Small Town

Who else was here, Galvin asked him, and it wasn’t just like pulling teeth, it was like pulling teeth with your fingers. “Draft Guinness,” he said, finally, snapping his fingers and grinning like he’d pulled off a miracle. “Two guys, they’re in couple times a week, sometimes together, sometimes not. Actors.”

“Actors?”

“Or maybe writers. Last I heard, it was something about a screenplay, but I don’t know if he was reading it or writing it. Way they pay for their Guinness, they’re movers.”

He didn’t know which company they worked for, or their names, or where they lived. Just that one was taller than the other.

“Or maybe it was the other way around,” Galvin said, and Ragan looked blank for a moment, then got it and grinned.

“They moved this woman from her boyfriend’s place, and one of them was saying she liked him, and maybe he should have hit on her. Whoever she was, she stiffed them on the tip, or the next thing to it.”

He went over it, found more questions to ask, but that was about all he got. He wrote it out in Eddie’s own words, or what his words would have been if the mope spoke English, and went over it with him and got him to sign it.

Which the bartender did, without hesitation. “You know,” he said, “I had a feeling. That’s another reason I know it was right after the woman got killed, because when I picked up the glass and the bottle it came to me that this could be a clue.”

“To the murder?”

“Not to that murder, but if all of this was, you know, like a movie. A TV show. Whatever. I mean, say something like that happens, and you have a shot of the bartender, and he’s holding up the glass, holding up the bottle, thinking these could have prints on them. I remember I had the thought, I should keep this glass. You know, just in case.”

Jesus, was it possible?

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

Mother of God. “Did you keep the glass?”

A slow smile. “Yeah, matter of fact I did.” And he pointed to a whole shelf of glassware above the back bar. “It’s one of those,” he said, grinning like a fucking chimpanzee. “But don’t ask me which one. It’s hard to tell them apart.”

It took the rest of that day and half of the next, but he found the moving men. There were half a dozen moving firms based in the Village and Chelsea, plus no end of Man-With-Truck operations. If it was just a guy with a van and a helper he was shit out of luck, but this sounded like guys who picked up day work when they weren’t going to auditions, which meant they worked for a company.

He didn’t have much to go on. A choice of three dates, draft Guinness (because the one thing he trusted Eddie on was who drank what), and a moving job for a woman. And Eddie’d come up with one more item, a colleague of the two named Big Arnie, with a droopy eyelid.

Big Arnie turned out to be the straw that stirred the drink, even though his name wasn’t Arnie at all. I know a guy like that, the desk man at one place told him, got an eye goes like this, and more so at the end of the day than early on. And he’s big, but his name ain’t Arnie. It’s Paul.

Big Paul had worked for him, but not lately. He’d had some complaints, no need to go into that now, but the last he heard Paul was working for Gentle Touch, on West Eleventh.

Which was his next stop, where he learned that Big Paul didn’t work there anymore, hadn’t for a while, but yeah, he was working for them around the time Galvin was asking about. And yeah, the books showed they had a local move on such and such a date when the client was a woman, a two-person job, and I guess I can let you have their names.

And he found them, and questioned them separately, and they both remembered the incident. They didn’t remember the guy, they never even saw the guy, but they remembered what Eddie went through, pouring another bottle of Tuborg into two glasses and making them taste it, to make sure the case wasn’t skunky or something. Fucking scene Eddie turned it into, when all it was was a guy didn’t finish his beer.

Sign a statement to that effect? Yeah, I suppose so. Why the hell not?

thirty

No way he was gay. No fucking way.

Jay McGann paused at the threshold, then let himself be drawn into the wet warmth of Susan’s pussy. He lay on top of her, felt her smooth female flesh under him, tasted her mouth.

Would a gay man be doing this?

Earlier, he’d feasted between her legs, and Jesus, wasn’t that a treat, hair pie without the hair. No gay man would be caught dead doing that, not if his life depended on it, not if his own mother came to him in a dream and told him he had to. Pussy was what Wheaties claimed to be, the true breakfast of champions, not teatime with lavender napkins.

Not that there was anything wrong with being gay...

But he wasn’t. A gay man wouldn’t be thrusting gently but firmly with his hips, moving his rock-hard cock in and out of that sweet channel, that velvet vulva, that pathway to paradise.