"That was a very enlightening talk on Goldfish," Hans said, and his whiny voice and smart-aleck tone made The Bad Czech mad.
Then the skinny K-9 cop whispered to his postdoc, "Your girl friend's looking at the big dummy like he's a booger on her finger. The girl's got taste."
Both postdocs wore Levi jeans. One wore a red T-shirt and moccasins. The Bad Czech liked her big chest, and he also eyed the other one, who wore a baggy work shirt and deck shoes. In general, they dressed not unlike off-duty male cops.
"Who're you guests of?" the postdoc in the T-shirt asked.
"That woman over there with the guy in the suit," The Bad Czech said. "Luna's her name."
"What do you do?" the other postdoc asked Hans, who was slinking closer along the bar as was his custom.
"I'm a waiter," Hans said. "He's a ..."
"We're both waiters!" The Bad Czech said, glaring at Hans. "We work in a real nice joint over on Restaurant Row. Ever eat over there?"
"Can't afford it," the postdoc in the T-shirt said. "Starving young scientists trying to make our place in the world. Next year we'll get real grown-up jobs doing science and maybe we can eat in a restaurant."
Just then a clutch of noisy graduate students came banging down the stairs and into the bar. They wore cutoffs and jeans and grubbies of all kinds. They didn't look any smarter than college kids the cops had occasionally jailed when they drove drunk through Rampart Division on their way to USC or UCLA. The difference was that all these were smart or they couldn't be here. One kid with a beard full of lint said to another, "Physics is like fucking. Mathematics is like masturbation."
The Bad Czech didn't get it, but at least it had to do with sex. The two unglamorous postdocs were starting to look better. "Another double," he said to the bartender, who was now having to move fast to keep up with the noisy crowd of drinkers.
The postdoc with the baggy shirt, who was getting more appealing to Hans, said to the other, "Have you heard the one about the theoretical physicist who drowned in a lake he theorized had an average depth of six inches?"
Both young women laughed like hell, and The Bad Czech, who didn't get that one either, said, "Maybe if ya bite the Goldfish vertical it means you're Caucasian, and sideways you're Oriental."
"Whadda you do?" Hans asked the postdoc in the baggy shirt. He was leaning on his elbow now and sidling ever closer, as The Bad Czech had seen him do many times before. He was the sneaky type that bellied along a bar, much as a police dog bellies close to the ground before attacking.
"Right now, colloidal interface chemistry," she said.
"Wow! That sounds erotic to me!" Hans cried.
"I wish that little pervert'd get back to his side a the bar," The Bad Czech whispered to his postdoc. "Tell ya the truth, he ain't even a waiter. He's my busboy."
Just then a man entered the barroom. He was older than the graduate students and postdocs. He was obviously a member of the faculty. The Bad Czech signaled to Hans to turn around on his stool and take a look. The man was neither fiftyish nor tall enough to be the one they saw outside of Dagmar Duffy's apartment house. He was a visiting research fellow, it turned out, and had just spiced up his lecture in bio-inorganic chemistry with a theory as to how vampires came to be.
One of the students who was drinking beer and twirling a Frisbee on his finger said to the professor, "Could you tell my friends here your theory on vampires?"
Which caused The Bad Czech to stop ogling the postdoc and come up off the bar and turn around and pay attention. They were talking about vampires! And he was one!
"It's quite credible, really," the professor said with a British public school accent. "It deals with the disease of porphyria, which is a genetic disease, so it could be regional, say around Transylvania, and ..."
The professor was interrupted by one of the most enormous men he'd seen lately, with eyebrows like fingers of fur, who was sitting at the bar looking tense. "How do ya spell that disease?" the huge man asked.
"Uh, that's p-o-r-p-h-y-r-i-a," the professor said. "And to continue, my theory is that it's the making of too much porphyrin, which with iron in it makes blood red, that gave them their problem. Drinking blood slows porphyrin production, so they would attack cows and drink their blood."
The Bad Czech suddenly relaxed. "Drinkin cows' blood ain't got nothin to do with me" he said to the postdoc, who looked puzzled.
"Now it happens that garlic can block an enzyme that gets rid of porphyrin," the professor continued, "so that plays right into the legend of garlic warding off vampires."
"Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's cow," Hans giggled to his postdoc, who was ignoring him completely.
"As it happens, quinine also blocks the enzyme," the professor continued, "so ..."
"That means ya can't give a vampire a gin and tonicl" The Bad Czech said, and for the first time his postdoc paid attention to him. He was right!
"Next time I accept a blind date I'll give him a gin and tonic test," she said, examining The Bad Czech, who with his black hair, furry eyebrows and Slavic features did look something like an archetypal Dracula-a very large one, to be sure.
"I could tell a real vampire story," The Bad Czech whispered, "if I get to know ya better. I can see ya like vampires."
Two male students who were going bonzo over the approaching deadline for submitting a doctoral thesis were arguing about whether or not one of their colleagues had jumped or fallen out of a window while loaded on nitrous oxide. Apparently science prodigies also had their stress problems.
The Bad Czech, who was working on his fourth double and charging into all the conversations, said, "He jumped, ya ask me. Everybody's jumpin these days or slashin their own throats or smokin their thirty-eights. Or killin their kids or ..."
"The restaurant business can't be that bad," one postdoc said to him.
uSo what's that these guys're talking about, this reaction dynamics?" Hans demanded boozily from his postdoc, who couldn't get away from the K-9 cop and had already noticed that he smelled like an animal.
"How molecules bump into each other," she said.
"Everything ya say sounds erotic to me!" Hans cried. "Write down your phone number, will ya?"
"I don't think so," the postdoc said, rolling her eyes at her colleague.
"Well, write down your area code," Hans begged, getting hotter by the minute.
"Not tonight," she replied, whispering, "Nerd alert!" to her girl friend.
"Well, then write me down a formula," Hans cried. "I'm crazy for smart girls!"
"Ya know what I like about gettin ripped in this place?" The Bad Czech said to the lady bartender, who was pouring his fifth double. "Everybody here's smarter than me. Where I usually drink, I'm smarter than everybody else and it makes me feel guilty cause I should know better than get drunk with all the dummies."
"Smarter, huh!" Hans whispered to his postdoc. "He's as smart as a box a rocks. He ain't even a waiter. Busboy is what he is. Been one for twenty years. Oldest freaking busboy on Restaurant Row." He waved at the bartender and said, "Can I have a refill, lovely lady?"
Just then another professor entered the barroom. He was rather tall and had dark hair and was at least fifty years old. He didn't wear glasses and didn't have a moustache, but The Bad Czech got excited for a minute. He nodded to Hans, who craned his noodle neck and shrugged.
When the man came to the bar to order a gin martini, The Bad Czech was already getting numb around the nose and chin.
He also was having some trouble keeping his elbow on the bar.
He wanted to hear the man's voice. He said, "I like to drink down here better than the fancy lounge upstairs. How 'bout you?"
The man looked at the boozy giant and smiled congenially, and didn't respond.
uThey tell me the lounge up there, whadda they call it, the hymen lounge ..."
"The Hayman Lounge," the bartender corrected him.
"Yeah, the Hayman Lounge, is where most a the people drink who donate big
bucks."
The man stood at the bar sipping his martini and looked at his watch.
"It's a pretty bar up there," The Bad Czech said, "but I like the people down here, don't you?"
"Un huh," the man said.
"Do you bite the tails off Goldfish or eat them all at once?" The Bad Czech wanted to know.
"Are you connected with Caltech?" the man asked.
"Naw, I own a restaurant," The Bad Czech said. "In fact, I own about six a them. Might give a few bucks to the college if I like it around here."
When the man smiled and walked away, The Bad Czech shook his head in the negative and Hans went back to making a move on one of the postdocs.
There wasn't much to deaden the sound in the concrete basement and the din was nerve-racking to Mario Villalobos, who was learning all about Lupe Luna's own failed marriage, and her life with a teenaged daughter, and her work at Caltech. He did everything he could to keep her talking so she wouldn't ask him too many questions. He was afraid if she knew the true nature of his investigation she might feel honor bound to report it, which he was positive would be the end.
Distilled right down to the bottom of the test tube, as it were, was nothing but a detective's hunch and instinct that someone in this place was running amok, and had killed a private eye and a hooker and was trying to kill the macho maid, Dagmar Duffy. Each time Lupe Luna tried to pump him for more specific information, he'd change the subject. After his third vodka he tried to get the conversation back to where it belonged: sex.
"And is your dance card pretty well filled up around here?" Mario Villalobos asked. "I imagine there're a few prospects among the faculty?"
uNot that many," she said. "These scientific types seem to have a biannual rutting season. They sublimate their sex urges for study and research and then suddenly go into a rutting frenzy like moose. That's when I start getting phone calls. How about cops?"
"They're not so consumed by their work," he said, taking a look at the two at the bar. "But they tend to get very tired in later life."
By now the two postdocs had scooted off and were replaced at the bar by two faculty members who did not remotely fit the description of the man in the pinstripe suit. The Bad Czech and Hans were both moving on the lady bartender.
"It's really true," Lupe Luna told Mario Villalobos, "that pure science can be very erotic to. these people. I've dated scientists who described their work the way you'd describe an orgy."
"I couldn't describe an orgy," Mario Villalobos said, "but if you have any orgy stories, let's have them!"
"What time do you want to mingle at the open house?" she said, looking with antelope eyes over the rim of the glass.
"About eight o'clock," he said. "This is a long shot, but it's a way to see lots of chemistry professors at one time. In the flesh."
"Then we don't have time to get into orgies," she said, clearly not used to three whiskey sours.
"I'm starting to feel the neurons bubbling," the detective said, reaching across the table and rubbing his finger along hers. "I was starting to think that catching crooks was all I had left."
"I'm feeling strangely sexy myself," she said, and the words were getting slurred. "I think this mystery is a turn-on."
"Agatha Christie never made you feel like this?"
"Uh uh," she said, and he felt her slender ankle touch his under the table.
Meanwhile, The Bad Czech had found a graduate student who was chestier than the postdoc. Except that she wore very grubby cutoffs and a man's BVD T-shirt without a bra. She was by no means the most unglamorous woman in the place.
"I'm a rookie gynecologist and I'm giving free Pap smears," Hans whispered to the grad student, who tried to ignore him.
"Let's wet that T-shirt down and get a weather report," Hans said slyly, as he nearly fell off the barstool slinking closer to her.
"Get lost," she said, glaring at the skinny guy in the leisure suit who obviously didn't belong here.
"If it was wet, I'd either know how cold it is or if maybe you like me!" Hans cried, skulking along the bar in her direction.
"Nerd alert!" she yelled to the other women and Hans decided she was probably as nasty as that cunt who told everyone about his P. E. problem. Which gave him an idea: he wondered if he could find a hotshot chemistry professor who might help him out.
Meanwhile, The Bad Czech gave up eyeballing the grad student in the T-shirt when one of her male classmates said, "Some of the women around here are slightly more than feminist. That one gives lectures on how to live a lifetime without men."
"She looks too old anyways," The Bad Czech said to the gangly student, having to shout to be heard over the noise in the basement bar.
"I know one guy who was in graduate school ten years. He was gray when he got out," the kid said.
With just enough booze in him to make him play detective, The Bad Czech said, "There must be a lot a stress around here. You ever know a professor to go wacko and maybe do somethin ... violent?"
"A professor?" The student ran his fingers through his snarled hair. "I heard of a student who bludgeoned his adviser at Stanford. Typical science student. He put a bag over the adviser's head to keep from bloodying his papers. Then he told the judge that after ten years of graduate school, Folsom Prison would be a piece of cake."
"Can't think of any violent ones?"
"Hard to say. Lots of them are nuts."
They were interrupted just then when the grad student in the T-shirt yelled at Hans, "No, I don't want to learn how to do a choke hold! I can take care of myself!"
"But it's the carotid artery hold!" Hans leered. "You know, the one they talk about in the news where the cops choke peoples' necks and they croak sometimes?"
"I do not want you choking my neck, man!" the grad student yelled.
"How about you choking my neck?" Hans cried. He was unstoppable when he was horny like this.
"No, I don't want to choke your goddamn neck!" she shouted.
"Then how about spanking me?" Hans screamed.
The graduate student grabbed her beer and stalked off to one of the tables while The Bad Czech said, "Ya can't behave nowheres, can ya? Ya gotta always be disgustin!"
The K-9 cop waved hornily at the bartender and said, "One more double, my dear! For the freeway!"
Returning to business, The Bad Czech asked the student, "Which professors are the most . .. emotional. Like which ones get really overexcited if things don't go right in their experiments or whatever. Is there a certain field a study that attracts, say, aggressive ones?"
"I think you oughtta ask her," the kid said, pointing to the lady bartender, who was listening.
"Most of the people you see here right now are into chemistry," she said to The Bad Czech. "They're the jovial ones and they drink like fishes."
"I don't think they sleep around much at their conferences," another student piped in. She was in chemical engineering and looked very disappointed that chemists didn't sleep around much at their conferences.
"Maybe they drink too many chemicals with their booze and they can't sleep around too much," The Bad Czech shrugged, and that again reminded Hans that he load to talk to a likely chemist about his recent "problem."
"Biologists are clean-cut and healthy," the bartender said. "So they do sleep around at their conferences and have lots of fun."
"Physicists have great integrity," one of the postdocs piped up.
"That's true," the bartender said. "They always pay their bar tab. But they're the least concerned about clothes and shaving and combing their hair."
"I think geologists are womanizers," another postdoc offered. "They get horny looking for rocks out there in the desert."
"Engineers are the cheapest," another student said. "They let someone else buy. They actually try to sneak their own cheap wine in here sometimes."
"Well, in terms of quantitative science, chemistry is a lot harder than biology," one student argued. "So you tend to drink more."
"Ph
ysics is more rigorous," another told The Bad Czech.
"Geology is in the basement," another told him.
"Physicists keep their word," the bartender said. "They also eat better food when they're not forgetting to eat."
And so forth.
The Bad Czech realized he wasn't getting anywhere trying to find a criminal "type" and was about to try another tack when one of the students told a riddle.
"Here's an ellipsoid swimming pool riddle," the student said. "If you dive in at one focus, will water splash at the other focus? Not allowing for water viscosity, of course?"
"Not another theoretical physicist," one student groaned.
"Water waves aren't like light waves," a student noted.
"A swimming pool isn't the Whispering Dome," another joined in. "Water waves aren't like sound waves."
"Because of the uneven depth of the water, the waves won't hit the focus at the same time," still another offered.
"I said, not allowing for relative depth and viscosity," the riddler reminded.
"The answer is yes," three of them said at once.
And The Bad Czech was getting dizzy. He walked over to Hans and said, "They might as well be talkin Cambodian!"
"Might as well be talking in tongues," the K-9 cop complained. "I thought I was getting somewhere with the one in the T-shirt."
And then, feeling confused by all the jokes he didn't understand, and wishing he was in The House of Misery where at least he was the smartest one at the bar, The Bad Czech prompted another of those tiny vagaries that trigger more significant events and seem to indicate that all men are linked in a great and mysterious chain.
the Delta Star (1983) Page 22