...but Brew doesn't go drinking. In chapter 5 we see him do some detecting. He visits Manolo, a kind of later-day oracle who soaks up rumors and information and secrets, and
The question he has "is the kind of question you had to ask at night," sinceif you asked him the right questions--or asked them the right way, or maybe if he trusted you for some reason--he'd tell you one or two of them.
The Chicano "old city" world is portrayed quite differently from the daylit Anglo city. In a fantasy novel it might be some scary forest where the hero has to go to get knowledge; as it is, it's a differnt culture, which Brew has an "in" with because of his knowledge of it, and the hub of Puerta del Sol's criminal underworld. (We also get a brief passing mention of El Senor.)"people like Manolo don't exist during the day. When the sun comes up, they evaporate, and all you can find of them is what they leave behind--a rank, sodden body snoring away like a ruin on a pallet full of fleas somewhere, as empty of answers as an old can of beer.
Before we get any farther in the plot, we have Brew's first real mention of his intuition (though I found the idea of not,/i] thinking to compare the watermarks is a bit much).
I'm not like Ginny--I'm not a puzzle solver. For instance, it might never have occurred to me to compare the watermarks on those two notes. My brain doesn't work that way. I get where I'm going--wherever that is--by intuition and information.
While I'm at it, I may as well mention (though it may be pretty well-known) that puerta del sol means "door to the sun." Appropriate for such a bright place, and ironically, Brew, who functions poorly in the daytime and does better by night, does his thinking in bright flashes of insight. So if there is any coherent imagery throughout, I'd vote for dark/light.
Anyway, after a page of build-up, Brew doesn't make it to Manolo's. Brew hears a scream and heads towards it, neglecting to pull out his gun.
Brew finds a man trying to rape a woman. The ensuing fight is cathartic for him, which shows his trademark tendency to bull-rush into things.("When I'm as big as I am, you get in the habit of thinking you don't need a weapon." Anyway, I had good reason not to trust the way I handle a gun"--again, hitting himself over his head with guilt)
Frustration and dread and all the long pain of trying to fight my way off the stuff came to a head in a second, and I went happily crazy.
The man is knocked out, Brew sees the woman's a Chicano (again, a kind of mythic quality to Chicanos: "when they stop being kids the loo too old for their years, and later on they look too young"), speaks to her in Spanish, gets her name (Teresa), and she replies in English with spunk that Brew likes. Turns out the man's a tourist who followed her, Brew drags him up and they find a phone in a bar (Brew doesn't like being that close to so many bottles) and call the police. The police, though, aren't eager to arrest the man, but Brew won't back off.
At the police building (which is just as bad at night as day) the tourist is taken away by paramedics, since he's hurt rather badly, and the police question Brew and Teresa, giving them every opportunity, as Brew notes, to drop the charge. Teresa emerges from a questioning by a Captain Carson looking shellshocked. Brew promises her he'll to see the man in jail as she is led away. Carson begins questioning Brew. Brew believes Carson said that he, Brew, wouldn't testify for Teresa, but Carson rejoins, saying Brew won't be able to testify anyway, as he's a known alcoholic who was outside a bar at the time. Brew, though, calls his bluff--Carson hasn't given him a blood alcohol test. A very uncordial conversation follows.
The tourist is from Cleveland--this has got to be a Cleveland joke--his kidney may be ruptured, and Carson tells the kind of story Encino would expect--Teresa was "just another Mex chippy who tried to back out when she didn't get enough money," and Brew threatens to go to the symathetic D.A. if the case isn't acted on ("But even if she is 'just another Mex chippy' it doesn't make any difference. She was being raped!").
Not unlike Covenant's sympathy for "broken things," Brew is instinctively and immediately protective of anything in need of help, and he's furious at Carson. But, the moral of the chapter is that it's good to help others, because before he can storm out of the building, Brew is stopped by another officer who tells him that Encino wants to see him (Encino is working very long hours, incidentially, it's after dark and he's been there since the morning, I belive). On the way to Encino's office, Brew finds a thank-you note in his jacket from Teresa.
That made a differnce somehow. All of a sudden, Carson didn't seem to be worth the emotion I was spending on him.
Encino knows what Brew did, and asks him what he told Carson. Brew makes Encino's day by telling him that he told Carson to "blow it out his ass," and Encino apologizes for being unjust, addressing him as "Senor Axbrewder" (there's a kind of courtly aspect to the dialogue SRD gives to Hispanic characters). He had been thinking about a connection between Carol and Alathea's cases and the ol' "I can't let you read these old cases, but I can leave you alone with them" trick is played. A nice little moment:
"I must leave the office for a short time. How can I know what goes on behind my back? Please, use my desk."
Brew reads the seven files left to him.
By the time I finished, I was dripping sweat on his blotter. My shirt was soaked and sticking to my back, along with most of my jacket. I didn't ask Encino's permission to use his phone--I just grabbed it and dialed as well as I could with my hands shaking like cowards.
Brew tells Ginny that there were seven other missing girls, that Carol Christie didn't drown, but OD'd on heroine, and can't bring himself to say anything else. Ginny is on her way to the station.
Okay...that was long and a ton of summary, but the chapter seems basically concerned with advancing the plot. ...aside from further expanding on the way SRD describes Chicanos. We also get a chance to see Brew acting on his own without Ginny, see his sense of moral outrage at work, and his generally good relationship with Chicanos is shown more.