Like a lot of towns with manicured images for tourists but dirt under their civic fingernails, San Diego had its share of dive bars. Not the remakes with websites, ladies’ night, and happy hour. Rather, the ones with scarred mahogany, split Naugahyde, and hours that couldn’t correctly be described as happy since the Reagan administration. The Four Aces was one of the latter.

The watering hole was an anachronistic eye-sore wedged between warehouses and bait shops on Harbor Drive. It had somehow withstood the onslaught of gentrification that seemed to be spreading like a flesh eating disease; the flesh of the working classes who didn’t know what anachronism or gentrification meant, but they sure as hell knew change when they saw it pass them by. That’s why The Four Aces was able to maintain its profitability. Those on the losing end of life’s ever changing lottery tend to routinely wash their defeat down with strong drink or cheap beer. Both were served liberally to luckless patrons more than satisfied to soak their troubles in a soothing balm of non-judgmental booze.

On this particular day however, one was there who differed from the regular clientele. He had on a suit with no tie and wore his thirty-nine years like a man much younger. Cross-cropped hair, chiseled chin and a face that looked lived-in rather than ravaged, tended to set him apart. Aware that he was likely to stand out among the misfits and miscreants that normally frequented The Four Aces, he had taken the last stool on the short corner of the long bar. It was out of the sight line of most customers, off the bartender’s regular loop, and about as private as anywhere in the place except the toilet. That’s why Brig Ellis chose it, and that’s why he was still nursing a Modelo that he had ordered a half hour ago. Unlike the others there, he hadn’t come to drink. He had come to watch another man drink and to see who the fellow might be drinking with. So far it was no one. Just as it had been for the last couple of days.

Ellis didn’t like divorce work. Normally, he didn’t take that kind of job. But Edith’s sob story sucked him in. Had two kids at home, she said. Couldn’t make ends meet as it was. Feared Bob was seeing some bimbo on the side and wasting what little money they had on suds and sex in the afternoon. Not necessarily in that order. Would he look into it for her? She could pay him in installments. So much a week. For as many weeks as it took. She had to know who it was. So she could take him to court and hopefully get alimony for her and the kids. Even though Ellis’s card read Investigations, Security, Confidential Matters, he seldom stooped to snooping on philandering husbands or wives. But there was something about Edith’s plight that brought out the soft touch in the hardnosed Private Investigator. Damn, he thought, is she going to be surprised