“Tell „em about the hotel and all,” he says.
“Look, O‟Brian did me all right. I could get blitzed over this.” Bong! “„Told „em about the fuckin‟
hotel, weed.”
“He gets me a suite here in the Breakers, gives me two G‟s, and says I got a couple of weeks to line
up some ladies. It‟s a sixty-forty split. He gets the forty.”
Salvatore looked over at me and smiled.
“What else you want to know?”
“Did you bring any ladies with you?” I asked.
“Uh-.-”
Bong!
“Yeah, yeah. Two.”
“That‟s the Mann Act,” I said.
“Look, could we maybe meet somewhere else if we‟re going to keep this up?” Mortimer pleaded. “I
could take a boxcar ride just talking to you guys.”
“How many pimps does O‟Brian have working down here?” I asked.
Mortimer looks at Salvatore wild-eyed and says, “Swear to God, I don‟t know. 1 got the hotel, that‟s
all I know.”
“This is your territory exclusively?” Charlie One Ear asked, and Mortimer nodded vigorously.
“Okay,” I said. “Finish your breakfast. We wanted information; we‟re not going to tell anybody about
our chat. Don‟t screw up and leave town.”
He shakes his head. Salvatore pockets the cue, and we split.
“Can we use this?‟ Charlie One Ear asks on the way out.
“No,” I said, “but it‟s nice to know.
“Coercion, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Now I know why Salvatore carries a pool cue. He calls it his sweet nutcracker.
See what I mean about due process, Cisco?
22
DRIVE-IN
Stick drove intelligently on the way back. Neither one of us had much to say. About halfway to town
he wheeled into a drive-in and got us each a hamburger and a beer. Re pulled around behind the place
and parked under some palm trees in the parking lot and we opened the doors to let the breeze blow
through.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Sure, why?”
“I figure maybe you got the blues.”
“How come?”
“You got that look in your eye.”
“I‟m doing fine.”
“1 know the blues when I see them.” He looked at me with that crazy sideways smile. “I just thought
I‟d let you know I‟m a good listener and I got an awful memory”
“It‟s nothing you haven‟t heard before,” I said.
“I‟m only thirty-one,” he replied. “You‟d be surprised what I haven‟t heard yet.”
“I‟ll keep that in mind.”
There was a lot of activity in the parking lot; a lot of young girls wearing just about as little as the law
allowed and young men with acne and cutoff jeans making awkward passes at them. The beer was ice
cold and it tickled the tongue and made the mouth feel clean and fresh, and the hamburgers were real
meat and cooked just right. So I hunkered down in the seat, bracing my knees on the dashboard, and
took a long pull on my bottle. It had been a long time since I had spent lunch watching pretty young
girls at play.
“Just look at that, would you,” Stick said wistfully.
“I‟m looking,” I said, just as wistfully.
After a while two girls in a TR-3 pulled in and parked near us. One of them got out and threw
something into the trash can. She was wearing thin white shorts that barely covered her bottom and a
man‟s white shirt tied just under her breasts, which were firm and perilously close to popping out. She
stood by the door of the TR-3 for a minute, flirting with Stick, and then she got in and leaned over and
whispered something to her friend. When she did, the shorts tightened around every curve and into
every crevice and you could see the lines of her skimpy bikini through the cotton cloth and see the
half-circles of her cheeks.
“Holy shit,” Stick muttered, “that‟s damn near criminal.”
“She‟s not a day over fifteen, Stick.”
“1 don‟t remember fifteen-year-olds being stacked like that when I was a kid,” he said somewhat
mournfully. “Do you remember them looking like that?”
I remember Doe at fifteen, coming up to Athens with Chief for homecoming, flirting with me every
time Teddy or Chief looked the other way. She definitely looked like that.
“Seems to me they were all flat-chested and giggled a lot,” Stick went on.
“They‟re giggling,” I pointed out.
“That‟s a different kind of giggling.”
“They‟re just beginning to figure it out,” I said.
“Figure what out?”
“How to drive a man up the wall.”
“She‟s got the angle, all right,” he said, drumming the fingers of one hand on his steering wheel and
staring back at the little cutie, who lowered her sunglasses and stared back.
“Oh my,” Stick moaned. “You just don‟t know where to draw the line.”
“About three years older than that,” I said.
“What a shame.”
He took a long pull on his beer, smacked his lips, and sighed.
“I missed all that,” he said. “They were little girls when I went to Nam and they were grown up and
spoken for when I got back. What a fuckin‟ ripoff.”
The girl in the TR-3 leaned her head way back and shook her long black hair across her face, and then
she leaned forward and flipped it back and smoothed it out with her hands. The shirt came perilously
close to falling completely open.
“She‟s doing that on purpose,” Stick said, watching every move. He looked back over at me. “Fifteen,
huh?”
“At the most.”
“Shit. What a fuckin‟ ripoff.”
The driver of the TR-3 cranked up and pulled around in a tight little arc so they drove past us.
“Love your hat,” the girl in the white cotton shorts purred as they went by. Stick whipped the hat off
and scaled it like a Frisbee in the wake of the TR-3. It hit the parking lot and skipped to a stop as the
sports car vanished around the building. Stick retrieved his hat and got back behind the wheel.
“All bluff,” he muttered, and then added, “I may have to take the night off.”
“I wouldn‟t mind taking the rest of my life off,” I said. “I been on this case too long. Almost six years.
I‟m sick and tired of the Taglianis. They‟re enough to give anybody the blues.”
“Relax. The way things are going there won‟t be any of them left to be sick and tired of,” he said
almost jauntily, staring at another young girl in a bikini bathing suit who was sitting on the back of a
convertible, her face turned up toward the sun. Her long, slender legs were stretched out in front of
her and her breasts bubbled over the skimpy top. The driver, skinny kid in surfing trunks and a cutoff
T-shirt, stared dumbly at her in the rearview mirror.
“Look at that kid in the front seat,” Stick said. “He doesn‟t know what the hell to do about all that.”
“It‟ll come to him,” 1 said.
“They‟re all over the place,” Stick cried lasciviously. “You know what this is? It‟s a plague of young
flesh, Do you get the feeling this is a plague of young flesh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “God‟s throwing the big final at us. He‟s testing our mettle.”
“Mettle, shmettle,” Stick said. “If that little sweetie in the back of the convertible takes a deep breath,
her top‟ll fly off and kill that kid up front.” After a moment he added, “What a way to go.
He finished his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor between his legs. “That‟s all it is then?
You‟re tired of the Tagliani case?”
I wondered whether he was fishing and what he was fishing for. Then I thought, who cares, so he‟s
fishing. Suddenly I had this crazy thought that while Stick was younger than me and newer at the