Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

He had no choice. Without telling anyone, Boldt left the office and drove the streets looking for that face. KPLU announced a Clifford Brown cut. Boldt pumped the brakes. The pool cars weren’t serviced well anymore.

Traffic was light for a change. He tried the streets of downtown, drove aimlessly over to Capitol Hill, and then to the address listed in the file. No face, no little boy. He stopped at a supermarket and shopped. He drove home and left off the groceries and tried to speak Spanish to Marina, who looked after his kids. He hugged Miles and kissed Sarah and wondered what the streets were like for a twelve-year-old.

Back in the car, jazz found its way into his bones, like the lingering warmth that follows a bath. It lived inside him. He let it out as often as possible, not often enough. He thought that people who lived without music lived tragic lives, but realized that others would say the same about modern art, or poetry, or even dog racing. Each to his own. For him it was jazz, sad and dreary at the moment, like the noon sky. He felt gray all over.

Bear Berenson owned and operated Joke’s On You, a comedy club and music bar with a fish-sandwich menu, a mirrored porthole behind the bar, and, during the evenings, several coeds in their late teens working the tables. On any given night, Bear could be found, slightly stoned, moving between his customers’ tables, one eye on the backsides of the coeds and the other on the bartender, to make sure he wasn’t failing to use the register. After a protracted legal battle with the federal government, Bear, although the victor, had failed to save The Big Joke, his first club and a longtime haunt of Lou Boldt and other cops. Joke’s On You was in Walling-ford, up on 45th, a long way from downtown and his former clientele. This time Bear was aiming jointly at the imports to the U, the young kids with their parents’ credit cards and loose change, and the yuppies turned parents who had abandoned the Beamers for the Caravans. Wallingford had changed a lot in the last ten years, and Bear was there to take advantage. The five-to-seven jazz and cocktail hour was for what Bear called the Headin’ Homes, the young professionals too tired to think, too tired to play mom or dad, but strong enough to stop for thirty minutes of courage. At nine the place rolled into stand-up, the drink prices dropped by a dollar, and the waitresses shed short skirts for black jeans and white tops with a logo of a laughing bear on the breast pocket. In jokes.

At three in the afternoon there were two barflies at the bar, a haze of smoke in the air, and a man behind the bar playing solitaire on a laptop computer. He was a barrel-chested guy but with droopy shoulders, black hair-lots of it-and thick lips. His eyes looked perpetually sad; his lips held back a cynical grin. Bear always looked like he knew something he shouldn’t.

“Rip Van fucking Winkle,” Bear said, the partial grin giving way to a full smile. “How goes, Monk?”

Thelonious Monk was Boldt’s favorite jazz pianist-he played the entire Monk book. Bear had called him this forever. “Just like the Energizer bunny,” Boldt said.

“Lots of dead people keeping you busy?”

That caused one of the two barflies to take note of Boldt. This man nodded at Boldt and Boldt said hello. “Enough to keep me busy,” Boldt answered.

“Obviously too busy to play,” Bear complained. Boldt, who had virtually owned the Headin’ Home happy hour piano slot, had passed it off to Lynette Westendorff, a friend who knew more about jazz than Boldt did police work.

“You don’t like her playing?”

“She’s fine. Better than fine. And she’s better-looking too.”

“And still you’re complaining,” Boldt said, reaching the bar then but not taking a seat on one of the vinyl stools.

Bear shrugged. “Gotta stay in shape,” he said.

Bear’s eyes were bloodshot. He’d been smoking pot already. He used to wait until eight or nine at night, but since the move he started midafternoon and smoked right through until closing. Boldt had tried several times to put him off the habit, but when the friendship seemed threatened he had backed off-he rarely even joked about it anymore. Bear was probably his most consistently loyal friend.

“How long?” Bear asked, meaning the investigation.

It was Boldt’s turn to shrug.

Bear poured his two patrons a drink on the house, locked the cash register, and led Boldt to a far corner table under a large black speaker cabinet from where the owner could keep one eye on the bar. “Afternoon business is really cooking,” he said, gesturing toward his two drunks.

“Lunch?”

“A little better. I don’t know: You like those curlycue fries or good old plank fries?”

“Curlycues.”

“Yeah, me too. You can get an extra quarter for them, but they come frozen, or else you gotta do ’em yourself and they’re time-intensive. The plank fries we can do fresh-simple, easy. I don’t know.”

“Fresh curlycues,” Boldt advised. “They add a touch of class.”

“Probably right. We could use a touch of something around here.”

“New location. It takes time.”

“It takes luck. And advertising. Good talent on stage, and a couple of babes working the floor. I don’t know; I miss downtown.”

“It’s going to work,” Boldt encouraged.

“Not so far it isn’t. People don’t want to part with their money, that’s the thing. It’s not like the eighties. And the stand-up humor has gone into the toilet-it’s all fuck this and fuck that. These kids don’t know anything about structure.”

“There’s always Monday Night Football ,” Boldt teased. Bear hated football, refused to show any of the games.

“Yeah, and opera,” he followed quickly. “The subtitles certainly changed the experience for me.”

Boldt warmed and smiled, realizing that it had been a while since he’d done so, and this was followed by the thought that life is choices, not fated paths, and perhaps his choices had been misguided lately. This was exactly why he stopped to visit with Berenson occasionally: perspective.

“I’ve resorted to backgammon and Monopoly,” the bar owner admitted reluctantly. “Had a Monopoly tournament last Saturday and packed the place with college kids. Sold a lot of beer. The winner gets a free meal.”

“The loser gets two free meals,” Boldt quipped.

They exchanged grins and were silent a moment.

“Is it Liz?” Bear asked.

“You a mind reader?”

“A psychic.”

It reminded Boldt of the case. Of Daphne. The wrong reminders just at that moment.

“I say something,” Bear asked.

“Liz is okay.”

“That means things are fucked.”

“No, they’re okay.”

“Oh, yeah. I know you. Is that why you gave Lynette the gig? Listen, here’s the thing. My take on the problem with adulthood,” began the barroom philosopher who sought to remain as perpetually stoned as possible, as childlike as possible with his bawdy jokes and quick one-liners, “is that you grow up as a kid saying exactly what you’re thinking. You know the way kids do: ‘Hey, look, Uncle Peter’s not bald anymore, but his hair’s a different color in the middle!’ That sort of shit. And as a kid you do basically what you feel like-torture little sisters, take clocks apart. Only over time do you find out what’s acceptable and what’s not. Which is the entire problem; this way, we teach kids to get it wrong. Because as adults it’s just the opposite: We rarely say what we’re honestly feeling or thinking, and we end up doing a lotta stuff we’d just as soon not do. Someone at a dinner party asks how you’re doing, and you answer that everything’s fine, when in fact it might suck big-time but you’re not about to say it; you get up at six every morning, take the trash out, and drag yourself off to a job you hate, all for those three weeks of vacation a year. What’s that all about? How is it we end up getting it all so screwed up?” He added, “As a parent, Monk, you owe it to yourself to think about this.” Wide-eyed, he trained his attention on Boldt. After a moment he asked, “So?”