Michael Crichton - A Case of Need

I KILLED TWO HOURS IN MY STUDY, looking over old texts and journal articles. I also did a lot of thinking. I tried to put it together, to match up Karen Randall, and Superhead, and Alan Zenner, and Bubbles and Angela. I tried to make sense of Weston, but in the end nothing made sense.

Judith came in and said, “It’s nine.”

I got up and put on my suit jacket.

“Are you going out?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

I grinned at her. “To a bar,” I said. “Downtown.”

“Whatever for?”

“Damned if I know.”

The Electric Grape was located just off Washington Street. From the outside it was unimpressive, an old brick building with large windows. The windows were covered with paper, making it impossible to see inside. On the paper was written: “The Zephyrs Nightly. Go-Go Girls.” I could hear jarring rock-’n’-roll sounds as I approached.

It was ten P.M. Thursday night, a slow night. Very few sailors, a couple of hookers, down the block, standing with their weight on one hip, their pelvises thrust outward. One cruised by in a little sports car and batted her mascara at me. I entered the building.

It was hot, damp, smelly, animal heat, and the sound was deafening: vibrating the walls, filling the air, making it thick and liquid. My ears began to ring. I paused to allow my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room. There were cheap wooden tables in the center booths along one wall, and a bar along another. A tiny dance floor near the bandstand; two sailors were dancing with two fat, dirty-looking girls. Otherwise the place was empty.

On stage, the Zephyrs were beating it out. Five of them—three steel guitars, a drummer, and a singer who caressed the microphone and wrapped his legs around it. They were making a lot of noise, but their faces were oddly bland, as if they were waiting for something, killing time by playing.

Two discotheque girls were stationed on either side of the band. They wore brief costumes, bikinis with fringes. One was chubby and one had a beautiful face on a graceless body. Their skins were chalky-white under the lights.

I stepped to the bar and ordered straight Scotch on the rocks. That way, I’d get Scotch and water, which was what I wanted.

I paid for my drink and turned to watch the group. Roman was one of the guitarists, a wiry muscular man in his late twenties, with a thick head of curly black hair. The grease shone in the pink stage lights. He stared down at his fingers as he played.

“They’re pretty good,” I said to the bartender.

He shrugged. “You like this kinda music?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“Crap,” the bartender said. “All crap.”

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Opera,” he said and moved down to another customer. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding me or not.

I stood there with my drink. The Zephyrs finished their piece, and the sailors on the dance floor clapped. Nobody else did. The lead singer, still swaying from the song, leaned into the microphone and said, “Thank you, thank you,” in a breathless voice, as if thousands were wildly applauding.

Then he said, “For our next song we want to do an old Chuck Berry piece.”

It turned out to be “Long Tall Sally.” Really old. Old enough for me to know it was a Little Richard song, not Chuck Berry. Old enough for me to remember from the days before my marriage, when I took girls to places like this for a wild evening, from the days when Negroes were sort of amusing, not people at all, just a musical sideshow. The days when white boys could go to the Apollo in Harlem.

The old days.

They played the song well, loud and fast. Judith loathes rock ’n’ roll, which is sad; I’ve always kept a taste for it. But it wasn’t fashionable when our generation was growing up. It was crude and lower class. The deb set was still fixed on Lester Lanin and Eddie Davis, and Leonard Bernstein hadn’t learned the twist yet.

Times change.

Finally the Zephyrs finished. They hooked a record player to their amplifiers and started the records going. Then they climbed down off the stage and headed for the bar. As Roman walked toward me, I came up to him and touched his arm.

“Buy you a drink?”

He gave me a surprised look. “Why?”

“I’m a fan of Little Richard.”

His eyes swept up and down me. “Get off it,” he said.

“No, seriously.”

“Vodka,” he said, sitting down next to me.

I ordered a vodka. It came, and he gulped it down quickly.

“We’ll just have another,” he said, “and then we can go talk about Little Richard, right?”

“O.K.,” I said.

He got another vodka and carried it to a table across the room. I followed him. His silver suit shimmered in the near darkness. We sat down, and he looked at the drink and said, “Let’s see the silver plate.”

“What?”

He gave me a pained look. “The badge, baby. The little pin. I don’t do nothing unless you got the badge.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“Christ,” he said, “when they gonna get some bright fuzz?”

“I’m not fuzz,” I said.

“Sure.” He took his drink and stood up.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me show you something.”

I took out my wallet and flipped to my M.D. card. It was dark; he bent down to look at it.

“No kidding,” he said, his voice sarcastic. But he sat down again.

“It’s the truth. I’m a doctor.”

“O.K.,” he said. “You’re a doctor. You smell like a cop to me, but you’re a doctor. So let’s have the rules: you see those four guys over there?” He nodded toward his group. “If anything happens, they all testify you showed me a doctor’s card and no badge. That’s entrapment, baby. Don’t hold in court. Clear?”

“I just want to talk.”

“No kidding,” he said and sipped the drink. He smiled slightly. “Word sure does get around.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah,” he said. He glanced at me. “Who told you about it?”

“I have ways.”

“What ways?”

I shrugged. “Just…ways.”

“Who wants it?”

“I do.”

He laughed. “You? Get serious, man. You don’t want nothing.”

“All right,” I said. I stood up and started to go. “Maybe I got the wrong man.”

“Just a minute, baby.”

I stopped. He was sitting at the table, looking at the drink, twisting the glass in his hands. “Sit down.”

I sat down again. He continued to stare at the glass. “This is good stuff,” he said. “We don’t cut it with nothing. It’s the finest quality and the price is high, see?”

“O.K.,” I said.

He scratched his arms and his hands in a quick, nervous way. “How many bags?”

“Ten. Fifteen. Whatever you have.”

“I got as much as you want.”

“Then fifteen,” I said. “But I want to see it first.”

“Yeah, yeah, right. You can see it first, it’s good.”

He continued to scratch his arms through the silver material, then smiled. “But one thing first.”

“What’s that?”

“Who told you?”

I hesitated. “Angela Harding,” I said.

He seemed puzzled by this. I could not decide whether I had said something wrong. He shifted in his chair, as if making up his mind, then said, “She a friend of yours?”

“Sort of.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Yesterday,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “The door,” he said, “is over there. I’ll give you thirty seconds to get out of here before I tear you to pieces. You hear me, cop? Thirty seconds.”

I said, “All right, it wasn’t Angela. It was a friend of hers.”

“Who’s that?”

“Karen Randall.”

“Never heard of her.”

“I understand you knew her quite well.”