“Then who the hell’s going to do all the killing you mentioned, Paul?”
“Oh, there are still gunsels around, Tim. There always will be. For the lower-level troops; sets a good example. Keeps everyone ‘honest,’ all the way up through organizational ranks. Vincent Martucci’s hit was an object lesson. A reminder that at the base of the new structure are the old rules.”
“So you don’t think Martucci was hit on Keeler’s behalf?”
Paul shrugged. “Some people win, some people lose. I think this time Keeler just happened to luck out. That’s the way it goes.”
Tim leaned back and locked his fingers over his chest. “Well, how about that, Joe? The little lady’s luck has changed at last.” Still looking at me across the desk, he said to Paul, “Joe here has spent sleepless nights worrying about Keeler. About how we might be railroading an innocent girl.”
“I never said she was innocent, Tim. I just never thought she was guilty.”
“Same thing,” Tim said complacently.
“You know something, Paul? It’s a good thing that Tim took all the examinations that came along. He’s got the perfect mentality for civil-service exams. One right answer per question. Miss X does so-and-so, therefore Miss X is (a) good; (b) bad. It’s not like that in real life, Tim. There are a lot of in-betweens between (a) good; (b) bad.”
“All comes down to the same thing in the end, Joe,” Tim said. “On the one hand ya got good; on the other hand ya got bad.”
“That’s a simplistic view, Tim, of a complicated philosophical question: good-bad. Depends on where you sit, what your point of view is, what your vantage point at the moment might be.” Sutro talks that way a lot; people are used to him.
“Bullshit,” Tim said simply, with the same conviction he had expressed at eighteen, when I once tried to explain to him that the difference between a “good” girl and a “bad” girl might be circumstance and opportunity rather than inherent evil.
“Well, I’ll tell you something interesting, Timmy,” Paul said in his slow, comfortable, unflappable way. “The word I got on Kitty Keeler in all this time has been that Keeler is a ‘good kid.’ I haven’t run into one bad word about her.”
“What the hell is the definition of a ‘good kid’ to the people we’re talking about, Paul? A girl who’ll take twenty without a squawk when she’s been promised twenty-five?”
I tried not to let the growing tension show; tried to lean back, listen politely, not let any of it get to me. It was very difficult; Tim’s expression was so damn smug and amused.
“No, no, nothing like that, Tim.” Paul leaned forward and looked from Tim to me, like a teacher including both of his students in the lesson. “There’s a lot of respect for Kitty Keeler out there. She’s a very bright girl. They respect that, brains. The world Keeler runs in is not exactly an equal-opportunity employer. These guys usually think of a woman only as a sex object, nothing else.”
“Well, what the hell else would you call Keeler? Jesus, she said so herself, Paul. When was it, the first week of the investigation, some reporter from the News asked her, ‘Hey, Kitty, how many of those guys in your little pink book are your lovers?’ You remember what she said, don’t you, Joe? She said something like ‘Go eenie, meenie, miney, mo and you got it!’ ”
“I’ll tell you something interesting, Tim. Keeler’s the only one who’s claimed any of these men were her lovers.”
“Oh, hell, I’m sure according to the guys in the book, Keeler got the wrong man listed. Who the hell wants to cop out to sleeping with a girl accused on the front pages of killing her own kids?”
Paul just went on in his own quiet way, steady, not argumentative, just explaining. “Well, Tim, I have run into a couple of the Don Juan types who were anxious to tell me what a great lay Keeler was, but I never believed one of them.” He held up his hand, anticipating Tim, and smiled. “Not about Kitty being a great lay or not. I just don’t think any of them knew one way or the other from personal experience. The interesting thing with Keeler is that over and over again the word is that Kitty’s smart. She’s ‘something special.’ I guess you could almost say she’s considered a sort of ‘stand-up guy.’ ”
“Instead of a lay-down lady?” Tim couldn’t resist. Then, in a hearty, buddy-buddy, you-can-tell-us-pal voice, he said to me, “Well, wadda you say, Joey? You got closest to the lady in question. She an innocent victim of her own bad-mouthing or what?”
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but actually Kitty’s reputation had come almost strictly from Kitty herself. She had given wise-guy, hard-nosed answers to anyone who questioned her about her sex life: police, reporters, television newsmen. She had built her own image out of her anger. But when it came down to it, I didn’t know who her lovers had been.
Not Ray Mogliano; not according to his brother, John. (“Kitty was a friend, ya know?”)
Not Vincent Martucci. (She fronted for Vince.)
Not Billy Weaver. (Kitty said she hadn’t slept with Billy.)
“Far as I know, Tim,” I said lightly, “the girl’s a virgin.”
Tim threw his head back and laughed, then said we should all go and get something to eat. He jabbed me on the arm and said to Paul Sutro, “Tell ya, Paul. You ever need a good guy on your side, you get my pal Joe here. When he’s on your side, he’s on your side all the way.”
CHAPTER 12
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when Kitty called. I had been home long enough to scan the late edition of the Post and the early-bird edition of the morning’s News. Both were playing up Vincent Martucci’s hit as it related to the Keeler case.
It took me about twenty minutes to get to her apartment. I hadn’t seen Kitty since that morning a few days ago when she’d shown me where, in Flushing Meadow Park, she and George had taken their sons for springtime picnics. I’m not sure what I expected her mood to be.
She walked from the hallway to the living room with a rigid stiffness; indicated the well-stocked bar cart. “Help yourself, Joe. Nothing for me.”
She sat on the beautiful dark-brown suede couch; she looked as though the room had been designed just for her. It was all expensive, contemporary mixed with a few touches of modern and one or two really good antiques. It suited her more than anything in Fresh Meadows had ever suited her.
She stood up abruptly when I sat beside her. She stood with her back to me for a moment, then let her hands drop to her sides. She kept clenching and unclenching her fingers.
“Well, Joe,” she said, finally turning to face me. She was very pale, very tense and agitated. “It’s all over. The whole thing. You want to know what my ‘attorney’ said? My elegant-Southern-gentleman Mistah Jaytee Williams said? He had his stooge, Jeff Weinstein, sneak me out of the building through the garage this afternoon so I wouldn’t run into any of those lousy bastard vultures downstairs, waiting with their cameras and microphones for my ... reaction to Vincent’s death. You know what Jaytee Williams said to me, first thing, the minute I set foot in his office?”
“What did he say, Kitty?”
“That bastard.” She began to pace, reached down, snatched up a large rough-textured pillow from a chair and hugged it hard against her body. She turned and stood very still, then said, “ ‘Wal, little lady, you-all surely got a good Mafee-oh-so godfather lookin’ after your best interests.’ ” She did a mean imitation of Williams. Then she dropped the pillow. “Is that your opinion, too, Joe? Is that what you think? That I had someone kill Vincent? Because if that’s what you think, I want to know about it, right now. I really want to know what’s going on inside your head about me, right now.”
“No, Kitty. I don’t think you had anything to do with it. It does have something to do with you, though. Vincent’s death.”
“You want to know something, Joe?” She began to speak again with that same intensity, the same restless energy and tension. “You want to know how I feel? I feel like every death, every single goddamn death in the whole world, somehow has something to
do with me.” She looked around, searching, then snatched the New York Times from a table; it was folded back to the obit page. She held it up for me to see. “Look, Joe. Look at this. You know what I was doing before I called you? I was sitting here, reading the names of all these people, all these dead people, wondering if any of them have anything to do with me.” Her hands were shaking as she tilted the paper toward the light, blinked quickly and began to read. “ ‘Abramson, Judah; beloved husband of Esther, father of David and Hannah; dear grandfather of ...’ ”
I took the paper from her and reached for her, but Kitty pulled back.
“No, Joe. I don’t need you to comfort me. You want to know why? Because I am glad that Vincent’s dead. I am glad he’s dead. I’m glad he’s dead.”
She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, then held her head up, chin out. “I wasn’t going to tell you that, Joe. I wasn’t going to say that to you. You know why? Because I was afraid of what you’d think. That you’d think the same thing that good-old Jaytee Williams thinks. That I just have to ... snap my fingers or something and I make people die. You know what he said to me when George ... when George killed himself? He said, ‘Why, Miz Kitty, what the hell did you say to that pore dumb son-of-a-bitch to make him think he’d be helping you by blowing his brains out?’ And, Joe, I never ... George did what he did ... I never wanted anything like that.”
Kitty reached for my drink, took a deep swallow, then sat down on the couch, her feet under her, her arms seeming to hold her body together inside the deep-salmon-colored jersey robe. She took a deep breath, then said, “Just let me talk, Joe, all right? I feel so ... so filled with the need to talk.”
“Go ahead, Kitty. You talk.”
“Look, I want you to know something. I want you to know how I feel about something. About Vincent’s death. You people are as responsible as anyone else. All of you. You all set him up, and Vincent couldn’t see any way out, so he went before the grand jury and he told the story you all told him to tell, because he didn’t have a choice. Vincent was a dead man from the minute you found out he was bisexual and ...”
That was funny. It was actually pretty stupid. From the minute that Vito Geraldi had announced to us that Vincent Martucci was searching for boys, we had all thought of him as a homosexual. The implications of his being bisexual just hadn’t occurred to me.
Kitty had stopped speaking; she watched me intently. “What’s the matter, Joe? There’s a funny look on your face. What are you thinking?”
“It’s just that I hadn’t thought of Vincent’s death in just that way. Our ... responsibility.” Which of course wasn’t really true; I had thought of it; I just didn’t give much of a damn, one way or the other.
“Well, it’s true. Everyone knew that Vince was on borrowed time. And I’m not going to lie and say I’m sorry it was before the trial instead of after. And you know what, Joe? There isn’t even going to be a trial. Williams said that Vincent was the District Attorney’s whole case. That there never was one single solitary shred of real evidence against me. There was just me. The fact of me. And what Williams calls my ‘life style.’ And the way I shoved it to them. Williams says that no one is going to make any kind of further effort in the case. Something to do with politics, Joe. I don’t understand any of that and I couldn’t care less, but I do care about one thing.”
“What’s that, Kitty? What do you care about?”
“That we can’t force them to have a trial; that I’m not going to have a chance to be tried and acquitted. I want that creep Quibro to bring his ‘case’ to a jury. He never had a case against me. He never really had to prove I was guilty, as long as he had Vincent. I was the one who had to prove I was innocent. Now it’s the other way around; the way it’s supposed to be. And he can’t prove I’m guilty. So he’ll get one adjournment after another, until after the election, Jaytee said. And then the D.A. will just quietly drop the indictment.”
Her long hair surrounded her face, which was shiny and moist and very beautiful, her skin picking up a peach-colored glow from her robe. Very softly, she asked, “Joe, can you understand? Can you understand that I want to go on trial? I want to get it all out in the open and be acquitted.”
“Yes, I can understand that, Kitty.”
She dropped her chin for a moment; the long light hair covered her face completely, then she parted it with her hands, like parting curtains, and held her face up toward the light, toward me.
“Joe. I don’t feel exactly the way I said. About Vincent. About Vincent’s death. We ... I knew Vincent for a long time, Joe. He was a friend. He was good to me. We trusted each other. I never judged him in any way. It was none of my business how Vincent lived. I wish ... he wasn’t dead. I’m sorry he’s dead. But, at the same time, for my own sake, I’m glad, and that makes me feel awful. Like I must be an awful person ...”
I knew that was the right time for me to sit beside her, to hold her against me. She seemed depleted; the energy had gone out of her, leaving her emptied and light and fragile and totally exhausted.
I held Kitty’s hand in mine, examined the nails: bitten and ripped down to the quick, slashes of bloody ragged wounds. I put her sore fingertips against my lips.
“Joe, I don’t care what a bastard like Jaytee Williams thinks. I don’t care what they print about me in the newspapers. I really don’t But ... it matters to me what you think, Joe. It matters to me very much that you believe I had nothing to do with Vincent’s death.”
“I believe you, Kitty. I believe you.”
“Joe, put me to bed. I am so tired.”
She seemed nearly asleep. I settled her on the bed, but when I started to leave she reached out for me.
“Stay with me, Joe. Can you stay with me? Just lie here, next to me. God, I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
I cradled Kitty against my body as she slept, her face turned toward the night light she wanted left on. I could see the stages of her sleep reflected on her face: the relaxation of tension as her lips parted and a kind of serenity washed over her. She had the smooth, untouched look of an expensive porcelain doll, almost too perfect to be real. As her breathing went deeper and slower, as she dropped deeper into sleep, her hands clenched into fists, her lips began to move, her dark brows pulled into a frown. I could see the movement of her eyes beneath the delicate beige lids, the flutter of those strange whitish lashes, as she went fully into her dream. Her body tensed and she began to whisper and to shake her head against whatever she was seeing. I stroked the long tendrils of hair from her damp face, and in her sleep Kitty reached and took my hand in both of hers and held on to it as she drifted closer to the edges of consciousness.
In the early morning, the room visible in that peculiar light of predawn, we turned toward each other as though each of us was inside the same dream, and in a slow, almost organic connection we made love slowly, languidly, almost totally devoid of tension, as though our movements against each other were part of a perfect ritual of easy mutual satisfaction.
“Joe,” Kitty said, her fingers tracing my lips, outlining my features, “could we be together this weekend? Could we go somewhere?”
“Where would you like to go?”
She shook her head. “No. You pick a place.” She insisted that the choice be mine, as though this was very important to her.
“How about Montauk? It’s about a two-, two-and-a-half-hour drive. Do you like the beach? Look, I’ll take a run over to my place, get a change of clothes and be back for you in about an hour. It’s six now; be ready to leave by seven, okay?”
“Okay. Joe. Just one thing. For this weekend. Let’s let it just be you and me. No ... newspapers or television. Nothing but music on the radio. Let’s not talk about ...”
I leaned over and kissed her. “Where’d you get the idea we were going to have time to talk?”
The two days we spent in Montauk were like a period of suspended time, unconnected in any way to any other time or place. Kitty was radiant, be
autiful; there was a lightness about her, a kind of total freedom as she waded up to her knees in the freezing ocean, challenging me to catch her, to run with her, to slide down the dunes with her, to make love to her out in the open on a desolate, cold stretch of sunny beach.
What surprised me was my ability to keep up with Kitty. I seemed to draw energy from her, to reach her level of vitality. I felt ageless; evenly matched; exhilarated by the intensity of everything we did.
We ate seafood in a good, uncrowded restaurant, then returned to our motel room, both of us exhausted by the fresh air, too much food, too much wine; both of us feeling stuporous, both of us somehow, mysteriously, coming alive again at precisely the same moment. She filled me so completely with herself that I began to believe her when she whispered to me, “There is just now, Joe. Just here and now. Just us. Just you and me. No yesterday, no tomorrow. Only now. Just now.”
Which is what, I suppose, is meant by the “now generation”: no promises, no commitments, no questions, no past and no future. Just now. Which might, or might not, be a good way to live.
We drove back to the city Sunday night in the kind of comfortable silence that can say more than hours of conversation. As I pulled up to the front of Kitty’s building, she said, “Joe, would you come upstairs with me? Just for one drink.” She slid her hand along my arm. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
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