least sit there and smell the combination.
Danny had not answered Hayes and seemed to have forgotten there had even been a question. He was even farther gone than I’d thought.
But Hayes was as determined as Connie. If he had to sober Danny up first, so be it, but he’d get what he wanted before the night was through. He pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s and led Danny inside to a booth, where he left him slumped in drunken contentment before leaving to wash his hands. I can’t say I blamed him. Danny pulled the ambience of the joint way down, and that was tough to do without breaking the law.
I glanced around at the weary patrons scattered around the dining room. At this hour, in this block, it was mostly filled with hookers taking a break, highway drivers fueling up on coffee, an occasional trucker overloading on cheap eats, and college kids trying to find the right combination of food and caffeine to keep them going all night.
There was usually a cop or two among the mix, but tonight there were just two detectives: one drunk and one dead. We made quite the pair.
I had to choose where to sit. I could either endure Danny’s reek, or I could sit next to Hayes and be bathed in the despair that had started to overwhelm me whenever I was near him. I decided to take a seat in the empty booth adjacent to theirs, where we’d be separated by little more than a half-wall divider. When Hayes returned from the washroom, he stood for a moment staring down at a near-slumbering Danny. Hayes was wearing a gray golf shirt and a pair of charcoal gray pants, both so precisely ironed they looked fresh from the rack. He had no expression on his face, nor could I discern a trace of his emotions. He simply stared, his unnaturally dark eyes taking in every detail of Danny, noting his rumpled clothes and stained shirt, the unwashed hair lying in limp strands across his ruddy skull, the unmatched socks, the class ring where a wedding band would be worn. His eyes flickered over Danny’s greasy all-weather coat, folded haphazardly beside my old partner, and then he shook his head lightly, as if to wake himself from a trance, and pulled a handkerchief from a pants pocket. Wiping the seat down with it, he sat across from Danny and said loudly, “Detective Bonaventura.”
Danny sat up straight, startled, recognized Hayes, and pretended to have been alert the entire time. It was a sad ritual and fooled no one but Danny. But he needed to do it anyway. “Yes?” Danny asked. “How was the restroom?”
Hayes hesitated, peering at Danny over the menu. “Fine, thank you.”
The waitress arrived and it was clear she had seen Hayes wipe down the booth. It had offended her. She was a black woman with an elaborate ringlet hairdo and she gave Hayes a contemptuous look. I was surprised. I felt a flare of anger in Hayes so swift and so strong it was as if he had raised a hot poker and was preparing to swing. He reeled his fury back in and ignored the woman as she produced a grimy bar cloth, then insisted on scrubbing the tabletop vigorously while Danny stared on, befuddled.
Hayes lowered the menu so that only his black eyes showed above it. He stared at the waitress and she froze, having seen something in his eyes she recognized. “That will be fine, thank you,” Hayes said in a clipped voice. The waitress, in a hurry now to get away, slipped the cloth into her apron pocket and pulled out a pad and pen. She did not look at Hayes again.
After ordering black coffee for himself, Hayes waited, not speaking, while Danny wolfed down a huge platter of hash browns, eggs, and sausages, then drained two cups of coffee. I guess walking out on dinner with Maggie had put a crimp in his eating schedule. I couldn’t imagine what his guts were like these days. It was a wonder he was still walking around. His body was poisoned hourly by what he put into it. “That hit the spot,” he said when he was done. He patted his belly, gulped down a quart-sized glass of cola, and announced he needed to drain his lizard.
Hayes did not so much as twitch a face muscle during the entire spectacle. I thought of a spider, sitting immobile in