Laura Lippman - In Big Trouble

"The manager here?" she asked the bartender, who was whistling as he worked. At least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He winked and gave her a raffish smile as he jerked his head toward a nearby door.

"In there," he said. "And if you want to be his friend, I hope you're packing some raw meat in your bag."

The man wedged behind the desk in the tiny office was startlingly huge, three hundred pounds plus. He didn't get up when Tess entered, a lack of politesse for which she was grateful. She couldn't help thinking the desk functioned as a retaining wall for his girth and that if he stood, his huge stomach would come rolling toward her like a tidal wave.

"Yeah, they played here," he said, barely glancing at the page from Marianna Barrett Conyers's newspaper. A nameplate, a dusty pink lei looped over one end, provided the name he had neglected to give, Don Kleinschmidt. "Now they don't."

"Weren't they any good?"

"They're great, if you want some chick up there singing stuff nobody's ever heard of and nobody can dance to. All the little girls want to be Fiona fucking Apple these days. Which is okay, if you want your own goddamn Lilith Fair every night. But chick music doesn't bring the guys in, and the guys are the ones who drink. If I wanna sell cranberry juice, I'll get me a Snapple franchise."

Kleinschmidt lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. A bright orange oval one sat on some bracketed shelves on the wall to his right. He could have reached it if he stretched. Apparently, Kleinschmidt had decided that a man's reach shouldn't exceed his grasp, for he flicked the ashes into a half-empty glass of Coke instead, then dropped the hand holding the cigarette behind the desk, as if fearful that Tess might demand a puff. Such stinginess seemed instinctive to him, Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

"I need a band that plays covers, dance tunes," he continued. "Oldies like ‘Wooly-Bully,' ‘Louie, Louie,' and whatever crap is on the radio right now. If the band has a girl singer, she can make like Alannis every now and then, but it's gotta be familiar. People come here to hear music they already know and eat food they already like. The only strange they want is on their pillow, after they leave. Get me? Get me?"

She got him. "And this band, Little Girl in Big Trouble, couldn't do that."

" Wouldn't do it. They said if they were going to play crap, there were people in town who would pay them more money to do it. So they walked. Prima fucking donnas."

"The girl was difficult?"

"No, it was him, mostly." He tapped a ridged, nicotine yellow fingernail on Crow's face. "Fast Eddie here. He didn't like me talking to the girl. He didn't like anyone talking to her. Jealous little schmuck. Almost started something with a customer one night. That was the end of it, you wanna know the truth. We might have worked out our artistic differences, but I draw the line at trying to beat up customers."

Pacifist Crow must be on on a real Sir Galahad trip with his new girlfriend, trying to impress her. "Do you know if they're playing anywhere else in town?"

Kleinschmidt smirked, sucking on his cigarette, then dropping it behind his desk again. His mouth was tiny but full, a child's pink rosebud, incongruously pretty. It made him look as if he had just eaten a small boy, who was now trapped in those mounds of fat. Don't be a fatist , Tess scolded herself. Kleinschmidt would be disgusting at any weight.

"What's the information worth to you?" he asked.

It would have been easy enough to slide a twenty his way, even a fifty. Tess's per diem was based on the understanding that the occasional bribe was one of her operating costs. But she hated the idea of giving this man anything.

"How about if I don't come back here tonight and help the cops pick out all the underage kids at the bar? How much is that worth to you?"

Kleinschmidt shrugged and stole another puff from his cigarette. "I can't be checking IDs too closely. Trinity University is our bread and butter here on St. Mary's Street. I'm flexible with the chronologically challenged. That's why I'm still here after fifteen years, while almost every other place along here has bit the dust."

"I'm waiting," Tess said.

He sucked on his cigarette as if it were a straw in a glass with just a few drops of soda left. "Last I heard, they were playing at the Morgue."

"The Morgue?" First Marianna's house of horrors, now this. Tess was beginning to think San Antonio was one death-obsessed burg.

"Not morgue-morgue. Newspaper morgue. The developer picked up the old San Antonio Sun building cheap, thinking he'd make it into a mini-mall. You know, shops on the bottom, professional offices up above. But he couldn't get the right mix of tenants. So now it's like five music clubs in one. There's a big room downstairs for headliners, then lots of little rooms that can change their personalities to fit whatever nostalgia craze is under way."

"How do you change a room's personality?"

"That's the beauty of it-the decor is totally minimal. All he needs to do is frame a few front pages to change the era. Like, a disco room, with front pages from the seventies-Watergate, Nixon resigns, blah, blah, blah. Eighties? Stock market crash of '87. He's making money hand over fist, the lucky bastard. I heard he based it on someplace up north."

"We had something like that in Baltimore, the Power Plant. But it went bankrupt. Now the Inner Harbor has all the usual theme restaurants-Hard Rock Cafe, ESPN Zone, Planet Hollywood. Anne Tyler was being whimsical when she wrote The Accidental Tourist , but it's come true."

"Yeah, the more people travel, the more they like to stay at home. They got a point. I mean, you ever heard mariachi music? I pay those guys to stop ."

They smiled cautiously at each other, pleased they had found something on which they could agree. "So do you think this band is still at the Morgue?"

"Could be. All I know is that Fast Eddie isn't my problem anymore. It's Friday night, go check out the scene yourself. You'd have a better time here, though. You know what we say, ‘Primo's is primo!'" He dropped the butt end of his cigarette into the dregs of his Coke, where it sizzled and sank.

"Maybe some other time."

Kleinschmidt eyed Tess thoughtfully. She couldn't help feeling he was wondering what she would taste like broiled, with a baked potato on the side. "You look like the demographic I really want-out of college, a little more money to spend than some of these kids. What would make you come here?"

A knife at my throat . But Tess, long the sounding board for Kitty's money-making schemes, couldn't help being engaged by the question. "I don't know-something pop culturish, slightly ironic and totally self-referential. They may call us Generation X, but we're more like Generation Self-Obsessed. Which makes us exactly like the boomers, come to think of it. How about…lunchbox night?"

"Lunchbox night?"

"Everyone brings their lunchbox from fifth grade. In this age range, you'll probably get a lot of ALF, The Cosby Show, Family Ties . You could give prizes for people who can sing the theme songs, play TV trivia. What was the name of Cosby's youngest daughter, that kind of stuff."

"Lunchbox night. I like it! And lunchbox sounds kind of dirty, if you say it right."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"Well, that's what separates the true entrepreneur from the rest of the population," Kleinschmidt said, smug as a Cheshire cat. "I know how to take an idea and run with it."

"Without ever getting out of your chair," Tess said.

The Morgue stood at the intersection of Broadway and McCullough, two streets that began their lives parallel, then somehow managed to meet. Tess, who knew Baltimore so well that she could visualize its every joint and connection, had gotten lost for the second time today, and it made her grumpy. What kind of place had parallel streets that met? For that matter, what was with the street names here? Who was Hildebrand, for Christ's sake, or MacAllister? She wanted streets named Paca, Calvert, and Charles. Those were good names. Here, it was Austin, Houston, Milam, and according to her map book, one called Gomer Pyle. Well, Gollll-eeee.