Katy stood before him, ballroom style. He took her hand, which was very cool from cradling her drink. As lightly as he could, he held her waist. Warmth came through her shirt, he felt the long muscles that let her bend and rise so neatly. He silently counted several beats, then they started dancing. The dance they did was a little like a stiff-kneed samba, a little like the first foxtrot kids ever learn, sweaty-handed in the junior high school gym.
They'd danced for maybe thirty seconds, made it three quarters of the way around their small table, when the waitress showed up with their plates in either hand, trailing plumes of fragrant steam.
They dropped their hands and sat back down. A few people briefly applauded.
Al's face was flushed. His knees tingled and he was very aware of the pulse in his neck. None of this had to do with holding Katy in his arms; of that he was quite sure. She had a plane to catch in an hour and a quarter. She was the mistress of a jealous bully; she imagined she was finished with him, but chances were they would drift unwholesomely together once again. Besides, she wasn't even Al Tuschman's type—that spiky hair, the suspect lashes matted with mascara. No—this accidental excitement he was feeling . . . okay, this thrill—it didn't have to do with her. All it was, was nerves from standing up to dance with people watching. Neither more nor less than that.
He sipped his margarita and looked across the table. Katy was smiling broadly above her plate of shrimp. Her eyes were bright, and sinews stood out in her throat. "That was great," she said. "That was the nicest thing I've done down here. Thanks."
To his amazement and chagrin, Al heard himself say, "Wanna do it more?"
Katy had just picked up her fork. Now she was a little bit confused. She looked from Al to her shrimp and back again.
Himself confused, Al said, "I don't mean right this second." He seized his knife, cut into his chicken, and smiled weakly.
They had some bites of food.
"How's the time?" asked Katy. She said it as neutrally as it could be said, but still there was something like death in the words.
"Sucks," said Al. "How's the shrimp?"
"Umm," she said. Her mouth was full. She gestured for him to try some.
He did. He chewed awhile. Then he put his fork down. He looked at Katy, who was not his type and who, at the very least, was on an instant messy rebound. But they'd watched the sun go down together. They'd danced. He'd eaten off her plate. Knowing that he shouldn't say it, he said, "That plane. You really wanna go?"
She looked away and wiped her mouth. "Oh, Jesus. Please don't ask me that."
He sipped his drink. It had lost its chill and tasted very salty. The tireless musicians played without a lapse. He said, "Simple question. What's so terrible I'm asking?"
Katy said nothing. Her fork jabbed toward her shrimp again, and then it stopped midair.
Al found himself staring at her fingers. He could see that they were bearing down, blanched around the nails. He wondered if he was tipsier than he'd realized. Fumbling, he said, "Look . . . hey, listen ... I don't know exactly how to say this. I'm not asking you to sleep with me."
Katy only gaped and blinked at that, touched, relieved, befuddled, and just a little bit insulted all at once.
"You wanna stay," he rambled, "we could see the town. Dance. There's a sofa in my room."
Katy dropped her fork, picked up her drink. "A sofa?" She looked past Al at the shrubbery, the arching palms, the orange mist around the streetlamps on this rare and humid night. Incredulous, she said, "You're asking me to be your roommate?"
25
Big Al and his rage woke up together from their nap.
Sitting on the edge of his vacant bed to eat his room- service steak, he thought angry thoughts that made him chew so hard he could feel it in the sockets of his teeth. An infuriating sense of wasted time assailed him. Time wasted on a moody broad who dragged him away from running his business and then turned out to be a flaky brat. Katy's betrayal—what else could he call it?—made him hanker to humiliate her, but it was tough to take revenge against someone who wasn't there. It called for ingenuity.
He ate his steak, drank his wine, and thought it over.
After a while, he dropped his utensils, mopped his mouth, and pushed away the rolling table, pushed it so vigorously as to tip the tiny bud vase with its single drooping orchid.
Leaning to his right, he opened the drawer of his night table and grabbed the knife he kept always within reach. It was long and slender with a brushed edge and a razor point, good for filleting and concealment. The plastic handle was flat and unobtrusive. The narrow blade slid smartly into a supple leather sheath; when he wore it on his person it barely made a bulge in his sock.
He admired the weapon a moment, then leaped the short distance between his small feet and the floor. Theatrically, he paused before moving with the measured steps of a toreador toward Katy's suitcase, still propped up on its stand. Knife in hand, he contemplated her lingerie, then leaned into a slow and lewd assault upon it.
He lifted up a lacy bra, severed the well-formed cups one from the other. He raised a translucent red negligee, vented it at chest and tummy. He skewered panties, halved thongs into the shapes of slingshots. He wrestled with stockings, tatters of nylon falling around him like dark snow. In his gradually accelerating fury, unsprung clasps and ribbons of spandex were tossed around the room.
Titillated by his deranged exertions, Big Al broke into a rutting sweat. He destroyed a final garter belt, murdered a last chemise, then threw himself into an armchair and surveyed with pleasure the black and pastel mess he'd made. Let her come back, he thought, and find that.
In the next heartbeat he edited the thought; in fact, erased it. He wasn't thinking about her coming back. He didn't want her to come back. He was over it already. He was moving on.
He'd be going out tonight. Hitting the bars. Pick up a sex-starved tourist or, failing that, a hooker. Get back on track, vacationwise. And, just in case his former girlfriend Katy happened to swing by to retrieve her things, let her find him with someone else. Let her see how easily replaced she was, how little she'd really mattered.
*
Katy and Al Tuschman finished up their dinner, then lingered over coffee to hear the island music and watch the chickens scratching in the dirt.
By the time they left the courtyard, it was well after nine. Heading for Duval Street, they slowly pedaled their borrowed bikes through air the temperature of skin. Katy now and then heard airplanes flying in and flying out, wondered which one she was supposed to be on. She was surprised at herself for staying; more surprised to have been invited. Now and then she stole a look at Al, wobbling along beside her with his dog in his basket. Straightforward, decent, he was just the sort of man she'd forgotten how to understand. Grateful for his gallantry, she told herself that when they parked the bikes and walked, it would be nice to take his arm. But she doubted she would really do it because she doubted that he wanted her to. That's how much she didn't understand him.
Duval Street was crowded and it gleamed with the ghoulish colors of humming neon. Drunks weaved among tourists trying to be drunk. Southern girls strutted by in tight lace shirts, their piled hair fighting off the dampness.
Al and Katy locked their bikes to a tree. Al bent down to tie his shih tzu to a parking meter. The dog looked at him with resignation and maybe just a hint of blame. They picked a bar more or less at random.
The place had music but no dancing. After a while Katy tapped Al on the back of his hand. He was looking at the bandstand, he hadn't expected to be touched, and he jumped a little bit. "Still wanna dance?" she shouted.
He did, but the truth was that his nerve had been eroding. Dancing at Coco's was one thing—it had just happened. Now he was planning to dance. This was different. "First let's have another drink," he shouted back.
Around eleven they were on the sidewalk once again. Retrieved the yawning dog. Left the bikes and strolled up the still-mobbed street. Katy thought to ta
ke Al's arm but didn't. After a couple of blocks they saw, reflected on parked cars and cafe umbrellas, the edgy, shattered light of a disco ball. They traced the flecks of glare to a second-floor club above an outdoor restaurant. Katy looked at Al. Al swallowed hard, wrapped Fifi's leash around a bike rack.
They went upstairs and danced. Danced like Al hadn't danced in many years, and like he never thought his grinding knees and gnarly ankles would let him dance again.
They left around one-thirty. A red moon was low in the west. Fifi was tangled in her leash and sulking. They reclaimed their bikes and shakily headed home toward Paradise, much too tired and too secretly nervous at being roommates to notice the Jaguar parked across from the hotel in the ragged shadow of the buttonwoods.
*
Big Al Marracotta's evening had not been going all that well.
He'd been in several bars, and he was fairly drunk before he'd started. But he'd made a plan and he was sticking to it. For the sake of both economy and sport, he'd decided to give it until midnight to find some sex he wouldn't have to pay for. Your basic pickup. Sex with a lonely visitor who needed her cigarette lit, who was waiting for her package tour to be made complete.
But with this stratagem he'd gotten nowhere. Women kept turning their backs on him. Big Al wasn't used to this. The places he went to in New York—they were Mob places, and he was recognized, if not by name, at least by type. The women there were looking for that type. This made Al mistakenly imagine that he was attractive. But these tourist women—from Iowa, from Ontario—what did they know from Mafia? Too ignorant to be impressed with what he did, they saw him only for what he was: a short gruff pushy guy with shiny shoes.
After midnight he started looking for a hooker. To his surprise, this turned out to be not so easy either. Again, it was a question of style. Al's eyes were peeled for a good old-fashioned New York whore: the slinky one-zip dress, the blowjob lipstick, the stockings with their dark tops showing just a little. Al couldn't seem to find that type, though he looked in several likely joints, and had a few more drinks in the process. Stumbling now on a sidewalk no longer horizontal, he wandered toward the oceanfront, looking for a floozy by the seawall. Nothing doing.
Once more he staggered up Duval Street. A fleeting spasm of wisdom came to him in the guise of nausea, told him he was probably too smashed to function anyway, and he might as well go back to his hotel. But just then, half a block away, he spotted a woman who came very close to his ideal. She was tall. Her skirt was short, her stockings obvious. In silhouette her chest made a long grade to the summit. She was standing outside a bar that Al had missed, finishing up a cigarette. She met his eye; he was sure she did. She dropped the butt on the sidewalk, snuffed it out with a twist of high-heeled shoe that refreshed Big Al's libido, and sashayed back inside.
He followed her in, moved through close-packed tables, and found her at the bar. As was right and fitting, she was unsurprised to see him. Not without some difficulty, he climbed onto a bar stool next to her. "Buy you a drink?"
"I love that opening," she said.
Al didn't take the sarcasm personally. Sass was part of the routine. He liked it. He gestured toward the bartender. They ordered drinks and he sized her up. Good wig but arousingly fake, blond above dark brows. Thick, cakey bands of eyeliner continuing past the edges of her eyes. Powdered cleavage delving into tempting shadow.
The drinks came. Al said, "Ya don't mind, let's get down to business."
"Can we have a toast at least?" the hooker said. Rather forcefully, she clinked his glass. "Bottoms up."
They drank. Al said, "I want the whole night and I don't want no to anything. How much?"
The hooker let her cold glass rest against her lip a moment. "Five hundred."
"That's big-city prices," Al observed.
"So? You wanna get fucked or you wanna ride the subway?"
Al looked down at the hooker's backside. "Riding the subway doesn't sound like such a bad idea."
"Five hundred. Free transfer."
"Deal," said Al. "Let's go." Gingerly, he started climbing down.
The hooker didn't budge. "Can't a girl even finish her drink?"
Grudgingly, Big Al climbed up again. The sudden change of direction made him just a little dizzy. He sipped his drink, and somewhere between the sip and the swallow he got the first inkling that something was not exactly right. He couldn't put his finger on it. He looked at the hooker. There was something a little too playful at the corners of her mouth. He glanced all around the bar. He liked tall women but this looked like a hoops squad. Redheads whose necks were on the thick side, brunettes with voices huskier than average. And there was something in the air, something barely smellable beneath the layers of flowery perfume, an elusive whiff of mannish sweat.
Big Al dropped his slurring voice. "You sure you're a woman?"
The hooker said, "Honey, I'm all the woman you can handle."
She said it a little louder than it needed to be said, and it dawned on Al that she wanted other people to hear it, that other people had been listening all along. Through a fog of alcohol he dimly realized that this was not the normal sass, that he was being mocked. His lips pulled taut across his teeth and his hairline started itching. "Don't fuck with me," he said.
The hooker gave an unafraid, coy shrug that really pissed him off.
With his chin he gestured toward her crotch. "I find a dick down there, I swear ta Christ I'll cut it off."
"Now you tell me, sweetie. Cost me a Miata to have a fancy surgeon do that very thing."
Big Al Marracotta blinked, and in the blink he was visited by a terrifying image of a hairy ersatz vulva between two hairy thighs. What was it made of? Pig intestine? Scrotum skin? Where did it lead? He said to the hooker, "You fucking faggot."
"Yeah, ain't it grand?" she said, and threw the rest of her drink in his face.
It took Big Al a moment to react. Then, eyes burning, cheeks dripping, he reached down blindly toward the knife he carried in his sock. But before his fingers could find the handle, the hooker grabbed him by the shirtfront and shoved him backward, stool and all. To Al, it felt like he was strapped securely in his seat but the airplane had disintegrated. His head snapped forward then back, his knees had somehow got above his face, he saw the ceiling skating past like a nightmare of galloping sky. He tucked and felt his stomach slide up toward his throat and waited for the sickening collision with the ground.
Two six-foot drag queens caught him just before he hit the floor. Putting dignity aside, he rolled off the stool onto his hands and knees, then scrambled to his feet. His legs trembled and his head was pounding and his innards churned. He longed to punch someone but didn't dare. A large and perfumed group had gathered all around him. Their heaving and emphatic bosoms left him barely room enough to wobble toward the door.
26
Al Tuschman hadn't brought pajamas. Katy Sansone had no clothes except the ones she was wearing. They tried not to acknowledge a certain awkwardness as they prepared for bed.
Brushing her teeth with an index finger, Katy examined the outdoor shower and said through toothpaste, "Hey, Tusch, y'ever go to sleepaway camp?"
He was washing his face, reaching for a towel. "Coupla summers. Sports camp, mostly."
"Me, I never did. Always wanted to. Crickets. Marshmallows. Canoes. Ya have canoes?"
Al looked at her. Her eyes were sleepy and her mouth had softened with fatigue. There was an intimacy in seeing someone so frankly tired. They kept talking because they couldn't stand to have the intimacy of silence added to it.
"Canoes," he said. "A raft you could swim to in the middle of the lake. Steps were slimy. Squished between your toes."
He sidled out of the bathroom. In the armoire by the picture of the greenish women with the greenish breasts, he found an extra pillow and a light blanket. He took them over to the sofa in the alcove. Fifi, exhausted and confused, followed him and sniffed at the upholstery. Al turned off the light. Skulking in shado
w, he stripped to his jockey shorts and lay down. The sofa was not quite as long as he was, but if he curled his legs it wasn't bad. The dog jumped up and settled in against his feet.
He heard the toilet flush. A wedge of light came through the bathroom door then was extinguished. Katy padded toward the bed; Al could tell her shoes were off. He didn't want to hear it, but he heard the zipper of her shorts. He heard the soft tick of buttons as she laid her blouse over the back of a chair. The bed squeaked a little when she sat down on it, and he could not help wondering if the sheets felt cool or warm against the backs of her long legs. He heard her swivel and lie down. He was relieved to think that by now the cotton blanket was pulled up beneath her chin.
After a moment, she said, "Tusch?"
"Yeah?"
"I think it's really great you're letting me stay here. I think it's really great we danced."
Trying to sound more sleepy than he felt, Al said, "I'm glad you're here."
"Really?"
"Really. Go to sleep."
She was silent for a moment. A soft breeze lifted the curtains from the windowsills.
"Tusch?"
"Yeah?"
"Hear the crickets?"
"I think those are tree frogs."
"Hey, I'm from Queens. G'night."
The sheets rustled once and then Katy seemed to be asleep. Al lay there for a while in his gallant curl. Then he reached down and dragged the dog underneath the blanket till it was nestled in between his arms and chest, and drifted off himself.
*
Outside in the Jag, Chop Parilla said, "So, Squid, we don't get fancy, right?"
Sid Berman didn't answer, didn't even look Chop's way. He was gathering his concentration, and besides, killing people made him irritable. He didn't like it at all. This was a matter not of sentiment but taste. Other crimes evolved, unfolded. They had a flow to them, a music. But murder was a blank brick wall that stopped the band, destroyed the flow, forced an ending that, by necessity, was always too abrupt. This depressed him.
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