“Who wants to know?”
“I think you might want to have a coffee with me, Davis Square, the Diesel Café, where all the freaks and fags hang out. It’s open late.”
“Let’s start with you telling me who you are.”
He watches his grandmother shuffle through more tarot cards, placing them faceup on the table, thoughtful and at ease with them as if they are old friends.
“Not over the phone,” the man says.
The murdered old woman suddenly enters Win’s mind. He imagines her purplish-blue swollen face, the huge, dark clots on the underside of her scalp, and the holes punched into her skull, bits of bone driven into her brain. He imagines her pitiful, brutalized body on a cold steel autopsy table, doesn’t know why he’s suddenly thinking about her, tries to push her away.
“I don’t meet strangers for coffee when they don’t tell me who they are or what they want,” he says into the phone.
“Vivian Finlay ring a bell? I’m pretty sure you want to talk to me.”
“I’m not seeing any reason at all why I should talk to you,” Win says as his grandmother sits calmly on the sofa, going through cards, placing another one faceup, this one red and white with a pentacle and a sword.
“Midnight. Be there.” The man ends the call.
“Nana, I’ve got to go out for a while,” Win says, pocketing his phone, hesitating by the rain-splattered window, getting one of his feelings, the wind chimes a discordant banging.
“Watch out for that one,” she says, picking another card.
“Your car running?”
Sometimes she forgets to put gas in it, and not even divine intervention keeps the engine from quitting.
“Was last time I drove it. Who’s the man in scarlet? You find that out, you tell me. You pay attention to the numbers.”
“What numbers?”
“The ones coming up. Pay attention.”
“Keep your doors locked, Nana,” he says. “I’m setting the alarm.”
Her 1989 Buick with its peeling vinyl top and rainbow bumper stickers and beaded dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror is parked behind the house beneath the basketball hoop that’s been rusting on its pole since he was a boy. The engine resists, finally gives itself up, and he backs all the way out to the street because there is no room to turn around. His headlights flash in the eyes of a dog wandering along the roadside.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Win says loudly as he stops the car and gets out.
“Miss Dog, what’cha doing out here, girl?” he says to the poor, wet dog. “Come here. It’s me, come on, come on, that’s a good girl.”
Miss Dog, part beagle, part shepherd, part deaf, part blind, a name as stupid as her owner, creeps forward, sniffs Win’s hand, remembers him, wags her tail. He strokes her wet, dirty fur, picks her up, and puts her in the front seat, massaging her neck as he drives her to a run-down house two blocks away. He carries her to the front door, bangs on it for a long time.
Finally, the woman inside yells, “Who is it?”
“I’ve got Miss Dog again!” Win yells back to her.
The door opens, the ugly, fat woman on the other side wearing a shapeless pink robe, has no bottom teeth, stinks like cigarettes. She turns on the porch light, blinks in the glare, looks past him to Nana’s Buick parked on the street, never seems to remember the car or him. Win gently puts down Miss Dog and she darts inside the house, gets away from the ungrateful sloth as fast as she can.
“I told you, she’s going to get hit by a car,” Win warns. “What’s the matter with you? This is how many times I’ve had to bring her home because she’s wandering the damn street?”
“What am I supposed to do. I let her out to potty, she doesn’t come back. Then he came over tonight, left the door open, not that he’s supposed to be here. You can blame him. Kicks at her, mean as a snake, leaves the door open on purpose so she’ll get out because that stupid dog gets killed it will break Suzy’s heart.”
“Who’s he?”
“My damn son-in-law the police keep arresting.”
Win thinks he might know who she’s talking about, has seen him in the area, drives a white pickup.
“And you let him on the property?” Win says severely to her.
“Just try to stop him. He ain’t afraid of no one, nohow. It’s not me who’s got the restraining order.”
“You call the cops when he showed up earlier?”
“No point in it.”
Through the open door, Win can see Miss Dog flat on the floor, cowering under a chair.
“How about I buy her from you,” Win says.
“There’s no amount of money,” she retorts. “I love that dog.”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars.”
“Can’t put a price on love,” she wavers.
“Sixty,” he says, and that’s all the cash he’s got, his checkbook in Knoxville.
“No sir”—she’s thinking hard about it—“my love for her’s worth a whole lot more than that.”
4
Two tufts kids with green hair and tattoos clack pool balls not far from Win’s table. He watches them disdainfully.
Maybe he isn’t from money, didn’t get sixteen hundred on his SATs or compose a symphony or build a robot, but at least when he applied to the schools of his dreams, he was respectful enough to buy a khaki suit (on sale) and new shoes (also on sale) and get a haircut (he had a five-dollar coupon) in the event he was invited by the dean of admissions to tour the campus and talk about what he wanted in life, which was to become a scholar and poet like his father, or maybe a lawyer. Win was never called for a campus tour or an interview. All he got were boilerplate letters that regretted to inform him…
He watches everything and everybody inside the Diesel Café, looking for a man he is supposed to meet about a murder that happened twenty years ago in Tennessee. It is almost midnight, still raining, and Win sits at his small table, sipping cappuccino, watching scruffy students with their horrible hair and grungy clothes and coffees and laptops, watching the front door, his temper heating up by the moment. At quarter past midnight, he angrily gets up from the table as some pimple-faced, thinks-he’s-an-Einstein punk clumsily racks pool balls, talking loud and fast to his girlfriend, both of them oblivious, self-consumed, hyped up on something, maybe ephedrine.
“No there isn’t,” the girl is saying. “There’s no such word as sodomitical.”
“The Portrait of Dorian Gray was called a sodomitical book.” Clack. “In some of the reviews back then.” A striped ball wobbles into a pocket.
“It’s Picture of Dorian Gray, not Portrait, genius,” Win says to the pedantic, body-pierced punk now twirling the pool cue like a baton. “And it was called a sodomitical book during Oscar Wilde’s trial, not in book reviews.”
“Whatever.”
Win starts to walk off, catches mulatto fag.
He walks back, grabs the pool cue out of the punk’s hands, says, “My turn to break.” He snaps the pool cue in half over his knee. “Now then. You said something to me?”
“I didn’t say anything!” the punk exclaims, glassy eyes huge.
Win tosses the broken halves of the pool cue on top of the table, strides off, ignores the girl behind the counter, who has been staring at him ever since he got here. She’s blasting steam into a big coffee cup and says excuse me as he reaches for the door. Sir? she calls out above the noise of the espresso machine.
He walks over to the counter and says, “Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.” He pulls a few bills out of his wallet.
She doesn’t seem interested in his pool-hall vandalism, says, “Are you Detective Geronimo?”