If I Should Die Before I Die (8 page)

I looked to the Counselor, waiting for some rejoinder that would cut through Barger's smooth talk. But it didn't come. The more Barger went on, the more he simply sat there, impenetrable, pipe in hand.

It was as though he was thinking about something else.

Maybe he was.

Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted Barger's invitation. Barger made the call then and there, and we were set up for lunch at Margie Magister's.

Still more to my surprise, he went.

As soon as Barger was gone, the Counselor himself took off. No postmortem, no instructions. I heard Ms. Shapiro calling the garage for the car to be brought down. This in itself was not unusual: it was still September, their house in the Hamptons was still open. But normally they'd wait till late Friday night or Saturday morning to avoid the traffic.

When I got home myself, I found a message from the Counselor's Wife on the answering machine. She wanted to talk to me urgently. Carter McCloy had called. He'd asked for an appointment the next week. She'd given him one. But when I phoned back, all I got was her own machine, and by the time I left to go out, she still hadn't called back.

CHAPTER

5

“Come on, all you kids out there, all you boys and girls, all you mothahs of both sexes.… Let's shake a leg! Let's vacillate a limb! Let's GO-O-O-O-O-O-O …”

The speaker was a king-size black man with a Rastafarian hairdo and gold chains inside an unbuttoned yellow silk shirt. He hovered over his consoles in the smoky air on a platform raised above the dance floor, and when he straightened up to harangue the throng below him, his teeth flashed gold.

The beat of “Gimme Shelter” boomed over the giant sound system, drowning his voice, and multicolored globes in the rafters rotated slowly, sprinkling blobs of light over the five hundred couples, give or take a few, who began to gyrate underneath, as well as a huge billowing floor-to-ceiling Orson Welles, blown up from the movie poster of
Citizen Kane
. The place was Rosebud's, an abandoned movie palace on the Lower East Side that had been converted into a vast bar and disco. For the well-heeled presumably, because it cost you twenty bucks a couple to get into the joint, two bucks a head at the coat check, four bucks for a beer at the mirrored orchestra bars and seven-fifty for a watery Scotch and two small ice cubes. The dancing, upstairs in the converted balcony, was free. Bobby Derr had called it a
Rocky Horror Show
environment. To Laura Hugger and me, the decor was a combination of high-tech and Forties movies, with bright lights downstairs and a lot of smoked-glass mirrors and dark corners where they couldn't figure out what else to put in. Add some neighborhood winos and contemporary flower children, who were let in free, I figured, for local color, plus a troop of shirtless high-stepping gays, black and white, wearing bib overalls cut down to their hipbones, and you had the recipe for nightlife success. Or so it seemed, because people were lined up out in the street in a drizzling rain, waiting to get in, and by midnight you had the feeling that one more body on the dance floor and the whole joint would explode.

Earlier that day Laura Hugger and I had declared a truce, and we'd gotten together after work at one of our favorite Chinese eateries on the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, without telling her, I'd left a trail for Bobby Derr in case he needed me. But Bobby didn't call. Then we went home to Laura's place, and it was there—
in flagrante
, as they say—that Bobby found me. The whole gang, McCloy and Bobby included, were about to leave Melchiorre's for the Rosebud.

“How did he know to find you here?” Laura said when I hung up.

She listened in bed, the sheet now pulled up over her body, while I explained some of the situation to her. I censored out the Counselor's Wife. Laura was known to be sensitive on the subject. Even so, the more I explained, the more I got ready to duck. Instead, and to my surprise, she got up and went into the bathroom to get dressed, saying over her shoulder that Gee, wasn't it a good thing we'd gotten the sex out of the way early because she'd always wanted to party with a bunch of rich young hoods?

Ms. Hugger, in case I haven't mentioned it, has a pretty sharp tongue when it comes to priorities. Especially mine.

She's also a pretty flamboyant dresser. She came out in a black mini-skirt and hot pink top, with a gold choker tight around her neck and heels high enough to bring her almost up to my height.

I must have raised an eyebrow.

“If you're going to try to pass, Phil,” she said, “you'd better do it right.”

Anyway, that's how we found ourselves on the dance floor at the Rosebud, shaking and baking to “Gimme Shelter” while the oversized Rasta boogied behind his consoles up above and Carter McCloy, a few couples away, revolved in the general direction of his partner, like a statue turning slowly on a pedestal.

He was a tall kid with a shock of straight brown hair that fell over his eyes a lot and which he got rid of either by a toss of the head or a flick of the hand. He had on loafers without socks, jeans, a blue blazer over a tieless white shirt, and a white silk scarf draped around his neck. Laura Hugger said he looked like a college boy, a handsome one at that. A very handsome one. Ralph Lauren, Laura said. He also looked stoned to me. He'd downed four double Scotches while I watched him across one of the downstairs bars, plus whatever he'd had before, but there was something else besides booze, I thought. His pupils were like pinpricks with the light gone out of them, his complexion pale, his expression vague, almost vacant. He moved like an automaton, like his mind was a million miles off, or nowhere, and on the dance floor it was his partner who did the work.

The girl was a freckle-faced youngster, pretty in a chubby sort of way, with brown hair piled on top of her head and wearing one of those oversized rhinestone-studded sweatshirts with the fake labels on them over a pair of black stretchpants. She was also chewing gum. According to Bobby Derr, in a hurried conversation at the bar, she was a pickup at the Rosebud, not one of the original crowd.

Bobby had given me a quick who's who, names included. There were six of them. They looked to me, well, like the Yale football team a little gone to seed: beefy, square-faced types in their twenties, preppily dressed, and one little guy they called Shrimp. They had, it seemed, great senses of humor. At least they made a lot of noise. Their girls, the bridge-and-tunnel types Bobby had described, matched them drink for drink and laughed at their jokes and snuggled up for more.

Plus Bobby. I had to hand it to Bobby Derr, he fit right in, Yale or no Yale. And one of the girls, it looked like, was his.

The Rasta disc jockey spun us out of “Gimme Shelter” and into some Heavy Metal number, then, announcing another “oldie goldie goodie,” into “A Hard Day's Night.” The Beatles, for some reason, drove the young crowd wild. Midway through it, I saw McCloy's partner pull him by the arm and shout to him, then lead him off the floor. He followed, unsteady. So did we. Strangely, because he'd hardly danced, his face was glistening with sweat, and he mopped at it with the silk scarf. Then I lost sight of him in the crowd going up and down the staircase, to pick him up again, across the main orchestra bar, heading for the men's room.

I parked Laura Hugger at the bar and followed.

The Rosebud men's room was one of the few places I've ever been where you get high and sick both, just while taking a leak. The acrid smell of grass was fighting a war with the disinfectant, and the contact high was winning. All the urinals were occupied, and a group of young white studs was passing a roach from hand to hand, and I couldn't locate McCloy for a minute.

Then I did.

He was standing in one of the cubicles at the rear, the door half-open behind him. Head down, scarf dangling, hands holding onto the tops of the metal panels on either side. He was puking his guts out.

While I watched, he heaved and threw up some more. He didn't look like much of a murderer, right then.

I think I pushed the door open for a better look—maybe I heard somebody call out “Where's Cloy?”—but simultaneously something hit hard into me from behind and my head clunked the door jamb.

“What d'you think you're doing?” somebody shouted behind me.

Maybe I said the same. I spun around to somebody who grabbed my shirt front and pulled.

His face was red and boozy, hair blond. Powell by name, one of McCloy's buddies, surrounded by the rest of the Ivy League offensive line.

I shook loose, and they crowded me.

“What's this, some kind of fag?” one of them asked, the one called Halloran.

“Are you okay, Cloy?” called another.

“Hey, where's McCloy? Is he all right?”

“Let's teach this fag a lesson.”

Adrenaline time. I couldn't take them all, but the blond one was sure going down with me. Right, and there was already blood or something on the side of my head from the door post so what the hell, bring on your armies! I let one fly at the blond, or started to because somebody was grabbing me from behind then—who else but my old pal, Bobby Derr?—and then the blond unloaded a shot, a good one, that caught me somewhere south of the diaphragm and north of the navel and set lights to spinning in my head that had nothing to do with Rosebud lights. I skidded, my feet went out from under, and down I went on Rosebud tiles.

I covered up, because the blond had his leg back and his foot aimed.

“Hey, leave him alone, Booger,” I heard Bobby Derr call out. “It's party time, let's get the show on the road!”

“Where the hell's Cloy?” somebody else shouted.

“Here he is, Hal!” came the answer, and a cheer went up as McCloy was led from the cubicle.

“Come on, Carter, you're up!”

“Go get her, tiger!”

From what I could see, he looked better than he had before. They helped him while he splashed water on his face, and then they took him out, Bobby Derr leading the way, singing as they went: “A-trolling we will go, a-trolling we will go …”

I did my own repairs, more or less. Then I made my way back to the bar.

“Jesus Christ, Phil, what happened to you?” Laura Hugger said in the din. “You look
green
!”

“Never mind,” I said. “Where are they?”

“Who, McCloy, etcetera? I think I just saw them leave.”

“Come on, then, let's get going.”

But—small complication—she didn't want to go. The Rosebud hadn't been her idea, but now that we were there, she wanted to dance some more. I made her feel exploited, she said. Besides, why couldn't we have some fun for once in our lives without me being at the beck and call of the goddamn Counselor?

At first I thought she was kidding. She wasn't. Then I told her she could stay there alone if it was so much fun, and for a minute I thought she was going to take me up on it. But then we were outside, where it was still drizzling and the line of people waiting to get in was down to the corner, and when I spotted my group still down at the Bowery end of the block, shouting and waving in the middle of the street, I told Laura I'd have to put her in a taxi and send her home alone.

I guess it was a bad night for couples. Maybe up above the rain there was a full moon, or Neptune was in retrograde, or some damn thing. Laura Hugger told me she didn't need me to put her in a taxi. She didn't need me to do anything at all for that matter. That wasn't all she told me either, and she told it at the top of her lungs, her black hair frizzing in the damp air, and listeners in the Rosebud line sent up a cheer for her.

Then a taxi pulled up. Two young couples got out. Laura Hugger got in, slamming the door as I reached for it, and the taxi rolled off.

I headed for the Bowery corner. My group had succeeded in flagging down two taxis. Bobby Derr was organizing them, shoving bodies into the back seats in a noisy commotion, and by the time I got there, he himself had wedged into the second cab, pulling the door shut behind him, and off they went into the mist.

I watched their taillights for a second. I'd parked the Fiero a couple of blocks away. I didn't have a coat, hat, or umbrella, and my head was beginning to hurt and it was past midnight in the seediest part of town.

A bad night for couples, though, like I said.

About halfway up the next block, under a streetlight which doubled as a garbage dump, Carter McCloy was arguing with the girl he'd been dancing with at Rosebud's. The girl had a see-through plastic raincoat on over her sequined outfit, and her hair had come partly loose. McCloy had the white scarf wrapped around his neck, and he seemed to sway on his feet in the dim light.

I saw him reach for her, maybe push her. She slipped but didn't fall, and I could hear the crack when, righting herself, she slapped him in the face. He swung back, fist balled. No sound, but down she went, sitting hard on a black plastic garbage bag.

“Bastard!” I heard her shout after him. “Lousy cheap fag bastard!”

McCloy, though, seemed oblivious. He swayed up the wet deserted pavement in the other direction, diagonaling in toward the building line, then out toward the gutter. I started to trail him, but when I got as far as the girl, still sitting on the garbage bag, I stopped. People like to say the Bowery's a harmless neighborhood, but life among the local winos is still cheaper than a joint or a pint of Gallo Thunderbird, and it's no place for a Linda Smith to be alone, in the middle of the night.

At least Linda Smith was the name she gave me.

I learned too that she lived in Astoria. She said she was a theatrical makeup artist which, it turned out, meant she gave manicures in a hotel beauty parlor in the West Fifties. She said she was twenty-three.

It took me a while to get that far, though.

“Do you need any help?” I said when I got to her. “Are you okay?”

She was rocking a little on the garbage bag, rubbing her jaw, talking to herself or to nobody.