"Yeah?"
"It's a plastic card with Club 52 on it and it says ALL ACCESS. You believe that?"
"Did you ever ask Doolan why a guy his age would be going to Club 52?"
"Sure I did. Get this—he says to me, 'Don't be a stick in the mud, Fred—don't you dig disco?' Dig disco? Was he kidding?"
This was the Doolan who died listening to recordings of the great symphonies, a lover of all the fine classics—and in his final days, he dug disco?
"When did you see him last?"
"Couple days before he killed himself."
"So did he seem really sick? Was he depressed, or in pain...?"
"Not really, but then he was taking strong painkillers before he died, and wouldn't be feeling it much if at all. Who knows—maybe there at the end, he was having one last fling. Hell, twice, he bought some rubbers from me."
"Maybe he didn't want to be a daddy at his age."
"Nuts. Didn't want to catch a dose, I'd say."
Either way, it was an interesting purchase for an octogenarian.
There wasn't much else Fred the druggist could tell me, so I said thanks and left. He'd warmed up—I was glad I hadn't slapped him. For a nontalkative guy, he and Doolan had gabbed plenty.
But all I had was one more screwy bit about my old friend that didn't make any sense at all—he had not only been to Club 52, he'd been a regular, or enough of one to rate a signed entry card from Little Tony himself.
I was going back in time now.
Down at the end of the street would be an old barroom with scarred furniture and artifacts dating to Prohibition days. Some of the customers would look like they had been there that long themselves, and the old sportswriters would be gathered at one end arguing about something that never happened anyway.
I would meet Velda at the back booth where the phone was right on the wall and she would have a cold beer and a meatball sandwich already ordered for me and we would compare notes of what had happened in the world of sports that day, with Ernie and Vern constantly butting in.
The taste in my mouth was sour and I spit it out. This time there would be no Velda and I shut her out of my mind. Vern had died the way a sportswriter should, of a heart attack after filing a story about a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium last year.
Two old-timers looked at me, surprised, then grinned. Somebody said hello from a booth and I waved in that direction while I moved through the modest crowd.
There in back was Ernie—a dark little balding mustached guy with a stubby pencil behind one ear, rolled up sleeves, a loose necktie, and baggy trousers, looking like he was trying out for a revival of The Front Page. Vern had been sports, but Ernie was police beat.
Right now he had the phone stuck to his ear, his waving hand describing something that couldn't be seen on the other end of the line. Not unless the rewrite man was psychic.
When I sat down in the booth nearby, he gaped at me, then hung the phone up without saying goodbye.
"How you doing, Ernie?"
"Man..." He shook his head, whether in disgust or amazement, I couldn't quite tell. "You are the fuck alive. I hardly believe it. Somebody said you were at Doolan's funeral, but I said they were either lying or hallucinating."
"I was there, all right. One of the youngest."
"That's not much to brag about," he said with a snort of a laugh. He slid in the side where his half-drunk beer was already waiting. "Where the hell have you been, Mike?"
"Away."
"Oh, so it's twenty questions? You think I don't ask enough questions in a given day, that you have to play cute?"
"I was living in Florida." That was the first time I'd used the past tense for that.
"No shit? I thought you died. Everybody thought you were dead. When the Bonetti kid popped you, and you just disappeared, everybody figured you'd bought it. Either crawled off to bleed out someplace on your own, or got followed there and put out of your misery." He shrugged. "Mike Hammer's dead, there goes New York, I said."
"Sure you did, Ernie."
"But here you are back again, right?"
"Right."
"And you don't even look like some old shot-up piece of shit."
"Thanks a bunch."
"You look fit in fact. Packing heat?"
"I'm warm enough."
"That old glow in your eyes is there and everything. Somebody gonna die?"
"Somebody might."
He shifted in the booth. "So something big's going down, right?"
"Right."
"And if I ask what it is, you're going to tell me to shove it up my ass, right?"
"Right."
"Shit." He threw the rest of the beer down, then waved until the waitress saw him, and he held up two fingers. "So where's Velda?"
"I don't know, Ernie."
"Was she in Florida with you?"
"No."
Everything seemed to stop in midair, then he frowned.
I said, "It's over."
That got another snort of a laugh out of him. "In a pig's ass it's over," he said. "You don't just drop a broad like that. George Washington don't drop Martha. Tarzan don't dump Jane."
"Maybe Jane dumped Tarzan. Anyway, I hear she's got somebody else. And she's not in the city anymore." I managed a shrug. "These things happen."
"Jesus, Mike—this is like when the Yankees dropped Babe Ruth."
"Yet somehow the Yankees survived. Now forget it."
A young waitress came up and set down two foaming steins of beer in front of us.
"Want some pretzels, fellas?" she asked.
We both nodded.
"I'll bring 'em," she told us.
Ernie was smiling at me.
"What?" I said.
"That kid doesn't even know you. Maybe you gone out of fashion."
I was in no mood. "I need some information, Ernie." A frown started and I added, "Not asking you to share anything off the record, if you're not so inclined."
He wiped foam off his mustache. "Hey, if it's news, Mike, everything's on microfilm and you can look it up."
"You're quicker, pal." I took a pull of the beer. It was icy cold and tasted good. "This disco, Club 52—what goes on there?"
"It's popular and expensive and harder than hell to get into. It's where that dance, the hustle, got famous. You see everybody from movie stars to the big politicians inside."
"Even though they do coke in back?"
He frowned. "I've never been in there, Mike. I don't know where they do the coke."
"But they do it."
"Probably. Sure. Everybody in the upper register seems to."
"And nobody cares?"
"Hell, no."
"Because the 52's mobbed up? Little Tony Tret's running it, right?"
Ernie's head shake said no, but his mouth said, "Yes." Then he amended it: "Only, Mike, it's not a mob thing. Tony divorced himself from his family a long, long time ago. He was just a young entrepreneur who had the right idea at the right time. This cocaine kick, it's no big deal. It's just social. They keep it discreet, and nobody complains. It's not like there's piles of stuff on tables and everybody's bending over and snorting it."
"The clientele is the young and the beautiful, right?"
"Sure, and the old and the rich. Now and then tourists get in, if they know somebody or throw a hell of a tip at the doorman. But it's a hard ticket, man."
"Yeah? I know a guy who had an all-access pass."