"I thought he was our man," Eileen said.
"We did, too, at first. Dragged him in right after the first murder, questioned him up and down, but he was clean as a whistle. Talked to him again after the second one, and again after the third. Alibis a mile long. We shoulda warned you about him. Be easy to make the mistake you made. How's it going otherwise?"
"I almost lost my virginity, but Alvarez bailed me out."
"Who'd he send?"
"Guy named Ortiz. Narcotics."
"Good man. Looks eighteen, don't he? He's almost thirty."
"You coulda told me I'd have help."
"We're just full of tricks," Shanahan said, and smiled.
"You gonna plant yourself in here?" Eileen asked.
"Nope. I'll be outside. Watching, waiting."
"Who grizzled up your hair?" she asked.
"The Chameleon," he said, and grinned.
"I hope you cansee through that eye."
"I can see just fine."
"And I hope our man doesn't want to arm wrestle," she said, glancing at the cast.
Across the room, Annie was coming back into the bar. She walked to where Larry was standing, put four dollars on the bar-top and said, "Your end, pal."
"Why, thank you, honey," he said, "much obliged," and tucked the bills into his shirt pocket, figuring the four represented twenty percent of whatever she'd got for her last trick. Ido love an honest hooker, he thought, and immediately wondered if she'd short-changed him.
Annie wandered over to where Eileen and Shanahan were sitting.
"Your blond friend went home," she said. "Caught a bus on the corner."
"That's okay," Eileen said, "I'm still waiting for Mr. Right."
Annie nodded, and then walked over to a table on the other side of the room. She wasn't alone for more than a minute when a big black guy sat down next to her.
"She needs help," Eileen whispered.
"Bring her outside," Shanahan said, and then rose immediately and said in a voice loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear, "I'll see you around the corner, honey."
Eileen went over to Annie and the black man.
"I got a one-armed bandit waiting in a car around the corner," she said. "He's looking for a hands-on trio, me driving, him in the middle, both of us dancing his meat around the block. You interested in a dime for ten minutes' work?"
"Dimes add up," Annie said, and immediately got to her feet.
"Hurry on back, hear?" the black man said.
"I did not appreciate all the shooting," Quentin Forbes said, looking petulant. He was still wearing the dress, pantyhose, and low-heeled walking shoes he'd worn while driving the station wagon, but the long blonde wig was hooked over the arm of a ladder-backed wooden chair. "There was no need for such violence, Alice. I warned you repeatedly hellip;"
"It was only insurance," she said, and shrugged.
"The costumes were all the insurance we hellip;"
"The costumes were bullshit," Alice said.
She was a beautiful little blonde woman in her late thirties, blue eyes and a Cupid's-bow mouth, perfect legs and breasts, four-feet two-inches tall and weighing a curvaceous seventy-one pounds. In the circus, she was billed as Tiny Alice. This went over big with homosexual men. She had changed out of the clown costume they'd worn on the last two holdups, and was now wearing a dark green dress and high-heeled pumps. To Forbes, she looked wildly sexual.
"Did you want the cops to think threeseparate gangs of kids were holding up those stores?" she asked.
"I wanted to confuse the cops, was all," Forbes said. "If you want to know whatI think, Alice, I think your shooting spree was what brought them down on us, is what I think."
"We should have finished them off," she said. "If you hadn't started honking the horn hellip;"
"I honked the horn to warn you. The moment I saw them coming from the back room hellip;"
"We should have finished them off," she said again, and took a tube of lipstick from her handbag and went to the mirror on the wall.
"The point of the costumes," Forbes insisted, "was to hellip;"
"The point was you wanted to put on a dress," Alice said. "I think you enjoy being in drag."
"I do indeed," Forbes said. "First time I've been in a woman's pants in more than a month."
"Braggart," Corky said.
She was slightly taller than Alice, a bad failing for a midget, but she was prettier in a delicate, small-boned, almost Oriental way. She, too, had changed into street clothes, a black skirt and a white silk blouse, a pink cardigan sweater, high-heeled patent leather pumps. She looked like a tiny, young Debbie Reynolds.