"Yeah. Well." The man sat up and yawned, rubbed his eyes again, looking at the thin boy asleep beside him or pretending to be asleep. "Get Buck n' Lowenstein. You and Gino meet me at d' other place in about ..." He glanced at the clock again. "Fuckin' goddamn shit clock it don' even tell the fuckin' time. Fuck it. Meet me over dere in half an hour. Bring ya tools 'n' shit. I don't guess we got to take dat fuckin' shit."
One of the main reasons he couldn't concentrate was he had Ritafication on the brain. Tonight's the night, he kept thinking. It was amazing to him the way he could always revert to a sixteen-year-old kid mentally at the mere cross of a leg in a high-heeled shoe. I mean, healthy is one thing, but Holy Moly, Captain Marvel, gimme a break here.
So Rita Paul now Haubrich of the legs and the red hair was the way he rationalized it. Whatever the real reason, this case was still a jellied blur.
The whole day had been spent first with Springer and a couple of homicide and organized-crime guys trying to do a chalk talk which had him so confused he erased it from his slate and tried his own simplistic version on a legal pad. It began like so:
THE TWO TONYS GANG
Cypriot (gone/NY?) Dago (slams)
Rikla . . . Measure Russo . . . Venable
He said to a detective nearby. "Hey, Glass?"
"Yeah?"
"Who is Johnny Picciotti?"
"Johnny Soldier. Punk worked for Measure's people. Blue Kriegal's bodyguard but it looks like the job's open. Appears he got himself snuffed."
"But no body, right?"
"Yeah. He's in the foundation of some new condo out in Lake St. Louis."
"Uh-huh," T. J. Monahan said, "or he's got compacted in the trunk of an old junker out at Used Car City."
"Right. He's now the rear bumper of a Dodge Omni."
"And Tony Tripotra. Was he with Rikla or Measure?"
"He WAS with Rikla. He's with the angels now. Dead muscle. A thief. Had a package behind ADW and an armed-robbery thing that he beat. I doubt if he ever made his bones even. Just a guinea moke for Rikla."
"How did Blue Kriegal get the name Blue?"
"Blue movies," somebody suggested.
"Naw," Pat Skully said. "It was because he blue so many little boys." Eichord thought it had warmed up a little or maybe it was just that he'd become punchy with the information overload.
"EEEhhhhh," Leech called out to him as he clomped through the squad room in his size-fourteen wides, "How's the Capo di Tutti Frutti today?" He said to Eichord.
"Sweet as ever and never been kissed." But fixing to remedy that situation, he hoped.
He shaved again for the date. Cut himself nicely, which was always a good sign, and looked at himself in a favorite sport coat and decided, No way. Ung. Not a shot in the world. He could feel his Right Guard going even as he pulled up in front of her place. She looked. What's the word? Gorgeous doesn't cover it. She looked like . . . Oh, let's be calm. Precise. We're a trained observer, he thought. She looks YIP P P P-EEEEEEE!
She was nice. Everything about her was nice. She looked very nice. Smelled nice. Smiled nice. Talked nice. Thought nice. This is going to be a nice, breathlessly boring date. Niceing each other to death.
She suggested a place at his request and it was — right — nice. A quiet, dark but not too dark, nice little place with good service and probably good food and wine. He didn't taste anything because he had Rita Haubrich to look at and taste. Pitiful and nobody's proud of being a slobbering, drooling sex maniac, but these are the facts, ma'am.
Rita drank a chilled white wine which she had to order as he had been struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy by the tactile senses that her presence had assaulted. He ordered something and it sat there untouched in front of him while they talked.
Yes, dammit to blazes, it was NICE talking with her about all kinds of things. He liked her a bunch and she seemed to be able to somehow tolerate Eichord, even laughing at his attempts at good humor. But then who wouldn't be charmed by the sophisticated, rapier wit and hilariously piercing bon mots such as the following:
"Well, how time flies," she had said to him with her big smile lighting up the dark corners of the restaurant. "We've been talking, or I should say I have been talking on and on. Did you want to do something else this evening?" And Jack Eichord replied — and get this now for some of that repartee, he didn't hesitate a moment — he replied brilliantly, "Hammma, hammma, ham-mma," which she had the taste to think was sublimely funny. She had probably seen various folk struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy before. She was what they used to call a looker. She had always been pretty. But now she was nothing less than SENSATIONAL.
They had fun talking and they sat there for hours making fools out of themselves not in the least. Rita kidded him that he was the first adult male she'd ever known who wasn't a lawyer.
"Are you sure you didn't become a lawyer in all that time?"
"I assure you I —"
"Promise." She made a pretty face. "Cops sometimes study for the bar."
"Cross my heart. Defense rests." He knew when to let a straight line go by untouched.
"Are you WANTING to be a lawyer?"
"'Fraid not. Is that good or bad?"
"Yes, probably one or the other but irrelevant. It's just so very wonderfully different. You are the only adult of the male persuasion I've ever met in the last twenty years who wasn't a lawyer."
"Still just a plain old cop."
"Cop, maybe. Old, ehhhh. Plain. Huh-uh." She laughed. She looked at his dark black hair flecked with gray, and dark eyes that bored into her soulfully, and that was when it happened.
"Oh, shucks," he said, summoning up a hidden wellspring of conversational brilliance. Thrilled to his sex-mad core. He LOVED St. Louis.
"You know," he began, some lame crap just to say something and he just couldn't finish the stupid sentence. He was absolutely bowled over by her and he let it hang there unfinished, just looking at her in admiration.
"Yeah?" is what another woman might have said to his unfinished dialogue. She thought it and he understood. And he thought that she could read the sincerity in his eyes. It was ridiculous, of course, but it was so damned biochemical and metaphysical and dad-gummed blue-eyed fun that he just nodded at her as if to say, Yes, I agree it was nice to be able to have a conversation without speaking. And then suddenly both of them got very self-conscious about it and at the exact moment Rita started to say, "It's interesting how a person can —" he started to say, "Have you ever considered the fact —" and they said them in unison and both broke up laughing and then they said, "Go ahead."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You go ahead, I wasn't going to say anything either."
"Would you believe I'm having lots of fun sitting here having the dumbest conversation that has ever been held?"
"Me too." And he wanted to ask her if he took an ink pen and connected all the little tiny dots on her body would it be some kind of far-out beautiful Picasso-like Cubistic artwork? And could he try that later, maybe? He could use something water-soluable. He had other thoughts, too.
They talked about old times. The St. Louis they both loved back in the delightful, SoHoish Gaslight Square days that made the town seem like an oasis of hip in the hopeless desert of the Midwest. They laughed about a district attorney, a preposterous guy who both of them still remembered. She told him all about her dad, a former judge and lawyer turned pol and long since retired. Her brother was a well-known criminal lawyer in Kansas City, and her former husband, Winslow Haubrich, was an upwardly mobile trust lawyer with North, Haubrich and Dechter, a firm solidly plugged into the St. Louis banking system.