“There was nothing to finish. Reports of our ‘affair’ have been greatly exaggerated. And I would appreciate it if you’d never, ever mention that woman’s name in my presence again.”
“Whatever you say, Jeff.” Now Mitch moseyed over to Abby to say hello.
“How are you, cookie?” Abby said to him as she signed and shook, signed and shook.
“Surprised to see you here. Pleasantly so.”
“No big. I called Chrissie from Boston last night and we decided it was something we actually could squeeze in.”
“And why not?” Chrissie deftly arranged an open book in front of Abby as the next eager kid in line stepped up. “It shows what kind of a classy, above-the-fray person you are.”
“And you were right, Mitch,” Abby added. “It’s a lovely little store. Jeffrey even laid in a supply of Cocoa Pebbles for me. Can you believe he remembered?”
“Where’s Frankie, out in the car?”
Abby’s saucer eyes widened in panic. “Listen, I barely knew that yutz, understand? And, besides, he’s history.”
“She fired his tight, hairy buns last night,” translated Chrissie.
“I’ve decided to travel a little lighter from now on,” Abby acknowledged, her eyes following Jeff as he scampered back into the stockroom for another load of books. “Maybe I should help him with those. He gets back spasms if he shleps too much weight.”
“You stay here and sign-I’ll shlep.” Chrissie dashed off to help him.
“You may be seeing a bit more of me in Dorset from now on, Mitch,” Abby confided.
“Working on a new book?”
“A new venture,” she replied, graciously handing over a signed book and moving on to the next kid. “You might even say I’m looking out for my own interests by being here today. This whole operation is going into receivership, and my business manager thinks it has a really huge upside if some new investor is willing to take it on.”
“And that investor is you?”
“Why not? I love food, I love New England…”
“And they’ve barely scratched the synergy surface here,” Chrissie said, setting down a huge load of books. “My God, I can see Emeril Legasse and Jacques Pepin giving cooking demonstrations out there while Jeff’s selling copies of their cookbooks in here. In fact, I can see you here, Mitch.”
“Me?”
“Sure, dinner and a movie with Mitch Berger, noted New York film critic. What do you think?”
“We’ll talk,” he replied. To Abby he said, “So you’ll be Jeff’s landlord?”
“Partner is more like it,” she said.
“We’re not divorced yet, Mitch,” Jeff pointed out as he dumped another load of books in front of her. “Technically, we’re still husband and wife.”
“Technically, we still are,” Abby allowed.
“I knew it-you two are going to end up back together again, aren’t you?”
“Not a chance,” protested Jeff. “Word of honor, Mitch. That could never, ever happen.”
“Not in a million years,” Abby chimed in, blushing furiously. “Like, ab-so-tootly never.”
Esme was building a huge sand castle with Becca on the beach near Big Sister’s lighthouse. Bitsy was watching them from her covered porch, fanning herself with her floppy straw hat. The day was bright and hot, with very little breeze.
“She’s hiding from the press,” Bitsy told Mitch as he stood there next to her, observing the two of them out there in their string bikinis, working away. “I don’t blame the poor thing. She can stay here as long as she wants to, as far as I’m concerned.”
“How long will she?” Mitch wondered.
“You’ll have to ask her that.”
He went down the wooden steps to the beach and plowed through the hot dry sand toward them. They were on their hands and knees before their rising castle, both of them filled with laughter and high spirits. From fifty feet away, they looked like a pair of impudent, playful fourteen-year-old schoolgirls full of lollipop dreams. From closer up they were the very picture of innocence lost-two battle-hardened veterans who between them had logged enough years on the dark side for ten lifetimes. Becca was nothing but skin and bone, with dark circles under her sunken eyes. Esme had that fat, scabby lip to go with the expression of dazed confusion that wracked her delicate, lovely face. Her eyes were those of a woman who was now completely lost and fearful.
“This is quite some castle,” Mitch observed, because it was. A good five feet high, with turrets, towers, and a fine, deep moat.
“Are you going to help us?” demanded Becca, wetting her hands in a water pail. “Or are you just going to stand there like a big boss man?”
Mitch promptly flopped down on his knees and started scooping out more sand for the moat. “How long are you planning to stick around, Esme?”
“Until they release Tito’s body,” she answered quietly as she continued molding the castle walls with her hands. “I want to take him back to Bakersfield and bury him with his parents.”
“That’s a really nice idea,” Mitch said. “Listen, there’s something important I need to talk to you about. The night Tito died, do you remember when he came home and was rummaging around in his closet before he went back out?”
Esme didn’t respond for a moment. Just kept fashioning the castle wall with her shapely hands. “I remember,” she finally said in a voice that came from somewhere on the other side of the ocean.
“It was his script he was getting. He must have mailed it to me on his way up to Chapman Falls that night. I just got it today. It really does exist, Esme.”
“How is it?” Becca asked eagerly. She seemed vastly more excited about Mitch’s discovery than Esme, who’d scarcely reacted at all.
“I have to tell you, I was pretty knocked out by it. Honestly, it’s terrific. He called it The Bright Silver Star.”
Esme sat back on her haunches now, swiping at the hair in her face. “I never once saw him working on it. He must have done it when I was asleep.” She let out a heavy sigh, her breasts straining inside the tiny bikini top. “Tito did get up a lot in the middle of the night. The poor thing had such awful nightmares.”
“I have it back at my house,” Mitch said, climbing to his feet. “I’ll go get it for you right now.”
“No, don’t,” Esme said abruptly. “I mean, please don’t. Tito wanted you to have it.”
“It’s your property, Esme.”
“He gave it to you.”
“But this is something of great value. You can get a lot of money for it.”
“I don’t want it. I don’t even want to read it. It will just make me sad. I’m tired of being sad, Mitch. Can’t you understand that?”
“Sure I can. Only, what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Something good,” she said simply. “Something decent. You’re a smart man. You’ll know what to do.”
“Getting a little dry here,” Becca announced, taking their empty water pails down to the water’s edge to fill them.
“Can we talk about something personal?” Mitch asked Esme.
“If you’d like.”
“Did you know that Tito was gay?”
The actress peered at him curiously. “You must think I’m a total bimbo, asking me that.”
“No, not at all. It’s just… Will told me that you didn’t know.”
“Will was wrong.”
“He said that’s what Tito told him.”
“Then Tito lied to him,” she said, her voice growing heated now. “I always knew he was gay. It was obvious. Gay is gay.”
“And yet you stayed together,” Mitch said. “Why?”
“I loved him. Is that so hard to understand?”
“Not to me,” said Becca, returning now with the water pails. “I think you guys were really great together. And I always will.”
“Besides,” Esme added, her face darkening, “after what I went through with Daddy dearest, Tito and me just seemed kind of…”
“Normal.”
“How much did Tito know about that?”
“Not a thing.”
“Why, were you afraid of what he might do to Dodge?”
“No, not really.”
“Then what was it?”
“That was the past,” Esme explained. “I don’t like to go there- there’s never anything back there that’s any good. So I never, ever look back. Only forward.”
“Is that why you never went after your dad?”
“You mean like call the law on him or something?”
“No need to do that,” Becca spoke up, her own sunken eyes getting a steely look. “His current punishment is much worse.”
Esme nodded her head in grim assent.
“What punishment is that?”
“Daddy has to live with himself,” said Esme.
“Each and every day,” Becca added.
Mitch let this one go. He didn’t tell them that Dodge seemed to have no regrets, no remorse, no functioning conscience at all. Esme and Becca both needed to believe that he did, and Mitch wasn’t about to take it from them. They had so little else to cling to. “Esme, why did you come back here this summer?”
“I thought Dorset would be good for us,” she replied, shrugging her soft shoulders. “I was wrong.”
A pair of kids on jet skis went hurtling past them now, shrieking with high-decibel delight. Mitch sat back on his ample haunches, watching them. “Look, maybe we ought to talk about Tito’s script again in a few days,” he suggested.
“No, Mitch,” Esme said. “I don’t ever want to talk about that again. Just promise me one thing, okay?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“His fans deserve to know who Tito really was. Tell them. It can’t hurt him now.”
“What about you? It can hurt you.”
“No, it can’t,” Esme said softly as she continued working on their castle, her wet hands fashioning its walls higher, higher, and still higher. “Nothing can hurt me anymore. Not a thing.”
CHAPTER 16
“Hey, Tina-long time no see.”
“Mitch, it has been too long!” Tina’s round, pink face lit up with motherly delight as she planted wet kisses on both of Mitch’s cheeks. She was a chubby, bustling little strawberry blond in her fifties. “Now tell me,” she commanded him, gazing up, up at Des. “Who is this lovely creature?”
“Say hello to Desiree Mitry.”
“Welcome to my restaurant, Desiree.”
Des smiled at her. “Thank you, I’ve heard a lot about it.”
The Port Alba Cafe was on Thompson Street a block below Washington Square Park, next door to a shop where men sat playing chess with each other. It was a tiny cafe-no more than a dozen tables, all but one of them filled. Young families with small children were eating there. Several couples. One very dignified old man in a white suit who sat alone, sipping an espresso. There was a mural of a fishing village on one wall, a tiny bar with glasses in an overhead rack. The ceiling was of stamped tin. Wonderful smells were coming out of the kitchen.
Des had on a dress for the first time in ages, a sleeveless little yellow knit thing that clung to her hips and bootay for dear life. She wore sandals with it, gold loops in her ears, her grandmother’s pearls, a bit of lipstick. She had even painted her toenails, which she almost never did. But this was a special night. She was out on a genuine New York City date with the man she loved.
Mitch wore a white oxford button-down, khakis, and Mephisto walking shoes, which was the same damned thing he always wore. But for this occasion his shirt and trousers were actually pressed and his mop of curly hair combed. He looked positively grown-up.
Tina seated them at the empty table by the window and brought them a bottle of chianti, a loaf of warm, crusty bread, and a platter filled with little plates of antipasti-grilled sardines, white beans in extra-virgin olive oil, marinated calamari salad, fresh buffalo mozzarella with basil leaves and tomatoes. After Tina had poured them each a glass of wine she went to fetch her husband, Ugo, a grave, scrawny little man who was the chef. Ugo solemnly shook hands with Mitch and asked him if he wanted the usual.
“For two,” Mitch said, beaming at Des. “If that’s okay with you.”
“What I’ve been waiting for, boyfriend.”
Ugo disappeared back into the kitchen.
Mitch reached across the table and took her hand. “You are a total hottie, you know that?”
“Um, okay, I’m thinking maybe I should put on a dress more often.”
“That’s funny, I’m thinking about taking it off of you.”
“You’re awfully frisky tonight, sir. Happy to get away from Dorset?”
“I’m just excited about spending the night here with you,” he said, attacking the grilled sardines.
Des spooned some calamari onto her own plate and dove in. “That was our deal. And a deal’s a deal, right?”
“Whatever you say, Master Sergeant.”
Des gazed over at the mural of the fishing village, loving it even though she was fully aware that Professor Weiss would pick it to pieces. The proportions, angles, placement of cast shadows-all were wrong, wrong, wrong. “So this was your place, am I right? You and Maisie.”
Mitch lowered his eyes, nodding.
“You haven’t been back here since she died, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.” His eyes met hers now. “Is this okay, us coming here?”
“Mitch, it’s more than okay. It’s an honor.”
They had gone through the entire antipasto platter and a half bottle of wine by the time Ugo emerged from the kitchen with a battered copper skillet full of spinach fettuccine. Tina laid warm platesbefore them and he spooned it out. Ugo had a whole Alfredo thing going on in there with the homemade green pasta and fresh spinach-lots of cream, butter, and melted cheese. Total sin. Especially when Tina was done grating even more cheese onto it.
She hovered there anxiously as Des tasted it. “You like?”
“No, I love.” Truly, it was the best pasta Des had ever eaten. It positively melted in her mouth.
Thrilled, Tina left them to it.
“Have you figured out what to do with Tito’s script?” she asked Mitch as they ate.
“I’m going to publish it,” he replied. “I’ll write an introduction that expands on the article I wrote after he died. I’ll go into the real deal of what happened to him, complete with the transcript of Will’s confession. Esme wants it that way. Whatever money it earns will go into a college scholarship fund for kids in the barrio where Tito grew up. And if someone wants to buy the movie rights, the same deal applies. Sound good?”
“Sounds real good, Mitch.”
“Des, what do you think will happen to Dodge?”
“You mean with the law? My guess is he’ll cop to malicious mischief, get off with six months probation.”
“No jail time?”
“I wouldn’t think so. He is a pillar of the community, after all,” she pointed out dryly.
Mitch sat back from his plate. He had a troubled look on his face. “I’m thinking I don’t believe in what I believed in before.”
“Which was?…”
“Dodge is a really, really bad guy. He’s done horrible things to Esme, to other girls, to his business competitors, his friends. He gets a slap on the wrist and is basically free to dust himself off and start all over again. Will, meanwhile, was a decent guy who fell in love with the wrong person, lost his head, and now he, Tito, and Donna are all dead. Where is the justice here?”
Des patted her mouth with her napkin and said, “First of all, you’re wrong. Will wasn’t a decent guy, he was a stone-cold killer.”
“And Dodge?”
“Total human scum, I’ll grant you.”
“So where’s the justice?”
“You don’t win them all. That’s why I have such a clean kitchen floor.”
“Okay, you just lost me.”
> “Bella gets down on her hands and knees and she scrubs when she’s upset. You watch old movies about giant bugs-”
“Not always. Sometimes they’re about giant crustaceans.”
“And I draw pictures, or at least I used to. I don’t know what to call the stuff I draw now. Actually, I do-I call it crap. My point is, we all deal in our own way. That’s real life.”
“Well, it sucks,” he grumbled, sipping his wine.
“Sometimes it does. Other times, it can be pretty damned perfect.”
“Like when?”
She put her hand over his and squeezed it. “Like right now.”
The Tavern was on Horatio and Washington, right around the corner from Mitch’s apartment. It had sawdust on the floor and very little in the way of decor. In past days, it had been a saloon favored by the neighborhood’s big burly meatpackers. Now it was filled with bright, boisterous young writers, artists, actors and grad students. A lot of them hadn’t paired off yet and were assembled in groups. A lot of those groups were mixed. Des saw black faces, Asian faces, all sorts of faces.
It was not, repeat not, a proper dance club. But it was a place he liked and it did have a jukebox. Since he’d insisted on buying dinner she got the drinks while he edged his way warily over to the juke, a look of sheer dread on his face.
She was at the bar fetching them two frosty mugs of New Amsterdam draft when she heard that opening blast of horns-the one that belongs to no other song than “Respect,” followed by that slamming guitar riff, and then by the lady herself. And now Aretha was singing about what she needed. And Des was gliding her way across the bar toward Mitch, their eyes locked on to each other, and therewas no one else in that crowded place, just them. She put their beers down on the juke and raised her arms up high into the air, bumping hips with the boy, feeling the music and the wine and… and… Damn, what was he doing with himself? Passing a kidney stone? And where was he going with those two clumsy feet of his? Did he not even feel the beat?
But, hey, he was dancing his dance and no one was staring or caring. And he was so damned cute.
Besides, it wasn’t long before they were back at his place and they were in each other’s arms in his big brass bed. He was still worried about her shoulder but she kept telling him not to be. They made sweet love deep into the night while the sirens and the car alarms serenaded them, and the refrigerator trucks outside the packing houses beep-beep-beeped as they backed up and the cabs went tha-thunk-ker-chunk over the steel plate Con Ed had put over the hole in the street.
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