empty brandy snifter from the booth and wiping the table clean with a cloth that stank of bleach. He could see Becky watching him, puzzled and unamused, but he didn’t care.
‘That guy,’ Tate said to the waitress, ‘the one who was sitting at this table: you ever see him in here before?’
The waitress shrugged. If she were any more bored, she’d have been horizontal.
‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘We’re midtown. Half the people who come in here I never see again.’
‘Did he pay cash or credit?’
‘What are you, a cop?’
‘No, I host a radio show.’
‘Yeah?’ She perked up. ‘What station?’
He told her. It didn’t register.
‘You play music?’
‘No, it’s talk radio.’
‘Oh, I don’t listen to that shit. Hector does.’
‘Who’s Hector?’
‘The bartender.’
Instinctively, Tate looked over his shoulder to where Hector was updating the food specials on the chalkboard. Even in the midst of his labors, Hector found time to wink at Tate again. Tate shuddered.
‘Does he know who I am?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the waitress. ‘Who are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s get back to the question. The guy who was sitting here: cash or credit?’
‘I get you,’ said the waitress. ‘If he paid credit, you could ask to see the slip. Then you’d know his name, right?’
‘Right. You should be a detective.’
‘No, I don’t like cops, especially not the kind that come in here. You sure you’re not a cop?’
‘I look like a cop?’
‘No. You don’t look like anything.’
Tate tried to gauge if he’d just been insulted, but gave up.
‘Cash,’ he said deliberately and, he hoped, for the final time, ‘or credit?’
The waitress wrinkled her nose, tapped her pen against her chin, and did the worst impression Tate had ever seen of somebody pretending not to remember. He wanted to shove her pencil through her cheek. Instead he took ten bucks from his pocket and watched it disappear into the waitress’s apron.
‘Cash,’ she said.
‘Ten bucks for that? You could have just told me.’
‘You gambled. You lost.’
‘Thanks for nothing.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said the waitress. She picked up her tray, with the brandy snifter and the stranger’s copy of the Post on top of it. As she tried to pass him, he took her arm.
‘Hey!’ she said.
‘Just one more question,’ said Tate. ‘Hector, the bartender?’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s gay, right?’
The waitress shook her head.
‘Hector’s not gay,’ she said.
‘You serious?’ said Tate. He was shocked.
‘Sure,’ said the waitress. ‘Hector’s really gay.’
As he and Becky prepared to leave, Tate kept thinking about the kid, Penny Moss. Becky couldn’t be serious, could she? After all, she was talking about knowledge of a crime yet to be committed, about the abduction and murder of a girl, but to what end: to foment unrest, or to boost his ratings? Both?
‘You’re part of something much larger than yourself, Davis,’ Becky told him. She was paying their tab, the fag bartender chuckling to himself as he ran Becky’s credit card, the waitress leaning against the bar, whispering to Hector while he worked, a feral smile on her blunt, graceless face. They’d given up on trying to get her to come over to the table to take Becky’s card. Tate was sure that she was telling the bartender about his earlier conversation with her. He hoped that Hector wouldn’t think Tate was queer for him. He had enough problems.
The waitress giggled at something Hector said to her, and covered her mouth to reply as she saw Tate watching her. You’re trash, Tate thought. You were bred for this work, and you won’t be smiling when you see the tip. Not that he ever intended to set foot in this place again, with its stinking customers and its weird vibe, as though the bar were a portal to another realm, one in which men performed unsavory acts on one another and women degraded themselves by association with them.
Tate hated New York. He hated the smugness of the place, the apparent self-assuredness of even the poorest of its citizens, the minimum wage flunkies who should have kept their eyes low and their heads down but instead seemed to have been infected by the city’s absurd confidence in its own rightness. He’d asked Becky to look into the possibility of broadcasting the show from somewhere – anywhere – else. Well, maybe not just anywhere. Jesus, he might end up in Boston, or San Francisco. Becky told him that it wasn’t possible, that they had an agreement with the studio in New York, that if he moved then she would have to move too and she didn’t want