“You think you’re such fucking hot shit, don’t you, pal? Well, you’re nothing but a ridiculous clown.” He seemed to like the taste of that phrase on his tongue. “You hear me? A ridiculous clown.”
That’s when another man appeared. He was big and there was a lot of efficiency in his movements. He got the drunk by the collar and the seat of the pants, and then the whole scene got funny. He wheeled the guy out while onlookers giggled and applauded.
“That’s one thing the public doesn’t realize,” Hanratty told me ten minutes later in the dim bar. “Drunks hassle you all the time. That’s why my wife will hardly go out anymore. It gets pretty miserable.”
The Castle motif was continued in here, too. The young women were dressed as skullery maids (at least that’s what Yvonne DeCarlo always wore when she played a skullery maid), and all types of lances and shields were hung on the wall. There was a candle between us. Its wavering glow made Hanratty’s Irish face look comic.
Hanratty was drinking martinis and obviously working hard at getting drunk. We were waiting for Dev Robards. By the third martini, Hanratty started to sweat. You could see it glisten there in the candlelight. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
“Wrong with what?”
“With Dev. He should have been here by now.”
“Relax.”
“He’s scared. He called me several times this afternoon. Said he was afraid to be alone.”
“You going to tell me?”
His fingers tightened around his drink. “Let’s wait for Dev.”
“We don’t seem to have a lot to talk about, the two of us. No offense.”
“You don’t like me, do you?”
“Would you really give a shit if I said no, I don’t?”
“Sure I would. I like to be liked. That’s why I do all that stuff on the air. Sing those corny songs. Inside I’m still a little altar boy who likes to be told he’s a wonderful kid.”
Boy, was he drunk.
“So your answer’s no?”
“To what?” I said.
“To liking me.”
“All right, I like you.”
“You’re lying.”
“I don’t even know you. How’s that?”
“You hate the songs?”
“Jesus, let’s just sit here, all right?”
We tried that. It lasted about forty-five seconds. He was really freaking. He got up, catching the edge of the table against his thigh. He knocked over a couple of drinks and cursed loudly in the process.
“Sit down,” I said.
“This is getting really weird.”
A waitress came over. Stood and watched him. Shook her head. He’d gotten sloppy drunk very quickly. I suspected he probably drank very little, very rarely. The waitress and I got him to sit down.
He put his face in his hands. I wondered if he was crying, but there was no sound of sobbing, nor did his shoulders move even slightly. When he took his hands away, he looked stern and washed-out and almost sober. “After what we did, I’m through in this business. The kid won’t be singing any more songs, let me tell you.”
“You going to tell me now?”
He looked at me. I could see that not only was he drunk, he was also a little crazy. Maybe more than a little crazy. He just kept looking at me, and then he put his hands back over his face and sat there until the waitress came up with a new martini.
“I don’t think he needs it,” I said.
Hanratty took his hands down. He stared at the drink and smiled. “Welcome aboard,” he said, and picked up the drink.
“Some admirers of yours sent it over.” She nodded to the far corner of the bar, where a group of older people sat. Near them was a piano. “They’ve asked if you’ll sing a song.”
With all the bitter stuff he’d been giving me about being washed up in this business, I figured he’d say no. Instead he said, “By gum, that sounds like a darn good idea.” He was the altar boy again. Praise was being promised him.
I waited in the lobby while he did it. I tried to tune in on the conversations of passersby so I wouldn’t have to hear him. He did “Danny Boy” and “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”; he did everything but “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I went and emptied my bladder, stepped out into the parking lot and asked the kid if he knew who Dev Robards was (he did) and had he seen him (he hadn’t) and would he run in and tell me if he did (he would).
Finally, maybe half an hour later, Hanratty came up. He was sloshing side to side, and he had lipstick all over him from where the older ladies had kissed him, and he had a grin that was obscene with self-pleasure.
“How’re you?” he said.
He tried to throw his arm around me old-buddy style, but he missed and fell to the floor. Or almost fell. I got him around the stomach and pushed him through the door and told the kid to get my car, and when he came he helped me push Hanratty into it.
“Isn’t that Bill Hanratty?” the kid said.
“Yeah.”
“That fucker’s potzed.”
“Potzed,” I said, roaring my engine into life. “I haven’t heard that one before.”
“It’s a good one, don’t you think?”
“It ain’t bad.”
I got him on the freeway and I kept the windows down and I went seventy and then eighty, and in maybe twenty miles he came around, and as soon as he did he told me to stop the car. He got out and wobbled a ways down the grassy hill. Even above the passing cars I could hear him puking.
When he came back, he looked much too old to be an altar boy.
“Where’s he live?”
“Dev?” he said.
I nodded.
He told me.
“I must’ve really made an ass out of myself back there in the bar,” he said on the way over.
“Look,” I said, “everybody’s under some kind of strain. You needed a release. It wasn’t a big thing. You were very friendly. When I get in your mood I tend to pop people sometimes, and that’s one hell of a lot worse than singing a song.”
“You hit people?”
“Not exactly hit them. More like argue with them. But it has the same spiritual effect on them and me. It’d probably be better for both our sakes if I did hit them.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“Of something having happened to him?”
“Yeah, I am.”
He put his face in his hands again.
Dev Robards lived in a new townhouse. Hanratty recognized his car. “That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”
“Could be,” I said. “You mind if I wait out here?”
I looked at him. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t care to. “Fine,” I said.
The front door was locked. It took me a good ten minutes to get it open with my pick and credit card. Even then I had to punch out a small pane of glass on the side of the door to reach inside.
I didn’t find him right away. I walked through a bachelor’s living room that had been given over to books and some impressive lithographs, and followed a flight of stairs to a hallway at the end of which the first dark of night filled a long window.
He wasn’t in the bathroom and he wasn’t in the den but he was in the bedroom.
He was wearing boxer shorts and garters and he was skinny and really an old bastard, and he looked funny-comic in a sad kind of way. I had no doubt that he’d been left for dead, but the way his chest rose and fell told me instantly that his would-be killer had botched the job.
I took his pulse. Faint but steady. I opened one eyelid for a look. He grunted something unconsciously. I grabbed the phone and dialed 911 and gave them the address.
Then I got down on my knees and looked over the rug. I started picking up things and looking under them and in them and around them, but I didn’t find a thing. Not a thing.