“No messages for you. Can I be of any further assistance?”
“That’ll do it, Phil. Thanks.”
“The guy’s all done for the night,” Harry told Mike when he got back to the bar. “Can’t do anything right now.”
“Done for the night? Fuck. What kind of coke dealer is he? It ain’t even four yet.” Mike zeroed in on that suit, frozen in the same spot where he bought his beer. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “We’re closed.”
The guy’s jaw slackened, and he trained his blurry vision toward the source of this noise. “Closed?”
“That’s right, closed.” Mike slipped the bottle out of his hand, and the suit pawed the air.
Mike was way too creaky to be vaulting any bar, but he did hustle around it to grab the guy’s arm. He pushed him toward the exit. When Mike shut the door and bolted it, the guy cocked his head like a terrier faked out in a game of fetch.
This was the six hundred pound gorilla, a mighty monkey indeed, ventilating a hapless, beer-gutted soak too looped to stick up for himself. Not that Harry felt sorry for the guy, but Mike was nasty with him, and for what? For nothing. Because Mike needed to get beamed up and Harry wasn’t holding.
He asked for another scotch.
Mike said, “I’m gonna need some money for this, you know. You can’t just drink here for free.”
Harry slid the twenty at him. Mike snapped it up and spitefully rang an eighteen dollar sale into the vintage NCR. The drawer flew open and Mike banged it shut without making change. He reopened it and started counting the night’s take.
“I’m trying to find out about Julia,” Harry said. He peeled another twenty off his roll, to replace the one Mike had stuck in the register. “I’m assuming she’s still in town.”
Mike said, “Uh-huh.” He wound a rubber band around a stack of singles. “Julia, right? Sharp-looking chick, tall brunette?”
“That’s the one, Mike. So do I get my drink, or what?”
“Sorry,” Mike said, “sorry,” reaching for the Dewar’s. “I’m a bit rattled tonight.” He poured until Harry said whoa. “This one’s on me. Happy days. What went on with you two, anyway?”
“What went on was, we took a trip to Florida, but then I got into some shit and I had to stay.”
“Told you that bitch was trouble. You gotta listen to old Mike.”
“Okay, you were dead-nuts on that one, but what I’m trying to do is get the rap on her now. Did she move some guy in? Is he banging my girl? Is he drying his ass with my towels?”
Mike was counting again, the fives this time, counting and nodding, maybe listening, maybe not. “You know what I was thinking, Harry? I was thinking you could ask somebody else.”
“The problem is, everybody I know that knows her is a friend of hers. They’re not gonna give her up. She’s got ’em all convinced I’m a monster. You follow me?”
“He’s not the only blow dealer in New York, is what I’m saying. You gotta know somebody else.”
Jeez. He was still fixated on getting his coke. “No, Mike, you gotta know somebody else. Cause I’m out of it. Like I said. Only you must not have heard me, because if you did, you wouldn’t keep fucking asking. I don’t know anybody, and I don’t wanna know anybody, that’s gonna make a fifty dollar drop at four o’clock in the morning.”
“I’d go a hundred,” Mike said, putting the singles with the fives.
“Try the car service on Avenue D. Go talk to Hector.” Hector was most likely in Rikers, but Harry was hoping Mike would run into some desperate crackhead and get robbed. “Otherwise, First Avenue, 8th Street, 9th Street. Those guys are always open.”
“Scrubbing powder,” Mike said. “Pure, unadulterated street garbage. I don’t put that trash in my body.”
Ah, yes. It was the cheap stuff that hurt you. “You remember the last time you saw her?”
Mike said, “Who?” He was halfway through a stack of tens, and had to start over. His totals were bound to be miles off. “Oh, yeah. That tall girl with the dark hair. What’s her name?”
“Julia, Mike. Her name is Julia.”
“Right, Julia. You gotta be careful of girls like her.”
“Seen her lately?”
“She was in, I don’t know, one night last week. Why? What’ve you got going with her?”
“Was she alone?”
“She came in alone and got guys to buy her drinks until her boyfriend showed up. You know the guy.”
“I know what guy?”
“The boyfriend. Kind of a big nose, real Italianlooking. You used to be friends with him.”
Harry said, “Who?”
“Jimmy,” Mike said, “Jimmy De Steffano.”
Harry was right. Hector was still on the good-boy bench, and the car service was shuttered, but Hector’s cousin Junior had moved the operation, and he was running it out of a bodega on 2nd Street. Junior carved him a gram of rock from his private stash. For old time’s sake, he said.
Harry bindled the gram into a fifty, and that more than got him past Felix, the four-till-midnight doorman at Julia’s co-op. After Harry assured him he’d keep his name out of it, Felix slipped him in with keys he should’ve been fired for using.
The apartment was basically one big room with an arched, wall-length window that faced east and let in lots of light but didn’t offer much of a view. In another part of town, the pad would’ve passed for a loft, the rambling space split into rooms by furniture, about twenty-five percent of it plasterboarded into a bedroom, and through there, the bathroom.
Julia’s estimated time of arrival, one half-hour. To get showered and changed and telephone vicious, half-true gossip to friends about other friends who were either in or out of their dinner plans. He hoped she showed up alone. He didn’t want to deal with De Steffano, not right now. Jimmy no doubt did backflips to convince Julia how tough he was, and if he felt any pressure to put his money where his mouth was, Harry’d have to kick his ass for him, and he didn’t want to do that.
Irish Mike’s tidbit stung Harry. He was wounded, but not because De Steffano had scooped up Julia. All anybody ever did was act according to his character, and Jimmy was always the kind of guy who’d get your girl in bed the second your back was turned. No point expecting him to change now.
But De Steffano’d had a golden opportunity to come clean. Instead, he’d let Harry find out through somebody else. That’s what got him. Julia wasn’t his girl anymore, and what he had to keep in mind, the one thing he did not want out of this life or any other, was Julia Stencyk hanging around his neck like a stone. But De Steffano could at least have told him.
Every bill was due. Phone, three months worth of cable TV, Con Edison. A charge account had been turned over to a collection agency, one of Julia’s financial managers having fallen down on the job.
Harry sorted through Julia’s jewelry box for a pair of diamond-stud earrings he’d bought her during a flush period. He found them easy enough, slipped them into his pocket, and started opening dresser drawers. There was a copy of his birth certificate in here somewhere, and he wanted it.
He should’ve avoided the drawer where she kept her photographs, but he didn’t. There were recent photos of Julia with Jimmy, among the same faces and in the same places that she used to hang out in with Harry. He dug through stacks of snapshots and landed in the Harry era, Harry and Julia with some castmates from her sitcom, all grown up and doing pretty badly. Harry and Julia flanking the old man after a gig. Harry looked pretty drunk in that one.
What do you know, Miami Beach. Harry and Julia entwined on the sand, the ocean rolling behind them. That must have been their first day there. Wait a minute. Behind them, featured in a series of three photographs of Harry and Julia kissing — he recognized this girl, the deep suntan, those shoulders. It came to him slowly. She was the girl from Manfred’s room. Jennifer.