Vermilion by Nathan Aldyne Read Free Book Online

spent in investigating petty larceny and murders that didn’t want much investigating. He rarely communicated with his mother, whom he didn’t like; his father was long since dead; and his younger sister was living in San Luis Obispo the last he had heard, but doing what, he had no idea—and didn’t care. When Searcy was put to the extremity of enumerating his friends, he named the two men with whom he played squash each week, but neither of these men did he really like, and of them he knew little more than that they too were policemen.
    When he had finished his cigarette, Searcy drove off, headed down the three short anonymous blocks that separated the essentially residential Bay Village from the essentially urban Park Square.
    Park Square is the half-respectable suburb of the Combat Zone where, directly across from the Teddybear Lounge, with its orange and purple neon, and its flyblown montage of seminude strippers with exotic names and hardened faces, stands the eminently fashionable Park Plaza Hotel. Lincolns and Cadillacs line the block here to pick up and drop off hotel residents. At one end of Park Square is the Greyhound terminal and at the other end the Trailways. On the third side is Hillbilly Heaven, a country music bar with a perennial floorshow of fistfights, and on the fourth is Shreve, Crump & Lowe, one of the most prestigious jewelers in America, older than Tiffany’s.
    Park Square is hustlers’ turf.
    Searcy circled about and came into the square from the south. Inside the glass double doors of Trailways a lone female passenger struggled with two large suitcases done up with thick rope. Under the awning of the Seamen’s Grill, next to the terminal, a skinny weary whore shivered beneath green neon.
    He twice circled the statue commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation, and moved up between the Teddybear Lounge and the Park Plaza. He drew up into a legitimate parking space, turned the heat on high, and lit another cigarette.
    When he had finished the cigarette, he lowered the window to let the stale hot air out of the car. The fresh air braced him, and he felt motivated to drive on, across Arlington Street, and slowly past the Greyhound terminal. Evidently a bus had just come in, and considering the number of persons hailing cabs, he judged that it was from New York. He double-parked directly across from the terminal, stretched across the seat, and stared up and down the dark sidewalk.
    It wasn’t really surprising that one day after a murder the street would be clear, and yet he had expected at least one young man to be slouched in a shallow doorway, or leaning against the cold wet concrete, or making some pretense of hitching. There was no one.
    Searcy drove to the corner of Berkeley Street, turned right, and immediately made another right onto Providence Street. Providence Street had the unsavory but accurate nickname of Vaseline Alley. It was a narrow dark passageway with large garbage bins piled up under the dim red lights of delivery entrances. Searcy drove slowly. An old Rambler with a flat tire was run up over the curb, a dark glass beer bottle stood upright in the middle of the street, but he could see no one. No shadowy figure ducked behind a barrel, no little groups turned to hide their lighted joints, there was not even a drunk taking a piss. The hustlers, fearing either the cold or the murder, had evidently taken refuge in the bars.
    Searcy eased out onto lighted Arlington Street, and by going the wrong way up a one-way street and making a U-turn, he found another parking space. For the walk to Nexus, a couple of blocks away, he lit another cigarette. He passed through the Trailways lot, slapped at the side of a bus to see how cold the metal was, and then turned onto Carver Street, which was shorter, darker, and narrower than Vaseline Alley.
    In the middle of this short cobbled passage between tall unlighted brick buildings is an incongruous Spanish facade in white