“Dill,” Laffter said. “Ben Dill.”
“Right.”
“Used to be with UP.”
“UPI.”
“What the fuck, I still call it UP. What’d you wanta talk about, your sister?”
“If you’ve got a few minutes.”
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Neither have I. Maybe we could have dinner together. My treat.”
“I was gonna have a steak.”
“Chuckles,” the Greek said. “You haven’t bought a steak here in five years.”
Laffter ignored Levides. “I was gonna have a steak,” he said again. “A big thick steak with fresh asparagus and maybe a shrimp cocktail to start.”
“Fine,” Dill said. “I’ll have the same.”
Laffter turned to Levides. “Hear that, you ignorant pederast? Tell Harry the Waiter that the gentleman and I’re gonna have two big steaks, porterhouse, I think. Medium rare. Shrimp cocktails to start. Asparagus. A pair of vodka martinis first though to spark the appetite. Doubles, I’d say. And also a bottle of wine — something sound for a change. A Burgundy perhaps. Cognac afterward, of course, and maybe even a cigar, although I’ll decide about that later.”
“Eat all that shit and you’re gonna wind up right back in intensive care,” Levides said.
Laffter had already turned to Dill. “He missed his true calling, you know,” the old man said with a small backward nod toward the Greek. “He should’ve been a pimp in Piraeus, selling the behinds of little Greek boys to sailors off of Turkish ships.”
In a bored voice, Levides said something rank about the old man’s mother and moved down the bar to see if the two lawyers wanted a refill.
Chapter 6
They sat at a corner table in the dining area. After the double vodka martinis came, Laffter took the folded edition of the Tribune from his pocket and handed it to Dill. “Page three,” he said.
Dill turned to page three and the 36-point flush-left one-column headline at the top on the right that read:
Dill read the bylined story quickly and found it contained little he didn’t already know. He refolded the paper and handed it back to Laffter. “She was twenty-eight, not twenty-seven,” Dill said.
“They told me twenty-seven.”
“Today’s her birthday. She’s twenty-eight today.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me about Captain Colder.”
“Your almost brother-in-law.”
“You know about that then.”
The old man shrugged. “They weren’t exactly trying to hide it.”
“Had they set a wedding date?”
Laffter looked at Dill with interest, but it died quickly. “He wasn’t divorced yet and so they were seeing each other socially, as they used to put it back in the dear dead days beyond recall. But I don’t think they’d set up light housekeeping. At least not so anybody’d notice.” The interest flared again in the old man’s pale eyes, but again died away. “She didn’t tell you about Colder, did she.”
“No.”
“Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”
“Such as?”
“How the hell would I know? Ask Colder.”
“He says he thought she’d told me.” It wasn’t quite what Colder had said, but Dill was interested in the old man’s reaction.
“Called her a liar, did he?”
“In a way.”
“That wasn’t very nice, but who pays for nice nowadays?”
Laffter finished his martini in a gulp and looked around for Harry the Waiter. Dill picked up his own untouched martini and set it down in front of the old man. “Here,” he said. “I haven’t touched it.”
“Jesus, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a controlled drinker.”
Laffter raised his new drink in a mock toast. “To our most enduring myth — the bibulous newspaperman.” He swallowed some of the drink, put it back down, took out a package of unfiltered Pall Malls, offered them to Dill, who refused, and lit one with a new Zippo.
“Guess how long I’ve been in this business,” the old man said.
“A hundred years?”
“Fifty come September the third. Half a century, by God. I was twenty-two and outa work and outa college for more’n a year when old man Hartshorne hired me for seventeen-fifty a week — and that was a forty-eight-hour week back then. One day off. I got Tuesday. Who the fuck wants Tuesday off? He’s still there, you know.”
“Who?”
“Hartshorne.”
Dill shook his head. “Couldn’t be.”
The old man grinned. Dill saw that he had some very shiny new teeth. “Walks to work every morning, ninety-seven years old. Swings along Grant to Fifth and then cuts south on Our Jack, the Cadillac creeping along just behind with old Pete, that colored chauffeur of his at the wheel who’s gotta be at least eighty himself. Ninety-seven and Hartshorne’s at work every morning by eight. That’s why I’m still there. He thinks of me as Young Laffter.”
“What about Jimmy Junior?”
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it, to be sixty-seven years old and have everybody still calling you Jimmy Junior? He’s editor and president and the old man’s still chairman and publisher and owns sixty-two percent of the stock so you can guess who calls the shots.”
Harry the Waiter came over and served the two shrimp cocktails. Harry the Waiter, whose real name was Harold Pond, was black, forty, and fat, and had started at the Press Club as a skinny dishwasher when he was sixteen. He had turned himself into what may well have been the city’s finest waiter. The Cherry Hills Golf & Country Club had tried to hire him at least a dozen times, but Harry the Waiter always refused and stayed on at the Press Club, where he pretended to despise news people. Or pretended to pretend. He reviled their product, mocked their intelligence, and scoffed at their pretensions. The members regarded him as a treasure and repeated his insults with pride.
After he set the shrimp cocktail down in front of Laffter, Harry the Waiter began one of his harangues: “You eat that shrimp, old man, and you’re gonna be up around two or three reaching for the Gelusil like always. Can’t for the life of me see how anyone old as you and with the gumption God gave a goose’d eat and drink stuff the doctor says is gonna kill ’im. One of these days I’m gonna serve you your chili-mac like you always eat, instead of that nice porterhouse you went and promoted yourself this evening, and you’re gonna dip your spoon in and shovel it into that big ugly mouth of yours and swallow it, and then your eyes’re gonna bulge out like this, and you’re gonna get all red in the face, even redder’n the drink’s done made it, and then you’re gonna keel over dead and guess who’s gonna have to mop it all up? Me. That’s who. The Greek said you wanted a French Burgundy. You don’t know nothing about French wine. I’m gonna give you a nice old Napa pinot noir that ought be just about right.” Harry the Waiter turned to Dill. “How you, Ben? Sorry to hear about your sister. Terrible thing. I was gonna say something about it before, but I didn’t get the chance.”
“Thanks, Harry,” Dill said.
“Go away,” Laffter said. “Go back in the kitchen and spit in the soup or whatever you do.”
“Spit in the soup?” Harry the Waiter said. “Goodgawdalmighty, I never thought of that! Lemme go tell the other niggers.”
After he left, Laffter asked, “How come he treats you like a white man?”
“Harry and I go back a long way.”
“How long?”
“Fifteen, sixteen years. We were both broke back then and we’d lend each other money. Sometimes he’d give me a ride home.”