Vermilion (5 page)

“Well,” said Valentine, “maybe Trudy'll have time for one full set before last call.”

In the hallway Trudy, her back to the Mirror Room, unbelted and unzipped her black fur coat in a frenzy of elbows and shoulder blades. Her head bobbed rapidly as she spoke to Irene, who paid no attention at all, but stared around the piano player to the stairway.

Trudy's clinging silk dress set off her shapely supple figure. She was short, slender, and celebrated for her legs, which Valentine contended would have precipitated a coronary of jealousy in Betty Grable. Through cycles of world fashion, Trudy's skirts remained hemmed three inches above her dimpled knees. She always wore green—dress, nylons, heels, and accessories. This unity of color in her dress was offset by the array of wigs she owned, in all various shades and styles. Her own hair was reported to be shining white, but even Irene hadn't seen it in twenty years. Trudy had three grown sons; her wife had died eighteen months back. Her real name was Sidney Robert White and she had, as Valentine often said, “the shape of Dolores Del Rio and the face of Charles Laughton.” Trudy turned, and twisted her lumpish little face coyly.

Shoulders back, arms tight at her side, she flew from the foyer to the bar. She dropped her green-dyed alligator clutch and her green gloves onto the bar beside Clarisse's leather envelope, and held out her hand for the gin fizz that Valentine had already prepared.

“I think I'm late,” she began, and sipping at the drink, held up a hand to prevent Valentine from speaking. She turned her head aside, closed her eyes and spoke quickly, in the undisguised voice of a man in late middle age. She took little bird-sips of the gin fizz between sentences. “First it was the car. Wouldn't start. Wouldn't even roll downhill. Telephone booth didn't have a directory. Couldn't call a garage. It already had three tickets on the door. Four cabs went by, wouldn't pick me up. I was just about to jump out in front of number five when a drunk came by, stepped on my heel and broke it. Had to run limping up the Hill. Little boy—should have been in bed—threw a sandwich at me. Put on another heel, waited for the glue to dry, then had to spray-paint it. Ran all the way down the hill again. Caught the subway. Man accused me of murdering his first wife. Here I am, probably not more than two minutes late. How about another gin fizz?”

“Life's hard,” said Clarisse gently.

Trudy idly twirled the overturned photograph with one long green nail. “Sometimes I wish I'd just dedicated myself to the kitchen,” she mused and flipped the photograph over. “Is this your picture, Clarisse?” she asked curiously.

“It was left here by a ruggedly handsome man called Searcy. As you can probably tell by the name, he's a pig.”

“A cop?” Trudy asked, and looked harder at the picture.

“It's a morgue shot, Trudy. That's why it looks so strange,” said Clarisse. Valentine was at the other end of the bar.

Trudy's thickly lashed eyes fluttered up. “Morgue…?” she asked hesitantly.

Clarisse nodded and pulled the newspaper around so Trudy could see the headline. “That's the little boy who embarrassed Scarpetti.”

Trudy turned the print facedown again. “I heard on the radio,” she muttered. “Hustlers are such sweet little boys. Who'd want to kill a sweet little boy?”

“That's what this cop Searcy wanted to find out. He was in here just a little while ago asking questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“You know, was the kid ever in here or not. That sort of thing.”

“The boy was never in here,” said Trudy firmly.

“That's what Valentine told the man.”

Valentine returned with another drink for Trudy. She downed a swift swallow. “The police follow trouble, the police cause trouble. It's all so upsetting. I haven't been touched by a cop since '59. Five of 'em marched in here on Valentine's Day and arrested me for impersonating Doris Duke.”

Valentine smiled. “You don't look a thing like Doris Duke. Of course, I've only seen pictures of her.”

“The police thought there was a great similarity. Maybe there had been complaints. We do both have tasteful wardrobes, and in '59 it was illegal to impersonate Doris on the street.” Trudy sighed. “Well,” she said, “time to see how many hearts I can break. It's a ‘Send in the Clowns' night. Can I have the newspaper to read on my break, Valentine?”

He nodded and she folded the paper under her arm. After greeting several of her admirers, she sat at the lacquered piano and played the promised song.

Clarisse turned to Valentine and found him staring blankly toward the foyer. She touched his hand that rested on the bar. “When are you going to call Searcy?” she asked.

L
IEUTENANT WILLIAM Searcy was angry with himself when he left Bonaparte's. He had entered as a cop, with authority and with purpose, but everyone there had seemed to get the better of him: the bartender Valentine, the woman Clarisse in her fur coat, even the hatcheck woman who wouldn't look at him. He returned to his car, which was parked beside a fire hydrant, and sat inside it until the heater had warmed him.

Searcy rested back heavily in the seat. He lit a cigarette, drew the smoke deeply into his throat, and released it slowly as he rubbed his eyes. He was grateful that only half an hour more of duty remained tonight.

Searcy was thirty-six, and his life had been such that he showed every day of his age. After a short and uneventful tour of Vietnam, he had joined the Chicago police force, where his record in undercover vice work had been outstanding. As his superior infelicitously wrote in his record, “Searcy has an affinity for vice.” Though he had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, and his mother lived there still, Searcy had not been reluctant to leave the city when the opportunity arose. That chance was a temporary transfer to Boston, as a consultant to the vice squad there. When a large promotion was offered as a bribe to stay on, Searcy unhesitatingly accepted.

He had been in Boston six years now, but gradually was working his way out of vice. Most of his time now was spent in investigating petty larceny and murders that didn't want much investigating. He rarely communicated with his mother, whom he didn't like; his father was long since dead; and his younger sister was living in San Luis Obispo the last he had heard, but doing what, he had no idea—and didn't care. When Searcy was put to the extremity of enumerating his friends, he named the two men with whom he played squash each week, but neither of these men did he really like, and of them he knew little more than that they too were policemen.

When he had finished his cigarette, Searcy drove off, headed down the three short anonymous blocks that separated the essentially residential Bay Village from the essentially urban Park Square.

Park Square is the half-respectable suburb of the Combat Zone where, directly across from the Teddybear Lounge, with its orange and purple neon, and its flyblown montage of seminude strippers with exotic names and hardened faces, stands the eminently fashionable Park Plaza Hotel. Lincolns and Cadillacs line the block here to pick up and drop off hotel residents. At one end of Park Square is the Greyhound terminal and at the other end the Trailways. On the third side is Hillbilly Heaven, a country music bar with a perennial floorshow of fistfights, and on the fourth is Shreve, Crump & Lowe, one of the most prestigious jewelers in America, older than Tiffany's.

Park Square is hustlers' turf.

Searcy circled about and came into the square from the south. Inside the glass double doors of Trailways a lone female passenger struggled with two large suitcases done up with thick rope. Under the awning of the Seamen's Grill, next to the terminal, a skinny weary whore shivered beneath green neon.

He twice circled the statue commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation, and moved up between the Teddybear Lounge and the Park Plaza. He drew up into a legitimate parking space, turned the heat on high, and lit another cigarette.

When he had finished the cigarette, he lowered the window to let the stale hot air out of the car. The fresh air braced him, and he felt motivated to drive on, across Arlington Street, and slowly past the Greyhound terminal. Evidently a bus had just come in, and considering the number of persons hailing cabs, he judged that it was from New York. He double-parked directly across from the terminal, stretched across the seat, and stared up and down the dark sidewalk.

It wasn't really surprising that one day after a murder the street would be clear, and yet he had expected at least one young man to be slouched in a shallow doorway, or leaning against the cold wet concrete, or making some pretense of hitching. There was no one.

Searcy drove to the corner of Berkeley Street, turned right, and immediately made another right onto Providence Street. Providence Street had the unsavory but accurate nickname of Vaseline Alley. It was a narrow dark passageway with large garbage bins piled up under the dim red lights of delivery entrances. Searcy drove slowly. An old Rambler with a flat tire was run up over the curb, a dark glass beer bottle stood upright in the middle of the street, but he could see no one. No shadowy figure ducked behind a barrel, no little groups turned to hide their lighted joints, there was not even a drunk taking a piss. The hustlers, fearing either the cold or the murder, had evidently taken refuge in the bars.

Searcy eased out onto lighted Arlington Street, and by going the wrong way up a one-way street and making a U-turn, he found another parking space. For the walk to Nexus, a couple of blocks away, he lit another cigarette. He passed through the Trailways lot, slapped at the side of a bus to see how cold the metal was, and then turned onto Carver Street, which was shorter, darker, and narrower than Vaseline Alley.

In the middle of this short cobbled passage between tall unlighted brick buildings is an incongruous Spanish facade in white stucco and iron grillwork; the building houses a restaurant called by its address, where no one has ever eaten, and Herbie's Ramrod Room, a gay denim-and-leather bar, that is as venerable and as pleasant as Bonaparte's but not nearly so respectable.

As Searcy passed on the narrow sidewalk, two tall rangy bearded men wearing enough black leather to shoe the entire Boston police force stepped out of Herbie's vestibule, blocking Searcy's path. They were laughing, but broke off when they saw him; both looked him steadily up and down.

“Get rid of the suit,” said the taller sternly to Searcy. “It doesn't do a thing for you.”

“I got a pair of jeans and a jock in my trunk that ought to fit you fine,” said the shorter. “Come try 'em on.”

They maintained their cocky but not unfriendly stare.

Searcy said nothing. He was reaching inside his jacket to pull out his police identification, but the two men inched apart just enough to let him pass through if he wished.

When he turned onto Boylston Street, Searcy heard their laughter again behind him. He hurried angrily into Nexus.

Just inside the entrance to the bar, Searcy hand-combed his curly hair and straightened his jacket. He pulled off his tie and slipped it folded into his back pocket.

The music from the dance floor at the bottom of the ramp was unidentifiable, but the beat was unmistakably disco. About seventy-five dancers were on the floor, twice as many men as women. The tables along the walls were occupied by excited old men trying to talk above the music, and bored young men who pretended that they couldn't hear a word.

Searcy edged along the dance floor and took a stool at the end of the bar, deliberately removed from the middle-aged bartender in yellow suspenders who was busy at the other end with dancers between their feverish bouts with the music. From this quietest corner of Nexus, Searcy began a methodical examination of everyone in the cavernous room. His first subject was not what he had expected to find in the town's principal bar for hustlers. A young woman, only a few seats down from him, was unaccountably dressed as Daisy Mae Yokum; her abbreviated costume was hardly enough to protect her from the gusts of frigid air that bellowed down the great ramp each time the outside door was opened. Daisy Mae had finger scratches down her left thigh and a set of TWA stewardess wings pinned over a nipple. She leaned back against the bar, bare legs crossed high, stirring a drink with a long-nailed finger, and staring about her with singular contentment.

“Can I help you?”

Searcy looked up at the bartender and shook his head, but said nothing.

“Do you want a drink or not? I'm probably not going to be back up in this neck of the woods for a good ten minutes.”

Searcy stared at him for a moment. “I'll be off duty by then.” He reached inside his coat pocket, but the bartender placed a hand lightly on Searcy's arm.

“Don't show me. You reach like a cop—I believe you. You pull that thing out, and there's a stampede up that ramp in about ten seconds. And I want my tips tonight. We've got a good crowd for Tuesday.”

Searcy nodded, and introduced himself.

“My name's Mack,” said the bartender. “The clock behind the bar is wrong. You're off duty now. What'll you have?”

“Bourbon and water.”

Mack turned to the bar and mixed the drink. Moving back, he motioned to a waiter standing nearby. The young man crossed behind the bar, and began waiting on the dancers. Mack slid the glass across to Searcy and then came around himself. He placed himself as a shield between Searcy and the rest of the room.

“You're here about Billy Golacinsky, right?” Mack said.

Searcy pulled another morgue photo from his pocket and handed it to the bartender. “The one and only.” Mack studied it for a moment and shook his head.

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“When did you see him last?”

“Last night.”

Searcy took a slow swallow of his drink, studying the man. “What was he doing here?”