“You mean you arrested them, but you didn’t recover the money?”
“Well, actually, Bobby got about seventeen hundred from the cashiers that was never recovered. He must’ve spent it by now. But see, we had Virgil in the Wayne County Jail at that time waiting trial. So when the prosecutor’s office is talking to him they pretend to let it slip that Bobby got about seventeen grand, not seventeen hundred, and stashed it someplace. See, Virgil wants to believe it, he’s dying to-even if he read in the paper no money was taken-because he not only doesn’t trust him, just associating with Bobby you never know, the guy’s fucking wacko. Sometime he’s liable to stick a gun in your mouth, you just don’t know with a guy like that. The people here say that’s, basically, what’s on Virgil’s mind, if he’s thinking about anything.”
“Jesus,” Ryan said. “You actually do things like that?”
“Yeah, well, if we can’t get to Bobby through channels, you know, and put him away, then we motivate Virgil and maybe he can do it. You think anybody’s going to piss and moan over Bobby Lear?”
“I will,” Ryan said. “Christ, I need him alive… at least for a while. How about Mr. Perez? You find out anything?”
“Not yet. I didn’t have time this afternoon. Tomorrow, if that’s soon enough.”
“Listen, there’s no hurry. It was just a thought,” Ryan said. “The guy’s probably a virgin and says the rosary every night before he goes to bed. But I wouldn’t mind being sure.”
6
THE GIRL WITH the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?”
Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.”
The girl said, “You like to travel?”
Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?”
She was drunk-two o’clock in the afternoon-but didn’t show it, sitting on the bar stool with her denim legs crossed. Maybe when she got up, if she ever did. She looked washed out and needed some sun, or makeup. Her blond hair was dirty, dull, flat to her head and showed dark roots. She was still a good-looking girl, in her late twenties or maybe thirty. She drank her Sauterne and smoked cigarettes and stayed somewhere inside herself.
“You do know him though, huh?”
“Who?”
“Bobby Lear.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You just said a minute ago, I asked you, you said-you called him something.”
“I called him a cocksucker.”
“So you don’t think too highly of him. But you do know him,” Ryan said. “Didn’t you use to go around with him? I don’t know, maybe you still do. That’s what somebody told me.”
“Who?”
“This guy that knows him.”
“Who? Hoo, hoo. I sound like a fucking owl.”
Ryan was patient. He knew he had no choice; he was talking to a drunk. He could resign himself to it, sip his Tab, or get up and leave.
An old man, a bum, had come out as Ryan approached the place-the Good Times Bar-walked across the sidewalk, leaned against the trunk lid of a car, and begun throwing up in the gutter. The old man was back inside, sitting at the bar with a bottle of beer. A black guy, in a maroon outfit, was at the end of the bar, near the door. The black guy was stylish, like a pro athlete, and didn’t look as though he belonged here. Everyone else was drab, their clothes, their expressions. There were a few others, a man at the bar with a hacking cough, two men and a woman at a table. The woman had a high, irritating laugh. Everybody having a good time at the Good Times Bar, with its stale beer smell and afternoon sunlight showing through the venetian blinds. It was the first sunny day in a week, not a trace of smoke haze, and Ryan was sitting in a Cass Avenue bar drinking a can of Tab.
The girl, Lee, was on the fourth double Sauterne that Ryan had counted, the third one he had paid for. She would finish one with six good sips and two cigarettes. When the level was two-thirds of the way down the glass she’d be thinking of the next one.
“I’ve been looking for you for two days,” Ryan said. “You know that? I started down there a few blocks, near Wayne, went in every bar on Cass. Then today, I came in here, I saw you and I had a hunch, I don’t know why. I said to the bartender, hey, isn’t that Lee down there?”
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“You know Bobby Lear, though. Robert Leary, Jr. What do you call him?”
“Shithead.”
“You seen him lately?”
She finished the wine and brought the glass down hard on the bar.
“Innkeeper!”
The bartender with the bony shoulders took his hand off his thigh and his foot down from something behind the bar and came toward them.
“Same way?”
Ryan nodded. He let the bartender take her glass and walk away before he said, “Lee… you’re not worried I might be a cop, are you?” Ryan waited as she got out a cigarette. He held a match for her. “Believe me, I’m not a cop… You want to know what I am?”
“I know what you are,” the girl said. “I don’t know who-hoo, hoo-but I know what you are. You’re a fucking pervert, aren’t you? You carry that raincoat-that’s how you tell-bright sunny day, you got a raincoat.”
“I didn’t know when I left home it was going to be nice.”
“Bullshit. You take your wang out and put the raincoat on, you see a little kid, little girl, you say, ‘Hi, honey’”-her voice turned oily-“‘want to see the big snake I got in here?’”
“Except on cold days,” Ryan said, “I describe myself.”
She turned and looked at him with sleepy eyes. “You want to show it to me? Go ahead, take it out. Nobody gives a shit, it’s a very friendly place. Art? You don’t care if he takes his wang out, do you?”
“If it makes him happy,” the bartender said. He put down the wine and can of Tab and took a dollar and a quarter from Ryan’s change on the bar.
“I’ll show it to you some other time,” Ryan said. “Okay? Right now I got to find this guy and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“Hi, honey”-with the oily voice again-“you want to see my snake?”
“It’s sleeping, gone nigh’-nigh’.”
“Wake him up. Come on, I want to see what you’ve got.”
“How about Leary’s wife, Denise?” Ryan said. “You know her?”
The girl stopped, about to say something, and looked up at his face, staring at him.
“Do you know her?”
“Not very well.”
“Do you know where she lives?” He waited.
But the girl’s face turned away and she went back into herself. He watched her, after a moment, take another sip of wine.
“You want to get there, what’re you fooling around with wine for?”
She didn’t answer him.
“I used to drink mostly bourbon, over crushed ice, fill up a lowball glass. I also drank beer, wine, gin, vodka, Cuba Libres, Diet-Rite and scotch, and rye with red pop, but I preferred bourbon. Early Times. I knew a guy who drank only Fresca and chartreuse. I took a sip one time, I said to him, ‘Jesus, this is the worst drink I ever tasted in my life.’ He said, ‘I know it is. It’s so bad you can’t drink very many of them.’ A real alcoholic, though, can drink anything, right?… What time you start in the morning?”
Without looking at him the girl said, “Fuck off.”
There was a silence. He watched her raise the glass.
“Okay, then, how much you drink a day?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “What do you think would be about right?”
“If you’re not working, have the time, I’d say a gallon, gallon and a half. Depends what time you start.”
“Early,” the girl said.
“Right after you throw up?”
“Before,” the girl said, looking directly at him now. “Before I get out of bed. Then I might throw up or I might piss in the bed, whichever comes first. You want to come home with me? You’re so fucking interested, I’ll show you what I did this morning.”