Wherever, he wasn’t anybody I’d paid any attention to. I’d been half expecting that sullen young prick from the Barn, the house dealer who I was so sure had smashed that lamp in my face. In fact that was why I’d put so much oomph behind the garbage can lid. I wondered if I’d decked some poor schmuck who just happened to be on his way to the same restaurant, at the same time, as Lu and me.
Then it came to me.
He was from the Barn. Not the guy I’d expected, but someone else I’d seen there; not a house dealer, but a regular. A clown who’d been there every night, and who liked to play five-card stud but didn’t have the balls for too high stakes, though he didn’t play badly, if I recalled right.
I checked his billfold. There was a couple hundred bucks in there, and it might have been mine, so I pocketed it. He had a driver’s license, too. It said he was from Santa Barbara, California, and that he was twenty-eight. And here’s the good part: his name was John Smith.
Well, I guess somebody has to be named John Smith. And I figured that’s who this guy was, because nobody, not even a little moron, picks a phony name that obvious.
He also had no gun. No weapon of any kind. Not even a goddamn pen knife.
Something was starting to tingle on the back of my neck. It was a bad feeling and it was spreading. Something was very, very wrong here.
My still unconscious friend was clearly not a professional anything. His idea of shadowing you was to tailgate; he was unarmed; and his name was either the worst alias in the world or maybe just proof he was some poor, dumb, bland-looking son of a bitch named John Smith from Santa Barbara, California.
Shit. The numbers here were not adding up. If the former Glenna Cole, current Lucille was the stakeout, and that prick dealer from the Barn was the hitter, where the hell did John Smith fit in?
The frustrating thing was I couldn’t just shake him awake and have a talk with him and find out. Talking to him meant I might have to kill him when I was done, and I didn’t want to do any killing right now. Killing him would perhaps tell certain people something about me I didn’t want them to know; leaving him alive, as the possible victim of a mugging, might make it necessary for the jury on me to stay out a while longer.
So I had to be content with stuffing him ass first in a garbage can and leaving him to wake up and wonder, after which I returned to my car, left the nine-millimeter in the glove compartment, and walked back to the restaurant to meet Frank Tree for the first time.
26
The outside of the place was classy-looking charcoal- colored brick with white mortar. There was more brick inside, but whorehouse-red brocade wallpaper dominated. And that’s the whole story of DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant: it was alternately sleazy and luxurious, as plush as the backseat of a millionaire’s limo, as tasteless as a girl whose panties have the day of the week on them.
Lu was waiting for me just beyond the huge. wooden front doors, with their elaborate carved wood handles shaped like rearing, roaring lions (you grabbed a lion around the belly to pull open a door), and she looked genuinely worried.
“What was that all about?” she wanted to know.
“I thought somebody was following us,” I said.
We walked past the area in front where some guys in white outfits and chef hats were making pizzas in front of the street window, the pizza ovens built of that same fancy charcoal-color brick, and moved into the subdued lighting of the dining area.
“ Was somebody following us?”
“Yes,” I said.
A lady in her forties wearing a dark red evening gown and a white corsage, with dark black brittle hair piled as high as a small child, and a mole as black as her hair next to a mouth as red as her dress in a face as white as her corsage, said, “Party of two?” and Lu told her we were with the Tree party and the lady asked us to walk this way, and I resisted the urge to turn that into an even bigger joke than it already was.
There were booths on either side of us, as we walked, and each booth had its own tiffany shade hanging lamp and its own original oil painting, which ran to matadors and still lifes and crying clowns and big-eyed children and frozen summer landscapes. We followed the lady in red into a large open area, where a mammoth cut-glass chandelier was suspended which no one seemed anxious to stand under, with an ornate bar off to the left, the prerequisite reclining-nude oil painting in the midst of an obscenely well-stocked series of wine and liquor racks, and an open stairway rising before us to reveal the second floor, or anyway a hallway thereof, with more oil paintings and the closed doorways to banquet rooms, apparently, and we went off to the right, to a private nook (or was it a cranny?) where Frank Tree and Ruthy sat at a table big enough for twelve.
“Jack Wilson, Frank Tree,” Lu said.
Tree stood and extended a hand and I shook it. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.
He said, “I’ve seen you around, Jack. You been winning some money off me, if I’m not mistaken.”
I said he wasn’t and sat down.
Ruthy raised a hand to boob level and milled her fingers in a sort of wave. “I’m Ruthy,” she said.
“I guessed,” I said.
She gave me a schoolgirl grin and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you, Jack.”
“If it isn’t bad, it isn’t true,” I said.
We were in the middle of the big table. I was across from Ruthy, who was wearing a yellow short-sleeve sweatshirt that had a dancing Snoopy on it. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face and she had little make-up on. She looked good, though. Nice tits. Lu looked good, too, in her pants suit with the halter top. Tree was wearing a sportcoat and open-collar shirt, and seemed to have sobered up considerably since this afternoon. The range of clothing at the table was in keeping with the rest of the patrons at DiPreta’s; there was everything from evening wear to sandals and sweatshirts and all the stops between. It was like being on Mars, or in Cleveland.
A middle-aged waitress in traditional black-and-white uniform with black hose came over to take our order, asking first if we wanted anything from the bar. Tree and I both declined, but Lu asked for a Bloody Mary and Ruthy a screw- driver. Then Tree recommended the rigatoni and Lu and I went along with him, but Ruthy wanted an anchovy pizza.
When the waitress had gone, I told Ruthy how much I enjoyed the play Sunday.
“Did you really?” It lit up her dark blue eyes, which darted around as she spoke, never looking at you, never landing. “It’s too bad you couldn’t see me in something heavy. I mean, Born Yesterday, after all. How shallow can you get? Anyway at least it was fun, and, well, you can’t go dropping Edward Albee in the laps of these little old ladies in tennis shoes at the matinees, can you?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“Not that anybody in Des Moines is ready for something heavy.” She shook a Virginia Slims out of the pack in front of her; she’d already had several. Tree used a lighter to fire it for her. “The theater’s a once-or-twice-a-year thing for Des Moines-birthday, anniversary… Before curtain the manager comes out and has everybody in the house applaud for people celebrating ‘special days.’ But you know that. You were there. Bunch of smalltown bullshit, but what can you expect? Now this Fourposter play coming up isn’t so bad, but I’m not in it. A good woman’s role for a change, too. I guess I’ll be playing these lousy ingenues and sexpot roles till my teeth fall the fuck out. It’d be nice to play something sensitive for a change. Like when I was at Drake.”
“Drake?”
“The university here. I did a lot of good stuff there. I did Rhinoceros. ”
“I don’t think I know it.”
“It’s a wonderful play. It’s about everybody turning into rhinoceroses.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Oh, it is. It’s very symbolic.”
“What of?”
She gestured with her cigarette. “Uh, people getting insensitive, I think. People turning into monsters and nobody noticing or caring and pretty soon everybody’s a monster. Our director at the time said it was about Vietnam, even though it was written before Vietnam. I think it’s about conformity. It’s a comedy.”