Drawing Dead by Pete Hautman Page A

an oversize ostrich-hide wallet, and looked inside. “Oops! I'm gonna have to stop at the bank. I’d write you a check, Joe, but I’d just as soon not have Cat asking me about it. How about I have it for you tonight? Come on, I’ll walk you out.”
    In the waiting area, Wicky insisted on shaking his hand again. The receptionist was staring into the screen of her word processor, tapping her perfect front teeth with the end of a plastic pen. She looked up, but not at them, and wrinkled her nose as though detecting an unpleasant odor.
    Wicky said, “Janet’s our best girl, isn’t that right, Jan?” Wicky was leering at her.
    Janet snapped her eyes at him. Crow could almost hear the eyelashes clatter. She turned back to her machine and began typing furiously.
    It occurred to Crow that both he and Janet were there to serve the whims of Dickie Wicky. He felt a surge of empathy and decided to revise his feelings about Janet the Ice Queen. She was who she was for reasons he was beginning to understand. To distract Wicky, he pointed across the room at the Picasso print hanging above the fake-leather sofa. “Is it real?” he asked.
    Wicky looked and laughed. “Are you kidding? Nothing in this business is real.”
    â€œI didn’t think so.”
    â€œBesides,” he said, “they're getting so good with vinyl there’s really no point. It looks just like leather, don’t it?”
    On his way home, Crow stopped at a discount electronics store on Lake Street and bought an answering machine. He spent most of the early afternoon getting it hooked up and then trying out an assortment of announcements ranging from the clever to the offensive to the absurd. He soon tired of hearing his own voice and settled for the mundane and minimal.
    â€œWait for the beep.”
    Debrowski said, “Are you asking me out, or do you just need a chaperone? Don’t answer that. Just bang on my door when you’re ready; I got nothing going on. I’ll be around all night.”
    Crow broke the connection. A moment later, the booming from the apartment below returned to its previous level, or perhaps a notch higher. Debrowski, his downstairs neighbor, was a breath of rock-and-roll in a Muzak world. Crow had first met her at Cocaine Anonymous, back when he was going to three, four meetings a week—not because he was afraid of fucking up but because it bored him stupid to be sober alone. Lately, things had been better. He hadn’t been to a meeting in over a year.
    Laura Debrowski still attended her weekly meetings. Before checking herself into Saint Mary’s two and a half years before, Debrowski had looted and all but destroyed her one-woman booking agency, “and had one hell of a good time doing it,” as she put it during one group session. Crow had liked her right away. Debrowski had held on to a bit more fire than most of the CA people. She met her recovery with backtalk, tears, and laughter.
    Crow’s return to sobriety was more sullen. He was rarely heard from at the meetings. When he confessed to his former profession, the news was greeted by most of the others with hostility. Cokeheads didn’t like cops, period. Crow couldn’t blame them. He didn’t like cops, either.
    Debrowski had said, “You don’t look like a cop to me, Crow.”
    â€œI'm not now.”
    â€œIt shows.”
    A few weeks later, pushed out into the gray, pallid world of mineral water, coffee, and cigarettes, they had stayed in touch, doing regular lunches at Emily’s Lebanese Deli, where they satisfied a mutual craving for olives, feta cheese, and company of a kind. Friendship formed around the seed of their shared addiction and continued to grow. They discovered in each other a sense of humor so dehydrated that to laugh out loud would cause a joke to crumble. To others, their conversations at Emily’s looked serious, even somber, but Crow always