16

King’s Dominion was not the kind of joint people stumbled into by mistake. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never find it, but then again you wouldn’t want to.

I parked in the lot of a small shopping center just off Roosevelt Boulevard. There was a Radio Shack, a T.J. Maxx, a dry cleaner, a vacant storefront, a CVS, a dollar store. Scintillating, no? The number I was looking for was taped onto a glass door next to the dollar store. I pushed open the door and was immediately hit by a deep throb of bass that resonated in my bad tooth. As I climbed the stairwell, I passed a series of signs tacked to the wall.

NO SNEAKERS

CHECK ALL GUNS

PEANUT BUTTER AND NANNER SAMMICH – 75¢

Not my kind of place, exactly. I just hoped they served Sea Breezes.

Beside the closed door at the top of the stairs, an old man sat on a stool, clipboard in hand. He was tall and stooped, his shoes were white patent leather, and it looked like a gray poodle was perched on his head. When I tried to walk past him, he shot out a bony arm and stopped me cold.

“What’s your song?” he said.

“I’m just here to see a Detective Gleason,” I said. “Has he shown up tonight?”

“Do I look like a matchmaker?” he said.

“Hello, Dolly,” I said.

“The name’s Skip.”

“Kept that from summer camp, did you? I like your shoes.”

“Dancing shoes. I know a guy what knows a guy what gets them direct from Hong Kong.”

“Maybe he can get me a pair.”

“You want a pair?”

“Nah. So is Gleason in?”

“Yeah, he’s in.”

I gave the old man a wink, and started again for the door, and again the bony arm barred my way. I looked at it for a moment and then at the old man.

“What, is there a cover?”

“No cover,” he said. “But it’s karaoke night.”

“Just my luck. I should have come tomorrow.”

“It wouldn’t do no good,” said the old man. “Here, every night is karaoke night. What’s your song?”

“I don’t sing.”

“Sure you do, if you want in. Everyone sings, at least once. Makes you part of the show, keeps it festive.” He cocked his head, the poodle shifted, his eyes brightened crazily. “It’s karaoke night.”

“I know ‘Feelings.’ Should I sing ‘Feelings’?”

He looked at me, looked at his clipboard, paged through the pages, looked back at me. “We don’t got it.”

“How about ‘Kumbaya’?”

He looked back at his clipboard. “We got ‘Kismet,’ we got ‘Kiss Me Quick,’ we got ‘Ku-u-i-po,’ which is pretty close, but no ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

“ ‘Satisfaction’?”

“None.”

“You don’t got much, do you?”

“Only everything he ever sung.”

“Ah,” I said. “Now I get it. Why don’t you pick something for me.”

“How’s your pipes?”

“Not so good.”

“Then stay with something low, something easy. I got one here that usually works for first-timers. There’s a slow part you can talk your way through.”

“Done.”

“What’s your name?”

“Franz.”

“Funny,” he said as he pulled a white slip from his clipboard, filled it out, handed it to me, “you don’t look like a Franz. That will be ten bucks.”

“Ten bucks a song?”

“Just for the first song. After that’s it’s free.”

As I pulled out my wallet, I said, “Good thing you boys don’t charge a cover.”

I stepped through the door and into a neon-lit room, ringed with everything Elvis. Velvet paintings glowing with black light, guitar clocks, gold records, ceramic busts, framed photographs from each Elvis era: Elvis impossibly young, Elvis impossibly handsome, Elvis impossibly svelte in black leather, Elvis impossibly bloated in a white jumpsuit. There were tables, about half full, in the center, bars around the edges, booths in the back. Waitresses dressed like schoolgirls with high hair carried drinks on circular trays. On a narrow stage in the front, a redhead in a ruffled shirt, looking a little like Ann-Margret, belted out the first verse of “Viva Las Vegas” as the words rolled up a television screen and the crowd hooted and clapped along.

A man in dark glasses greeted me with a bright smile. “Welcome,” he said in a deep voice. “Slip?”

I handed it over. He gave it a look.

“Good choice, Franz,” he said. “You want some company tonight?” He thumbed toward a trio of women at the bar with bouffant hair and low blouses. They were nice-looking women once, but once was enough.

“No thanks,” I said. “I already had my fiber today.”

I scanned the scene, found whom I was looking for in a booth in the back. He was sitting alone, hunched over a drink, something dark and almost gone in his glass. He wasn’t viva-ing to Ann-Margret. I wondered if my visit that afternoon hadn’t ruined his day. Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t doubt it.

Gleason glanced up when I sat down across from him, didn’t seem one bit surprised to see me. “How’d you find this place?” he said.

“Torricelli.”

He nodded, he understood. Torricelli hadn’t just told me about the bar, he had told me about the shooting, too. “I should hang up a sign,” he said. “Do not disturb.”

“You know that piece of gum you step on and can’t get off your shoe?” I said. “It ends up on your hand, your other hand, your nose. That piece of gum? That’s me.”

“I was thinking of something else that sometimes gets on my shoe. What do you want?”

“I want to know if you were the one to teach Seamus Dent karate.”

His eyes widened a bit, as if he were about to say something, but just then one of the waitresses with the schoolgirl skirt and high hair came to our table. Her eyes were rimmed dark, her lips were red as paint.

“Anything, boys?” she said.

“My treat,” I said.

“Wonder of wonders,” said Gleason. “I’ll have another bourbon, neat.”

“Can I have a Sea Breeze?” I said. “With lime?”

“Closest thing we have is a Blue Hawaii,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Vodka, pineapple juice, crème de coconut, and blue Curaçao.”

“Aloha,” I said.

“Thanks, Priscilla,” said Gleason before she swished away.

I raised an eyebrow. “Priscilla?”

“They’re all Priscilla,” he said. “How’d you know about the karate?”

“It made sense. From the stories I’d been hearing, Seamus Dent, big as he was, was never a fighter. Then suddenly he starts giving side kicks like he’s Jackie Chan. Somehow he learned. And then you have this whole Elvis thing going with the sideburns, the little southern twang you give your voice even though you grew up in Manayunk, not Memphis. And the way you described Seamus’s fight with that drug dealer. You seemed to even know the type of kick he used to send him to the ground. It just added up.”

“Aren’t you clever.”

“Well, you know. Deal with cops long enough, it rubs off.”

“Why the hell do you care so much about Seamus?”

“Because he testified against François Dubé.”

He stared at me for a while, saw something in my eyes that made him turn to look at the stage, where the woman was swinging her arms as she wailed the final chorus.

“She’s not bad,” I said. “And she does look a little like Ann-Margret.”

“But not the Ann-Margret of Viva Las Vegas, more like the Ann-Margret of Any Given Sunday.”

“Can’t have everything.”

Okay, folks, said the DJ, the man who had taken my slip, speaking from off the stage, so his voice was like a disembodied presence. Let’s hear it for the scintillating Elvira. The audience cheered. Next up, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, doing a little blues number from 1957. A young man with blue-black hair in a duckbill and a face like a punching bag stepped up to the stage, took the microphone off the stand, cleared his throat, mumbled, “Let’s get it this time.” After a short blues intro, he started in with a gravelly rendition of “One Night.”