Let's Hear It For The Deaf Man by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain [McBain, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

The cop who picked up the surveillance of Frederick Lipton at five o’clock that evening was Cotton Hawes. From his parked sedan across the street from the real estate office, he watched Lipton as he locked up the place and walked down the block to where his Ford convertible was parked. He followed him at a safe distance to a garden apartment a mile and a half from the real estate office, and waited outside for the next four hours, at which time Lipton emerged, got into his Ford again, and drove to a bar imaginatively named the Gee-Gee-Go-Go. Since Lipton had never met Hawes and did not know what he looked like, and also since the place advertised topless dancers, Hawes figured he might as well step inside and continue the surveillance there. The place was no more disappointing than he expected it to be. Topless dancing, in this city, was something more than topless—the something more being pasties or filmy brassieres. Hookers freely roamed the streets and plied their trade, but God forbid a mammary gland should be exposed to some unsuspecting visitor from Sioux City. The dancers, nonetheless, were usually young and attractive, gyrating wildly to canned rock music while the equivalent of front-row center in a burlesque house ogled them from stools lining the bar. Not so at the Gee-Gee-Go-Go. The dancers here were thirtyish or better, considerably over the hill for the kind of acrobatics they performed or the kind of erotic response they attempted to provoke. Hawes sat in bored silence while the elaborate electronics system buffeted him with waves of amplified sound and the dancers, four in all, came out in succession to grind away in tempo along the length of the bar. Keeping one eye on Lipton, who sat at the other end of the bar, Hawes speculated that the sound system had cost more than the dancing girls, but this was Calm’s Point and not Isola; one settled for whatever he could get in the city’s hinterlands.

Lipton seemed to know one of the dancers, a woman of about thirty-five, with bleached blond hair and siliconed breasts tipped with star-shaped pasties, ample buttocks, rather resembling in build one of the sturdy Clydesdale horses in the Rheingold commercials. When she finished her number, she kneeled down beside him on the bar top, chatted with him briefly, and then went to join him at a table in the rear of the place. Lipton ordered a drink for the girl, and they talked together for perhaps a half hour, at the end of which time she clambered onto the bar top again to hurl some more beef at her audience, all of whom watched her every move in pop-eyed fascination, as though privileged to be witnessing Markova at a command performance of Swan Lake. Lipton settled his bill and left the bar. Without much regret, Hawes followed him back to the garden apartment, where he put his car into one of a row of single garages on the ground level of the building, and then went upstairs.

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