Dreaming of Babylon

Author:Richard Brautigan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: gr:read, gr:kindle-owned
ISBN: 9780848832605
Publisher: Amereon Ltd
Published: 2009-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Beer Tastes on

a Champagne Budget

The lights of San Francisco looked beautiful shining across the hay from where we were sitting in a little bar in Sausalito.

My client was enjoying a beer.

She took a great deal of pleasure from drinking it. She didn’t drink the way you’d expect her to. There was nothing lady-like the way she handled her beer. She drank beer like a longshoreman on payday.

She’d taken her fur coat off and underneath she was wearing a dress that showed off a knockout figure. This whole thing was just like a pulp detective story. I couldn’t believe it.

The neck was out in the car, waiting for us, so I felt a little more relaxed around her. If I wanted to I could use the word champagne without fear of the unknown. The world sure is a strange place. No wonder I spend so much time dreaming of Babylon. It’s safer.

“Where is the body you want stolen?” I said, watching this delicate-looking rich dame belt down a gulp of beer. Then belch. “You really enjoy your beer, don’t you?” I said.

“I have beer tastes on a champagne budget,” she said.

When she said champagne I involuntarily looked around for the neck. Thank God it was in the car.

“Now about this body you want,” I said.

“Where do they keep bodies?” she said as if I were a little slow.

“A lot of places,” I said. “But mostly in the ground. Do I need a shovel for this job?”

“No, silly,” she said. “The body’s in the morgue. Isn’t that a logical place to keep one?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll do.”

She took another huge gulp of beer.

I motioned to the cocktail waitress to bring us some more beer. While I did this my client finished off the one that was in front of her. I think she’d just set the world record for a rich woman drinking a beer. I don’t think Johnny Weissmuller could have gone through a beer any faster.

The waitress put another beer down in front of her.

I was still dabbling in an Old Crow on the rocks that I had ordered when we first came into the place. It would be my only drink. I wasn’t much of a drinking person: a drink now and then, and one was my limit.

She went at the second beer with the same relish she had applied to the first beer. She was right when she said that she was a beer drinker.

“Do you think you can handle stealing a body from the morgue?” she said.

“Yeah, I can handle it,” I said.

Then something popped up like a shooting gallery rabbit in my mind. Peg-lcg had told me that she’d looked at the body of the dead prostitute for possible identification as a relative but said it wasn’t the right person and she’d been very cold about the whole thing as if looking at dead bodies was a normal part of her day.

I thought about her crying when she left the morgue.

This was getting interesting.

Playing it casual,

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