I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.
“Hooch.” She grinned at me — a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”
“And besides that?”
I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.
“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.
“That might be. What friends have you got?”
“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”
I shook my head.
“No — not yet.”
“But you’re looking for him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe I could tell you how to find him, if I knew you were all right.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said carelessly. “I’ve a few more minutes to waste, and if he doesn’t show up by then it’s all one to me.”
She cuddled against my shoulder.
“What’s the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”
I stuck a cigarette in her mouth, one in my own, and lit them.
“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seems to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it’s no skin off my face. I’ll buy you another drink and then trot along.”
She jumped up.
“Wait a minute. I’ll see if I can get him. What’s your name?”
“Parker will do as well as any other,” I said, the name I had used on Ryan popping first into my mind.
“You wait,” she called back as she moved toward the back door. “I think I can find him.”
“I think so too,” I agreed.
Ten minutes went by, and a man came to my table from the front of the establishment. He was a blond Englishman of less than forty, with all the marks of the gentleman gone to pot on him. Not altogether on the rocks yet, but you could see evidence of the downhill slide plainly in the dullness of his blue eyes, in the pouches under his eyes, in the blurred lines around his mouth and the mouth’s looseness, and in the grayish tint of his skin. He was still fairly attractive in appearance — enough of his former wholesomeness remained for that.
He sat down facing me across the table.
“You’re looking for me?”
There was only a hint of the Britisher in his accent.
“You’re Ed Bohannon?”
He nodded.
“Jamocha was picked up a couple of days ago,” I told him, “and ought to be riding back to the Kansas big house by now. He got word out for me to give you the rap. He knew I was heading this way.”
“How did they come to get him?”
His blue eyes were suspicious on my face.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they picked him up on a circular.”
He frowned at the table and traced a meaningless design with a finger in a puddle of beer. Then he looked sharply at me again.
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He got word out to me by somebody’s mouthpiece. I didn’t see him.”
“You’re staying down here a while?”
“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I’ve got something on the fire.”
He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.
“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you’ll take a walk with me I’ll give you something real to drink.”
I didn’t have anything against that. He led me out of the Golden Horseshoe and down a side street to an adobe house set out where the town fringed off into the desert. In the front room he waved me to a chair and went into the next room.
“What do you fancy?” he called through the door. “Rye, gin, tequila, Scotch—”
“The last one wins,” I interrupted his catalog.
He brought in a bottle of Black and White, a siphon and some glasses, and we settled down to drinking. When that bottle was empty there was another to take its place. We drank and talked, drank and talked, and each of us pretended to be drunker than he really was — though before long we were both as full as a pair of goats.
It was a drinking contest pure and simple. He was trying to drink me into a pulp — a pulp that would easily give up all of its secrets — and I was trying the same game on him. Neither of us made much progress. Neither he nor I was young enough in the world to blab much when we were drunk that wouldn’t have come out if we had been sober. Few grown men do, unless they get to boasting, or are very skillfully handled. All that afternoon we faced each other over the table in the center of the room, drank and entertained each other.
“Y’ know,” he was saying somewhere along toward dark, “I’ve been a damn’ ass. Got a wife — the nicesh woman in the worl’. Wantsh me t’ come back to her, an’ all tha’ short of thing. Yet I hang around here, lappin’ up this shtuff — hittin’ the pipe — when I could be shomebody. Arc — architec’, y’ un’ershtand — good one, too. But I got in rut — got mixsh up with theshe people. C-can’t sheem to break ’way. Goin’ to, though — no spoofin’. Goin’ back to li’l wife, nicesh woman in the worl’. Don’t you shay anything t’ Kewpie. She’d raishe hell ’f she knew I wash goin’ t’ shake her. Nishe girl, K-kewpie, but tough. S-shtick a bloomin’ knife in me. Good job, too! But I’m goin’ back to wife. Breakin’ ’way from p-pipe an’ ever’thing. Look at me. D’ I look like a hop-head? Course not! Curin’ m’self, tha’s why. I’ll show you — take a smoke now — show you I can take it or leave it alone.”
Pulling himself dizzily up out of his chair, he wandered into the next room, bawling a song at the top of his voice:
He came staggering into the room again carrying an elaborate opium layout — all silver and ebony — on a silver tray. He put it on the table and flourished a pipe at me.
“Have a li’l rear on me, Parker.”
I told him I’d stick to the Scotch.
“Give y’ shot of C. ’f y’d rather have it,” he invited me.
I declined the cocaine, so he sprawled himself comfortably on the floor beside the table, rolled and cooked a pill, and our party went on — with him smoking his hop and me punishing the liquor — each of us still talking for the other’s benefit, and trying to get the other to talk for our own.
I was holding down a lovely package by the time Kewpie came in, at midnight.
“Looks like you folks are enjoying yourselves,” she laughed, leaning down to kiss the Englishman’s rumpled hair as she stepped over him.
She perched herself on the table and reached for the Scotch.
“Everything’s lovely,” I assured her, though probably I didn’t say it that clear.
I was fighting a battle with myself just about then. I had an idea that I wanted to dance. Down in Yucatan, four or five months before — hunting for a lad who had done wrong by the bank that employed him — I had seen some natives dance the naual. And that naual dance was the one thing in the world I wanted to do just then. (I was carrying a beautiful bun!) But I knew that if I sat still — as I had been sitting all evening — I could keep my cargo in hand, while it wasn’t going to take much moving around to knock me over.
I don’t remember whether I finally conquered the desire to dance or not. I remember Kewpie sitting on the table, grinning her boy’s grin at me, and saying: