She flopped off beside me, breathing hard. I was breathing hard, too.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She nuzzled my neck, then got up and her round, dimpled bottom receded into the bathroom, where the door closed, and I was left in darkness, to ponder the character of a woman who didn’t want to divorce her cheating husband because she was Catholic, but was fine with covering up killings for him as well as fucking the help by way of showing her appreciation for a job well done.
But then I’d never really understood women.
Chapter Six
I parked the Sunbird on the street between a pick-up truck and a row of Harleys. It was eight p.m. in beautiful downtown Haydee’s Port, and not really hopping yet, though the seven or eight bars on one side of the street and the eight or nine bars on the other were spilling red and blue and green and yellow neon onto the sidewalks along with loud music from country to heavy metal, frat rock to New Wave. The neon spillage made a sort of blurry melted rainbow but the melding of popular music was just plain noise.
Smoke and beer smell issued from every entryway, both invitation and threat, though it was too early for the bouquet of puke. Guys in groups of two or three or four swaggered along the sidewalk, window-shopping for just the right bar, but no similar groups of women were on the prowl.
I’d been told that early evening in Haydee’s Port was slow, but that it picked up from ten till maybe one and then stayed steady, although the crowd gradually shifted from those looking for wide-open fun to seekers of a bar that served alcohol after one a.m., closing time across the river.
The Lucky Devil was no classier than any other dive along Main Street, just bigger, taking up three storefronts, the right and left ones with front windows painted black. The center storefront allowed you to see into a dingy bar, and the only promise of something special were two signs in the window-one a big, bold red-and-black cartoon outlined in red neon of a grinning, winking devil’s head, right down to the regulation pointy mustache and beard; the other a red cursive blinking neon spelling out the establishment’s name.
I went through double-push doors into a space about the size of a high-school cafeteria and every bit as inviting. The front half of the smoky chamber was a drab collection of red-plastic-covered tables with old-fashioned wooden chairs, and (at the bar itself) stools whose red seat cushions were bursting. Behind the bartender, shelves of booze were back-lit red, but then the whole room was dimly lit and red-tinged, with beer-sign halos spotted around. The lighting was better at the rear, where up a few steps behind pipe railing, four pool tables under Schlitz chandeliers were all in use by guys in plaid shirts with rolled-up sleeves open to either white t-shirts or bare chests. They were either hicks or gay. Or gay hicks.
The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even your Uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed, faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers-the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.
I was overdressed in my navy t-shirt and black jeans and running shoes, but nobody seemed to notice. I took one of the open stools at the bar and ordered whatever was on tap, and asked a few questions of the bartender, a guy in a blue-striped white shirt with rolled-up sleeves over a black t-shirt; he had black wavy hair and a thick black mustache, and looked a little like Tom Selleck’s dumber, not-so-good-looking brother.
“So where’s all this famous action I keep hearing about?” I asked pleasantly.
“What kind you looking for?”
“I keep an open mind.”
He leaned an elbow against the bar. “The girls over at those tables have trailers either side of the parking lot.”
Four girls in lots of makeup and with a plentitude of high feathered hair and a modicum of spandex dress were at a table smoking and staring at nothing, unless maybe they were playing invisible cards. They had drinks in tumblers that might have been whiskey but probably were tea. They looked like prom queens, if this were prom night in Hades, which it kind of was.
“Trailers out back, huh? What does twenty-five bucks get you?”
“Their attention. Now, if you’re interested in a game of chance, you’ll want to head that-a-way.”
The bartender gestured to a doorless doorway to the right of where the pool table level rose, presumably providing passage to the adjacent storefront. A brawny black guy in a black polo with a red cursive Lucky Devil on the breast and black jeans was seated on a wooden chair on a boxy platform, like a low-riding life-guard station. Or maybe he was just waiting for the right white guy to come along to give him a shoeshine. In any case, he was keeping watch on the bar and standing guard on that door, his arms folded like a genie; somehow I didn’t think he was granting wishes.
I finished my beer and wandered over there. I paused in front of the big black lifeguard and looked up at him, and asked, “Okay I go on in?”
“You free, white and twenty-one, ain’t you?”
I decided this was a rhetorical question, and went on through. I expected to find the casino, but did not-this was another bar, but with a big hardwood dance floor, lightly sawdusted, with a stage that butted up where the front window was blacked out. Under hot colored lights, four guys in cowboy hats and tattered t-shirts and jeans and boots were getting ready to play. The tables were only maybe a third full. It was so early the males and females were still in their own little enclaves.
This seemed a different clientele than next door, and was not that different from the dance crowd at the Paddlewheel Lounge. The age was twenties and early thirties, the male attire running from denim jackets to Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants to designer jeans, the female attire from leopard print tops to vests over tube tops, miniskirts to short shorts. A girl of maybe twenty-five in a black-and-yellow backless minidress, with high heels and a yard-in-all-directions of frizzy blonde hair twitched her taut tail as she headed from the ladies’ room back to her hive of half a dozen honeys.
I bought another beer and sat at the bar and watched as the band began to play Southern Rock at ear-bleed level, and waitresses in low-cut spandex minidresses took orders and not very discreetly dealt drugs. This section of the Lucky Devil had the same shitty wall paneling, but framed Patrick Nagel beauties and movie posters (Flashdance, For Your Eyes Only) indicated a vague sense of purpose if not style.
At the rear another bouncer perched on a lifeguard stand, a white guy this time, also in a Lucky Devil polo shirt-a bruiser with a nose that had been broken so many times you couldn’t really call it a nose anymore, and eyes that weren’t missing anything. Next to him were push-through doors, and patrons of various stripes had been cutting through to those doors, opening them to reveal glimpses of a bustling casino beyond.
I watched as the males and females began to intermingle-when they weren’t going off independently for a toot or what-have-you in the can, anyway-and took in the bar band’s respectable covers of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, and made the beer last a good hour. This bartender was a skinny good-natured kid with thinning hair, a wispy mustache and a khaki shirt over an Alabama tee.
“Seems pretty tame,” I said, between songs. “I heard this place ran wild.”
“Wild enough. More flavors of sin than Baskin Robbins got ice cream.”
“I dunno. Nobody seems that frisky.”
He shrugged. “We have some heavy-duty bouncers, dude. Fights don’t last long in the Lucky.”