“Hey, that’s great,” Billy said, in the tone of voice one uses when soothing a sensitive child. “If that’s what you want, great.”
“How about you, man? What are you up to?”
He shrugged with studied carelessness and said, “A little bit of everything. My Ten-Forty says I sell commercial real estate”-and here Billy winked-“but I have an interest in a couple of cash businesses in the suburbs. Restaurants, carryouts, you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Things are okay,” he said, then looked at the remainder of his beer and finished it off. Billy held the bottle up. “How about another one of these Green Guys?”
I found him one and killed off the rest of my Grand-Dad, then poured myself another shot. While I did that I watched him nail half the bottle of Heineken. He looked up my way and stared at me for an uncomfortably long time.
“It’s good to see you, Nicky,” he said finally.
“It’s good tos ’s go see you too, man.”
After that there was another block of silence. I had a taste of bourbon and chased it with some beer while he looked away. The music had stopped, but he was drumming his fingers on the bar. I moved down to the stereo and switched it over to WDCU, to give him something to drum about. They were playing Charlie Parker’s “Lester Leaps In.” When I walked back Billy was grinning. It was still an ingratiating grin but a little forced now, as if he were attempting to smile against a cold wind.
“So,” he said, “I never would have figured you to end up as a detective.”
“It just happened. Anyway, I’d hate to think I ended up as any one thing.”
“You know what I mean.”
“All too well. You meet somebody, right away, what’s the first thing they ask you? ‘What do you do? ’ I never know how to answer that. I mean, I do a lot of things. I’m a bartender, I read books, I’m a private investigator, I go to movies, I drink, I box, I listen to music, I fuck-which activity are they referring to?”
“I doubt they’re referring to the last one.” Billy shook his head and chuckled condescendingly. “You haven’t changed one bit, man.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But you probably knew that. And you came down here anyway to ask for my help. Right?”
Billy finished his beer and replaced the bottle softly on the bar, then looked at me. “That’s right.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“I’d feel better if we went somewhere else.” Billy had a look around the bar. “I mean, this place is so depressing. Don’t you think it could use a few…”
“Plants?”
“Yeah, something.”
“I don’t know. I kind of like it the way it is.”
We were gliding north on Fourteenth Street in Billy’s sleek white Maxima, the glow of the dash lights rendering our complexions pale green. There was a car phone between the saddle leather buckets. The numbers on the car phone were also illuminated in green. A notepad filled with blank white paper was suctioned to the dash.
Billy had a pull off one of the road beers I had grabbed before locking up the Spot, then wedged the bottle between his thighs. I flipped through his CD selection and tried to find something listenable, but all he owned-Steve Winwood, Clapton, Phil Collins, the Who (“Hope I die before I get old,” indeed-why didn’t you, then?)-were forty-minute beer commercials. I closed the box and settled for the soft, intermittent rush of the Maxima’s wipers.
Outside, the snow was drifting down in chunked, feathery flakes. Soft, radiant halos capped the streetlights ahead. Children were out, laughing and running on the sidewalks and in the street. One of them, a boy no older than eight who wore only a red windbreaker, th ofdbreakerew a powdery snowball that hit our windshield and dissolved. I made a mocking fist and shook it at him as we passed, and he smiled and shook his own fist back. Billy locked the doors with a rather awkward, fumbling push of a button.
Just past Fourteenth and Irving we passed the remains of the Tivoli Theater. My grandfather had taken me there in 1963 to see Jason and the Argonauts, a film noted as the pinnacle of Ray Harryhausen’s work in stop-motion photography. The scene in which the skeletons come to life to do battle with Jason inspired some of the most frighteningly memorable, sheet-soaked nightmares of my childhood. The night of the film my grandfather and I had walked through a heavy snowstorm from our apartment to the theater. I can still feel the warmth of his huge and callused hand in mine as we made a path through the snow.
“Hey,” Billy said. “Your papa still around?”
“Papou,” I said. “He died a couple of years back.”
“How about your folks? You ever hear from them?”
“No.”
At my direction Billy pulled over and parked near the intersection of Fourteenth and Colorado. He double-checked all the locks before we headed down the block, turning his head back twice to look at the car as we walked.
“Relax, will you?”
“That’s twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of car,” he said. “I don’t want to see it up on cinder blocks when I come out of this place.”
“You worry too much,” I said, but judging from the pale look on Billy’s face, that bit of analysis didn’t help. I pulled on the thin door and we entered Slim’s.
Slim’s was a small jazz-and-reggae club owned and run by a couple of East Africans, neither of whom was named Slim. At night there was always a live but unobtrusive band, and the Ethiopian food was top-notch. Slim’s had a ten-dollar minimum tab, a quota I never once had trouble making, to keep out any undesirables. I stopped in once in a while on my way home and had a couple of quiet drinks at the bar while I listened to some of the cleanest jazz, mostly of the bebop variety, in town.
We crossed the room to a deuce in the back that was centered under a stylized portrait of Haile Selassie. Our waitress showed momentarily and took our order for two beers. Her name was Cissy. She was wearing a plain white T-shirt and blue jeans, and had beautifully unblemished burnt-sienna skin.
The band that night was the club’s regular sextet-trumpet, sax, piano, drums, guitar, upright bass-whose members took turns soloing on practically every number. The turban-headed trumpeter was the coleader, though oddly the least talented of the group, and his partner was the saxman, an aging, bottom-heavy Greek I had seen around town who took his scotch through a straw. The youngest man of the bunch was the guitarist, and also the musician with the most potential, but obviously a heavy user. When he wasn’t soloing he sat on a wooden stool with his chin on his chest, a crooked knit cap pushed over his brow, deep in his down world.
Billy and I sat throughira sat th the rest of the band’s set without speaking. Cissy had given us two unsolicited Jim Beam Blacks (a very smooth bourbon that is in fact too smooth for my taste) and served them in juice glasses halfway full to the lip. The band ended its set with a pumped-up version of Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” The young bartender put some low-volume Jamaican dub on the house stereo. Billy, who was starting to look a little pickled, leaned my way.
“Let’s talk business,” he said.
“All right.” I pulled the deck of Camels from my overcoat and shook it in his direction. He started to reach for one but then waved it away. I slid one out, lit it, and took in a lungful.
Billy said, “I guess you’ve noticed the ring on my finger.”
I nodded and said, “So?”
“This is about that.”
“I don’t tail wives or husbands anymore. I should tell you that straight up. My bartending job keeps me off that sort of thing.”
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“What is it then?”
“My wife has left me, Nick.” Billy took the matches that rested on the top of my cigarettes and pulled one off the pack. He struck it, watched it flare, then blew it out. “She walked on her own accord. You’d call it desertion, I guess, if it was a man doing the walking.”
“Kids?”
“None. We tried for a couple of years, but it wasn’t in the cards.”