straightening up and wondering what the hell I was doing there when Toby hailed me.
'See this fist?' Toby called, brandishing his right in the air. 'This fist is a power salute to the man who made Joanna Link eat her eyeliner.'
Dolly tittered, a bad sign. Maybe a man would have been a better idea, even though I knew how Dolly hated woman beaters. Finding them was one of her specialties.
'Toby,' I said, 'I have several acres of rear end exposed on your account at the moment, not only with the police, but with the press as well. Play straight, or it'll be your rear end instead.'
'Champ,' Toby said, punching me lightly on the upper arm, 'are those the proper sentiments for the occasion? Let's go in and pay our last respects.'
This time we went in through the front door. Toby sent Dolly ahead to make sure there weren't any photographers lurking about. When she came back to report in the negative, the three of us hurried up the driveway from the parking lot and across the sidewalk. Toby went first, anxious to minimize his exposure. The entrance was masked by a heavy red velvet curtain, which Toby dropped in Dolly's face.
'He's nervous,' Dolly explained apologetically.
'We're all nervous,' I said, and, in fact, I was. Where the hell was Nana? 'Dolly,' I said, grabbing her arm, 'don't let him bamboozle you.'
She looked me straight in the eyes-she was as tall as I was-then dropped her gaze. A second later, she nodded. 'Damn,' she said, looking back at me, 'but he sure is decorative.'
Nana wasn't inside, either. The Spice Rack was more crowded than it had been the last time I was there. All the stageside chairs were full, and people who hadn't gotten seats were leaning against the walls. I saw Pepper, Clove, Saffron, a beautiful Hispanic called (naturally) Chili, and a couple of other girls I'd seen dancing but didn't know. Saffron glanced anxiously at Toby as we came in. Toby didn't even nod to her. He was supremely indifferent to the whole scene: in his mind, he was the star. Everyone else was an extra.
I went to work on the other men in attendance. Six or eight were customers, and Ahmed, the Middle Easterner with the disappearing dollar bills, was among them. The remaining regulars were resolutely invisible, slumped in their ugly chairs with their eyes downcast and their arms folded, presenting the smallest possible identifiable surface area to the world. The other men in the room, five that I could count for sure, were with the girls.
There was some quality that cut across all of them despite their superficial differences. Two were white, two were black, and one was Asian, possibly Chinese. They were the only males who looked unapologetic. Their eyes took in the club as if it were a golf course and they were tournament pros.
Toby saw me looking at them. 'Scuzz,' he said. 'One step up from pimps. Is there anything worse?'
'You tell me. Where's Nana?'
'Who gives a shit? Champ, she's just the same as the rest of them.'
'Shut the fuck up, Toby.' It came out more vehemently than I had intended it to.
Toby squeezed my arm, and I pulled it away. 'And cut,' he said. 'We're getting a little bit jumpy here. Anyway, time for the main attraction.'
The speakers suddenly spouted music that the snob in me recognized and condemned as the love theme from Zeffirelli's
Tiny climbed ponderously onto the stage, dressed in his standard white. He held a tattered paperbound book to his chest. The girl called Pepper climbed up behind him. Tiny looked biblically grave.
He raised a fat hand, and the music faded away. He started to speak, failed, and cleared his throat. Pepper put a hand on his shoulder. He reached over and patted it once, looked at the faces of the people in the room, and began again.
'This is the worst day of my life,' he said. 'I'd be in bed now, but Amber asked me not to be. Amber asked-' He cleared his throat again and blinked quickly several times. 'Amber asked me to be here.'
'What's that supposed to mean?' Toby whispered. He sounded apprehensive.
'All of you, most of you, I mean, are here because she wanted you to be. You all had a place in her heart. Amber's heart was the biggest thing about her. There was room for a lot of people in it.'
'Her heart was okay,' Toby said in my ear. 'It was her veins that were the problem.'
Dolly tapped him on the shoulder and shook her head disapprovingly. Toby instantly arranged his features into a passable semblance of melancholy. It was like watching a Polaroid develop in a tenth of a second.
'Amber knew she was going to die,' Tiny rumbled on. 'She knew it a long time ago. I'm not being mystical. I don't mean she knew some bastard was going to beat her to death.' He swallowed twice and then shook his head to clear it. He took a step back as though the stage had tilted suddenly beneath him.
'I'll tell them,' Pepper said.
Tiny nodded and moved aside, staring at the wall opposite. Pepper, a seasoned performer, found the brightest light and then reached out a hand to Tiny. Slowly, he handed her the creased book. It had a unicorn on the cover.
'I guess a lot of you know that Amber stayed with me sometimes,' Pepper said. Until that moment I'd only heard her shouting over the music in the club. Her voice now, in the silence, was unexpectedly musical. 'When she didn't have any place to stay, or when one of her men treated her bad, she came to me. So she had a lot of stuff at my place, and one of the things she had there was her book.'
She opened it and leafed through a couple of pages. 'It's all here,' she said. 'Everything.' Toby shifted from foot to foot, looking uneasy. 'There are two pages here that are headed 'When I Die.' Not 'If I Die,' but 'When I Die.'
'She wanted you all to come here. 'I want my service to be at the club,' she wrote. 'My friends are at the club.' ' Pepper's voice broke slightly. 'Her friends. That's us. Her closest friends in the world.' Tiny wiped at his nose with his sleeve. 'Her wonderful friends,' Pepper said.
She took a breath. 'The things on the stage were hers. She's given them all to you. Every girl in the club gets something. It's all written down in the book. She even chose the music. It was her favorite song.' She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. 'She was such a sap,' she said. Her eyes were very bright. After a long moment she went on.
'Amber made four requests. The first was that you should come here. She'd be happy to see you all here now. The second was that we should give her things away. We're going to do that in a little while. The third had to do with the money she'd saved, and Tiny will tell you about that. These aren't in any order,' she said suddenly. 'I've gotten them all mixed up.'
'She wouldn't care,' a girl said from somewhere in the room. 'She loved you, Pepper.' It was Nana's voice. I turned and saw her standing next to the door. She was dressed all in black, and her eyes were puffy and red.
Pepper nodded. 'I guess the fourth thing comes first. She wanted Tiny to read a page to you. It was something she wrote a couple of months ago. Tiny read it for the first time today.'
She turned to him and held out the book. 'Can you?' she asked. At first I thought he couldn't. He hesitated for a long time and then grasped it. It took an act of will for him to force his eyes down to the open page.
'This is really for the girls,' he said. 'The rest of you can listen, but this is for the girls.' He put a finger on the margin, squinted at the words, and breathed heavily before he began to read.
' 'Wednesday, May 8. I don't know how to write this, but why should I? I don't know how to do anything anymore. I think I used to know how to do things.' '
The thick index finger moved down the edge of the page. It was shaking. ' 'I don't even know how to go home,' ' he read. ' 'Where is home now? Where is the place that makes me feel safe? Nobody took it away from me, I can't blame anybody else. I must have thrown it away. How do I get it back? Everywhere I go I take the dragons
