The Bar Watcher

by Dorien Grey

  *

  Things were at least starting to fall into place. Comstock’s killer had been watching him enough to know where he parked his car and how he got into Rage. I wasn’t sure how he’d found the magnetic keybox, but they were hardly rare. He’d removed all the keys, since he didn’t know for sure which one opened the side door at Rage. He’d probably just dropped the first one when it didn’t work and thrown the second aside. There must have been a third key—missing—that had worked. It was just luck no “auditions” were being held in the small room when he entered.

  Actually, it took a lot of balls to take all those risks. The guy must have been pretty determined.

  As to why the cops hadn’t found the keys, it was pretty obvious they hadn’t bothered much to look. They were going on the assumption the killer had come in through the main entrance, since all the other entrances were locked. Even if they’d decided the killer had left through that side door, they probably wouldn’t have felt a need to give it more than a cursory look. The murder weapon certainly didn’t have to be looked for.

  I stopped back at Rage to get the addresses and phone numbers of the members on the list Troy had given me—and to accompany him on another quick guided tour of the small room—then returned to my office to start calling the guys on the list. The few I was able to find at home were, at first, understandably reluctant to talk to anyone about that night—the cops had given them a hard enough time—but when I identified myself as a private investigator and one of the family, they were more cooperative.

  I asked each one what time he’d arrived, and if he’d happened to come through or pass by the alley. A few said they had passed the alley on their way to the entrance, but no one had paid attention to who might or might not have been in it or hanging around it. In short, I didn’t learn anything at all that might be of help. And of course, no one had seen anyone suspicious. I hadn’t expected they would have. If the killer were either an average Joe or mildly unattractive, most of these guys wouldn’t have noticed him if they’d tripped over him.

  I also asked each one if he had heard anything negative said about Rage’s membership policy, and if so, what was said and under what circumstances. More than half hadn’t even been aware that Rage discriminated so blatantly. Probably not really that surprising, since they had gotten in with no hassle.

  The rest had just heard general grumbling in the community, but nothing so specific as to warrant further investigation. And three had been approached by Comstock at one time or another to join his little porno enterprise; only one had taken him up on it.

  I knew Jared didn’t get off work until around 4:30, and that he probably wouldn’t be home much before five, assuming he didn’t stop off for a couple rolls in the hay along the way. However, he had given me his home number, and I had an urge to call him, for a couple of reasons other than the obvious.

  I’d not talked to him since Comstock’s murder, and I had been thinking about Troy’s version of how Jared lost his Rage membership. I wanted to see if Jared’s version differed in any significant detail. Plus, I was curious to know if he might have heard anything in the course of his deliveries and/or bar visits that might be useful.

  I took a chance that, though he’d not be home yet, he might have an answering machine. He did.

  “Jared, this is Dick Hardesty. Can you give me a call at home? I should be there by five-thirty. Thanks. Bye.”

  The phone was ringing when I walked in the door. I caught it just before my answering machine did.

  “Hi, Dick, it’s Jared. What’s up?”

  “Jared, hi. I was wondering when we might be able to get together. I’ve got a couple of questions for you, and wondered if you’ve heard anything of interest—”

  “About Comstock’s getting killed?” he asked, anticipating the rest of my sentence. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. Everybody’s talking about it, of course.”

  “Well, would you like to get together to talk for a while?”

  “Tonight? And just to talk?”

  “Well, that last part is certainly open for negotiation, but yeah, if you could.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What time and where?”

  “How’s eight? We could grab a bite to eat, if you’d like.”

  “Sure. I hate cooking. And maybe afterwards, we could stop by Glitter for a few minutes. I’ve got a buddy who’s subbing for the regular DJ tonight, and I told him I’d come by if I could.”

  Glitter was the city’s leading disco, and it attracted much of the same type of guy who went to Rage, although Glitter had a far more relaxed policy regarding who could get in. I almost never went there because I tend to avoid “in” places—too crowded, too noisy, too much narcissism. Still, I was willing to give it a shot, especially with Jared.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we meet at Rasputin’s around eight?”

  “Deal. See you there.”

  I got undressed to head for the shower.

  *

  Of course, I got to Rasputin’s twenty minutes early, and was sitting at the bar when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Started without me, huh?”

  As I turned to Jared, I noticed the clock behind the bar said 7:48.

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “I thought I was the only guy who always shows up early.”

  He pulled the empty stool next to me closer and sat down.

  “I hate being late, so I always set my watch ten minutes fast.”

  The bartender came over to take Jared’s order, and when he’d left, Jared swung around on his stool to face me, making the now-familiar knee-thigh connection.

  “So, what’s going on?” he asked.

  I told him I’d been hired by Comstock’s partners to investigate his murder.

  Jared smiled broadly. “Hey, that’s great—two pieces of good news. Comstock’s dead, and you’ve got a new case.”

  The bartender brought Jared’s drink, and he raised it in a quick toast.

  “Good luck,” he said. He was still facing me, and his knee was still pressed into my thigh. I was getting to like it.

  But business before pleasure.

  “So you were the guy who punched Comstock?” I said, making it only half a question.

  Jared looked into his drink, then back up at me.

  “Ah, you heard,” he said. “I’m kind of surprised I was the only one. He was damned lucky I didn’t mop the floor with him.”

  “Exactly what happened?”

  He took another sip of his drink then set it on the bar.

  “You know that hot little blond at the registration desk?”

  “Troy,” I said.

  He nodded. “Troy. I’d been going fairly regularly, and every time I saw this Troy, I kept getting stronger and stronger vibes from him. That night, I hadn’t even shown him my card when he said, ‘How’d you like to fuck my brains out?’” He grinned, and his eyes had a devilish gleam. “Kind of hard to pass up an offer like that, so I said ‘Sure, when?’ and he said ‘It’s my break time. Now’s good.’

  “He picked up the phone under the counter and punched in a number and said ‘Tom, come watch the desk.’ He motioned me toward the door and buzzed it open, and just as I entered, a guy comes down the hall and goes into the office without a word. Troy comes out, and I follow him just a little way down the hall to a room on the left next to Comstock’s office.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”

  He gave me a raised eyebrow and a grin then picked up his drink and drained about a third of it in one gulp.

  “Did you know it’s got a fucking two-way mirror in it? I should have fucking known, but I had all my attention glued on Troy’s hot little ass.” He sighed then continued. “So, we did it, and just when we’re leaving the room, the door to Comstock’s office opens, and he comes out into the hall. ‘Come into my office for a minute,’ he says, and I haven’t got a fucking clue as to why he might want to talk to me.

  �
��Troy just nods and goes back to the registration office, and me, dumber’n owl shit, I follow Comstock into his office. He closes the door and motions me to a seat. ‘You ever done any porn?’ he asks. ‘No,’ I says. ‘Why do you want to know?’ I’m sitting in this chair, and Comstock’s standing practically right beside me, and I’m getting pretty fucking uncomfortable.

  “‘I’ve got a video company,’ he says, ‘and I’m always looking for really hot studs to be in them. The pay isn’t that good, but you get to fuck some of the hottest guys in town.’”

  Jared paused for a moment. “Now, when I get uncomfortable, I also tend to get pissed, and Comstock was coming mighty close to pissing me off big time. ‘I already fuck some of the hottest guys in town,’ I said, ‘and I don’t have to do it in front of a fucking camera.’

  “‘Don’t knock it till you try it,’ he says. ‘And it’s kind of hard to find a guy hung like you who’s uncut these days.’ Jeezus, but I’m dumb! That went right over my fucking head, how the hell he knew how I’m hung, or that I’m uncut. I was too busy trying to keep the lava from coming out of my ears to let it register.

  “But then he says—get this—‘There are other perks, too,’ and he fucking unzips his fly and whips out his cock about a foot in front of my face. That did it. I jumped up out of the chair and slugged him so hard he stumbled back against the wall and knocked that big picture off-center, and I saw the fucking two-way mirror behind it. That son of a bitch had been watching Troy and me fucking!”

  He looked at me, wide-eyed, shaking his head.

  “I tell you, Dick, I lost it. I had to get out of that room before I killed the bastard—and, oh, I wanted to. So I left, and I never went back. I was afraid that if I ever saw Comstock again, I would kill him.”

  He noticed me looking at him, and he suddenly realized what he’d said. He gave a quick, not totally convincing smile, and said, “I didn’t, of course. Somebody else beat me to it. I owe him one.”

  He finished his drink and pointed at my almost-empty glass. I drained it, and he waved to the bartender, indicating the glasses.

  “Maybe we should get a table,” he said.

  When the drinks came, we did.

  *

  Glitter occupied the entire second floor of a huge old warehouse in the riverfront district. The dance floor took up at least half the space, with an assortment of bars scattered around the edges. In the back, separate from the dance area, was a show lounge that attracted some well-known B-level entertainers. It had a separate outside entrance for those who didn’t want to fight through the dance-floor crowd to get there.

  The whole huge space was painted black—exposed girders, pipes, factory-style windows that pushed out from the bottom to let air in when the air conditioning couldn’t handle the heat generated by the crowd.

  The DJ’s booth was suspended from the girders in the center of the room, and was reached by a catwalk from a side wall, where a narrow, metal-caged stairway led to it from a locked metal gate on the side of the dance floor.

  The volume was set just below “stun.” Nobody talked much at Glitter, not that most people there were in a talking mood anyway. A makeshift U-shaped balcony ran across the end of the room above the main entrance and enabled those so inclined to look down on the milling throng below. It was a good place for the predators to spot their prey.

  Jared and I paid our $5 cover charge and pushed through the mob to the stairway to the balcony. Jared thought he’d have a better chance of being seen by his DJ buddy from up there. There was yet another small bar at the top of the stairs, and we each ordered a beer—easier to keep control of in all the jostling. We managed to work our way to the railing, where we had an unobstructed view of the action.

  Jared’s buddy was doing a pretty good job of keeping both the volume and the excitement level high, and whoever was working the lights was doing an impressive job as well. The two of them worked well together, with the room going pitch black at exactly the right spot in the music, then bursting into a minute or two of full strobes, the jerky, freeze-frame effect never ceasing to fascinate me, and I wondered if they’d posted a notice warning epileptics that strobes were used. Every time a sweeping spotlight would move across the balcony, Jared would wave toward the DJ booth, and finally the spot swept back and zeroed in on him for just a second, then blinked on and off before moving on.

  “Mission accomplished,” he yelled into my ear.

  I was slightly distracted by an incredible blond, standing at the far end of one of the ends of the U staring down at the crowd. A firm believer in ESP, I stared at him until he happened to look my way and our eyes met. He smiled and nodded, as did I. I know I was there with Jared, but like I said, it was my slut phase, and while I wouldn’t have gone home with the guy that night, a phone number’s good for a rain check.

  Just then, there was some sort of commotion on the dance floor, and a circle cleared around two people in the center—a really hot kid with black curly hair, and a neatly dressed guy around sixty. The dark-haired kid was really in the older guy’s face, like a drill sergeant, screaming something we couldn’t hear over the music, but he was clearly infuriated.

  The older man turned and moved toward the door, the younger one right behind him, yelling, and the crowd melting back from them as they progressed. They passed under the balcony and were lost to sight.

  Jared leaned toward me and yelled, “Richie. What a fucking sonofabitch.”

  I merely shrugged, wanting to know more but deciding to wait until we got somewhere we could talk.

  I left Jared at the railing while I pushed through to the bar for two more beers. When I got back, the dance floor had returned to its usual frenetic normalcy, and it was as if nothing at all had happened. Rather like dropping a stone into a shallow bowl of water. Ripples, then calm. Though calm was hardly a word you could ever apply to Glitter.

  I looked around for the blond, but he was gone.

  When we’d finished our second beer, Jared yelled “Are you about ready?”

  I nodded, and we fought our way to the stairs, down to the main dance floor, and then out into the blessedly quiet street—though you could still hear the muffled throbbing of the music’s bass line.

  “A little of that goes a long way,” Jared said, and I nodded again in agreement.

  *

  We’d left Jared’s car in Rasputin’s lot, and as we drove over to get it, my curiosity got the better of me.

  “What was that all about on the dance floor?” I asked. “And who’s Richie?”

  Jared leaned back and put his left arm on the back of my seat.

  “Richie Smith. He’s a card-carrying Arrogant Prick of the First Order,” Jared said. “He’s a fixture at Glitter…and at Rage: I understand he was one of Comstock’s golden boys.”

  “You mean in the porns?”

  “Richie is a classic case of a guy who’s been told he’s hot so many times, he gets elephantiasis of the ego. He can have anybody he wants, any time he wants them, so he doesn’t have to bother to even pretend he gives a shit about anybody but himself.”

  “Speaking from experience?” I asked.

  Jared’s hand dropped from the back of my seat to my shoulder.

  “Unfortunately, yeah. I made it with him when I first got into town. He’s got a fantastic face and an incredible body and a dick you wouldn’t believe. But he’s what I call an ‘Adore Me!’ He just basically lays there, expecting you to fall all over him. I got the impression that all I—and I imagine every other guy he goes to bed with—was to him was a walking dildo.”

  “What do you suppose tonight was all about?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe the guy had the audacity to hit on him.

  “Richie’s on a really slippery slope. Lots of booze, lots of dope inevitably lead to too much booze, too much dope. If he lives to see thirty, it’ll be a miracle.”

  *

  As we drove into Rasputin’s parking lot, Jared retracted his arm f
rom my shoulder and moved his hand to my leg, then to my crotch.

  “Got time for a quick one at my place?” he asked.

  “Take a wild guess,” I said as we pulled up behind his car.

  He grinned as he opened the door and started to get out of the car.

  “Good,” he said. “You can follow me, okay?”

  “Sure.” He was about to close the door when I added, “But, hey, promise me something?”

  He looked puzzled. “Yeah? What?”

  “You won’t just lie there, will you?”

  He grinned again. “Trust me.”

  *

  I managed to make it to the office on time in the morning. Jared had to be at work at eight, and told me to sleep in if I wanted, but I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being in his place alone—we didn’t know each other quite well enough for that yet. Although it was nice of him to suggest it.

  Before picking up the morning paper at the newsstand in the lobby of my office building, I stopped at the coffee shop on the ground floor to get a large black coffee to go. The place had been there since Noah, and looked it. There were two waitresses who had been there just about as long—identical twins Evolla and Eudora, who had found a hairstyle they liked somewhere in the mid-1940s and had never found it necessary to change since. Every now and then, I’d stop in at lunchtime for a bowl of soup just to hear one or the other of them yell the order to the cook—“BAW-el!” I get a lot of fun out of the little things.

  I’d just sat down at my desk and was prying the lid off the coffee when the phone rang. I waited for the second ring before picking it up.

  “Hardesty Investigations.”

  “Dick! It’s Jared.” I know, I thought. “Have you read the morning paper—the late edition?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “Remember Richie Smith from last night?”

  “Yeah…” I said, something in the back of my head telling me I knew what was coming next.