Read Online Golden Orange by Joseph Wambaugh - Free Book Online Page A

made a three-pointer and the Celtics had shaved the lead to two.
    On the verge of his own crying jag, Carlos looked mournfully at Regis, who was trying to climb into the saucer of beer, splashing foam all over the bartop.
    â€œI wish I never asked Bilge to bring Irma in here,” Carlos said to Winnie. “I wish Regis never even seen Irma.”
    Winnie was growing more and more depressed. Especially when, just before he left the bar, Guppy Stover, so blanched she looked like she’d been soaked in water all night, said to the beer-soaked reptile: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she had to crawl into this one!”
    Winnie staggered out the door with an aching heart, thinking of star-crossed lovers: Bogart and Bergman, Irma and Regis. But mostly he thought of himself and Tess Binder, while the saloonkeeper took time out from Lakers’ basketball to play “As Time Goes By” for Regis on the battle-scarred bar-top with a pair of particularly filthy spoons.

6

    Night of the Lizard
    W innie was going job hunting. So to speak. That is, he was so worried about paying his lawyer, among others, that he got up before ten A.M. And instead of putting on jeans and a T-shirt, he borrowed a suit from his downstairs neighbor, a failed mortgage broker now working out of an abandoned warehouse in Costa Mesa, selling worthless mining stock to wealthy coupon clippers.
    The 44 Regular fit Winnie okay, but he wasn’t used to baggy trousers and big shoulders, and when he stopped at Spoon’s Landing for a pick-me-up, Spoon looked him over. “That just-took-it-outta-the-washer-with-the-sleeves-rolled-up look of today ain’t it, Winnie.”
    â€œThink it’s too much?” Winnie buttoned the jacket, then unbuttoned it. “Maybe the green paisley tie don’t go with the winter white?”
    â€œToo yuppie-ish,” Spoon said. “You’re no yuppie.”
    Guppy Stover, who’d begun drinking brain tumors at nine A.M ., was already surly. “Duppie,” she said. “You’re definitely downwardly urban. Goddamn duppie.”
    Winnie said to Spoon, “I heard they’re lookin for a boat salesman over at that broker by Mariner’s Mile. I think I could probably sell those big stinkpots, right?”
    â€œJist turn on them oh-so-sincere peepers and you could sell the Rushdie memoirs to one a the ayatollahs,” Spoon droned.
    Which caused Guppy to say, “That guy Rushdie oughtta move to Orange County. Our Eye-ranians couldn’t leave the discos long enough to kill anybody.”
    Winnie finished his drink and left, but hadn’t been gone five minutes from Spoon’s when the saloonkeeper took the phone call from Tess Binder.
    He seemed to like Winnie and somehow that made it more depressing. Winnie walked along the row of motor yachts in the broker’s boat slips, trying to be interested in what the guy was telling him about an Ocean fifty-three-foot sports fisher. And an Egg Harbor 46 that he’d just sold. And there were two Vikings in his inventory, one fifty-seven-footer having a custom wet bar that cost $20,000. He told Winnie about a 111-foot steel-hulled oceangoer built to Lloyds specs that he’d been offered for two million, and a seventy-four-foot Stephens Flybridge for a million and a half. But it was only when he’d spot a sloop or a ketch that Winnie would get a spark of interest. A Nordic 44 knocked him for a loop, and he fell in love with a Hinckley 52.
    â€œI’d be better at selling sailboats,” he offered. “I’m a sailor.”
    â€œ Lot more money in powerboats,” the broker said. “Outsell sails five to one in this store. You sell one of the big babies, you made your year.”
    â€œYeah,” Winnie said without enthusiasm. “Gotta be hard to move em though.”
    â€œBe surprised. Good year, we got no problem moving them, even the hundred-footers. This