“What?”
“Where were you about nine last night?”
Frank looked at him and for a moment seemed unable to think. “In the production. Watching the replay of the top of the show and seeing if there was anything we could use before the fight broke out. Why?”
“Just curious.”
Then Tobin’s real meaning occurred to Emory. “You’re asking me if I’ve got an alibi, aren’t you?”
Tobin shrugged. “I guess I kind of am, yes.”
“Jesus.”
“They’re trying to nail me, Frank. I didn’t kill Richard, but I need to find out who did.”
“God, it wasn’t me.” He shook his head, dazed. “Hell, now I’ve got to find a replacement for Richard.” He sounded utterly lost. “And if I can’t find a good-enough one...” Misery gripped his voice.
Tobin stood up, knowing he needed to be out of there, and walked over and slid his arm around Emory and said, “Sorry, Frank. I had to ask. I really did.”
Emory smiled bleakly. “I know. I know you did.”
“So why don’t you go sit behind the desk?”
Emory grinned. “Guess I may as well. Somebody has to.”
“That’s right,” Tobin said softly, “Somebody has to.”
He waited for a cab in the lobby, planning all the time to go back to his apartment and settle in for the night with a tape of his favorite film, Out of the Past. But then, standing there, his fingers touched a round and smooth little button in his pocket. The pin of the damn thing stuck him.
Then, as the Checker pulled up in front, he decided not to go straight home after all.
13
7:58 P.M.
The saxophone player, who was also obviously the star of the six-man group, was as unlikely a Neat Guy as Bill Haley had been in the first place. All the chunky guy in the lewd red dinner jacket, complete with lewd red cummerbund, needed was a little piggy spit curl to complete the image of Bill Haley reborn. He even had Haley’s total lack of talent.
Tobin stood in the back of the union hall (the International Brotherhood of Service People in Bay Ridge), and there in the darkness was reminded of every high-school dance he’d ever attended. The ceiling drooped with streamers, and around a punch bowl wobbled at least two dozen drunks and on the floor short people danced with tall people and fat men danced with skinny ladies and women even danced with women (though this was no homage to Lesbos, simply a tradition necessitated by the fact that some men would rather do anything than dance with their wives), and for every fifty who laughed, ten, inexplicably, sobbed. There was hooch and marijuana on the air and enough Aqua Velva to keep the Green Bay Packers happy for several decades. Across the front of the stage was a big hand-painted sign that read A CHRISTMAS ROMANCE, and beneath it stood the six hack musicians playing cornball rock ’n’ roll (which they alternated with slow songs such as “The Great Pretender” by the Platters so, as in the old days, the guys could take their turns dancing with the girls with big charlies) and trying to keep their cummerbunds from falling over the slopes of their guts. But of course the dancers themselves were not exactly Hollywood material either. Holiday booze had given them a certain frantic energy, but there were too many bald pates and toupees and falsies and girdles and shoe lifts to keep them from seeming young and truly spontaneous.
There, in the gloom at the rear of the hall, beneath the ear-thrumming speakers, Tobin felt a kinship with them — grinding out some middle-aged pleasure that, even if it was a tad desperate, imposed some meaning on lives lost in punching time clocks and watching children drift away, knowing that in the end you’d made a fucking botch of it all. Almost as if he were tuned into Tobin’s reverie, the saxophone player grabbed hold of Little Richard’s “Lucille” and grabbed hold of it good, actually bringing something close to artfulness to his rendition. Tobin, all five feet five of him, found himself alive with music and forgot for a moment about playing detective and allowed himself to be Pied-Pipered toward the bandstand, where the punch bowl loomed in the shadows like a shrine. The guy doing the ladling was as drunk as any of the dancers, and so he got nearly as much on Tobin’s sleeve as he did in Tobin’s glass, but Tobin didn’t give a shit, he just started roaming, still a little buzzy from the bourbon he’d shared with Frank Emory, hoping suddenly that he’d find some unlikely lady here and that together they’d hump through the night (or fifteen-twenty minutes, more realistically, then just sort of hold each other through the night).
He was drifting this way, through knots, clumps, corrals of people, when a hand meant to do him harm began to play trash compactor with his shoulder.
“You think I don’t know who you are?”
The guy obviously had a video cassette of Urban Cowboy at home and obviously he’d let it have a big impact on him. He was such a squared-away cowpoke that he would have given Hopalong Cassidy an inferiority complex, and he’d accomplished all this without ever leaving the city.
But Tobin knew better than to laugh because even if the guy was a cowboy peacock, the jerk had a hand that could uproot redwoods and a sneer that looked as if it had been put there by a switchblade.
“You’re here doin’ a story on our pension fund, aren’t ya?”
“No. Actually.”
“Bullshit. I seen you on TV.”
“You’ve seen me on TV, but not as an investigative reporter.”
“Fuckin’ Reagan wants to bust unions. That’s what all this shit is about.”
“This may surprise you, but I don’t like Reagan either.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’re you doin’ here?”
“I’m not sure.”
The guy grabbed him. He was drunk and he’d been meaning all along to grab him anyway. He had just been looking for some excuse and Tobin had been stupid enough to give him one.
He pulled his fist back and sort of aimed it like a missile and was ready to let go when a guy about Tobin’s height but maybe sixty pounds heavier came up and grabbed the cowboy’s hand and proceeded to envelop it in a fist that forced the cowboy to let go of Tobin and start doing a whole passel of grimacing.
“You’ll always be a moron, won’t you, Gilhooley?”
“He’s a TV guy,” Gilhooley said by way of explanation. He whined. Like a child. Tobin took a great deal of pleasure from the sound.
“ ‘He’s a TV guy.’ Jesus Christ — of course he’s a TV guy. He’s a movie critic.”
“A movie critic?”
“That’s right. A movie critic. Now haul your ass out of here. You understand?”
“Gee, Sal, I was just tryin’ to do the right thing.”
“Dudley-Do-Right,” the stout man named Sal said as Gilhooley disappeared into the press of dancers. He put out his hand. “Sal Ramano. I’m vice-president of the union.” As they shook hands, he smiled. “And you’re Tobin.”
“I’m Tobin.”
“I guess I’ve got to say that I don’t blame Gilhooley for being surprised at seeing you here.”
“I’m just looking for a little information is all.”
“Why don’t we go to my office and have a drink and see if I can help you.”
“That’d be great.”
“It’s our pin, all right.”
Ramano pushed the union button back across his desk to Tobin.
“It was found last night at the scene of a break-in.”
Ramano smiled. “I wish I could say that all of our members are good little boys and girls who go to mass twice a day and never say anything worse than ‘Fudge.’ That doesn’t happen to be the case.” He flicked ash from his plastic-tipped cigarillo. “Where was the break-in?”
“It was out at Hunter College. In an office in the English department.”