Despite the humidity, I continued to shiver. We used both the blankets from the trunk on Dennis. I wrapped my arms around myself. Cody put the heat on. We kept the windows open wide enough for fresh air but closed enough to keep out the rain. He radioed ahead so they would be ready for us at the emergency-room entrance when we got to the hospital.
“How’d you happen to be on the road?” I asked.
“Violet insisted I at least check the road to the swamp. She can be pretty persuasive. She got worried when you didn’t come back.”
As we raced toward Brinard, I told him what had happened. I did not relate all the leads Jasper had given us about who might want to kill the sheriff. I did ask, “What’s the story on Jasper’s dad? How could he protect an insane son?”
“Lots of tolerance for eccentricity in the South.”
“Violet said the same thing the other night. This isn’t eccentric—this is stark raving, totally, entirely, certifiably nuts.”
“His dad owns more than half that swamp. Jasper lives there legally. The family was one of the first to settle the county. They’ve got cash and history on their side.”
Our trip was slowed by the elements. By the time we were halfway to the hospital, Dennis was shivering and sweating. He became conscious enough to begin moaning. If nothing else, the shock and loss of blood could kill him.
After several miles of silence I asked, “Did the autopsy report come back on the sheriff?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
“He wasn’t killed there. We’ve only identified your fingerprints so far. He had a mild narcotic in his system.”
“He was given knockout drops?”
“Probably. Enough of something to make him sleepy and easy to control, happy and goofy.”
“He died laughing. Good for him. Where was he the night before?”
“Wife says he left at eleven. He told her he had police business to take care of. She didn’t ask. As sheriff he was always on call, no matter what the hour. If something came up that needed a decision or was a major problem, his orders were to call him in.”
“Was there a real police call that night?”
“We haven’t been able to confirm one. They found his car in the middle of the forest. None of your fingerprints so far.”
“So he was out cavorting in the countryside at all hours on any given night.”
“Sometimes there really was police business to do.”
“And I’m the Easter bunny.”
“I thought you were the good fairy.” The man had a little bit of a sense of humor.
“Has anybody tried to figure out what he was doing or where he went that night?”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“Nobody’s asked. Somebody must have seen him.”
“If they did, they haven’t come forward.”
“Jasper talked like he was best buddies with at least one person in the police department.”
“That’s hard for me to believe.”
“Not for me. I’d suspect the police department would be a good place to find Klan members, or Nazis, or skinheads.”
“The guys are okay. Jasper was too crazy. Nobody would hang around with him.”
“Who on the department would be most likely to want to join Jasper in a group?”
“Nobody.” I couldn’t tell if he was covering up or just being loyal to his own, which could have been the same thing.
“What killed him, officially?”
“A dull and rusty razor blade. Whoever did it kept cutting after he was dead. Report said it wasn’t just a quick slit. Somebody had to saw away for at least a little while.”
“Somebody was very angry. Did he struggle?”
“No evidence of it. You saw the body. No tissue under his nails. Gun with bullets in it just sitting there on his hip.”
“He must have made a lot of people very angry.” I thought I knew the names of some of them. I wanted to talk to the people Jasper had mentioned as soon as possible.
On the outskirts of Brinard I said, “I know you don’t have to answer this, and I’m not trying to make you angry, but why do you dance in front of guys? It can’t be just the money. As a cop in this town, wouldn’t you be able to get a reasonably decent part-time job?”
He rubbed his chin and shifted in his seat. “I’m straight.”
“I’m not disputing that.”
“The money is unbelievably good. I’m in good shape. I work out a lot at home. I feel like a stud when I do a strip. It’s a trip to have people watch me naked.”
“Why not work in front of women in one of those exotic places I saw signs for on the highway?”
“Our good southern women can take their clothes off in them, but they can’t go there to watch a man take off his.”
“What about afterwards, when you leave with guys?”
He looked at me carefully. We were a block away from the hospital parking lot. He said, “I just lay there. I let them do what they want, but they know the rules. No kissing. I don’t touch them.”
“You don’t enjoy it even a little?”
“I lay there and think about women and having an orgasm. I concentrate on that.”
If it worked for him, who was I to disagree? He had his reality all rationalized and in comfortable pigeonholes in his mind.
At the emergency-room entrance, they rushed Dennis in.
A small cluster of reporters, including one television minicam, formed a crowd around me. When Cody called the hospital, someone must have been listening to the police band on the radio and tipped them off.
The reporters flung questions at me. I marched to the doors leading to the emergency room and followed Dennis in. Cody kept the reporters out of the unit.
I called up to the CCU. Mary, Shannon, and Mrs. Carpenter were there. Scott had left to find Violet and to hunt for me. The hospital personnel brought me some dry clothes. Taking off my wet garments was a joy. Drying off was heavenly. I put on white hospital orderly pants and a letterman’s jacket from the lost and found. I’d had a choice of that or a Bullwinkle sweatshirt, which I’d have taken except it was three sizes too small.
They rushed Dennis into surgery. They insisted I lie on a gurney and be examined in the emergency room. The nurse took my temperature and blood pressure. I was exhausted, desperately in need of sleep and a warm blanket. If somebody suggested a trip across the Sahara for our
next vacation, I’d have leapt at the idea. A heaping gallon of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream smothered in tons of hot chocolate syrup would not have been amiss, either. I was too keyed up to rest. I had the goods on half the county. I wasn’t planning to rest until several people gave satisfactory answers.
Dr. McLarty came in to examine me. Good. One of the people on my list. He poked, prodded, asked me where it hurt, and declared me to be fine. He seemed clinical and distant, not like the kindly local practitioner who’d spoken softly and at great length with the Carpenter family about their father.
He did ask what happened. Telling him the physical stuff in this antiseptic surrounding caused me to begin shaking again. Not enough time and distance had passed to begin to diminish the horror of the situation. He saw me shivering, called for the nurse, and directed her to bring me a blanket.
The nurse brought in several. She and McLarty gently wrapped me in three layers of warmth. The nurse left.
I felt myself stop shaking. I eyed McLarty as he made notes on my chart. He sat on a stool with four legs with wheels on the ends.
“How’s Dennis?” I asked.
“They’re still working on him,” McLarty said. “They think the eye should be fine. The lid got sliced, but that’s all.”
“He’s a great kid.”
McLarty sat at a small desk and finished filling out hospital forms.
I said, “Dennis said you wanted to talk to me. Do you have information about the sheriff that might help me find his murderer?”
He put down his pen and rotated the chair so that he
faced me. He folded his arms across his chest and crossed his ankles.
“It must be nice,” he said. “Living in Chicago, prancing around in the gay pride parade …”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything? That does it! Nobody else in this town gets to say another nasty thing about my being gay. Not you. Not anybody. If you have something useful to say that will help me discover who killed the sheriff, fine. Otherwise shut the fuck up and keep your bigoted opinions to yourself.”
“I’m gay,” he said.
What was I supposed to say to that: “Okay, since you’re gay you can have bigoted opinions”?
“Then why start out with an attack on me?”
“Because I’m envious and jealous. You’ve got a beautiful lover, a famous baseball player, and every gay man on the planet would give anything to be in your position. Yet you two come down here and stir things up. The rest of us have to live here.”
“I didn’t ‘stir things up.’ They were pretty well boiling when I got here. I still don’t get your problem.”
“I just want to live a quiet life. Not bother anybody. My mother and aunt are here. I can’t leave. I have to stay here to care for them. You running around town flaunting the fact that you’re gay just upsets everybody. I’m the ‘bachelor’ in town. I know they whisper about me, but I don’t want my mother to know.”
“You really don’t think she knows you’re gay?”
“I never press the issue.”
I shook my head. “You told Dennis you wanted to talk to me.”
“I don’t usually work in the ER, but with the rain we’ve had a lot of accidents. However, I took your case deliberately. I wanted to ask you to tone down your behavior, if
not for the sake of the few gay people in town, then to warn you that bad things could happen.”
I glanced down at the blankets I was wrapped in. “Gosh, you were right. Congratulations.”
He frowned. “I don’t think sarcasm helps.”
“Do you have information that might help me find out who killed the sheriff?”
“If I tell you anything, I cannot have my name associated with you in the paper. Talking in here this long could begin to look suspicious.”
“Somebody has a stopwatch timing visits with each patient? This is absurd. What do you know?”
“If this got out, I could be drummed out of the profession.”
I waited.
“The sheriff came to me four times in the past five years to be treated for sexually transmitted diseases.”
“Did he have AIDS?”
“He was tested. No. These were the run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, cheating-on-your-wife kind.”
“She never knew?”
He shrugged.
“Why didn’t he go out of town to be tested?”
“He knew I’d keep quiet. He figured out I was gay and threatened to expose me.”
“How can you live like that?”
He unfolded his arms from his chest, reached a hand up under his glasses, and began to massage the bridge of his nose. When done, he said, “I just do.”
“If you’re the ‘bachelor’ in town, what difference does it make if he tells everybody you’re gay?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
“People might think I’m gay, but unless I have naked lovers dancing in my front yard, they can ignore it. I can be
friendly Dr. McLarty. If it’s out in the open, then something has to be done about it. Preachers have to make statements, the bigots in town have to fling slurs and become physically violent. Silence equals survival.”
He gazed at me evenly. His life was a chilling one that I would never want to live, but I suspected it was all too common among too many gays and lesbians. I wasn’t going to change him or the people with narrow minds by berating the compromises he’d made to live his life. I switched topics.
“From whom did the sheriff catch the diseases?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. I always guessed it was women he picked up at the Rebel Hell.”
“Did his wife catch any of the infections?”
“He claimed they never had sex after he slept with other women and before he got tested.”
“You believed that?”
“I wasn’t in a position to challenge what he said. If she was ill, she never came to me for treatment. The gossip in town never included them having fights in public.”
“Where were you the night he was killed?”
“Home, alone, in bed, asleep.”
“Any other gay people in town it would do me any good to talk to? Any that might have been afraid of him and could have information? Maybe had a temper and might have wanted to kill him?”
“I’ll question people, not you. There aren’t many of us, and we have to be very careful. If anybody knows anything, I’ll let you know.”
I thanked him. I felt warmer, so I took off the blankets. Now, I wanted to see Scott more than anything else. I also wanted to find some food.
I found Scott pacing the floor in the CCU. “I just got here,” he said after he hugged me. “Are you all right? What’s happened? Where are your clothes?”
“Doctor says I’m okay. We went out to see loony Jasper in his swamp. The reporter I was with is in surgery.”
Violet walked off the elevator. “You’re safe!” she said. “What about Dennis?”
“They’re operating. I’m hungry. I’ll give you both all the details over a hot meal.”
On the way out of the hospital I asked Scott, “Is your dad okay?”
“Yes. He might be able to walk a little tomorrow. We’re very hopeful. What happened?”
I insisted on Della’s Bar-b-que. Violet found out which door of the hospital the reporters were clustered around and we left by another exit. Outside, the rain continued to pelt down. With any luck the entire state would wash away.
The restaurant was nearly empty, but we sat in a booth far in the back, partly to be as unseen as possible, certainly to be unheard. Sometimes paranoids do have enemies, and we had a shitload of them.
I told the whole story as we ate. Food had never tasted so good to me. The streetlights came on and total dark fell before I finished relating all of the horrors of the afternoon.
Scott sat on the same side of the booth as me. He put his arm around me to comfort me. I didn’t care if the whole goddamn town was staring and taking pictures.
“I can believe that hypocrite Hollis is molesting kids,” Scott said. “I can’t believe he gets away with it.”
“If he really did it,” Violet said. “You only have Jasper’s word for any of this.”
“But I’m going to try and prove all of it,” I said.
“Poor Dennis,” Violet said.
“We should do something for him,” I said.
Scott said, “I probably have a few friends left in the
media. There’s got to be a job somewhere other than around here. When all this is over, I’ll try talking to a few people.”
“Good idea,” Violet said.
“And we’re leaving town,” Scott said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m still a suspect in the sheriff’s murder.”
“I’m calling our lawyer. Todd must know some way to get you out of here.”
“I’m going to want to talk to everybody that Jasper told me about, including your family.”
“None of my brothers or sisters would do anything to hurt me.”
Violet said, “Maybe I can speak subtly with Hiram and Shannon. Not get them upset. I can at least try. We have to find out what Jasper was talking about.”
“They wouldn’t do anything,” Scott insisted. “I’ll go with you to do the other questioning. Dad’s doing much better and I can get away for a while.”
I told them about the police reports that Cody had told me about. Violet had also talked to him, and he had given her the same information.
“Why a rusty razor blade?”
“Wouldn’t killing him that way take longer?” Scott asked.
“It makes it more vicious and angry. Jasper fits that mold. This is a very unhappy person,” Violet said.
“I wouldn’t call Jasper unhappy,” I said. “He was a raving loony.”
“What’s wrong with him must have started somewhere,” Scott said.
Violet shook her head, “Some people are just plain crazy from the day they’re born. No reason for it. Nothing anybody can do. Maybe Jasper’s parents were kind and loving;
maybe they beat him every night. We’ll probably never know. There isn’t always a rational explanation for everything.”
“Hard to picture a killer coming out of a stable and loving home,” Scott said.
I thought of his siblings and kept my mouth shut.
“What if the things Jasper told you aren’t true?” Violet asked. “Maybe the preacher doesn’t molest children. Certainly I’ve never heard of such a thing. A whole town couldn’t keep that quiet. I don’t think they’d want to. I hope they wouldn’t.”
“I’m going to work on the basis that what he said was true. Somebody had to have a reason to kill the sheriff, and these are good ones.”
“Is Jasper still alive?” Violet asked.
“Cops said they’d look for him,” I said, “but I guess they’ll wait for the rain to stop before going into the swamp.”
“From what you said he sounds pretty resourceful,” Scott said. “Maybe we should take precautions.”
“Like call the police?” I asked. “Excuse me, you’re both from here, and I don’t mean to be insulting, but I don’t trust the local cops in the least. We’ve got one who is less than happy with us because we’re blackmailing him for information, and one of them who was at least as much of a Nazi as Jasper. I think we’d best just be extremely careful.”
Violet said, “I talked with Leota, Peter’s wife. She hasn’t got a clue about why her husband died. You can cross her off the list.”
“We’ve got to get some answers,” Scott said. “You’ve been through enough, Tom.”
“Don’t do something foolish,” Violet said.
“I’m going to do what is necessary to clear Tom’s name.”
As we got ready to leave, Violet said, “I can’t go with you. I’ve got to get back to the library. The water in Johnson
Creek is starting to rise pretty rapidly. We’re moving some of the books and audiovisual equipment to higher ground.”
“Is it going to flood?” I asked.
“Weather report said it had been raining about an inch every two hours,” Violet said. “We’ve had over three inches. They claim it will stop some time tonight, but I’m not going to take any chances. Low-lying areas are going to be swamped. Good thing it’s been so dry this year. I’ve got all the employees and lots of volunteers over at the library, and I want to be on hand to give directions.”
Thunder, lightning, and pouring rain met us outside. Violet gave us directions to all the people we were supposed to see.
“I want to talk to Preacher Hollis first,” I said. “If he’s diddling little girls, we’ve got a powerful tool to hold over his head.”
“He has to be reported and stopped,” Scott said.
“We’ll hold it over his head tonight and report it first chance we get after that.”
Scott still had his rented BMW.
As we got in, we saw the television truck go by with the letters WRIS and a smiling peach as a logo on the side. We ducked down until it passed us.
We drove past the jail and the police department. We crossed over a bridge about forty feet long. The street lights glinted off the surface of the swollen river. It still looked like it had quite a way to go before it reached the level of the bridge. A slight slope led from the banks of the stream on both sides. It would have to rise at least fifteen feet above the banks to get to the jail. I looked around. If it got that high, a sizable chunk of the town would be under water.
Preacher Hollis and his family lived next to his church about a mile from downtown. A light shone through a
stained-glass window in the nave of the church that soared above the towering trees around it. Bright lights lit up the empty parking lot, and a covered breezeway that led to a two-story school behind the church. Their house was behind this. All the buildings were built of dark red brick. As we pulled up to the house, I looked back and saw a streak of lightning illuminate the cross on top of the spire.
We dashed through the rain to the front door. A gray-haired woman in a blue smock responded to our knock. If she recognized us, she didn’t say anything. When we asked for the preacher, she asked us to wait. She shut the door most of the way and left. The door reopened a minute later to reveal a pudgy man with black hair and a big smile, which died as soon as he saw us. He wore a flower print shirt, fluorescent Bermuda shorts, and black socks with no shoes. If nothing else, a call to the fashion police was in order.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked. “Could I hope you’ve come to confess your sin?” The smile began to return to his face.
“We need to talk to you about the sheriff’s death,” I said.
The man’s face turned purple.
Scott wrenched open the screen and caught the wooden front door before Preacher Hollis could finish slamming it. Scott followed his fist into the house. I trailed after.
“Hey, you can’t come in here like this! Millie, call the police!” The woman reached for the phone.
“Please call,” I said. “The whole world will want to hear what we have to say.”
Millie stopped with her finger above the buttons on the phone.
“Preacher, we’re going to talk about your activities with little girls.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Specifically, when you have sex with children.”
Millie let out a piercing scream and fled the room.
I thought, She knows it’s true.
He looked after his wife, then back at us. “This is utter nonsense.”
“People aren’t going to like it when their professional Christian and resident holy man is a pedophile. They might be even more angry with you than they are at us.”
Preacher Hollis strode toward us. His little piggy eyes glared out of his gleaming pink face. He stuck the smirk on his face that so many of the righteous present to the world. “I’ll destroy the both of you. We preachers will make sure Mr. Carpenter’s baseball career is ruined. He will be too frightened to ever pitch in a major-league ballpark. The righteous will not permit it.”
“Oh, blow it out your ass,” I said. I plunked myself down on the couch. The furniture was in shades of pale green, accented with brass pole lamps.
“Our source says he has pictures of you.”
Hollis turned stark white. He breathed deeply for several moments, then rallied. “Impossible. I never touched anyone. Get out of my house!”
“How did the sheriff find out?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. And so does your wife. Why don’t we go through the list of little trips you’ve taken with members of your congregation and talk to all the little girls who were there? Someone will tell the truth. Did the sheriff demand money, or simply permanent support for his reelections?”
This was all bluff based on the testimony of someone I thought was certifiably insane and hopefully dead.
“You’d better leave,” he said. “No one in my congregation would talk to you.”
“Only takes one.”
We didn’t hear any more about calling the police. That, as much as his wife’s actions, made me believe he was
guilty. An innocent man calls the cops and doesn’t try to trade bluff for bluff.
I said, “I don’t want to tell anyone about your little escapades. I just want to know where you were two nights ago and what compromise you reached with the sheriff.”
“I was here.”
“Now, now, we could use the phone to call the reporters. You’ve heard there’s a pack of them in town to cover Tom and Scott, the evil faggots.”
“Leave!”
Scott stooped to the phone, picked up the receiver, and handed it to me.
I punched 411. I listened to the rings on the line. “Who do I ask for first? We did see that WRIS television truck. Let’s call them first. They local or out of Atlanta?” The preacher seemed disinclined to be helpful. I asked for the number of the station. The operator told me the signal came out of Macon. I said the number out loud and let the recording repeat itself. I didn’t think the preacher’d lend me a pencil and paper. I had nothing in my pockets but my sodden wallet. I still had the outfit on that I’d gotten in the hospital. I began punching in the number.
Preacher Hollis rushed across the room and wrenched the phone out of my hand.
“You can’t,” he said. “I’m sixty years old. Even if it’s not true, and it isn’t, that kind of allegation ruins someone’s reputation. You must stop.”
“Give us information.”
“I admit nothing,” he said. “But to stop you from making these false accusations, I will say that I did see the sheriff two nights ago.”
“What time?”
“Just after midnight. I’d been to see a member of the congregation late. We’d prayed for her son, who is a drug addict. Earlier in the day the sheriff told me to meet him at
midnight at Magnolia’s in Filmore County.”
Scott said, “That’s the next county south. I know Magnolia’s. It’s got a worse reputation than Rebel Hell.”
Hollis said, “He told me he knew what you said you know. Again, I wanted to avoid a scandal.”
“What did he make you promise?”
“That I would support him in every election and oppose Clara. That I had to get behind all his projects.”
We left with the nugget of knowledge of where the sheriff had started out his evening.
“Are we really not going to tell?” Scott asked as we got in the car.
“Let’s stop at the hospital, dodge some reporters, and check on your dad. Then we’ll call Todd, get him working on getting me out of town, and let him decide how to handle the preacher scandal. I have no qualms about breaking my word and ratting on him. Using a power position to destroy the lives of little kids is the most disgusting thing I can think of. Todd’ll know if they have to get the state police in here or the FBI. They’ll have to investigate and find someone to talk.”
Half an hour later we were on the road south to Filmore County and Magnolia’s.
“How do you know about all these places?” I asked. “I thought you were the saintly athlete, too busy practicing or working out or being a star to have heard about these dens of iniquity.”
“I used to hang out in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly on Saturday nights with the other kids. On hot summer evenings we’d sneak off and go places. Popular athletes get taken everywhere. We have a secret society that lets us in on all the hidden knowledge—a sort of fraternity of with-it kids who know about sex and booze and the secrets of adult life before everyone else.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sounded good to me.”
“I played sports in high school and college. We just pretty much hung out and drank.”
“Sort of the same here. I went to Magnolia’s once. Me and Peter and a few guys—I think Hiram was with us. We figured we could get in. Didn’t think they’d say no to teenage stud athletes. During the trip down we bragged about how often we’d been laid, and how we were going to get laid that night.”
“All true?”
“Mostly lies.”
“What happened?”
“They threw us out.”
We passed through numerous small towns. There wasn’t much traffic on the road. It was late on a Thursday night, and it had been raining. We drove around large puddles of standing water on the road.
“Where is this place?” I asked.
“A mile or two into Thomas Jefferson Forest, going in from the south entrance. No direct way from here—we’ll have to go around.”
We turned off the main road ten feet past a sign that read, “Grandma’s Launderette—Free Dry on Thursdays.” It looked like the sign had been there since the Civil War, but I didn’t see any building to correspond.
“Where’s Grandma’s?” I asked.
“Sign’s been there since I was a kid. Used to be able to see a foundation for a building about thirty feet into the woods.”
We drove down a road that must not have been used since Sherman marched through these parts. We plopped into water-filled potholes and banged over and into lumps and bumps. The expensive car did its best to ease our
path, but a new set of shocks would probably be in order when we turned it back in. Time and again water sluiced up the side of the car, caking it with mud that was quickly washed off by the rain.
We topped a small rise. Down the other side, I saw a ten-foot-wide expanse of rushing water racing directly across our path.
“You’re not going through that?” I asked.
“I don’t remember any deep ravines on this road. It’s just a bitty crick most of the time. Can’t be that deep.”
“Yes it can.”
“Conventional wisdom at times like this is, If the car starts to float downstream, abandon it.”
“Nobody’s going to be at the bar tonight. I vote we turn around.”
“Will you calm down? Everything is going to be fine. Plus the next step in the trail leads down this road. You want to wait until morning?”
Our headlights illuminated the pouring rain and the swollen creek. I put my hand on the door handle.
“Do I shut or open my eyes?”
“We’ll be fine.”
I kept the door open a crack as we crossed. I figured this way we could jump out of the car if it started to float away. The water barely got up to our hubcaps.
I hate it when he’s right.
A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a shack that made the Rebel Hell look like a palace. A feeble light shone over the door. A yellow neon sign in one window said “Magnolia’s.” Those and our car lights were it as far as evidence of rural electrification were concerned. The roof of the place sagged, gutters hung half off the two sides of the building I could see, and the wooden walls seemed to bulge outward. In one flash of lightning I thought I caught
sight of an outhouse. Three pickup trucks nuzzled up to the walls, and at the far end of the lot was a van that seemed to be sinking into the mud.
We pulled as close to the building as we could and dashed through the rain to the door. Inside, directly across from us, was a bar that ran the length of that side of the room. It seemed to have been made of the same warped wood as the walls. Black-and-white photos of cowboys at rodeos were crammed around all the edges of a smoke-begrimed mirror, which reflected the interior. A thin strand of Christmas lights lined the ceiling on three sides. Two revolving beer ads provided the only other brightness in this part of the bar. To the right were three Formica-topped tables, each of which had enough grime encrusted on top to qualify as an individual toxic dump. A warped linoleum dance floor was just beyond them. To the left was a beautiful pool table: dark green felt encased by dark mahogany. A hanging Tiffany lamp above the table gave off the most light in the whole bar.
Three guys holding pool cues and smoking cigars looked up at us. Their glare was unfriendly. Picture three guys too ugly for even an MTV video: tight tank-top T-shirts emphasizing scrawny bodies; scruffy, unshaven, pockmarked faces; unwashed hair hanging in strands to below their shoulders; and random streaks of unwashed grime on their shoulders, necks, and faces.
Behind the bar was a tall, attractive African-American woman. She wore a starched white blouse and tight blue jeans that emphasized her sensuous figure.
We approached the bar and sat down on black-vinyl-topped stools.
The woman strolled over to us and asked, “What can I get for you boys?” Her voice was beautifully melodious and sensuous. She could sing for any opera company or drive a client wild in a scented boudoir.
We ordered two beers. She served them, then said, “Hell of a night to be outdoors.”
“We need information,” I said.
I looked in the mirror behind her. Through the murk I could see the three men who’d been playing pool, arrayed in a semicircle behind us.