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“She mad too. She mad at you and now at Coleman. All she ever wanted was a life like they live on the TV. And all she ever got was the front page of the Post.”

It was something I said from time to time. I laughed and she snickered. We got up at the same moment to hug each other good-bye.

Angles and Dangles was a dilapidated bar about eight blocks from the old navy yard. There were a few small neon signs in the dirt-caked windows provided by defunct beer companies. Inside, nautical knickknacks like life preservers and big oak ship wheels hung, leaned, and sat on shelves here and there.

Some of the men who drank at the bar and the few tables along the walls might have been seamen at one time or another; the rest had been dockworkers. The woman behind the bar, Cress Mahoney, was the heavy voice that had hung up on me. She was faded but still lovely at almost fifty. Her graying hair had been brown. Her blue eyes had a spark to them.

Everybody was white in there and they all noted my skin color.

“You still make that grog with lemon juice and water?” I asked Cress when I bellied up to the bar.

“Do I know you?” she asked with a sandpaper larynx.

“I only ever ordered from Pop Miller before today.”

“You knew Pop?” She was doubtful.

“Knew? Is he dead?”

The question hurt Cress. She loved the old guy.

I liked him myself and hadn’t heard of his passing. The only reason I called the bar was to make sure that it was still there after so many years.

“Heart attack fishin’ out on his rowboat,” she said. “They didn’t find him for three days. He’d floated half the way to Delaware.”

“He left you the bar,” I stated.

“What do you know?”

“That ‘Cress Mahoney is the finest woman on the Eastern Seaboard. She could gut a fish or spear a shark better than most’a yer so-called seamen.’” I approximated his accent well enough to convince her of my half-truth.

“What’s your name?”

“My father named me Thor after a comic book he read one time.”

She’d never heard of me but still smiled at my imagined christening.

“And what do you want here?”

“Grog.”

I knew her lover, Athwart “Pop” Miller, and more about her history than I was willing to say.

I had turned Pop into my CI when I found out about a regular marijuana delivery that he ran down at the docks. I didn’t interfere but instead made him identify and then report on Little Exeter Barret. Pop didn’t like Exeter because he dealt in heroin. I had a deep interest in the ferret-faced runt because he could lead me to the biggest bust in New York City history.

I only ever came to the bar after hours, so Cress was unlikely to know my face or anything about me.

“I don’t recognize you,” she said.

“Pop an’ me used to play Go after he closed,” I said. “He told me that his clientele wouldn’t like a man of my shade playing Chinese checkers at his bar.”

“Atty tried to teach me,” she remembered aloud, “but I just didn’t get it.”

“They say Go is harder than chess. Pop said he picked it up on a tour of Southeast Asia in the merchant marines.”

“And why you think I own the place now?” she asked. “He’s got three kids and two ex-wives.”

“But only one lusty wench,” I quoted, “that he wanted to be marooned with in the South Pacific.”