The Cocktail Waitress

what I mean, is to stand by you one hundred percent-you did this thing for me, and I’m not letting you take the fall for it alone.”

“That’s a lovely sentiment, Tom, but I don’t see what you can do, unless some of those projects of yours have ripened and you now have not one but twelve thousand dollars to spare.”

“I think I don’t need it, and neither do you. If we can find that son of a bitch and bring him back for trial, we can let a court take it from there. But that’s what I think, and what I know is nothing. As of now, the first thing is to get a lawyer.”

“… I don’t know any lawyer.”

“So happens, I do.”

He mentioned one I’d heard of, at the time of my real estate deal, with offices over in Marlboro, Dwight Eckert was his name, and Tom offered to drive me to see him. I thought to put in a call first, to find out if he’d be in, and it turned out he would be, after four o’clock. It was then going on for three, which just gave me time to change from my waitress clothes, and put on a suit I’d bought, which would do nicely, as the air by now had a nip in it. I excused myself, went back to the bedroom and started to change, when there he was, in the door. I asked: “Who invited you back here?”

He leaned against the doorpost and crossed his arms. “Figured we could continue talking. Not like it’s the first time I’ve seen you undressed, brief though the last time was.”

I was wearing no more than I’d been the last time, just my panties. I turned to him and held out my hand, palm up. “That’ll be twenty-five dollars, please.”

“… What did you say?”

“I said, pay. From being taken to visit a whorehouse, I learned some tricks of the trade. Now, you want to watch me undress, you pay to watch me undress. Twenty-five dollars, I said-payable now.”

He stood there, stared, and then took out his wallet. He counted out two tens and a five, and tossed them on the bed. I snatched them up and threw them at him. “Tom,” I said, in a way that really meant business, “you get out. You get the hell out, do you hear?” He picked up the money, took out his wallet once more, and put it back in. At the bedroom door he turned back.

“I don’t understand you. Starting with the night at the Wigwam. If you’d pushed me away as soon as we walked through the door, all right. But you didn’t. You can’t tell me you didn’t want me. Or you can tell me, but I know better-you were hot wet, and let me tell you, a wet-”

“Tom!”

“All right, let’s say a woman’s body, then-a woman’s body doesn’t lie.”

“At that moment, Tom, I wanted you with every fiber of my being. So much so that I didn’t even mind you taking me to that rotten place so long as it made possible what we both wanted. But Tom, there’s something I wanted more, and I can’t have both.”

“And that’s what?”

“Another man, one who will marry me-”

“Who said I wouldn’t marry you?”

“-and provide for me, and what’s more important, for my son, in a way you never could. I’m sorry, Tom, but it’s so. You never could, not if all your projects succeeded, every one of them.”

He nodded, said no more, and walked out the bedroom door, shutting it quietly behind him. I finished changing my clothes, then went back to the living room. He was sitting there waiting, and got up, very formal, when he saw me. I said: “Are we ready?” Then I remembered and called Bianca, to tell her I wouldn’t be in. I could have just come late, the meeting with the lawyer wouldn’t run more than an hour I was sure, but with what I had on my mind, an evening of serving drinks was more than I could face. She was upset, but had to say O.K.

Not much was said on the drive over to Marlboro, except for his answers to some of my questions as to who Mr. Eckert was and what I needed to ask him-all I could think of was, would I lose my house, but Tom reminded me that other things had to be asked, like how much time did we have, and actually what would be done, on a “play- by-play basis,” as he put it. “I would think the sheriff figures in it,” he told me, in a hesitant, guarded way, “and we ought to find out first how he goes about it, whatever it is that he does. Could be we have to cooperate-or something.”

I had a sudden vision of walking into a police station and finding Private Church there, suspicious as always and ready to jump on me at the least little sign of anything askew. I took some comfort from the distance between Hyattsville and Marlboro, but not as much as I would have if there had been a county line separating them. I almost said we should turn around and I’d take my chances, losing the house if need be, but by the time I’d reached that point we’d arrived.

Mr. Eckert turned out to be a youngish guy in lounge coat and gray slack pants, who shook hands, looked at me quite sharp, and came around the desk to seat me in a chair beside him. When he’d motioned Tom to a chair facing him, he sat down, and read what it said in the paper, which Tom still had in his hand. “Yes,” he told us, nodding. “I heard about it and heard about the young girl who had no more sense than to go Jim Lacey’s bail-which nobody else would do, considering the guy he was. Jim’s wild, that’s all that can be said- and the kindest thing, I guess, is to leave it at that and get on. Now hold everything while I check on how things stand.”

He picked up his phone and called, then asked: “Sheriff’s office? Dwight Eckert calling-about the Lacey case. Will you put somebody on that’s familiar with it?” Apparently someone came on, a deputy from what Mr. Eckert said, and for a time it was nothing but all sorts of questions, the date of the warrant, what was being done to serve it, the officer in charge of the case, and: “So, what do we think, where is he?”

Then: “Oh, you have no idea at all? But don’t you fellows know Lacey well enough …?”

Pretty soon he hung up, and reported: “They’re on the case, they’ve been given the bench warrant to serve, the one the judge signed this morning, for Lacey’s arrest, and they’ll bring him in when they know where he is. But that’s the catch: They don’t know where he is, and being ‘short-handed,’ as that deputy said, they have no one detailed to find him. Now I’ll leave you to decide if that’s really the reason or if the fact that Lacey was the engineer who worked on building their new station house has anything to do with it. He hung around the station plenty, glad-handing and ingratiating himself as best he could. They all knew him.”

“You don’t mean they’d let him get away?”

Eckert shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe not; maybe they didn’t even like him. Most people who got to know him didn’t. But if they did, and if they’re short-handed anyway, it could be they just wouldn’t choose to put the few men they do have on his case. No one could fault them-you have to remember, it’s not a regular criminal case. Still…” He looked me over in a way that made me feel like I was wearing my work uniform rather than my gray wool suit… “… it wouldn’t surprise me, if a good-looking lady were to go over and talk to whoever’s in charge over there and explain what she had at stake, that might light a fire under them. They’re human too, after all.”

“Thank you, Mr. Eckert. How much am I going to owe you?”

“… For our chat today, nothing. If you want me to stay on the case, put it on my calendar-oh, shall we say two-fifty?”

“Two-fifty’s fine. Thank you.”

I wrote him a check for $250, thanked him again, and led the way out, Tom following. “Which way is this new station house your friend built, if you know?” I asked him.

“Across the street from the courthouse.”

“Then we can walk.”

The sheriff’s office was in a big room off the street, but shutting it off when you went in was an elbow-high counter with desks on the far side, girls seated at some, uniformed men at the others. We leaned on the counter, and Tom rapped with his knuckles. A girl came, and when she heard what case it was, called a deputy in the back of the room. He came, and remembering what Mr. Eckert had said, I put on a bit of an act, playing the poor, upset little girl who’d gotten charmed into putting her property at risk-which wasn’t so far from the truth, of course. “I went bail for a man who has skipped,” I said with my friendliest smile, “and I’ve come to find out what I can do, what the Sheriff can help me to do, to bring him back so I don’t lose my house.”

“… On that,” he said, eyeing me close, “I’d take it very serious.”

“I do take it serious,” I assured him. “If it was your house at risk, I think you’d take it serious too. But you seem to mean more than you’ve said. Give. What’s your name?”

“Harrison.”