WEST HAD OCCASIONALLY stayed at the St. Paul Mission. They took him there in the back of a Minneapolis squad, got him a shower. Sandy, his friend, had voluntarily stopped at a Goodwill store and picked up clean clothes. She waited outside while West dressed, and he looked at himself in the mirror-jockey shorts, white T-shirt, plaid shirt, stone-washed jeans. "I look really square, dude," he said, with an unhappy grimace.
"Ah, you look okay," Lucas said. West went away for a minute, mumbled to an unseen presence, flinched, said, "Ow." Lucas touched him on the shoulder: "You really look good."
West came back. "What?"
"You sure as shit smell better," Del added.
"I'm gonna miss my turn at the stoplight," West said. "And I'm not gonna make a dime dressed like this."
"I'll give you a couple bucks," Lucas said. "If you're reasonable."
"A couple bucks? Man, I need thirty bucks a day just to make my nut," West said. He tended to slip into a whine when things weren't going well.
Lucas: "You want to eat or what?"
THEY ATE IN A BAR, Coney Islands and sauerkraut and beef. Sandy wanted to come along, but they thanked her for her trouble and sent her on her way. "He'll be okay?"
"He' ll be back on the job tomorrow," Del said.
As they were walking over to the bar, Del chatted with West. When they got there, Del hooked Lucas by the arm before they went inside, and he said, "West didn't kill anybody." "Seems pretty unlikely," Lucas agreed.
"It'd be the most unlikely thing I've ever run into-he's scared all the time, he's got dead relatives plucking at his shirt and his hair, some days the sidewalks melt and get weird and his feet stick in the concrete."
"Ah, man." "With some people I'd say it might be an act; but with him, it's not."
WHEN THEY TOLD WEST what they wanted-explained the situation-he said, "You shoulda come to me first."
"Well, Mike, we tried," Sloan said. "We've been looking all over for you."
"I've been workin' the same spot every day, six days a week, for a month, dude. Really fuckin' first-class police work, huh?"
"So… what do you think?" Lucas asked.
"I woulda told you that it wasn't Charlie. Charlie might have killed one or two of them, but then he would have hid them and run," West said, adding more raw onions to the Coney Island. "He would have got scared. He wouldn't have done anything to them. I mean, except fuck 'em and kill 'em. He wouldn't torture anybody."
"That's what we're figuring out," Lucas said. "We've talked to all those guys, you know, the shrinks and the security guards, and they can't give us a name. I mean, we thought we had a name-Charlie. It turned out it wasn't him. Then we got another name. Yours. Everybody said you were Charlie's friend, and you worked down there around the Big Three. So, one way or another, we figured you might know who else was talking to the Big Three."
West shuddered. "Those guys. Those guys are really nuts. I mean, all of us were nuts, except maybe Alison. But they were really nuts."
Lucas bit: "Alison?"
West had a mouthful of Coney Island, chewed it, swallowed carefully, and for a moment went someplace else, his mouth half open, three inches from taking a new bite. After a long moment, he suddenly came back, his eyes shifting, and he said, "Yeah. Alison. She wasn't nuts, she was just in there for the money. She didn't make any secret of it."
Del looked at Lucas, and Lucas rubbed his forehead with both hands: "I don't want to know."
Del said, "I gotta know." To West. "Okay, what about Alison? What do you mean, she was in it for the money?"
West looked a little surprised: everybody knew about Alison. He put on a patient voice, as if talking to a village idiot, and said, "Where else are you going to meet rich guys that no other women want? I mean, there are always a bunch of guys in there for evaluation. Some got the big bucks. Especially the obsessive-compulsives; but the paranoids do pretty good, too."
"She's in there… to date?" Del asked. This was the kind of informational nugget he treasured.
"Yeah. What have I been telling you?" West finished the last of the Coney Island, held up a finger to the waitress, pointed at his plate, and mimed, "Another one."
LUCAS WRENCHED THE CONVERSATION back on course: "So give me two names," he said. "Who are two people most likely to have been taken over by the Big Three? Include women-do women work around them?"
"When they're not in isolation," West said. He twitched, said, "Don't," and pulled away from his invisible uncle, tears coming to his eyes. Lucas looked away, but then West went on, as if there'd been no interruption."Okay: Danny Anderson. He got out a couple of months before I did, and he was pretty… dim. Like you could take him over."
Sloan stirred, and asked, "Who else?"
West scratched his head with a fork and finally said, "You know what you're asking is, who knows those guys? The answer is, lots of people. But I don't know anybody who was likely to get taken over. I tried to stay away from them, and so did everybody else. I mean, those guys weren't just nuts, they were nasty. They'd yell shit like 'Hey, ugly boy, hey pimple boy, your dick as big as that pimple on your nose?' And Biggie was aways yelling at guys to show their asses. Or Taylor would yell at some woman that he had some grease for her pussy, and he'd have like a handful of come. I mean, who is gonna get taken over by somebody like that? When you're trying to stay away from them?"
Sloan said to Lucas, "Dan Anderson's been in California since two days after he got out, living with an aunt. He had to check in with the authorities out there because it was a sex crime, and they've tagged him ever since. He's not the guy."
West was disappointed: "Never liked him. He was an ass wipe."
"So you got no names," Lucas said to West. "You're not helping us much."
West was drinking a Budweiser through a straw. "No. That's not right. I got about a million names. I knew everybody in the place. But I don't know which one it is. Like I said, it all seems wrong to me. Hardly anybody hung around those ass wipes."
They all sat there for a minute, then West said, "What time is it?"
"Two o'clock," Lucas said.
"If somebody gives me a ride, I could still make it over to my light."
OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, squinting in the bright sunlight, West burped beer fumes and said, "Sorry I couldn't help. This guy sounds like a serious ass wipe."
"Ah," Lucas said and stepped away.
"You know, I do got an idea, when I think about it. Ones who might have got their brains changed," West said. He said it with the self-conscious smile of a bad comedian about to deliver a worse joke.
"Who?" Sloan said.
"Like O'Donnell and Jimenez and Grant and Hart and Sennet and Halburton and Grosz and Steinhammer… those are the guys who hung around with the Big Three all the time, talking to them. Docs and guards."
LUCAS STARED AT HIM for a long beat, then looked at Sloan and said, quietly, "Oh, shit."
Sloan said. "No way."
Lucas nodded: "Way. Ah, Jesus, Biggie told us, and I missed it."