"Sooner or later you were gonna come across those boys. You'd find them or they'd find you."
Someone stepped onto the second-floor landing. He held his fist out, thumb down.
Marconi shook his head. "Another tin soldier tipped over on the board. Dead with his toy honor intact Take care, Griffin."
"Mr. Marconi."
He stopped with one foot out of the car.
"I don't much like being lied to."
"I can appreciate that."
"Or set up. Or tailed."
He shrugged without looking back at me. "Who would?"
The wiry bodyguard came out of the doorway. He stood scanning the street as Marconi went up the stairs, then with a glance my way turned and followed.
10
It was night now. Streetlights ran long fingers in through the window and caressed the back wall. Neither of us had made any move to turn on lights in the house.
"You missed it all, Lew. I got up and came in looking for you and there was Hosie on the couch making these horrible gasping sounds. That was bad enough, but then they stopped. I couldn't tell whether he was breathing or not I didn't think he was."
She drank off the last of her coffee. I'd made my way down the first third of a botde of Dewar's I'd got at the K amp;B up the street.
"The paramedics said he aspirated-vomited while he was out cold, breathed it into his lungs. There was blood and vomit all over the couch and floor, that really scared me, but they said the blood was probably from his stomach too, that happens with serious drinkers. They hooked him up to monitors, put a tube in his throat, started IVs, and packed him up. The ambulance sat there for half an hour. All these faces all up and down the street peeking out from behind doors and windows, trying to get a look, find out what was going on."
She got up and walked to the window above the sink, stood there looking out, not saying any more. A banana tree swayed outside, dipping one broad leaf into the air like an oar.
Tm sorry, V."
She nodded. "I'll make more coffee. Be a long night." When she opened the refrigerator door, light leapt into the room. She took out a can of French Market topped with aluminum foil. Light caught in the foil as she unwrapped it, bounced about the walls, semaphore from signal mirrors far away.
"You weren't here again, Lew. You're never here. All those cases you keep taking on, the Clayson girl, Billy Deacon, that man's new young wife over in Slidell… You're the missing person, Lew."
She turned to look at my glass. "Can I get you more ice?"
I shook my head.
"I keep trying to tell myself it's going to change, for a long time now. I don't know how much longer I can go on doing that."
She sat at the table to wait. We watched one another. Neither of us said anything. After a while she got up and poured coffee. A passing car lit the part of her face I could see, threw her shadow hugely on the wall.
"Get you anything while I'm up?"
Again I shook my head.
"I wish I could. I wish there was something I could do for you."
"You do a lot for me, Verne."
"No. I don't. Nothing that matters. You won't let me, can't admit there are things you need. From me or anyone else."
A moth flew once against the window, went away and came back. Nudged at it again and again, wanting in from the light maybe. In from the cold. Father, the dark moths crouch at the sills of the earth, waiting.
I remembered a story Mom told me, how when she and Dad were first married, living in one of the two-room shacks thrown up twenty or thirty to the block on hardscrabble acreage at the edge of town, this bird, a dove, got in the habit of coming by every morning. First day, it flew into the window and when Mom went out she found it lying stunned in the dirt under the window. She got some cornmeal from inside and piled it up by the bird. Next day about the same time, she looked up and there the dove was, sitting in the window looking in at her. So every morning after that, she'd put cornmeal out on the sill for it. Even after the dove stopped coming, for a week or so she went on putting out cornmeal.
"I've met someone, Lew. An older man, and his life's different from anything I've ever known. Every time I see him it's like visiting another country. But I think he cares about me. I don't know if anyone else ever will, not that much. Or that way."
I nodded. She sat at the table again.
"I have to try this, give it a chance. Give myself a chance. See what might come of it."
"Okay."
"I'm sorry, Lew."
"No reason to be."
"Yes. There is. Good reason."
She stood and dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink, rinsed the cup, set it on the drainboard.
Years later, at an AA meeting, a member told us that just before swallowing an even hundred pills and opening her wrists in the bathtub with an X-Acto knife, his wife had spent the evening-he was out drinking as usual-ironing his shirts. They were in a stack on the kitchen table, neady folded, when he got home.
"Rent's paid up through next month. You want, I'm sure Mrs. Vandercook would let you take over the apartment after that."
Okay.
"I'll be by to pick up my things later this week if that's all right"
Yes.
'Take care, Lew."
"You too."
When the front door closed half an hour later, I got up and went into the front room. I looked through the records till I found one with Duke Ellington's "In My Solitude." I played it sixteen times while I finished the Dewar's.
"Jesus I'm sorry, Lew."
Coffee lurched over the side of my cup onto the table. I held on to the cup with both hands and leaned into the table. I'd just told Don about LaVerne leaving.
He'd come by to let me know that Hosie was going to be all right and found me out back on the patio lying up against the fence with glittery tracks from slugs on my clothes. God knows how long I'd been out there or what I had thought I was doing.
I told him what I'd found at Amano's trailer, about my visit with Jimmie Marconi. Then about LaVerne.
"She'll be back, Lew. You guys have split up before, but you're meant for one another. Anything I can do?"
"Yeah." I held up my empty cup.
"Only if you promise to drink it this time instead of splashing it on the table." He poured, then sat. "This other thing, though… Have to tell you. You're in over your head on that"
"Marconi, you mean."
Don nodded. "Maybe this other shit too. But Marconi for sure."
"He came to me, dealt himself in."
"So you get up and walk away fromthe table. You're done playing. Where's the problem?"
"I can't"
"Yeah. Yeah, I know that."
Don tipped his chair back, head against the wall, gently rocking. There were spots rubbed smooth on the wall where others had done that before.
"So Bone hauls ash for Marconi's group and winds up with a bankroll he's not supposed to have. Somehow Marconi's sidemen are so busy they forget to ask him about this. By the time they do, the Esmay woman's in the picture. Maybe she's Bone's love interest, maybe she's running a scam. Maybe both. Then the money disappears. Someone climbs up on a roof and shoots at you and the woman. Bone gets wiped. The woman either kills herself or meets up with an unusually imaginative dispatcher. Meanwhile these self-styled Aryan types are buying up serious weaponry-with mob money?"
"You tell me."
"And Marconi's dogs are looking to pull them down, make some kind of example of them. One thing."
"Where's the money?" I said. Just what I'd been wondering.
Don nodded.
"This guy Joey the Mountain pulled off of you, this Ellis: you don't think he walked down the back stairs, huh."
"Not with his feet touching."
"So what'd they get from this litde episode? They already knew the white boys were in it This Ellis didn't talk, and you say he didn't, what do they have they didn't before?"