A salt-and-pepper couple danced halfheartedly by the juke, three men were draped over the bar like laundry left out in the rain, two couples and a foursome were in the booths. A tall elegant man dressed all in black like an undertaker or an old-time Mississippi riverboat gambler was chatting and laughing with the black bartender. He started out just as Ballard arrived.
They passed each other in the doorway. His hair was blondish brown and cut short, brushed forward over his forehead in a widow’s peak, and the blue, slightly narrowed eyes said riverboat gambler, all the way.
“A foggy night in London town,” he grinned to Ballard.
Lots of Tenderloin characters, but no Bart Heslip. Ballard chose the middle of three empty barstools. “Gimme a draft.”
The bartender drew a beer, scraped off the foam with a tongue depressor, filled it again. Totally black shades hid his eyes, his head was a bald and shining bullet, his neck was thick, his shoulders wide. Through his nose was a nasty-looking gold bull ring.
Ballard laid a brace of five on the bar.
“Listen, I was wondering if a—”
“Forget it, Jack.” The barkeep’s voice sounded as if someone hostile had done something permanent to his vocal cords.
He had spoken to Ballard but had been looking beyond him, then turned away to make change for one of the fives as two bulky men bellied up to the bar, one on either side of Ballard. One was bald as the barkeep, the other blond as Ballard. Both wore tweed jackets and neckties as tasteful as Denver omelettes.
Baldy said, either to Ballard or across him, “Whadda ya do when an epileptic has a seizure in your bathtub?”
Blondy said, “Throw in your laundry and a cup of Dash.”
Then, as if they were rehearsed water ballet movements, each removed a worn leather folder from his pocket, flopped it open to show the bartender a gold SFPD inspector’s shield, with the same practiced ease flipped them shut and disappeared them.
“We’re lookin’ for a black guy s’posed to be a bartender.”
“Here in the Tenderloin. We got a composite.”
“Police sketch artist did it from eyewitness descriptions.”
“Eyewitnesses to what?” grated the black barkeep.
One of them laid a photocopy of a pencil sketch on the bar. The bartender leaned over to give it a look. Ballard leaned over to give it a look. The two cops looked at Ballard exactly as if they had caught him at a peephole watching their wives undress.
“You ain’t seen him around the neighborhood?”
“This is a neighborhood? I thought it was an armpit,” said the bartender in his ruined voice. He added casually to Ballard, “She usually shows up at the Ace in the Hole around three ayem, man, but she ain’t worth stayin’ up for.”
Ballard slapped his empty glass back on the bar, picked up his intact five, pointed at the bartender in thanks and left.
Behind him the one with hair said, “How d’ya know when you’re in an Italian neighborhood?”
“They got burglar alarms on the garbage cans.”
The barkeep asked hoarsely, “On the house, gents?”
Ballard went through the door and out, intrigued by being told when and where to meet a woman he hadn’t asked any questions about, in such a way that it seemed the tag end of a conversation going on before the two cops had arrived.
He had hours to kill until 3:00 A.M. and Ace in the Hole. Would it be pushing his luck to front-tail the cops to their next stop, try to eavesdrop a little? That composite had looked just a hell of a lot like Bart Heslip.
Maybelle Pernod came to clean the empty DKA offices five nights a week at nine o’clock, when all the temp typists and part-time skip-tracers would be gone, and only Mr. K or Giselle might be around — or a field man or two, depending they had reports to catch up on.
Fat, black, and 61, Maybelle been singing spirituals all her life, started out to Sunday Baptist services at her preacher father’s little frame church in south Georgia when she’d been just a pickaninny. When her daddy died her mama had taken the chirren to Atlanta lookin’ for work, but she’d found bad company instead. Maybelle, too — only good thing come from Atlanta had been a wanderin’ man an’ the baby he gave he, her boy Jedediah.
But come Vietnam she’d lost her Jedediah to the war. After that, things had got worse and worse for Maybelle, ’til less’n a year ago, she’d almost taken that final walk with Jesus. Working part-time in a steam laundry, selling her 61-year-old body just to keep a big fancy car — she’d like to of despaired.
But no more, the good Lord had started talking to her again. Never knew what would come into her mind and out of her mouth when she sang, but she knew it came from Jesus.
She emptied Giselle’s wastebasket into the black plastic bag stretched around the inside of her two-wheel janitor’s cart. First Giselle had freed her from that devil of a Lincoln Continental by repossessing it. Then Kenny Warren, who’d been her dead Jedediah’s best friend, had saved her from some trouble and found her work ’til she could afford her own place. These days she walked with her head up. Had her an apartment and this good job Kenny’d got her. Had her some friends. Even Mist’ K’d come around. The folks at DKA had become almost family to her.
Course she really knew who had rescued her — it was Jesus. And he’d been with her ever since. Seemed like recently he’d been trying to tell her something, didn’t know what. When it came out of her mouth, she’d know it was him speaking.
Maybelle picked up her spiritual again, full-out in her big rich contralto:
“Maybelle, that’s some—”
“Eeeekk!”
Kearny finished disjointedly, “—voice you got there.”
“Like to scare me to death, Mist’ Kearny!”
He made a weak apologetic gesture as Maybelle went over and bent, grunting, to retrieve her dust rang from where she had thrown it when Kearny had startled her.
“Just came to pick up some files,” he said. He gave her that smile lit up his face, and departed. Still, the man looked sad, that he did. And him usually so tough. Come Sunday, she’d pray for him at church. She smiled. Mist’ K liked her singing! She started to hum, then sing softly:
Maybelle’s eyes opened wide when she realized the words she was singing. Lord talkin’ to her for sure. She put the dust rag on the corner of the desk and started dancing as she sang, her big, round, sensuous body moving with the spiritual that old blues-playing black musicians like Satchmo had given to the streets:
It was because that police composite had looked exactly like Bart Heslip, had been Bart Heslip, to a tee, that Larry Ballard had gotten out of Mood Indigo in such a hurry — before his face was fixed in the cops’ minds.
And why he was loitering with intent inside the Vietnamese grocery store three doors down from the bar.