Page 15 - WTP VOl. X #3

“I always thought he was kind of odd,” said a woman; her name was Patsy. She had been a bit of a stoner, like Holmes, although he hadn’t known her well. He remembered she never wore a bra. But that was the case with a lot of Compton College women in those days. Now she was dressed in a dark blue skirt, gray blouse, and a long cardigan sweater that looked
like mohair. She was probably also wearing the full complement of feminine undergarments. She’d told Holmes she was divorced when they’d first gathered at the club, just before they toasted Esther.
“But you’re not,” she said. “Unless you’re wearing a disguise.”
Holmes held up his ring finger, showing off the gold band. “No disguise. Still married. Thirty years.”
“Congratulations. Where is she?”
“Home. Working. She told me to come and have a good time without her.”
“And to behave yourself, right?” “Oh sure.”
What his wife—her name was Diane; she was a law- yer—actually had said was: “Go have a good time and don’t do anything stupid.”
“You mean like sleep with someone I had a case on thirty years ago?”
“That would be in the category of very stupid.”
Which was correct. All the same, he and Patsy made eye contact a few times from their seats on opposite sides of the table. Which was funny, because he had never thought much about sleeping with her when they were students.
“What in the world made you think of Charlie Lam- bert?” she said.
“Charlie Lambert,” Holmes said. “Charlie Lambert, Charlie Lambert.” He shrugged. “He was just part of the scene. Actually, part of the background.”
“That would make sense,” she said. “He built them.”
Holmes and Charlie Lambert had known each other in a polite and distant way. They would nod and say “Hello” when they saw each other on the campus. But Charlie Lambert began talking to Holmes one day outside the library, a couple days after Florio had been busted, falling in beside him and walking, and then asking him if he had any grass to sell—Holmes, with six-hundred-and seventy-five dollars invested in the bags he still had stashed in the library. But Lambert was staring intently into his eyes, which made Holmes feel uncomfortable, because Lambert was crowding him. And further complicating the relationship: he was feeling sorry for Lambert, pity- ing him because the guy really was a forlorn-looking oddball who, as far as Holmes knew, didn’t have a
lot of friends. And now here he was, asking Holmes if he could buy some weed, appealing to Holmes’s generous impulses, and Holmes was not only pitying Lambert; he was feeling contempt for the guy at the same time.
“I just heard maybe you might know something,” Lambert said.
“I might.”
“How much?” “Twenty an ounce.”
They had planned to sell for fifteen an ounce, which would give each of them their own stash, their profit margin, but with Florio busted, sup- plies on the campus were low and demand was, as usual, steady. Like with Lambert, stepping up to him, out of nowhere, asking to do a deal. At least, Holmes reasoned, he could ask for twenty and see what Lambert offered.
“Twenty sounds good,” Lambert said.
“Let me make a couple phone calls,” Holmes said. By then, it also had occurred to him Lambert might be a narc. He’d decided not to sell a single flower bud to the guy.
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