I snorted in disgust. I was the only guy in town who wasn’t sitting around with his feet up, enjoying the comforts of home sweet home. But I knew how to fix that.
I went home and shoved a sheet of cheap yellow paper into the typewriter and stared at it for ten, fifteen minutes while words failed to materialize on it. Then I got up and liberated a Falstaff from the fridge. I glanced at the front page of the paper. I read all the cartoons in last week’s New Yorker. I picked up a yellow legal pad and, pretending to sketch out the scene in the book that I was having trouble with, sketched out a pretty good picture of the beer can on my kitchen table.
The doorbell rang and I answered it, which only goes to show how uninspired I felt. I’m very good at not hearing doorbells, phones, and other modern nuisances when the writing is going well. When it isn’t, every little distraction is welcome.
I opened the door and looked at Koosje.
“Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?” she said.
“I’ll take your cookies any day, little girl,” I said, and ushered her into the room.
She stepped in and removed her oversized dark glasses. Koosje—Koosje Van der Beek, Doctor Van der Beek, to the likes of you—is a psychologist. A very good psychologist, she tells me, and I believe her. She has the respect of her colleagues and the admiration of her clients. She has a reputation for compassion, intelligence, dedication, and precision. And she has long dark hair and very nice legs, but that’s neither here nor there.
Incidentally, there’s no point knocking yourself out trying to pronounce her name. You can’t, at least not her first name. It’s Dutch, and the double Os conspire to form a sound not found in English, something midway between oh and oo. Say KOHshuh VANderbeck and you’ll be close enough.
She stopped in the center of the room and looked at me. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
“Let’s see … you’re not wearing a coat, so I haven’t forgotten to offer to take it. Your birthday’s in November, so I haven’t forgotten to send a card. We’re not married, so I haven’t forgotten our anniversary …”
“Dinner,” she said. “Tonight,” she said. “The French Café, six-thirty, my treat,” she said. “Honestly, Nebraska, I can understand your forgetting about me, the time, and the place, but forgetting a free dinner … that’s not like you, my friend.”
“You can say that again. I’m sorry. It just slipped my mind entirely.”
“Mm. That was my guess. I hope your absent-mindedness is due to an almost total immersion in your new book and not to another woman.”
That stung. It hit a little close to home.
I said, “Truth is, another woman has distracted me.”
She let one eyebrow climb slightly skyward.
“The French Café this ain’t, but if you’re hungry I’ll throw together something for us and tell you about her.”
Which is what I did.
Some time later we were in the back room, in my office, which doubles as my bedroom. When not folded out, the fold-out sleeper sofa leaves plenty of room for desk, chair, typing stand, dresser, and other necessities. When folded out, the sofa leaves slightly less room than an ant needs to jitterbug in, but one learns to make do.
I was on my back, watching the ceiling go black. Koosje was on her side, using my left shoulder as a pillow. Her breath was cool against the side of my neck.
She said, “Why did you tell me?”
I said, “Because you have a right to know.”
“No, I don’t.” Her lips moved against my shoulder. “Not a right. We don’t have that kind of arrangement. If you want to go to bed with another woman, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“It does,” I said. “Because of the way I feel about you. Because of the way I think you feel about me.”
Koosje rolled away from me and groped for her glasses on the far arm of the sofa. They were wide-lensed designer glasses, “eyewear,” as they say in the trade, and they made her look very studious and intellectual, even if she was stark naked, with her hair going every direction.
“I’ve never made any claim or demand on you. I wouldn’t.”
“I know,” I said. “That doesn’t change anything. My wanting to be faithful comes from me, not you. Old-fashioned word, faithful.”
Koosje elbowed herself into a sitting posture and rested her head against the back of the sofa. “Mm. A good word, I think.” She looked at me. “If things had … progressed last night, would you have gone to bed with her?”
“I don’t know. Probably. I’d like to think not, but probably. There’s no denying events were heading that direction. Maybe I possess such inner strength as would have caused me to bring things to a screeching halt if put to the test … but I doubt it. Not that I feel compelled to hop on everything that’s hot and hollow, as Hammett so eloquently phrased it—”
“Charming.”
“—I think I’m a little more sentient than that. But there’s a whole lot of … something left over between Carolyn and me, even after all these years. The flood of memories, of emotions, all of which I thought I’d put behind me years ago—it’s practically overwhelming.”
“Mm,” Koosje said. She says that a lot. It had taken me a while to deduce that it’s just a habit, just a reflex, just a little sound she makes that doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all. She drifted out of the room, and a few seconds later I heard her moving about in the bathroom. Then there was the soft tap of bare feet on the kitchen linoleum, the dull, sucking pook! of the refrigerator door opening, and the rattle of cans on the fridge’s wire shelves. A moment later she ambled back through the doorway with two Falstaffs.
“That’s what I call a vision,” I said. “A naked maiden bearing beer.”
“Hardly ‘maiden,’ ” she said. She crawled across the rumpled sheets and handed me a can. I pried back the pull tab and she did likewise.
“Here’s to crime,” I said.
“Here’s to crime fiction,” she corrected, tapping the edge of her can against the edge of mine. “You know, what you’re feeling isn’t unusual,” she said, settling back again. “People aren’t machines. We can’t turn emotions on and off like a spigot, nor would we want to. When a relationship ends, there are bound to be feelings left, good or bad, and the people who were involved have to learn to handle those feelings. Some are easier than others. When a love affair ends naturally, when it runs its course, then it’s easier. There’s a certain mutual agreement that it’s time to end things—or put them on different terms.”
“ ‘Can’t we just be friends?’ ”
“Exactly. But when one party wants to end the relationship before the other is ready …” she shrugged and sipped beer. “Unfortunately, it happens that way more often than not. From what you tell me, that’s what happened with you and Carolyn. She left you holding the bag, so to speak, without offering any real explanation. The story never had an ending, happy or otherwise. Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably been waiting, wanting, to write an ending to that chapter for twenty years.”
I rested a hand on the inside of her left knee. “So what do you prescribe, doctor?”
She looked at me. It was hard to see her, since the room had grown so dark. “I can’t decide for you. What do you want?”
“Well, that’s easy. I want to go to bed with Carolyn. And then when I wake up the next morning I want it never to have happened. I want to have my cake and eat it too—”
“Bad analogy.”
“I see your point. But do you see mine? Is it unreasonable to want it both ways?”
“Unreasonable, no. Impossible, yes. Face it, Nebraska, if you’re going to have a relationship with Carolyn Longo, or anyone else, then you’ll have to accept whatever consequences it may have on the other relationships in your life.”
“Right now I’m only concerned about one other. What consequences?”
Koosje ran the sweating beer can across her forehead and down one cheek. The room ha
d been warm to start with, and we hadn’t helped it cool off any. Windows, such as they were, were a narrow strip of glass and aluminum high up on the back wall. If the wind was from the east, great. If not, no ventilation. The apartment had air-conditioning, a window unit crammed into a hole cut into the living-room wall, but it didn’t seem to do much besides make noise and run up the electric bill.
“I don’t know,” Koosje said. “I honestly don’t. I’ve never asked you to be faithful to me, but I’m pleased that you have been.” She gripped my arm. “If you weren’t … Well, I don’t know. Speaking as the cold, clinical professional—”
“I’ve never known you to be either cold or clinical.”
“Mm, maybe we’ll try that game later on. At any rate, the professional answer is, ‘We’re not married, we’ve made no promises, we have no hold on one another. We don’t know how long our relationship will last, or whether it’s strong enough to survive external buffets, or whether it should continue if it isn’t.’ ”
“All right. And not speaking as the cold, clinical professional?”
She looked at me. Her face was very close to mine, but I could barely see it in the diffuse gray light. Her voice was a whisper, a soft ghost of a whisper in the darkened room. “What we’ve got is good, very good. Do we really want to risk losing it?”
I held her close. After a while, I held her very close. And, once again, she was neither cold nor clinical.
CHAPTER FIVE
Loverboy, a.k.a Jonathon Desotel, got the next morning off: I had bigger fish to fry, or at least different ones. So I let him find his own way to work, and by seven-fifteen I was back at Hascall Street, or what was left of it. The crew was beginning to assemble. The foreman had told me work started at seven-thirty.
At seven-forty I saw Al Patavena’s Stud Baker pull onto Vinton Street and park along the curb, opposite where it had stood yesterday. Patavena, behind the wheel, was alone. That was okay: I had wanted to try to undo yesterday’s damage by interviewing them separately today. But it was kind of an interesting development, since yesterday the two had seemed as inseparable as Willie and Joe.
Patavena paused a little when he caught sight of me, in the alley that connected Hascall and Vinton behind the church and school buildings. But he put on a resolute face and kept coming, ignoring me as he passed.
As he passed, I said, “Where’s your boyfriend,” not only to get the conversational ball rolling but also because, even at that hour of the day, a little bit of strategy was beginning to jell in the old gray matter.
Patavena stopped, turned, glowered. “Keep your mouth shut, prick. Or I’ll shut it for you.”
Of the two—Abel and Patavena—Patavena stood the better chance of making good on the gangsters-movie threat. He was skinny but in that rangy, wiry way that you have to watch. Still, I didn’t think we’d come to blows, and even if we did, I always had my master plan to fall back on: fight dirty, then run.
I shrugged carelessly. “Hey, what do I care what two consenting gardenias do in the privacy of their own hovel? I just hardly recognized you without your shadow, that’s all.”
Patavena’s glower deepened. He didn’t know what exactly I meant by it, but he didn’t think he liked it. His eyes were hot. “He didn’t feel too good today,” he grumbled. “We hit the bottle pretty hard last night.”
“A little celebration, maybe.”
“Payday yesterday.”
I laughed. “Okay. If you say so.”
He had turned and taken half a step toward joining the others. Now he stopped and looked at me again. “What’s that supposed to mean—if I say so?”
I smiled and looked away from him, toward a line of poplars that sheltered a house from the alleyway. “If I were you, I’d be real interested in finding out if Abel is really home with a case of bottle fatigue right about now, or …” I ended it with a shrug that was supposed to be worldly-wise.
Patavena moved closer. “Or what? Spit it out, shitface.”
“Your buddy-boy got awful quiet yesterday when we started talking about Longo’s girl, didn’t he? I think that’s interesting. I think maybe the cops don’t know Longo had action going on the side. So if Longo had a wad of dough to stash, and he stashed it with the girlfriend …”
“Hell,” Patavena said hotly.
“Good hiding place, but inaccessible. What I’m getting at is you and Abel might be the only guys who know about this woman. If she’s still around town, that is. Suppose Abel figured that out yesterday. Suppose he managed to figure out that seventy-eight thousand divided by two is only thirty-nine thousand but seventy-eight thousand divided by one is seventy-eight thousand. Suppose he started looking for a time when he could ditch you and hit on the girlfriend by himself, like …”
Patavena was silent a moment. Beads of sweat appeared on his face, but then it was a muggy day. I waited while the gears turned. Like the mills of God, they moved slowly, but they moved. After a minute or so, he looked at me with the menacing scowl back in place.
“Bullshit, man,” he spat. “Marlon wouldn’t pull nothin’ like that, not on me. We been through a lot, him and me, and if he was gonna rip me off, he’s had lots of chances.”
“Seventy-eight thousand of them?”
“Fuck you. ’Sides … Marlon don’t got any car.”
With that he turned again and this time successfully walked away from me.
I trudged back up the hill to my crate and moved it down Seventy-fourth to where it and Vinton conspire to form a concrete T. I had a good view of Patavena’s car when he got into it not five minutes later.
He roared off down the hill. I followed.
I followed him to Ralston, a bedroom community just south of Omaha. I followed him through a couple of picture-post-card neighborhoods, keeping well back when we left heavy traffic. I followed him to an Amoco where he consulted a phone book at a drive-up booth. And then I followed him to a mobile-home park that we had done a good job of circling but not stumbling across for the past half hour.
After a little searching, Patavena brought the clunky car to a jerky stop in front of a trailer at the edge of the park, alongside a faded red Le Car. The trailer—I know they don’t call them that anymore, but what the hell—the trailer was pastel green with white trim and green-and-white metal awnings. Three wooden steps, redwood stained, took you up to a narrow white metal door. Someone had been doing some landscaping on the little strip of lawn surrounding the home, white marble chips covering the ground around the skirt of the place in a loping, curved outline that ran from about eighteen inches at its narrowest point to maybe three feet at its widest. A couple of puny evergreen bushes in the middle of the decorative stones wilted in the glare of the morning sun. Two bags of marble chips slouched against the trailer’s side. The idea of trying to beautify such unbeautiful surroundings struck me as both futile and touching.
I let the Impala coast to a stop under some maples and watched Patavena fly out of his wagon and up the wooden steps. He pounded on the door and it opened. I couldn’t see who operated it from the inside. I couldn’t hear what Patavena said. But it was good enough to get him admitted.
As the trailer door slammed, I reached across and opened my car’s glove compartment. Inside, I keep an old canvas bag, the kind banks used to give you. Inside that I keep one of my two .38 police revolvers. I don’t like automatics. The more sophisticated something is, the greater the possibility of a breakdown. If you’re in a situation that calls for a gun, you want to be able to pull the damn trigger without having to wonder whether or not it’ll do any good.
I shook out the gun, checked the cylinder, climbed out of the car, and stuffed the gun into my back pocket. I know us hardboiled private-eye guys are supposed to shove our guns into our waistbands, and our untucked shirttails are supposed to hide them, but anyone who’s tried that trick knows it gets mighty uncomfortable mighty fast, and a shirttail hides a pistol about as well as a veil hides a stripper.
I went ac
ross the little pea-stone road, climbed the stairs, and cocked my head toward the door. Voices came from within, but indistinctly. A small air conditioner jammed into a window alongside the door did a good job of drowning out everything.
I hit the aluminum with the flat of my hand and didn’t have to wait too long for the door to be opened. The doorman was a woman, a trim, dark-haired woman of twenty-seven, twenty-eight.
“Hi there,” I said. “Would you be interested in taking out a subscription to Real Thrilling Crime Detective Stories?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. No words, that is, only sound, a sort of ehhhhh.
Then Marlon Abel stepped out from behind the door. He made sure I saw the .22 he held.
“Get in here, cop,” he hissed.
Nobody ever calls me shamus.
I got in there, edgewise, so as not to reveal the gun butt sticking out of my back pocket.
The mobile home was like the time machine on Doctor Who, bigger on the inside than on the outside. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was that the place was a mess. Not messy, but a mess, a wreck. Someone, Marlon Abel, no doubt, had tossed the joint, torn it apart looking for something. I could guess what.
I didn’t notice too much else. I was preoccupied with the gun that was rudely staring at me from Abel’s hand.
“The guy with the firepower usually gets to do the talking,” I said.
“Then shut up.”
“Take care of him, Marlon.” Patavena. I hadn’t noticed him, slouched in a far corner of the living room. His face was red and veins stood out in his neck and forehead. He held a wooden duck, a decorative duck decoy, between his wide hands, as if he’d like to twist the bird’s head off. No doubt I’d interrupted a fiesty discussion of how Marlon came to be on the premises without his old buddy Al.
“You shut up too,” Abel said. He eyed me a long minute, blinking rapidly several times. The one-eyed monster staring at me never blinked.
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