Only a handful of people were at the bar when I stepped inside—two guys and three women, all of them smoking cigarettes and drinking Budweiser. When I opened the door, I sent sunlight spilling into the dark room, and everyone turned and squinted at me, expecting a familiar face. Those were the faces you saw most in the Hideaway, and that antiquated the place maybe even more than the ancient building itself. The kid from my last visit was behind the bar again, and Scott Draper was standing beside him, talking softly over the counter with an older guy who wore jeans and a silk shirt. I moved toward them, but before I got to the bar, someone spoke from behind me.
“The hell you think you’re doing in here, prick.”
I turned to see an old man with an ugly scowl set on his fleshy face sitting at one of the little tables across from the bar. He was maybe sixty, with thick gray hair and red-rimmed eyes, and he was staring at me like he wanted to break his beer bottle over my head.
“Good to see you, too, Bill,” I said.
“Kiss my ass.”
Bill Foulks had been in the neighborhood for every one of his sixty-some years on the earth, and as far as I knew, he’d never left for more than a week. He’d worked at one of the meat shops in the West Side Market when I was a kid, and he’d been one of Norm Gradduk’s closest friends.
“Somebody invite you here, asshole?” he said. “You haven’t had the balls to hang around here since you busted Eddie, but now that he’s dead you think it’s okay? Think something changed? Well, nothing has. Get the hell out.”
I was opening my mouth to suggest Bill get his fat ass off the stool to make it easier for me to throw him through the window when Scott Draper stepped over.
“Give it a rest, Bill,” he said.
Foulks looked at him with wide eyes. “You shittin’ me, Scott? This prick’s the guy—”
“I know damn well who he is,” Draper said, his voice low and cold, “and I don’t need to hear your opinion on him, either. Lincoln’s here because I asked him to be.”
Foulks gaped at him in disgust. “You telling me you want the son of a bitch down here?”
Draper wouldn’t look at me. “He’s here on business,” he told Foulks, and then he motioned for me to follow him back into the dining room. Foulks glared at me and showed me his fat middle finger as I left.
I followed Draper into the dining room, which was empty. On the wall all along this row of booths were pictures of the neighborhood through the years. I was in one of them, standing with Ed and Draper on the steps outside the bar the day we graduated from high school, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice the picture still hung above the old booth where we’d all carved our names. I took a step toward it, wanting a closer look, but Draper took my elbow and guided me away from it and into another booth.
“What can I get you to drink? On the house, of course.”
“Whatever’s cold and in a bottle.”
“Be right back.” He went back out to the bar, and I heard him talking in low tones with Bill Foulks. I wondered what Draper was saying. Probably not giving me a hell of a lot of support. He’s here on business.
When Draper came back to the dining room, he had a bottle of Moosehead Canadian in each hand, and the guy in the jeans and silk shirt trailing behind him. Draper handed me one of the beers, then nodded at his companion.
“This guy was Ed’s boss,” Draper said. “I was just filling him in on what happened last night.”
I looked at the stranger with interest now.
“Jimmy Cancerno,” he said, offering his hand as he slid into the booth beside Draper. He wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought, probably no more than fifty, but he carried himself with slouched shoulders, and his thinning hair was shot with gray.
“You want anything to eat?” Draper asked me.
“You kidding me?” I hadn’t eaten in many hours, but the Hide-away food wasn’t going to improve on an empty stomach.
“What? Food’s better around here now, Lincoln. We made some changes.”
“So the grill got cleaned?”
He grinned. “Some of the changes are still on the list. But we got new pickles.”
“Dill chips?”
“Spicy dill chips. They were on sale, of course.”
Cancerno watched this interplay without interest. We were jammed together in one of the tiny booths, hunched over an old wooden table. Above the booth we sat in today was an old black-and-white photograph showing Draper’s grandfather sitting on the hood of a big Oldsmobile, probably taken around 1950.
“Bar’s been here a long time,” I said, looking at the picture.
“Better than a half century,” Draper said. “My grandfather opened it when he got back from World War II. Dad took over when he came home from ’Nam. Family tradition called for me to fight a war before I could run the show, but then my old man died before I had the chance, so I took over.”
“Died too young,” I said. David Draper had died from lung cancer a few years after we graduated from high school. He’d smoked better than a pack a day for forty years and spent the rest of his time working in a bar that was generally so hazy with smoke it was difficult to see the television screens.
“Hell, all of our dads did,” Draper said. “Yours was the oldest when he went, and he was still too young.”
Draper took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out for himself, and offered them to me. Apparently his father’s illness had done nothing to deter Scott’s habit. I declined, and he lit his own, then immediately set it on the edge of the ashtray.
“They put Ed in the ground this week,” he said, and his brown eyes were flat. “I haven’t decided if I’m going out for it or not. Wouldn’t make a bit of difference to Ed.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Poor bastard,” Draper said, sighing and lifting his cigarette back to his lips. “But in a way, it’s almost better, you know? Things would have been ugly for him, Lincoln. You know that.”
“If he didn’t kill her, we could have proven that, maybe gotten him back out.”
“We?”
I shrugged. “The police, then. I offered to help him, but it’s too late now.”
Draper drained a third of his Moosehead in one swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was wearing a white T-shirt that hugged his muscles closely, a thin silver chain hanging over the collar.
“I got to admit, I was pissed off at you last night, and I mean good,” he said. “It’s for the best that they put you in the police car. I was blaming you for it, even if you hadn’t shoved him. I mean, he was fine upstairs until you showed up.”
I sipped my beer and kept silent. Ed had been anything but fine, hiding out in a bar, drunk, with a cop’s blood on his shirt, but if Draper wanted to tell himself he’d played the role of a protector, I wouldn’t challenge it.
“I’m past that now,” he said. “Blaming you, that is. You showed up, right? And I know you showed up ’cause you wanted to help him. That took some serious balls, Lincoln.”
I leaned back, trying to clear some space in the little booth. He watched my face carefully, smoking his cigarette. Then he shrugged. “I think Ed had to appreciate the effort. And if he was going to go down that day, well, must have been nice for him to have an old friend by his side as he went.”
I thought of Ed’s drunken run into the street, the clumsy way his feet had tangled, the screech of brakes that were doing too little, too late.
“Sure,” I said. “Must have been nice.”
Cancerno hadn’t said a word during our exchange, just sat and sipped a whiskey on the rocks.
“How long had Ed worked for you?” I asked him.