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about the tennis gig?”
    He bobbed his head. “It’s a living.”
    He dropped to a boxer’s stance and threw a fake punch my way, missing by a mile.
    “No hard feelings, huh?” He reached out and gave me a slap on the arm. “See you around the cemetery.”
    He laughed and then walked off. Who could have known how nearly right he was.

CHAPTER 5
     
    I took my mystery to the Screaming Oyster Saloon. The S.O.S. is a dockside joint, a ramshackle old building that looks as if it might at any minute lean too far and slip right into the oily harbor. There’s a vaguely nautical motif about the place, mainly the sort of flotsam you’d expect to find washed up on the beach in the weeks after a ship has broken apart out on the rocks. Netting, wooden casks, a ship’s bell… junk basically, touched with brine. Dominant in the sunless room is a weathered dinghy that hangs above the bar, a receptacle of years and years of bottles and cans sent there by the deft hook shots of the S.O.S regulars. It’s not uncommon as the night moves along at the Oyster for these hook shots to lose some of their deftness. Bottles and cans bounce off the side of the dinghy and come right back down, sometimes landing harmlessly, sometimes shattering on impact, occasionally cracking open an unsuspecting forehead. Drink at the Oyster long enough and you learn where to stand. That’s the theory anyway.
    The Oyster is a mom-and-pop place in the truest sense. The mom and pop who run it are Frank andSally Finney. They’re Julia’s parents, my former inlaws. If you’ve read your Mother Goose then you are already familiar with Frank and Sally. They appear in those pages under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat. Sally is as big as a piano, a large round woman with a big round red face, short arms and large meaty hands. Sally’s voice is as big as her body, something which comes in handy when running a bar like this. I’ve seen her break up a fight that was clear across the room just by bellowing at the participants to take the damn thing outside.
    Frank, on the other hand, is a tall crooked stick with an Adam’s apple that rivals his nose, and a basset hound face that promises the end of life as we know it at any minute now. Every mug he lands on the bar lands there with the heavy thud of finality. If you’re in a good mood and you don’t want to be, Frank’s your man. He doesn’t even have to speak, he’ll simply open up his bleak vortex for you and down you go.
    One other feature of the S.O.S. worth mentioning. There is a black door at the far end of the bar that costs Frank and Sally a biannual payoff to the city building inspectors to keep it operational instead of nailed shut. The little fee is well worth it, though, on those occasions where a friendly neighborhood bar brawl threatens to get out of hand, and Sally is able to herd her unsuspecting pugilists through the black door and right into the harbor outside. It’s a great show, and Sally will usually spot the bar a free round of drafts, laughing like a witch in the wind as she pulls back on her sticks. If you can take her at her word—which I think I do—nobody has drowned yet. In the harbor, that is.
    It being early afternoon, the Oyster was pretty sparsely inhabited. Frank was working the bar alone, so the general atmosphere was subdued. Nearly dead, in fact. Tony Marino was on his usual stool at the end of the bar stirring his Scotch with his pinky. Another Oyster regular, Edie Velvet, was parked midway down the bar, gazing up at the television in the corner. Barely taller than her barstool and very nearly its weight, Edie predated even Frank and Sally Finney at the Oyster. Her father, a third-rate jockey named Bud Velvet, owned the place back before Frank and Sally, a hedge against his consistently poor showings at Pimlico. When he sold the place to the Finneys, his daughter apparently came with the deal. I liked old Edie a lot. If you could get past the mass of wrinkles and the