Read As she rides by for Free Online Page A

could have flipped for it, it’s only forty or fifty bucks.”
    “All right, all right,” he said. “So I am a tourist. So I do come from somewhere halfway civilized.”
    “That’s no way to talk about South Miami ,” I said. “Whatever will the city fathers think?” He grinned, gave me a mock salute, and closed the window. I continued up the path, found the right office number, and went in. A stunning redhead in a halter top, with headphones on, was typing away furiously but soundlessly on an electric typewriter almost as big as my car. She arched one perfect eyebrow in my direction. “Dick Distler,” I mouthed. “Appointment with.”
    She pressed a button on her desk, then told me to go down the hall to the first door on the left. I promptly did so.
    Dick Distler was a little bald bundle of sizzling energy. He was also twenty years too old for his wardrobe, which was yellow slacks, lime-green collarless shirt open down to his knees, no socks, and suede, pump-up Reeboks. Dick Distler, however, it became instantly clear, was one smart cookie, and one tough cookie, too, tougher even than those dry, chewy oatmeal ones a certain execrable lady poet of my acquaintance once proudly presented to me in a desperate attempt to butter me up for something. She should have saved the butter for the cookies.
    The first thing Dick did was to answer a question I hadn’t even asked yet. “You’ll wanna know,” he said, “how come we’re still drinkin’ buddies when I was their manager and it was their management, among a long, long list, that ripped the boys off. Right?” He hopped up onto his desk and began swinging his legs busily.
    I took a closer look at the desk. It reminded me of my pal John D.’s desk. He owned and ran the Valley Bowl, which wasn’t that far from where I lived, and he’d rescued some slats when he’d had a couple of his lanes resurfaced and built himself a nifty piece of furniture with them. Dick’s desk looked just like half a shuffleboard table, and when I took a closer look, I saw that’s exactly what it was. To make it easier to work at, one of the boards that ran along the sides to prevent the puck from shooting off into space had been removed.
    Was I jealous?
    Don’t be childish.
    I was sitting in an old barber chair facing him. A gorgeous old thirties Art Deco chair, with green and orange tinted leather and built-in ashtrays. Was I jealous? Extremely, and I am the first to admit it. I must say, otherwise his office was a surprise—there wasn’t one photo of him posed with clients or other celebrities and then lovingly signed, as is the show business norm, from my experience. I’d noticed the OD’d kid’s fingertips were callused in the way that all guitar players’ digits get after a while; it seemed unlikely he’d wind up smiling down from some mogul’s wall. Him and a million others. Know what the cops had found when they went through the pockets of his fake army surplus pants? A couple of guitar picks and a wad of Monopoly money.
    “So what are you lookin’ at?” Dick said then.
    “Bare walls,” I said.
    He laughed. “It was my first wife’s idea. I forget her name. I think it ended with an ‘i,’ so it could have been Bambi or Bobbi. She said it was tacky, a whole lotta glossies, she said it made the place look like a second-rate delicatessen; she said what I should do is like right before a meeting I should put up just one photo of the guy I got the meeting with. That way I don’t look tacky and he thinks I think he’s my main man.”
    I laughed.
    “What the hell,” he said, waving one hand. “So what I was saying was, how come? How come is, I was their manager too late in the game, it was all over pretty much by then, they were already too deep in the doodly squat, they’d signed everything but the Declaration of Independence by then, the dummies. We did what we could, me and the present incumbent next door there”—he gestured with his thumb to the door