Small Town

“Or spiders. That’s what women need men for, you know. To kill spiders. The day she saw me kill a spider in the kitchen, Jacqui knew we had a chance of making it together. You’ve had some bad luck, Jerry. One of your customers went home with the wrong guy, and another one opened the door to the wrong guy, but they were two different guys. They’re sure the writer killed Marilyn, and they’re just as sure he had nothing to do with the mess at the whorehouse.”

“Mess,” he said, “does not begin to describe it.”

“Don’t quibble, Jerry. Stay with me on this. And bear in mind one of the lessons sobriety teaches us. Your lifelong conviction notwithstanding, you are not actually the piece of shit the world revolves around.”

“Meaning?”

“You tell me.”

He thought about it. “Meaning I’m the only connection between Marilyn and Molly, and that’s just coincidental. They’re not dead because they had the bad luck to hire me.”

“Very good. Now go to a meeting.”

“I just came from a meeting.”

“So?”

“I guess another one couldn’t hurt just now. Lois? Suppose it happens again?”

“Happens again? I don’t... oh, you mean if you walk in on a third dead body?”

“It would be a fifth, actually. A third, what did you call it? A third mess.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If that happens, you can go back to Hamtramck. I’ll even pay your plane fare. But Jerry? No matter how many dead bodies you find, you still can’t drink.”

In the end, he didn’t even take a day off. He couldn’t really afford to; the closing of the whorehouse represented a serious drop in his income. So he got up each morning and took care of the three bars, then serviced whatever residential customers were on his schedule. And went to as many meetings as he could fit in.

This morning, Saturday, the forecast was for near-record levels of heat and humidity, and you could already feel both indicators starting to climb by the time he got outside. Saturdays and Sundays were light days, morning days, with nothing on his schedule but the three bars. They were apt to be grungier than usual on Saturday mornings, after the intensity of Thank-God-It’s-Friday celebrating, and sometimes a bartender, eager to get out of there after an especially late night, would slack off on his part of the deal, leaving the chairs on the floor, say, and unwashed glasses on the bar top.

He walked to Death Row, and long before he got within sight of the place he was breathing in the smell of it, the strong odor of a fire that had been put out with water. He paid no attention, because it was something you smelled a lot in that part of town. The Hudson piers would catch fire, especially on the Jersey side, and the creosote-soaked timbers would send up plumes of black smoke for hours.

Then he drew closer and saw four or five people gathered on the sidewalk across from Death Row, which was unusual at that hour, when the block was almost invariably deserted. And he looked at what they were looking at, and saw the windows all broken out on the building’s upper floors, and the streaks of soot and fire damage on the lintels.

He joined the four men across the street. They were quick to tell him what had happened, although they had slightly different versions. There’d been a fire, certainly, and it had started in the basement leather bar, Death Row, and pretty much gutted the entire structure before the firefighters got it under control.

“They threw one rough trade type out, and he came back with a gun and opened up on everybody, and then he started a fire.”

“I didn’t hear anything about a gun. Just some queen with a resentment, and Buddha was killed trying to keep her from getting in the door.”

“Please. It was bashers, it had to be.”

“Every time a gay man stubs his toe somebody calls it gay-bashing.”

“Well, what do you call it when three gay bars go up in flames on the same night? Do you think they were struck by lightning?”

“I felt so wonderful during Gay Pride Week, and now this has to happen. I heard there were over thirty people killed at Death Row alone.”

“I heard forty.”

“I heard twenty-seven, including some of the people who lived upstairs.”

“People actually lived upstairs of that hole?”

“A friend of mine, he’s a nurse at St. Vincent’s in the Burn Unit, and he said they brought in men with third-degree burns over eighty percent of their body. When it’s that bad you’re not expected to live, and it’s probably better if you don’t.”

“I can never remember, is it first-degree that’s the worst?”

“Only with murder. With burns, third-degree is the worst.”

“There’s no fourth degree?”

“Only what the firemen call Crispy Critters.”

“Oh, gross.”

“I heard it was worse at the other bars.”

“No, I heard Death Row was the worst.”

“I just hope the cops get them. It must have been two or three of them, because they spilled a whole fifty-gallon drum of petrol down the stairwell.”

“The drums hold fifty-five gallons, and when did you turn into an Englishman?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Petrol? She thinks she’s Camilla Parker-Bowles.”