He had drunk whiskey sours the day they’d had lunch together, Carella remembered, but he was drinking martinis tonight. Good. The more potent the drinks, the looser his tongue might become. Carella looked around the room. The men ranged in age from the low thirties to the late fifties, a scant dozen in the place at this early hour, all of them neatly dressed in city weekend clothes, sports jackets and slacks, some wearing shirts and ties, others wearing shirts with ascots, still others wearing turtlenecks. The women, half in number, were dressed casually as well—pants suits, skirts, blouses or sweaters, with only one brave and rather ugly soul dressed to the teeth in a silk Pucci. The mating game, at this hour, consisted of sly glances and discreet smiles; no one was willing to take a real gamble until he’d had an opportunity to look over the entire field.
“What do you think of it?” Fletcher asked.
“I’ve seen worse,” Carella said.
“I’ll bet you have. Would it be fair to say you’ve also seen better?” Their drinks arrived at that moment, and Fletcher lifted his glass in a silent toast. “What kind of person would you say comes to a place like this?” he asked.
“Judging from appearances alone, and it’s still early . . .”
“It’s a fairly representative crowd,” Fletcher said.
“I would say we’ve got a nice lower-middle-class clientele bent on making contact with members of the opposite sex.”
“A pretty decent element, would you say?”
“Oh, yes,” Carella answered. “You go into some places, you know immediately that half the people surrounding you are thieves. I don’t smell that here. Small businessmen, junior executives, divorced ladies, bachelor girls—for example, there isn’t a hooker in the lot, which is unusual for a bar on the Stem.”
“Can you recognize a hooker by just looking at her?”
“Usually.”
“What would you say if I told you the blonde in the Pucci is a working prostitute?”
Carella looked at the woman again. “I don’t think I’d believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, to begin with, she’s a bit old for the young competition parading the streets these days. Secondly, she’s in deep conversation with a plump little girl who undoubtedly came down from Riverhead looking for a nice boy she can bed and eventually marry. And thirdly, she’s not
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Fletcher said. “Never even saw her before tonight. I was merely trying to indicate that appearances can sometimes be misleading. Drink up, there are a few more places I’d like to show you.”
He knew Fletcher well enough, he thought, to realize that the man was trying to tell him something. At lunch last Tuesday, Fletcher had transmitted a message and a challenge:
Fanny’s was only twenty blocks away from Paddy’s Bar & Grille, but as far removed from it as the moon. Whereas the first bar seemed to cater to a quiet crowd peacefully pursuing its romantic inclinations, Fanny’s was noisy and raucous, jammed to the rafters with men and women of all ages, wearing plastic hippie crap purchased in head shops up and down Jackson Avenue. If Paddy’s had registered a seven on the scale of desirability and respectability, Fanny’s rated a four. The language sounded like what Carella was used to hearing in the squadroom or in any of the cellblocks at Calcutta. There were half a dozen hookers lining the bar, suffering severely from the onslaught of half a hundred girls in skin-tight costumes wiggling their behinds and thrusting their breasts at anything warm and moving. The approaches were blatant and unashamed. There were more hands on asses than Carella could count, more meaningful glances and ardent sighs than seemed possible outside of a bedroom, more invitations than Truman Capote had sent out for his last masked ball. As Carella and Fletcher elbowed their way toward the bar, a brunette, wearing a short skirt and a see-through blouse without a bra, planted herself directly in Carella’s path and said, “What’s the password, stranger?”
“Scotch and soda,” Carella said.
“Wrong,” the girl answered, and moved closer to him.
“What is it then?” he asked.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“Some other time,” he answered.
“That isn’t a command,” she said, giggling, “it’s only the password.”
“Good,” he said.
“So if you want to get to the bar,” the girl said, “say the password.”
