Free Fun with Brady and Angelica (Kit Tolliver #10 (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page A

and we don’t even know what we’re talking about. Except we sort of do, don’t we?”

    The place she found was just off Beale Street. The windows were blacked out, and an unobtrusive sign told the establishment’s name: The Daiquiri Dock. There was nothing to suggest that it might be a lesbian bar, but she evidently sensed something, and lingered in a doorway across the street. And, sure enough, the door opened and a pair of visibly gay women left arm in arm. She stayed where she was, and another woman turned up and walked into the bar, and two more followed shortly thereafter.
    She could have a glass of white wine. Get a sense of things, then go back to her room alone.
    And that’s what happened, except that it was two glasses of red wine, not one glass of white. She bought one, and a woman who said her name was Sandy insisted on buying her the second. Sandy wasn’t very attractive, she had a stolid quality to her that she found unappealing, and anyway Sandy lost interest and went off to study the jukebox selections. A couple of other women glanced her way, but she kept her face unexpressive and let her body language suggest that she just wanted a quiet drink.
    Back in her hotel room, she began loading her clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t quite ready for this, but she was getting there. She’d get a good night’s sleep, leave town in the morning. And in the next city, or the one after that, there’d be a lesbian bar and she’d be ready.

    St. Louis, on a quiet street near Carr Square, within sight of the famous Arch. Another city, another lesbian bar, and when she’d scouted it out the previous evening she hadn’t even allowed herself to cross the threshold. Instead she’d spent the better part of an hour in the diner diagonally across the street, nursing a cup of coffee, watching through the fly-specked window as women passed in and out of Eve’s Rib.
    Now and then, a man. Not a mannish woman, there were plenty of those, but occasionally a man entering or leaving, sometimes accompanied by a woman, sometimes alone. One of these—alone, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets—reminded her for a split second of Sid.
    Sid from Philadelphia, who of course was not from Philadelphia, and was probably not named Sid. Sid the Cipher, Sid the Unfindable, the one remaining name on her list of Things to Undo. Sid who, just by existing, kept her from—what?
    Living her life.
    But this wasn’t Sid. It was just a man who looked disappointed, as if he’d expected to find the secret of the universe in a dykery, and—
    Oh, for Christ’s sake. That’s why the called the place in Memphis The Daiquiri Dock , even in the utter absence of a Caribbean motif. Daiquiri = Dykery. It had taken her a week and a few hundred miles to get the joke.
    She shook her head, finished her coffee. Then she’d returned to her hotel room.
    Tonight she was back, and dressed and groomed for the place, more femme than butch, but certainly no housewife, no sorority girl, no cheerleader. Just a woman looking to meet a woman.
    Missy, she thought. Tonight her name would be Missy.
    And tonight she didn’t hesitate. She went inside, made her way to the bar.

    While his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the man led the woman to a booth with a good view of the bar. He sat down opposite her and breathed deeply, watching the women around him. And they were all women; he hadn’t seen another man since he crossed the threshold.
    He said, “God, I love this place.”
    “You love what we find here.”
    “And the place itself. This bar, and others like it. I like the atmosphere, Jesus, I like the way it smells.”
    “You like dyke bars because you like girls,” the woman said. “That’s the smell you like. You like the way they smell, and their softness, and how they yield, how they give in. How they submit.”
    “Well,” he said.
    The bar was called Eve’s Rib, and you had to be looking for it to find it, tucked away on a side street on