Vermilion (4 page)

He spelled his name for her.

“Not the same,” she said, adding with a smile, “If this place had a bartender, I'd buy you a drink and apologize.”

“Apology accepted.” Searcy relaxed again. “Call me Bill.”

Clarisse lifted the weighty leather envelope onto the bar and flipped the latch. A bundle of legal papers poured out messily, along with three packs of cigarettes, different brands, a tube of lipstick, several dozen keys on a large ring, and a battered box of adhesive bandages. Clarisse selected the opened pack of Kools and then shoved the contents back into the envelope, struggling for a moment to close the latch. Searcy reached to help and she secured it.

“You're a treasure,” she said, and tapped a cigarette out of the pack.

While Searcy beat his pockets for matches Clarisse suddenly leaned past him over the bar and snatched up a pack of matches from a basket beside the cash register. Her breasts brushed against his arm. Sitting comfortably back, she lit her cigarette, drew the smoke deep into her lungs and released it slowly from her mouth. She tossed her thick black hair and looked about the bar, noting each man in the room, evidently unconcerned whether the conversation were pursued by Searcy or not.

“Have you ever been in here before?” asked Searcy.

Clarisse tilted her head. An expression of boredom crept across her mouth. “I've heard better lines on the six A.M. farm report.”

“No, what I mean is…well, you know, this is a gay bar.”

“Oh,” she said blandly. “Is there a sign? I must have missed it.” She turned her profile to him.

Searcy paused, trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. “Listen,” he went on carefully, “I have to finish up some business here and after I'm done, would you like to go somewhere else for a drink?”

“If this is a gay bar, Mr. Searcy,” said Clarisse with a small smile, “what are you doing here trying to pick up a woman?”

“I told you, I have business here, with the bartender. He's upstairs right now. After he comes back we could go over to the Howard Johnson's 57 Club. It's just up the street.”

“It's too cold for ice cream.”

“No, I meant—”

Before he could finish, Valentine came down the stairs and crossed back behind the bar. He dropped the photograph onto the bar between Searcy and the woman. She picked it up.

“Jack's never seen him.”

Searcy shrugged. “I'll leave the print. Show it around and call me if you hear anything.” Searcy handed Valentine a cheaply printed business card.

Pocketing the card, Valentine took a glass, filled it halfway with chunks of ice and then poured in two fingers of good scotch. The woman wrapped a hand around it but did not drink.

Searcy was confused by the woman's presence in the bar and now the bartender's evident familiarity with her—though they had not spoken. Yet he could not resist making one more attempt: “Well, I guess you don't want to have that drink with me…”

She looked at him. “Are you a policeman?”

“I'm a detective.”

Clarisse lifted the cup Searcy had been drinking from and passed it beneath her nose. She set it back in the saucer.

“I see you're on duty,” she said, then more softly, “Maybe some other time.”

Searcy nodded harshly.

“Anything else, Lieutenant?” asked Valentine.

“No. Just call me if you get anything.”

Valentine lit a cigarette. “You know, Lieutenant, you're wasting your time in here. A nineteen-year-old hustler would never come in Bonaparte's. He'd go to Nexus, or one of the bars in the Zone. If I hear anything I'll call you, but don't sit by the phone.”

Searcy rested one large hand on the bar, rhythmically tapping his thumb against the wood. “Let me tell you one thing, Valentine, I don't care if somebody knocks off a hustler every night, but when I'm assigned to a case I check everything. Scarpetti's down our necks like—”

Valentine cut in sharply. “What Scarpetti says is bullshit. It's good press.”

The policeman's flat black eyes stared hard at Valentine.

“E
VER RUN INTO that one on Charles Street?” asked Clarisse.

“No,” replied Valentine, “but I know the type. Double trouble—”

“He was cute for a cop though.”

Valentine cringed. “You don't call somebody like Searcy ‘cute.' He's ‘ruggedly handsome,' as
Viva
would say.”

“Nice touch—those circles under his dark intense eyes. ‘A good cop never sleeps.'”

“A good cop doesn't guzzle liquor when he's on duty.”

“Just one drink though, wasn't it, Val?”

“It wasn't his first. He didn't have to tell me he was drinking bourbon. I can smell cheap liquor at twenty paces in a chocolate factory. I was probably the first bartender that didn't pour him the house brand.”

“It's a hard life when you're a cop,” sighed Clarisse.

Valentine looked up. “Why are you making excuses? Your cold shoulder could have sunk the
Titanic
.”

“He was OK. I just didn't like the way he came on. I had to use a forklift to get his eyes up above my tits.”

“It's no wonder. They must have been practically in his lap.”

“It didn't matter,” said Clarisse, and ran a long finger around the rim of her glass so that it whistled shrilly, “especially since I've taken a vow of chastity.”

“Is that what you told the insurance man you met at the Laundromat last week? You went off with him and let my underwear melt in the dryer.”

“It's a recent vow,” said Clarisse. “Besides,” she added, after a sip of scotch, “he wasn't insurance, he was mutual funds. And we didn't do anything anyway.”

“Nothing?”

“At least nothing I thought was worth putting down in my diary for that day.”

“Clarisse,” said Valentine earnestly, “I'm your best friend in all this large cold city, and I've got to tell you—”

“What?”

“You've got as much chance to bed Searcy as you do me.”

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

“Not to slap on a label, but get out the glue: Lieutenant Searcy of Boston's Finest is a ‘Lady of the Secret Sorrow.'”

Clarisse's blue-rimmed eyes narrowed. “A what?”

“A closet case. I could be wrong, I was wrong once before. But the eyes are always a giveaway, and Lieutenant Searcy's eyes gave him away.”

“Val, you think every man in Boston walks the streets with a splint in his sleeve, to hold up his limp wrist. There's probably a couple of good-looking straight men left somewhere in Boston—though I wish somebody'd point 'em out to me. Besides, I didn't want to marry the man, I just wanted to see what he looked like—with his jacket off.”

Valentine was suddenly called to mix half a dozen drinks for men newly arrived. When he returned to Clarisse he found her fingering the photograph that Searcy had left.

“Strange eyes,” she said.

“They're painted on. It's a morgue photograph.”

Clarisse dropped the print. “Is this Mr. Scarpetti's little friend in the bushes?”

“Yep.” Valentine retrieved the picture and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“I was listening to the radio, and I heard something about Mario Scarpetti and a hustler. For a minute there I thought he was announcing he had left his wife for the tender embrace of a sixteen-year-old boy.”

“He was nineteen,” said Valentine.

“And he was also dead.”

Disco music filtered down from the jukebox upstairs, and Trudy was an hour late. Valentine cleared a sink of dirty glasses and Clarisse read about the late William A. Golacinsky.

There was sudden five-fingered pressure on her arm. Clarisse looked up to a man with raised eyebrows and wide melancholy eyes. He was less than thirty-five, clean shaven, with a ruddy complexion. He removed his hand from her arm and smiled apologetically.

“Miss Lovelace?” he asked.

Clarisse nodded, and could not take her eyes from his raised brows. In her mind she screamed,
Go down! Go down!
but they did not, and his wide melancholy eyes grew bigger and sadder.

“You remember me, don't you?”

Clarisse knitted her brow. “I'm afraid…oh yes, I'm sorry.” She sat up, and trailed a sharp-pointed nail down his white cambric shirt. “‘Two bedroom garden apartment, large living room with marble fireplace, full and half bath, elegant Union Park. $450 a month, all utilities.' I don't remember your name though.”

“Griffith,” the man smiled. “I was wondering if the lease had been drawn up yet. I went by the realty office twice last week, but you were out both times. I phoned the other days. You weren't in then either.”

Clarisse reached over and spilled the contents of the leather envelope across the bar. Without hesitation she reached in the jumbled pile and pulled out a clipped sheaf of papers. “Here it is, Mr. Griffith.” The rest she laboriously stuffed back into the envelope. Griffith pressed his thumb gallantly on the latch.

“I apologize for the delay. Everything can be done right now, and Valentine will get you whatever you're drinking.”

Valentine pushed a Heineken across the bar.

Clarisse scanned the original, explained several passages briefly, and asked her client to make sure all was in order. She sat silently by while he read through the document. Clarisse fished a pen from her coat pocket, and Griffith initialed and signed both copies beneath her dexterous, pointing finger. He was pleased, and his eyebrows rose another quarter of an inch.

Clarisse looked away. “I was going to call you today, but life is hard when you're a real estate broker. One of my buildings burned to the ground last night, and the arson squad and I have been sifting through wreckage all day.”

Griffith nodded sympathetically, and expressed the hope that no one was injured in the fire.

Clarisse shook her head, handed him his copy of the lease and shoved the other back into the envelope. Once again she struggled with the catch. “Twenty-five people homeless, but not a scratch on any of 'em. I think the commissions just aren't worth the long hard hours. Not to mention the heartache. Well, stop by the office and Richie will give you the keys. You'll love Union Park.”

Griffith thanked her and wandered away. When Clarisse turned she found Valentine setting a fresh drink before her. “I have never heard such a series of bald lies in my life,” he said. “
What
fire?”

“Actually, there
was
a fire last night, but it was in
my
building, just after I got in. The awful little boy who lives upstairs set fire to his father's collection of matchbooks, and they had to throw it in the bathtub to put it out.”

“That's not exactly twenty-five people homeless.”

“Well, the father was in the bathtub at the time, how's that?”

“Not good enough,” said Valentine, “and what was all that about a ‘hard life,' and ‘long hours,' and what was it—oh yes, ‘heartache.'
Heartache?
”

“It's a tough racket. You get hardened.”

Valentine laughed. “Maybe if you ever worked an eight-hour day, you'd—” He broke off suddenly, and stared blankly across the room.

“What's wrong?”

He looked at Clarisse a moment before he spoke. “I
have
seen that kid.”

Clarisse looked behind her. “Which one?”

Valentine tapped the pocket containing the morgue photo. “Poor little Mr. Golacinsky.”

“You told that cop you'd never seen him before.”

“He was asking if I had ever seen him in here—and of course I hadn't.”

“Then how do you know him?”

“I don't know, but I have seen him. Recently, too. Read what he was wearing when they found him.”

Clarisse ran her finger down the column. “Nylon football jacket…jeans, torn sneakers.” She looked up. “Maybe he just froze to death.”

Valentine blinked. “He was on the Block last night.”

“Valentine, you are
not
going to tell me that while I am languishing between freshly laundered percale sheets, that you are out on the street looking for
trade
?”

“I wasn't cruising the Block, I was out there walking your dog. So Veronica Lake and I were going down Marlborough and there was this poor kid, just about frozen to a lamppost, trying to look seductive when it's ten degrees below zero.”

“You talked to him?”

Valentine nodded and leaned over the bar toward her. “He wanted me to pick him up. He asked if Veronica Lake were a sheep dog.” They both laughed. “I wasn't paying, I wasn't going to take it for free either. I told him to go on home, he was wasting his time.”

“What did he do?”

Valentine shrugged. “I don't know. I left him there. I took Veronica Lake back to your place. You still weren't there, so I went on home. He was dressed just like the paper says, but…” He removed the photo from his pocket and placed it atop her glass. “…his eyes were softer than they are here. The way it looks now, maybe I
should
have taken him home.”

“What was he like? Hoodlum, or what?”

Valentine stood erect. “He tried to be tough, I guess. He didn't make much of an impression. Innocuous. Look, I didn't even remember him when that cop stuck his picture under my nose.”

Valentine moved away. Clarisse picked up the photograph, and turned it in the light. She set it down with a small grimace. She took a swallow of her scotch and lit another cigarette. Valentine returned.

“Well, are you going to call Searcy? Tell him what you know?”

“Not this minute. He said he'd be back. I'd rather not—” Valentine's attention was drawn to the foyer. Clarisse leaned over a little and looked in the mirror.