“Yes. We don’t have any right to say things like that. It’s not her fault she’s not beautiful.”
“But there didn’t seem to be any other way of making your point?”
“Other than slugging him, you mean?”
“Right. Other than slugging him.”
“Not at that moment.”
He opened some more packets of sugar. It was a goddamn Niagara Falls of white granules. “You ever watch Perry Mason?”
“The ones with Raymond Burr?”
“Right.”
“Sure.”
“You like them?”
“Some of them were very good, in fact. Why?”
“You know how the jury always gasped a little bit every time there was a revelation?”
“Right.”
“Well, think of how a jury would gasp when they heard some of the things we’ve talked about tonight. Driving his motorcycle across a bar — gasp. Punching out a fellow film critic — gasp. Taking a swing at his partner in a downtown bar — gasp.” He was good at this stuff, and so of course he saved his best for last. “Having an affair with his partner’s wife — gasp.”
“I see your point.”
“I assumed you would.”
“So you’re arresting me?”
Huggins shook his head. “It’s a funny thing, the way the world works.”
“How’s that?”
“Say you were a bus driver.”
“All right. Say I was a bus driver.”
“If you were a bus driver and two eyewitnesses walked in and found you kneeling over a dead man you’d recently had an argument with — you’d be on your way to lockup right now. But...”
“But?”
“But you’re not a bus driver. You’ve got a newspaper column and you’ve got a TV show. And you’ve got a lot of friends. So you’re not on your way to the lockup, are you?”
“I guess not.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you won’t be real soon now, Mr. Tobin.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You took a swing at him last night.”
“That doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“You got into a fight with him on stage tonight.”
“I still didn’t kill him.”
“And you and his wife are having an affair.”
“That’s just an assumption on your part.”
Huggins stood up. He looked at the pink plastic bowl where the sugar packets had been stored. Empty. “You’re our boy, Mr. Tobin.”
“I’m not. Goddamn, you’ve got to believe me, I’m not.”
Then he saw the smile and he knew instantly what had inspired it and he also knew what Huggins had been wanting all along.
Tobin’s tone had just become frantic — pleading — the way it was back in the eighth grade, when Frog Face had hidden his new Schwinn.
Huggins had gotten just what he wanted. He put the bowl down and said, “See you soon, Mr. Tobin.”
Then he was gone.
9
11:16 P.M.
He tried Neely’s apartment; he tried Neely’s office; he tried Neely’s latest girlfriend; he tried Neely’s most recent ex-girlfriend. Then he ran out of quarters and had to go into a coffee shop where a young couple in a booth, cheery with impending Christmas, pointed to him and whispered and smiled and kind of nodded — yes, it actually was Tobin of TV fame right here in the coffee shop with them, probably here to do something very human like wolf down a burger or use the men’s room.
He got some more quarters and headed outside, grateful for the way the near-zero temperature slapped him around and got him out of the funk the cop Huggins had imposed on him. Standing here on the curb, his breath silver against the light of the street lamps, midnight traffic heading toward the bridges and tunnels that take the suburbanites home, he thought again how ridiculous it all was: Dunphy’s death (Dunphy, for Christ’s sake, dead) and himself a suspect (his father an M.D., his youth spent boying altars and chasing the chastest of Catholic girls) — himself a murder suspect. Bloody Christ. Impossible.
Twenty minutes later he made connections with Neely. Or started to, anyway.
“He said,” said his answering service, “that he will be at Diablo’s. In Queens.”
“Damn.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” he said, and hung up.
Diablo’s was a singles bar where guys who still wore walrus mustaches and secretly dreamed of bell bottoms coming back into fashion stood and preened and perched for the attention of women who, alas, really were Those Cosmo Gals — horny, lonely, and desperate as any marooned sailor had ever been.
Confirming all this was the fact that the sound system was blasting 1977’s favorite dip-shit song, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” when he arrived. (He had always fantasized about punching Leo Sayer in the mouth. Leo was just one of those guys.)
Christmas decorations floated above the layers of cigarette smoke. Given the predilections of the crowd here, he was surprised he didn’t see condoms twisted into the shapes of reindeer floating from the ceiling.
He found Neely after elbowing his way through a mob of dancers and then a mob of talkers and finally a mob of gawking businessmen who were inclining their heads to a tired sexpot of a secretary who was shaking herself into what seemed to be a trance. The man she danced with, balding and given to lapels wide enough to use as boat oars, glanced at the gawkers occasionally and gave them a smug little smile.
Neely sat in the center of the curving bar, where the barman usually stood, as forlorn as somebody in a late F. Scott Fitzgerald story wiping up gin and tears.
“Hey, Tobin. Qué pasa, man?”
Tobin couldn’t control himself. “Qué pasa? Do you have any idea how dated that particular cliché is?”
But then a Cher record came on the system and Tobin realized it was hopeless. In a time-warp bar like this (you still heard the word “meaningful” a lot here), there was no sense bitching about anything being dated. That’s why they came here.
At one time Neely had been the handsomest man of Tobin’s acquaintance, and that included all the movie stars Tobin interviewed. But now Neely’s hair was graying and a gut hung over his belt. He had the look of a satyr gone to sad seed. “You see that babe on the floor?”
“The one thrashing around?”
“Yeah. Her.” He grinned. “How about those knockolas?”
“I take it you haven’t heard the news.”
Neely’s brow knitted. “She diseased?”
“No, asshole, the news about Dunphy.”
“Oh, Dunphy, that jack-off.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead? You’re kidding me.”
“Right, Neely. I came all the way over to this despicable dive so I could shit you. Sit at the bar all night long and shit the hell out of you.”
“You kill him?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re serious? Jesus, Neely, do you realize you’re accusing me of murder?”
“Hell, man, you hated him and everybody knew it.”
“I didn’t ‘hate’ him.”
“Intensely disliked him then.”
“We have to talk.”
“No shit.”
“But not here.”
Neely, who could see the dance floor from here, raised his eyes from the dance-contest secretary and said, “Hell, let’s just sit here and enjoy the view.”
“No way. This is serious.”
He watched the secretary. “I can be serious here.”
Tobin frowned. “This is where it ends,” he said.
“What ends?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Hell, no, man, speak your mind. We’re simpático.”
“Simpático. Right.”