The Bar Watcher

by Dorien Grey

  *

  I stepped out of the elevator on O’Banyon’s floor at exactly 4:28. The receptionist smiled and, before I had a chance to announce myself, said “Mr. O’Banyon has been slightly delayed, Mr. Hardesty, but he should be here shortly. May I get you some coffee while you wait?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, and moved to one of the expensive-looking upholstered chairs against the wall, picking up a copy of the latest U.S. News & World Report on the small table beside it.

  At 4:45, the elevator door opened and O’Banyon stepped out, carrying a briefcase and looking every inch the successful attorney he was. He saw me, came over to shake my hand and said, “Just give me a minute, would you, Dick?”

  “Sure,” I said as he went to exchange greetings with the receptionist and then passed through the glass doors and disappeared down the hall toward his office.

  Another ten minutes passed while I paged through the Wall Street Journal looking for the comics’ section. Finally, Donna appeared at the door and invited me to follow her.

  The door to O’Banyon’s office was already open, and Donna just motioned me in. O’Banyon hung up the phone and rose from his chair for another handshake.

  “I apologize, Dick,” he said, and sounded as though he meant it. “When I have to be in court all day, there just isn’t enough time to get much else done.” He gestured me to a seat, then sat himself.

  “Now,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  I leaned forward to hand him the large envelope with my report.

  “Basically,” I said, “everything is in here. I’m not happy with the way things are going…or rather, not going…in regards to getting any real leads on Comstock’s death. But what really bothers me is that I think Barry’s death may have somehow started a chain reaction. As I say in the report, a lot of it is just gut reaction, but…” I proceeded to tell him about Richie Smith’s death and what I suspected may have led directly to it, and about the two queens at Venture and their subsequent deaths.

  “And here’s what I consider the clincher,” I said, and told him about finding the bullet in the shredded tire.

  O’Banyon’s eyebrows raised and he pulled back his head, and stared at me.

  “A bullet!” he said. “You’re sure it was a bullet?”

  “A .22,” I said. “I used to do a lot of target shooting.”

  O’Banyon sat back in his chair, still looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said; “I didn’t mean to doubt you, but this does put a whole new light on things.” He sat quiet for a full minute, apparently lost in thought. “The police will have to know about this,” he said, finally.

  “I know,” I said. “The problem is how to do it without opening up the whole can of worms and telling them everything. If we do that, my involvement in the case will become moot—which is fine if that’s what you think should happen. But I have a deep feeling that something’s been started here that isn’t anywhere near over yet, and if the police take it out of our hands, there’s not much we can do to stop it.”

  I paused to give him a chance to speak, but he remained silent, so I continued.

  “I’d thought about making an anonymous call to the police, but they’d be sure to find out from the yard’s owner that somebody had been nosing around the wreck.”

  We both sat another moment or two in silence, until I had an idea.

  “What about Lieutenant Richman?” I asked. “Could he be brought in somehow? Or do you think he’s too hard-line when it comes to anybody interfering in police business?”

  O’Banyon pursed his lips. “Hmmm,” he said, nodding his head several times, almost imperceptibly. “Richman might be good. I think he could be convinced that we’re not trying to circumvent the police investigation, but to supplement it. And I know he’d be interested in hearing about the McAlester incident. I don’t know if we can avoid telling him everything, but we’ll see. Let me give him a call, and see what develops.”

  It was my turn to nod. “Okay,” I said. “And in the meantime?”

  He sighed. “In the meantime, keep on as you have been. And keep your radar going. I’ll do the same—I tend to hear a lot of different things, and I’ve tended to ignore a lot of them. But now we have something of a filter, and if anything gets caught in it, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  I knew full well, of course, that I’d been specifically hired to track down Comstock’s killer, and that I should concentrate every bit of my effort to that end. But Richie Smith’s death, and the death of the two bitch-queens were, my gut told me, not coincidental to Comstock’s, and while everything I’d tried had led to a dead end with Comstock, these other deaths might offer leads that would lead to the one guy I believed was responsible for them all.

  After leaving O’Banyon’s office, I made a stop at the library to check out last Thursday’s paper to see what it said about the accident in general and the two guys who had gone over the cliff in particular. I found a brief article on page 3, giving the essentials of the accident and listing the names of the two guys who were killed as Timothy Breck, 57, and Matthew Sharp, 59. I wrote their names down on a piece of paper and stuck it in my wallet.

  If their last stop had, indeed, been at the Hilltop, perhaps there might be some sort of clue there. I hadn’t been to the Hilltop in nearly a year—it was a nice place, but a little off the beaten path. I knew the owner casually, but had heard he’d been ill recently and was very seldom actually there—the rumor was that he’d come down with that ‘gay cancer’ people were whispering about. So the person I’d really want to check with would be the bartender on duty the night of the accident. Although I hadn’t a clue who he might be, it occurred to me that Jared might well know, and as soon as I got back to my office I called his apartment and left a message on his machine asking him to give me a call.

  What had been bothering me, in the back of my mind, is how the killer could possibly have known that the queens would be coming down McAlester—it was pretty clear that he’d have to have been somewhere in front of them in order to be able to shoot out the passenger’s side tire. The “couple pops” the kid had heard had undoubtedly been the shot and the tire blowing. I decided it might be a good idea to drive back up McAlester to the Hilltop, and then to follow Cortez along the top of the bluff paralleling McAlester to see where the killer might have been to take the shot.

  This time, I drove up McAlester from Riverside. I pulled off the road onto the narrow shoulder just before the curve with the new guardrail, got out of the car, and looked up at the bluff behind me, trying to see if I could spot where the killer might have been standing. There were one or two places, and making a rough mental approximation of how far they were in relation to the Hilltop, I continued up the bluff to Cortez and turned right.

  There were no houses on the bluff side of Cortez, and when I got close to where I’d estimated the line-of-sight spots were, I parked and walked along the bluff as close to the edge as I could get. Sure enough, there was one little promontory that afforded a perfect straight shot forward and down to the curve below. And it also was in direct line of sight to the Hilltop. The killer could have followed the queens to the club, taken a few minutes to scout out the promontory, and waited there for the queens to leave. If he’d followed them there, he’d have known what car they were driving.

  I spent a few minutes searching the ground for an empty .22 casing, but with no luck. It was quite probable that if the shooter were standing close enough to the edge, the casing had likely gone over the edge of the bluff as it was being ejected from the rifle—and I assumed it was a rifle, since it’s hard to sight a pistol at that distance. But at least I was pretty confident in the scenario.

  *

  I got home a little after five, and was just fixing my evening Manhattan when the phone rang. As always, I picked up on the second ring.

  “Dick Hardesty.”

  “Hi, Dick;” Jared said, “Got your message. What’s going on?”

 
; “Hard to say,” I said, honestly. “But I was wondering…you deliver to the Hilltop, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I was wondering if you might know the bartenders—especially who might have been on duty last Wednesday night.”

  He was silent a moment, then said: “Yeah, there’s Mike and Tony and Irv, but he’s only on weekends.”

  “Would you have any idea who might have been on last Wednesday night, then?”

  “Tony,” he said without hesitation.

  “Boy, you do keep a close eye on everything, don’t you?” I said, admiringly. “You know all the bartenders and their schedules?”

  “Well, not quite,” Jared said, “but in this case I know for sure—I was there. Tony and I had a….well, let’s call it a sort of date… Wednesday night after he got off work.”

  “Aha!” I said, picturing a faceless Tony getting royally plowed by Jared. “What time did you get there, do you remember?”

  He thought a moment then said, “Must have been around eleven, I’d guess. I had class Wednesday night till nine, and I had Thursday off from work—otherwise I’d never have gone out.”

  I took a sip from my drink—not enough vermouth—before saying, “Do you remember hearing about the two guys who went over the bluff on McAlester Wednesday night? It happened just around midnight, and they were probably coming down from the Hilltop.”

  “Shit, of course!” Jared said, and I could almost see him slapping his forehead. “I never put two and two together. How fucking stupid! It was those two creeps, I’ll bet. They were an accident just waiting to happen.”

  “What do you remember about them?” I asked, stretching the phone cord to reach the vermouth.

  “I was standing back by the door,” Jared said, “watching some guys play pool, when these two came in. They looked pretty well sloshed already, and they went up to the bar and ordered drinks. While I was too far away to hear everything they said, I could tell they were being pretty loud and obnoxious.

  “When they ordered another drink, Tony cut them off and told them to go home, and they really threw a fit.” He paused. “Do you know Tony?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, Tony’s a great guy, and pretty damned hot, but he was in a motorcycle accident a couple years ago, and got his face smashed up pretty bad. He’s had a lot of surgeries on it, and they’ve done a great job, but he still has a really deep scar from his left eye down to his jaw, and he’s pretty sensitive about it, though he pretends not to be.

  “Anyway, when Tony cut them off, they got all indignant, and the whole place sort of quieted down. One of them said ‘Well, who needs a dump like this anyway? We can go down to the Troc where they appreciate our business.’”

  The Troc’s a sleazy beer bar on Riverside, about six blocks from McAlester.

  “They got up and started for the door, and Tony called out to them ‘Hey, guys, don’t take McAlester down, okay?’ They were just about to the door, and the one turns around and says ‘Yeah, thanks for the tip, Scarface.’”

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “Yeah, Jesus is right,” Jared said. “If I hadn’t had the pool table between me and them I’d have made them wish they were dead! But they did it for themselves, I guess.”

  “Well,” I said. “I wouldn’t bet that they might not have had a little help. I have strong reason to suspect their deaths were about as ‘accidental’ as Richie Smith’s.”

  “No shit?” Jared said. “You think somebody’s out knocking off bastards? Good for them! Oh, and speaking of rotten bastards, did you see this week’s issue of Rainbow Flag? Just came out today?”

  “Not yet,” I said, pouring a little more vermouth into my Manhattan. “Why?” I took another sip. Better.

  “You know Carlo D’Allesandro, the fashion photographer?”

  “Ah, his Gay Royal Highness,” I said. “Yes. Another charter member of the Bastards Club. What did he do now?”

  “He fired his top model—John…Peterson, I think his name is. I made it with him one time at Rage.”

  “Is there anybody in this town you haven’t made it with?” I asked, realizing that my envy made it only half-kidding. “That guy is too beautiful to be real. But I hear he just got out of the hospital. What a lousy time to get fired, but it sounds like typical D’Allesandro to me.”

  Carlo D’Allesandro was yet another of those arrogant pricks who assume fame freed him from any laws of common civility.

  “Well, he outdid himself on this one. You’ve heard about this gay cancer people are talking about?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but only rumors. I find it pretty hard to believe, to be honest with you. Is that why Peterson was in the hospital?”

  “So I’ve heard,” Jared said. “And I’m not too sure it’s just a rumor. Pretty fucking scary, if you ask me. Anyway, D’Allesandro is doing this big fashion shoot—had several magazine fashion editors on the set—and John Peterson comes in to get dressed for the shoot, and D’Allesandro says ‘Go away. You’re fired.’ He could have fired the guy in private, of course, but that’s not his style. When a couple of the reporters asked him what was going on, D’Allesandro says…here, I’ve got the article; I’ll read it to you…

  “‘My models epitomize beauty, vitality, and health. I’ve recently been told that John has gay cancer and is going to die. I do not use dying models.’ Can you believe that? Can you actually believe that?” Jared’s voice echoed his incredulity.

  No, I couldn’t. I stood there, my drink suspended halfway to my mouth.

  “It’s a joke, right?” I said after a long pause.

  “No joke,” Jared said. “And again, if you’re right about these other guys….”

  I had a very strange, but by now all too familiar, feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Jared,” I said, “I think I’d better make a phone call—now.”

  “Sure. And let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “You’ve already been a real godsend,” I said—and meant it. “Talk to you later.”

  *

  The minute I hung up the phone I called Glen O’Banyon’s office, hoping against hope someone might be there at that hour. I got a machine. Damn! And of course O’Banyon wasn’t listed, and I didn’t have his home number! Damn again!

  I do not like being totally confused and frustrated, but I was totally both. I frantically reviewed my options; there weren’t many. Having no way to contact O’Banyon, the only other thing that entered my mind was to call Lieutenant Richman and warn him that D’Allesandro might be in danger.

  The operative word there was might. I had no solid proof he actually was in danger—hell, I had no solid proof of anything except that four men were dead. What could I possibly say to him? There was nothing tangible that I could offer—just theories and hunches. Even the causes of death were different in each incident. Comstock stabbed, no doubt about murder there; Richie asphyxiated—with nothing but a hunch that it wasn’t accidental. The two drunk queens? A freak accident; some kid shooting off a rifle somewhere. The whole thing would involve a whole lot more explaining than I cared to—or probably even could—do.

  And, everything else aside, I was still on O’Banyon’s dime. Unless I could go to Richman with something other than hunches and conjecture, I really couldn’t justify it without checking with O’Banyon first.

  Shit, Hardesty!

  In addition to feeling helpless and frustrated, I was thoroughly pissed at myself. So I decided just to wait until morning and catch O’Banyon whenever and however I could.

  I made dinner then plunked myself down in front of the TV for another exciting evening at home. By ten, I was ready for bed and got out of my chair to turn the TV off just as the local news was coming on. The opening shot of the newscast was of the anchorman sitting somberly at his desk in front of a large full-background photo of someone I recognized immediately, even before the anchor opened his mo
uth to say, “Tonight’s top story concerns the shooting death earlier this evening of famed fashion photographer Carlo D’Allesandro….”

  Chapter 6

  The morning news and the local morning papers centered on the D’Allesandro shooting, of course. Apparently, he had been shot on the front steps of his mansion at around eight o’clock as he was leaving for some social function. His male “personal assistant” (uh-huh) had gone to bring the car around and heard a single shot as he entered the garage. He’d run immediately to the front of the house to find D’Allesandro dead, but had seen no one, although attempted robbery was not ruled out as a motive.

  Just as I was unlocking the door to my office, the phone began to ring. I ran across the room and picked it up on the third one.

  “Hardesty Investigations.”

  “Dick, this is Glen O’Banyon. I wonder if you might be able to join me for a quick lunch today? I’ve got to be in court in a few minutes, but if you could meet me at Etheridge’s around twelve-fifteen, we can talk.”

  From the background noises, he apparently was calling from a pay phone and didn’t want to go into specifics over the phone, but I had little doubt as to the purpose of the call.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Just ask them for my usual table. And please excuse me if I’m a few minutes late.”

  “No problem, I’ll see you there.”

  *

  Etheridge’s is sort of a local landmark. Located directly across the street from the City Building, it’s a combination of a very upscale coffee shop (no counter) and a limited-hours restaurant, in that it serves a complete and elaborate lunch menu but closes at 6:00. It caters almost exclusively to workers from the City Building, including the lawyers, judges, and staffers from the various courts.

  I got there about fifteen minutes early and killed some time walking up one side of the block and down the other, sending out little mental sonar waves…and picking up some decided blips from interesting-looking business types coming and going from the City Building.