the
crossword
puzzles while he was sitting on his duff waiting for my old man. Half
the
useless crap running around in my head, I'd learned from Bermuda
Schwartz, and
all I could recall was his satchel face, his big red hands and the
silly name
everybody called him. Go figure.
Chapter 8
In
a pulp
novel, an erstwhile local private dick like me, faced with finding an
old
ex-cop, would simply call his cynical, weather-beaten buddy on the
police
force. He'd have the buddy see if the pension check was still going
out, and,
if so, where to. Wham bam thank you ma'am. Problem was, I didn't have a
buddy
on the police force. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, it was
generally
agreed that one of the quickest and surest paths to a lifetime of
obscurity on
the Seattle Police Department was to have anything to do with me.
That's
because my ex-wife Annette was now working her marital magic on a
certain Seattle police captain
named Henry Monroe. He'd started out cheerful enough. Henry the
Magnanimous,
always greeting me loudly and clapping me on the back, in the assured
manner of
a man who feels certain he's grabbed the brass ring. Not for long,
though. No
... a couple of years of connubial bliss and, without so much as a
word, he'd
started having me removed from the Public Safety Building whenever he
saw me in
the halls. Couldn't say as I blamed him either. I figured it was one of
those
unfortunate "Friends don't let friends ..." kind of things. Love may
be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. I'd met Claire Wells right
after
my divorce, when well meaning friends had fixed us up on a blind date.
She'd
recently separated from some guy named Joe. Yeah, I knew better, but in
those
days my urges usually got the upper hand, so to speak. I'd taken her to
Ristorante Isabella, an atmospheric Italian joint on Third Avenue.
You know, a little wine, a little
pasta, a couple of choruses of "Volare." Whoa oh. You never know. It
could happen.
Not
this time
though. Hell, we never even made it through the salad. Half a glass of
wine and
twenty minutes of inane conversation later, she looked out over the rim
of a
nice glass of Estancia Chardonnay, narrowed her slate-gray eyes and
popped the
question.
"Are
you
having a good time?"
Usually,
answering a question such as this is easy, because, unless you're a
barbarian,
your options are limited. As I see it, you either pass the buck with a
question
of your own such as "Are you?" A pathetic, shopworn ruse lacking in
both style and originality. Or you try to change the subject to
something . . .
anything less threatening than your own feelings. "How's the wine?"
for instance. The problem with this sort of random segue is that, a la
Groucho
Marx, anybody who'd fall for it wouldn't be somebody with whom you'd
want to be
sharing a meal. So you're pretty much left doing what everybody does in
a
moment like that, you tell 'em what it is you think they want to hear.
"Oh, yeah. Real good." It's like apres sex. I mean, what the hell are
you going to tell somebody you've just been doing the hokey pokey with
when
they look over and give you some variation of the old "It was good for
me;
was it good for you?" I mean, it's not like you can yawn into the back
of
your hand and reckon how, all in all, you'd rather have been pulling
weeds in
the front yard. No sir. You can't even sidestep the issue with
something like
"I especially liked the part where you moved." No . . . no. Unless
you want to be short-listed for the Goth of the Month Award, you come
up with
something life-affirming. Period. No matter what anybody says, some
situations do
not cry out for candor.
That's
why the
words that escaped my lips so startled me.
"Not
a
bit," I said.
Claire
Wells
smiled. "So . . . it's not just me," she began. "I was afraid
that maybe I wasn't ready for something like this. That maybe it was
just too
soon for me." She took another sip. "But it's not that, is it? We
don't agree on anything, do we?"
I
figured in
for a
crossword
puzzles while he was sitting on his duff waiting for my old man. Half
the
useless crap running around in my head, I'd learned from Bermuda
Schwartz, and
all I could recall was his satchel face, his big red hands and the
silly name
everybody called him. Go figure.
Chapter 8
In
a pulp
novel, an erstwhile local private dick like me, faced with finding an
old
ex-cop, would simply call his cynical, weather-beaten buddy on the
police
force. He'd have the buddy see if the pension check was still going
out, and,
if so, where to. Wham bam thank you ma'am. Problem was, I didn't have a
buddy
on the police force. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, it was
generally
agreed that one of the quickest and surest paths to a lifetime of
obscurity on
the Seattle Police Department was to have anything to do with me.
That's
because my ex-wife Annette was now working her marital magic on a
certain Seattle police captain
named Henry Monroe. He'd started out cheerful enough. Henry the
Magnanimous,
always greeting me loudly and clapping me on the back, in the assured
manner of
a man who feels certain he's grabbed the brass ring. Not for long,
though. No
... a couple of years of connubial bliss and, without so much as a
word, he'd
started having me removed from the Public Safety Building whenever he
saw me in
the halls. Couldn't say as I blamed him either. I figured it was one of
those
unfortunate "Friends don't let friends ..." kind of things. Love may
be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. I'd met Claire Wells right
after
my divorce, when well meaning friends had fixed us up on a blind date.
She'd
recently separated from some guy named Joe. Yeah, I knew better, but in
those
days my urges usually got the upper hand, so to speak. I'd taken her to
Ristorante Isabella, an atmospheric Italian joint on Third Avenue.
You know, a little wine, a little
pasta, a couple of choruses of "Volare." Whoa oh. You never know. It
could happen.
Not
this time
though. Hell, we never even made it through the salad. Half a glass of
wine and
twenty minutes of inane conversation later, she looked out over the rim
of a
nice glass of Estancia Chardonnay, narrowed her slate-gray eyes and
popped the
question.
"Are
you
having a good time?"
Usually,
answering a question such as this is easy, because, unless you're a
barbarian,
your options are limited. As I see it, you either pass the buck with a
question
of your own such as "Are you?" A pathetic, shopworn ruse lacking in
both style and originality. Or you try to change the subject to
something . . .
anything less threatening than your own feelings. "How's the wine?"
for instance. The problem with this sort of random segue is that, a la
Groucho
Marx, anybody who'd fall for it wouldn't be somebody with whom you'd
want to be
sharing a meal. So you're pretty much left doing what everybody does in
a
moment like that, you tell 'em what it is you think they want to hear.
"Oh, yeah. Real good." It's like apres sex. I mean, what the hell are
you going to tell somebody you've just been doing the hokey pokey with
when
they look over and give you some variation of the old "It was good for
me;
was it good for you?" I mean, it's not like you can yawn into the back
of
your hand and reckon how, all in all, you'd rather have been pulling
weeds in
the front yard. No sir. You can't even sidestep the issue with
something like
"I especially liked the part where you moved." No . . . no. Unless
you want to be short-listed for the Goth of the Month Award, you come
up with
something life-affirming. Period. No matter what anybody says, some
situations do
not cry out for candor.
That's
why the
words that escaped my lips so startled me.
"Not
a
bit," I said.
Claire
Wells
smiled. "So . . . it's not just me," she began. "I was afraid
that maybe I wasn't ready for something like this. That maybe it was
just too
soon for me." She took another sip. "But it's not that, is it? We
don't agree on anything, do we?"
I
figured in
for a
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