Mourn The Living (12 page)

Nolan nodded and drew on the cigarette. He looked out the car window and stared blankly at the river. He watched the water reflect the street lights that ringed the entire area. The suggestion of a smile traced his lips.

“What are you thinking, Earl?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on . . . don’t tell me you couldn’t use a friend. You’re not that different from everybody else. Spill some emotion.”

Nolan shifted his eyes from the river to the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Emotion is usually a messy thing to spill.”

She edged closer, putting a warm hand against his cheek. “I’m lonely, too, Nolan.”

His jaw tightened. “It’s Webb.”

She shook her head, turned away. “Okay, okay. Be an asshole.”

He opened the car door and she slid out his side. He paused for a moment and looked out at the river again. It had reminded him of a private place of his, a cabin he maintained along a lake in Wisconsin, near a resort town. It was one of several places he kept up under the Earl Webb name, for the times between, the times of retreat from the game he played with the Boys. Even Nolan had need for moments of solitude, peace. He hadn’t meant to hurt Vicki Trask, but he didn’t know her well enough yet to share any secrets.

They walked along the riverfront, casually making their way toward the building a block away. They walked where the river water brushed up easily against the cement, lapping whitely at their feet. In spite of himself, Nolan found his hand squeezing hers and he smiled; she was lighting up warmly in response when Tulip stepped out from between two parked cars.

A scream caught in Vicki’s throat as she watched the apeish figure rise up and raise his arm to strike Nolan with the butt of a revolver.

Nolan dropped to the cement, the gun butt swishing by, cutting the air, and shot a foot into Tulip’s stomach. Tulip bounced backward and smashed against a red Chrysler, then slid to the pavement and lay still. Nolan picked the gun from Tulip’s fingers and hefted it—a .38 Smith & Wesson. Tulip made a move to get up and Nolan kicked him in the head. Tulip leaned back against the Chrysler and closed his eyes.

Nolan shook his head, said, “When they’re that stupid, they just don’t learn,” and tossed the gun out into the river.

They walked on toward the Eye, Nolan behaving as if nothing had happened. When they were half a block away
from the entrance, she managed to breathlessly say, “Did . . .
did you kill him?”

“Tulip?”

“Is that his name? Tulip?”

“Yes, that’s his name, and no, I didn’t kill him. I don’t think.”

She looked at him in fear and confusion and perhaps admiration and followed him toward the Eye.

There was a medium-sized neon sign over the door. It bore no lettering, just an abstract neon face with an extra eye in the center of its forehead. From the look of the brick, Nolan judged the building wasn’t over a year old. The kids milling about the entrance were ill-kempt, long-haired and smoked with an enthusiasm that would have curdled the blood of the American Cancer Society. Nolan saw no open use of marijuana, but he couldn’t rule it out—most all the kids were acting somewhat out of touch with reality.

Inside the door they pushed through a narrow hallway that was crowded with young girls, most of them thirteen-year-olds with thirty-year-old faces. One, who could have been twelve, extended her non-existent breasts to Nolan in offering, giving him a smirky pouty come-on look. Nolan gave her a gentle nudge and moved past with Vicki through the corridor.

At the end of the hall they came to a card table where a guy sat taking money. He looked like an ex-pug, was around thirty-five and had needed a shave two days before. Nolan looked at him carefully and paid the two-fifty per couple admission. Nolan smiled at the ex-pug, a phony smile Vicki hadn’t seen him use before, and moved on. Nolan followed Vicki as she went by a set of closed, windowless double doors, then trailed her down a flight of steps.

“Where the doors lead?”

“To the dance floor and Beer Garden.”

“Oh.”

She led him through two swinging doors into a shoddy room, cluttered with a dozen wooden tables.

“This it?” Nolan asked.

“Don’t let it fool you,” she told him, leading him to a small table by the wall, “the food’s not bad at all.”

Nolan looked around. The room was poorly lit and the walls concrete, painted black. The naked black concrete was partially dressed by pop-art paintings, Warhol and Lichtenstein prints and a few framed glossies, autographed, of big-time rock groups like the Jefferson Airplane and Vanilla Fudge. The tables were plain wood, black-painted and without cloths, and each was lit with a thick white candle stuck down into a central hole. The far end of the room, the bar, was better lighted, and the doors into the kitchen on either side of it let out some light once in a while. Other than that the room was a black sea of glowing red cigarette tips.

Nolan lit a fresh cigarette for both of them and they joined the sea of floating red spots.

“You notice the guy taking money as we came in upstairs?”

She nodded. “The one who looked like a prize-fighter?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about him?”

“I used to know him.”

“What? When did you know him?”

“A few years back. In Chicago.” He looked at her meaningfully.

“You mean you knew him when you worked for . . . ah . . . ”

“Yeah.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“Hell no,” Nolan said. “He doesn’t recognize himself in a mirror. Punchy. Surprises the hell out of me he makes change.”

“What’s he doing here?”

Nolan stared out into the darkness and said, “You tell me.”

“How?”

“Start with the man who runs this place.”

“The manager, you mean?”

“Not the manager. The owner.”

“As a matter of fact . . . I
have
heard the owner’s name. I’ve heard Broome mention it. It’s Francis, or something like that.”

“Franco?”

“Yes, I think that’s it.”

Nolan withheld a smile. “Fat George.”

“I believe his first name is George, at that.”

A waitress came to the table, put down paper placemats and gave them water and silverware. She handed them menus and rolled back the paper on her order blank.

Vicki asked for a steak sandwich, dinner salad and coffee, and Nolan followed suit. They ordered drinks for their wait, Vicki a Tom Collins, Nolan bourbon and water.

Nolan sat, deep in thought, not noticing the silence maintained between them until the drinks arrived five minutes later.

Vicki cupped her drink, looking down into it, and said, “Do you want me to talk about Irene now?”

“That’d be fine.”

“Well . . . she was wild, Earl, not real bad or anything, but a little wild . . . I guess you could blame that on her father.”

“He isn’t what I’d call wild.”

“But . . . isn’t he . . . a gangster?”

“The deadliest weapon Sid Tisor ever held was a pencil.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, Irene and I used to be quite close. You have to be, to live together, share an apartment and all. Both of us were artistic, using that same balcony studio in the apartment. Some of those paintings on the apartment walls are hers. Once in a while she wouldn’t show up at night, she’d sleep over with some guy or other—no special one, there were several—but that was no big deal, I’m no virgin either. It was just this year that it started getting kind of bad. Not with guys or anything. It was when she started getting in tight with some of these would-be hippies. I went along with a lot of it, because some of these people are witty and pretty articulate. Fun to be with. For example, they meet upstairs here during the day, and put articles and cartoons and stuff together and put out a weekly underground-style newspaper, called the
Third Eye
.”

“What you’re trying to say is they’re not idiots.”

“Right. I’m friendly with some of them. If you leaf through some back copies of the
Eye
you’ll see some of my artwork. But not all of these Chelsey hippies are well, benign. Some of them are hangers-on, bums, drop-outs, acid-heads. Like this Broome creep who runs the band here. Irene fell in with characters like Broome this last month or so, and I saw less and less of her . . . she was experimenting that final week or so, with pills mostly. And she kept saying, threatening kind of, that she was going to try an LSD trip.”

“And?”

“She did, I guess.”

“You think it was suicide?”

“Her death? I think it was an accident.”

“Oh.”

“You sound almost disappointed, Earl.”

“To tell you the truth, Vicki, I don’t give a damn one way or another. I’m just doing Sid Tisor a favor.”

She looked at him, shocked for a moment. “But you knew her, didn’t you? Don’t you care what happened to her?”

He shrugged. “She’s dead. It begins and ends there. Nothing brings her back, it’s all a waste of time.”

She squinted at him, obviously straining to figure him out. “You came to this stinking little town to risk your life when you think it’s a waste of time?”

Nolan drew on the cigarette. “You don’t understand. It’s a debt I’m paying. Also, there’s a chance for me to make some money off the local hoods. But I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Sid Tisor. He cares, and that’s what counts.”

“Because you owe him.”

“Because I owe him.”

Their meals were brought to them and they ate casually, speaking very little. She watched him, beginning to understand him better.

He paid the check and they went upstairs.

3

THE LARGE
gymnasium-sized room was filled with cigarette smoke, unpleasant odors and grubbily dressed kids. Nolan stood with Vicki at the entrance and looked around, over the bobbing heads.

The black concrete walls were covered with psychedelic designs, vari-colored, abstract, formless but somehow sensual, done in fluorescent paints. The lighting consisted of rows of tubular black-light hanging from the ceiling; a strobe the size of a garbage can lid was suspended from the ceiling’s center, but it was turned off at the moment. At one end of the room, to the left of the double doors, was a shabby-looking bar with an over-head sign that read “Beer Garden.” It was open for business but serving soft drinks only. The other end of the room was engulfed by a huge, high-ceilinged stage piled with rock group equipment.

“Let’s take a look,” Nolan said.

Vicki nodded agreement and pushed through the crowd with Nolan till they reached the foot of the stage.

On stage were three massive amplifiers that looked to Nolan like black refrigerators. A double set of drums was perched on a tall platform, and various guitars were lying about as if discarded. An organ, red and black with chrome legs, faced out to the audience showing its reverse color black and white keyboard. Boom stands extended microphones over the organ and drums, and upright stands held three other mikes for the guitarists and lead singer. The voice amplification was evidently hooked up to two large horns the size of those found in football stadiums.