Inside the door they pushed through a narrow hallway that was crowded with young girls, most of them thirteen-year-olds with thirty-year-old faces. One, who could have been twelve, extended her non-existent breasts to Nolan in offering, giving him a smirky pouty come-on look. Nolan gave her a gentle nudge and moved past with Vicki through the corridor.
At the end of the hall they came to a card table where a guy sat taking money. He looked like an ex-pug, was around thirty-five and had needed a shave two days before. Nolan looked at him carefully and paid the two-fifty per couple admission. Nolan smiled at the ex-pug, a phony smile Vicki hadn’t seen him use before, and moved on. Nolan followed Vicki as she went by a set of closed, windowless double doors, then trailed her down a flight of steps.
“Where the doors lead?”
“To the dance floor and Beer Garden.”
“Oh.”
She led him through two swinging doors into a shoddy room, cluttered with a dozen wooden tables.
“This it?” Nolan asked.
“Don’t let it fool you,” she told him, leading him to a small table by the wall, “the food’s not bad at all.”
Nolan looked around. The room was poorly lit and the walls concrete, painted black. The naked black concrete was partially dressed by pop-art paintings, Warhol and Lichtenstein prints and a few framed glossies, autographed, of big-time rock groups like the Jefferson Airplane and Vanilla Fudge. The tables were plain wood, black-painted and without cloths, and each was lit with a thick white candle stuck down into a central hole. The far end of the room, the bar, was better lighted, and the doors into the kitchen on either side of it let out some light once in a while. Other than that the room was a black sea of glowing red cigarette tips.
Nolan lit a fresh cigarette for both of them and they joined the sea of floating red spots.
“You notice the guy taking money as we came in upstairs?”
She nodded. “The one who looked like a prize-fighter?”
“That’s the one.”
“What about him?”
“I used to know him.”
“What? When did you know him?”
“A few years back. In Chicago.” He looked at her meaningfully.
“You mean you knew him when you worked for... ah...”
“Yeah.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Hell no,” Nolan said. “He doesn’t recognize himself in a mirror. Punchy. Surprises the hell out of me he makes change.”
“What’s he doing here?”
Nolan stared out into the darkness and said, “You tell me.”
“How?”
“Start with the man who runs this place.”
“The manager, you mean?”
“Not the manager. The owner.”
“As a matter of fact... I have heard the owner’s name. I’ve heard Broome mention it. It’s Francis, or something like that.”
“Franco?”
“Yes, I think that’s it.”
Nolan withheld a smile. “Fat George.”
“I believe his first name is George, at that.”
A waitress came to the table, put down paper placemats and gave them water and silverware. She handed them menus and rolled back the paper on her order blank.
Vicki asked for a steak sandwich, dinner salad and coffee, and Nolan followed suit. They ordered drinks for their wait, Vicki a Tom Collins, Nolan bourbon and water.
Nolan sat, deep in thought, not noticing the silence maintained between them until the drinks arrived five minutes later.
Vicki cupped her drink, looking down into it, and said, “Do you want me to talk about Irene now?”
“That’d be fine.”
“Well... she was wild, Earl, not real bad or anything, but a little wild... I guess you could blame that on her father.”
“He isn’t what I’d call wild.”
“But... isn’t he... a gangster?”
“The deadliest weapon Sid Tisor ever held was a pencil.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, Irene and I used to be quite close. You have to be, to live together, share an apartment and all. Both of us were artistic, using that same balcony studio in the apartment. Some of those paintings on the apartment walls are hers. Once in a while she wouldn’t show up at night, she’d sleep over with some guy or other — no special one, there were several — but that was no big deal, I’m no virgin either. It was just this year that it started getting kind of bad. Not with guys or anything. It was when she started getting in tight with some of these would-be hippies. I went along with a lot of it, because some of these people are witty and pretty articulate. Fun to be with. For example, they meet upstairs here during the day, and put articles and cartoons and stuff together and put out a weekly underground-style newspaper, called the Third Eye.”
“What you’re trying to say is they’re not idiots.”
“Right. I’m friendly with some of them. If you leaf through some back copies of the Eye you’ll see some of my artwork. But not all of these Chelsey hippies are well, benign. Some of them are hangers-on, bums, drop-outs, acid-heads. Like this Broome creep who runs the band here. Irene fell in with characters like Broome this last month or so, and I saw less and less of her... she was experimenting that final week or so, with pills mostly. And she kept saying, threatening kind of, that she was going to try an LSD trip.”
“And?”
“She did, I guess.”
“You think it was suicide?”
“Her death? I think it was an accident.”
“Oh.”
“You sound almost disappointed, Earl.”
“To tell you the truth, Vicki, I don’t give a damn one way or another. I’m just doing Sid Tisor a favor.”
She looked at him, shocked for a moment. “But you knew her, didn’t you? Don’t you care what happened to her?”
He shrugged. “She’s dead. It begins and ends there. Nothing brings her back, it’s all a waste of time.”
She squinted at him, obviously straining to figure him out. “You came to this stinking little town to risk your life when you think it’s a waste of time?”
Nolan drew on the cigarette. “You don’t understand. It’s a debt I’m paying. Also, there’s a chance for me to make some money off the local hoods. But I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Sid Tisor. He cares, and that’s what counts.”
“Because you owe him.”
“Because I owe him.”
Their meals were brought to them and they ate casually, speaking very little. She watched him, beginning to understand him better.
He paid the check and they went upstairs.
3
The large gymnasium-sized room was filled with cigarette smoke, unpleasant odors and grubbily dressed kids. Nolan stood with Vicki at the entrance and looked around, over the bobbing heads.
The black concrete walls were covered with psychedelic designs, vari-colored, abstract, formless but somehow sensual, done in fluorescent paints. The lighting consisted of rows of tubular black-light hanging from the ceiling; a strobe the size of a garbage can lid was suspended from the ceiling’s center, but it was turned off at the moment. At one end of the room, to the left of the double doors, was a shabby-looking bar with an over-head sign that read “Beer Garden.” It was open for business but serving soft drinks only. The other end of the room was engulfed by a huge, high-ceilinged stage piled with rock group equipment.
“Let’s take a look,” Nolan said.
Vicki nodded agreement and pushed through the crowd with Nolan till they reached the foot of the stage.