Big Dave Strand was the owner and chief bartender of the Filmore Tap. He was, true to his name, big—at least six four, with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew. Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips and dark green jailhouse tattoos on both biceps. The one on the left arm depicted a revolver and bore the word FUCK below it. The one on the right seemed to be of a bullet impacting with a skull and said YOU below it.
Oddly, I’d never run into Big Dave in church.
“Knew guys like him in the joint,” Big Dave said. He drew himself another pint of Piel’s from the tap. “Freaks. They’d keep ’em out of general population ’cause they knew what we’d do to them. They knew.” He downed half his pint, looked up at the TV again, and belched.
The bar smelled of sour milk for some reason. And sweat. And beer. And buttered popcorn from the baskets spaced out along the bar at every fourth stool. The floor was rubber tile, and Big Dave kept a hose behind the bar. By the looks of the floor, it had been a few days since he’d used it. Cigarette butts and popcorn were ground into the rubber, and I was pretty sure the small movements I saw coming from the shadows under one of the tables were those of mice nibbling on something along the baseboard.
We’d questioned all four men at the bar about Helene McCready, and none of them had been much help. They were older men, the youngest in his mid-thirties but looking a decade older. They all looked Angie up and down as if she were hanging naked in a butcher’s window. They weren’t particularly hostile, but they weren’t helpful either. They all knew Helene but didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her. They all knew her daughter was missing and didn’t seem to feel one way or another about that either. One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said, “The kid’s missing. So? She’ll turn up. They always do.”
“You’ve misplaced children before?” Angie said.
Lenny nodded. “They showed back up.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
“One’s in prison, one’s in Alaska or someplace.” He whacked the shoulder of the man nodding off beside him. “This here’s the youngest.”
Lenny’s son, a pale skinny guy with two brightly blackened eyes, said, “You’re fucking A,” and dropped his head into his arms on the bar.
“We already been through this with the cops,” Big Dave told us. “We told ’em, Yeah, Helene comes in here; no, she don’t bring the kid with her; yeah, she likes her beer; no, she didn’t sell the kid to pay off a drug debt.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Least not to anyone in here.”
One of the pool players came to the bar. He was a skinny guy with a shaved head, cheap jailhouse tats on his arms, but none done with the attention to detail and fine aesthetic sense of Big Dave’s. He leaned in between Angie and me, even though there were a few car lengths of space to our right. He ordered two more beers from Dave and stared at Angie’s breasts.
“You got a problem?” Angie said.
“No problem,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”
“He’s problem-free,” I said.
The guy continued staring at Angie’s breasts with eyes that looked as if they’d been zapped with a lightning bolt and seared of life.
Dave brought his beers, and the guy picked them up.
“These two are asking about Helene,” Dave said.
“Yeah?” The guy’s voice was so flat it was hard to tell if he had a pulse. He pulled his two beers in between our heads and tilted the mug in his left hand so that some beer spilled on my shoe.
I looked down at my shoe, then back up into his eyes. His breath smelled like an athlete’s sock. He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he looked at the mugs in his hands and his fingers tightened around the handles. He looked back up at me, and those stunted eyes were black holes.
“I don’t have a problem,” he said. “Maybe you do.”
I shifted my weight slightly in my chair so that my elbow had more leverage on the bar in case I had to bob or weave suddenly and waited for the guy to make whatever move was floating through his head like a cancer cell.
He looked down at his hands again. “Maybe you do,” he repeated loudly, and then stepped out from in between us.
We watched him walk back to his friend by the pool table. His friend took his beer, and the guy with the shaved head gestured in our direction.
“Did Helene have a big drug problem?” Angie asked Big Dave.
“The fuck would I know?” Big Dave said. “You implying something?”
“Dave,” I said.
“Big Dave,” he corrected me.
“Big Dave,” I said. “I don’t care if you keep kilos under the bar. And I don’t care if you sell them to Helene McCready on a daily basis. We just want to know if she had enough of a drug problem that she was in deep to somebody.”
He held my gaze for about thirty seconds, long enough for me to see how much of a badass he was. Then he watched some more TV.
“Big Dave,” Angie said.
He turned his bison’s head.
“Is Helene an addict?”
“You know,” Big Dave said, “you’re pretty hot. You ever want to go a few rounds with a real man, give a call.”
Angie said, “You know some?”
Big Dave looked back up at the TV.
Angie and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. I shrugged. The attention-deficit afflicting Helene and her friends was apparently widespread enough to fill a psych ward.
“She didn’t have no big debts,” Big Dave said. “She’s into me for maybe sixty bucks. If she was into anybody else for…party favors, I’d have heard about it.”
“Hey, Big Dave,” one of the men down the end of the bar called, “you ask her yet if she blows?”
Big Dave held out his arms to them and shrugged. “Ask her yourself.”
“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Hey, honey.”
“What about guys?” Angie kept her eyes on Dave, her voice clear, as if whatever these assholes were talking about had nothing to do with her. “Was she seeing anybody who might be pissed off at her?”
“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Look at me. Look over here. Hey, honey.”
Big Dave chuckled and turned away from the four guys long enough to put a fresh head on his beer. “There’s chicks who can make you crazy, and chicks you’d fight over.” He smiled over his pint glass at Angie. “You, for instance.”