The Hired Man Read online

  “Fine,” I said.

  As we said goodbye outside the restaurant, I told Phil how good it was to see him again and asked him to please give me a call. He said he would, and when we shook hands, I got the definite impression he meant it.

  Can crotches smile? I wondered.

  *

  I’d been lucky enough, if lucky is the word, about six months before to handle a case for Mollie Marino, a lesbian who worked in the Clerk of Courts office in the City Building. Mollie’s ex-husband had threatened to expose her sexual orientation to her notoriously homophobic boss, which would, at the time, have put her job at risk or at least effectively ended any chances she might have had for advancement. When I was able to discover the ex was dumb enough to be having a secret affair with his boss’s seventeen-year-old daughter, that pretty much resolved the case then and there.

  But Mollie was very grateful, and I’d been able to get priority treatment whenever I needed information on someone’s arrest record, which I made a standard part of most of my background investigations.

  After stopping briefly at my office to check for mail and phone messages, I wrote down the names and basic information from Anderson’s résumés on a single sheet of paper, folded it, put it in my shirt pocket, and headed for the City Building. Mollie was, I was glad to see, on duty, and she accepted the list without giving it more than a cursory glance.

  “When do you need it?” she asked.

  “As soon as you possibly can without going out of your way,” I said.

  She smiled. “Give me a call around three—I’ll see what I can do.”

  As they say, it’s not what you know…

  *

  I was pleasantly—to put it mildly—surprised to find, on returning to the office, that I’d had a call from a Phil Stark. I don’t think I ever knew Phil’s last name, but I was sure it was him, and I hastened to return the call.

  When the phone was answered, I didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Phil?” I asked, wondering if I’d been wrong and this was another Phil.

  “No, this is Billy. Phil should be back in about half an hour. Can I have him call you?”

  Billy, huh? He sounded pretty young—and pretty sexy, if voices count.

  “Yeah, if you would,” I said. “This is Dick Hardesty returning his call. I’ll be in the office for a couple hours.”

  “I’ll give him the message,” Billy said. “Thanks for calling. Bye.”

  Billy, huh? my mind repeated.

  Yes, ‘Billy, huh’, I answered. Why in hell couldn’t you have been born a Gemini instead of a Scorpio? There’s more to life than your fucking crotch.

  Like, for instance…?

  I reached for the phone and called downstairs to the coffee shop to order lunch—a chef’s salad, blue cheese dressing, and a large black coffee to go, then immediately took the elevator to the lobby. My order was waiting for me when I got to the cash register. Either Eudora or Evolla, the identical twin waitresses I was sure had voted for Coolidge, handed me the bill and the white paper bag. After all these years, I still couldn’t tell them apart without their name tags, which they often did not bother to put on, or as I strongly suspected, frequently switched—the only oblique concession to humor (or any other emotion) I ever saw them display. They knew who they were, if nobody else did, though.

  I didn’t want to tie up the phone while I waited for Phil’s call, so I spent the time looking through the phone book with one hand and eating with the other. I went through each applicant’s past work history then checked for and wrote down the phone numbers of the companies/ organizations for which they had worked. A couple of the applicants had moved into the city from elsewhere, so that meant a little more work and some calls to Information. One of the women applicants had included phone and extension numbers in her list, and she immediately moved to the top of the heap in my estimation, which admittedly probably wasn’t going to be much of a factor in Anderson’s final determination.

  The phone rang just as I was wiping a dab of blue cheese dressing off one of the résumés. I let it ring twice, which gave me time to move the salad safely out of the way, before answering.

  “Hardesty Investigations.”

  “Dick, hi. This is Phil.” Of course it was. “Sorry about the phone tag. I had an appointment for a haircut and just got back.”

  “No problem,” I said. “And before I forget, I want to thank you again for referring Stuart Anderson to me. I really appreciate it.”

  “Well, like I said, I never forgot our little get-togethers, and when Stuart said he needed some help, I thought of you immediately.”

  “I owe you,” I said. “And speaking of get-togethers, I’d really like to see you whenever you have the chance. I want to hear all about what’s been happening with you since you sort of disappeared.”

  “I’d like that,” and he sounded as though he meant it. He paused then said, “Tell you what. My evenings are pretty much tied up, but how about meeting me at Hughie’s Saturday afternoon around four-thirty?”

  “You still go to Hughie’s?” I asked, a little surprised at myself for being surprised to hear that he might.

  “I haven’t in a long time,” he said, “but I always say, you should never forget where you came from—you never know when you might have to go back there.”

  “Phil,” I said, “I somehow suspect you’ve moved a bit beyond Hughie’s. But it will be fun to see you, there or anywhere. Until four-thirty Saturday, then.”

  “Looking forward to it,” he said. “So long.”

  *

  When my crotch finally allowed me to tear my thoughts away from some very interesting fantasies involving Phil, I started calling the phone numbers I’d written down on the résumés. As so often happens, one minute it was 1:45 and the next it was 3:00 and time to call Mollie at the Clerk of Courts office. The three résumés I’d managed to go through produced nothing but good-to-glowingly positive ratings, and I was rather hoping Mollie might have at least come up with an ax murder conviction to make it interesting.

  No such luck.

  “A total of three speeding convictions,” she said, “one destruction of property conviction—breaking a window at an abortion clinic during a protest rally—one assault and battery charge stemming from a mini-riot after a football game, and one violation of a restraining order issued by an ex-wife filing for divorce. Kind of vanilla.”

  I agreed but noted the appropriate information on the appropriate résumé and promised Mollie I’d take her and her new lover Barb out to dinner one night soon by way of thanks.

  *

  By the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I had finished the background checks on all the résumés Anderson had given me and typed up my report. Not a single ax murderer among them. While assignments like this paid the bills, they are hardly the stuff of which impressive PI reputations—mine, in this case—are made.

  While I had resolved some time ago not to work on weekends, I stopped by the office Saturday morning just long enough to type up my bill, put it in the envelope with the résumés and my report, and bring it home so I wouldn’t have to take the time to go by and pick it up Monday morning.

  While I was really looking forward to seeing Phil, I knew my tendency to always be early, so I deliberately took my time puttering around the apartment until I was sure I had it timed perfectly to make it to Hughie’s by four-thirty. Of course, I arrived fifteen minutes early.

  Hughie’s was a time warp. No matter when you went in, no matter the hour or the day or the month or the year, it never changed. Bud, the bartender, was behind the bar as he had been all but a handful of times I’d been there. The individual hustlers changed, of course, and so did the individual johns, but they were still cookie-cutter hustlers and cookie-cutter johns.

  I ordered my usual dark beer on draft. Actually, I never had to actually ask for it—Bud only needed to spot me out of the corner of his eye as I walked in the door for his hand to immediately reach
for the cooler where the iced mugs were kept. Something both a little comforting and a little disturbing about that, I thought.

  I sat at a stool near the end of the bar as Bud brought the beer over, flourished a napkin in front of me, and set the mug on it. As always, by the time I’d fished a bill out of my pocket to pay for it, the napkin had turned sopping wet from the condensation running down the sides of the mug. But it was part of the routine, as was Bud’s “How’s it going, Dick?” and my “Fine, Bud, how about you?” then his shrug, and his taking my money to the cash register.

  “Got a match, buddy?” a voice behind me said, and I turned to see…Tex. Not the new Phil from dinner but the original Tex/Phil I’d met in Hughie’s that afternoon that seemed now like an eternity ago. Full Marlboro Man drag—cowboy hat set sexily back on his wavy black hair, denim jacket open to the navel, no shirt, incredibly tight Levi’s jeans, a silver belt buckle the size of a small hubcap, scuffed cowboy boots.

  I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear.

  “My God, man!” I said, “You’re incredible. You did this just for me?”

  He put one big hand easily on my shoulder while he pulled up the empty stool next to mine with the other.

  “Mostly,” he said with a grin. “Actually, Billy’s meeting me here around seven. We’ve got a Double Shit-Kicker Special on for tonight.”

  Still grinning, I shook my head.

  “Lost me,” I admitted.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said, motioning to get Bud’s attention. “I guess we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said, and he grinned again.

  “Like shit you are,” he said, giving a rather obvious eye-slide down my body to my crotch.

  “Glad you remember,” I said.

  Bud came over, and Phil ordered a Miller. Bud nodded without a word and moved off to get it. Phil started to reach into the very small front pocket of his Levi’s, but I waved him off, taking another bill out of my pocket.

  “You hustler,” I said, putting it on the bar. “Me john. John pay.”

  He gave me a quick, raised-eyebrow grin.

  “So, fill me in,” I said when Bud had put Phil’s beer in front of him and left.

  Phil clicked the top of his bottle against my mug and took a long drink before beginning.

  “Long story,” he said.

  “I like ‘em long,” I replied straight-faced, which produced another of his raised-eyebrow grins.

  “Well, about six months ago now…maybe seven,” he began, “I was working Beech Street one night around eleven when this Jag pulls up. Older guy, average-looking, nice grey hair, obviously not worried where his next meal was coming from. We go through the usual, and I get in.

  “But instead of taking me someplace, or him even making a pass in the car, we just drove around for about half an hour talking. That’s a little unusual, but not unheard-of. He’s asking me all sorts of questions on all sorts of things. Mostly about me, but a whole bunch of other things, too. Seemed like a pretty nice guy.

  “Finally, he says ‘How would you like to work for me?’ I told him I thought that’s what I was doing, but he smiled and said, ‘No, a real job. Same line of work, but it will pay a great deal more.’

  “I was a little leery, but he asked me to hear him out, and I agreed. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But first, I’d like you to meet my wife.’”

  Now I was the one with the raised eyebrows, and Phil grinned and held up his hand.

  “Yeah, I know, that was my reaction, too, but it wasn’t like that at all. I told him I didn’t do that kind of kinky stuff, and I sure as hell didn’t do anything with anybody who doesn’t have a cock. He just looked at me and smiled again. ‘My dear boy, you misunderstand,’ he said and then explained the whole thing.”

  Phil looked at me then took another long drink from his beer, draining it. He set it on the bar and pushed it toward the far side. I did the same.

  “Am I telling you more about penguins than you care to know?” he asked.

  “Hell, no,” I said, and meant it. “Tell all.”

  I waved at Bud and took another bill from my pocket and put it on the bar. Phil shook his head, reached out and handed the money back to me, then fished in his own pocket, coming up with a folded hundred. He picked up his story where he’d left off.

  “His name’s Arnold Glick,” Phil said. “He’s bisexual and a retired stock market analyst from New York. If he’d been giving me this line in a bar, I’d probably have thought ‘uh-huh’ and dozed off, but when I’m driving around town in a brand new Jaguar with less than a thousand miles on the odometer—I looked—I tended to give the whole thing a little more weight. Though why he chose me is still a mystery.”

  Gee, I wonder? I thought. Six-three, a body and face to die for, a great personality…go figure.

  Bud brought our drinks, took a look at the $100 bill and carried it over to a small light by the cash register, where he carefully examined it before opening the till and counting out the change, which he brought back and laid in front of Phil.

  “Business must be good,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Phil said, and left the change on the bar.

  When Bud left, Phil picked up his story.

  “Glick’s wife Iris is a lot younger than he is by about a third—she’s only about forty—and she started out as a showgirl in Vegas. She isn’t exactly what you’d call a shrinking violet: she’s got bigger balls than a lot of the guys who used to pick me up.

  “Anyway, when she got too old to be in the shows, she decided to start a sort of finishing school for showgirl wannabes and some of the more enterprising hookers. She met Arnold in Vegas about five years ago, and they decided to get married. He’d just retired, and when they moved here, she was pretty unhappy about having to give up her school.

  “So they took stock of the situation and hatched the idea of opening a modeling agency and male escort service. Arnold had a lot of rich friends who dig guys, and Iris figured she could extend her finishing-school talents to include guys. Their goal was to offer class without bullshit, strictly legit in that everybody involved, on both sides of the fence, knows all the rules going in, and nobody…nobody…breaks them.”

  I hadn’t taken my eyes off him for one second since he started talking, and I was totally absorbed in every word. Talk about a different world!

  Suddenly, Phil indicated my left arm with a head-lift.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  I looked at my watch.

  “Five-fifteen,” I said. “You’ve got plenty of time, if you don’t have to meet Billy until seven.”

  He gave me a big grin. “You didn’t think I planned to sit around here for two and a half hours, did you?”

  I hoped I was the only one who could hear my crotch shouting, Wheeeeeeeeee!

  “Well,” I said, “we could always continue our talk at my office. As I recall, you do some of your best talking in offices.”

  We looked at each other, still grinning, then in unison drained our drinks, set the empties on the bar, and walked out.

  *

  I had no idea what Phil’s professional rates were, but there was no question whatever that they were a steal no matter how much it cost. And although he had undoubtedly undergone some polishing of his social skills, in a horizontal position he was as natural and spontaneous as the first day I’d met him.

  When the fireworks display was over, and we’d regained our respective breaths, I lay back against the arm of the office couch with Phil semi on top of me, his head on my chest.

  “And you have to go through this again tonight?” I asked, my chin on my chest so I could look at him. “How in the hell do you do it?”

  He smiled. “All part of the business,” he said. “And Billy and I know how to pace ourselves.”

  I had been curious about Billy ever since he’d answered the phone.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, just what is the ‘family relation
ship’ here? And what is a Double Shit-Kicker Special?”

  Phil’s smile widened into a full grin.

  “We’ve got this one client, a businessman from Tokyo, who grew up watching American westerns. So, whenever he comes to town, he arranges for me and Billy to come over in full cowboy drag and put on a little show for him. He never gets involved himself; he just pulls a chair up beside the bed and watches while we go through this little ‘bunkhouse buddies’ playlet we came up with the first time.

  “We do it exactly the same every time, no variations—he wants it that way. Then, when we’re done, we get dressed and leave, and he hands us each a hundred-dollar bill as a tip.”

  “Jeezus, am I in the wrong business,” I said.

  Phil grinned again. “Hey, if you’re interested…”

  I put my hand behind his head and pressed it against my chest then released it.

  “I appreciate that,” I said, “but I’m kind of used to what I’m doing now.”

  “Well, if you should ever change your mind…” Then his gaze fell on my watch, which was lying on top of my pants on the floor beside the couch. “Oh-oh,” he said. “I’d better get going; it’s six-thirty.’

  We untangled our arms and legs and got up, sorting through our clothes to get dressed.

  “Wish I had a shower here,” I said. “We both could use one.”

  Phil, slipping his shorts up over his hips, shook his head.

  “Nah,” he said, “that’s fine. My being all sweaty just adds to the hard-riding cowboy image. The guy’ll love it.”

  “So,” I said, “it’s none of my business, but are you and Billy…?”

  He reached for his jacket.

  “Oh, no,” he said without looking at me. “Billy’s like my kid brother. I got to know him when he first came to town, and I sort of adopted him. We room together, and we trick…well, we work…together from time to time, but that’s about it.”

  “Billy works for ModelMen, too, then?” I asked, tucking in my shirttail and looking for my shoes.