“You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Coates, would you?”
“That fat pig.” He threw his hand at me disgustedly. “Yeah, I know him.”
“I heard he and Tommy were pretty tight.”
“Tommy just uses the pig’s pad, that’s all.” Vin straightened up in the wheelchair. “The T’s got better taste than Lester Coates.”
“You know where Coates lives? In case I can’t find Tommy at the Ramrod?”
“Deco Apartments. Number 425. But don’t touch nothing. The stink stays on your hands all day.”
I stared at him for a moment—at his nasty lesbian face. “You didn’t know Ira Lessing, did you?”
He thought about it for a second. “I seen the name in the papers. The guy that got offed by Terry Carnova, right? The guy you mentioned at the bar.”
I nodded. “You ever see him in here with Tommy?”
He shook his head. “Never saw the guy, period. But that don’t mean he didn’t cruise the bars. Knowing Tommy, he’d more likely be over at the Rod, anyway. That’s probably where he picked up Terry, too, the poor fucker.”
“Terry was into S and M?”
“Not really. He didn’t have the right temperament for the job. Tommy T., he’s a cold-blooded cat. Ice cold. But Terry . . . he ain’t decided what he is. Hell, I saw him the night your pal got hacked, running around here acting all pissy and tough.”
“On the night of the Fourth?”
“About seven o’clock. Shooting his mouth off how it was going to be a big night for him ‘cause it was his big-deal birthday. Bragging on how he was going to make a monumental score.”
“What kind of score?”
“T’s and B’s. Christ, he was already loaded. You could see it in his eyes. When everybody got tired of hearing his mouth he went on over to the Rod. Least that’s where he said he was going. That’s the last time I saw him, till I spotted his picture in the papers. Guess he scored all right. That friend of yours, Lessing, just picked the wrong boy on the wrong night.”
On that note I pushed away from the table.
“Going over to the Ramrod, huh?” Vin said with a touch of disappointment, as if he’d seen the evening developing in a different way.
I nodded.
“It figures. All the good ones go to the Rod.” He started to wheel himself away, then turned back to me. “Talk to the bartender—Raymond. Tell him the kind of action you’re looking for and tell him Vinnie sent you. You’ll be all right.”
It’s hard to believe, but I actually said, “Thanks.”
20
THE RAMROD was located in the basement of the Lincoln Hotel, three blocks northeast of the Underground. You had to go down a flight of steps off Walnut to get to it—which is what Vinnie had complained about. The walls were stucco instead of flock; the leather trim on the furnishings was red instead of black. Outside of that the setup was identical: elevated dance floor, laser lights, booths, and a mahogany bar. The difference was in the clientele, but it took me awhile to see it.
The clothes were the same—lots of expensive suits and ties, lots of silk shirts and tight pants. The table talk was just as loud, the dancing just as frenetic. But as I sat at the bar, waiting for the bartender to work his way up to me, it dawned on me that, for the most part, there were really only two kinds of people at the Ramrod—middle-aged men and boys in their late teens or early twenties. The boys stood side by side at the bar or strutted together on the dance floor; the men sat at the booths and ogled them. It was exactly like a strip joint—a meat rack, with the boys playing the parts of the B-girls.
Some of the kids were weight-lifter types, steroid freaks with doughboy faces and upper arms that looked like bagged grapefruit. Some of them were thin and nervous, with wiry frames and the mean eyes of speed freaks. A few of them looked all-American as hell, as if they’d just stepped off Wheaties boxes. They all dressed alike, in muscle shirts and sprayed-on pants. They all moved alike, self-consciously, deliberately, as if each one knew he was being watched.
The older men were just as self-conscious—and just as much of a piece. Their suits were tailored, their hair tinted and razor-cut. They wore gold rings, watches, jewelry—anything to make them seem prosperous. They’d affected the look of successful executives, even though half of them probably managed at drive-in restaurants, or kept the books tidy at Blue Cross, or cooked up soap at United American. But no amount of money or flash could disguise the fact that they were buyers in a sellers’ market. Their appetites showed through the table talk, the jewelry, the tailored clothes. It gave their eyes the desperate, driven look of obsession.
For all I knew I was staring at a roomful of Ira Lessings. A roomful of Terry Carnovas and Tommy T.’s. The thought was unsettling enough to make me turn back to the bar.
The bartender was standing there waiting for me to order. From the frown on his face, he’d been standing there for a while. There was nothing affable or chummy about this one. In fact, he looked like a piano player in a whorehouse. Thin, flat face. Bee-stung lips. Frog eyes. Pencil mustache. Greasy black hair combed straight back, as if he’d just slid out from under a Chevy. He was probably no more than forty, but he was definitely on his third or fourth lifetime.
“Can I get you?” he said in a weary voice.
“Scotch, straight up.”
He poured the drink and set it down on the bar in front of me. I gave him a five.
“Are you Raymond?” I asked.
“I’m Raymond,” he said, as if, in Vinnie’s words, it didn’t mean a shit.
“A guy named Vinnie told me to talk to you.”
He still didn’t look interested. “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for someone. Tommy T. Vinnie said you’d know where I could find him.”
“Tommy hasn’t been around all night.”
I got another twenty out of my wallet and laid it on the bar.
Raymond smiled dully. “I ain’t Tommy.”
“I just want a few answers.”
He smoothed the twenty out with his right hand, like he was ironing a shirt. “You could try across the street, at the Deco. Sometimes Tommy crashes with a cat who lives there, name of Les Coates.”
“I heard that.” I studied his face for a second. He still hadn’t picked up the twenty. “You ever see him in here with a man named Lessing?”
Raymond laughed—a little blip of a laugh, like a scratch on a record. “You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”
“Sort of. How’d you know?”
“You’re either a reporter or a cop, and I already talked to the cops. Besides, it’s been ten years since anyone around here give me a twenty-dollar tip.”
“Did you see Tommy T. in here on the night of the Fourth of July?” I asked.
“Saw him and Terry both. Right over there.” He pointed to the dance floor. “They left about ten-thirty. One after the other, maybe five minutes apart.”
“Was this guy Coates with them?”
Raymond shook his head. “Nope. He wasn’t here.”
“Did Tommy say where he was going?”
“Nope.”
“Did either of them come back in—later on?”
He shook his head again. “That’s the last I saw of them that night.”
“How about Lessing? You still haven’t told me if you saw him here.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” the bartender said.
“What’s to think about? Either you saw him here or you didn’t.”
“That’s big news, huh? If I saw him?”
“It’s news.”
Raymond put his forefinger on the twenty and began to swivel it around on the polished wood bar. “You know what I don’t like about you reporters? You feed on pain.”
I laughed out loud. “What do you call this?” I pointed to the hustlers lining the bar.
Raymond looked up at me, still swiveling the bill. “That’s not the kind of pain I’m talking about. Besides, we ain’t all Tommy T.”
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He looked back down at the twenty. “Say a guy is basically decent. Good citizen, good provider. Churchgoer, all that. Only he has a kink, a bend. Maybe his old man give him the habit—caught him jerking off and kicked the shit out of him. Tied him down in bed and waited for him to get a hard-on, then scalded him with hot water every night for a year. It happens. Whatever the story, the guy’s got a bend that don’t straighten out. For the rest of his life it don’t straighten out. He goes to shrinks, to whores, to bars. He gets married, has kids. He tries hard as he can to be like everybody else. But he can’t be, ‘cause of that kink. One night he just can’t pretend it ain’t there anymore. So he goes out and finds somebody like Tommy T. And maybe that scares him straight for a while. Maybe it don’t. Maybe he picks the wrong dude and gets iced.”
He pushed the twenty away from him and it fluttered off the bar to the floor. “And that’s when somebody like you comes along with a twenty-dollar bill.”
Raymond walked down the bar.
“That’s it?” I called to him.
“That’s it,” he said over his shoulder.
******
It was fully dark when I left the Ramrod. I could have stayed awhile longer, looking for somebody like Vinnie—some barfly desperate for a drink. But I didn’t have the stomach for it. I wanted out—back in the real world. Even at that I felt like I was coming out of a porno theater, as if the color on the street was too lurid, the light too intense, the third dimension one dimension too many. Everything looked fat and ripe and repulsive. I knew it was because of the way things had gone with Raymond—because of the way the night had gone up until then, and the way it was bound to go thereafter.
There was no question in my mind that Raymond had seen Ira Lessing in the Ramrod bar. Whether the story he’d told me was something he’d heard about Ira—or just a composite of the lives of other pathetically damaged men—I didn’t know. But I felt as if I’d learned a part of Lessing’s history in outline, and it depressed me. Even though I’d half expected it, it depressed me. It was something I didn’t want to hear.
I stared across the street at the Deco apartment house—a six-story brownstone wedged between a two-story storefront and a ten-story office building. I’d passed the damn thing a thousand times before. It was one of the few downtown residential apartments that predated urban renewal. But at that moment my curiosity was at low ebb.
Instead of immediately tackling Lester Coates, I ducked into a coffee shop at the corner of Seventh and drank ice tea at the counter, in the bright light of ordinary commerce, amid the soothing banalities of a short-order restaurant full of short-tempered waitresses and sweaty natives. When I felt reasonably normal, I went back out onto Walnut, crossed over to the other side of the street, and walked the half block up to the Deco.
21
THE DECO had a buzzer system outside the lobby door—something I hadn’t counted on. That meant I needed to give Coates a reason to let me in, and the best one I could think of, on the spur of the moment, was to tell him I was a cop. I still carried a special deputy’s badge from my days on the D.A.’s staff. If Coates didn’t examine it too closely, it might work. And if it didn’t . . . well, I’d be inside by then.
I pressed the button for 425 and a man with an effeminate voice asked, “Who is it?”
I said, “Police, Mr. Coates. We need to ask you a few more questions about the Carnova case.”
“Is this really necessary?” the man said irritably.
“Afraid so.”
He pressed the buzzer, opening the main door.
I went in. The place had the look of a dead-end hotel—grungy green-and-black tile, peeling plaster walls, bare fluorescent lights overhead. A blue neon sign for the elevator sputtered at the far end of a hall. I walked down to it, past the scarred metal doors to the ground-floor apartments. Someone had put a pottery planter shaped like a toad on the hall radiator. There were no plants inside, just cigarette butts and a few condom wrappers sprouting in the dirt.
Like everything else in the Deco, the elevator looked grim. It was one of those rickety, self-serve jobs with graffiti-covered walls and an empty frame where the safety permit was supposed to be. I got in and pressed four.
While the elevator struggled up to Coates’s floor, I read the graffiti. Tommy T’s name was etched in one of the walls with the words “The Boss” printed underneath it. Terry Carnova was there, too, inside a heart with Kitty Guinn.
The elevator lurched to a stop on the fourth floor, and I stepped out into a dim hallway with three metal doors opening off it. Apartment 425 was the door farthest from the elevator—the rooms looking out on Walnut at the front of the building. A very fat, very bald man of about forty, wearing a plaid bathrobe, argyle socks, and brown wing-tip shoes, was standing in the open doorway staring at me. He couldn’t have been more than five-ten, but his sheer bulk made him look enormous.
“Are you the policeman?” he called out in his squeaky voice.
“Yep.”
I took the deputy’s badge out of my pocket and walked down to him.
Up close I could see that he wasn’t really bald—he’d shaved his head. In fact he seemed to have shaved all his facial hair—eyebrows, eyelashes, beard. It made his fat face look as if it wasn’t quite finished, not yet fully human. The tiny blue eyes buried beneath his brow glittered faintly in the hall light.
Through the open door behind him I could see a living room. The furniture—a baize couch and two armchairs—had been beaten to death by the man’s bulk. The smell of the room was awful—a greasy odor, mixed with something staler than rotting food.
“You’re Lester Coates?”
“Yes. For chrissake, what is it?”
“My name is Stoner.” I showed him the badge and he bit his lip. His lips were thick, pink, and sculpted-looking, like soap flowers. “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.”
I edged past him into the living room.
“Questions?” Coates said, scampering up behind me. He must have had taps on the wing tips because his shoes clicked noisily on the linoleum floor. “I’ve already answered your questions. Why must I do it again? Your Lieutenant Finch seemed content with what I told him several weeks ago.”
He’d probably been ecstatic, I said to myself. The last thing Art wanted to do was stumble across another suspect.
I turned around, and Coates hopped away with a pained look, as if I’d stepped on his toe. “We’ve got some new information we need to check with you.”
“About what?”
“About Carnova and a friend of his, Thomas Chard.”
“Tommy?” Coates said. “Tommy had nothing to do with it. I’ve already told you people that. He spent the night with me.”
“That’s the problem,” I said, pretending confusion. “You say he was here all night. But we’ve got witnesses who’ll swear he was with Carnova.”
“What witnesses?”
I ignored the question. “We have reliable information that Chard was in the Ramrod up until ten-thirty on the night of the Fourth.”
“That’s right. And then he came over here.”
I shook my head. “He was spotted later that night driving Ira Lessing’s BMW—he and Carnova and another boy. All three of them were seen entering your apartment house early Monday morning. Our witness says that both Chard and Carnova had bloodstains on their clothing.”
Coates’s face reddened. “That’s a mistake. Whoever told you that must be mistaken.”
I shrugged noncommittally. “I guess we’ve got a problem, then. Maybe you’d better get dressed, Mr. Coates.”
“Dressed?” he said, taking a step back.
“We’ll go down to the Justice Center and try to clear this thing up.”
The man pursed his florid lips, as if he didn’t like the taste of that at all. “I’m not going anywhere with you. This whole thing is ridiculous.”
I gave Coates a tough look. “Get your clothes on and let’s go.”
“I’m not leaving here!” the man said, stamping his feet like a hysterical child. His taps rang on the tile. “You have no right to detain me.”
“If you withhold evidence in a murder case, you’re an accessory to murder, Mr. Coates. That gives me a right.”
“Accessory,” he said, staring at me, horrified.
“You could be opening yourself to a lot of charges. Concealing evidence. Conspiracy. Obstruction of justice. Aiding and abetting. Perjury. Homicide.”
Coates flinched a little each time I ticked off a charge. When I finished, he dropped his head to his chest.
“Enough,” he said in a strangled voice.
Head bent, he walked over to the couch and dropped heavily onto the cushions. He put his hands on his knees and sat there for a second, staring dully at the far wall of his horrible room.
“I can’t go to jail,” he said, as if that was the one thing that had become clear to him. “I’d die in jail.”
I didn’t say anything.
The man cleared his throat and looked up at me miserably. “If I talk to you, I won’t go to jail?”
“Not if you tell the truth.”
“The truth?” Coates echoed, as if the word was new to him. “All right. I’ll tell the truth.”
I took a notebook and a pencil out of my coat.
Coates cleared his throat again and made a show out of straightening the hem of his robe above his fat white knees. “I . . . I didn’t really spend the whole night with Tommy. I was confused before. Shocked by the murder. And then Lieutenant Finch was only interested in Terry.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Tommy and I are very close, you know,” Coates said with a pathetic smile.
“When did Tommy come to your apartment?”
“Around one A.M., I think. It may have been later than that.”
“Who was with him?”
“Terry Carnova and another boy, Terry’s cousin. I don’t know the other boy’s name. They were all rather high. And Terry seemed very nervous.”
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