She smirked. “In the mood for some more quality entertainment — like those shitty comics of ours?”
“Well,” I said, and my hand around the nine millimeter grip tightened, “I am in the mood for entertainment. Has Mac Wallace been back around?”
“He was in his favorite booth last night. Why?”
She didn’t know it was Wallace who cracked my ribs. I’d told her I was mugged. She had thought that was funny, since I was a guy with a gun and yet some asshole had gotten the best of me. I thought it was a riot myself.
“Just wondering,” I said.
The bill hadn’t changed — same bad comics, same stacked strippers, from lackadaisical Peggy Steele to busty Chris Colt to gyrating Jada. The difference was that tonight I watched from the wings. This new position gave me some refreshing angles on the peelers, but also a more inconspicuous sideways view on the audience.
As promised, Wallace was in that same back booth, again pouring brown-bagged bourbon into glasses of ice, getting quietly if not noticeably sloshed. During the show’s second half, he rose and went off toward the men’s room.
I took the backstage steps to come out a door to one side of the elevated platform and cut along the side of the club. The mostly male audience — the house was about two-thirds full — saw nothing from their wide eyes but the near-naked girl onstage, a short, curvy number with a taffy-colored bouffant. Her gimmick was that pieces of her fringed outfit seemed to drop off of their own free will as she did the Twist to Bill Peck and his Peckers playing “Irresistible You.”
When I reached the men’s-room door, I taped on a hand-lettered sign (which I’d fashioned at Janet’s apartment) that said CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This was necessary because there was no lock on the door of the good-sized restroom, with its half a dozen urinals and four stalls.
Within the dreary but fairly clean yellow-walled john, one guy was washing up, another was just coming out of a stall, and Wallace was pissing at a urinal. I washed my hands, watching Wallace in the mirror while the first guy left and the guy who’d exited a shitter came over and washed his hands beside me. Both were gone when Wallace did the little dance men do to coax out those last few droplets, and he didn’t recognize me until he was washing up. I was standing nearby using a paper towel.
“Something I can do for you?” Wallace asked blandly. As before, his handsome oblong face with its baby-face plumpness was smudgy with beard, the eyes cold and dark behind the black-rimmed glasses. He was again in a black suit, though his necktie was red tonight.
“I think you already did,” I said pleasantly. “I hear Mrs. Plett’s insurance company decided to pay out her claim. Only took them two years.”
“Typical bureaucracy.” He was washing his hands, faucet running hard. He looked at me in the mirror and his smile was small and smug, his dimpled chin jutting. “Not that I’d know what you were talking about.”
“You know what I don’t get?”
“Why don’t you tell me.”
I watched him closely, figuring he might throw soapy water in my face.
“I don’t get,” I said, “how a pinko student protestor grows up to be the willing arm of a bunch of right-wing Texas fascists?”
Looking at me in the mirror wasn’t enough. He shut off the faucet and turned his head toward me, frowningly. “The President is a great man.”
I chuckled. “So that’s it. The ol’ strange bedfellows routine. Your pitch-and-putt benefactor Lyndon feathers the nests of his oil buddies, so he’s free to do good in the world.”
Tightly, Wallace said, “He’s done a lot of good.”
“I’d agree. Took a Southern conservative to push civil rights through. And there’s the war on poverty. We’ll forgive him Vietnam, ’cause he’s got to throw the military-industrial boys some kind of bone. It’s the old ends-justifies-the-means gambit. I get it.”
“You may,” he said.
“What?”
“Get it.”
And he flicked the soapy water on his hands toward my eyes, but I was ready, and ducked it, and slammed a fist into his belly. When he doubled over, I grabbed the back of his head and kneed him in the face. He didn’t go down, but he wobbled. I took out the nine millimeter and slapped him alongside the left temple, and then he went down.
He looked up at me, drunk with pain, his face smeared with red from his nose and his mouth, his eyes seeking focus, and I took him by the lapels of his undertaker’s suit coat — a little tricky with a gun in my right hand but I did it — and I hauled him over and into the first stall.
“Your face is a mess, Mac,” I said. “Let me help.”
I shoved him face-first into the toilet bowl and flushed it several times. My son called this a swirly. I called it plain old-fashioned fun.
Wallace was coughing and sputtering and spitting water when I turned him around and sat him down hard on the can and shoved the snout of the nine millimeter in his neck. My eyes bore in on his dark ones, blinking now, no longer half-lidded.
“Listen, Mac, I don’t care whether you killed Henry Marshall, President McKinley, or Cock Robin — none of that is my business or my concern. You saw to it that my client got her payout from the insurance company, so we’re square.”
“What... what... what...”
I had no idea what he was asking, but I answered anyway: “This isn’t my way of thanking you for that, it’s my way of settling the score for the other night. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, I understand you live in California.”
He frowned, beads of water running down his face like tears that started at his scalp. His hair, which wasn’t very long, nonetheless looked stringy as seaweed.
“My ex-wife and my son live out there,” I said. “Why would I tell you that? Because it’s only fair, since I will kill you or have you killed if you are ever seen anywhere near them or where they live. You may think you are one deadly motherfucker, and you might think you could find me and kill me. And probably you could. But I employ just under one hundred hard-ass ex-cops, any one of whom would just love to teach you how to really rig a fake suicide. Do I make my point?”
He just looked at me, gulping air, face running with water droplets.
I slapped him — just with my hand, not the gun.
“Do I make my point?” I asked again.
He swallowed and nodded.
“Good,” I said.
And left him there.
This time I followed Janet home, my rental Galaxie tagging after her convertible Caddy like an eager puppy. I was feeling pretty damn good. I was feeling no pain on Demerol, and a man in his late fifties had just kicked the ass of a hard case maybe fifteen years younger. Mac Wallace was an evil fuck, but I had put the fear of God in him. Or the fear of Heller, anyway.
And in bed, I took the lead, bending my redheaded benefactor over the edge of her bed, entering her that way, and the bump-and-grind was under me now and slower this time, with a yearning that made both of us very happy and maybe a little sad, because I’d already told her I was leaving tomorrow.
She was leaning back in bed, sheet at her middle, perky pointed titties bared, and she was smoking. Apparently she didn’t know it was a cliché. I didn’t crave a smoke, though earlier I had felt the urge, right before I cornered Wallace. But I hadn’t succumbed. One must maintain control, after all.
“You wrapped up your job, huh?” she said.
“I did.”
“Somebody said Mac Wallace limped out of the club, looking like he got his clock cleaned.”
“Do tell.”
“You did that, didn’t you?”