Wing was tempted to ask more questions, but instead he finished his coffee and said, “We won’t worry about him, then. We’ll worry about you, Bobby, and how you’re going to get friendly with Miss Frosty.”
“No thanks. If I had the time and the money to have a steady girl, I wouldn’t want one who could snap my spine in her bare hands. And I wouldn’t want any sexpot pushover anyways.”
“At fifteen?”
“Since thirteen, Jimmy. It’s no secret. And she isn’t the only one in West Bay Junior High. There’s a whole crowd of them in that school, and, I don’t know, they make me nervous. The way they look at you, you know they just don’t give a damn. They don’t even go steady. They just go around in a rat pack and do any damn thing. They know how to keep from getting in trouble, but it just doesn’t seem right. I know I’m only eighteen, but those kids make me feel as middle-aged as you are.”
“Thanks so much.”
“Aw, you know how I mean it, Jimmy. Say! Why couldn’t we do a story on it together? I could get the facts.”
“Much as I hate to deprive you of the chance to do creative research, Bobby, we don’t work for a crusading paper. Too many of our advertisers have probably fathered those little sluts. Borklund would drop in a dead faint if I suggested it.”
“I guess he would. When I get out of college, I’m going to work for a paper with some guts. Why do you hang around this crummy town, Jimmy? You’re good enough to get on a better paper.”
“Thanks again.”
“I mean it. Why do you stay here?”
“I left once, and it didn’t work out.”
“Oh.”
“And I always get lost driving around a strange city. I haven’t got much sense of direction.”
“Don’t talk down to me, Jimmy.”
Wing stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Okay. I won’t. I’ll tell you one of the great truths I’ve learned. Every place in the world is exactly like every other place.”
Bobby, looking up at him, shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe that. I wouldn’t want to let myself try to believe that. If that’s true... there wouldn’t be much point in anything.”
“It’s just something you don’t want to find out too soon,” Jimmy Wing said, and walked out and back to the newsroom. He checked the files for the previous week and found that Gardner had given his exhibition of golf on a Wednesday afternoon at Cabeza Knolls.
It took him a half hour to drive to the Drowsy Lady. He arrived a little before ten-thirty. On the way out he had time to plan his approach.
Floodlights blazed against the lobby entrance to the Drowsy Lady. As Wing turned in he remembered, fondly, Van Hubble’s explosive reaction to motel architecture. Van had been a mild man, until something offended his sense of taste and decency.
“They cantilever a great big goddam hunk of roof at a quote daring unquote angle and hang big vulgar sheets of glass off it and light it up like an appendectomy. You can’t tell a bowling alley from a superburger drive-in from a motel from a goddam bank, Jimmy. They all turn people into bugs crawling across aseptic plastic. It’s all tail-fin modern, boy. It’s cheap, jazzy and sterile. It isn’t architecture. There’s nothing indigenous about it. It’s all over the country, all the same, like a red itch, like junk toys dumped out of a sack. And it’s so stinking patronizing.”
A huge sign displayed a single heavy-lidded feminine eye, the trademark of the establishment, repeated on highway signs thirty miles in every direction.
He parked and went into the tall lobby. The restaurant had closed at ten. A desk clerk placed a registration card in front of him with a hospitable flourish.
“Is the manager around?”
“What would you like to see him about? Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m not selling anything, if that’s what’s worrying you. Is he around?”
“He’s in the cocktail lounge, watching the fights. I could get him now, if it’s that important...”
“I’ll go watch the fights too. What’s his name?”
“Mr. Frank Durley. He’s a heavy-set man, bald.”
The cocktail lounge was very dark. Some lens spots shone directly down onto the bar, and there was a light behind the bottle racks. So much crowd noise came over the television set Wing got the impression there were a lot of people in the room. After he felt his way to the bar his vision adjusted and he saw there were but five people in addition to the bartender. A couple in a corner were leaning toward each other, ignoring the television set. Three men sat at the bar, watching it. The bald man sat alone. The other two were together.
Wing ordered a beer. He had taken a first sip when the fight was stopped in the seventh round. The bartender went to the set and turned it off, turned on some kind of background-music system, and increased the intensity of the light over the bar.
Durley got off the bar stool and said, “So you make another half buck off me, Harry.”
“A pleasure,” the bartender said.
As the manager started to leave, Jimmy Wing stopped him, introduced himself. When he said it was private, Durley led the way over to a table in the corner near the door.
“This is a delicate matter,” Jimmy said. “I’m a reporter for the Record-Journal, but this isn’t newspaper business. It’s more a favor for a friend.”
“That’s how come the name struck a bell. James Wing. I’ve seen it in the paper. I’ve seen you before too. Out here?”
“I came out to your opening in April. I don’t remember meeting you then. I met two of the owners.”
“I’m one of the owners too, fella. And manager. What’s this delicate matter you got on your mind?”
“A couple of kids. They’ve checked in here at least once, I think. Both the girl’s parents and the boy’s parents are friends of mine. I want to nail it down, prove it, so the parents can straighten those two out and get them off this kick.”
Durley had a fleshy, unrevealing face, a casual voice. “You want to nail it down.”
“I suppose the registration card would be the best way.”
“You got any kind of writ or warrant to check my books?”
“Mr. Durley, that isn’t a very cooperative attitude.”
Durley leaned forward, wearing a rather strange smile. “You want to know about my attitude? I got this kind of an attitude. I got the attitude of a man with a heavy piece of money in this thing. I sold out a nice operation in Jersey. You know when we were due to open? December first last year. So we open in April with the season over. You know the occupancy I run? Forty percent is a good night, a helluva good night. You know where the break-even is? Seventy-one per cent. So you come around doing a favor for a friend. I’m hurting, fella. I’m hurting real bad, and I’ll rent units to anything that’s warm, breathing and has money. Nobody around here ever heard of your kids. Anybody rents an overnight key here, they buy privacy too. You want something on anybody, fella, you don’t get it the easy way, not from me. You go around the other way, like following them. If we got to do a hot-pants trade to keep alive, we’ll do it until we get fat enough to pick and choose. You following me? In the meantime, they rent the key and they buy privacy. We need the local plates we’re getting, and if I fink on any of that business, word gets around and we lose it. Right now I’m running a hot-pillow trade in a six hundred thousand dollar plant, which makes no sense at all and sometimes makes me feel ashamed, but I’m doing it to survive, and I’ll keep doing it until I decide I don’t have to. That’s the kind of attitude I’ve got.”