“Where’s Lee Marvin when you need him?” I said to Angie.
“Or Eastwood,” Angie said. “I’d take Clint about now.”
Two guys shot pool in the back. Well, they were shooting pool. And then we came in and somehow messed up their game, and one of them looked up from the table and frowned.
The bartender turned his back to us. He stared at the TV above him, intently focused on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The Skipper was hitting Gilligan on the head with his cap. The Professor was trying to break it up. The Howells laughed. Maryann and Ginger were nowhere to be found. Maybe that had something to do with the plot.
Angie and I took stools at the far corner of the bar, near the bartender, and waited for him to acknowledge us.
The Skipper kept hitting Gilligan. He was apparently mad about something involving a monkey.
“This is a great one,” I said to Angie. “They almost get off the island.”
“Really?” Angie lit a cigarette. “Pray tell, what stops them?”
“Skipper professes his love for his little buddy and they get all caught up in the wedding arrangements and the monkey steals the boat and all their coconuts.”
“Right,” Angie said. “I remember this one now.”
The bartender turned and looked down at us. “What?” he said.
“A pint of your finest ale,” I said.
“Two,” Angie said.
“Fine,” the bartender said. “But then you shut up until the show’s over. Some of us haven’t seen this one.”
After Gilligan, the bar TV was tuned to an episode of Public Enemies, a fact-based crime show in which the exploits of wanted felons were reenacted by actors so inept they made Van Damme and Seagal look like Olivier and Gielgud. This particular episode concerned a man who’d sexually molested and then carved up his children in Montana, shot a state trooper in North Dakota, and seemed to have spent his entire life making sure everyone he encountered had one bad fucking day.
“You ask me,” Big Dave Strand said to Angie and me, as they flashed the felon’s face onscreen, “that’s the guy you should be talking to. Not bothering my people.”
Big Dave Strand was the owner and chief bartender of the Filmore Tap. He was, true to his name, big—at least six four, with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew. Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips and dark green jailhouse tattoos on both biceps. The one on the left arm depicted a revolver and bore the word FUCK below it. The one on the right seemed to be of a bullet impacting with a skull and said YOU below it.
Oddly, I’d never run into Big Dave in church.
“Knew guys like him in the joint,” Big Dave said. He drew himself another pint of Piel’s from the tap. “Freaks. They’d keep ’em out of general population ’cause they knew what we’d do to them. They knew.” He downed half his pint, looked up at the TV again, and belched.
The bar smelled of sour milk for some reason. And sweat. And beer. And buttered popcorn from the baskets spaced out along the bar at every fourth stool. The floor was rubber tile, and Big Dave kept a hose behind the bar. By the looks of the floor, it had been a few days since he’d used it. Cigarette butts and popcorn were ground into the rubber, and I was pretty sure the small movements I saw coming from the shadows under one of the tables were those of mice nibbling on something along the baseboard.
We’d questioned all four men at the bar about Helene McCready, and none of them had been much help. They were older men, the youngest in his mid-thirties but looking a decade older. They all looked Angie up and down as if she were hanging naked in a butcher’s window. They weren’t particularly hostile, but they weren’t helpful either. They all knew Helene but didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her. They all knew her daughter was missing and didn’t seem to feel one way or another about that either. One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said, “The kid’s missing. So? She’ll turn up. They always do.”
“You’ve misplaced children before?” Angie said.
Lenny nodded. “They showed back up.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
“One’s in prison, one’s in Alaska or someplace.” He whacked the shoulder of the man nodding off beside him. “This here’s the youngest.”
Lenny’s son, a pale skinny guy with two brightly blackened eyes, said, “You’re fucking A,” and dropped his head into his arms on the bar.
“We already been through this with the cops,” Big Dave told us. “We told ’em, Yeah, Helene comes in here; no, she don’t bring the kid with her; yeah, she likes her beer; no, she didn’t sell the kid to pay off a drug debt.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Least not to anyone in here.”
One of the pool players came to the bar. He was a skinny guy with a shaved head, cheap jailhouse tats on his arms, but none done with the attention to detail and fine aesthetic sense of Big Dave’s. He leaned in between Angie and me, even though there were a few car lengths of space to our right. He ordered two more beers from Dave and stared at Angie’s breasts.
“You got a problem?” Angie said.
“No problem,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”
“He’s problem-free,” I said.
The guy continued staring at Angie’s breasts with eyes that looked as if they’d been zapped with a lightning bolt and seared of life.
Dave brought his beers, and the guy picked them up.
“These two are asking about Helene,” Dave said.
“Yeah?” The guy’s voice was so flat it was hard to tell if he had a pulse. He pulled his two beers in between our heads and tilted the mug in his left hand so that some beer spilled on my shoe.
I looked down at my shoe, then back up into his eyes. His breath smelled like an athlete’s sock. He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he looked at the mugs in his hands and his fingers tightened around the handles. He looked back up at me, and those stunted eyes were black holes.
“I don’t have a problem,” he said. “Maybe you do.”
I shifted my weight slightly in my chair so that my elbow had more leverage on the bar in case I had to bob or weave suddenly and waited for the guy to make whatever move was floating through his head like a cancer cell.
He looked down at his hands again. “Maybe you do,” he repeated loudly, and then stepped out from in between us.
We watched him walk back to his friend by the pool table. His friend took his beer, and the guy with the shaved head gestured in our direction.
“Did Helene have a big drug problem?” Angie asked Big Dave.
“The fuck would I know?” Big Dave said. “You implying something?”
“Dave,” I said.
“Big Dave,” he corrected me.
“Big Dave,” I said. “I don’t care if you keep kilos under the bar. And I don’t care if you sell them to Helene McCready on a daily basis. We just want to know if she had enough of a drug problem that she was in deep to somebody.”
He held my gaze for about thirty seconds, long enough for me to see how much of a badass he was. Then he watched some more TV.
“Big Dave,” Angie said.
He turned his bison’s head.
“Is Helene an addict?”
“You know,” Big Dave said, “you’re pretty hot. You ever want to go a few rounds with a real man, give a call.”
Angie said, “You know some?”
Big Dave looked back up at the TV.
Angie and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. I shrugged. The attention-deficit afflicting Helene and her friends was apparently widespread enough to fill a psych ward.
“She didn’t have no big debts,” Big Dave said. “She’s into me for maybe sixty bucks. If she was into anybody else for…party favors, I’d have heard about it.”
“Hey, Big Dave,” one of the men down the end of the bar called, “you ask her yet if she bl
ows?”
Big Dave held out his arms to them and shrugged. “Ask her yourself.”
“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Hey, honey.”
“What about guys?” Angie kept her eyes on Dave, her voice clear, as if whatever these assholes were talking about had nothing to do with her. “Was she seeing anybody who might be pissed off at her?”
“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Look at me. Look over here. Hey, honey.”
Big Dave chuckled and turned away from the four guys long enough to put a fresh head on his beer. “There’s chicks who can make you crazy, and chicks you’d fight over.” He smiled over his pint glass at Angie. “You, for instance.”
“And Helene?” I said.
Big Dave smiled at me as if he thought his come-ons to Angie had me worried. He glanced down the bar at the four men. He winked.
“And Helene?” I repeated.
“You saw her. She’s all-right looking. She’d do, I guess. But one look at her, you know she ain’t worth much in the sack.” He leaned on the bar in front of Angie. “Now, you, I bet you’ve fucked guys in half. Right, honey?”
She shook her head and chuckled softly.
All four guys at the bar were fully awake now. They watched us with high beams in their pupils.
Lenny’s son came off his stool and walked over to the door.
Angie looked down at the bar top, fingered her grimy coaster.
“Don’t look away when I’m talking to you,” Big Dave said. His voice was thicker now, as if his throat were clogged with phlegm.
Angie raised her head, looked at him.
“That’s better.” Big Dave leaned in closer. His left arm slid off the bar and reached for something below.
There was a loud snap in the still bar as Lenny’s son turned the bolt on the front door.
So this is how it happens. A woman with intelligence, pride, and beauty enters a place like this and the men get a glimpse of all they’ve been missing, all they can never have. They’re forced to confront the deficiencies of character that drove them to a dump like this in the first place. Hate, envy, and regret all smash through their stunted brains at once. And they decide to make the woman regret, too—regret her intelligence, her beauty, and, especially, her pride. They decide to smash back, pin the woman to the bar, spew and gorge.
I looked at the glass front of the cigarette machine, saw my reflection and the reflection of two men behind me. They approached from the pool table, sticks in hand, the bald one in the lead.
“Helene McCready,” Big Dave said, his eyes still locked on Angie, “is a nothing. A loser. Means her kid woulda been a loser. So whatever happened to the kid, she’s better off. What I don’t like is people coming in my bar, implying I’m a dealer, running their mouths like they’re better than me.”
Lenny’s son leaned against the door and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Dave,” I said.
“Big Dave,” he said through gritted teeth, his eyes never leaving Angie.
“Dave,” I said, “don’t be a fuckup here.”
“Did you hear him, Big Dave?” Angie said, a hint of tremor in her voice. “Don’t be stupid.”
I said, “Look at me, Dave.”
Dave glanced in my direction, more to check on the progress of the two pool players coming up behind me than because of what I’d said, and his head froze as he spotted the .45 Colt Commander in my waistband.
I’d moved it there from the holster at the small of my back the moment Lenny’s son had walked over to block the door, and Dave raised his eyes from my waist to my face and quickly recognized the difference between someone who exposes a gun for show and someone who does so to use it.
“Either of those guys behind me takes another step,” I told Big Dave, “and this situation’s going nuclear.”
Dave glanced over my shoulder and shook his head quickly.
“Tell that asshole to move away from the door,” Angie said.
“Ray,” Big Dave called, “sit back down.”
“Why?” Ray said. “The fuck for, Big Dave? Free country and shit.”
I tapped the butt of the .45 with my index finger.
“Ray,” Big Dave said, his eyes locked on me now, “get away from the door or I’ll fucking put your head through it.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “Okay, okay. Jeez, Big Dave. I mean, jeez and shit.” Ray shook his head, but instead of returning to his seat, he unlocked the door and walked out of the bar.
“Quite the orator, our Ray,” I said.
“Let’s go,” Angie said.
“Sure.” I pushed my bar stool away with my leg.
The two pool players stood just off to my right as I turned toward the door. I glanced at the one who’d spilled beer on my shoe. He held his pool stick upside down in both hands, the hilt resting on his shoulder. He was stupid enough to still be standing there, but not so stupid he was going to move any closer.
“Now,” I told him, “you have a problem.”
He glanced at the stick in his hands, at the sweat darkening the wood below his hands.
I said, “Drop the stick.”
He considered the distance between us. He considered the butt of the .45 and my right hand resting a half inch away from it. He looked into my face. Then he bent and placed the stick by his feet. He stepped back from it as his friend’s stick clattered loudly to the floor.
I turned away and took five steps down the bar and then stopped. I looked back at Big Dave. “What?” I said.
“Excuse me?” Dave watched my hands.
“I thought you said something.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I thought you said that maybe you hadn’t told us everything you could have about Helene McCready.”
“I didn’t,” Big Dave said, and held up his hands. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Angie,” I said, “you think Big Dave told us everything?”
She had stopped by the door, her .38 held loosely in her left hand as she leaned against the doorjamb. “Nope.”
“We think you’re holding out, Dave.” I shrugged. “Just an opinion.”
“I told you everything. Now I think you both should just—”
“Come back when you’re closing up tonight?” I said. “That’s a great idea, Big Dave. You got it. We’ll come back then.”
Big Dave shook his head several times. “No, no.”
“Say about two, two-fifteen?” I nodded. “See you then, Dave.”
I turned and walked down the rest of the bar. Nobody would meet my eyes. Everyone looked at their beers.
“She wasn’t over at her friend Dottie’s house,” Big Dave said.
We turned and looked back at him. He leaned over the bar sink and fired a spurt of water into his face from the dispenser hose.
“Hands up on the bar, Dave,” Angie said.
He raised his head and blinked against the liquid. He placed his palms flat on the bar top. “Helene,” he said. “She wasn’t over at Dottie’s. She was here.”
“With who?” I said.
“With Dottie,” he said. “And Lenny’s kid, Ray.”
Lenny raised his head from his beer and said, “Shut the fuck up, Dave.”
“The skeevy guy who manned the door?” Angie said. “That’s Ray?”
Big Dave nodded.
“What were they doing in here?” I said.
“Don’t you say another word,” Lenny said.
Big Dave glanced at him desperately, then back at Angie and me. “Just drinking. Helene knew it looked bad enough she left her kid alone in the first place. If the press or the cops knew she was actually ten blocks away at a bar and not next door, it would look even worse.”
“What’s her relationship with Ray?”
“They do each other sometimes, I think.” He shrugged.
“What’s Ray’s last name?”
“David!” Lenny said. “David, you shut the—”
“Likanski,” Big Dave
said. “He lives on Harvest.” He took a gulp of air.
“You are shit,” Lenny told him. “That’s what you are, and it’s all you’ll ever be, and all your retarded fucking offspring will be and everything you touch. Shit.”
“Lenny,” I said.
Lenny kept his back to me. “You think I’m going to say a word to you, boy, you are on fucking angel dust. I might be watching my beer, but I know you got a gun, and I know that girl has one too. And so fucking what? Shoot me or leave.”
Outside, I could hear the sound of a siren approaching.
Lenny turned his head, and a smile broke across his face. “Sounds like they’re coming for you, don’t it?” His smile broke into a hard, bitter laugh that exposed a red sore of a mouth with almost no teeth.
He waved at me as the siren grew so close I knew they were in the alley. “Bye-bye now. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
His bitter laugh came out even harder this time and sounded more like the coughing of ravaged lungs. After a few seconds, his cronies joined in, nervously at first but then openly, as we heard the doors of the cop car opening outside.
By the time we walked out the door, it sounded like a party in there.
5
When we stepped out of the bar into the alley, we met the grille of a black Ford Taurus parked a matter of inches from the front door. The younger of the two detectives, a big guy beaming a little boy’s smile, leaned in through the open driver’s window and turned off the siren.
His partner sat cross-legged on the hood, a colder smile on his round face, and said, “Woo, woo, woo.” He held an index finger aloft and rotated his wrist and made the sound again. “Woo, woo, woo.”
“Frighteningly realistic,” I said.
“Ain’t it?” He clapped his hands together and slid down the car hood until his feet rested on the grille and his knees were almost touching my legs.
“You’d be Pat Kenzie.” His hand shot out toward my chest. “Glad to make your acquaintance.”
“Patrick,” I said, and shook the hand.
He gave it two vigorous pumps. “Detective Sergeant Nick Raftopoulos. Call me Poole. Everyone does.” His sharp elfin face tilted toward Angie. “You’d be Angela.”
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