Dagger Key and Other Stories

  “You got him scoped, huh? He’s dead to rights.” Patty grinned and leaned against the wall, putting one fashionably booted foot up on the bench. “Rudy and me…it was a couple weeks right before the band left town. It was probably stupid. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I don’t.”

  Andrea asked how it happened, and Patty, who obviously wanted to talk about it, said, “You know. Like always. We started hanging out, talking. Finally I asked him straight out, ‘Where’s this going, Rudy?’ Because we only had a couple of weeks and I wanted to know if it was all in my head. He got this peculiar look on his face and kissed me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, but it was deep, you know. That’s why I’m glad Rudy didn’t tell everyone how it was in the sack. It’s a dumb thing to worry about, but…” Her voice had developed a tremor. “I guess that’s what I’m down to.”

  “You loved him,” said Andrea.

  “Yeah. I did.” Patty shook off the blues and sat up. “There wasn’t anywhere for it to go. He’d never leave his kids and I was going off to Pittsburgh. I hated his wife for a while. I didn’t feel guilty about it. But now I look at her…She was never part of our scene. With Vernon and Rudy and the bands. She lived off to the side of it all. It wasn’t like that with you, Andrea. You had your law thing going, but when you were around, you were into it. You were one of the girls. But Beth was so totally not into it. She still can’t stand us. And now it feels like I stole something from her. That really sucks.”

  Platitudes occurred to me, but I kept quiet. Andrea stirred at my side.

  “Sometimes it pays to be stupid,” Patty said gloomily.

  I had a moment when the light and happy babble of the bar were thrust aside by the gonging thought that my friend was dead, and I didn’t entirely understand what she meant, but I knew she was right.

  Patty snagged a passing waitress. “Can I get a couple of eggs over?” she asked. “I know you’re not serving breakfast, but that’s all I eat is breakfast.” She winked broadly at the waitress. “Most important meal of the day, so I make every meal breakfast.”

  The waitress began to explain why eggs were impossible, but Patty cut in, saying, “You don’t want me to starve, do ya? You must have a couple of eggs back there. Some fries and bacon. Toast. We’re huge tippers, I swear.”

  Exasperated, the waitress said she’d see if the cook would do it.

  “I know you can work him, honey,” Patty said. “Tell him to make the eggs dippy, okay?”

  We left McGuigan’s shortly after eight, heading for Corky’s, a workingman’s bar where we could do some serious drinking, but as we came abreast of the statue, Patty said, “Hey, let’s go talk to Stanky.” Stanky and Liz were sitting on the base of the statue; Pin and the other boys were cross-legged at their feet, like students attending their master. The crowd had thinned and was down, I’d guess, to about a hundred and twenty; a third of that number were clustered around the science van and the head scientist, who was hunched over a piece of equipment set up on the edge of the library lawn. I lagged behind as we walked over and noticed Liz stiffen at the sight of Patty. The boys gazed adoringly at her. Stanky cast me a spiteful glance/

 “I heard your EP, man,” Patty said. “Very cool.”

  Stanky muttered, “Yeah, thanks,” and stared at her breasts.

  Like me, Patty was a sucker for talent, used to the ways of musicians, and she ignored this ungracious response. She tried to draw him out about the music, but Stanky had a bug up his ass about something and wouldn’t give her much. The statue loomed above, throwing a shadow across us; the horse’s head, with its rolling eyes and mouth jerked open by the reins, had been rendered more faithfully than had Black William’s face…or else he was a man whose inner crudeness had coarsened and simplified his features. In either case, he was one ugly mother, his shoulder-length hair framing a maniacal mask. Seeing him anew, I would not have described his expression as laughing or alarmed, but might have said it possessed a ferocious exultancy.

  Patty began talking to the boys about the Swimming Holes’ upcoming tour, and Andrea was speaking with Pin. Stanky oozed over to me, Liz at his shoulder, and said, “We laid down a new song this afternoon.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “It’s decent. ‘Misery Loves Company.’”

  In context, it wasn’t clear, until Stanky explained it, that this was a tide.

  “A guy from Dreamworks called,” he said. “William Wine.”

  “Yeah, a few days back. Did Kiwanda tell you about it?”

  “No, he called today. Kiwanda was on her break and I talked to him.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said they loved the tape and David Geffen’s going to call.” He squinched up his face, as if summoning a mighty effort. “How come you didn’t tell me about the tape? About him calling before?”

  This, I understood, was the thing that had been bothering him. “Because it’s business,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you about every tickle we get. Every phone call.”

  He squinted at me meanly. “Why not?”