ELMORE LEONARD - Unknown Man #89

“Where’d you see them?”

“Different places.” Tunafish paused and his face almost came alive for the first time. “Hey, I seen her a week, two weeks ago. Was in the afternoon, she was alone. She had the blond hair and the beads, drinking wine. I said to myself, Who is that? Then I remember, yeah. But she look different.”

“Where was it?” Ryan said. “A bar?”

“Yeah, on Cass,” Tunafish said. “Shit, I don’t know the name. Down near Masonic Temple.”

“You think she lives around there?”

“I don’t know, she might.” Tunafish nodded then, still picturing her. “Yeah. I don’t see any reason she be in the place unless she live around there. Trashy, man. Six, seven in the morning the bars open.”

“What was different about her?” Ryan asked him. “You said she looked different.”

Tunafish frowned, picturing her. “Yeah, well, not different. It was like she look sick. You know?”

Ryan didn’t say much on the way back to where his car was parked on Beaubien. He thought about the girl named Lee, forming a picture of her in his mind, the blond hair and the beads and the glass of wine. In the picture she came across as a hooker, a flashy broad in a miniskirt and boots, somebody that would go around with a guy like Bobby Lear. Finding Lee would probably be next.

And if he couldn’t find her, then the guy that was mentioned, Virgil something. He said to Dick Speed, “What’s the guy’s name, was in on the robbery with Leary, Virgil?”

“Virgil Royal.”

“I didn’t get that part of it.”

“They held up the Wyandotte Savings and Loan. Virgil did time, Leary got off.”

“Yeah, I understand that.”

“What don’t you get?”

“Why Virgil’s looking for him. Because he got sent away and Leary didn’t?”

“I think there’s more to it than that,” Speed said. “I think Leary made a deal and laid the job on Virgil, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t in on that one, I’ll have to look it up.”

“And Mr. Perez,” Ryan said. “Don’t forget Mr. Perez.”

Dick Speed phoned him that evening. “How’d you make out?”

Ryan was sitting on his fake-leather black couch, his shoes off and his feet on a pillow on the footlocker coffee table.

“I didn’t plan it right,” Ryan said. “I parked near Wayne University and walked south looking in the bars, every bar on Cass down to Temple, then another four or five blocks to be sure.”

“Yeah?”

“I saw a lot of hookers getting their afternoon eye-opener and going to the grocery store, but I didn’t run into anybody named Lee.”

“Who said she was a hooker?”

“No, that’s the way I see her. You know. Then I had to walk all the way back to get my car. How’d you do?” Ryan said. He was thinking of Mr. Perez.

“Well, there’s a little more to it than I thought,” Dick Speed said. “See, everybody thinks Leary laid the job on Virgil and that’s why Virgil’s pissed off. But that’s not it. Virgil thinks Bobby Lear kept the money from the job and spent it while he was in the can. About eighteen grand.”

“You mean you arrested them, but you didn’t recover the money?”

“Well, actually, Bobby got about seventeen hundred from the cashiers that was never recovered. He must’ve spent it by now. But see, we had Virgil in the Wayne County Jail at that time waiting trial. So when the prosecutor’s office is talking to him they pretend to let it slip that Bobby got about seventeen grand, not seventeen hundred, and stashed it someplace. See, Virgil wants to believe it, he’s dying to-even if he read in the paper no money was taken-because he not only doesn’t trust him, just associating with Bobby you never know, the guy’s fucking wacko. Sometime he’s liable to stick a gun in your mouth, you just don’t know with a guy like that. The people here say that’s, basically, what’s on Virgil’s mind, if he’s thinking about anything.”

“Jesus,” Ryan said. “You actually do things like that?”

“Yeah, well, if we can’t get to Bobby through channels, you know, and put him away, then we motivate Virgil and maybe he can do it. You think anybody’s going to piss and moan over Bobby Lear?”

“ I will,” Ryan said. “Christ, I need him alive… at least for a while. How about Mr. Perez? You find out anything?”

“Not yet. I didn’t have time this afternoon. Tomorrow, if that’s soon enough.”

“Listen, there’s no hurry. It was just a thought,” Ryan said. “The guy’s probably a virgin and says the rosary every night before he goes to bed. But I wouldn’t mind being sure.”

THE GIRL WITHthe stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?”

Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.”

The girl said, “You like to travel?”

Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?”

She was drunk-two o’clock in the afternoon-but didn’t show it, sitting on the bar stool with her denim legs crossed. Maybe when she got up, if she ever did. She looked washed out and needed some sun, or makeup. Her blond hair was dirty, dull, flat to her head and showed dark roots. She was still a good-looking girl, in her late twenties or maybe thirty. She drank her Sauterne and smoked cigarettes and stayed somewhere inside herself.

“You do know him though, huh?”

“Who?”

“Bobby Lear.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You just said a minute ago, I asked you, you said-you called him something.”

“I called him a cocksucker.”

“So you don’t think too highly of him. But you do know him,” Ryan said. “Didn’t you use to go around with him? I don’t know, maybe you still do. That’s what somebody told me.”

“Who?”

“This guy that knows him.”

“Who? Hoo, hoo. I sound like a fucking owl.”

Ryan was patient. He knew he had no choice; he was talking to a drunk. He could resign himself to it, sip his Tab, or get up and leave.

An old man, a bum, had come out as Ryan approached the place-the Good Times Bar-walked across the sidewalk, leaned against the trunk lid of a car, and begun throwing up in the gutter. The old man was back inside, sitting at the bar with a bottle of beer. A black guy, in a maroon outfit, was at the end of the bar, near the door. The black guy was stylish, like a pro athlete, and didn’t look as though he belonged here. Everyone else was drab, their clothes, their expressions. There were a few others, a man at the bar with a hacking cough, two men and a woman at a table. The woman had a high, irritating laugh. Everybody having a good time at the Good Times Bar, with its stale beer smell and afternoon sunlight showing through the venetian blinds. It was the first sunny day in a week, not a trace of smoke haze, and Ryan was sitting in a Cass Avenue bar drinking a can of Tab.

The girl, Lee, was on the fourth double Sauterne that Ryan had counted, the third one he had paid for. She would finish one with six good sips and two cigarettes. When the level was two-thirds of the way down the glass she’d be thinking of the next one.

“I’ve been looking for you for two days,” Ryan said. “You know that? I started down there a few blocks, near Wayne, went in every bar on Cass. Then today, I came in here, I saw you and I had a hunch, I don’t know why. I said to the bartender, hey, isn’t that Lee down there?”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“You know Bobby Lear, though. Robert Leary, Jr. What do you call him?”

“Shithead.”