The Delta Star (22 page)

“Bourbon on the rocks. Double,” The Bad Czech said, wondering how long was considered polite in high-powered science institutes before you made a move on lady bartenders.

“Scotch on the rocks. Double,” Hans leered, not caring what was considered polite.

And Mario Villalobos thought, so much for worrying about other people’s bar tabs.

Lupe Luna gave him a shrug and said, “We believe in supporting our local police, as they say.”

“Okay,” Mario Villalobos said. “A very dry vodka martini on the rocks. Double.” And when he added, “Hold the vermouth. Hold the olive,” the woman behind the bar displayed a knowing bartender’s smile and gave him a very healthy shot of vodka over ice.

The Bad Czech said to Hans, “This might turn out to be pretty good duty after all.” And then he saw the dish full of Goldfish bar tidbits, and a huge plastic bag full of popcorn on a table.

“You give away free Goldfish and popcorn?” The Bad Czech asked the bartender.

“All you want,” she said.

“This here ain’t like Leery’s, eh, Mario?” The Bad Czech said. “You get somethin free!”

Lupe Luna, who was sitting at one of the wooden tables with the detective, said, “Where’s Leery’s?”

“That’s the, uh, owner of the restaurant where they work.”

“He calls you by your first name? Are you so intimate with all your witnesses?”

“I believe in being an approachable cop.” “Uh huh.”

“Speaking of intimate, when’re we going out again?”

“Have you told me the whole truth about this … jewel theft you’re working on?”

“Would I lie?” Mario Villalobos asked, swallowing the double vodka.

“That,”
she said, pointing to The Bad Czech, “is a busboy?”

“Do you think I could have just one more drink on your boss’s tab? We’d buy our own if this wasn’t a private club.”

“I’ll get it,” she said, and he knew that the lie might not fly.

“Tell her a vodka martini …”

“Very, very dry,” Lupe Luna nodded.

“She knows I’m full of crap, and still she buys us drinks. I think I’m in love!” Mario Villalobos mouthed the words to The Bad Czech, who just shrugged.

When Lupe Luna returned she brought him a double vodka and a whiskey sour for herself.

“I’m gonna get you drunk and take advantage of you,” she warned him playfully.

“You are?” Mario Villalobos cried. “Along with free drinks?”

“Yeah. Then I’m gonna find out what you’re really investigating. I’m getting excited. I love a mystery.” She looked at him over the rim of her whiskey sour with mischief in her eyes.

“I hate a mystery,” Mario Villalobos said. “It drives me bonkers. But I’m getting excited too. I love overbites.”

Meanwhile, The Bad Czech and Hans were no longer cranky at all about their detective assignment, and the bar started to get crowded. They were both working on their second double and The Bad Czech was threatening to break the pub record for eating Goldfish, previously held by the chairman of the division of chemistry.

In fact, The Bad Czech began giving a lecture to two “post-docs,” young women who were postdoctoral research fellows, one doing work in physics, the other in chemistry, after having received their doctoral degrees. The Bad Czech’s lecture to the two young women was on how to eat Goldfish.

“Some people eat a Goldfish by chewin off the tail first,” The Bad Czech said. He took the little fish-shaped cracker and held it in fingers as big as 50-milliliter test tubes. “It’s real interestin sittin at a bar and seein how people eat Goldfish,” The Bad Czech said. “There’s these tail biters. Some bite the tail edgewise and some do it flat. Then there’s these types that put the little fish between their teeth and kind a split it down the middle. Then a course, there’s people that jist gobble them up and all the crumbs jist floop outa their mouths. I ain’t much interested in mectin people like that. I see you two’re tail biters. I like tail biters. I wish I could buy ya a drink, but we’re jist guests here.”

“That was a very enlightening talk on Goldfish,” Hans said, and his whiny voice and smart-aleck tone made The Bad Czech mad.

Then the skinny K-9 cop whispered to his postdoc, “Your
girlfriend’s
looking at the big dummy like he’s a booger on her finger. The girl’s got taste.”

Both postdocs wore Levi jeans. One wore a red T-shirt and moccasins. The Bad Czech liked her big chest, and he also eyed the other one, who wore a baggy work shirt and deck shoes. In general, they dressed not unlike off-duty male cops.

“Who’re you guests of?” the postdoc in the T-shirt asked.

“That woman over there with the guy in the suit,” The Bad Czech said. “Luna’s her name.”

“What do you do?” the other postdoc asked Hans, who was slinking closer along the bar as was his custom.

“I’m a waiter,” Hans said. “He’s a …”

“We’re both waiters!” The Bad Czech said, glaring at Hans. “We work in a real nice joint over on Restaurant Row. Ever eat over there?”

“Can’t afford it,” the postdoc in the T-shirt said. “Starving young scientists trying to make our place in the world. Next year we’ll get real grown-up jobs doing science and maybe we can eat in a restaurant.”

Just then a clutch of noisy graduate students came banging down the stairs and into the bar. They wore cutoffs and jeans and grubbies of all kinds. They didn’t look any smarter than college kids the cops had occasionally jailed when they drove drunk through Rampart Division on their way to USC or UCLA. The difference was that all these were smart or they couldn’t be here. One kid with a beard full of lint said to another, “Physics is like fucking. Mathematics is like masturbation.”

The Bad Czech didn’t get it, but at least it had to do with sex. The two unglamorous postdocs were starting to look better. “Another double,” he said to the bartender, who was now having to move fast to keep up with the noisy crowd of drinkers.

The postdoc with the baggy shirt, who was getting more appealing to Hans, said to the other, “Have you heard the one about the theoretical physicist who drowned in a lake he theorized had an average depth of six inches?”

Both young women laughed like hell, and The Bad Czech, who didn’t get that one either, said, “Maybe if ya bite the Goldfish vertical it means you’re Caucasian, and sideways you’re Oriental.”

“Whadda you do?” Hans asked the postdoc in the baggy shirt. He was leaning on his elbow now and sidling ever closer, as The Bad Czech had seen him do many times before. He was the sneaky type that bellied along a bar, much as a police dog bellies close to the ground before attacking.

“Right now, colloidal interface chemistry,” she said.

“Wow! That sounds erotic to me!” Hans cried.

“I wish that little pervert’d get back to his side a the bar,” The Bad Czech whispered to his postdoc. “Tell ya the truth, he ain’t even a waiter. He’s my busboy.”

Just then a man entered the barroom. He was older than the graduate students and postdocs. He was obviously a member of the faculty. The Bad Czech signaled to Hans to turn around on his stool and take a look. The man was neither fiftyish nor tall enough to be the one they saw outside of Dagmar Duffy’s apartment house. He was a visiting research fellow, it turned out, and had just spiced up his lecture in bio-inorganic chemistry with a theory as to how vampires came to be.

One of the students who was drinking beer and twirling a Frisbee on his finger said to the professor, “Could you tell my friends here your theory on vampires?”

Which caused The Bad Czech to stop ogling the postdoc and come up off the bar and turn around and pay attention. They were talking about vampires! And he was one!

“It’s quite credible, really,” the professor said with a British public school accent. “It deals with the disease of porphyria, which is a genetic disease, so it could be regional, say around Transylvania, and …”

The professor was interrupted by one of the most enormous men he’d seen lately, with eyebrows like fingers of fur, who was sitting at the bar looking tense. “How do ya spell that disease?” the huge man asked.

“Uh, that’s p-o-r-p-h-y-r-i-a,” the professor said. “And to continue, my theory is that it’s the making of too much porphyrin, which with iron in it makes blood red, that gave them their problem. Drinking blood slows porphyrin production, so they would attack cows and drink their blood.”

The Bad Czech suddenly relaxed. “Drinkin cows’ blood ain’t got nothin to do with me” he said to the postdoc, who looked puzzled.

“Now it happens that garlic can block an enzyme that gets rid of porphyrin,” the professor continued, “so that plays right into the legend of garlic warding off vampires.”

“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s cow,” Hans giggled to his postdoc, who was ignoring him completely.

“As it happens, quinine also blocks the enzyme,” the professor continued, “so …”

“That means ya can’t give a vampire a gin and tonic
!
” The Bad Czech said, and for the first time his postdoc paid attention to him. He was right!

“Next time I accept a blind date I’ll give him a gin and tonic test,” she said, examining The Bad Czech, who with his black hair, furry eyebrows and Slavic features did look something like an archetypal Dracula-a very large one, to be sure.

“I could tell a real vampire story,” The Bad Czech whispered, “if I get to know ya better. I can see ya like vampires.”

Two male students who were going bonzo over the approaching deadline for submitting a doctoral thesis were arguing about whether or not one of their colleagues had jumped or fallen out of a window while loaded on nitrous oxide. Apparently science prodigies also had their stress problems.

The Bad Czech, who was working on his fourth double and charging into all the conversations, said, “He jumped, ya ask me. Everybody’s jumpin these days or slashin their own throats or smokin their thirty-eights. Or killin their kids or …”

“The restaurant business can’t be that bad,” one postdoc said to him.

“
So what’s that these guys’re talking about, this reaction dynamics?” Hans demanded boozily from his postdoc, who couldn’t get away from the K-9 cop and had already noticed that he smelled like an animal.

“How molecules bump into each other,” she said.

“Everything ya say sounds erotic to me!” Hans cried. “Write down your phone number, will ya?”

“I don’t think so,” the postdoc said, rolling her eyes at her colleague.

“Well, write down your area code,” Hans begged, getting hotter by the minute.

“Not tonight,” she replied, whispering, “Nerd alert!” to her
girlfriend
.

“Well, then write me down a formula,” Hans cried. “I’m crazy for smart girls!”

“Ya know what I like about gettin ripped in this place?” The Bad Czech said to the lady bartender, who was pouring his fifth double. “Everybody here’s smarter than me. Where I usually drink, I’m smarter than everybody else and it makes me feel guilty cause I should know better than get drunk with all the dummies.”

“Smarter, huh!” Hans whispered to his postdoc. “He’s as smart as a box a rocks. He ain’t even a waiter. Busboy is what he is. Been one for twenty years. Oldest freaking busboy on Restaurant Row.” He waved at the bartender and said, “Can I have a refill, lovely lady?”

Just then another professor entered the barroom. He was rather tall and had dark hair and was at least fifty years old. He didn’t wear glasses and didn’t have a moustache, but The Bad Czech got excited for a minute. He nodded to Hans, who craned his noodle neck and shrugged.

When the man came to the bar to order a gin martini, The Bad Czech was already getting numb around the nose and chin.

He also was having some trouble keeping his elbow on the bar.

He wanted to hear the man’s voice. He said, “I like to drink down here better than the fancy lounge upstairs. How ‘bout you?”

The man looked at the boozy giant and smiled congenially, and didn’t respond.

“
They tell me the lounge up there, whadda they call it, the hymen lounge …”

“The Hayman Lounge,” the bartender corrected him.

“Yeah, the Hayman Lounge, is where most a the people drink who donate big bucks.”

The man stood at the bar sipping his martini and looked at his watch.

“It’s a pretty bar up there,” The Bad Czech said, “but I like the people down here, don’t you?”

“Un huh,” the man said.

“Do you bite the tails off Goldfish or eat them all at once?” The Bad Czech wanted to know.

“Are you connected with Caltech?” the man asked.

“Naw, I own a restaurant,” The Bad Czech said. “In fact, I own about six a them. Might give a few bucks to the college if I like it around here.”

When the man smiled and walked away, The Bad Czech shook his head in the negative and Hans went back to making a move on one of the postdocs.

There wasn’t much to deaden the sound in the concrete basement and the din was nerve-racking to Mario Villalobos, who was learning all about Lupe Luna’s own failed marriage, and her life with a teenaged daughter, and her work at Caltech. He did everything he could to keep her talking so she wouldn’t ask him too many questions. He was afraid if she knew the true nature of his investigation she might feel honor bound to report it, which he was positive would be the end.