Epitaph

by James Siegel

  "Personal pictures."

  "Right."

  "What the fuck you talking about? I gave you a picture."

  "Yes, I remember. It's other pictures I'm thinking about."

  "That's funny."

  "Why?"

  " 'Cause there ain't no other pictures. So that's funny. That you came back in this fuckin' heat to ask me for something I don't got."

  Rodriguez was right about the heat. It might have been the hottest day of the year and if it wasn't, it might have been the most humid, and if it wasn't that, it was close. The sun was particularly brutal up on the roof; the top of William's head was starting to feel well-done, not funny at all. And the scent of Bain de Soleil was beginning to sicken him, the odor of fruit left too long in the sun.

  "What's the matter," Rodriguez said, "something bothering you…?"

  Yes. The heat was bothering him. His shoulder was bothering him. Rodriguez was bothering him. Bothering to come here was bothering him.

  "Okay," William said, "okay, so there were no other pictures lying around."

  "What the fuck you think I've been trying to tell you?"

  There comes a time when you either believe someone or you don't, and even if you don't, you have to walk away. So bye.

  "Take it easy," he said.

  "Uh huh." Rodriguez trained both mirrors on him; William looked like something basted now. "You know," Rodriguez said, "you're nuts. It's hot out, man."

  "Yeah. I noticed."

  Do it from behind… that's what's on my mind… the radio was wailing away; Rodriguez was turning away; William was walking away. Over to the stairway door which said Chakalakaboo on the top and Fuck all Niggers on the bottom, then through it and into the steaming elevator, when he suddenly realized that he needed something. Desperately and immediately. He needed water. If last night's drinking hadn't dehydrated him enough, buzzing around in ninety degree heat had. Now he had a choice: He could go back up to the roof and ask Rodriguez for a little something from his beer cooler. Or he could knock on someone's door and depend on the kindness of strangers. Or he could stay in the elevator and die of heat prostration-that too. Okay-door number two. He didn't think he could make it back up to tar land, and though dying had its attractive side- not having to negotiate his way back through kung fu city for instance, he thought two funerals in a week was a lot to ask of anyone-even Rodriguez.

  He took the elevator down to the third floor. To Jean's floor, but not to Jean's apartment. No, another apartment just a bit further down.

  Where Mr. Crazy lived. That old white-haired tortoise, Mr. Weeks. And why not. At least when he asked him for water he could ask him by name.

  It took almost a minute of knocking before Weeks came to the door, but the second he opened it and looked out at William with an expression that was either one of fear or one of relief or maybe even one of both, William knew he may have come for water but that he'd be leaving with just a bit more.

  "You're here about Jean," Weeks said. "Aren't you?"

  "Yeah," William said. "I am."

  Later, sitting in an armchair rough as sandpaper with a glass of water finally in hand, William thought that he could have knocked on any door, any one, but that he'd knocked on this one. Which made him think that maybe he should have stayed and played the horses after all. Fortune was definitely smiling on him today.

  First William had knocked and Weeks had answered. Then William had asked for water and Weeks had given it to him. Then William had gone ahead and asked for something else.

  "Jean's apartment," he'd asked, begging the same thing of Weeks that he'd asked of Rodriguez. "Did you take something from it-not steal, not at all-just borrow maybe-Jean being dead. Some pictures maybe?"

  And though Weeks hemmed and hawed at first, he hadn't done it convincingly or done it for long. Maybe his heart wasn't in it, maybe he just had to resist a little before giving a lot. Maybe he'd only been waiting for someone to ask.

  Pictures then. Lots of them-Weeks bringing them out in a large manila envelope. Pictures, because that's what the woman had said. He kept them, answering his curiosity, he kept them, I guess. I guess. But they hadn't been in Jean's apartment and they hadn't been in Jean's box and so someone had taken them. That's what had crossed his mind this morning smack in the middle of OTB, thinking of that picture of the three of them. One picture suddenly becoming many pictures.

  And now he sat with the pictures on his lap, just a dutiful and polite neighbor leafing through the trip to Hoover Dam, the excursion to Mount Rushmore, the holiday to Disneyland. That's me with Mickey… There I am with Old Abe… Okay, maybe a bit more exotic than that. For instance no Abe here, and no Mickey, no Teddy or Goofy or Donald Duck. In fact no Jean either; just her.

  Mr. Weeks's apartment suited this particular photographic retrospective too; dark, shuttered down, as if Mr. Weeks was trying to extricate himself from the outside world. Three fans were set up in a triangle around the room, streams of hot air converging on each other like separate rivers into a murderously hot delta, stirring up instead of silt and shells, fine dust and white lint.

  Okay. The pictures. He'd gone for a certain look here, Jean had. A definite theme had been attempted, a common thread carefully sought. There was, for instance, the matter of her clothes. Black boots, black stockings, a brown cloth shirt. And on her arm a symbol most definitely retro, a symbol more commonly exhibited on rest room walls and in certain South American countries with large German populations. A swastika. Red, white, and absolutely true, your honor. A swastika. In every picture. The only thing, in fact, that changed from picture to picture was her position-now spread-eagled on a couch, now standing ramrod straight against the wall, now sitting defiantly on a small settee. And yet, William thought, perhaps he was wrong about that as well. Each picture had been shot from the floor up; to take such a picture, at that kind of angle, one would have to grovel belly down, no higher than shoe level. Each position was different but each position was exactly the same: superior. Okay, so maybe he hadn't enjoyed being beaten, remembering now what the woman had said, but what he had enjoyed was close.

  "You shouldn't judge him," Mr. Weeks said now, softly, but with a certain undeniable firmness there. "Not by that. It's not fair."

  And now William realized he'd been wrong about something. He'd been right about who'd taken the pictures, give the gentleman a gold star, but he'd been wrong about why. He'd assumed Mr. Weeks had taken them for the same reason he'd thought Rodriguez had. A little amateur pornography, the Old Dick and the C, the charming story of a retired detective trying to recapture those carefree days of Dachau. Something to look at on a rainy afternoon, something to hide beneath the bookshelf. But okay, he was willing to admit that's not why Mr. Weeks had taken them after all. It wasn't general horniness that sent him into Jean's apartment before Rodriguez got there; it was something more bizarre. A genuine regard for the deceased. Hard to believe considering the deceased was your old friend and mine, the utterly charming Jean Gold- blum. But then there's no accounting for taste, is there. Instead of robbing the dead, Weeks had been protecting his memory. At least, he'd been giving it the old college try.

  "Sure," William said, "I'm not judging him." But that, of course, wasn't entirely true. He wasn't judging him because he'd already condemned him. And while he was at it, he'd gone and sentenced him too. Death by general disgust. It was the swastika, of course. It was a swastika that had made Jean's wife and child disappear; it was the swastika that made William sick.

  "You don't understand," Weeks said.

  Fair enough. He didn't. Strange sex, after all, wasn't exactly his province these days. Sex was not exactly his province these days, though on occasion he could remember it quite vividly, especially the kind practiced in a certain ground-floor room at the Par Central Motel. But while that was worse, this was close, somewhere, at least, in the general ballpark.

  "Sure I do," William said. "Jean was exercising his rights under the First Amendment. Jean was j
ust having some fun."

  "Jean didn't have fun."

  "Oh, yeah. I forgot."

  "Jean wasn't the kind of person who could."

  "That's right. It slipped my mind."

  "You didn't know him…"

  "You can say that again," William said. "Hey, I don't care about the pictures. I don't want them. You can rip them up, burn them, sell them to Rodriguez, whatever you like. I'm not interested in them."

  "Then why'd you ask for them?"

  Yes. Why did he ask for them?

  "It's a little hard to explain." Which was true, considering he hadn't exactly explained it to himself yet. "We used to work together," William said, a line he seemed to know by rote now.

  "Uh huh." Mr. Weeks was still waiting; Mr. Weeks looked like he'd been waiting for a long time.

  "Back when we worked together we sometimes had to finish each other's cases. We didn't like each other all that much, but we'd cover for each other. Because it was professional courtesy. That's all."

  "He's dead."

  "Yeah. Right. You've got me there. But maybe what he was working on isn't. Dead. What do you say, Mr. Weeks? Is there something else you haven't given me? Just one thing else. Maybe something Jean really cared about, not like the pictures, something else?"

  Okay, the cat was out of the bag. He hadn't come for the pictures. He'd just followed the pictures, the way you follow those signs on the highway that promise food fifteen, then ten, then five miles down the pike. He was hungry; after all, he hadn't eaten in twenty years, and he could just about taste the meal. The pictures? They were just the flyers that rummies hand out in the glow of topless bars. He'd come for the show. For if someone had taken the pictures, someone, for instance, like Mr. Weeks, it stood to reason he would have taken something else, the something he wanted, the something he'd come for.

  And now Mr. Weeks was sitting stock-still, his shock of white hair rippling up and down from the fans, up and down like the hair of a cat caught between fear and hunger.

  "Okay," Mr. Weeks said. "Okay…"

  He stood up and walked to the back of the apartment where it was darker still, where Mr. Weeks disappeared into the gloom and all William could hear was the sound of someone rifling through drawers, through this, inside that, right down to the bottom.

  Then he was back, and in his hand a file, which he dropped ever so softly into William's lap, as if it were holy.

  To William, it was. The file was thin, worn, and stained with thumbprints. And it was red.

  TWELVE

  One of the fans had died, just like that, sputtering off like an aircraft engine hit by flak. Mr. Weeks had ministered to it for several minutes, but it was no go; machines were a mystery to him, he said. He readjusted the remaining fans as best he could but it made little difference-instead of three fans blasting hot air around the room, there were now two; it was nearly an improvement.

  Yet the darkness in the room made it seem like the inside of a rain cloud: the heat, the moisture, and the sense that something was about to happen, that answers, like lightning, were about to light up the room.

  But no such luck. The file was full, but full of what? William had spent several minutes flipping through it as if skimming a book for the dirty parts; but there were no dirty parts, nothing that juicy. Just a list of names: Mr. Samuels… Mrs. Timinsky… Mr. Shankin… Mrs. Winters. Names and addresses-one to a page, and a check under each. And on another page some numbers- license plates perhaps, six to a group. That was it. William looked up now at Mr. Weeks, who was back in his chair and staring back at him, warily, as if under house arrest. Senile, Rodriguez had said. Well, William thought now, we'll see… He leaned forward, just enough to be friendly, like an old friend, like an old friend of an old friend. "Did Jean ask you to hide this for him, Mr. Weeks?" Mr. Weeks nodded. "He said it was in case something happened. Don't give it to anyone, he said. It's my last testament, it's what I bequeath, understand? He made me promise." What I bequeath. "But you didn't keep your promise?" "I know who you are. Jean showed me your picture once. When I saw you in the hall yesterday with Rodriguez, I knew you'd come back." So, William thought, so… "Funny, isn't it." "Funny?" "Jean gets you to clean up for him-just in case. And Rodriguez to bury him-just in case. Two of you-just in case. And then Jean's on a case, that too." "Yes…?" "It's just that Jean being Jean, we could say maybe something had him worried. Not just here, understand, but hereafter." Mr. Weeks blinked at him, at him, or at the wall, or just at the situation. "So, Mr. Weeks, what was the case?" "I don't know."

  "You don't know, or you don't know if you should tell me?"

  "I don't know."

  "Not another something he made you promise, huh?"

  "No." Mr. Weeks shook his head, a good shake, a no- doubt-about-it shake. "He never said a word to me. If you knew Jean, you knew that wasn't his way. I wasn't even supposed to look in the file. I haven't."

  Okay, so he was right. That wasn't Jean's way. Even with that woman. I can't tell you, he'd said. I can't… Secrets, for Jean, were like insurance policies and he'd loaded up on so many of them that he'd long ago reached equity.

  "Okay. Any guesses? Go ahead… it's free."

  "I don't know anything," Mr. Weeks said, as if he were making a general statement of his intellectual worth, a totaling up of seventy-odd years' worth of acquired knowledge. Maybe the older you get, the less you do know. Maybe Weeks had gotten so old he was already into negative knowledge. On the other hand…

  "Maybe you don't know what you know. Knowing things is like that." Like his clients, remember, who always knew, but didn't. "Why don't we see?"

  "How?"

  "Tell me about Jean's last few weeks. What he looked like, where he went, what he said. Walk me through them, okay, Mr. Weeks? We'll take a stroll, nice and easy, you and me. Okay?"

  Somewhere outside, an ice cream truck was rolling up the street. There were these bells, this jingle, something insipid but kind of catchy… Here comes Mr. Softee… over and over… Here comes Mr. Softee… but as far as he could tell there were no takers. Not a one.

  Now inside, it was different. Here comes Mr. Weeks… and he had a customer too, a customer just about panting for something refreshing, for something tasty to chew on.

  Mr. Weeks had gone to the refrigerator for some juice, had opened it, closed it, come back empty-handed, shuffled his feet, cleared his throat, made up his mind. He would tell William about the last few weeks, but not just about the last few weeks. He was one of those people who have to start from the start, not from the end, not even from the middle. To remember his lines he needed the first cue, and the first cue here was Jean-not several weeks ago, but several years ago, more than that, a Jean bored, broke, and nearly beaten.

  He'd tried his hand at security years before, Mr. Weeks began, but whether he'd resigned from it or whether he'd been forced to, the experience hadn't been pleasant and hadn't been long.

  William picked forced to. Jean had always been a lot happier breaking laws than trying to enforce them. Does fox in the chicken coop ring a bell?

  After that, Mr. Weeks continued, after a long while of doing nothing at all, really nothing, because Jean didn't read, or have a television, or even an interest, he tried to start over again. Another agency, a one-man agency. He found a storefront in Flushing, he fixed it up, he hung up a shingle. No one came. One look at the man in the one-man agency and would-be clients turned tail and ran.

  "Christ, he should have been out on a golf course, they thought, maybe shuffleboard, maybe not even that, the exertion might have killed him, okay. He was seventy or so-and he looked ten years older," Mr. Weeks explained. Anyway, the agency went bust. Quickly. The store turned into a Cantonese Buffet, Jean went back to his room. "Then," Weeks sighed, "Jean maybe got a little desperate. A little seedy. That's what happens when no one wants you anymore and when you still think they should, when you think there's still a place for you." Yes, William thought. The secret, of course, is realizing there i
sn't. A place for you. That tends to ease your desperation just a little, or at least, keep it quiet. "Jean went looking for business, sort of," Mr. Weeks said. "Sort of, how?" "Well, he went looking for children"-Weeks winced here-"for runaways. He'd go down to the Port Authority, to the tunnel. Sometimes, he'd find them…" "And when he found them?" "He'd notify the parents," Weeks said. "Is that so? He'd notify them. How responsible of him. What a good citizen. That's all then…?" "He'd ask for the reward." "Sure. The reward. That's fair, isn't it, seeing as how he went to all that trouble. Just tell me one thing. Just asking, but what if there wasn't a reward?" "Well…" There was that wince again. "He'd name a figure I guess, a figure he thought was fair…" "Sure, Jean was always fair, wasn't he? But, just asking again, what if the parents, the ones he notified, didn't think the figure was fair? What if they maybe didn't have it, what if they were a little strapped for cash. What then?"

  "Then?" Mr. Weeks wasn't happy now; William wasn't being friendly anymore, he wasn't being a friend of their old friend, laughing at his silly foibles, chuckling over those endearing eccentricities that made Jean such a card.

  "Yes, then," William said. "The parents didn't have the money, let's just say they didn't, so our Jean would say, don't worry, if you don't, you don't, here's where your son is, your thirteen-year-old daughter, the one all the pimps are after, the one who's broken your heart. Here she is. Right, Mr. Weeks? That's what he'd do."

  "Not exactly," Weeks said.

  "Then what exactly?"

  "If they didn't pay him the money, he'd hang up."

  "Yeah," William said, "of course. I sort of thought that's what he'd do."

  "You're just like Jean said you were," Weeks said.

  So Jean hadn't just shown Weeks his picture; he'd provided commentary. Did I ever tell you about Father William, Father William and his confessional down the hall, Father William, whose wife was caught playing nooky with the Monsignor?

  "What did he say?"

  "He said you were a Boy Scout."

  Okay, there was a definite change in tone emanating from Mr. Weeks's side of the room. No doubt about it. Mr. Weeks, who'd picked Jean's apartment clean of incriminating evidence, wasn't going to give up his friend without a fight. Maybe reliving the old days wasn't going to be such a hoot after all.