ten blocks, so one will always be within easy walking distance. S’posed to make New Yorkers healthier. Right now, it’s a pilot project. This place has already gone to the dogs. I didn’t think we could sink any lower.”
“So who was this guy Bonnie thought might be a winner?”
“I don’t know if Bonnie thought that. I did. Something about him. He just seemed like a nice guy. Genuine, if you know what I mean.”
Fedderman didn’t, exactly. “What’d he look like?”
“Average looking, but there was, like, nothing wrong with him. Features like they came out of a mold. Everything fit, nothing unusual. I guess that’s what makes him hard to describe.”
“Go ahead and try, so I won’t have to cuff you.”
“Hmmm.”
“Behave, Rose. This is a murder investigation.”
That reminder seemed to sober her. “Average, is what he was. That’s how I’d describe him. Not too tall or short, not too fat or thin.” She smiled. “Mr. Just Right.”
“Hair?”
“He had enough of it and it was brown, I think.”
“Eyes?”
“Two. Blue, I think.”
Fedderman wrote Brown over blue in his notebook, and then a question mark.
“How’d he dress?”
“Put his underwear on first, I would imagine.”
“Rose . . .”
“Average. I remember him in a suit, and once in khakis and a blue shirt. Always looked nice the half dozen or so times I saw him.”
“Was he always with Bonnie Anderson?”
“I think so. Though they didn’t always come in together. They used the Lap Dog as a meeting place, then they’d have a few drinks and head on out to who knows where.”
“Not you, I guess.”
Rose smiled. “Sorry. I make it a point not to pry into my customers’ private lives.”
“Now here’s a big one,” Fedderman said. “Do you know the guy’s name?”
“Rob,” Rose said, grinning, coming through again.
“Just Rob? No last name?”
“Hey, whaddya want? This is a first-name-only kind of place.”
“Ever hear ‘Robert’ or ‘Robin’?”
“Nope. Not ‘Roberto,’ either. Just ‘Rob.’ ”
“When you saw them leave here together,” Fedderman said, “did they usually turn left or right?”
“Right,” Rose answered without hesitation.
Toward Bonnie’s apartment, which was within easy walking distance. If that meant anything.
Fedderman closed his notebook.
Rose grinned. “Did I do good?”
“A-plus,” Fedderman said. “No need for handcuffs.”
“Hey, that’s not fair.”
“What’s fair,” said a voice from down the bar, “is if you’d sell me a drink.”
Fedderman turned to see an elderly man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. He was scrawny but wearing a blue T-shirt that said P AIN AND G AIN G YM in faded black letters across the narrow chest. He didn’t look as if he’d ever worked out in his life.
“Gin straight up,” he said. “First of the day.”
“I believe it if you tell me,” Rose said, and moved down the bar to pour from a gin bottle.
Fedderman swiveled down off his bar stool and walked past her, gave her a smile and a wave. Let the old guy with the beard deal with this hungry cougar.
“C’mon back sometime and I’ll break the law,” she said.
“Just try it,” Fedderman said.
Rose laughed. “I’ll sew a bigger button on that cuff for you.”
When he was outside on the baking, sunny sidewalk, where Rose couldn’t see him, Fedderman buttoned his shirt cuff and went on his way.
He put on his sunglasses and walked toward where he’d parked the unmarked car, his ego boosted by Rose the bartender, a definite slouchy spring in his step.
Lookin’ cool. Then he noticed that his shoelace was untied.
He stopped, kneeled down, and tied it and the other shoelace in double bow knots. Then he was up and striding toward his car again.
Lookin’ cool.
The man watching the woman across the street stayed back in the doorway, where she wouldn’t notice him. This was the third time that he knew of that she’d come here. The first time
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