Wall of Glass (12 page)

As big as a barn—it had been one, twenty years ago—the room was dominated by the long wide wooden dance floor, empty now. The bandstand, also empty, sat at the far end, opposite the bar. Running along the sides of the building was a raised wooden platform that held small round tables and straight-backed wooden chairs. Most of these were unoccupied, but scattered in the dimness were four or five couples, each pair huddled over drinks, sharing privacy the way couples tend to do in a nearly empty lounge.

No couples huddled at the bar. Three construction workers sipped Coors; a pair of heavy-set Indians did the same; three young Hispanics in white shirts drank highballs; a couple of old men with lined red faces who could have been farmers sat behind shots of what could have been bourbon. My nearest neighbor, two stools down, was a small skinny guy about forty years old with a narrow ferret's face, wearing denim pants and jacket and a green Caterpillar Tractor cap. Leaning forward, bootheels notched against the stool strut, he had both hands wrapped around his glass of draft beer as though he were afraid someone might try to snatch it away.

And, later on tonight, when things got lively, someone might. The Lone Star was the place you went when you wanted to hear honky-tonk and kick a little ass. The management had kept the place simple and unadorned—“thoroughly unpretentious,” as Rita liked to put it, smiling—because anything elaborate in the way of furnishings was liable to get stomped on or, during especially festive occasions, shot at.

“Been a while, Josh,” someone said, and I turned back to the bar to see Phil standing behind it. He was Irish, in his forties, balding and red-bearded, barrel-chested and slowly, over the years, becoming barrel-bellied. With his beefy freckled forearms, his white shirt and apron, he would've looked more at home at P.J. Clarke's in New York, or maybe McSorley's, than he did here, in a cowboy bar in a cowboy state.

He held out his hand. “How's it going?”

We shook, and I said that everything was dandy. He asked if I was still drinking Jack Daniel's and I told him I was. He poured it for me and I asked him if he'd heard about Frank Biddle.

Phil's face didn't change—he'd been a bartender too long for that—but he scratched for a moment at his beard. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard he got wasted.”

“Four thirty-eight slugs.”

Phil nodded. “Slow you down some.”

“He used to hang out here,” I said.

He shrugged. “Once in a while. Wasn't what you'd call a regular.”

“When he did hang out here, who did he hang out with?”

He shrugged again. “No one in particular. Why?” Phil owed me a favor, and he wanted to know whether he was paying it back.

“I'm trying to get a line on him.”

“Business?”

I nodded.

He shook his head. “He was a loner, mostly. Everybody knew him to say hello to, and he was friendly enough, but mostly he kept to himself. Sometimes he brought in the girl he lived with.”

“Carla Chavez.”

“Yeah. Sexy little thing.”

“Did he ever bring in any other women?”

Phil smiled. “I don't think Carla woulda gone for that. Probably put a knife between his ribs if she heard he was doing someone else.”

“Would Carla have to know?”

He shrugged. “A lot of the women come in here, they know Carla. They'd tell her if Frankie showed up with someone else.”

“But he could've had something on the side and never brought her in here.”

“Wouldn't surprise me. Frankie was the type. You could tell from the way he looked at them.”

“How do you mean?”

Bartenders are like interns; they like explaining their observations. “Some guys,” said Phil, “married guys, they look at women like little kids at a candy store, you know? Wanting something they know they can't have, and a little sneaky just for wanting it. But Frankie looked at them like he coulda had them anytime he wanted, only now wasn't the time. Not here, where it might get back to Carla.”

“So he never moved in on any of them.”

He shook his head. “Not here.”

“Was he selling coke, Phil?”

Phil's face once again took on its bartender blankness. “Not here, he wasn't.”

“But somewhere else?”

He held up his hands, palms out, and raised his eyebrows: I don't know, don't ask me. “I know for a fact he wasn't moving anything through here.”

“How do you know?”

And then, from down the bar, someone called out Phil's name. He turned. “Yeah?”

It was one of the construction workers, short, squat, his long blond hair kept in place with a headband. “Phil,” he called, “what time you get off tonight?”

“Two,” Phil called back.

“Any chance of getting another beer before then?”

Laughter down the bar. Phil grinned, turned to me. “Back in a minute.”

I sipped at my Jack Daniel's. The ferret-faced man to my right sipped at his draft. When Phil had covered the rest of the bar, he returned. Leaning toward me, hands clasped, forearms against the bar, he said, “Look, even if he
was
dealing—dealing somewhere else, I mean—he wasn't dealing in quantity. A gram here and there, maybe an eightball or two. Small change. Frankie was a small-change guy.”

I nodded. “You ever see Frank with Carla's brother?”

He frowned, shook his head. “You're really stuck on the coke thing.”

“And it looks like you're really stuck on protecting ol' Frankie's reputation.”

“I liked him. He never gave me any hassle, never bitched and moaned about how crummy life was. He was cocky, maybe, he never took shit off anybody, but he never went looking for it either.” He shrugged. “I liked him. He was all right.”

Another epitaph. “Phil,” I said, “for all I know, he was a prince. I'm just asking if you ever saw him with Benito Chavez.”

“All right, yeah. So once, twice maybe, they were here together. But I'm telling you that no coke deals went down in this bar.”

“You talked to Biddle about it. You told him no dealing here.”

He shrugged again, his face empty.

Code of the West.

“Okay, Phil,” I said, “Fine. If you believed him, that's good enough for me. What about Frank and Stacey Killebrew?”

“They used to hang around together, last year, before Frankie took off for Texas. But something happened, and after Frankie came back they weren't talking to each other. It was like Frankie got pissed at him for something.”

“You don't know what.”

“No.”

“What do you know about Killebrew?”

“Enough not to want to know anything at all.”

“He hangs out here.”

Phil glanced quickly around the bar, then nodded. “Now and then.” He leaned closer. “Listen, Josh, I don't think you want to have anything to do with Stacey Killebrew.”

“Everybody keeps telling me that.”

“No offense, babe, but he's out of your league. The guy is crazy. He
likes
to hurt people.”

“Do you know what he does for a living?”

“Officially, he owns a piece of a garage over on St. Francis.”

“And unofficially?”

“Who knows?” He shrugged. “Like I say, I hear things.”

“What things?”

Another shrug. New Yorkers shrug almost as much as Frenchmen. “That he's working something not totally kosher. I don't know what it is, but it must bring in a fair amount of cash, because he throws the stuff around like it was monopoly money. Last week he gave the band a hundred bucks for playing what he wanted to hear.”

“What was that?”

“Silence.”

I smiled. “He's got better taste than I would've thought.”

Phil smiled back. “You've heard the band too, huh?”

“Who does Killebrew hang out with when he comes here?”

“Guy named Lucero, usually. John Lucero. An Indian. He's supposed to be an artist, but I never saw him paint anything so you couldn't prove it by me.”

“Is Lucero here now?”

He shook his head. “Doesn't come in till later.” He looked at his watch. “Around eight. Another twenty minutes, half an hour.”

I asked him for a description of Lucero, and he gave it: in his thirties, tall, slender, wispy black mustache, long black hair usually worn in a braid. It was a description that would've fit half the Indians in Santa Fe.

And then I asked him if he thought Killebrew could've killed Biddle.

“I dunno,” he said. He shrugged again. “It's possible. Killebrew could shotgun his mother and then go out for pizza.”

“Okay, Phil,” I said. “Thanks. If you hear anything about Biddle, let me know.”

“Will do.”

He went off to attend to the rest of the bar, and I sat there, sipping my Jack Daniel's and wondering what had caused the rift between Biddle and Killebrew. Had it something to do with the burglary at the Leightons'?

Rita would've said that I didn't have enough information to form suppositions, but I sat there forming them anyway. Suppose that Sergeant Nolan was right, and Killebrew and Biddle had planned the robbery together. Suppose that Biddle had taken off to Amarillo to give himself an alibi. Suppose that when he returned, Killebrew refused to split the take with him.

But what take? The necklace hadn't been fenced, not if it was still around last week. There had been no take to split.

Out of the corner of my eye, barely noticing it, I saw the ferret-faced man to my right swing himself off the stool and walk away.

A few moments later, I felt the tap on my shoulder.

A
LONG TIME AGO
in a magazine—
Esquire
, I think it was—I saw a life-sized photograph of Mohammed Ali's fist. My own fist is hardly tiny, but when I held it up against the picture, it looked like a child's. The fist that came rushing at me that night in the Lone Star, delivered in a fast, effortless right jab up from Killebrew's belt, looked as big as Ali's.

Reflexes took over and snapped my head to the side, but even so, the fist smashed along the side of my skull, scraping away at my left ear.

I spun around, going with the momentum of the punch and swinging away from the bar. As I turned to face him again, Killebrew moved in with a roundhouse left. I caught it on my right shoulder and drove my own left, all my weight behind it, into his middle, just below the rib cage.

I doubt that it hurt him, but it must've surprised him because he backed away, fists coming up.

His smile didn't change at all.

The left side of my face, my cheek, my ear, had gone numb. Adrenaline had over-ridden the pain circuits and sharpened all the others. My vision was working with abnormal clarity; everything in the room had an outline sharp enough to slice fingertips. I was aware of the smells of cigarette smoke and beer, of the sounds of the crowd around us, the men jostling each other for position and hooting us on.

Someone shouted, “
Fair fight, leave 'em alone!
” and I knew without looking that it was Killebrew's ferret-faced friend.

Both big fists making small tight circles in the air, left fist above and slightly forward of the right, Killebrew danced toward me.

He was very good. His grin never wavered and his eyes never left mine, never signalled his intent. He feinted a left jab, his heavy torso weaving, then shot a straight right at my heart. I backpedalled away, but he came with me, moving more lightly and swiftly than I thought possible. Another feint, this time with the right, and then a wide left. I stopped it with my right forearm, felt the arm lose all sensation, and moved inside and jabbed twice at his face as hard and as fast as I could. It was less painful than hitting a cinderblock, but not much.

When I moved quickly away, I saw that I'd drawn blood. A red trickle of it, bright as paint, ran from his nose down over his lips.

Killebrew wiped at his chin, glanced down at the shiny scarlet smear on his palm, then showed me his yellow teeth in another grin. He said, “You're dead, boy.”

There was something unreal, theatrical, about the whole scene. Bar brawls don't work this way, not in real life. In real life, people slam at each other with beer mugs, plates, anything available—ketchup bottles are good, because they're heavy and because when they do break, the guy you've hit thinks he's bleeding to death.

In real life people don't put up their dukes and dance around the room the way movie cowboys do, the way Killebrew and I were doing. I didn't know, at the time, what either one of us was trying to prove. Since then, of course, Rita has explained it all to me, several times.

I still couldn't quite believe, even as I saw it, how quickly the man could move. He sailed into me now, fists pumping like pistons in a Maserati, pounding at my upper body, my head, my chest, my belly. Most of this I blocked or slipped away from, but my arms had begun to feel as though they were made out of sandbags, and I couldn't send him anything back. And, heavy shoulders hunched, teeth bared in his mulish grin, he kept coming at me.

Finally he hit me with a gut shot, a good one, a left, and, paralyzed with the shock of it, my guard went down. I can remember thinking,
Shit, this is it
, and it was, because his huge right fist came roaring in like a bullet train and crashed square against my cheek. And then the room did an extraordinarily clever trick and flipped over on its axis, dumping me flat on my back.

Lying there, staring at the ceiling, I knew that I had to get up, knew that if I didn't, Killebrew would finish me off with his boots, kick me or stomp me into a pudding.

But my body, unaccountably, didn't seem to share my brain's anxiety. It liked staring at the ceiling. As ceilings went, it felt, this one was awfully nice.

NINE