with the little bravado I could muster, “I'll see you.”
The hardcase snickered. “Come back,” he said. “We'll have a tongue sandwich.” He got a laugh.
I'd been sitting in Alice for at least five minutes, bleeding through my jeans and waiting for my legs to stop shaking, before I heard again what he'd said to Junko when she'd started to answer my question about Aimee. It hadn't been “Sshh,” as in “Be quiet.” It had been “Tssss,” as in a cigarette being put out in a bucket of water. Or a cigar in someone's navel.
7
The Red Dog
I was half-drunk and more than halfway to disorderly when Hammond and his friend walked into the Red Dog. I'd gone straight to the bathroom, tugged down my pants, and looked at the punctures, little purple-black slits that were already ringed with an angry red. Then I'd scrubbed the blood off my jeans with water and handfuls of paper towels and emerged into the bar looking like someone who couldn't hit the urinal even if the wind were right. I felt spent, incontinent, inadequate, and stupid.
I'd taken most of it out on Peppi, the aggressively lesbian barmaid, hassling her nastily about the quality of the whiskey she was foisting on me. I'd spent the rest of it on scorn for the burned-out cops in the bar who were trying to attain a level of intoxication at which they could shake off the fear and frustration of the day and kid themselves into thinking they were having a good time. Cop groupies, a scary bunch as a whole, were trying to help. I scorned them too. They didn't seem to notice. Scratchy sixties rock-and-roll screeched from the speakers. The Red Dog was a cop bar, and no compact discs were allowed.
Hammond, as usual, was heard before he was seen. I'd run out of scorn and I was gazing morosely at my drink, trying to remember why ice floated, when the patented Hammond Sonic Boom cut through the Buckinghams singing “Kind of a Drag.” “Peppi,” he bellowed, “upgrade that asshole and bring us a couple more. It's on him.” He pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down, smiling around the room at no one in particular. “Jerks,” he said through the smile. “No one above lieutenant. Sit down, Max.”
The man who sat down was a slender little dandy with fine sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, a harpist's spidery hands, an air of permanent melancholy, a very good suit, and an impossibly long, droopy nose. He looked everywhere but at me as he sat, and he dusted the chair before he sank into it. More than anyone else, he reminded me of Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in
Peppi pulled my drink off the table with ill-concealed displeasure and put a new one down in front of me before serving doubles to Hammond and Bruner. When she plunked down Bruner's drink he pushed it toward Hammond with one hand and took Peppi's sleeve with the other. It looked casual except that it was so fast. He hadn't looked at either of them.
“Soda,” he said quietly. “No ice.” She strode back to the bar in her seven-league boots and her incongruous black mesh stockings. Peppi made black mesh look like chicken wire.
“Simeon here wants to know about the kids,” Hammond said, putting the top half of his drink into the past tense. He burped and looked at Bruner expectantly.
Bruner turned flat blue eyes to me. “What's his interest?” he asked softly. So softly, in fact, that I wasn't sure I'd heard him right until Hammond said, “Interest? What do you mean, what's his interest? For Chrissakes, Max, he saw the kid with the belly-button.” Bruner continued to gaze at him. “Which, by the way,” Hammond said, “was earlier. Earlier than the broken neck, I mean. Scar was maybe a week old.”
“He's not a cop,” Bruner said without looking at me. His long thin nose drooped and twitched as he talked. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Hammond cleared his throat explosively and I realized I was staring. Peppi materialized and put a glass of plain bubbly soda in front of Bruner.
“I'm looking for a little girl,” I said. When Bruner figured out that I was through, he took a metallic-foil packet out of the pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket, peeled it back to free a couple of Maalox tablets, and chewed them like they were potato chips.
“That's what I said,” he said in the same quiet voice. “You're not a cop.”
“A1,” I said, “I've had enough today without the Scarlet Pimpernel here. What's with the gorgeous suit, anyway? Working undercover at Bijan?”
Hammond threw back a pound of peanuts. “Shut up, Simeon,” he said, “and, Max, if you don't mind my saying so, you shouldn't get all twisted. With your stomach you got to be careful. I'm telling you, he's okay. Simeon helped me out when they sent me to records.”
“Is that so?” Bruner said neutrally.
“Max has been in records too,” Hammond confided. “He was taken off the street for trying to put a pimp's finger into the fan belt of his squad car.”
I thought about engines. “The fan belt?” I asked. “Didn't the fan get in the way?”
Bruner sat back, distancing himself from the conversation. “Yes,” he said. “It did.”
“If it hadn't, he might not have wound up in records,” Hammond said. “By the time they found the asshole's fingertip they'd developed a bad case of witnesses. And then the eleven-year-old veal chop on the pimp's string decided to side with the pimp.”
“Why’d she do that?” I asked.
“He,” Bruner said.
A pall descended on the table. “Oh,” I said. Bruner took a sip of soda, his eyes on the middle distance. I found myself warming to him. “Why a finger?” I asked, just to fill the silence.
“He'd done something with it I couldn't condone,” Bruner said softly. Hammond's big heavy shoe caught me on the shin, telling me to change the subject. “Max got out of records,” Hammond said, “but the doilies in charge wouldn't put him back on the street. Gave him a desk job in the underage vice task force.”
“She's thirteen,” I said. “From Kansas City. Gone about six weeks. Showed up briefly at the Oki-Burger.” Bruner's blue eyes ignited briefly like a gas flame and then subsided. “She isn't there anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I've been sitting there for the last week.”
“How’d you like it?” he asked.
“I preferred it to rectal cancer,” I said, “but just barely.”
He nodded about a sixteenth of an inch, the biggest reaction I'd provoked yet. “Is she pretty?”
I gave him one of the yearbook pictures. He looked at it and sighed. He sighed periodically. It added to his air of melancholy. “Too pretty,” he said. “Haven't seen her, though.”
“You girls drinking or just talking?” Peppi said, laying a gnarled hand on Hammond's shoulder. “They’s people who'd like this table, you know?”
Hammond guiltily drained his drink and half of Bruner's. I had raised my glass to my lips when I caught Bruner's stare. He was looking up at Peppi, and his face was absolutely expressionless. She tried not to look as though she knew she was being stared at, but gave up after a beat and turned to face him.
“Peppi,” he said in the same hushed voice. “Go away. Don't come back until we call you.”
Two spots of color appeared on Peppi's cheeks. “What's with your friend, Hammond?” she asked, trying for a light touch. “Didn't he get lunch?”
Bruner reached over, lifted Peppi's hand from Hammond's shoulder, and let it drop. “Look at me, Peppi,” Bruner said. She did.
