“It’s dark in here, Stan,” I said, “and you’re being nice.”
“Been years since I saw anybody in the light,” he said. “Complimentary bullshot?”
“Why not?” After all the water with Christopher, I would have drunk Mogen David from a workboot.
“Interesting clothes,” he said, setting the drink down in a glass that looked uncomfortably like an erect penis on a flat, circular base.
“I thought so when I bought them.”
“Thirty-four?” he asked, squinting at me.
“Thirty-seven.” The bullshot was vile and wonderful at the same time. The glass felt silly in my hand. Somebody laughed roughly behind me, and I turned to see two men entwined in a booth.
“You’re taking care of your skin,” the bartender said, pursuing his theme, “but you want to watch the bullshots.”
I tapped the glass with a forefinger. “I’m keeping my eye on this one.”
“You know,” the bartender said, watching me carefully, “there are other bars up the street.” He mopped the surface of the bar with a rag that might have been Veronica’s Veil two thousand years ago. “Straight bars, you know? If that’s where you’d rather be.”
“Is it as obvious as that?” In some unweeded corner of my soul, I was dismayed.
“About two blocks up. Like I said, this one’s on the house.”
Everyone was offering me freebies today. “But I like it here.”
“You’re being asked to leave,” a new voice said, and I turned to see one of the men in the booth standing up with evident hostile intent. He was bigger than Godzilla and he was wearing most of Argentina’s annual export of black leather. “And you’re being asked real nice. Stan’s a lot sweeter than I am.”
The situation was slipping away from me, a familiar sensation lately. “You know Max Grover?” I asked the giant.
He paused for a count of five. “Max?” he said. “Everybody knew Max.”
“What’s Max to you?” Stan the bartender asked.
“Christy hired me,” I said. “The cops want Christy, and I’m his, um, his guy to, um, keep them away from him.”
“Prove it.” That was Stan.
I swiveled on my squeaky stool. “Oh, sure. Prove it. There’s no way I can prove it. I mean, I’ve got a card, but-”
“Let’s see it.”
I decided not to finish the sentence, which had been something to the effect that anyone could print a card, and pried one of my detective cards out of my wallet. I handed it to Stan, and he held it under one of the Christmas lights, reading it during blinks. This was obviously an acquired skill.
“Simon Grist,” he read aloud. “Private investigator.”
“ Simeon,” I corrected him. “As in ‘Simeon.’”
“Apelike,” the giant supplied into the conversational void.
“As in Simeon Stylites,” I said, stung. “A saint who spent most of his life standing on a pillar in the desert. My parents are interested in-”
“He’s a private eye,” Stan said. He sounded impressed; maybe I was the first one he’d met. If so, there was disillusionment in his future.
“And Christy hired me,” I said.
There was a long pause.
Then the man still seated in the booth stirred and raised his face to mine. It was a memorable face, the face of a prizefighter who’d gone fifteen rounds with a 747. “Poor Max,” he said in a voice softer than a fresh diaper.
“Everybody loved Max,” Stan the bartender said, nodding. “Max was a hundred percent.”
“A thousand per cent,” said Mr. Leather. “Oh, Jeez, Max.”
“So he was in here?” I asked, breathing again.
“In and out with his caseload,” Stan said. He touched his index finger to his forehead. “You know, his lost souls.”
“The kids he was helping,” I suggested.
“There’s never been anyone like Max,” the leather giant said tenderly. “Easiest touch in the world. Money for nothing, you know? And too old to expect anything for it.”
“And now the cops want Christy,” I said.
“Christy.” Stan sounded reflective. “Harmless plus.”
“But they were fighting,” said the man sitting at the table.
“Jealous, Christy,” Stan offered, immediately revising his opinion.
“Didn’t mean anything, though,” the giant tendered fondly. “Those guys had a karmic link.”
“Ancient souls,” Stan said, nodding. Agreeing with everyone was apparently part of his job description.
“Took a swing at Max, he did,” the sitting man said, “at Dante’s a couple of weeks ago.”
“He always had a violent streak,” Stan agreed.
“But he couldn’t have hurt Max,” said the giant.
“Absolutely not,” Stan said.
This could go on all day. “There’s a guy with the Sheriffs Department who thinks he did,” I said.
“Name?” asked the giant.
“Spurrier.”
“Spiky Ikey,” the man sitting at the table said, surprising me. “Ike Spurrier couldn’t find his asshole in a shit-storm.”
The pivot beneath my seat squealed as I turned. “You know him?”
“Everybody knows Spurrier.” The man at the table emitted a choked sound like a muzzled dog barking. A laugh. “The Sheriffs’ Department’s number one closet case.”
It was mildly interesting. “You think so?”
“This is a guy in deep denial,” Stan said.
I considered it for a moment and then stopped considering it. “So who killed Max?”
“Somebody,” said the giant, who had taken the hand of the soft-voiced man at the table, “who should have his skin stripped off inch by inch.”
Realizing I had the bullshot in my hand, I drank some.
“Did Max bring any new kids in here in the last month or so?”
“Other than the caseload?” That was the bartender.
“How would you know who wasn’t part of the caseload?”
“Street kids,” the bartender said. “You can smell them in the dark.”
“There was the pretty one,” said the man still seated at the table.
“Shhhh,” the giant said.
“Whenever anyone says ‘Shhhh,’ I get real interested,” I said. “Maybe I should have told you that before.”
“Skip it,” said the giant apologetically.
“The hell I’ll skip it. Max is dead, and you’re hushing people because, um, because-”
“Because he thought the kid was cute,” the man at the table said, drawing the word “cute” into three heavily sugared syllables: kee-yee-ute.
“He was cute,” Stan the bartender said.
“The boy was nice,” the giant said defensively. “Everybody liked him. You,” he said to the man at the table, “have a mind like a third-world latrine.”
“Just that one boy,” said the man at the table to me. “Very young, very pretty. Hair like corn.”
“Like wheat,” the giant said.
The man at the table looked up at him. “When was the last time you saw wheat? When was the last time you were outdoors?”
The giant opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I get outside,” he said, sounding hurt. “Wheat, corn. Some kind of cereal. Rice puffs, maybe.”
“Hair the color of corn,” the man at the table said dreamily. “Scared eyes. Looked maybe seventeen, eighteen, but he had I.D.”
“I.D.” I swiveled around to regard Stan. “Was there a name on the I.D.?”
“Sure,” Stan said. “But who remembers? Danny? David?”
“Something with a D,” the giant said. “I remember a D.”
“What kind of I.D.?”
Stan thought about it. “Driver’s license. Out-of-state, kind of funny-looking. No, I don’t remember which state.”
“Someplace where they grow them big and blond,” the man at the table said. “Like a farm state. He was, I don’t know, a farm boy. Hair like corn.”
“Wheat,” the giant murmured rebelliously.
“When were they here?”
“A couple of days ago.”
“Sunday?”
Stan the bartender looked at the wall opposite. “I guess so. It was pretty quiet. Could have been Sunday.”
“How were they getting along?”
“Max treated him like he was a piece of candy,” said the man at the table. “The kid was staring like a tourist who’d never been to town before, afraid to talk to anyone.”