She shook her head. "It's cold outside," she whispered.
He smiled. "It's Prague, isn't it? It's always cold in Prague." Then he kissed her.
Sweet Christ Almighty, what is there to do but kill him? No jury in the world would convict me. I've bookmarked that page as Exhibit A, and the novel accompanies me now to Anne's house. I believe it will simplify matters for the homicide crew.
Yet the moment Anne answers the door, all thoughts of murdering her fiance dissolve. She looks fabulous and happy. Carla was right.
Anne invites me inside and, before I can ask, lets on that Derek is at the county library, reading up on Soviet nuclear submarines. "Oh. In Jane's," I say smugly.
"Pardon?"
"Jane's. You can look up any ship in the world in Jane's. A sixth grader could do it."
Anne's sigh is tinged with resignation. "Carla warned me you were taking the news badly. What've you got there?" She nods at Derek's book, which I'm clutching like a hot casserole. "Jack, if you came here to lecture me, you're wasting your time."
"Fine. But his writing is unforgivably wretched. Surely you're aware." This is not my finest hour. Anne would do well to boot me from the premises. Instead she brings me a perfect vodka tonic and tells me to sit down and listen up for once.
"In the first place," she says, "all my favorite novelists are dead, so they're not available to marry. In the second place, Derek is a good guy. He's fun, he's affectionate, he doesn't take life so damn seriously ... "
"You've just described a beagle, not a husband," I say. "And, for the record, it's deathI take seriously. Not life."
"Knock it off, Jack. Please."
"Tell me you didn't meet him at a book signing. Tell me you met him at a Starbucks or a Yanni concert. That I could almost live with."
"He did a reading at our store," Anne says.
"Aloud? He's got balls, I'll say that."
"Enough!"
"You know his real name is not Derek Grenoble? It's"
"Of course I know."
"And you're telling me you've actually slogged through ... this?" I hold up The Falconer's Mistress.
Anne laughs. "Yes, it's truly awful. But I love him, anyway. Like crazy."
"He isn't forty-four. Did he tell you he was?"
"No," she says, "but I told Carla to tell you that."
"Cute. How old is he then?"
"I don't know and I don't care."
"Well, I know. I looked him up."
"Then keep it to yourself," Anne says sharply. "Didn't you hear anything I said? He makes me feel good. Know what else? He'll be the first to admit he got lucky with those silly spy books. He doesn't pretend to be John le Carre."
"Wise of him," I say.
Anne, who has been pacing, sits down beside me. She's wearing a Stetson University tank top over white jogging shorts. Her legs look astounding, as always, and she smells of jasmine. Taking my hand, she says, "I'm sorry about one thing, hotshot. I completely forgot that Saturday's your birthday. Derek set the wedding date and I said yes and later it hit me. By then it was too late to change the arrangements."
"Right. He's off to Ireland."
"I'm really sorry. I feel lousy about it."
So far, none of this is as devastating as I'd anticipated. Naturally I want to pull Anne to the floor and gnaw off her clothes, but that urge is unlikely to abate in my lifetime. The dolorous tug at my heart, however, seems surprisingly mild and manageable. For this I credit the twin distractions of Emma, hugging my neck when we got to my apartment, and the latest twist to the Jimmy Stoma story. His sister's disappearance is so troubling that it's impossible for me to focus on the task of winning back a lost love.
Yet I take an unmannered gulp of my vodka and give it a shot.
"May I please make a case for myself? I've gotten so much better, Anne, I swear. I don't dwell on all that dark stuff. And forty-six hasn't exactly been a cakewalk, what with JFK and Elvis and, as you so helpfully noted, Oscar Wilde"
"That was thoughtless of me," she concedes.
"Point is, I've had a pretty strong twelve months, all things considered. And I'm ending on a very positive note, working on a big storya seriously heavy story that could spring me off obits and turn my career in a whole new direction. Up, hopefully."
Anne gives me the sort of pitiful smile I used to see on the faces of visitors to the animal shelter where Alicia worked; the smile for the doomed mutts who weren't quite cute and cuddly enough to make the cut.
"Your mother called me, Jack. She's concerned."
"Beautiful."
"Don't be angry," says Anne.
"I guess she's only got two things left in the world to worry aboutme, and Dave's colon."
"How isDave's colon?"
"Seriously, don't you think I seem better?"
"Yes, honey, for now. But it'll start all over again, like always. The obsessing, the dreams, the midnight monologues ... "
She's kind enough not to mention the actuarial charts I once taped to the medicine cabinet.
"I hope I'm wrong," she says, "but I'm afraid it'll kick in like gang-busters on Saturday when you turn forty-seven. This year was Elvis and Kennedy, next year it's bound to be someone else."
My spine turns into an icicle.
"Someone like who?"
Anne shakes her head. "Don't do this, Jack."
"Come on. Who died at forty-seven that I would possibly fixate on?"
Angrily she drops my hand like it was a hot coal. "Here we go again. That goddamn job of yours ... "
"You're winging it," I tell her, definitely asking for trouble. "You're blowing smoke. You can't give me one name, can you? Not one."
She grabs the empty vodka glass and steams for the kitchen.
"Anne!"
"Jack Kerouac," she calls over her shoulder.
And I hear myself muttering, "Oh Christ."
19
I couldn't sleep last night so I drove back to Beckerville in a rainstorm at two in the morning. Janet's Miata was filling with water in the driveway and the house was exactly as Emma and I had left it. Incredible: The cops never showed up. I thought about calling 911 again, but decided to hold off.
Now I'm at my desk in the newsroom, looking at a picture of Jack Kerouac on the Internet. He's standing beside a desert highway, his shoulders rounded and hands shoved into his pockets. The biography accompanying the photograph divulges that English was his second language, and that he wrote On the Roadin three weeks. It's enough to sink me into a funk of disconsolate envy. Reading on, I see that Anne was correct: the man punched out at age forty-seven. I seem to recall that he drank himself into a mortal spiral, and this detail is also confirmed. I will cling to it like a chunk of driftwood for the next twelve months, uplifted by the knowledge that this particular Jack wasn't taken randomly from life; he delivered himself free of it. He wasn't shot by a crazed fan or flattened by a runaway Winnebago or bitten by a Texas sidewinder. He boozed himself to death, a fate that I'm unlikely to replicate, given my tendency to fall into a snoring coma after three cheap vodkas.
So there.
From across the newsroom I hear a familiar, tubercular hacking: Griffin, the weekend cop reporter, sneaking a smoke. It's unusual to find him working so late.
"Three domestics," he explains in a tone of infinite boredom. "Knife, gun and claw hammer. Two 'graphs each. What the hell're you doing here?"
Griffin favors solitude. He has his own special way of working the phones. On impulse I ask: "Is there anybody worth a shit at the Beckerville substation?"
"Sure." With a pencil he laconically stirs a cup of black coffee. "Sure, I got a sergeant up there on night shifts. He'll talk to me." Translation: He's my source exclusively, so don't bug me for the name.
"You got time to make a call?"
"All depends, Jack."
I'm careful not to tell old Griffin too much. After I'm finished he squints up and says: "What're you working on? I thought you were still stuck on obits."