Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “Nope.”

  “Beer!” Bluerock said with enormous satisfaction. “Not Coke or Gatorade, but beer! Do you know how that felt, sport? I was just a kid, twenty-one years old. And up till then, nobody’d done anything but tell me what not to do. I get to Canada, run through my first workout, and there’s a cold bottle of beer waiting for me when it’s over—just like I’d done a day’s work! ‘Blue,’ I said to myself, ‘you finally made it. You’re finally a man.’ And that’s the way it felt, too.”

  Bluerock leaned back in the seat, shutting his eyes and hugging the bottle to his chest. “Good story, huh?” he said.

  “Great story,” I said.

  He laughed. “Where are we? Are we in town yet?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well, wake me when we get there. I want to go to the Waterhole. See if I can find Wild Bill.”

  For a second I couldn’t place the name. “You mean Parks?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go talk to Wild Bill. I miss the son-of-a-bitch.”

  ******

  The Waterhole was one of a number of nightclubs located on Front Street, near the Stadium. Like the others, it catered to blue-collar money. Plumbers, carpenters, hard hats. Guys who didn’t mind spending the extra dollar for a drink or a toot if they got their vanities patted down by good-looking women in leotards and got to rub shoulders with jocks. A lot of the players hung out there during the season. After all, they were blue-collar workers too. They were suckers for the same thin mix of class and cleavage. Plus, they got their backs slapped, got their drinks taken care of, and got their choice of the girls who worked there. It didn’t seem like Otto Bluerock’s kind of place. It certainly wasn’t mine. But Bill Parks apparently liked it there, so that’s where we went.

  I parked the Pinto in a little lot underneath the L&N bridge, and Bluerock and I stumbled out of the car and up to the club. From the outside the Waterhole looked like a collision between a family restaurant and a riverboat. Half of it was quaint white brick house, with trellises and vines snaking up its sides. The other half was scuppered, portholed, streamlined metal.

  “It’s like a theme park without a theme,” I said.

  Bluerock laughed and said, “Oh, it’s got a theme, all right. Wait till you get inside.”

  There was a canopied entryway in front of the brick part, with a doorman standing beneath it. He had on red livery and a black billycock hat, but inside the uniform he was the same sleazy guy who stands beside the sandwich sign yelling, “Girls, girls, girls!”

  “Where’s Bill?” Bluerock roared at him.

  The doorman laughed nervously. “Bill who?”

  “‘Bill who?’” Bluerock mocked. “Bill Parks, you weasel-faced bastard.”

  “I haven’t seen him, sir,” the doorman said. “He hasn’t been around in several months.”

  “Balls!” Bluerock said, and pushed past him through a metalized swinging door into the club.

  The doorman, who’d been intimidated by Bluerock’s size and bulldog face, wasn’t so intimidated by me. “We don’t like noisy drunks around here,” he said.

  “Tell him,” I said.

  “You tell him,” the doorman said in a nasty voice. “We run a nice clean place.”

  “Sure, you do,” I said.

  I followed Bluerock through the door into the nightclub. It was so dark inside that I had to stand still for a moment, eyes shut, in order to dark-adapt, and at that, the only things I could make out clearly were the burnished hardwood dance floor and the bar, which was glowing like an aquarium on the far side of the room. I walked toward it, feeling my way with my hands and brushing into a few startled customers sitting at the tables scattered around the dance floor. As soon as I got close enough, I grabbed for the bar, sat down on a chrome stool, and looked around for Otto. It was hard to believe, considering his size, but Bluerock had vanished. I started to get up again when they turned the music on—a blast of Prince that hit me like a feather boa with a length of lead pipe in it and knocked me right back onto the stool. As soon as the noise started, couples began to file onto the dance floor. Someone turned on the strobes and lasers. Within a few seconds, all I could see was a tangle of flashlit limbs and leering faces. I turned back to the bar, where a big bartender in a black bow tie, diamond vest, and white shirt with garters on the puffed-up sleeves leaned over to get my order. I couldn’t quite figure out how the western outfit fit in with the hi-tech look of the rest of the club. I thought maybe it was the Waterhole’s bow to tradition, like that first dollar bill framed above the bar. The music was so loud that the bartender couldn’t hear me when I said, “Scotch.” He moved his mouth again and made a questioning face.

  “He wants to know what you want to drink,” someone said close to my ear.

  I looked around. A pretty blond in a black tube top, designer jeans, and red pumps had seated herself on the stool beside me.

  “I know what he wants,” I yelled at her. “I just can’t make him understand.”

  “Tell me!” she shouted back, pointing to her chest.

  I laughed. “Scotch up.”

  “Scotch up,” she shouted at the bartender, who nodded serenely and walked away.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  The girl grinned. She was very pretty and very young—no more than twenty-one or twenty-two—with short, shaggy ash-blond hair cut in a punk style, and a gamine’s angular hollow-cheeked face. She’d made up heavily, mouth as red as cut strawberries and eyes blackened with mascara. Two spots of rouge glowed on either cheek, giving her a pert and vaguely doll-like look. It was hard to tell over the roar, but her voice had sounded Kentuckian.

  “Thanks for the help,” I said to her.

  She gestured casually. “No big deal.”

  “What are you drinking?”

  She picked up a glass of what looked like a gin and tonic and swirled it around.

  “You want another?” I said.

  She smiled like a belle. “Thank you, sir,” she said, and almost curtsied.

  I yelled at the bartender, and we went through the same ridiculous charade, until the girl stepped in and translated for us again.

  “They should hire you to do this for a living,” I shouted at her when the bartender had gone.

  “They do,” she said with a wink.

  “So it’s like that, is it?” I said.

  “Sometimes. Not always.” She gave me a coy look. “What’s your name?”

  “Harry,” I said. “Yours?”

  “Laurel.”

  I raised my glass. “Here’s to free enterprise, Laurel.”

  The girl studied me over the rim of her glass. I wanted to believe that it was my looks that were dazzling her, but I had the gut feeling that she was wondering whether I was Vice.

  “I haven’t seen you here before, Harry,” she said, almost on cue. “You new in town?”

  “It just looks that way,” I said.

  “Are you married?” she said in a cute little voice that was designed to tickle.

  I shook my head, but she acted like she didn’t believe me.

  “It’s okay. I think married men are neat.” Laurel frowned suddenly and said, “Damn,” under her breath.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.” She gave me an embarrassed look. “I just made a bet with myself, that’s all. I swore off using those dumb kids’ words like neat and cool. It was kind of a New Year’s resolution—you know, like when you give up drinking or smoking.”

  I smiled at her. “How old are you, Laurel?”

  “Twenty-four?” she said, as if she were guessing my weight.

  I didn’t believe that. I wasn’t sure I believed anything about the girl, including the little scene about giving up “kids’ words” and the racket she had going with the bartender. Her whole act was too practiced, too cute—like that sweet, ticklish voice of hers. But practiced or not, it was an amusing play, and a far cry from the hard sell of the
B-girls of my era. She wasn’t the first whore I’d met who was bent on improving herself, but she was the first one who’d incorporated it into her patter.

  “At twenty-four you’re allowed to use words like neat and cool.”

  “Yeah?” she said, looking pleased.

  I turned toward the dance floor and stared into the tangle of bodies, hoping to catch sight of Otto. But it was hopeless.

  “Christ, it’s loaded in here tonight,” I said.

  “Oh, this is nothing,” Laurel said. “Wait till the season starts. Once training camp is over this place really swings.”

  “You like football players, do you?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I think they’re totally bosco.”

  I heard her say, “Damn,” again, and I laughed. “You got a favorite?”

  “I like Chris.”

  I suddenly remembered I was a detective and asked: “How about Billy Parks?”

  Laurel grimaced. “He’s taken. Besides, he’s weird.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just weird,” she said with a shudder. “Believe me.”

  “Who took him?”

  She frowned as if she didn’t like the question. It was a little blunt, so I put an edge on it by grinning like a tourist. “Just curious,” I said.

  “It’s no big deal,” Laurel said. “She’s a friend. She used to work here. I guess she got what she wanted, all right. I guess.”

  I wanted to ask her the girl’s name, but I couldn’t think of an innocent way to do it. Before I could say anything at all, the bartender reappeared, leaned over the bar, and whispered something into Laurel’s ear. She gave me an alarmed look.

  “Did you come in here with another guy? A real big dude?”

  I nodded.

  “Clay says he’s causing some trouble.”

  “Now, there’s a surprise,” I said. I got off the stool. “Where is he?”

  “Follow me,” the girl said.

  Laurel plucked a lace shawl off one of the stools, took my hand, and headed into the crowd. She guided me to the other side of the room in about a quarter of the time it had taken me to get to the bar.

  When we got to the metal door, Laurel put a cautioning hand to my chest. “Are you a cop?” she asked gravely.

  “No.”

  She bit her lip. “All right. But don’t get me in any trouble with the cops.”

  She pushed the door open and we stepped outside.

  It was quite a scene. Two patrol cars were parked beneath us on the apron of pavement at the foot of the canopied stairs. Their blue flashers were on and their radios were squawking loudly in the hot night air. The sleazy doorman was sitting on the bottom stair, head bent, hat gone, hands between his legs. Another man, who looked just as sleazy, was sitting opposite him, one stair up, leaning against a canopy strut. His nose looked broken, and his left eye was black and swollen completely shut. A dozen bystanders were gathered in a semicircle in front of the patrol cars, staring at the main attraction—Otto Bluerock, who was lying on the pavement, wrestling with the cops. The cops—all four of them—were trying to keep Bluerock pinned to the concrete, but he kept bucking them off, like so many kids playing rough-house with Dad.

  “Jesus,” Laurel said softly. “Who is he?”

  “Otto fucking Bluerock,” I said with disgust.

  I walked quickly down the stairs to where the cops were struggling with Otto. Two of them were holding his legs down, the third was sitting on his left arm, and the fourth was trying to get a pair of cuffs around his right wrist. Bluerock thrashed mightily beneath them.

  “Why don’t you arrest them?” he bellowed. “They’re the goddamn lowlifes.”

  “Shut up!” one of the cops shouted.

  The cop who was trying to cuff Bluerock looked up, white-faced. “They won’t fit,” he said, with something like awe in his voice. “His wrists are too damn big for the cuffs.”

  At that moment, Bluerock managed to work his left arm loose again. He swung it up and toppled the cop who was holding it, then punched the cop who was sitting on his right leg and threw the one on his left onto the ground.

  The cop with the cuffs jerked his nightstick out of his Sam Browne. “All right, motherfucker,” he said. “You asked for it. You’re going to get it.”

  Bluerock snarled at him and lunged at his pants leg. The cop brought the stick down hard on top of Bluerock’s head. The stick made a pock like a mallet hitting a croquet ball. Otto groaned and fell backward, his fingers still grasping the cop’s trouser cuff. The cop jerked his leg loose and raised the stick again.

  I yelled, “Hold it!” at the top of my lungs.

  The cop with the stick whirled around, his face livid with anger.

  “Hit that man again,” I said, “and I’ll see to it that you serve time for aggravated assault.”

  “And just who the fuck are you?” he shouted, jabbing me with the stick.

  I reached into my jacket with my left hand and pulled out my old badge—the one I’d worn as a deputy with the DA’s office. “I’m a sworn officer of the court,” I said, flashing the badge at him. “Just like you.”

  The cop stared furiously at the badge in its leather case. I could tell that he thought it was a phony. I could also tell that he was no killer—just a tough man who’d lost his cool. Which wasn’t to say that he’d liked me telling him his job. No cop likes that, and I knew that I’d pay for it later on, when he found out that his instinct had been right. But at that moment, the badge was enough of a distraction to calm him down. He glared at Otto, who was groaning on the pavement, and back at my badge. Then he slipped the nightstick slowly into his belt.

  “Put that asshole in the car,” he said to the other cops. “As for you”—he turned to me—“you’re coming with us. And if you aren’t who you say you are, I’m going to charge you with obstructing justice.”

  I looked back at Laurel, who was still standing at the top of the entry way.

  “Do me a favor?” I called to her.

  She stamped her foot. “You lied to me. You said you weren’t a cop.”

  A couple of the cops laughed.

  “Call Hugh Petrie,” I said. I spelled his name for her and gave her his number. “Tell him to meet Harry Stoner at Station X.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “Just do it, Laurel. Please.”

  The cop with the billy club grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the patrol car. “Who the hell is that monster?” he said as he stuffed me into the back seat alongside Otto.

  “Just a guy who’s had a bad day,” I said.

  5

  AROUND TWO o’clock that morning, Hugh Petrie visited me in the Station X lockup in the basement of City Hall. I’d been there for some time, sitting in a holding tank with assorted other drunks and sad cases. They’d taken Otto to University Hospital to have his head patched. Me, they’d thrown in jail—after the cop I’d tangled with discovered that the badge I’d shown him was a ringer.

  I’d been talking to a drunk for better than an hour when Petrie finally showed up. The drunk, whose name was Elmer, had been telling me his philosophy of life, which mostly consisted of the single admonition, Don’t forget to eat.

  “It’s when you forget to eat that they start slipping by.”

  “What?” I asked him.

  He looked at me piteously. “Why the days, man,” he said. “The days.”

  “Oh, them,” I said. The days.

  Of late, Elmer had had to remind himself to eat, because his wife had gotten fed up and left him, and his children wouldn’t speak to him, either. He lived off his sister, a good Catholic woman who prayed constantly for his redemption and turned the other cheek when he filched beer money from her purse. Elmer thought she was a hypocrite because of the priests, “I say to her, ‘Those priests of yours, they have a pick-me-up of a morning. What the hell d’you think they got in those cups? Pepsi-Cola?’ That shuts her down.”

  He was a card, El
mer.

  He had just begun to explain the virtues of buying eyeglasses at Walgreen’s rather than at K mart, when Petrie walked up to the cage. Elmer glanced at Petrie’s iron-jawed face and paled. “Don’t forget to eat, Harry,” he said in a stricken voice, and retreated a discreet distance. I was still a little loaded, so I laughed.

  “Howdy, Hugh.”

  Petrie stared at me for a moment. His shirt was misbuttoned at the collar and his cheeks were dark with a day’s growth of beard, but he still looked tough and businesslike in a sleepy, disheveled way. He wore a felt hat over his forehead, shading it sharply the way his brow shaded the rest of his face.

  “What happened?” he said softly.

  “I don’t think Otto liked being cut. He went a little nuts in a downtown bar.”

  Petrie nodded, as if he’d heard the story before. “What was he doing in the bar?”

  “Looking for Parks. Or so he said.”

  “Does he know where Bill is?”

  I shrugged. “Apparently he thought he was at the Waterhole. He was pretty drunk, and feeling sorry for every football player who ever butted heads with management. I’ll tell you one thing—he isn’t too crazy about you guys at the moment.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” Petrie said. He peered through the bars at Thursday night’s collection of losers. “How’d you end up in here?”

  “A cop was using Otto’s head for batting practice. I stepped in.”

  “From what I’ve been told, Otto did a little practicing of his own.”

  “He got in his licks,” I said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have cut him, after all,” Petrie said dryly. “My lawyer’s arranging for your release. You should be out of here shortly.” He wrinkled his brow and the brim of his hat kissed the bridge of his nose. “By the way, who is Laurel Jones?”