26
Deciding he needed a break from the stakeout routine, Cooper took a drive to the bar where it might have appeared, to the untrained eye, that the albino’s dark-skinned girlfriend was working as a cocktail waitress. He parked the Taurus around the corner from the place around six-forty-five, which gave him a good two hours before Jim came to collect his woman for another night of rapture.
The minute he came through the door, Cooper, private-eye-for-the-dead, confirmed the obvious: the girl was working there, all right, but not as a cocktail waitress. The only legitimate employee in the place was the bartender. He stood behind the bar, facing a pair of rummies, who sat on two of the pub’s four stools. The joint was a dump-a couple of naked bulbs dangling above the bar, some reggae playing on a boom box behind it, a handful of seats and tables in the narrow corridor between the bar and the opposing wall.
Seated at one of the tables were four girls. One of them was Jim’s woman; all four wore skirts that bottomed out around mid-ass and tops about as modest as Saran Wrap. They wore cheap jewelry that dangled from ears, wrists, ankles, and waist, Cooper figuring there were some dangling from places he couldn’t see too. There was the rich scent of weed, wafting to him from the hazy cloud of smoke over their table, starting to give him a buzz just from standing in the doorway.
Cooper took one of the vacant stools at the bar and ordered some bourbon. When the bartender finished pouring the watered-down, unlabeled selection of his own choosing, Cooper said, “How much for more?”
The bartender looked him over, shrugged, and said, “That depend on what you want, mon.” He had that accent, Jamaicans always sounding to Cooper like they were ready to party. Every little thing goin’ to be all right.
Cooper put a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and said, “I like the skinny one.”
The bartender’s eyes gleamed, staring down at the bill. Cooper could sense an inner turmoil. He guessed the man was thinking how to make a buck off him, since Cooper was obviously loaded, laying down a C-note like it was nothing. But the man didn’t want to lose his top client, either.
The bartender-pimp completed his inner battle and said, “That get you two hours.”
Cooper frowned, giving him an acting job, Man, tough decision, all that money. “All I get is two hours then?”
The bartender-pimp flipped his hands upside down and shrugged again. “Understand, any other time you get more than that, but Rhonda here, she got a regular kind of thing, mon. Friend of hers coming by ’round nine o’clock.”
Cooper nodded. He said, “Rhonda.”
“We got a deal, mister? Or you want another maybe.”
“No,” Cooper said, “Rhonda’s my kind of girl.”
Rhonda didn’t say or do anything different from what she’d been doing since Cooper had come into the bar: eyes closed, she pulsed slightly to the music, sitting on her chair, toking absently on the joint each time it came around to her.
The bartender-pimp swiped the hundred bucks off the counter.
“Nine o’clock,” he said. “Don’t be late, mon.”
Coming across the busy lobby of the Crowne Plaza around seven-thirty, Rhonda’s skirt showed an under-crescent of her skinny ass with every step, first one side then the other. She was so stoned that Cooper gleefully anticipated at least an “Excuse me, sir” from the concierge-or somebody on the hotel staff-but sadly, they made it through the lobby, into the elevator, and all the way into his room without incident.
In his suite he watched her shed the halter top and unzip the miniskirt. Lying on the bed then, eyes half-shut, one knee raised, arms splayed out with her palms outstretched, Rhonda telling him to come and get some, Cooper thought that the sight might have been appealing to him had his tastes run to anorexic, comatose preteen boys. Holding back from tearing off his clothes, he took out his wallet and fanned about fifty bucks in fives and tens on the table beside the bed. He was obvious about it, crumpling then unfolding the bills to help release her from the anticipatory trance she had going.
“Nice as that looks, Rhonda,” he said, “I’ve got something else in mind.”
Rhonda had her eyes open now, the girl counting the money he was showing. “What that you lookin’ for den, mon,” she said.
“Tell you what. Why don’t I just ask you some questions,” he said. “Any answers you give sound true to me, I’ll pay you five or ten bucks. We’re done and I feel like you haven’t been making everything up, you get a fifty-dollar bonus. After that, I take you back to the bar and the albino comes and picks you up just like he did yesterday, and the day before that. Two or three weeks go by and I find out you can keep a secret, nobody knows we did anything but fuck like bunnies up in here, there’s another five hundred bucks coming your way free of all commissions to your pimp daddy bartender.”
She didn’t say anything, just stayed splayed out on the bed, lips moist and parted.
“How’s that sound, Rhonda,” Cooper said.
Rhonda shuffled her feet to push herself back up against the headboard. She pulled on the halter top, zipped up the miniskirt, brought her legs up against her body, and clasped her arms around her knees. Eyes no longer hiding under their lids, Rhonda looked at him, fully alert.
“Yeah, mon,” she said, “that sound pretty good to me.”
According to Rhonda, Jim had gone through two of the other girls in the bar-spend a few weeks tagging one, take another for the same price, switch back once in a while, depending on the mood. He always did it the same way-come in, get a drink or two, bring the girl back, pound away like a madman for something like five hours, this guy a sexual piston, sleep a couple hours, wake up, call a cab, kick the girl out. Rhonda told him there had been the occasional visit from a friend, sometimes expected, sometimes not, somebody swinging by once every two or three days. This Cooper knew: Jim’s supplier. He asked her what she thought he did to make his money; Rhonda said she knew he didn’t ever leave to go to any particular job, Jim having her stick around well into the day a few times, and all he ever did was buy more dope and come back inside and smoke it.
He asked if Jim kept anything around the house that had something to do with a career of any kind; Rhonda thought it over before saying there was nothing she could remember, except that she’d seen him fiddling with a chain.
“You know, mon,” she said, “pendant and chain, but the kind a man keep,” and Cooper thought of something and said, “You mean dog tags?” and she said that was it.
He asked if she knew where he kept them, and she said he had a jewelry box-she’d seen him taking it in and out of the top drawer of his dresser. Cooper asked about his real name, or at least the name he used with her, and she said he went only by Jim. He asked if she’d ever seen his full name on anything, maybe on a utility bill, and she told him he never left anything out for her to look at. When he asked whether she’d ever seen what it said on the dog tags, she said she hadn’t.
The only other interesting revelation, in which Rhonda made about a hundred bucks, was that whenever Jim was paged, he announced it was time for Rhonda to leave. It had happened twice, late at night both times, Jim pulling out of her, checking the pager, telling her it was time to go, let’s get you a cab, then walking out the door with her and driving off in that van of his before the cab arrived. When Cooper asked how late at night this was, she said it had happened sometime after 2 A.M. each time.
He took Rhonda back to the bar around eight-forty-five and hung around until Jim showed up. Cooper watched Jim sip some rum and Coke from a straw, reach over and do one of those brother-man handshakes with the bartender-pimp, the kind Cooper could never keep up with, always something new with these guys-then Jim took Rhonda by the hand and led her out to his van. It looked to Cooper as though Rhonda actually gave him a wink as she walked out the door, but with those swollen, bloodshot eyes it was hard to tell for sure.