“Are you always this attentive to your guests, Mr. Cornell?”
A black waitress in an Afro wig delivered him three fingers of what looked to be Scotch over two ice cubes. He smiled, said, “Thank you, darlin’…drinky-poo, Mr. Gibson?”
“No thanks.”
“That’ll be all, darlin’,” he told her, kissed the air in her direction and she smiled and walked off.
He watched with admiration, his smile genuine now. “Boobs like cannonballs,” he said, and shook his head, eyes darting up. “You believe it? Wants to be a grade-school teacher. Mine were all prunes.”
“Community college student, huh?”
He gave me a sharp look and said, “You pick up a lot, don’t you, Mr. Gibson?…What were we talking about?”
“I was asking what I’d done to deserve the massa’s attention.”
He chuckled at that. “You’re here alone. You’ve been here since around nine-thirty. You’ve had a meal, alone, you gambled alone…about broke even I believe, very modest, very controlled…you spent some time upstairs, but didn’t dance, and you haven’t been drinking at all, except possibly a beer and maybe a few gallons of diet cola…really, how can you stand that bilge?” He shuddered. “Finally you wound up here in the bar, where you struck up a conversation with my wife. In fact, you struck up a lot of conversations this evening.”
Either I was getting sloppy, or his security team was smarter than they looked.
“I didn’t see any cameras,” I said.
That pleased him so much all his teeth came out to play in a beaming smile. “I don’t have security cameras-I just have a staff that looks out for their boss. The injuns send up smoke signals to their chiefy-poo, if somebody doesn’t fit any of the usual molds.”
“More like squaws-with the exception of your noneck squad, it’s mostly women here…like Cannonball Katie over there.”
His smile settled down and his eyes almost shut as he sipped the Scotch. He reached over for his wife’s purse and helped himself to a Virginia Slims-confident enough in his masculinity to risk the estrogen content. He used her matches and got his going, not bothering to ask me if I wanted one. The reports on me probably said I hadn’t been smoking. He knew everything about me. He thought.
“Here’s the thing, sport,” he said, and if condescension were a liquid he would have been dripping. “Casing the joint won’t do you any good. I’ll be upping my security team and my precautions will go on high alert status, so you can tell your friends that knocking over the Paddlewheel would be a very, very poor idea.”
“Of course it would. You’re doing land-office business, sure, which means a good payday for a score. But taking down a place that attracts a Wednesday night crowd like this? Calls for a D-Day Invasion.”
He wasn’t sure what to make of that. His eyes tightened as he drew in smoke, held it so long it might have been marijuana, and let it out. Even in the dim nightclub light, you could see his face was as cracked and leathery as it was handsome.
Then he said, “Whatever you have in mind, mate, ponder this-I am connected to individuals in Chicago who would not rest until anyone who tried anything against this facility was apprehended. And by apprehended, I mean castrated, fed their genitals and dumped in the river.”
“Concrete overshoes?”
“Some fashions never go out of style.”
“That’d be the Giardelli family, I suppose.”
That surprised him, his nostrils flaring, though the eyes remained half-lidded. He said nothing.
I shook my head, laughed a little. “I’m not an advance man for a plunder squad. Get real, Dickie.”
“…Only my friends call me ‘Dickie.’ ”
“Oh, we’re going to be friends. You see, I’ve done work, off and on, myself for the Giardellis. Checking up on me would be tricky, though, because I worked through a middleman and he’s dead now. But I can give you chapter and verse on mutual acquaintances.”
He set the cigarette in the glass tray. “If you’re a federal agent, Mr. Gibson, I’m asking you to declare yourself, right now. Or we’ll be talking entrapment.”
“Oh, we’re talking entrapment, all right. Anyway, the fix your Chicago friends put in must go at least up into the lower federal rungs. You don’t open up a casino because you have the county sheriff in your pocket. This has to go way higher.”
“What kind of middleman?”
He’d been thinking. He might even have figured it out.
“I used to do contract work.”
“Used to?”
“Now I’m more in…preventive maintenance.”
“What kind of…preventive maintenance?”
“Helping people like you stay alive.”
“Why would I need your help to stay alive?”
“Because other people still do contract work.”
He was staring at me, the eyes wider now, though more alert than scared. He got it. He followed.
“I’m not wearing a wire,” I said. “And I don’t have a weapon on me. You can have one of your musclemen frisk me, if they can bend over that far.”
He had another sip of the Scotch. And another.
He checked his watch, mumbled to himself, “It’s after two…” Then he said, “Maybe we should talk privately.”
“Maybe we should,” I said.
The “after two” reference had been about the dance club on the upper floor closing at that time. He mentioned on the way up in a private elevator off the kitchen that he had a small business office on the restaurant level, but a larger, more comfortable one shared the third floor with the Paddlewheel Lounge.
Office wasn’t really the word for it-bachelor pad would be more like it, a room wider than it was long with the far wall engulfed by a projection TV screen and a viewing area consisting of a plump brown leather sofa bookended by overstuffed brown leather chairs. Between them was a glass coffee table under which the projection TV unit lurked, and a brown geometric-patterned area rug was beneath all those furnishings. The exposed floor was a gray marble-like tile, with the upper reaches of the brick walls at left and right given to shelving, books at left, video cassettes and CDs at right; stereo speakers rode the walls, as did track lighting.
The wall to the left of the projection screen displayed a framed Warhol “Marilyn” pop-art print. An open door to the screen’s right provided a glimpse of a bedroom, though the lights were off and its shape remained vague. Much less vague was the shape of the slender little blonde, with an Orphan Annie head of yellow curls, who was in sheer white panties, her knees on the rug in front of one brown comfy chair, as she leaned prayerfully over the glass table, snorting a line of coke. And I don’t mean Diet.
“Chrissy!” Cornell snapped. “Go wait in the other room.”
Still on her knees, she looked up, powder on her nostrils; she was cute as cotton candy, if you injected cotton candy. No more than twenty, I’d guess, skinny enough for her ribs to show but with pert little puffynippled handful titties.
“Sure, Dickie,” she said.
But she finished snorting before jumping up to pad into the bedroom, displaying a cute dimpled ass and not one iota of cellulite (or for that matter shame), shutting the door tight behind her.
“Sorry,” he said.
I shrugged. “Kids.”
There was a wet bar against the back wall, next to where we’d come in.
“Drinky?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
He got himself a few inches of Dewar’s on the rocks, then gestured to the chair Chrissy had been kneeling before. I took it. It was warm. From here I could see on the glass the ghosts of two more lines of consumed coke. People and their vices.
He seated himself on the brown comfy chair opposite, rested an ankle on a knee-he was wearing Italian loafers and, like me, no socks. It was like we were long-lost brothers-this was just like my place at Paradise Lake, except for the dope, the near-naked doper girl, the projection TV and the leather furniture.