William Lashner - Falls The Shadow

I stepped through the door and into a neon-lit room, ringed with everything Elvis. Velvet paintings glowing with black light, guitar clocks, gold records, ceramic busts, framed photographs from each Elvis era: Elvis impossibly young, Elvis impossibly handsome, Elvis impossibly svelte in black leather, Elvis impossibly bloated in a white jumpsuit. There were tables, about half full, in the center, bars around the edges, booths in the back. Waitresses dressed like schoolgirls with high hair carried drinks on circular trays. On a narrow stage in the front, a redhead in a ruffled shirt, looking a little like Ann-Margret, belted out the first verse of “Viva Las Vegas” as the words rolled up a television screen and the crowd hooted and clapped along.

A man in dark glasses greeted me with a bright smile. “Welcome,” he said in a deep voice. “Slip?”

I handed it over. He gave it a look.

“Good choice, Franz,” he said. “You want some company tonight?” He thumbed toward a trio of women at the bar with bouffant hair and low blouses. They were nice-looking women once, but once was enough.

“No thanks,” I said. “I already had my fiber today.”

I scanned the scene, found whom I was looking for in a booth in the back. He was sitting alone, hunched over a drink, something dark and almost gone in his glass. He wasn’t viva-ing to Ann-Margret. I wondered if my visit that afternoon hadn’t ruined his day. Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t doubt it.

Gleason glanced up when I sat down across from him, didn’t seem one bit surprised to see me. “How’d you find this place?” he said.

“Torricelli.”

He nodded, he understood. Torricelli hadn’t just told me about the bar, he had told me about the shooting, too. “I should hang up a sign,” he said. “Do not disturb.”

“You know that piece of gum you step on and can’t get off your shoe?” I said. “It ends up on your hand, your other hand, your nose. That piece of gum? That’s me.”

“I was thinking of something else that sometimes gets on my shoe. What do you want?”

“I want to know if you were the one to teach Seamus Dent karate.”

His eyes widened a bit, as if he were about to say something, but just then one of the waitresses with the schoolgirl skirt and high hair came to our table. Her eyes were rimmed dark, her lips were red as paint.

“Anything, boys?” she said.

“My treat,” I said.

“Wonder of wonders,” said Gleason. “I’ll have another bourbon, neat.”

“Can I have a Sea Breeze?” I said. “With lime?”

“Closest thing we have is a Blue Hawaii,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Vodka, pineapple juice, crème de coconut, and blue Curaçao.”

“Aloha,” I said.

“Thanks, Priscilla,” said Gleason before she swished away.

I raised an eyebrow. “Priscilla?”

“They’re all Priscilla,” he said. “How’d you know about the karate?”

“It made sense. From the stories I’d been hearing, Seamus Dent, big as he was, was never a fighter. Then suddenly he starts giving side kicks like he’s Jackie Chan. Somehow he learned. And then you have this whole Elvis thing going with the sideburns, the little southern twang you give your voice even though you grew up in Manayunk, not Memphis. And the way you described Seamus’s fight with that drug dealer. You seemed to even know the type of kick he used to send him to the ground. It just added up.”

“Aren’t you clever.”

“Well, you know. Deal with cops long enough, it rubs off.”

“Why the hell do you care so much about Seamus?”

“Because he testified against François Dubé.”

He stared at me for a while, saw something in my eyes that made him turn to look at the stage, where the woman was swinging her arms as she wailed the final chorus.

“She’s not bad,” I said. “And she does look a little like Ann-Margret.”

“But not the Ann-Margret of Viva Las Vegas, more like the Ann-Margret of Any Given Sunday. ”

“Can’t have everything.”

Okay, folks, said the DJ, the man who had taken my slip, speaking from off the stage, so his voice was like a disembodied presence. Let’s hear it for the scintillating Elvira. The audience cheered. Next up, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, doing a little blues number from 1957. A young man with blue-black hair in a duckbill and a face like a punching bag stepped up to the stage, took the microphone off the stand, cleared his throat, mumbled, “Let’s get it this time.” After a short blues intro, he started in with a gravelly rendition of “One Night.”

“It wasn’t like your partner was saying,” said Gleason after we both listened a bit to Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, who was not too awful at all. “There wasn’t anything sexual about it.”

“You don’t have to hitch up your pants and talk about the Eagles. It doesn’t matter much to me.”

“But see, that’s the thing. Everyone thinks they understand when they think the worst. But the worst isn’t always the truth.”

“So what was the truth?”

“He was a kid in trouble. I was trying to help.” Gleason finished off his bourbon. “And that, my friend, is the whole sordid story.”

There was something in his voice that didn’t seem to care whether I believed him or not.

“How’d you meet him?” I said.

“There was a killing in Juniata. We crashed a drug house, looking for a witness. Seamus was cowering in a room up the stairs, hugging his guitar. I put away my gun, asked him if he could play that thing. He showed me.”

Priscilla came back with our drinks. I told her to make up another round and to run a tab. Gleason took a gulp of his bourbon and winced, more from the memories, I thought, than the drink. The Blue Hawaii was cold and too sweet, but it looked good in the glass. The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn’t pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can’t drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its lack of conviction.

“Was Seamus good at the guitar?” I said.

“Better than good. You ever hear any recordings of Robert Johnson playing his old Kalamazoo archtop?”

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t understand. Physically he was a mess, filthy, strung out, a black eye, but he could play some blues. So I took him out of there and bought him a cup of coffee. He told me all about the drugs, the things he had done with those friends of his, everything. It was a brutal, sad story, but I saw something in him. He was really sorry. In my racket it’s rare to see it like that, sincere and not put on as a show for a judge. So I got him treatment, got him a job running files. And when it started working out, I helped him even more. Let him stay at my place. We used to play guitar and sing together. Spirituals, believe it or not. I did what I could for him.”

“Like fixing his teeth.”

“God knows he needed it. I found a dentist to do it for free. Some guy who had come to the station, passing out his card, looking to do a little public service.”

“And the karate?”

“A boy that big, not able to defend himself. It wasn’t right. I asked myself, what would Elvis do? He’d teach him karate, so that’s what I did. I’m a third-degree black belt, I help out at an inner-city dojo on weekends. I brought him along. After enough years in homicide, you get tired of helping corpses. It was nice to help a boy with still some hope. And I was helping, I could tell. He cleaned up quick.”

How to get down with the King, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley. There was clapping, whistles. Next we have a first-timer. Let’s hear a warm welcome for Franz. Come on up, Franz, and do your thing.