'Yeah.'
'Hell, no. I was faking orgasm.'
'Both times, huh?'
'You betcha.' She drew close to me, put her hand on my chest. 'You'll stay over, won't you?'
'What would your sponsor say?'
'Probably that I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb. Oh, shit, I almost forgot.'
'Where are you going?'
'Gotta make a phone call.'
'You're actually calling your sponsor?'
She shook her head. She'd put a robe on and now she was paging through a small address book. She dialed a number and said, 'Hi, this is Jan. You weren't sleeping, were you? Look, this is out of left field, but does the word Ricone mean anything to you?' She spelled it. 'I thought it might be a dirty word or something. Uh-huh.' Then she listened for a moment and said, 'No, nothing like that. I'm doing crossword puzzles in Sicilian, that's all. On nights when I can't sleep. Listen, you can only spend so much time reading the Big Book.'
She finished the conversation, hung up and said, 'Well, it was a thought. I figured if it was a dialect or an obscenity it might not be in the dictionary.'
'What obscenity did you think it might be? And when did the thought happen to cross your mind?'
'None of your business, wiseass.'
'You're blushing.'
'I know, I can feel it. That'll teach me to try to help a friend solve a murder.'
'No good deed goes unpunished.'
'That's what they say. Martin Albert Ricone and Charles Otis Jones? Are those the names he used?'
'Owen. Charles Owen Jones.'
'And you think it means something.'
'It has to mean something. Even if he's a lunatic, anything that elaborate would have to mean something.'
'Like Fort Wayne and Fort Smith?'
'Like that, maybe, but I think the names he used are more significant than that. Ricone's such an unusual name.'
'Maybe he started by writing Rico.'
'I thought of that. There are plenty of Ricos in the phone book. Or maybe he's from Puerto Rico.'
'Why not? Everybody else is. Maybe he's a Cagney fan.'
'Cagney?'
'In the death scene. 'Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?' Remember?'
'I thought that was Edward G. Robinson.'
'Maybe it was. I was always drunk when I watched the "Late Show" and all those Warner Brothers gangsters tend to merge in my mind. It was one of those ballsy guys. "Mother of mercy, is this the - " '
'Some pair of balls,' I said.
'Huh?'
'Jesus Christ.'
'What's the matter?'
'He's a comedian. A fucking comedian.'
'What are you talking about?'
'The killer. C. O. Jones and M. A. Ricone. I thought they were names.'
'They're not?'
'Cojones. Maric¢n.'
'That's Spanish.'
'Right.'
'Cojones means "balls," doesn't it?'
'And maric¢n means "faggot." I don't think there's an E on the end of it, though.'
'Maybe it's especially nasty with an E on the end.'
'Or maybe he's just a lousy speller.'
'Well, hell,' she said. 'Nobody's perfect.'
THIRTY
Around mid-morning I went home to shower and shave and put on my best suit. I caught a noon meeting, ate a Sabrett hot dog on the street, and met Jan as arranged at the papaya stand at Seventy-second and Broadway. She was wearing a knit dress, dove gray with touches of black. I'd never seen her in anything that dressy.
We went around the corner to Cooke's, where a professionally sympathetic young man in black determined which set of bereaved we belonged to and ushered us through a hallway to Suite Three, where a card in a slot on the open door said hendryx. Inside, there were perhaps six rows of four chairs each on either side of a center aisle. In the front, to the left of the lectern on a raised platform, an open casket stood amid a glut of floral sprays. I'd sent flowers that morning but I needn't have bothered. Sunny had enough of them to see a Prohibition-era mobster on his way to the Promised Land.
Chance had the aisle seat in the front row on the right. Donna Campion was seated beside him, with Fran Schecter and Mary Lou Barcker filling out the row. Chance was wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a narrow black silk tie. The women were all wearing black, and I wondered if he'd taken them shopping the previous afternoon.
He turned at our entrance, got to his feet. Jan and I walked over there and I managed the introductions. We stood awkwardly for a moment, and then Chance said, 'You'll want to view the body,' and gave a nod toward the casket.
Did anyone ever want to view a body? I walked over there and Jan walked beside me. Sunny was laid out in a brightly colored dress on a casket lining of cream-colored satin. Her hands, clasped upon her breast, held a single red rose. Her face might have been carved from a block of wax, and yet she certainly looked no worse than when I'd seen her last.
Chance was standing beside me. He said, 'Talk to you a moment?'
'Sure.'
Jan gave my hand a quick squeeze and slipped away. Chance and I stood side by side, looking down at Sunny.
I said, 'I thought the body was still at the morgue.'
'They called yesterday, said they were ready to release it. The people here worked late getting her ready. Did a pretty good job.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Doesn't look much like her. Didn't look like her when we found her, either, did it?'
'No.'
'They'll cremate the body after. Simpler that way. The girls look right, don't they? The way they're dressed and all?'
'They look fine.'
'Dignified,' he said. After a pause he said, 'Ruby didn't come.'
'I noticed.'
'She doesn't believe in funerals. Different cultures, different customs, you know? And she always kept to herself, hardly knew Sunny.'
I didn't say anything.
'After this is over,' he said, 'I be taking the girls to their homes, you know. Then we ought to talk.'
'All right.'
'You know Parke Bernet? The auction gallery, the main place on Madison Avenue. There's a sale tomorrow and I wanted to look at a couple of lots I might bid on. You want to meet me there?'
'What time?'
'I don't know. This here won't be long. Be out of here by three. Say four-fifteen, four-thirty?'
'Fine.'
'Say, Matt?' I turned. ' 'Preciate your coming.'
There were perhaps ten more mourners in attendance by the time the service got underway. A party of four blacks sat in the middle on the left-hand side, and among them I thought I recognized Kid Bascomb, the fighter I'd watched the one time I met Sunny. Two elderly women sat together in the rear, and another elderly man sat by himself near the front. There are lonely people who drop in on the funerals of strangers as a way of passing the time, and I suspected these three were of their number.
Just as the service started, Joe Durkin and another plain-clothes detective slipped into a pair of seats in the last row.
The minister looked like a kid. I don't know how thoroughly he'd been briefed, but he talked about the special tragedy of a life cut short in its prime, and about God's mysterious ways, and about the survivors being the true victims of such apparently senseless tragedy. He read passages from Emerson, Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Then he suggested that any of Sunny's friends who wished to might come forward and say a few words.
Donna Campion read two short poems which I assumed she'd written herself. I learned later that they were by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two poets who had themselves committed suicide. Fran Schecter followed her and said, 'Sunny, I don't know if you can hear me but I want to tell you this anyway,' and went on to say how she'd valued the dead girl's friendship and cheerfulness and zest for living. She started off light and bubbly herself and wound up breaking down in tears, and the minister had to help her off stage. Mary Lou Barck
er spoke just two or three sentences, and those in a low monotone, saying that she wished she'd known Sunny better and hoped she was at peace now.
Nobody else came forward. I had a brief fantasy of Joe Durkin mounting the platform and telling the crowd how the NYPD was going to get it together and win this one for the Gipper, but he stayed right where he was. The minister said a few more words - I wasn't paying attention - and then one of the attendants played a recording, Judy Collins singing 'Amazing Grace.'
Outside, Jan and I walked for a couple of blocks without saying anything. Then I said, 'Thanks for coming.'
'Thanks for asking me. God, that sounds foolish. Like a conversation after the Junior Prom. "Thanks for asking me. I had a lovely time." ' She took a handkerchief from her purse, dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose. 'I'm glad you didn't go to that alone,' she said.
'So am I.'
'And I'm glad I went. It was so sad and so beautiful. Who was that man who spoke to you on the way out?'
'That was Durkin.'
'Oh, was it? What was he doing there?'
'Hoping to get lucky, I suppose. You never know who'll show up at a funeral.'
'Not many people showed up at this one.'
'Just a handful.'
'I'm glad we were there.'
'Uh-huh.'
I bought her a cup of coffee, then put her in a cab. She insisted she could take the subway but I got her into a cab and made her take ten bucks for the fare.
A lobby attendant at Parke Bernet directed me to the second-floor gallery where Friday's African and Oceanic art was on display. I found Chance in front of a set of glassed-in shelves housing a collection of eighteen or twenty small gold figurines. Some represented animals while others depicted human beings and various household articles. One I recall showed a man sitting on his haunches and milking a goat. The largest would fit easily in a child's hand, and many of them had a droll quality about them.
'Ashanti gold weights,' Chance explained. 'From the land the British called the Gold Coast. It's Ghana now. You see plated reproductions in the shops. Fakes. These are the real thing.'
'Are you planning to buy them?'
He shook his head. 'They don't speak to me. I try to buy things that do. I'll show you something.'
We crossed the room. A bronze head of a woman stood mounted on a four-foot pedestal. Her nose was broad and flattened, her cheekbones pronounced. Her throat was so thickly ringed by bronze necklaces that the overall appearance of the head was conical.
'A bronze sculpture of the lost Kingdom of Benin,' he announced. 'The head of a queen. You can tell her rank by the number of necklaces she's wearing. Does she speak to you, Matt? She does to me.'
I read strength in the bronze features, cold strength and a merciless will.
'Know what she says? She says, 'Nigger, why you be lookin' at me dat way? You know you ain't got de money to take me home.' ' He laughed. 'The presale estimate is forty to sixty thousand dollars.'
'You won't be bidding?'
'I don't know what I'll be doing. There are a few pieces I wouldn't mind owning. But sometimes I come to auctions the way some people go to the track even when they don't feel like betting. Just to sit in the sun and watch the horses run. I like the way an auction room feels. I like to hear the hammer drop. You seen enough? Let's go.'
His car was parked at a garage on Seventy-eighth Street. We rode over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and through Long Island City. Here and there street prostitutes stood along the curb singly or in pairs.
'Not many out last night,' he said. 'I guess they feel safer in daylight.'
'You were here last night?'
'Just driving around. He picked up Cookie around here, then drove out Queens Boulevard. Or did he take the expressway? I don't guess it matters.'
'No.'
We took Queens Boulevard. 'Want to thank you for coming to the funeral,' he said.
'I wanted to come.'
'Fine-looking woman with you.'
'Thank you.'
'Jan, you say her name was?'
'That's right.'
'You go with her or - '
'We're friends.'
'Uh-huh.' He braked for a light. 'Ruby didn't come.'
'I know.'
'What I told you was a bunch of shit. I didn't want to contradict what I told the others. Ruby split, she packed up and went.'
'When did this happen?'
'Sometime yesterday, I guess. Last night I had a message on my service. I was running around all yesterday, trying to get this funeral organized. I thought it went okay, didn't you?'
'It was a nice service.'
'That's what I thought. Anyway, there's a message to call Ruby and a 415 area code. That's San Francisco. I thought, huh? And I called, and she said she had decided to move on. I thought it was some kind of a joke, you know? Then I went over there and checked her apartment, and all her things were gone. Her clothes. She left the furniture. That makes three empty apartments I got, man. Big housing shortage, nobody can find a place to live, and I'm sitting on three empty apartments. Something, huh?'
'You sure it was her you spoke to?'
'Positive.'
'And she was in San Francisco?'
'Had to be. Or Berkeley or Oakland or some such place. I dialed the number, area code and all. She had to be out there to have that kind of number, didn't she?'
'Did she say why she left?'
'Said it was time to move on. Doing her inscrutable oriental number.'
'You think she was afraid of getting killed?'
'Powhattan Motel,' he said, pointing. 'That's the place, isn't it?'
'That's the place.'
'And you were out here to find the body.'
'It had already been found. But I was out here before they moved it.'
'Must have been some sight.'
'It wasn't pretty.'
'That Cookie worked alone. No pimp.'
'That's what the police said.'
'Well, she coulda had a pimp that they didn't know about. But I talked to some people. She worked alone, and if she ever knew Duffy Green, nobody ever heard tell of it.' He turned right at the corner. 'We'll head back to my house, okay?'
'All right.'
'I'll make us some coffee. You liked that coffee I fixed last time, didn't you?'
'It was good.'
'Well, I'll fix us some more.'
His block in Greenpoint was almost as quiet by day as it had been by night. The garage door ascended at the touch of a button. He lowered it with a second touch of the button and we got out of the car and walked on into the house. 'I want to work out some,' he said. 'Do a little lifting. You like to work out with weights?'
'I haven't in years.'
'Want to go through the motions?'
'I think I'll pass.'
My name is Matt and I pass.
'Be a minute,' he said.
He went into a room, came out wearing a pair of scarlet gym shorts and carrying a hooded terry-cloth robe. We went to the room he'd fitted out as a gym, and for fifteen or twenty minutes he worked out with loose weights and on the Universal machine. His skin became glossy with perspiration as he worked and his heavy muscles rippled beneath it.
'Now I want ten minutes in the sauna,' he said. 'You didn't earn the sauna by pumping the iron, but we could grant a special dispensation in your case.'
'No thanks.'
'Want to wait downstairs then? Be more comfortable.'
I waited while he took a sauna and shower. I studied some of his African sculpture, thumbed through a couple of magazines. He emerged in due course wearing light blue jeans and a navy pullover and rope sandals. He asked if I was ready for coffee. I told him I'd been ready for half an hour.
'Won't be long,' he said. He started it brewing, then came back and perched on a leather hassock. He said, 'You want to know something? I make a lousy pimp.'
'I thought you were a class act. Restraint, dignity, all of that.'
'I h
ad six girls and I got three. And Mary Lou'll be leaving soon.'
'You think so?'
'I know it. She's a tourist, man. You ever hear how I turned her out?'
Lawrence Block - Scudder 1982 - Eight Million Ways To Die Page 29