Denial (13 page)

I quickly did the same and pretended to be watching the dancers.  But I wasn't watching anything.  My eyes were closed.  Rage was boiling up from some primitive place inside me.  I gulped the rest of my scotch and put the glass down quickly to avoid whipping it at the bastard's smug face.  I couldn’t afford to lose control and get myself in a jam, especially in a strip joint.  I took a deep breath, opened my eyes and tried to concentrate on the dog-collar girl, who was smoothing oil onto her immense breasts and tugging at her nipples.  They glistened as the colored lights fell on them.  Then, just as I tossed another dollar on the pedestal, I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I looked over at it — black hair down the fingers, buffed nails, a gold signet ring.  There was no turning back.  I stood up.  My fists were clenched.

"Frank Clevenger.  I thought that was you," Lucas smiled, holding out his hand.  His voice was melodic — an announcer's voice.  Even in dim light his teeth gleamed.  "Good to know I'm not the only perverted doctor north of Boston."

I stood there, glaring into his piercing eyes.  Why hadn't he left when he'd spotted me?

He leaned past me and picked up my empty.  He smelled the glass, then held it in the air.  "Peggy," he shouted to the portly woman tending bar, "another Black for my psychiatrist, and another double bourbon Manhattan for me."  He sat down in the chair next to mine and looked up at me.  "You don't mind if I sit here, do you?  I know some guys like to be alone in a crowd."

"I didn’t think you were the type to worry about another man's space," I said, taking my seat.

He threw a ten down on the pedestal and nodded at the dancer.  "Nice tits!" he yelled.

I cringed.

She chuckled and licked her lips.  Then she crouched down and picked up the ten by squeezing her breasts against one another.  "Thanks," she grinned.  She sat on the pedestal, spread her legs and held her ankles while she rocked back and forth.  The ring through her lips jutted out and receded rhythmically.

The waitress put our drinks down in front of us.  Trevor handed her a twenty and waved off the change.  He glanced at me, then went back to watching the girl.  The song had changed to ‘Ride Like the Wind,’ and she was pretending to straddle a motorcycle.  "Terrible about Sarah Johnston," he said.  "Damn good nurse."

"Yes."

"Damn good-looking nurse, too."

I took a sip of my scotch but said nothing."

"Wrong-place, wrong-time kind of thing, huh?  Just bad luck."

"Looks that way."

"I hear you got up close and personal with the nut who defiled her."

Had Nels Clarke been talking to him?  Had Kathy?  "No one's convicted yet," I said, stills staring straight ahead.

"The papers don't seem to be ambivalent."  He gulped his drink.  "You have a shadow of a doubt?"

I was tired of being civil.  "Not about you."  I looked him in the eyes.

He pursed his lips, shook his head.  "Why come down on me, Frank?  Nobody's forcing Kathy to play both sides."

"I don't doubt the whole thing's a game to you."

"Cat and mouse," he grinned.

Mouse
.  If he meant to irk me by mentioning Kathy's nickname, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.  I turned away and tossed a dollar bill onto the runway.

He took another gulp of his Manhattan.  "I've never thought of her as more than a good fuck, but I think she fell pretty hard."

My fingers went white as my fist tightened around my scotch.  I glanced back at his face, dark from a day's growth of beard, and pictured shards of glass splaying open his Grecian nose and cleft chin.

"It wouldn't solve anything," he said, looking down at my glass.

"Huh?"

He leaned a bit closer.  His face seemed to undulate under the red and blue lights.  "You could do it.  You're bigger and stronger than I am, and I've heard you're capable of almost anything when you're angry.  But I'm not your problem.  Kathy is."

I was infuriated with him but captivated by him.  "You don't take any responsibility for what you did?  What does that make you, some sort of mindless, sexually transmitted virus?"

He laughed.  "On the contrary.  I take full responsibility.  That's why I'm sitting here with you.  I could have disappeared."

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Rachel leave the dressing room and start toward the bar.  My eyes tracked her.  She was wearing sweat pants and a white tank top that hugged her pert breasts.

"Flat," Trevor said.

"Excuse me."

"The girl you're ogling.  She's flat."

I looked at him.  "Maybe she'd excite you more if you knew she was shacking up with someone else."

"Probably.  Are you doing her?"

I picked up my glass and grimaced.  Trevor threw up a hand to shield his face.  I tilted my head back and drank half my scotch.  "You are one sorry fuck.  You mistake rivalry for passion because no one ever really gave a shit about you."

He smiled.  "Interesting theory.  But then how would you explain it if Kathy actually loves me and just screws you?  Not that you could blame her, Frank.  I get closer to her than you'd ever dare.  I get closer than she gets to herself."

I reached into my pocket.  "You need to leave now," I deadpanned.

He nodded to himself.  "Last night we really had fun.  She was phenomenal.  But tell me something.  You seem to dabble in this analytic stuff:  Why does she scream ‘Daddy!’ when I put it in her ass?"

I used my thumb to open my silver knife and kept it hidden under the counter.

"It's kind of like ‘Dadeeeeh!’"

With a flick of my wrist I slashed the bulge in his trousers with just enough force to lay open the cloth.  I knocked my drink over with my other hand.

He jumped up and nearly fell backward.  "Jesus Christ!  Are you crazy?"

"It's razor sharp," I told him.  I smiled to reassure the other customers and patted the spill with my napkin.  "If you're planning to sleep anywhere other than the operating table tonight, you'd want to get going."

He took two steps back.  "Maybe you're right.  I wouldn't want to miss Kathy.  She gets so angry when I'm late."  He turned and headed for the door.

I could have gone after him, but I didn't.  Somewhere underneath all the scotch and cocaine and nicotine, in a part of my brain where the chemical messengers still flowed according to plan, I knew what he had said was true.  He was irrelevant.  My problem was with Kathy.

Had she lied to me?  Was she really screwing him again?  It certainly sounded that way.  The image of her on her stomach, ass up in the air, looking back at him through her blond hair nauseated me.  But even my reserves of narcissism ran shy of letting me judge her from where I sat:  Perverts’ Row, waiting around to send it home to a naked dancer with freckles who called herself Tiffany.

I drained the quarter inch of scotch left in my glass and headed for the men's room.  My vision was slightly blurred.  Too much booze, not enough coke, I thought to myself.  I had to concentrate to walk normally, reminding myself to swing my arms and put heel to the ground before toe.  I walked through the door, past a couple guys standing like soldiers at the urinals, staring straight ahead.  It's alright to blow a kiss at a dancer's genitals at the Lynx Club, but glance at another customer's and you could get to know the cement floor real well.  I locked myself in a stall and took a leak.  Then I got out my package, shoved a pinch in each nostril and inhaled.  The dizziness was gone in a minute.  I walked out.

A new girl with shiny black curls had started to dance to that Bonnie Raitt tune about
chargin’ by the hour
.  She was dressed like a cowboy, with holsters and guns, but she had nothing on under her chaps.

Rachel was sitting with an old man at the bar.  She had her hand on his knee.  I took a seat diagonally across from them and ordered a cup of coffee.  Peggy, the barmaid, a slow-to-move woman who looked about fifty years old and about fifty pounds overweight, set it down on a cocktail napkin for me.

"Five dollars, honey," she said.  She had a warm voice.

"Five bucks for coffee?"

"You want a little Kahlúa or Bailey's in it?  Same price."

"I better not."  I paid her six.

She pulled down on the collar of her polyester crew neck to show me her cleavage.  "Enjoy the show," she chuckled.

I took a sip and looked over at Rachel.  Her eyes met mine, and she smiled, but her attention never really drifted from what the man was saying.  I noticed a bottle of champagne on the bar.  She leaned over, ran her hand all the way up his thigh and whispered something in his ear.

The girl on stage had dropped her chaps and was on her knees, her eyes closed, the barrel of a revolver in her mouth.  She slid it all the way in, pulled it out, licked the length of it, then slid it in again.  I imagined the panic that would erupt if the gun were loaded, and she turned it on the crowd.  Would that not be a poetic mass murder, a stunning expression of rage?  Step up to every man with a dollar in front of him and fire into his lap, then turn around, bend over and fire into his face.  "I just killed the tippers," she could testify.  "Mercy killing.  I thought that's what the dollars were for."  I wondered if I could get her off on an insanity plea.

I felt a pair of hands fall lightly over my eyes.  They were delicate and soft, and, even with the sudden darkness, I felt comforted by them.

"I'll be hurt if you watch the other girls," Rachel said.  She let go and took the stool next to mine.

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  Her strong forehead and the amber color of her eyes impressed me even more than they had before.  "I was starting to feel lonely," I said.

"Trevor gone?"  She glanced back to where he and I had been sitting.  "I figured it was the doctors’ night out."

Was I having a nightmare?  "How the hell do you know Trevor?"

"We all do.  He's a regular.  Candy, the girl with the ring, knows him from... well, professionally."

So Trevor had been buying it, too.  I wondered what Kathy would think of having traces of Candy — and probably half of Revere — inside her.  "How well do
you
know him?" I asked.

"Just to say hello."  She smiled.  "You certainly don't think
I
saw him professionally?"

I thought about it for a second.  "No," I said.  "I didn't."  I took another sip.  It was very bad coffee.  "Who's the old guy?"

"Joe Smith."

"Ah.  Very creative."

"It doesn't matter if he's lying.  I think it's easier for him to talk without telling me his real name."

"What's he talking about?"

"I shouldn't say."

"I won't tell a soul."

"On your oath?"  She squinted at me.  "Do you guys still take an oath?"

"Absolutely."  I held up a hand.  "I swear on the oath of Hippocrates.  ‘Whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.’"

"You memorized it?"

"‘I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman."

"We can talk about that part later.  For now, maybe you can help me out with Joe."

"Sure."

"OK.  He had a skin cancer removed from his inner thigh, near his groin, three months ago.  There's a bad scar, he says, and I guess part of it hasn't healed up."  She squinted at me.  "Can it take that long?"

"At his age, especially if there was any infection."

"OK," she shrugged.  "Anyhow, he says it's still partly open.  So he won't let his wife see him naked, let alone touch him.  He thinks he looks like a freak down there."

"That's what he's talking about?  To you?  Here?"

"It's probably cheaper than talking to you.  And you won't stroke his leg."

"I wouldn't have guessed that was allowed."

"It isn't.  But it makes him feel better, and he's buying champagne — unlike some customers I know —so Peggy told the manager to fuck off."

I glanced over at him.  "People will get what they need."

"Really?  I'm not sure.  I think some people hurt so much they can't take what they need, even when someone wants to give it to them."

You figure you're talking to a stripper and you end up talking to a healer.  God headlines at the Lynx Club.

"So what should I tell him?" she asked.

"He's thinking of himself as a victim, something less than what he was.  For all we know, that's why he's not healing up in the first place.  You need to help him see himself as a survivor.  He's beaten cancer, stared death in the face.  The wound is his badge of courage.  Ask him why he thinks he lived when so many other people die from malignancies.  Ask him how he stood all the pain."

"That will help him?"

I shrugged.  "Maybe.  The truth is, anything you say will help him as long as you keep touching his leg."

"Good," she smiled.  "That's kind of what I thought."  She stood up.  "I dance next.  I should finish getting ready."

"I'll wait here."

"Why not sit up front?"

I couldn't argue with that.  I took a seat back at Perverts’ Row, next to two young guys in pinstriped shirts and club ties who were talking about selling Porsche and Mercedes automobiles.

"The problem with Porsche buyers," the one nearer to me was saying, "is that they're wannabes.  They're a bitch to get financed because they can barely afford the cars.  It's an ego thing with them."  HE took five one-dollar bills from his pocket and laid them on the counter.  "Whereas the Mercedes buyer is within his means.  He doesn't need an image boost.  He needs quality transportation."

"What about Range Rovers," I piped up.

"Snobs with bad credit," he said, turning to me.

"Big repossession car," his friend added.

"Oh," I said.

"You drive a Rover?" the first one asked.

"Yup."

"Sorry," he chuckled.

"Don't worry about it."

"It's true, though.  If you want a truck, get a truck.  A Ram or a Suburban.  I mean, why pretend you're in the middle of a jungle?"

"I'll have to think about that."

He handed me his card: 
JERRY STEIN, MANAGER, MEL'S AUTOWORLD
.  "We take in a lot of preowned trucks.  We can find you a real one."