“Well, I’ll go talk to Reardon and see what I can find. I can’t make it tonight—I’ve got Joshua duty while Jonathan’s at school. But I’ll do it tomorrow sure, and let you know what he has to say.”
I debated, after hanging up, whether I should try to contact Reardon by phone first or just show up at the Spike and hope he’d talk to me. I had no idea if he knew Art probably killed Hysong and if he didn’t…well, I was most curious as to what his reaction might be. I decided that, whatever it was, I’d like to see it firsthand.
It was already close to quitting time and I was pretty sure the Spike didn’t open until five, but I dialed the number just to be sure. No answer. Okay—later, from home. I also wanted to find out what time Reardon got there.
*
Jonathan left for class at his usual time, and Joshua and I did the dishes, after which he wandered off to his room and I went to the phone to call the Spike.
“Spike,” a very butch voice announced on picking up the receiver.
“Two questions,” I said. “What time do you open tomorrow and what time does Pete usually get in?”
“We open at four, and Pete usually comes in around five,” he said. “He’s here now. You want to talk to him?”
“No, that’s okay, I’ll catch him tomorrow. Thanks.” And I hung up.
When Jonathan got home I explained there was an outside chance I might be a little late getting home Thursday and why.
“I should be back in plenty of time before dinner, but if I’m not you go ahead and start without me,” I said. “If I’m late I can warm something up.”
“We’ll wait,” he replied.
“Uh, are you sure? I don’t want to come home and find Joshua on the verge of starvation.”
Jonathan grinned. “We’ll wait,” he repeated. “If he passes out, I’ll just wave a cookie under his nose and that’ll bring him to.”
*
I arrived at the Spike at five fifteen Thursday afternoon. Three customers and a bartender—not Val, who I thought worked days. This guy was only in his late twenties, so I knew it couldn’t be Reardon. I took a seat at the far end of the bar and ordered a beer.
“Val off today?” I asked.
“Val’s not here anymore,” the bartender said.
Ah, the peripatetic life of a bartender.
“Is Pete Reardon here?” I asked as he brought the beer. No glass offered, of course, not that I would have wanted one if it was.
“Yeah. He’s in the office. You want to see him?”
“If I could,” I said, taking out a bill and handing it to him. He took the bill and reached under the bar for a phone and apparently pressed a button.
“Guy here wants to see you,” he said, then put the phone back under the bar and moved off to the cash register.
As I waited, I looked around, noticing that Pete’s ’56 Harley gleamed under the spotlights, though it was facing in the other direction from the last time I saw it. I noticed, too, that it was now almost touching the wall.
I glanced at the bartender just in time to see him looking over my shoulder and indicating me with a nod of his head. I turned to find Pete Reardon towering over me.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I was wondering if we could talk for a few minutes about Art Manners.”
I saw a quick facial twitch.
“What about him?” he asked. “And who are you?”
“Sorry,” I said, remembering I hadn’t introduced myself. “My name’s Dick Hardesty and I’m investigating Cal Hysong’s death. Did you know Manners stole the gun that killed Hysong?”
He scowled, and his eyes darted around the room as if he feared we could be easily overheard, which I sincerely doubted.
“Let’s go into my office,” he said, turning abruptly and heading for a door beside the platform on which his motorcycle sat.
I picked up my beer and followed him.
When we got into his office, which was a surprisingly large storeroom, he pointed to a chair and said, “Sit,” as he pulled another chair out from the desk and turned it around to face me.
“So, Art did what, now?”
“He stole the gun that killed Cal Hysong,” I repeated.
“How do you know that?”
“The police found his fingerprints.”
“On the gun?”
“No, on Jake’s window ledge, which pins Art to stealing the gun, and they figure whoever stole it used it.”
Reardon shook his head slowly in a wide arc.
“That stupid sonofabitch!” he said. I wasn’t quite sure how he meant that.
“You didn’t know anything about it?” I asked.
“He hated Hysong’s guts. I knew that.”
Was it just me, or did I hear the sound of tapdancing?
“Do you think he could have killed him?”
He looked at me as though the thought had never occurred to him. I wasn’t convinced.
“Shit, that sonofabitch was crazy enough to do anything.”
Well, that was an interesting response, I thought.
“He could have?” I echoed. “Do you have any reason to suspect he might have?”
He stared at me for a minute before answering.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t feel right talking about Art—him being dead and all…”
“I understand you and Manners were close.”
He shrugged. “Neither one of us was exactly the ‘close’ type, but we got along pretty good. So what?”
“I’ve heard you’re trying to buy the Male Call and that Manners was going to back you financially.”
“I’ve been thinkin’ of buyin’ the Male Call for a long time, yeah. Brewer’s run the place into the ground, but it’s got a lot of potential for somebody who hasn’t got his head as far up his ass as Brewer does. When Art heard I was thinkin’ about it, he offered to help with the financing. Not that I couldn’t handle it on my own, but both places need a lot of work and a little extra money would come in handy.”
“That was pretty generous of him,” I said. “And what did Art want in return?”
“He didn’t want anything. Like I said, we were friends and Art had more money than he knew what to do with. But we talked about him maybe managing the Spike while I ran the Male Call.”
Interesting, I thought. From what I’d heard, Manners wanted to run the Male Call, which was the bigger bar by far. And I was more than a little skeptical of Reardon’s claim he had enough money to buy Brewer out on his own.
“You really need two leather bars?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were slightly daft. “Why not? This town’s been supporting two leather bars for years. Always competing with each other. Why split the profits when you can have them all? Nothin’ wrong with a monopoly. I can tell you this—if I don’t take over the Male Call, it’s gonna fold. Nobody else’s willing to touch the place with those AIDS rumors and Cal’s death hangin’ over it. Who’s he going to get to buy it? The shape it’s in now? I know the leather scene better’n anybody in town, including Brewer. No, anybody else who tried would fall flat on his face.”
“So, why not let the Male Call fold? Then the Spike’d be the only game in town.”
“Spike’s not big enough,” he said. “And guys like to be able to move around—as long as they got more than one place to go, they’re happy. They don’t give a shit who owns them. And I could save a bundle on volume discounts from the suppliers if I was buyin’ for two bars. Split Specials nights between ’em, different events, different nights, no makin’ it difficult to choose which bar to go to on which night. That way, neither place gets shortchanged. No, it’ll work out great.”
Though I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t quite see how he thought he could overcome the stigma of the AIDS rumors and Hysong’s death. Plus, he’d be bringing with him his own stigma of the Dog Collar fire, which he’d never fully overcome.
I realized we’d gotten off my main line of questioning. Reardon obviously knew more than he was saying, and I wanted to find out what it was.
“So, bottom line,” I said, “do you think Art killed Hysong?”
He took in a long, deep breath and let it out slowly before nodding.
“Like I say, Art could be pretty crazy sometimes. I remember more than a couple of times him sayin’ he wanted to see Cal dead.” After another pause, he continued. “I remember, too, that right after he went to a meeting at Jake Jacobson’s place to talk about what could be done to stop Cal from spreading AIDS, he was telling me about Jake’s collection of rifles. Art said he was thinkin’ about borrowing one to go shoot a rat.”
Hmm, I thought. But I was getting tired of the bobbing and weaving.
“So, do you think Art killed Hysong?”
Another long, deep sigh, then another head nod. “I know he did.”
“And you know this how?”
“He told me.”
Surprise, surprise!
“He told you?” I asked. “When?”
“A couple of days before the ride,” he said. “Art had been acting really strange, really depressed. He was always moody, but I’d never seen him so down.”
“Did you ask him why?”
He shook his head. “I figured he’d tell me if he wanted me to know.”
“But why didn’t you tell the police when you found out he’d killed Hysong?”
“I don’t rat on my friends,” he said simply.
“Well, that’s noble of you, but what about Jake? He’s going to be tried for a murder he didn’t commit.”
Reardon shrugged. “If they know Art stole the gun and have his prints, that should let Jake off the hook. And now that Art’s dead, if the trial does go on and it looks bad for Jake, I’ll step in with what I know.”
“So, why not go to the police now and save everyone a hell of a lot of time and effort?”
“Because I don’t want to get into trouble for not coming forward the minute I knew Art did it. But don’t worry—like I said, if it starts looking like Jake’ll be convicted, I’ll come forward. But not until then. I’ve got too much to lose.”
And in the meantime, Jake goes through hell and the city spends tons of the taxpayers’ money, I thought. Jeezus, what did this guy use for brains? I knew that arguing with him wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
The intercom light on his desk phone came on followed by an angry bee-on-steroids buzzing. He picked it up.
“Yeah? Okay, I’ll take it.” Putting his hand over the mouthpiece he said, “I’ve got to take this one,” and I quickly got up from my chair.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I think we were about done anyway. Thanks for your time.”
We did a fast handshake, and I let myself out.
Actually, I wasn’t done: I just needed some time to step back and think some things over.
As I walked through the bar I paused to look at some of the photos on the wall surrounding the platform with Reardon’s bike, noting again that the bike was facing in the opposite direction from usual. No big deal, of course, but its new position meant it had to have been backed up the ramp rather than pushed up. It struck me that it would have been easier to guide it up the ramp from the front end than from the back, but I wasn’t exactly an expert on manipulating motorcycles up and down ramps.
I then got distracted looking at the photos. Reardon and his bike were in probably a quarter of them, and in two of them he and his bike were side by side with a guy I recognized as Art Manners on a powerful-looking bright-yellow Harley—I didn’t know Harley made yellow bikes, and suspected Manners must have customized it, as the elaborate detailing also indicated.
Must be nice to have money, I thought.
*
First thing Friday morning, I called Glen’s office, asking Donna to have him call me. I’d been thinking about my conversation with Reardon since I left his office, and now, sitting behind my desk drinking coffee, more thoughts, like gas bubbles in a tar pit, kept rising to the surface of my mind.
Could it be that Reardon wasn’t quite as dumb as I’d thought while we talked? Everything could have been perfectly on the up and up, of course, but my gut—upon which I relied probably far more than I should—told me something wasn’t quite right.
Friendship is friendship, but money is money. To hear Reardon tell it, Art volunteered to lend him the money—which, of course, might be true. But why would Manners have told Don Gleason he’d be managing the Male Call, while Reardon claimed he’d offered to have Art manage the Spike. If, as I suspected, Reardon couldn’t have afforded to buy the Male Call on his own, that would mean Manners was probably going to put in most of the money, which in turn would have put him into the driver’s seat in deciding which bar he was going to manage.
Yet again, to hear Reardon talk, it sounded as though he was still planning to buy Brewer out. While he hadn’t said anything about there being a formal business arrangement between him and Manners, I wondered if they had one; I’d imagine a partnership would have been the most logical way to go. And if there was a legal agreement between them, I wondered if it contained any contingency for death of one partner.
While I could in a way understand Reardon’s reluctance to turn in his friend after he learned that Art had killed Hysong, it struck me as odd that he hadn’t come forward right after Manners died, to get Jake off the hook—especially since he didn’t seem particularly reluctant to tell a perfect stranger—me—that Manners had confessed to killing Hysong.
Well, I guess different people have different priorities. Nevertheless, and for whatever reason he might have had to tell me that Art killed Cal, the fact was that now he had told me, Glen had to know. It might be the key to stopping Jake’s trial even before it started.
I rummaged around until I found Reardon’s home number and dialed it. I knew I might be waking him up, but it was a chance I had to take.