by Chaz McGee
“You’re Tony?” Maggie asked him carefully.
He nodded. “I don’t think last names are necessary, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” Maggie agreed. “You got shoved from behind, is that right?”
He nodded, drained one of the beers in a single series of gulps, wiped his hand on his beard, belched like rumbling thunder, and launched into his story. “I was standing there admiring Jeanna—she’s like the best dancer they’ve had here in years and Roger only lets her get up there maybe once an hour, on account of it keeps the crowd hanging on and drinking while they wait.” He waited for Maggie to nod her understanding and continued. “So there’s Jeanna up on the bar, dancing away, and I’ve got a frosty one in my hand to cool things down.” He hoisted a beer mug in salute. “And all of a sudden some son of a bitch headbutts me from behind.”
“Headbutts you?” Maggie repeated.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tony said indignantly. “Had to be a head-butt. Cowardly, but true. I got headbutted from behind, and while I am a big man, as you can see, I can’t be expected to hold my own when attacked from behind like that.”
“No, of course not,” Maggie murmured, and she was smart enough not to tell the guy that she knew who had been tossed into him from behind. The poor kid had a shaky enough future in front of him as it was.
“I go flying forward, knock two guys off their stools, slam into Charley, who is not too friendly even on a good night, and drinks got spilled and all hell broke loose. Charley came up swinging at me, someone tried to crack a bar stool on my head, I got kicked in the nuts, and well, after that, things went a little red, you know what I’m saying?”
Maggie nodded.
“We all end up outside and everyone is jumping into it, and I just kept swinging until I notice that the guy over there”—he gestured toward Bobby Daniels—“is bleeding pretty bad. I helped Roger stop the fight after that. I mean, fun is fun, but I could see the dude had been cut with something serious. Not a beer bottle. A serious blade. Now, I know Roger, he’s a buddy of mine. Stuff happens like that at his place too often and they could shut it down. They’re looking to shut it down, believe you me.”
“Did you see who had the knife?”
He shook his head. “I was swinging first and looking second.” He hesitated and glanced at Bobby Daniels. “I know that guy’s fresh out. I know the look. But you got to tell his parole officer, he had nuthin’ to do with it. Really. He was just sitting there.”
Maggie seemed genuinely touched by his concern. “It’s okay. He’s not on parole. He’ll be all right.”
The biker nodded, satisfied.
“Anything else?” Maggie asked, sounding hopeful.
“Hell, yeah. But you better talk to Barney about that, and maybe you better fasten your holster before you do.” Tony popped a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s got something pretty damn interesting to share.”
“Thank you, Tony,” Maggie said as she handed him the twenty she had promised him for guarding Daniels. “You are a prince among men. Now go on and finish your guarding duties, then go get your money’s worth out of Roger. I want you to drain an entire keg for free.”
“Will do, ma’am,” he rose from the picnic table and Maggie went tilting backward. She grabbed the wooden edge to keep from falling off. “Care to join me in a beer when you’re done?” Tony asked as he tugged hopefully on one of his beard’s pigtails.
“I appreciate the offer,” Maggie said sincerely. “But I’ll be on the clock.”
“No problem,” Tony said magnanimously. “And if someone don’t cooperate, you just tell them Big Tony will kick their ass until they do.”
Maggie smiled. “Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that. Would you mind sending Barney over? Nicely?”
Tony’s idea of sending Barney over nicely was to nearly launch him in the air, but Barney did not seem to take of fense at Tony’s enthusiasm. He had something important to tell Maggie.
“It was a cop,” he said before he’d even sat down.
Maggie froze. A sadness filled her. I think she finally put it together with what the two biker chicks had told her and knew who he was going to name before he’d said a word. “A cop?” she asked quietly.
Barney held up a hand. “God as my witness. I know you aren’t going to want to believe me, but it was a cop.” He had a massive gut that was splitting the sides of his black leather vest and his bald head gleamed first pink and then blue in the neon glare.
“Who was a cop?” Maggie asked. “The man with the knife?”
“The dude who started it all.”
“Tell me from the beginning,” Maggie said. Her appreciation of the people she was questioning and their quirks had disappeared. She felt weary and resigned, truly sad to hear another officer had been involved. And not, I realized, the least bit doubtful. She believed the biker.
“I walked in the door a couple minutes before it all happened,” Barney explained. “It’s my momma’s birthday and we had a little party for her so I got a late start. I was ready to catch up with my drinking and I’d heard about Jeanna.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about Jeanna, too,” Maggie said, her heart not really in it. But she was too good of a cop not to try and establish rapport.
“Well, then, you know she’s worth laying down for a drink or two. I come in the door and there he is: the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. Sitting right there at the bar, next to that poor guy.” Barney nodded toward Daniels, who had closed his eyes and seemed to have fallen asleep.
“You recognized a police officer? When you walked in?” Maggie asked carefully. “With that guy?”
“Hell yeah, I did,” Barney said. “Asshole planted an eight ball on me twelve years ago. I did hard time for it, too. Missed my boy growing up. They pinned a whole operation on me. I’ll never forget his face.”
“What’s his name?” Maggie asked, though I think she already knew it.
Barney looked a little shamefaced. “I said I’d never forget his face. But as it so happens, his name does escape me.”
“Describe him,” Maggie asked.
“About five foot ten; maybe fifty pounds overweight; head the shape of a sixteen-pound bowling ball with ginger-colored hair kind of plastered over it so he can tell himself no one notices he’s going bald; big, fat bulb of a nose from hitting the bottle; a sweaty face filled with freckles; bad suit the color of dog shit; smells like cheap-ass aftershave.”
Maggie stared at him. So did I. He had just described Danny to a tee and there was no mistaking it. Danny was the one. And I knew he had probably planted the coke on good ole Barney twelve years before, too. That interested me almost as much as the fact that Danny had been at the Double Deuce an hour before. Because, while Danny and I had been sloppy and stupid and drunk and useless, we had never been dirty cops. At least I never had. I’d never planted a scrap of evidence in my life. That was the one thing I would not do, and I’d never known Danny to, either.
Now? I started thinking back to our drug busts, going over our cases. Danny could have been crooked the whole time. I may not have known him at all.
“Did you see anyone else you recognized?” Maggie asked. Her eyes were sad. She didn’t want Danny to be a part of this.
Barney looked apologetic. “Just the usual assholes who jump into every fight that comes along.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. The news had made her tired. She handed Barney his twenty wearily and he took it, looking a little ashamed.
“I shouldn’t take this from you,” he said to her. “You’re okay.”
“No, you take it,” Maggie said. “Buy your son a present. You’ve been very helpful. Can you send Jeanna over?”
“Sure.” Barney brightened. “I’ll escort her here myself.”
“That won’t necessary,” Maggie told him with a tight smile. “She looks like she can make it on her own.”
Jeanna had obviously just finished her shift on the bar. She was covered with sweat, breathing hard and
counting a wad of dollar bills as she sat down in front of Maggie. Up close, she wasn’t as quite a pretty as I—and everyone else, no doubt—had hoped. Her jittery movements, pinpoint eyes, and the strange, disjointed energy she gave off told me why. I had seen enough meth heads in my career to know one when I saw one. She might be the best thing standing at the Double Deuce right now, but it wouldn’t be long before she, too, was old before her time and the grayish cast to her skin grew worse. It made me sad. I was wit nessing her last few months of glory, the final days of her beauty, and they would pass all too quickly before she became just another worn-out, washed-up woman sitting at the bar of the Double Deuce, hoping some man would be drunk enough to see her as beautiful.
I think she could see her future, too. She did not look Maggie in the eye the whole time she was interviewed.
“Here,” Maggie said, sliding two twenties over the table to her. “These are for you.” She slid another twenty toward her. “This is for Roger.”
“Thanks,” she mumbled, quickly pocketing the money in a slit in her low-slung jeans. She stuffed the wad of ones in a back pocket. She glanced at Maggie quickly before looking away. “I’ve got a kid and I need this gig.”
“I understand,” Maggie said and I think she truly did. “You make your money while you can.”
“Damn straight. I still got a few good years left in me.” Jeanna pulled out a box of Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead,” Maggie said, noting the woman’s trembling hands.
Jeanna saw her looking. “It’s not what you think,” she explained, holding one hand out in front of her. “It’s what I saw tonight that’s scaring me.”
“What did you see?” Maggie asked quietly.
Jeanna took a deep breath and picked a fleck of tobacco from one corner of her mouth. Her fingernails had been bitten to the quick. “You’re just going to think I’m crazy,” she said. “Or drunk. Or both.”
“Try me.”
Jeanna fixed her eyes on the neon signs blinking out their promises. “I’ve been dancing here for about a month. The money’s real good and Roger keeps the creeps off. I mean, we pretend to be college girls who just got the urge to dance on the bar and take their clothes off for the marks, but the regulars know we’re here all the time. I’m a professional, just like you.”
Maggie didn’t argue and Jeanna looked encouraged. “I dance maybe five, six times a night. Just for the tips. And all I do is dance. You know what I’m saying? I’m not one of the girls who starts working the minute she steps down from the bar.”
“I know that,” Maggie said, but then her voice grew surprisingly harsh. “But they all started out like you. You do understand that?”
Jeanna looked up at the sky. “Course I do. I’m not stupid.”
“And there’s no going back once you start,” Maggie added.
Jeanna stared down at her hands before taking a deep drag on her cigarette, ignoring both Maggie’s comments and the possibilities for her future. “I’ve seen a lot of creeps come in the Double D. I mean, face it, it’s not the classiest of joints.” Her laugh was bitter. “We get a lot of guys right out of the pen down the road, like that one.” She nodded toward Bobby Daniels, asleep with his head against the bar wall. “I pegged him as soon as he walked in the door, even if he is nicer-looking than most. It’s the bad haircuts that give them away, but it’s also this look they have. Like the world’s too much for them but they’re not able to keep themselves from walking right into the middle of it anyway.”
“What did you see tonight that scared you?” Maggie asked gently.
“There was this guy standing toward the back of the crowd. You know how it is. You start dancing and a bunch of guys gather and they’re drinking, and then they want you to take something off so they start handing you bills, and they kind of crowd closer until Roger has to step in and make them behave.”
“And this guy at the back of the crowd got too close?” Maggie asked.
Jeanna shook her head. “Just the opposite. Everything about him was just the opposite. He was too straight for this place, too well dressed.” She hesitated. “Too clean.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Sure. And that’s the scary part. He was standing in a dark corner at first, I think he wanted to be hidden a little, and I just figured he was some perv, you know, who needed a dark corner for what he was doing. Wouldn’t be the first time at the Double D.”
Ugh. Roger’s job had its drawbacks after all.
“But there’s this crazy kind of mini-searchlight that Roger turns on when you really get going, just to whip the crowd up and get the booze and money flowing. It turns in a circle, all through the bar.”
Maggie nodded. She’d seen it in action. So had I. It had always added a touch of surreal World War II escape-from-prison-camp atmosphere to my arrests when the spotlight was sweeping over me while I was handcuffing someone. But the crowd had loved it.
“So, I’m standing to one side of the bar, waiting for my time up, turning down guys that think I’m some kind of whore.” She cast another quick glance at Maggie, then looked back at the neon signs. “And I notice that every time this searchlight scans the room, it sort of freezes on this guy, just for a couple of seconds, before it moves on. And he can’t hardly move, you know, because he’s wedged in between a lot of hollering fools, and I don’t think he likes that this spotlight is stopping on him, but it’s all preprogrammed and no one really notices anyway and I don’t think there’s much he can do about it. The guy’s real tall, did I say that yet?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Well, he was. Real tall. So I can see his face and I noticed that he’s staring at Becky and Nan kind of funny.”
“Becky and Nan?” Maggie asked.
“They go on before me. Roger puts them both up there at the same time, hoping to draw a bigger crowd. They do this rubbing up against each other and pouring tequila on each other stuff. It’s kind of lame, I mean, take a good look at them. Would you really want to see either one of them naked, much less both of them at the same time? But I guess late at night, with everyone drunk, and the lights kind of low and those spotlights flashing around, well, people can make them into anyone they want them to be.”
She was smarter than she looked, I decided. I hoped she was smart enough to get out while she could.
“And this man?” Maggie prompted.
“It was the way he was staring at them that got me. I mean, I am halfway across the room but I can’t stop staring at him because even from there I can see his eyes. They were mean. They were really dark. Black, mean, hate-filled eyes, and he was just staring at them on the bar, and his whole face was real still, frozen, and real creepy and white each time that spotlight stopped on him, and he was just staring at Becky and Nan and I knew what he was thinking.” She paused. “He wanted to hurt them bad. He hated them. He didn’t even know them and I could tell he hated them. He looked mean and hungry and like he wanted to pull out a blade and start cutting them up into ribbons.”
She stopped, her voice quavering, and took a drag on her cigarette, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in. I wondered how she knew what a man looked like when he was in the mood to cut. I figured she probably danced here so she could wear those low-slung jeans most of the time. They’d hide a lot of scars. But I didn’t question her authority. I knew she’d seen that look in men before.
“What happened then?” Maggie asked.
“It was my turn to dance. Roger puts me up there alone on account of I like to dance all over and, well, people like my dancing.”
“So I’ve heard a few times tonight,” Maggie said with a smile. She wanted the woman to keep on talking. Or maybe she was just being nice. She didn’t have the need to tear down others like most people did. I think she liked being kind to them. I think it made her feel better about all the ugly things she had to see.
Jeanna smiled back at Maggie, and for just an instant I got a glimpse of what Je
anna must have been like before she started taking off her clothes and dancing on top of a bar for a crowd of drunks. An image flashed through my mind: Jeanna, young, strong, healthy, tanned, dark hair blowing behind her as she stood at the prow of a powerboat, skimming the surface of an indigo lake, the sun shining bright above her. She was younger, happier, filled with hope.
How had she ended up here?
“I go up and start doing my thing,” she told Maggie. “But I couldn’t get that guy out of my mind. I was worried about Becky and Nan. They got bad judgment about men.” She laughed at the irony of her words, but it was not a humorous laugh. “I thought, oh, lord, what if one of them goes out into the parking lot with that man? They will not come back.”
She looked up at Maggie, her face frightened. “But he didn’t leave. He just stood there in that corner, staring at me with so much hatred I could feel it across an entire room. I could feel it across a hundred bodies. I could feel it washing over me each time that spotlight hit him.” She shivered. “I couldn’t take my mind off of it. I knew he was bad, and I knew he was looking at me and trying to decide where to cut me first.”
She was talking faster now and I wondered how much the speed had to do with what she had experienced and how much it was just that she had recognized Alan Hayes for what he was, when so many others had been fooled.
“Did he have something to do with the fight?” Maggie asked her.
“I can’t be sure. I didn’t see it start. First thing I know, there was trouble and chairs were flying and glass was breaking and I had to hop down behind the bar before I got hurt, and then people were rolling out the front door and the whole place emptied, and Roger was madder than hell and started outside with a baseball bat.”
“Did you see the man again?” Maggie asked.
The dancer shook her head and looked around her into the darkness. “I think I’m always going to see his face, though. In my nightmares. I get them a lot, you know. Nightmares.” She shivered. “I will tell you this. He may not have started that fight, but he had something to do with it. As soon as I saw him, I knew it—I knew that something real bad was going to happen.”
