NO Quarter

by Robert Asprin

  I arched an eyebrow. “Both you and Bone would be ‘safer’ not living and working in the Quarter. You’d both be ‘safer’ living in Podunk, Idaho. We all make our choices, and sometimes we opt for a path that isn’t as secure as another.”

  “I had a fortune cookie last night that said that,” she murmured, her eyes wandering away.

  I went on. “It was Bone’s choice to get into this thing. I didn’t talk him into it or con him at all. He feels it’s something he has to do. And he’s made it quite clear he’ll do it with or without me.”

  “I’m not the worrywart girlfriend, Maestro,” she said, her gaze centering on me again. “Bone’s not so fragile that he needs to be kept in a box. I could object to this thing, if I wanted, if I thought he was doing something totally stupid. He respects me enough to listen to me. And he could veto me if things were reversed. But I don’t object. If the cops can’t find Sunshine’s killer, then somebody else should ... somebody else has to. Sunshine was my sister. We just didn’t have the genes to prove it. I feel bad, real bad, that she drifted away from me and Bone toward the end.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say to that, so I kept quiet. Alex had obviously wanted to talk to me privately. Bone was at work now. I wondered how long it had taken her to track me here to Poppy’s.

  I waited to see if she had anything more to say.

  She did. At that moment her eyes grew slightly glassy. Her earlier hell-hath-no-fury manner vanished, and she suddenly looked uncertain and subdued.

  “I was married once,” she said softly. “It was an unholy disaster. When I climbed out of it, I thought, ‘That’s it. No more men.’ Then I met Bone. He’s the kindest, most caring man I’ve ever met—at least he’s that way with me. He’s also the bravest soul I know.” She caught herself. “Don’t misunderstand. I never got between Bone and Sunshine—never would have. But when she pulled away, he became my rock, my best friend. You know how into movies he is, right?”

  I nodded. “He’s mentioned it a time or two.”

  She sighed, let out a little laugh. “Yeah. I know. Sometimes you can’t get him to stop talking about them. Bone and his movies. Did you know he keeps a kind of movie journal? No, you wouldn’t know. He doesn’t tell anyone. He writes in these spiral-bound notebooks, like from high school. Fills them up, one after the other. He’s been doing it for years. And I mean years, like since he was 18. He’s got boxes at his apartment, full of these notebooks.”

  I had no idea where she was going now, but I was intrigued. “Tell me, what exactly does one write in a ‘movie journal’?”

  “Bone writes down his own reviews of movies he rents or remembers seeing as a kid. Sometimes he writes these sort of short philosophical essays about different aspects of films. Or he writes about specific actors or actresses, or pans famous movies or praises obscure ones. He’s an encyclopedia. I love to watch movies with him. He enjoys them so much, it’s infectious. He doesn’t always show me what he writes, and he never tells anybody else about it. He’s not looking to publish these notebooks or anything.”

  I nodded again. “Why are you telling me this, Alex?”

  “Because you don’t know Bone. You may have been hanging out with him at the bars for a few months, joking, having a good time. But there are things you don’t know ...” Her eyes went glassy again; her pretty face deadened. She looked right through me, like she could see something I couldn’t.

  I ground out my cigarette in the ashtray. “You can tell me or not tell me,” I said, very gently.

  “When Bone was 16 he was hospitalized, for a full year. For ... depression. Serious. He was committed.” A tear dropped from her left eye.

  I found myself sitting very still.

  “He worked hard to get himself together,” she went on. “Then he got sucked into a bad marriage, and Jesus, that bitch tore him apart. Learned where he hurt and kept hitting there, over and over. But he pulled himself together. When everything went south with Sunshine, he survived that, too. And that’s why I say he’s the bravest person I know.”

  Her small hand came across the table and closed around mine. Her grip was like steel.

  “Obviously, I don’t go around telling people this stuff. But I want you to know. Not because I don’t think Bone is capable of being your partner in this—what do you call it?—this hunt for Sunshine’s killer. I know he’s capable. But I want you to know about him ... because I want him returned to me in the same condition when this is done. That’s on you. Clear?”

  “In fact, it is,” I said, and I couldn’t hold back an awed little smile. Either they’re making women different these days, tougher and smarter, or women are just starting to let it show. Either way, Bone had certainly picked himself a live one ... or vice versa.

  Alex quickly wiped her eyes with a napkin and took a long slurp of coffee. She cleared her throat.

  “I don’t suppose I need to point out that if there’s anything I can do to help in this hunt, let me know. And you will refrain from all macho bullshit about ‘keeping the women out of the line of fire.’”

  “I shall so refrain.”

  “Good.” She took another swallow of coffee, and gathered herself up to leave. “I’m trusting you to use me if you need me. I’ll be telling Bone this when I see him. I just wanted to make it clear with you first. The rest of our conversation here is between you and me, Maestro. Got it?”

  “Deal,” I solemnly agreed.

  I was sitting with my back away from the door, of course, and watched her go out. Scotty eventually came and cleared my plate. I paid the check, but sat a little while longer, absorbing it all—or trying to, anyway. It was hard enough processing the information, much less figuring out how I felt about the news Alex had told me. It certainly cast Bone in a new light.

  I got up and left. I focused instead on the fact-finding mission I had planned for tonight.

  “Where can I buy some drugs?”

  I was clocked out. The graveyard shift was on, in the form of that young newish waiter—Otis. Piper had told me what he knew about Dunk, and was gone. I should have been gone too. Shift over. Hell, now I had days off ahead of me, days that Dallas had granted me, and it had been some long time since I’d last had an appreciable number of days off work all in a row.

  Blitz was chewing gum, a big wad of it, chewing it loud. He was your typical Quarter dishwasher.

  “Wuzzat yuh wan’? Drugs? Wha’ the fuck’s that s’posed to mean? Drugs?” He leaned a hip on his sink, which had mounds of suds in it. You couldn’t just bang dishes straightaway into the dishwashing machines. They had to be scraped off and rinsed first, so that the melted cheese and other tenacious food residues wouldn’t cling.

  It was a job low on the totem pole. Dishwashers put in physically grueling days. There was the added fun of doing the job in summer—up to your elbows in hot water, your machines spitting steam at you. You would sweat your clothes soaked. You also got stuck with whatever shit jobs your higher-ups needed done. Everybody was your higher-up, even the busboys.

  Finally, the job paid lousy, so of course the turnover was insane. It was no Quarter record to have five dishwashers come and go inside a week.

  Which meant Blitz, a three-week employee—it’s the really wretched ones that actually stay with the job—was shiftless, hostile, and had probably been hired straight out of one of Decatur Street’s seediest bars.

  “Where do you people go to buy your dope? Grass, coke, whatever. I know some of the bars along here are places where you can buy. Which ones?”

  He snapped his gum, chewed, lifted his chin toward me. “Fuck yuh mean by ‘you people’?” He weighted his tone heavy with threat.

  I was standing in the entryway into the dank dishwashing nook. My earlier snit, the one that might have become anger or might have become melancholy, had sharpened into a
n impulse to act. I had gotten good information from Piper, and I had acted on my own initiative in questioning him, not on marching orders from Maestro. I was proud of myself. I wanted to do more.

  I stayed where I was. “What I mean, you jelly-brained, knuckle-walking, houseplant-IQ idiot,” I said coolly, “is that I want to know where around here you and your illiterate breed of troglodytes gets your pep pills and magic powders and wacky tabacky. You understand that?”

  Most guys have heftier builds than me. Mine is a wiry thinness, and I’m capable of some fast physical action, but nonetheless I don’t have that ready muscle to back up my opinions that others have. That, Blitz had. He was taller and larger. He wasn’t someone that had to take any shit like this.

  He also wasn’t moving from his spot leaning on the sink.

  I peeled a bill out of my pocket, held it up.

  “See?” I said. His dull ox-eyes saw the ten dollars. He’d stopped chewing his gum.

  “Now,” I said. “Tell.”

  * * *

  It was almost like something runaway ... but not. No, not that helplessness, that terrible sense of being borne along, hands folded leadenly in your lap, and all struggling pointless. This was different. I was not possessed. This was no snit—and there’s a word, “snit,” my word, my special soft word to cover what was harsh and powerful.

  It wasn’t my emotions, though, that were driving me. I wasn’t going headlong. I was moving, but moving cold.

  Maestro would take this thing slow, I realized. He would exercise caution and make sure I did the same. He would, if he could, call all the shots, and see to it that I drew the safe assignments in this hunt. I was him, after all, wasn’t I—the younger him, giving off a vibe he recognized. And what was that exactly? I doubted very much we had led parallel lives. At some stage of his past, though, Maestro must have been a good deal less settled, less complacent, less assured. Maybe that was what looked familiar to him in me. So, what was he doing—rewriting his past by trying to keep me out of trouble?

  I chuckled, lit a smoke, and pushed through into the bar. I wondered what Maestro would say about me psychoanalyzing him—particularly if I was right.

  I was in boots, jeans, and T-shirt, and I was still several days unshaven. That was the right look, more or less, for this place. I had passed this bar any number of times going to and from work, had never once considered going in. Even from the outside it looked rank, oozing white-trashy sleaze. The inside didn’t disappoint.

  Dimly lit, but hiding things other dimly lit Quarter bars didn’t need to hide—patrons even more riff-raffy than those I’d found at Sin City. I felt the check-out stares and glances, and I responded with a perfectly at-ease swagger, down along the bar, past the occupied stools, finding an empty at the end.

  The bartender was another big guy. It you’re going to sling booze in the Quarter, it pays to have some beef on you, or else to be an attractive female. Either can cancel out trouble.

  “What can I getcha?” It was the same neutrally friendly tone I used on first-time customers at the restaurant. Everybody gets a fair shake before being judged, though, oh children, that judgment might be swift.

  “Cap’n and Coke.” I’d been drinking soda off and on in the bars for a little while, but here wasn’t the place for it.

  The big bartender—black beret, sandy hair past his shoulders—set down my rummincoke, and I paid and waved off the change. With that, I realized how much money I had just spent—on Blitz, on this cocktail—and that I had cut myself off from making tips for the next ... next ... how long? It was the right thing to do, though, I knew. I was on a hunt for Sunshine’s killer. I couldn’t do that effectively and try to hold on to my job at the same time.

  I tapped an ash into the nearest ashtray. California’s anti-smoking laws may have reached fascist extremes, but smoking is embedded deep in New Orleans culture, and you’ll have a hard time finding a non-smoking anywhere here. Certainly not a bar.

  The jukebox stopped playing a twangy, miserable country song, started playing a grungy, unintelligible heavy metal one. It was that kind of joint. No bartop trivia machines. Just pinball, a hulking old arcade video game, and a pool table awkwardly wedged into the rear of the bar. I’d never known about the table. Even had I known about it, it wouldn’t have tempted me to come into this trailer park trash refuge.

  It’s easy to sit in a bar and be left alone—if you’re a male anyway. You can sit on your barstool and stare at the rows of bottles and drink your drink slow and maybe nod along with the juke a little, and nobody will bother you. Just don’t put out any energy.

  If you want to mingle, though, you have to give of yourself a little.

  I went and chalked my name on the cracked slate next to the cobwebby Budweiser sign, and waited and watched the current game. The guy holding the table was missing both canines. (Dental hygiene in this city is, beyond doubt, generally atrocious.) He was also in the habit of shouting “mothafucka!” after every shot, whether he sank something or not. A good player, one stripe left to his opponent’s four solids.

  “Mothafucka!” The thirteen plunked into a corner pocket, the cue rolled out and, there—a perfect shot waiting on the eight ball.

  “Good leave,” I said from where I was leaning, watching.

  “Mothafucka! Thanks. That’s yer ass, Billy. Who’s up onna board? Who’s Bone?”

  “That’s me.” I’ve played pool since I was old enough to go into bars, but I’ve never owned a custom cue. Thus, I’m very good at picking out good or decent or the least decrepit bar cues. I picked one off the wall rack and slotted quarters into the table.

  “I’m Brock. Wanna play fer who buys next round?”

  “Sure,” I said, racking. “What rules do you like to play? League?”

  “Fuck that pussy shit,” Brock said amiably. League rules were the next best thing to playing slop. “Call your shots.”

  Brock was a better shooter than me, though I’m not at all bad, even if I do play “side-arm.” That is, I don’t line my elbow with the rest of my arm, and it makes for erratic shots. Even so, Brock ended up buying me my next rummincoke. No one else was interested in the table, though, so we just kept shooting—two games, three. As happens, we got to talking.

  He had a bristly Vandyke that was entirely grey, and he had permanent pouches beneath his eyes. His nose was dark with ruptured blood vessels. I realized after a while that this guy was maybe four years older than me, and thought with some amazement what a killing machine the Quarter can be for some people—a climate designed to connect the individual with what will age or destroy him or her fastest. Most visible one here is alcohol.

  But I’m not chasing booze tonight, I thought, sipping nonetheless on my drink. I was after drugs. Or, more to the point, after those who dealt drugs.

  Specifically, I wanted very much to meet Sunshine’s supplier. And Dunk’s. He was a pothead, and Sunshine had been living with him, so they probably used the same pusher.

  “Mothafucka! Aw, you in the shit now, Bone, mon frère.”

  I was indeed. Brock had neatly arranged a three-ball run for himself that the lamest shooter would have a hard time botching. I lolled against the wall’s cracked plaster, planted my stick between my boot heels.

  “Hey, you heard about that girl that got stabbed? By the river? Well, yeah, you must’ve, right?”

  Brock was chalking his cue. “Sure.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Knew of her, y’know. Word gets around. I prob’ly even met her, if she’d been hanging in the Qwardah fer any amounta time.”

  “Well, I did know her. She worked over Big Daddy’s. We—”

  “Those chicks there are fine.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed because that’s what guys do. “This—chick, though, we used to get stoned together. Sunshine was her na
me. And I’m telling you, she had the best weed. It was amazing. I’d sure as hell like to get my hands on some—that stuff, I mean. If I could just find out who was selling it to her ...”

  Brock finished the slow deliberate chalking of his cue stick. He lined up for the start of his three-ball run.

  “Well, there, Bone, I’m gonna finish kickin’ yer ass here, yer gonna buy the round, an’ then, well, maybe we’ll talk some more ‘bout what yer lookin’ for.” He wasn’t looking at me, but I nodded anyway.

  I waited until he put down the eight before I went to buy the new round.

  * * *

  Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:

  William Peter Blatty created a gem called The Ninth Configuration, where Stacy Keach presides over a military mental asylum & exhibits his own eccentric behavior. Eventually we learn that he too is nuts, & more, how he came to be the head psychiatrist. Breathlessly entertaining for the hilarious lightning-fast dialogue alone, but also intelligent & quite insightful. At that turning point, though, when we find out the truth about Keach’s identity and past, it’s a jolt. We backtrack over the movie & place all of his character’s behavior in the new context, & suddenly his craziness makes “sense.” We understand him, and we sympathize. Appraisal: one of a kind.

  I took a bit of extra time gearing up.

  On the one hand, pretty much anything goes for bar-hopping dress in the Quarter. T-shirt and jeans are the norm, but a sport coat or a cloak for that matter, are common enough that they don’t raise much of a stir. When I first relocated down here I was surprised at the number of men shooting pool or just hanging out while wearing tuxedo shirts and slacks, until I realized this was pretty much standard uniform for the waiters who work all those spiffy restaurants the tourists and upper-class locals support.