LITMIR.BIZ

      The man at the end of the bar sobbed into his hands and no one paid the slightest attention. A mirrored ball in the ceiling threw spinning diamonds of cut light over men slow-dancing to a torchy Bette Midler ballad. Though it wasn’t quite three, the dark bar was filling with the after-work crowd, adding to the others who’d skulked here since the door opened. A fat man with cow eyes gave me a once-over and licked his lips. I sent him a wink and a glimpse of shoulder holster. He disappeared like smoke in a hurricane.

      Squill’s “deployment plan” meant putting Harry and me on the shoe-leather trail, aiming us at gay bars around town. Harry’d taken his own list and gone a-hunting. Though the bars had been checked once, we were retracing with Deschamps’s photo.

      Canvassing bars is easy on TV, where one bartender works around the clock and knows every client down to shoe size. In reality even a modest bar might have a half-dozen regular barkeeps, plus part-timers on call. Even if you sat all the employees in one room and showed them the photos, it’d still be a crapshoot. My dictum for the experience in six words: memories are faulty and people lie.

      The bartender was a guy with cartoonishly huge muscles and a penchant for black leather: cap, vest, belt, chaps. His sideburns looked like black leather pasted in front of his ears. He wasn’t a tall guy, five ten or so, but nail a chrome grille to his chest and he’d have been a Kenworth. His skin looked oiled under the black vest, the better to define the pecs, I guessed. I flashed the shield and set the photos on the bar.

      “Seen either of these gentlemen?” I asked the Steroid King.

      “No,” he said.

      “You didn’t look at the pictures.”

      “True.” He pumped his fists to make the muscles in his forearms jump; they looked like steaks wrestling beneath his skin. He gave me bunker-slit eyes and said, “Good-bye.”

      I pointed to a corner booth where several men vamped and giggled. “Look over there, Meat. I’ll bet each one’s carrying something. Smoke, Ecstasy, acid…I’ll walk over and check them out. They’ll mask fear with belligerence. I’ll become frightened for my safety and call for backup. Cops will rush in, the place will clear out. What will that do to your tips?”

      The steaks went wild. “You think you’re a tough guy?”

      I sighed. “Worse. I am a busy guy.”

      Meat stared at me, pursed his lips, then shrugged and put his elbows on the bar. He studied the photos.

      “Oh,” he said, and—inappropriate to his image—tsk-tsked.

      “What?”

      He pushed Deschamps’s picture aside and tapped a sausage finger on Nelson’s face. “This one. He’s been around. And I mean that both ways.”

      “Enlighten me, Buddha.”

      “A charmer, knows how to talk and act above his station. He’ll come in occasionally, pick off some old queen who’ll keep him for a while.”

      “Know anyone who’d like to see him boxed and shipped?”

      It took a second to sink in. “He’s dead?”

      I nodded. The barkeep flipped the photo back. “Sad. I remember him as kind of goofy; a dreamer. He never really hurt anyone, maybe broke a few old men’s hearts.” He paused, thinking. “He was in here a couple-three weeks back. I remember because he usually drank well booze, but he’d switched to top shelf. Buying rounds instead of hustling them. Said he found himself a bottomless honey jar and life was going to get sweet.” The bartender shook his head, grunted a laugh. “Like I’ve never heard that one before.”

      “You didn’t believe him?”

      The barkeep was still laughing when I walked out the door.