By the time you got to Off-Off, the bars would be more accurately described as dives.
Matt had explored these places when he’d first come to Vegas searching for his no-good stepfather, Cliff Effinger. This time he was looking for old cops and old crooks who might belly up to the same bars together even though they were presumably out of the game. This time, he’d come prepared to fade into the foreground.
He’d visited one of Temple’s beloved vintage shops to nab banged-up jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt topped with a plaid long-sleeved work shirt. He even messed up his altar-boy smooth blond hair with some drugstore gel goop, teased into a point at the top. The effect was still too tidy, but would have to do.
Tired swirls of neon lettering indicated the bars among the lingerie, tattoo, head shops and Vegas T-shirt emporiums in these shabby, one-story strip shopping areas.
Tired girls and women anchored darker street corners, one leg cocked to rest a hooker high-heel against the wall. Matt saw the sheen of their neon-tinted eye-whites as their gazes followed him. Some shifted their weight onto two feet, ready to approach him through the open car window, but he didn’t look, didn’t stare, just gazed listlessly ahead like a hopeless drunk out of beer money.
LUCKY STARS the nearest neon sign announced in a meteor shower of gold, green and blue stars. Cars and motorcycles kept lurching company in the front parking strip, but Woody found an empty, if tight, slot for his ponderous old Dodge sedan.
“Here we are, Mr. Midnight. Slots and jukebox in the front, pool table and hookers in the back. Tabletop nudie entertainment, everywhere.”
Woody nudged Matt through the door first. Matt’s pushing palm encountered a stickiness that could be any unclean bodily fluid he’d care to imagine. He wiped his hand on the jeans. They’d be in the Circle Ritz Dumpster tomorrow.
Smoke haze was even thicker here than in the Strip casinos. Wetherly bulled through broad-shouldered guys wearing biker leather and jeans jackets to a large, empty corner booth. The old man sat with a fervent oomph, then pushed himself grunting along the curved vinyl seat until he sat in the center, back to the wall.
A jerk of his head had Matt sliding in beside him.
The cigarette smoke and pot fumes made Matt’s vision blur, but he could see both sides of the oval bar and most of the room on either side.
“You have an in with the maître d’?” he asked Woody.
An elbow jabbed Matt’s side, the one with the bullet wound, and Woody wheezed out a pained breath. “That’s a good one. Yeah, Mr. Midnight, I have an in with the maître d’. Been coming here fifty-five years. You could say I’m married to the joint.”
“Have you ever been?” Matt asked.
“I’ve been a lot of things. What?”
“Married, I mean.”
“Oh, hell. I don’t remember. I do remember some wedding chapel, so I was either a justice of the peace, a bridegroom, or Elvis assisting at a ceremony. You never been married.” He leaned forward with a piercing look.
“Not yet,” Matt said.
“Bet you got a girlfriend who would be shocked, shocked, if she knew you were here.”
“I won’t take that bet.” Matt glanced at surrounding bar tops to glimpse a lot of luridly lit topless and maybe bottomless flesh, but the array of lights, particularly black light that turned skin an eerie spoiled skim milk purple-white, was so exotic it dampened the impression of wall-to-wall nudity. Oddly, half of the customers were favoring drinks over ogling.
“Boilermakers.”
“Huh?” Matt said, startled, but as he looked back, he saw Wetherly was addressing a waitress, topless, who’d appeared at their table, and whose mascara looked older than she was.
“How many, sir?” she asked, holding up her pad with newbie importance and obscuring her personal scenery.
“Two.” Wetherly raised stubby fingers.
Matt tried not to react. Topless waitresses and boilermakers were not his socializing style. And mixing beer and booze seemed redundant.
Wetherly waggled the fingers. “Each.”
Matt tried not to choke. He needed a clear head, so he had to be either a slow or sloppy drinker tonight.
“This is how you do it.” The old guy leaned close, the stale cigar breath coming through teeth riper than a rotten fish head. “Bull your way in. Establish a presence. Then wait.”
“For what?”
“You look like you came right off the set of The Bachelor. I will stop calling you ‘kid’, but guys in here won’t. Clean-cut, that’s a gutsy thing to be in this part of town. They’ll want to settle their curiosity, but then maybe we can satisfy some of yours about Cliffie Effinger. You gotta give a little to get something.”
“I have a feeling I’m like…bait.”
Wetherly grinned and slapped Matt on the back. “That’s the spirit.”
When the boilermakers arrived, crowding the round brown tray no gin joint in all of the world was ever without, Matt decided that was just what he needed.
Wetherly dropped the shot glass of whiskey down inside his pint glass of beer, but Matt already distrusted the cleanliness in this place. So he downed the whiskey in one go, like in the movies, and hoped the high-octane bolt wouldn’t make him cough. That would be way too clean-cut for this place.
Wetherly chuckled. “That’ll make your eyes cross. Don’t look left. We got a customer.”
Customer. As in the expression “bad customer”. The guy who was swaggering over to their table was tame enough to have only a couple visible tattoos on his biceps and wrist. He also looked to be about sixty. The late Effinger’s generation.
The guy screeched a heavy wooden captain’s chair over to their booth. “Woody, my man,” he greeted Matt’s escort. “You got a long-lost grandson?”
Wetherly’s wheezing laugh turned into a cough, but on a grizzled veteran it didn’t sound weak.
“Naw. This here’s Matthew from Chicago.” Wetherly spoke slowly, as if spelling unsaid things out…not to Matt, but to his pal.
Matt was beginning to feel like a marked man, or a shill. Why had he trusted the retired cop? Because Molina knew of him? She was relatively new in town. “Woody” could have been as crooked as a scarecrow in his day. Matt sipped the beer and studied the bar, repelled by tattoo-clothed muscleman arms and a greasy ponytail snaking down a jeans jacket back. Narrow-eyed glances eeled over leather jacket shoulders toward the banquette and away so fast you’d wonder if you’d imaged the attention. This place was one step lower than a biker bar. Beyond the bar, Matt could only glimpse a supernaturally high-kicking chorus-girl leg over the crowded circles of hooting men. Nudie pole dancing.
Wetherly leaned forward over the huge table, and lowered his voice. “You know, Ox, I got some kin up there and said I’d help him out.”
“With what?”
“Post-mortem report on a former brother of the coast.”
Matt recognized the phrase “brother of the coast”. That was old-time talk for pirates. Anybody who’d seen Johnny Depp Jack Sparrow movies knew that.
Not everybody knew Cliff Effinger had died tied to the figurehead of the pirate ship attraction far up the Strip from this place. Had died tied. Tie-dyed in water. A horrible death Matt wouldn’t wish on his worst nightmare, which Effinger had been when he was a kid.
The newcomer named “Ox” laughed. “You old buccaneer. I think I see where you’re sailing. What’s to ask about that? Old business.” He suddenly eyed Matt with suspicion. “You the law? Why no mustache?”
Matt was flummoxed. Then he recalled all the bicycle cops around town—tanned, fit, hair bleached blond from the sun, and their mustaches too. “I’m a—”
Wetherly took control. “Crime buff broadcaster.”
“Well, he’s buff enough,” Ox said sourly. “We’ll never be that again.”