Vermilion (2 page)

Billy dodged the slow-moving traffic and ducked into the shadow of a burned-out building that, despite the cold, still stank of charred wood and water. He pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it quickly through his hair. Then he wiped his face on his nylon sleeve. After retrieving the ten-dollar bill from his shoe, Billy unzipped his jacket and walked slowly to the entrance of Nexus. He had prepared an arrogant smile for the men gathered there, but they had moved off down the street in a laughing group. The smile fell, and Billy blinked the snow from his eyes.

Billy edged through the dark vestibule. The coatroom was not yet opened—the crowd could not be as great as he had hoped.

He stepped cautiously onto the carpeted ramp that spiraled easily down into the large main area of the bar. Involuntarily, Billy paused. The sudden blast of heat, the blaring music from the enormous speakers on either side of him, the pricks of blinding white and silver light off the revolving glitter ball were too great a contrast to cold, silent, dark Marlborough Street. He leaned against a wall until he had adjusted to the changes.

After a time, Billy made his way down the ramp. Below, two bars flanked a darkened stage, used for drag shows and live bands on the weekends. Billy stood at the smaller bar with one sneaker on the brass foot rail. He looked about before ordering.

There were no more than twenty-five patrons in Nexus, most at the other end of the room. He wouldn't be able to make out their faces until the glitter ball was darkened, and the dim red wall lights were brought back on. Billy assured himself that the crowd would have doubled within the half hour.

The bartender, a balding round-faced paunchy man of middle age, wearing a white shirt with a butterfly collar and wide yellow suspenders, was talking casually with two customers at the opposite end of the bar. Billy raised a finger to attract his attention but the bartender didn't see him. Billy looked closely at the customers—a man and a woman. The man was black; he wore a tailored purple suit and a black tie over a ruffled pink shirt. On the collar of the suit jacket was a large diamond stickpin that matched his cuff links, all in heavy gold. The woman wore insubstantial sandals, a pair of unfaded jeans cut off appreciably above the line of her thighs, and a brief white blouse with large red polka dots scattershot over it. Her heavy white-blond hair flared above her ears into long thick ponytails. She was a hooker who, in warmer weather, stationed herself in a particular doorway on the next street over. Billy had never seen her when she was not dressed as Daisy Mae Yokum.

She and her companion laughed at something the bartender said and then slipped off their stools as a disco version of “Ave Maria” rode over the end of the last song. Red, green, and gold lights flashed in time with the music. The couple paused directly beneath the now darkened glitter ball, listened a moment, and on cue erupted into dance. The man moved his feet very little, possibly because of the stricture of his sharply pointed tiny boots, but the woman was all elbows, ankles, and breasts flailing in the heated colorful air. They were the only couple on the floor.

Billy squinted at the dozen tables lining the opposite wall. He made out the shadowy figures of two other hustlers, sprawled in the darkness, also waiting for the crowd. He tightened his stance in the sudden heat of competition.

“What'll it be?” said the bartender, just at Billy's shoulder.

“Miller.”

The bartender flipped open a cooler, extracted a bottle and twisted off the lid before sliding it across the bar. Billy held out the ten.

“On the house. Happy New Year,” the man said and winked without smiling.

Billy nodded thanks and stuffed the bill back into his pocket. He felt better for having saved the dollar. He could nurse this beer until a man entered who would buy him others; who would want to spend thirty or even forty dollars more after the bar had closed. Billy moved around the corner of the bar to a stool in the shadows. He laid his jacket across the seat, and then swung onto the stool in the approved fashion of hustlers.

By midnight, only about fifty persons had showed up, but the small crowd was lively. The dance floor was never empty, and the single waiter never enjoyed the opportunity to sit with his friends. Billy remained in the shadows. He leaned against the bar, elbows up, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, legs cast wide apart. He searched every face that passed near him, discounting the regular patrons, the hookers between tricks or just out of the cold, and the four drag queens. That still left more than a dozen older men for him to work on. From long practice Billy could recognize hunger and desperation in a man's eyes from ten paces away in dim red light; he also knew how to disguise the same in himself—with lowered lids and a seductive, apparently unconscious half-smile.

Billy lit another cigarette. He had nursed his beer one hour by the clock. He guzzled the last of the warm liquid, and set the bottle disconsolately on the bar. Another Miller's took its place immediately.

Billy looked around at the bartender.

“Your timing's good tonight,” said the man dryly.

“Who bought it?” demanded Billy.

The bartender shrugged. “An admirer. Anonymous—at least for right now.”

Billy drank this second beer much more quickly, and stared about trying to guess which man had sent it over. After a bit, he gave this over as not worth his trouble—it was unlikely the man would go away unintroduced.

Three free beers later Billy was weary and woozy. It was past one; the bar would close in less than an hour. Before then he must secure a bed for the night and money for the following day.

Billy looked around. The crowd was not larger, but was differently composed. Daisy Mae had left and returned with an undistinguished overweight man about fifty. He was now purchasing at least a third set of hard drinks. Daisy Mae sipped hers, and abandoned it half finished, while encouraging her companion to gulp his down. She coyly brushed her breasts against his chest while whispering—licking—in his ear. The man's eyes were bright and distracted. He dragged Daisy Mae onto the dance floor and, ignoring the disco beat, held her in a slow embrace. She accommodated him, bending slightly forward and jutting her Parker House posterior far behind her. When her partner lurched drunkenly, Daisy Mae fell roughly against a drag queen who was impersonating a TWA stewardess. The stewardess turned heatedly on the comic-book hooker. Those around them left off dancing and grinned expectantly, calling for a fight.

Billy wanted to move closer for a better view, but found he was now too drunk to stand easily. He leaned back and yawned, for the first time in the evening indifferent to how he ended up.

“I don't know if I should buy you another drink.”

Billy looked to his side. His unfocused vision smeared white hair and a round pink-cheeked face across his brain. He turned back to the fight.

The man signaled the bartender and received another beer. He handed it to Billy.

“Drink up and we'll go.”

Billy took the sweating bottle and looked slowly up at the older man. Billy stared at his face and found it more unhandsome than he was accustomed to. The man wore a heavy overcoat over a dark brown double-knit leisure suit. Beneath the off-white dress shirt, a thin gold chain was hung about his wrinkled pink neck.

“Thirty-five,” Billy said carefully, trying to sound sure of himself and sober.

The thin-lipped mouth pursed. The bright eyes dropped down Billy's body appraisingly. “Twenty,” the man said.

Billy swiveled the bar stool around, and stared at the clock behind the bar. Nexus would close in twenty-five minutes. He raised the beer and drank it down in several long gulps.

“All right,” he said. He dropped unsteadily to the floor and the man gripped his arm. Billy pulled away and struggled into his jacket.

Above the disco version of “Auld Lang Syne” there was a hoarse shriek. The bartender rushed past Billy, leaping into the crowd on the dance floor. The man with the white hair and pink cheeks led Billy up the ramp.

From the top, Billy turned and stared into the bar. The crowd in the center of the dance floor had pulled back a little. The bartender had been knocked to the floor. The TWA stewardess had ripped off Daisy Mae's blouse, and tossed it to a girlfriend, who was dressed as a geisha. Daisy Mae shrieked in terrible anger.

The man touched Billy's arm and guided him out into the cold New Year's night.

Tuesday, 2 January

P
ROFESSOR PHILIP Lawrence stood on his front porch and stared across the snow-covered street at the row of hemlocks that screened the house of his neighbors across the way. His breath crystallized in sharp puffs, and he squinted angrily in the cold glare. A pile of someone's discarded clothing had been spilled out onto the side of the road. Mercifully, the heap had been dumped not onto his own lawn, but onto the property of Mario Scarpetti, fourth-term representative to the Massachusetts legislature.

Pulling his wide-brimmed black felt hat down further and wrenching his collar up about his neck, Lawrence moved resolutely down the sidewalk. He was wrapped in a black greatcoat and carried a black leather attaché case in one kid-gloved hand. His full auburn beard was stiffening in the cold air. The marred landscape rankled him and he knew that if he did not retrieve and dispose of the trash it would be there to annoy him when he returned from a full day of classes. The Scarpettis had money and a certain peculiar prestige, but little sense of pride in the appearance of their neighborhood.

As he crossed the road, powdery snow clouded up about his black boots. From his coat pocket he retrieved a pair of glasses, thin gold-rimmed spectacles with smoked amber lenses. As soon as he had them on, the lenses fogged. With well-practiced but grudging patience, he wiped the glass clear with a white starched kerchief. He stood on the sidewalk a few feet from the row of hemlocks, and looked down through the dense evergreen foliage. His mouth loosened and fell slightly open.

“Jesus
Christ
…!” he exclaimed.

The head of the corpse, its face turned modestly into the snow, was obscured by the deep-green branches of the hemlocks. Without hesitation Lawrence bent over and pulled back the foliage.

The man was young, no more than twenty, Lawrence surmised. He was sprawled on his side, arms and legs tangled in the broken lower branches of two of the trees. Above the right temple, the thick blond hair was caked with blood. A thin stream had frozen like a bright red frame around the corpse's staring clouded eye.

Lawrence let go of the branches, sifting snow over the bruised head, and stood erect. The boy wore a too-large nylon football jacket, dark blue with yellow piping; the insignia was of a high school in Pennsylvania. A thin green sweatshirt was still tucked carefully into thin faded denim jeans. The corpse's feet, in dirty white athletic socks and worn black sneakers, pushed against the black trunk of one of the hemlocks.

Lawrence pushed aside some of the higher branches, and looked across the expanse of inclined whited lawn, thick with bare lindens and blue spruce, up to the Scarpetti's house. The structure was a solid three stories, squarish, covered with cream stucco. An ornate parapet running about the edge of the roof was the only decoration on the otherwise severe 1920s design. Nothing stirred behind the windows on the near side of the house.

The snow on the lawn was unmarred. Lawrence turned to look briefly up and down the road, which ended in a cul-de-sac two houses beyond. There were no footprints near the boy's body, but a faint set of tire tracks came up from the highway to the spot, and was repeated going down again. The boy had evidently been dumped shortly after the snow began to stick.

Professor Philip Lawrence smiled with pleasure as he contemplated informing Representative Mario Scarpetti that the body of a young man had been deposited beneath his hemlocks. He glanced once more at the corpse, and then stepped through the screen of evergreens, heading toward the house.

D
ANIEL VALENTINE punched a key on the cash register. The bell pinged sharply as the “$1.00” tab popped up into the tiny glass window and the drawer slid open. He smoothed the bill out and pushed it into the proper compartment. Before closing it, Valentine reached into the back of the drawer and extracted matches and a fresh pack of Lucky's.

Valentine opened the cigarettes and took one out. He leaned his elbows lazily on the highly polished bar and smoked sedately, consciously enjoying this slow part of the evening. In less than an hour, Bonaparte's regular crowd would begin its erratic but inevitable buildup. He sighed and dragged deep on the Lucky; he was weary and the 2:00 A.M. closing seemed about four days away. For the fifth time in ten minutes, he swept his eyes across the room for a head count.

A little down from the register two men in business suits talked quietly and laughed softly as they sipped at a third round of rye. In a shadowed corner stood three other men, who were regulars at Bonaparte's.

In rattan chairs set among the jungle of palms in the room behind the mirrored bar two more men pursued a low-voiced serious argument, the same discussion that had occupied them in an identical manner—in the same chairs, across the same table—over the past couple of months. The walls of this back room were a dark rich green. Six more rattan chairs were grouped around three more glass-topped wicker tables. In the corner was a lacquered baby grand.

Valentine checked his watch. Trudy, scheduled to play at the piano from ten to two, was late, but not much later than usual. Trudy maintained that she couldn't tell the time on a digital clock.

Valentine looked across the room, through the opened white louvered doors. The foyer was empty but for Irene at her station in the coat checkroom. Irene was a plump woman in her sixties, who wore her white hair pulled severely back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Large round rhinestone-studded bifocal glasses perched at the bridge of her thin red nose. Alert but motionless, hands resting on the lower half of the Dutch door, Irene stared ahead as if she were momentarily expecting to witness a bloody murder on the staircase that led to the dance floor above. She did not notice Valentine's wink.