Robert B Parker - Spenser 23 - Chance

by Chance(lit)

  Shirley nodded. It didn't seem to make us closer. I drank another small swallow of wine.

  "You and Anthony ever have any, ah, little spats?"

  "Never, I told you before, he'd stand on his head for me."

  I nodded. She drank the rest of the wine in her glass and reached around to the ice bucket and poured out the remainder of the first bottle.

  "Well sure, I know a woman who'd stand on her head for me, unless she was wearing a skirt. But now and then we might disagree about something."

  Shirley laughed loudly. Her face was flushed.

  "I bet she wouldn't," Shirley said between guffaws, "if she was wearing a dress. I bet she wouldn't."

  She laughed very loudly again.

  "Well, luckily, Anthony doesn't wear a skirt," she said.

  "So he can stand on his head whenever he wants."

  "When he stands on his head, do you forgive him?"

  She was still giggling.

  "Depends how long he stands." She had trouble saying it because she was giggling so hard.

  I laughed along with her. She tried to get it under control by having some more wine, but it only made her more giggly.

  "What's the longest you ever made him stand on his head?" I said. Jovial.

  "Well, of course he never really stood on his head. But there was the time when I found out about him and the cocktail waitress at The Starlight," she said.

  Her face was bright red now, and she spilled a little of her wine as she drank.

  "He paid big for that one," she said.

  "He paid for that big time."

  "I'll bet he did," I said, bursting with mirth.

  "I'll bet he never tried that again."

  "You kidding?" she said, leaning forward toward me over the table.

  "Little fink would fuck a snake, you hold it for him."

  "Really?" I said.

  "I'm telling you," she said.

  "How you feel about that?"

  "I won't hold one for him," she said. And leaned back in her chair and laughed hard. I had a bite of chicken and glanced around the room. The chic lunch crowd was grimly ignoring her.

  "You ever catch him with anyone else?" I said.

  "Naw. That time I caught him I laid down the goddamned law.

  He's too scared to try and step out on me," she said.

  "Your father know about this?"

  "Gawd no," she said.

  "That's what I told Anthony.

  "I tell Daddy about this," I told him, 'and he'll have them cut off your balls."" I nodded.

  "That would be discouraging," I said.

  She giggled again.

  "

  "Course I wouldn't really want them to snip off his balls, you know. Wouldn't be in my best interest, you know what I mean.

  Little bastard is something in bed, I'll tell you."

  "I'm glad to hear it," I said.

  Shirley stood up quite suddenly.

  "Scuse me," she said.

  "I gotta go to the little girls' room."

  I stood, ever gallant, and watched her as she wove among the tables, showing too much of her chunky legs, looking sadly vulnerable with the little dress draped badly over her big butt. People stared at her as she wobbled among the tables. Not our kind.

  I sat down and looked at nothing much. Shirley had eaten half her salad and none of her chicken. But the second bottle of wine was nearly empty. I caught a couple of people peeking over at me, wondering who would be lunching with her! I'd have to come here with Susan and try to recoup. The long dining room was impressive. Along the front, picture windows looked out onto Huntington Ave." and across at the Prudential Center. The bar was across the far end of the room, and the ceiling was two stories high. The

  kitchen was, apparently, at the top of a flight of stairs to the right of the hostess station, which must have been an added benefit for the wait staff. Earn a living while developing the quadriceps of a long jumper.

  The maitre d' came to my table. His brass name tag said Jose.

  "Excuse me," Jose said. He spoke with the silken hint of an accent.

  "I'm afraid your companion has had a small accident in the ladies' room."

  "She pass out?" I said.

  "I'm afraid she has, sir," Jose said.

  "But unfortunately not before she was sick."

  "Okay, Jose," I said.

  "Keep the other ladies out of there for a couple minutes and we'll get her out."

  "Jose," the maitre d' said.

  "I'm Brazilian. In Portuguese you pronounce the J."

  "Jcs," I said, and went to the front door of the restaurant and gestured at her driver. Jackie was more alert than I had thought.

  He came rolling out of the car very quickly, with his hand inside his coat. He was a tall rangy kid, with a lot of black hair cut short on the sides, left long on the top.

  "She passed out in the ladies' room," I said.

  He took his hand out of his coat.

  "You give her something to drink?"

  "Some wine," I said.

  Jackie nodded.

  "Probably two bottles, right?"

  I nodded.

  "Which way?" Jackie said.

  We went into the ladies' room and found Shirley asleep on the floor in one of the stalls, her cheek resting on the toilet seat, her white thighs exposed by the skirt that had hiked up above her hips. She looked like a clumsy little girl who'd eaten too much Halloween candy. I wanted to put my coat over her, or something.

  "Goddamn it," I said.

  Jackie pushed past me. He straddled her, got his arms around her waist, and hoisted her up.

  She mumbled something that sounded like "hey."

  Jackie turned her toward the sink.

  "Clean her off," he said to me.

  I wet one of the hand towels and did the best I could. She wasn't cooperative but she was too zonked to put up much resistance. I used a second towel to finish the cleanup and a third to dry her off.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Want me to take an arm?"

  Jackie shook his head.

  "Easier I just do her around the waist like this. You can go ahead and open doors."

  "Done this before, I gather."

  Jackie didn't say anything but he let his eyes roll upwards in their sockets for a moment. We got her through the restaurant, out the door, and into her father's car. She slumped over when Jackie put her in the backseat. He went around to the front, got in behind the wheel, nodded at me, power-locked the doors, and drove her away.

  I went back in to pay the check.

  "I hope the lady is all right, sir," Jose said.

  I gave him my American Express card.

  "I don't think she'll ever be all right," I said.

  "But she'll be no worse for this experience."

  Jose went away with my card.

  No wonder they didn't like her to drink wine at lunch.

  CHAPTER 9

  I feel like Chester the Molester," I said to Susan.

  We were walking Pearl the Wonder Dog along the Charles River, on the Esplanade, near the Hatch Shell.

  "Getting a young woman drunk and pumping her for information?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Are you familiar with the term "Consenting Adult'?" Susan said.

  I nodded. Susan was wearing black high top sneakers, black sweats, a black baseball cap with the words "Community Servings" printed in 'white over the visor, and a yellow all-weather jacket which said "DKNY Athletic" in black letters on the back.

  "Did you find out things that will help you?"

  "I found out that her husband handles a lot of money. I found out that he has cheated on her and seems inclined to again, except he's afraid that her father will have someone cut off his testicles."

  "Well, it would render the question of adultery moot," Susan said.

  "Conventionally denned."

  "Good point," Susan said.

  "I also found out from Lennie Seltzer that Anthony
, that's Shirley's husband, gambles a lot and loses."

  "And," Susan said, "you found out that Anthony is married to a stupid, coarse, spoiled, self-indulgent, childish drunk."

  "You shrinks have a real knack for saying things so they don't sound bad."

  A platoon of people in elbow pads, helmets, and spandex pants Rollerbladed by with various degrees of grace. Pearl gazed after them with what might have been scorn, or even derision. I wasn't sure. Dogs are hard to read.

  "I'd love to do that," Susan said.

  "I think I'll take some lessons."

  I made no comment. Pearl returned to straining against her leash, sniffing the grass along the edge of the sidewalk, alert for a wayward Zagnut wrapper.

  "So what you have is a picture of perhaps a compulsive gambler with a wandering eye, married to an undesirable wife, with access to a great deal of money," Susan went on.

  "That you had to find some of this out by sitting quietly while Shirley Ventura got drunk and made an ass of herself seems a fair exchange for a man in your business."

  "You ought to try Rollerblading, at that," I said.

  "And if you don't like it you can always eat the skates."

  "Oh come on," Susan said.

  "You complain that I'm hard. You're the hardest person I've ever known. And I'm in a fairly tough profession, myself."

  "Including Hawk?"

  "Okay, one of the two hardest people I've ever known," Susan said.

  "And most of the time you accept it. In fact most of the time you enjoy it, except when you have one of these little sentimental spasms."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "I needed that."

  We walked quietly for a bit. Pearl spotted a couple of sparrows and went into her bird dog stalk, head extended, body tense, each step infinitely deliberate as she seemed to steadily elongate toward the birds until they flew away. As they rose in the air Pearl looked back at me expectantly.

  "Bang," I said.

  Pearl returned to the Zagnut hunt.

  "Of course," Susan said, "I love you for having the little spasms of sentimentality."

  "I know," I said.

  "That's why I have them."

  Pearl paused to roll vigorously on an earthworm which had gotten squashed on the sidewalk, probably the victim of a reckless Rollerblader.

  "Ick," Susan said as Pearl rolled.

  "Why do they do that?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Dogs are sometimes mysterious," Susan said.

  The small sailboats that people rented from the public boat club bobbed not very gracefully around the basin where the river widened behind the dam. They had small sails and flat bottoms and the people in them were mostly amateurs, but the scatter of white sails on the blue-gray river looked nice anyway. On the other side MIT stretched along Memorial Drive, its gray stone buildings and its domes looking technical and serious.

  "I also have a connection between Gino Fish and Julius Ventura," I said.

  Pearl got through with the worm and got up and shook herself and proceeded. We went with her.

  "Who's Gino Fish," Susan said.

  "Sort of filled the number-one slot," I said, "when Joe Broz got old."

  "Broz retired?"

  "Not really, but his kid's a bust, and Vinnie left him, and he's about seventy, and his heart's not in it anymore."

  "And where does Shirley's father rank in all of this?"

  "If it weren't for Gino, he'd have Broz's slot," I said.

  "He might get it anyway. He's ambitious."

  "So what's the connection?"

  "Gino's guy Marty Anaheim had some people following me."

  "And you're sure it's about Whatsisname, Shirley's father?"

  "Better than that," I said.

  "Hawk and I braced Marty and he asked if Julius hired us to do anything with Anthony Meeker."

  "Why are they interested?"

  "I "Don't know."

  "What would you speculate?"

  "Money."

  Susan smiled.

  "That would always be a reasonable guess, wouldn't it," she said.

  "Yes."

  "And the other guess would probably be sex," Susan said.

  "So young," I said, "so beautiful, and yet so cynical."

  CHAPTER 10

  There were maybe a dozen places in the phone book with the word Starlight in their name. I eliminated places which wouldn't employ waitresses, like Starlight Video, or the Starlight Laundry, and narrowed it down to The Starlight Lounge in Lynn, and a roadhouse called Starlight Memories on the beach in Salisbury. I took the wedding picture of Anthony and Shirley with me and went to check out the waitresses.

  The Starlight Lounge was closest, out at a traffic circle near Lynn Beach where the causeway to Nahant branched off. It had been built after the war and was called the Redwood: a lot of glass windows, a lot of exposed pine stained red, the kind of restaurant that sold fried clams and hamburgers and frapps before the fast food franchises were invented and put them out of business. After that for a while it had been a bait and tackle place, and then it was a place that sold ceramic lawn statues, and then a pizza joint, and then, for a long time, an abandoned building except for a month in the winter when Christmas trees were sold out of the parking lot.

  In 1989 somebody painted it all over a dark blue, windows included, put in a bar and a bunch of cheap tables and chairs, installed a spinning strobe light in the high center of the room, hired a bunch of waitresses to work topless, and The Starlight Lounge was born.

  It was still bright daylight when I parked there at 5:20 in the afternoon. There were a couple of motorcycles parked outside and a truck full of cement sidings was nosed in at an angle taking a space and a half, as if the crew hadn't been able to wait a moment longer when quitting time came.

  The inside of the place was painted the same dark blue as the outside. I took off my sunglasses and waited for my pupils to dilate. The strobe reflector in the ceiling turned slowly, scattering the light like confetti. There was heavy rock music playing. I didn't recognize it, but I didn't expect to. All rock music sounded to me like glass being ground.

  To my right there was a long nearly empty bar, where once maybe there had been a soda fountain. I went over and leaned on the end of it. One of the bartenders came down to get my order. He was wide faced and curly haired with the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up over his thick freckled arms. He put a paper napkin down on the bar in front of me and said, "What'll it be?"

  "Got any draft beer?" I said.

  "Nope. Bottle only."

  "Got any New Amsterdam Black and Tan?"

  The bartender grinned at me.

  "You got to be shitting," he said.

  "What have you got?" I said.

  "Bud, Bud Light, Heineken."

  "Bud," I said.

  The bartender got me a long neck, popped the cap, put a glass beside it, and went away. I looked around the room. The guys from the forms truck were at a big table down the bar drinking beer and making small talk with the waitresses. There were two guys in motorcycle jackets at another table, and there were four waitresses. All of them bare chests and short shorts and a lot of hair.

  Leaning on the far end of the bar opposite me was a guy with a round head and sloping shoulders. He too was wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled. The music banged away through a couple of speakers up high somewhere in the dark blue top of the dim room. I drank my beer. The bartender returned.

  "You want another one?" he said.

  "Not yet," I said.

  "Who's in charge of this joint at the moment?"

  "In charge?"

  "Yeah. There a manager or anyone?"

  "Me and Vie, I guess," the bartender said.

  "Vie the guy at the other end of the bar?"

  "Yeah. Mostly he's the bouncer. It get real busy he comes back here with me. But usually one man can handle it. It's a beer crowd, not a lotta mixed drinks, you know."