back end of a pool hustle work, but then I thought, Why bother? Talking to a Mirplo about strategy is like talking to two-year-old about sharing. “You go,” I said. “I’m gonna wait this out.”
“I gotta say, man, it’s not like you to get hooked on trim.” Hooked on trim? Who talks like that? “But I’m not gonna leave you, buddy. I’ll be your wingman.”
“Thanks anyway. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, huh? But I’ve got no place else to go, and besides …” again the thumb-and-forefinger gesture. “… no scratch.”
I sighed heavily. “Will twenty get you in the wind?”
“You kidding? Twenty’ll get me half a hooker.” I paid Vic to leave, and I have to tell you, it didn’t feel half bad. Like taking care of a retarded brother. He drove off, his perilous Serenade coughing the blue smoke of an engine badly in need of a ring job. I went back to watching the Java Man, but no one of note came or went. Eventually I decided to go in and check it out for myself.
I had to credit Vic’s observational skill. He’d nailed everyone in the place (except for the girl with the lip ring—I actually thought it worked). I ordered a coffee and read the inspirational quote on the cup: “The truth speaks with a trumpet voice.” That had some logic, but grift logic: If you can’t be right, be loud; if you’re loud enough long enough, you will appear to be right. I settled in at a wobbly round table by the window and occupied myself with someone’s cast-off crossword puzzle. This nimrod had arrived at naked as a synonym for succulent (it’s juicy), which made Alaska’s capital Nuneau.
Okay, then.
At first I kept half an eye on the door, but I soon became absorbed in the puzzle. I’m like a dog with a bone with these things. Once I get my teeth into one, I can’t let go. I was just figuring out that 23 across, linguistic keystone, was Rosetta, when I noticed the guy Vic had identified as a Brian Dennehy-looking motherfucker bending down beside me.
He did bear a resemblance. The barrel chest, the jutting jaw, the close-cropped hair all gone to gray. I made him to be in his sixties but had to give or take a decade, for though he looked hale enough, there was a weary or distracted air about him, like he was feeling, I don’t know, maybe old before his time.
“You dropped this,” he said, picking up a thick wallet from the floor and holding it in his beefy hand. It was a counterfeit Calvin Klein, which you could tell at a glance because the embossed lettering on the front read Calvin Klien. I knew where it came from. They sell them downtown in Santee Alley, along with $20 Bolex watches, Barbee dolls and Narlboro cigarettes.
“That’s not mine,” I said.
“Really? Because it was right under your chair.” He dropped it on the table. We made eye contact. This was unusual, for most strangers won’t look you in the eye, not even over a found wallet fat with cash.
As for the wallet …
“It’s really not mine,” I said. I reinforced the point by patting the bulge in my back pocket. “Turn it in at the counter. Maybe someone will claim it.”
“Okay,” he said. He picked up the wallet, but awkwardly, so that it fell out of his hand and splayed open on the table. (I had to admire the deft clumsiness of the move.) We could both see that the credit card slots all were empty. “Strange,” he said. “There doesn’t appear to be any identification.” He picked up the wallet again and gave it a good going over—making a point, I thought, of showing me the sizable number of sizable bills inside. “Nothing,” he said after his inspection. “Just cash. Oh, and this.”
I knew what “this” would be before he handed it to me: evidence of some kind that the money in the wallet was tainted or criminal and therefore not traceable or returnable. Sure enough, he passed me a creased and folded piece of paper, which bore columns of figures, including dollar amounts and numbers expressed as odds. “What do you think it is?” he asked.
I played along. “Looks like a betting slip,” I said. “Whosever wallet this is, the guy makes book.”
“Book?”
“He takes bets illegally.”
“Really?” The man’s eyes grew wide, as if I’d just fingered a white slaver or serial killer. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”