Right as Rain

'Now you're gonna tell me, in general, what black men can and cannot deal with.' Strange looked over his shoulder again, did a double take, and said, 'There's my boy. Be back in a few.'

Strange found his snitch back in the hall that led to the kitchen and bathrooms, and returned ten minutes later. He told Quinn that the subject of the skip, Sherman Coles, had gone upstairs an hour earlier.

'What's upstairs?'

'Private lap dances, shit like that.'

'I'll come with you. Don't worry, I'm not going to get in your way.'

'Look, I'm just checking out the situation. Might not be the right time and place to try and bring him in.'

'Understood.' Quinn picked a piece of paper up off the bar and handed it to Strange.

'What's that?'

'Your receipt.'

Strange inspected it: a playing card showing a photograph of a bare-breasted woman on its face. Across her breasts was written, 'In receipt of seven-dollar cover charge, for strip bar, Toot Sweet.'

'Funny boy,' said Strange.

'You told him to be creative.'

'My accountant's gonna like it, anyway.' Strange slipped the card into his jacket. 'Come April, all those hours he puts in, he needs a little something to pick up his day.'

They walked up a red-carpeted set of stairs. A guy was coming down, and he moved aside to let them pass, not looking them in the eye. There was an oval spot of wetness high on the front of the man's jeans, just below the crotch.

'You see that?' said Strange, as they hit the top of the stairs. 'Man must have spilled something on his self.'

'Yeah,' said Quinn. 'His seed.'

'Bible says you're not supposed to do that.'

'Probably on his way to confession right now.'

'I was him, I wouldn't be wearing those blue jeans into church.'

Up on the second floor, the lamps were conical and dimmed, and smoke hung in their light. Another bar ran along the wall, and there were tables spread around the bulk of the room, some in darkness, some barely lit. At the tables, a few guys were getting lap-danced by girls wearing G-strings, nothing else. The girls used their crotches, breasts, and backsides to rub one off for the customers, who were sitting low in chrome-armed chairs, languid smiles on their faces. The music up here was slow and funky, heavy on the wa-wa pedal, with a deep, silky male vocal in the mix.

Strange and Quinn had a seat at an empty deuce near the bar. Strange settled into his chair and patted the table in rhythm to the music.

'This here's more like it,' said Strange. 'Joy, by Isaac Hayes. I had the vinyl on this one, too. You could hear the champagne bubbles rising when you listened to the record on a nice box. But on the CD the sound quality just doesn't make it.' He nodded to a light-skinned girl, on the thin side with a man's shirt worn open over panties, who was walking toward them with a drink tray balanced on her palm. 'Speaking of champagne, check this out. She's fixin' to sell us some now.'

'Can I get you gentlemen a drink?' asked the girl as she arrived.

'Waitin' on a third party to join us,' said Strange, who was squinting, not looking directly at the girl, looking around the room. He pulled the Coles photograph from his jacket pocket, along with the Coles papers he had taken from the file box in the trunk. He studied the photograph until the girl spoke again.

'How about a private dance?'

'Maybe later, baby.'

'We've got a special on champagne.'

'Later, hear?'

She gave him a look, then gave Quinn one for good measure, and walked away.

Strange said, 'They're selling some bullshit off-brand, two steps down from cold duck, for fifty dollars a bottle to these poor suckers in here. Guys making minimum wage, taking home one hundred and sixty a week, come in here on a Friday night and spend it all in an hour. Walk out of here after a hard week of work with nothin' to show for it but a headache and a big old stain on the front of their drawers.'

'You some kind of expert?'

Strange looked over Quinn's shoulder. 'Listen, you want to pay for a lady's time, I'll take you someplace you're gonna get your money's worth. This ain't nothing but a cheap hustle they got going on right here.' He stood abruptly from his chair. 'Excuse me for a minute while I do my job. Looks like I located Coles.'

'Need some company?'

'Been doin' this for a long time. I think I'll just go ahead and handle it myself.'

'Fine. I'll be back in the bathroom, taking a leak.'

Quinn watched Strange cross the room, moving around the tables, walking toward a four-top at the edge of the darkness, where a little man in a suit and open collar sat, a long cigarette in one hand, his other hand wrapped around a snifter of something brown.

The man wants to be left alone, thought Quinn, I'll leave him alone. He got up and moved toward a dark hall, where the head was always located in a place like this.

Strange was walking toward the table where Sherman Coles was sitting, and had gotten to within a few yards of it, when another man emerged from out of the shadows. He was a very big man, with wide shoulders and hard, chiseled features. The cut of his biceps showed beneath his shiny shirt.

Strange stopped walking just as the man flanked Coles. He could have averted his eyes, kept going past the table, but they had watched his approach all the way and would say something or stop him if he tried the dodge. He knew his shot at Coles was over for today. Any way he looked at it, he was burned. It made no sense for him to turn his back on them, though, or walk past them, anything else. He had to stop and let it play out. And he was curious to know what Coles had to say.

'You lookin' for someone, man?'

'I was,' said Strange, forcing a friendly smile. 'From across the room there, I thought you were this fella I knew, from back in the neighborhood where I came up.'

'Oh, yeah?' Coles's tone was high and theatrical. 'You got to have twenty years on me, though. So how could we have come up together? Huh?'

Strange shook his head. 'We couldn't have, you're right. Now that I'm up close… the thing of it is, I can't see too good in this low light. And don't even get me started about my failing eyes.'

Coles took a sip from the snifter before him and tapped ash off his cigarette. He glanced over his shoulder to the man behind him and said, 'You hear that, Richard?'

A crescent scar semicircled Richard's left eye. 'Man can't see too good in this light.'

'Or maybe he thinks we can't see too good,' said Coles. "Cause we did see you, sittin' over there with your Caucasian partner, lookin' at whatever it is you put back in your pocket, tryin' to make me.'

'Trying to make you as what?' Strange chuckled and spread his hands. 'Brother, I told you, I just mistook you for someone else.'

'Oh, you mistook all right.' Coles smiled, then dragged on his cigarette.

'Whatever you're thinking,' said Strange, his voice steady, 'you are wrong.'

'Tell you what,' said Coles, looking past Strange. 'I'll just go ahead and ask the white boy. Here he comes now.'

Quinn had been turned away by a sign on the men's room door that told him it was closed for repair. He was coming back down the hall when he stopped briefly to look through the crack of a partially opened door. In the candlelit room, a young man in a chair was being fellated by the waitress who'd been talking to them minutes earlier. Her head was between the guy's legs, her knees sunk into orange shag carpet, and there was a bottle of bad champagne and two glasses on a small table beside them, the hustle just as Strange had described. A sculpture candle of a black couple standing up, intertwined and making love, burned on the table next to the glasses. Quinn walked on.

He came out of the hall and along the bar and saw Strange in a dark corner of the room, standing in front of the table where Coles sat. A big man stood behind the table, cracking the knuckles of one hand with the palm of the other. Quinn walked toward them.