Friday afternoon’s lunch had been typically hectic.
Our regulars had arrived early, shuffling in and nodding hello with pleading doe eyes while I hurriedly sliced fruit and tossed bleach tablets into the rinse sink. The patrons were eager to start their weekend binges. Darnell’s Fish Platter, a house favorite, began to get a lot of action, and at one point he was sliding the plates onto the platform of the reach-through faster than I could serve them. Ramon was lurking around somewhere, but, having blown a stick of sensimillion in the basement just before opening time, he was virtually useless.
That, however, had been the easy part of my day. When the rush ended I was left to baby-sit those few drinkers who had decided, as early as their first beer, not to return to work. Today this group of geniuses included Happy, who in his perfect world would someday be buried with one hand rigor mortised into a glass-holding C, the other in a horizontal victory sign, the fingers spread just wide enough to accommodate a Chesterfield; Buddy and Bubba, today arguing about boxing (confusing it with bullying) and splitting a pitcher with such intense closeness that they appeared to be joined at the hip; an alcoholic Dutch secretary named Petra for whom we exclusively stocked Geneve, a syrupy gin that was rumored to have the power to induce hallucinations; and, least tolerable of all, a fat federal judge by the name of Len.
The fact that Len Dorfman was a federal judge is a point worth mentioning only in relation to his repulsive personality. Len would swagger in after a tough morning on the bench, announce to our deaf ears that he had just “worked out” at the gym (I would wager any amount that he could not, if a gun were to be placed in his mouth, execute one sit-up), and order a Grand Marnier because, he claimed, he had “earned” it. After one snifter he would check over the clientele and begin to brag about all the “savages” he had put away that morning, adding with bluster that he had “thrown away the key.” Then, like some third-rate Don Rickles (“Hey, if we can’t make fun of ourselves, who can we make fun of?”), he would launch into his “I’m a cheap Jew” routine, a tired shtick that had everyone at the bar staring into their drinks in embarrassment. The fact that Len himself was Jewish made it, contrary to his belief, no less offensive. Finally, after his third round, he would begin to trash gays with a lispy, plump-mouthed imitation so filled with vicious self-hatred that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Len was a man who had, on several occasions and probably in some bathroom stall in our very hallowed halls of justice, fallen to his soft knees and, with a fervor equal in enthusiasm to his flamboyant bar soliloquies, sucked cock.
He was doing that imitation when Dan Boyle walked into the bar. Boyle hated Dorfman, not for his ignorant slurs (they shared roughly the same prejudices) but for what he perceived to be Len’s soft stance on criminals. Dorfman knew it and consequently settled up quietly and exited the Spot. The customers, even Happy, gave Boyle a round of applause.
I did my part and had a mug of draught in front of Boyle before his ass spread over the wood of his barstool. His eyes traveled up and lit on the stack of shot glasses. I separated the top one from the stack and set it next to his mug. Then I poured two inches of Jack Daniels into the glass.
“This one’s on the house.”
“You’re the greatest,” Boyle said.
“You Irish boys get so sentimental about your bartenders.”
“Leave me alone. It’s been a bad fuckin’ day.”
“Out on those mean streets, you mean?”
“Go ahead and laugh. After you walk a mile in my shoes.”
“ ‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’?” I said. “Joe South, nineteen-sixty-nine.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.”
I heard a sharp whistle and turned. Petra had done the whistling and now she was, with a perfectly angelic smile and the middle finger of her left hand pointed straight at the ceiling, flipping me off. Though she surely knew the meaning of that most universal symbol, some joker had convinced her one night that, in Washington’s bars, this was also an accepted method of ordering a quick drink.
Boyle said, “I think that Dutch broad needs another hit.”
I poured her a short one and while I was on that end drew a fresh pitcher for Buddy and Bubba. Buddy wht=bba. Buas a sawed-off little guy, and even while sitting straight, his wide shoulders barely cleared the lip of the bar. Now he was slouched and his blond head seemed to be sprouting directly up out of the mahogany. I placed the pitcher in front of that head. He nodded and then growled.
I changed all the full ashtrays into empties and moved back down to Boyle. He had taken off his overcoat and beneath that was wearing an old tweed with suede patches sewn on the elbows. As he turned to fold his coat on the adjacent barstool, I could see the bulge of his Colt Python protruding from the small of his back. I slid him another mugful of draught and washed out the empty in the soap sink.
“I checked into that thing for you,” Boyle said.
“William Henry?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing, really. No new leads, not since the initial investigation.”
“What do you think?” I said.
Boyle had a long drink from his mug, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sport coat. “It’s not in my jurisdiction,” he said. “I only looked at the jacket last night.”
“At a glance, then.”
“At a glance? Your friend probably knew his attacker. There weren’t any signs of forced entry. He had solid dead bolts on the door and an auxiliary lock; none of the jams were splintered. The ME’s report said he was stabbed over twenty times with a serrated knife, like the kind your buddy Darnell uses in his kitchen. Henry was probably dead or in shock before the guy was finished knifing him.”
“What does all that mean?”
“It could mean a lot of things. The intent was clear-he didn’t want to wound Henry, he wanted him dead. It could have been a drug deal gone bad. Or it was a crime of passion. You know, a homo burn.”
“A homo burn?” I frowned. “Come on, Boyle, what the hell is that?”
“We explore every possibility, Nick. That building he lived in, it had a history of homosexual tenants.”
I sighed and drummed my fingers on the bar. “Keep going.”
Boyle pointed to his empty shot glass. I reached behind me to the second row of call, grabbed the black-labeled bottle of Jack, and poured him some sour mash. He sipped it, chased it with some draught. “The main point I got out of the report, the angle I’d go for if I was looking into it, was how he got past the security guard in the lobby.” Boyle winked. “That’s, like I say, if I was going to look into it.”
“What was the security guard’s name, Boyle? The one that was on duty.”
“I’ll deny this if it ever gets out.” I nodded and looked around the bar. Our regulars were drinking peacefully. A couple of them had solemnly closed their eyes and were mouthing tht=e mouthhe words to Joe Jackson’s version of “What’s the Use of Getting Sober? (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)” as it came through the speakers. Boyle said, “James Thomas.”
I wrote down the name and said, “Any progress on the case?”
Boyle snorted and closed his eyes slowly as he sipped from the shot glass he held in his thick hand. When he was finished he put the glass down. “A case gets cold after a few days, Nick. And there’s always something else. Right now we’ve got hookers gettin’ whacked down in the Midnight Zone. Detectives working double shifts.” Boyle drained half of what was left in the mug. “The thing you got to remember is, almost one out of two homicides in the District go unsolved. Pretty good odds for the bad guys, huh? You kill someone in this town, you got a fifty percent shot at getting away with it.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re never going to find that boy’s killer, Nick. That’s a fuckin’ bet.”
“Thanks for the information.”
Boyle leaned in and stared hard. He was attempting to focus his jittery pale blue eyes on mine. “If you need anything else, partner, you let me know.”
“I will. In the meantime, I gotta be getting out of here.” I wiped the area in front of him with my bar rag. “Believe it or not, I’ve got a date.”
“I remember those days,” Boyle said. “Dates. Now all’s I got is rotten screaming kids.”
“There’s a solution to that.”
“What would that be?” he said.
“Take ’em out in the street,” I said, “and shoot ’em in the head. Public fuckin’ executions.”
On the way home I stopped and picked up my package at the office of my answering service on Georgia Avenue. After that I headed west a few blocks and parked the Dodge in front of my apartment. The afternoon sun had taken care of most of the snow. What was left was gray now and in mounds near the curb. My cat ran out as I stepped along the walk. She rolled onto her back and let me scratch her stomach. As I did this her left rear paw boxed the air convulsively. When her paw stopped moving I tickled the scar tissue where her right eye had been, then entered my place.
I changed into sweat clothes while the water boiled. Then I made coffee and took the coffee and my package to a small desk I had set up in my bedroom. I opened the package and spread its contents out on the oak top.
Billy Goodrich had organized his wife’s file with all the efficiency and warmth of a client’s prospectus. There was a cover letter and a photograph that appeared to have been professionally taken. I tacked that one to the bulletin board that hung over my desk. I glanced over the rest of the material-family and medical history, doctors, a resume-and placed it back in the package.
After that I drove west and met Rodney White at a junior high gymnasium in uppens. sium inr Northwest. I did ten sets of abs and several sets of lat and tricep push-ups, then jumped rope while he taught his class. When he had dismissed his students we put on our sparring equipment and went to it.
“Move to the side, Home,” Rodney said after I had taken a particularly vicious flurry of punches and squared off in front of him. “Just slide over, man, then make your move.” He demonstrated, suddenly springing to the left, throwing mock jabs to my kidneys. I was facing away from him.
“What about doing that Hemingway thing, standing in there, going toe-to-toe?”
“Only in gladiator movies, Nick.”
We sparred for another fifteen minutes, until my hands became too heavy to hold up in front of my face. Rodney White removed his mouthpiece and rubbed it dry on the arm of his gi.
“All right, that ought to do you for tonight.” He pulled a towel from his bag and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Say,” he said. “Been a while since you’ve been in to see me, for a checkup.”
I pulled out my own mouthpiece. A string of bloody saliva ran from the side of it and clung to my mouth. “A checkup?” I said, fighting for some air. “Doctor, I believe I could use one. Right about now.”
A half hour later I was back in my apartment. I threw my wet clothes into the hamper, showered, shaved, dressed in a rented monkey suit, and fed and watered the cat. I got into my black forty-dollar Robert Hall overcoat and slipped a fresh deck of Camels into its breast pocket. Then I locked my apartment, ignitioned my Dodge Dart, and went to pick up Jackie.
Jackie Kahn lived in a two-bedroom condo with her lover, a woman named Sherron, in a three-story building on the edge of Kalorama. The D.C. guidebooks all claim that Kalorama means “beautiful view,” from the Greek kalo. Not to split hairs, but kalo is actually the Greek word for “good.” The word for beautiful is, phonetically, orayo, but I would never lobby for the change-Orayorama sounds a little like the gimmick for a fifties horror movie.
Jackie’s building was an elaborate Grecian knockoff with egg-and-tongue molding that ran below the roofline, with an urn pediment centered above the stone portico. It was quite regal, and I supposed she was paying for it. I entered an unlocked set of glass doors and pushed her buzzer. After the usual formalities I made it through the second set of doors and took the gated, open lift to her floor.
Sherron opened the door on my first knock. She was wearing winter white pleated slacks and a black sweater with black buttons sewn along the top of the shoulder. On the front of the sweater hung a necklace of spheres that may or may not have been made of gold and that grew progressively larger as they converged at the center. She was taller than me and had wonderfully long legs, and in total she had the build of a Thoroughbred. I had seen reasonably intelligent men commit public stupidities in her presence.
“Can Jackie come out and play?”
“Come on in,” she said in an accent laced with Puerto Rican.
“Thanks.” I kissed her hello and caught the edge of her ripe mouth. She frowned and led me through a marble foyer to an airy living room painted primarily in lavender. There was a fire burning in a marble-manteled fireplace that was centered in the west wall.
“You look different dressed up,” she said, her idea of a compliment. “Have a seat and I’ll fix you a drink. Jackie will be out in a few minutes.”
“Bourbon rocks,” I said. Sherron left the room, and I watched her do it. After a few minutes she came back in and placed a tumbler filled with bourbon whiskey and cubes on a cork coaster edged with a silver ring. I had a long pull, tasted Wild Turkey, and set the glass back down on the tumbler. Sherron had a seat on the divan against the wall across from my chair. She looked me over as if I were a marked-down dress, then crossed one lovely leg over the other.
“So,” she said. “Been peeping in any windows lately?”
“It’s very pane-full.” I drew out the last word so she could get it, but humor wasn’t her shtick. In fact I had never seen her smile. I lit a cigarette because I knew she didn’t like it and childishly bounced the match off the side of the crystal ashtray that was next to the coaster. Some smoke drifted her way and she made a small wave of her long, thin hand, like she was shaking off a bug. Mercifully, that was when Jackie walked into the room.
She was wearing an above-the-knee black evening dress with multicolored Mylar buttons down the front and gold piping around the neckline. Above the curve of the neckline was the top of her firm cleavage, the ridge of her sternum, and the tightly muscled traps of her shoulders. She had on patterned black stockings, and on the ends of those stockings were medium-heeled black pumps. There was a black patent leather belt that was tight enough to showcase her thin waist and the curve of her hips. Her black hair was swept up on one side and held in place by a thin diamond barrette. I thought I could see a bit of the flames from the fireplace reflecting off her bright brown eyes.
“How do I look?” she asked.
Sherron said, “Hot.”
I said, “I’ll say.”
Sherron ignored that, and I finished the rest of my drink while they kissed. Sherron helped Jackie on with her cashmere coat, smoothed the front it, and walked us to the door. We said our tearful good-byes and then Jackie and I were alone and out in the hall. We walked to the elevator, called for it, and waited.
“You do look good,” I said.
“So do you,” she said. “You clean up very nicely.”
“I don’t think Sherron likes me too much.”
“She’s really nice, Nick. But you can lay on that Peck’s Bad Boy act a little thick. And she’s probably a little jealous. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Yep.”
The elevator arrived and we got into it. I closed the accordion gate and through it watched the marble staircase as it appeared to rise while we descended through its center.
“I used to love these things when I was a kid. The old Dupont Building, where Connecticut and Nineteenth meet at the Circle, had a gated elevator and a uniformed operator to go with it.”
“Me too,” she said. “I think this elevator was what closed the deal for me on this place.”
“So who am I supposed to be tonight?”
“Anyone you want. Let ’em guess. These company Christmas parties get pretty rowdy, and I figured I could use an escort.”
“Rowdy accountants?”
“Yeah. Once a year they’re expected to cut loose.”
“Sounds like my meat,” I said.
“Do me a favor, Nick. Don’t be an asshole.”
The party was in the penthouse of a new office building on the east edge of Alexandria and on the river, past National and just past Dangerfield Island. We parked Jackie’s Subaru in the garage and, with a couple of foxy receptionists who had arrived at the same time, took the elevator up as far as it would go.
A mustachioed young man tediously took our coats when we stepped off the elevator. I retrieved my cigarettes and switched them to my jacket pocket, and we entered the party room. It was situated on the northeast corner of the building, and two of the walls were thick glass. The north view stretched past the lights of National to the Mall and the major monuments. The east view shot over Goose Island in the Potomac to Bolling Air Force Base and then into Anacostia and P.G. County.
The floor was shiny and veined to approximate black marble. There were several freestanding Corinthian columns scattered about the room that looked to be made of papier-mache, their shafts painted a poinsettia red. Thick green ribbons were tied and bowed around the columns that I assumed had been rented for the affair. A swing combo situated on a narrow balcony was playing jazzy Christmas standards. The violinist had Stephane Grappelli’s style and tone down perfectly.
The room was already crowded and predominantly suited in black. Many of the men sported red bow ties with their tuxes, and most of the women were also in black, though there were a few seasonal reds and, at a glance, one blonde squeezed into gold lame. I took Jackie’s order and made a beeline for the bar.
The bar was set up in the left rear corner. As I approached it I saw the offerings grouped on the white-clothed table. The bottle with the familiar orange label, the gold lettering THE HEAD OF THE BOURBON FAMILY, and the gold oval-framed granite bust in the center that had a fitting resemblance to both LBJ and Buddy Ebsen was right out front, in all its eighty-six-proof Kentucky glory. I stood behind the other kids in line and waited my turn.
“Yes, sir?” asked a built brunesti built t as I stepped up to the table. She had on a tuxedo shirt and a turquoise tie that was close to the color of the lenses in her wicked eyes.
“A vodka tonic, please. And an Old Grand-Dad, rocks.”
She marked me with one long motherly look and poured our drinks. There was a pitcher set next to the bottles that was half filled with one dollar bills, probably her own. Good bartenders always place a tip receptacle on the bar and start it off with their own money. Wish fulfillment. I put two of mine in the pitcher, she thanked me with a wink, and I rejoined Jackie.
Jackie was with a tall man, and they were laughing about something as I handed over her drink. He was close to my age and his face was boyish, but his hair was steel gray. Two pieces of it, like the tines of a grilling fork, had fallen over his forehead, giving him the reckless look of, say, a young millionaire who raced cars.
“Nicky, this is John Wattersly. John, my friend Nick Stefanos.”
We sized each other up and shook hands. “Good to meet you, Nick,” he said in a smooth baritone.
“Same here.”
“John’s a senior,” Jackie offered.
“Really,” I said. “When do you graduate?”
Wattersly laughed and then showed me a warm smile that had probably opened plenty of doors for him during his climb. He seemed intelligent but not arrogant, and I sort of liked him, but he was certainly turning that smile in Jackie’s direction an awful lot.
Jackie said, “I meant he’s a senior manager. He’s on his way to partner.”
“I knew that, sweetheart,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek as I squeezed her arm. Mine was now around her shoulder.
The next time Wattersly turned his head, Jackie ground the stiletto heel of her pump into the toe area of my shoe. The pain ricocheted off my Achilles tendon, sped up my calf, and watered my eyes. By the time Wattersly faced me again I had released Jackie and was wiping my face with a handkerchief.
“What do you do, Nick?” he said.
“International finance,” I said.
“Interesting work. Who are you with?”
“Fitzgerald and O’Malley,” I said, digging my grave as I pulled two names out of the air and stared at my shoes. “Gold bars, bullion, currency exchange.” I winked. “That sort of thing.”
I gulped half my drink as Wattersly winked back.
The evening continued to degenerate along those lines, but happily I was not alone. These accountants and their dates were certainly not averse to having a good time. Someone pulled the plug on the Christmas combo early on, and a boom box was set up, and everything from Motown to Springsteen to Depeche Mode began to turn the place on. There were also several art director types flitting abuee flittiout who, I was later informed, were members of the firm’s in-house advertising department. Their leader was a popinjay who had grown his hair in front of his face precisely so that he could shake it out of that smug face with a casual toss of his head; he was running about the room taking clever Polaroids of the accountants whom he obviously thought he was so far above. After my fourth trip to the bar, I decided that it was a wonderful party and these were all very nice people and I was perhaps the wittiest individual in the room.
My responses to that ice-breaking question “What do you do?” began to range from the unlikely to the absurd. To Jackie’s boss I was a university professor who was teaching a course this semester entitled Existentialism and Top 40. I explained that the course placed a special emphasis on the works of Neil Diamond (just “Neil!” to his legion of fans) and to his perplexed expression contended that “I Am… I Said” was one of the most deceptively simple yet brilliant songs of the last twenty years. To another executive I made the ridiculous claim to being the sole heir to the WHAM-O fortune. And to shut down a guy who would not stop talking to me about his son’s high school football program, I proudly proclaimed, with a subtle flutter of my eyes, that I was studying to be a male nurse, explaining that I had chosen the profession “for the uniforms.”
Late in the evening I followed the stunning blonde in the gold lame dress to an area near the glass wall. One of my new accountant buddies had explained, with a remorseful shrug, that she was “with” one of the senior partners, a fact that may have frightened off most of the martinets in attendance but at this point did not affect me. When she was alone I touched her on the arm and she turned.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” she said evenly, with the weary resistance born in beauties like her. Her push-up bra had set her lightly freckled, perfectly rounded breasts to a point where they touched and hung like trophies on the edge of her low-cut gown. She had a mane of wheat hair and a black mole above her arched lip. In the midsixties I had experienced one of my first erections while admiring such a mole on Anne Francis’s lip during an episode of “Honey West,” though at the time I did not even possess the beneficial knowledge of self-relief.
“I’m not an accountant,” I said, and hit my bourbon. By now I had forgone the ice, which was taking up far too much room in the glass.
“Really,” she declared aridly. “What are you, then?”
“A mole,” I said, still watching her lip. “I mean, as in spy. I was sent by an industrial espionage firm to infiltrate this party.”
She caught the reptilian gleam of my eye. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, without the barest trace of levity, “unless you are a mole who happens to be very, very wealthy.” Then she walked to the glass and turned her back to me, sipping her drink as she took in the view.
I was studying the arrogant little ball of her calf and the manner in which her dress was painted onto her luscious championship ass when Jackie walked over and stood by my side. Thankfully she was smiling.
“What’s slithering around in that mind of yours right now?” she asked.
“The truth?” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“I was thinking how, right now, I’d like to see her place her palms on that glass and lean over just a bit. How I’d lift up that dress, lift it with my forearms as my hands slid up the back of those tanned thighs. How I’d pull down those sweet panties, put one of my hands on the glass for support, and the other on her fine ass. How I’d enter that moist mound, not too gently mind you, hard enough to see her bite down on her lip and shut her eyes, shut her eyes slowly and peacefully like some Disney deer.” I gulped some bourbon, rocked back on my heels, and exhaled. “So, in answer to your question, I was just thinking what I’d do with that if I had the chance. What were you thinking?”
“Same thing, brother,” Jackie said with a low, sinister chuckle. “Different method.”
On the way home Jackie and I stopped at Rio Loco’s, a neighborhood Tex-Mex bar at Sixteenth and U and found a couple of stools in the back near the juke. Lou Reed’s “Vicious” was just ending. Our blue-jeaned waitress set down a juice glass that contained two inches of Grand-Dad, and a mug of coffee for Jackie. We tapped receptacles and sipped our respective poisons.
“You mad at me?” I asked.
“Uh-uh. You were a hit tonight. A bunch of my friends asked me about you.”
“Sorry about the kiss. The weird thing was, when Smiley was coming on to you, I was jealous.”
“You’re loaded,” she said flatly. “So don’t start analyzing things, not tonight.”
“Right.” I winked and had another taste. The juke was now playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“There must be something missing in your life,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I mean there must be a reason why you drink like you do.”
“Christ, Jackie, not now. There’s work time and there’s drinking time.” I raised my glass. “Okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry. But I want to talk to you about something, something really important.”
“Sure,” I said, and put a cigarette in my mouth. Jackie lit a match, and I pulled her hand in until the flame touched the tobacco. I blew the match out with my exhale. “Let’s talk.”
“Not tonight. It’s too important, like I said. I want your head to be clear when we discuss it.”
“When, then?”
“You free for dinner Sunday night?”
“I guess so.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”
I kissed Jackie good night and climbed into my icy Dart. It started after a few attempts and I pointed it northwest. There wasn’t much action on the streets except for other drunks and cops too warm in their cars to bother. I parked in front of Lee’s apartment building and listened to “Cemetry Gates” on the radio until it was finished. Then I ran across the hard frozen ground to her stairwell and rang her buzzer.
After what seemed like a very long while her door opened. She was wearing a brown-and-green flannel shirt and, from what I could tell, little else. She began to shiver as soon as the door was open. I had woken her up and she wasn’t smiling. Her very green eyes had picked up the green off the shirt.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” My tongue was thick and I was leaning on the door frame for support.
“It’s late, Nick. I’ve got a final tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, Lee.” I smiled hopelessly and felt my upper lip stick clumsily to my front teeth. “I thought…”
“I know what you thought,” she said in a low voice that began to build. “There’s lipstick on your cheek, hard liquor on your breath, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and you’ve got a hard-on. You thought you’d slide on in here and relieve yourself, that’s what you thought. Well, think about this. You mean something to me, Nick, in a strange way, but the next time you disrespect me like this, it’s going to be the last time. Understand?”
Before I could tell her that I certainly did, the door was closing with a thudding finality. I stared at it for a minute and then walked back to my car. I drove around the corner to May’s on Wisconsin where my bookie friend Steve Maroulis let me in the bar entrance. We had a nightcap together under the cruel lights of last call. I asked him a couple of questions about local gambling and wrote down the answers so I wouldn’t have to ask him again. I think I downed another drink while he closed up and did the paperwork. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I awoke fully clothed on a made bed, that I realized I had driven myself home.