Nick's Trip (5 page)

But none of that really matters. There is a photograph of Billy and me, taken by a tourist, that to this day is in an envelope at the bottom of my dresser. In the photograph we are sitting high up on a fire escape near Bourbon Street. Billy’s hand is on my shoulder, and our hair is long and uncombed and past our shoulders, and we are both smoking cigarettes. There is that look on both of our faces, that look that almost shouts that it has all been grand and that it is never, ever going to end.

In everything that I have done since, and everything that I will ever do, there is nothing that will equal the wondrous, immortal summer that I experienced in 1976. Now Billy Goodrich had walked into my bar, fifteen years later, and brought it all back home.

H
OW YOU DOIN’,
man?”

“Good,” he said, nodding slowly as he smiled. “I’m doing good.”

I stood there looking at him from behind the bar. He hadn’t changed much. The blond hair was there, but it started farther back, and it was short and swept back. His face was still smooth and unlined, though there was a cool hardness now around his mouth and the edges of his azure eyes. He glanced at my shot glass, then up at me.

“Call it,” I said.

“Anything in a green bottle. If you’re buying.”

I grabbed him a Heineken from the cooler and a Bud to go with my bourbon. Billy removed his jacket—he was wearing suspenders, a very bad sign—and folded it up on the stool to his left. Then he had a pull off the import.

“Well,” I said, “you gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“How the hell you found me.”

He furrowed his brow theatrically. “Who said I was looking for you? I was in the neighborhood…”

“Bullshit,” I said, going over his clothing. “Guys like you are never in
this
neighborhood.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Well?”

“I tripped over your name in the phone book, to tell you the truth.” Billy paused. “I was in the market for a private investigator.”

“And?”

“I called your answering service, and the girl said…”

“She’s a grandmother.”

“Okay, the
old lady
said I could get you down here. I was surprised she gave me the information so easily.”

“She’s the motherly type. Probably thought she was doing me a favor. Business has been slow, to say the least.”

“Well,” he said, “the whole thing was a shock to me. I mean, I ran into Teddy Ball a couple of years ago, remember him from high school?” I nodded, though I didn’t really. “Anyway, he told me he heard you were some advertising bigwig for one of those electronics retailers.”

“I was,” I said, and let it go at that. “Now I do this.”

“Hey, that’s great,” Billy said, in the tone of voice one uses when soothing a sensitive child. “If that’s what you want, great.”

“How about you, man? What are you up to?”

He shrugged with studied carelessness and said, “A little bit of everything. My Ten-Forty says I sell commercial real estate”—and here Billy winked—“but I have an interest in a couple of cash businesses in the suburbs. Restaurants, carryouts, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Things are okay,” he said, then looked at the remainder of his beer and finished it off. Billy held the bottle up. “How about another one of these Green Guys?”

I found him one and killed off the rest of my Grand-Dad, then poured myself another shot. While I did that I watched him nail half the bottle of Heineken. He looked up my way and stared at me for an uncomfortably long time.

“It’s good to see you, Nicky,” he said finally.

“It’s good to see you too, man.”

After that there was another block of silence. I had a taste of bourbon and chased it with some beer while he looked away. The music had stopped, but he was drumming his fingers on the bar. I moved down to the stereo and switched it over to WDCU, to give him something to drum about. They were playing Charlie Parker’s “Lester Leaps In.” When I walked back Billy was grinning. It was still an ingratiating grin but a little forced now, as if he were attempting to smile against a cold wind.

“So,” he said, “I never would have figured you to end up as a detective.”

“It just happened. Anyway, I’d hate to think I
ended up
as any one thing.”

“You know what I mean.”

“All too well. You meet somebody, right away, what’s the first thing they ask you? ‘What do you
do?
’ I never know how to answer that. I mean, I do a lot of things. I’m a bartender, I read books, I’m a private investigator, I go to movies, I drink, I box, I listen to music, I fuck—which activity are they referring to?”

“I doubt they’re referring to the last one.” Billy shook his head and chuckled condescendingly. “You haven’t changed one bit, man.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you probably knew that. And you came down here anyway to ask for my help. Right?”

Billy finished his beer and replaced the bottle softly on the bar, then looked at me. “That’s right.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“I’d feel better if we went somewhere else.” Billy had a look around the bar. “I mean, this place is so depressing. Don’t you think it could use a few…”

“Plants?”

“Yeah, something.”

“I don’t know. I kind of like it the way it is.”

WE WERE GLIDING NORTH
on Fourteenth Street in Billy’s sleek white Maxima, the glow of the dash lights rendering our complexions pale green. There was a car phone between the saddle leather buckets. The numbers on the car phone were also illuminated in green. A notepad filled with blank white paper was suctioned to the dash.

Billy had a pull off one of the road beers I had grabbed before locking up the Spot, then wedged the bottle between his thighs. I flipped through his CD selection and tried to find something listenable, but all he owned—Steve Winwood, Clapton, Phil Collins, the Who (“Hope I die before I get old,” indeed—why didn’t you, then?)—were forty-minute beer commercials. I closed the box and settled for the soft, intermittent rush of the Maxima’s wipers.

Outside, the snow was drifting down in chunked, feathery flakes. Soft, radiant halos capped the streetlights ahead. Children were out, laughing and running on the sidewalks and in the street. One of them, a boy no older than eight who wore only a red windbreaker, threw a powdery snowball that hit our windshield and dissolved. I made a mocking fist and shook it at him as we passed, and he smiled and shook his own fist back. Billy locked the doors with a rather awkward, fumbling push of a button.

Just past Fourteenth and Irving we passed the remains of the Tivoli Theater. My grandfather had taken me there in 1963 to see
Jason and the Argonauts,
a film noted as the pinnacle of
Ray Harryhausen’s work in stop-motion photography. The scene in which the skeletons come to life to do battle with Jason inspired some of the most frighteningly memorable, sheet-soaked nightmares of my childhood. The night of the film my grandfather and I had walked through a heavy snowstorm from our apartment to the theater. I can still feel the warmth of his huge and callused hand in mine as we made a path through the snow.

“Hey,” Billy said. “Your papa still around?”

“Papou,”
I said. “He died a couple of years back.”

“How about your folks? You ever hear from them?”

“No.”

At my direction Billy pulled over and parked near the intersection of Fourteenth and Colorado. He double-checked all the locks before we headed down the block, turning his head back twice to look at the car as we walked.

“Relax, will you?”

“That’s twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of car,” he said. “I don’t want to see it up on cinder blocks when I come out of this place.”

“You worry too much,” I said, but judging from the pale look on Billy’s face, that bit of analysis didn’t help. I pulled on the thin door and we entered Slim’s.

Slim’s was a small jazz-and-reggae club owned and run by a couple of East Africans, neither of whom was named Slim. At night there was always a live but unobtrusive band, and the Ethiopian food was top-notch. Slim’s had a ten-dollar minimum tab, a quota I never once had trouble making, to keep out any undesirables. I stopped in once in a while on my way home and had a couple of quiet drinks at the bar while I listened to some of the cleanest jazz, mostly of the bebop variety, in town.

We crossed the room to a deuce in the back that was centered under a stylized portrait of Haile Selassie. Our waitress showed momentarily and took our order for two beers. Her name was Cissy. She was wearing a plain white T-shirt and blue jeans, and had beautifully unblemished burnt-sienna skin.

The band that night was the club’s regular sextet—trumpet, sax, piano, drums, guitar, upright bass—whose members took turns soloing on practically every number. The turban-headed trumpeter was the coleader, though oddly the least talented of the group, and his partner was the saxman, an aging, bottom-heavy Greek I had seen around town who took his scotch through a straw. The youngest man of the bunch was the guitarist, and also the musician with the most potential, but obviously a heavy user. When he wasn’t soloing he sat on a wooden stool with his chin on his chest, a crooked knit cap pushed over his brow, deep in his down world.

Billy and I sat through the rest of the band’s set without speaking. Cissy had given us two unsolicited Jim Beam Blacks (a very smooth bourbon that is in fact too smooth for my taste) and served them in juice glasses halfway full to the lip. The band ended its set with a pumped-up version of Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” The young bartender put some low-volume Jamaican dub on the house stereo. Billy, who was starting to look a little pickled, leaned my way.

“Let’s talk business,” he said.

“All right.” I pulled the deck of Camels from my overcoat and shook it in his direction. He started to reach for one but then waved it away. I slid one out, lit it, and took in a lungful.

Billy said, “I guess you’ve noticed the ring on my finger.”

I nodded and said, “So?”

“This is about that.”

“I don’t tail wives or husbands anymore. I should tell you that straight up. My bartending job keeps me off that sort of thing.”

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“What is it then?”

“My wife has left me, Nick.” Billy took the matches that rested on the top of my cigarettes and pulled one off the pack. He struck it, watched it flare, then blew it out. “She walked on her own accord. You’d call it desertion, I guess, if it was a man doing the walking.”

“Kids?”

“None. We tried for a couple of years, but it wasn’t in the cards.”

I had a sip of bourbon then followed it with a deep drag off my cigarette. When I exhaled I blew the smoke past his head and tried not to look into his eyes. “Like you said, Bill, this is business. I’m going to ask you some questions that are personal….”

“Go ahead.”

“This type of thing—and not to make it seem small—well, it happens every day. Hell, man, in a way it happened to me. So why hire a detective?”

“I’m worried about her,” he said. “It’s that simple. And since there’s no evidence of foul play, the cops won’t give it the time of day.”

“You’ve been to them?”

“Yeah, I reported it the first day. They came around, asked me a couple of questions, I never heard from them again.”

I had a last pull off my smoke and butted it. “What do you want me to do?”

“Find her, that’s it. You don’t even have to talk to her. Just report her location back to me, and I’ll do the talking. If she doesn’t want to come home, then at least I gave it a shot.” Billy looked at me briefly and then looked away.

“What else?” I said.

“Like?” He nodded me on with his chin.

“Did she leave you for someone else?” Instead of answering, Billy finished the bourbon in his glass, an answer in itself. I signaled Cissy for two more. “Do you know him?” I asked.

“Yeah, I know him. He was a man I did business with.” The waitress brought our Beams and two more beers. Billy and I lightly touched glasses, and I had a drink while he continued. “I met this guy as a client. I was showing him around town, some spots for a chain of carryouts he was thinking of opening. Anyway, I did him a couple of serious solids in terms of negotiating
leases, that sort of thing. He liked my style, and he put me on the payroll of his corporation in a retainer capacity.”

“You kept your job with the real estate company?”

“Yes.”

“Kind of a conflict of interest there, wasn’t it?”

“It depends on how you look at things, I suppose. I’ve learned some very creative ways of putting deals together, and I guess Mr. DiGeordano didn’t want me doing that for anyone else but him.”

“Joey DiGeordano?”

“That’s right.”

I whistled softly. “You got yourself pretty connected, didn’t you, Bill?”

“You’ve heard of him, then.”