The guy blinked, shrugged. “No idea. I just pour the happy juice. I don’t follow him home.”

Ganz dipped and swished and worked the room, throwing his boa around the necks of delighted patrons. He bore absolutely no resemblance to the man I’d spoken to a few days earlier: the one with the box cutter and the attitude; the one who refused to tell me how he’d found out about the status of Tim’s case. I turned back to the bar. “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Vincent Darby, would you?”

The bartender looked confused. “The name doesn’t register.”

“Have you seen a three-hundred-pound bruiser in here who looks like a walking tree? Or a short, fat guy with eyes like Satan’s?”

He took his rag and moved farther down the bar. “This some kind of put-on?”

I waved him off, turned back to Ganz and the vamping.

“You gonna wait for C.D.? He’s got, like, three sets and two breaks tonight.” The bartender asked, though something in his voice told me he hoped I wouldn’t.

I smiled, sensing a breakthrough coming. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me out of here now.”

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

It was almost nine PM and I was waiting at the bar for Ganz to change out of his dazzle clothes and meet me there. I wasn’t afraid he’d duck out the back and leave me hanging. We’d made eye contact midway through his second set. He knew the jig was up. He also knew running would only postpone the inevitable. It was late; it’d been a long day; I was in no mood to monkey around with him. I’d gotten little from Spada’s double-talk or Ayers’s high-handed attempt at intimidation. I had a theory, but I had a feeling my luck was about to change big-time.

If I believed Stephen Ayers, and I didn’t much, C.D. Ganz was a blackmailer. I had a feeling there was more to it than that. Ganz didn’t strike me as being the dodgy sort. After a time, C.D. emerged from the back, dressed in men’s clothes, a sheepish look on his freshly scubbed face. Those sitting at the tables paid him no mind at all. Ganz held on to a sparkling leash with a jumpy little ratlike dog on the business end of it. I watched the dog.