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By Root 429 0

along Centre Avenue were barred and shuttered, the door handles chained, the broken sidewalks deserted except for a party of girls in starchy pink and yellow and ladies in broad hats who were coming down the steps of the A.M.E. church on the corner of the Hi-Hat’s block. Crabtree guided us into the parking lot of the Hat, where on Friday night that flickering Shadow had danced its corrida with the Galaxie. It was empty of everything but a stiff breeze and a broad whirling fairy circle of paper cups, losing numbers, the want ads, a hair net, fluttering sheets of waxed paper stained with barbecue sauce. The black steel doors of the club were closed tight, a corrugated shutter covered the kitchen window, and the place had the usual forlorn appearance of a nightclub in the daytime, unplugged, unmagical, closed up like a frozen custard stand on a deserted stretch of boardwalk in the winter.

“Oh, well,” I said.

“Oh, well, nothing,” said Crabtree, backing out, dragging the wheel around, putting the car in first. “We’re going to—Hey.”

I looked. At the other end of the alley, where it gave onto the next street, sat a red sports car, parked at a crazy angle and blocking our path, as though its driver had been in too great a hurry to drive it any farther and had abandoned it just so. It was one of those angular new Japanese models that bear such a disturbing resemblance to the naked skull of a rat.

“Think that’s Carl Franklin?” said Crabtree.

“How about if I go see,” I said.

“There’s an idea.”

I nodded. I set the manuscript on the seat and got out of the car. Crabtree looked at it and for a moment I thought he was going to pick it up. He left it lying there. He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes.

“Go on,” he said, pushing in the dashboard lighter. “We don’t have all that much time.”

I went over to the pair of black doors and one-two pounded on them. I watched a lipsticked cocktail napkin chase itself around an oblong patch of mud beside the door. Years ago there had been an evergreen hedge planted here, a survivor from swankier days at the Hi-Hat, which in the summertime bore tiny white flowers as heady as gardenias, but it had proved too attractive a target for the local Six-Inch Rifle Club, and now there was only the patch of mud. I reckoned the shade of lipstick on the napkin as Rose Sauvage. A minute passed. I looked back at the car, praying as I turned my head, He’ll be reading it. He was not. He sat blowing smoke, hands on the wheel, brow furrowed, examining me for signs of an imminent failure of nerve. I pounded on the door, harder this time, and waited, then looked back at Crabtree and shrugged. He spun his hand at the wrist several times in an impatient circle, and I started back to the Le Car. At that moment I heard the report of a heavy bolt being drawn, and the squeal of hinges, and behind the windshield of Hannah’s car Crabtree’s eyes widened. I whirled and found myself looking at a naked chest, hairless, damp, incandescent with muscle, beautiful in color as a slab of raw liver. Clement, the doorman, was not only shirtless, but the fly of his jeans was unbuttoned, revealing two inches of red silk underpants. He was not at all happy to see me.

“Hey, Clement,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

“Uh huh.” The interior of the club was dark behind him but I could hear the slow exhalation of a saxophone and then the irresistible carnal reasoning of Marvin Gaye. Clement folded his twenty-two-inch biceps across his chest. The smell of pussy was on him, around him, drifting out of the gap in his trousers, the smell of cumin and salt pork and sawdust hot off the saw. “You are, though.”

“I know, and I mean it, I’m really sorry. You know me, don’t you?” I laid a hand over my wildly beating heart. “Name’s Tripp. I used to come here a lot.”

“I know your face.”

“Great, okay, well, listen, I’m, uh, my friend and I are looking for someone. Little guy. Tall hair. Black. He has a big nasty scar on his face. Kind of looks like he has an extra mouth, right here.”

I touched my fingers to my cheek. Clement’s eyes tightened