Mike Teague is the pussycat, and no matter what Mrs. Costigan says, he really is bedridden. He lies there all day, and his head is filled with memories of punching bags and boxing gloves, the smell of liniment and sweat, and the thud of flesh hitting flesh. Mike was an athletic trainer all his active life, first with teams, then with fighters, and the walls of his room are covered with photos of the people he calls "my boys." Ballplayers of every sort, coaches, managers, but mostly boxers. Mike is one of those people who never met an athlete he didn't like, he's incapable of malice, or envy, or greed. He spends his time writing postcards to his boys, a dozen a day, and he gets that many in return. He never forgets a name or a face, and he can tell you in graphic detail what Willy Pep did to one of his boys that night in Cleveland back in Forty-seven. Sure, he's short-tempered and grouchy, who wouldn't be, tied to a bed that way, but he isn't any junkyard dog. He's a pussycat, and he certainly isn't Gemstone.
I tapped Jeremy Pasco next. He's a slim little guy, about twenty-five, with dark hair that he slicks back, and a mustache that's hardly worth mentioning. Pasco comes from Dallas, but he hasn't been back there in years. He makes a living playing cocktail piano six nights a week at the Flamingo Lounge on Third Street, and he spends most of his days at the track. He's a loser in more ways than one. The ponies don't love him, and the way he sees it, the rest of the world is down on him, too. You know the type. Nobody appreciates him, nobody recognizes his talent, nobody ever gives him a break, and every time he stubs his toe it's because some son of a bitch put a rock in the road. He once had ambitions as a concert pianist, but that's only a dream now. He's past it, he hasn't practiced seriously in years, and he's going to spend the rest of his life playing "Misty" and "Stardust" to the same old bunch of drunks. But there was a time when it could have happened, until somebody put that stone in the road. The guy with the stone was his younger brother, David.
Jeremy and David Pasco were born two years apart, the only children of two musicians. Papa Pasco was a violinist with the Dallas Symphony, Mama taught piano at home, and their boys were raised in a world of music. Both kids were introduced to the piano at an early age, and both took to it with a natural ease. They were good, everyone said so, and by the time that both were in their teens, people were predicting brilliant futures for them. If it had been a horse race, Jeremy would have been the favorite. At that stage in their development, his playing was the more considered, the more sensitive, and his technique was more advanced than his brother's. He was on the way up, and the first rung on the ladder was the All-Texas Youth Competition. Winning the All-Texas would open the right doors, and for two years Jeremy worked with the competition as his goal. He was nineteen when his parents thought he was ready. They entered him and, almost as an afterthought, they entered David, too. They expected little from the younger brother, but they thought that the experience would be valuable for him. Jeremy was the rising star.
It didn't work that way. At nineteen, Jeremy had progressed as far as he ever would, while David had matured into an accomplished artist. Both brothers made it into the final round, but David was the winner, and Jeremy finished out of the money. When the decision was announced, Jeremy threw his arms around his brother and hugged him exuberantly, grinning broadly as if he, himself, had won. It was a family triumph, he told his parents, and hugged his brother again.
The Pasco family went to bed late that night after a champagne supper. Jeremy sat up in his room and waited until he was sure that the others were asleep. He knew exactly what he was going to do. At two in the morning he packed a small bag, looked around his room, and said goodby to his childhood. Then he went down to the parlor, found his mother's sewing box, and took her pinking shears. He went up to his brother's room. David lay on his back, his mouth open, snoring. Jeremy put his pinking shears around his brother's right index finger, and paused. David did not move. Jeremy squeezed. He was surprised at how easily the shears cut through flesh and bone. He cut off David's finger at the second joint, severing it completely. He grabbed his bag, and ran. He went out of the house and down the street with the screaming in his ears. He did not look back. Not then, not ever.
He's been pounding the piano at places like the Flamingo Lounge ever since, and he still feels that he got a bad break. That's Jeremy Pasco. He isn't much, but he isn't Gemstone, either.
Clara Moskowitz is an eighty-five-year-old flim-flam artist who scores off susceptible elderly widowers, a first cousin to the octogenarian lady sharks who cruise Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Clara prefers to work the provinces, and she does well at it. Nothing spectacular, not a fortune, but every so often she'll meet some poor sap who was married to one woman for fifty years, and who, now that she's gone, does not know how to make it on his own. Clara shows him how. Nothing physical, not at her age or his, just a little hand-holding, lots of sympathy, a commanding presence, and before el sappo knows it, Clara has taken over his life, his checkbook, and his CMA account at Merrill Lynch. Unlike her Miami cousins, she never marries the mark. She's already buried three husbands, and she can't take the strain of those funerals anymore. She just turns the sap upside down, and when there's nothing left to shake loose she sends him back to South Dakota, or Wisconsin, or wherever to live off the reluctant generosity of his children. The way Clara sees it, she gives value for the money, and there must be something to it, because no one has ever filed a complaint. She's a neat little piece of work, our Clara, but she isn't Gemstone.
Then there's Mr. and Mrs. Rovere. Paul and Patsy are in their late fifties, and the story they give out is that Paul took an early retirement from his job back in Kingston, New York. Dicey heart, a small pension, but they manage with it. Breakfast at The Clock, lunch at Denny's, the early-bird special at the Fisherman's Net, sit on the porch in the evenings and rock away the hours. It isn't a bad story, and they actually do come from Kingston, but their name wasn't Rovere then. It was something quite different back home where they were pillars of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Paul was the chairman of the building fund. Yeah, you got it. His retirement began the day he cleaned out the fund, and they headed south. He got away with something just short of 200K, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't working out. They had just enough brains to steal the money, but not enough to know what to do with it. Instead of putting it to work, they've been nibbling away at it for the past four years, and it's almost gone. They don't sleep well. They lie in bed with the covers over their heads, wondering which will come first, the law, or the day when there won't be enough left for the early-bird special at the Fisherman's Net. They're pathetic people, but neither of them is Gemstone.
The last one I tapped was Bertha Costigan, and I peeled that woman's mind like an onion. On the surface I found a placid, kindly widow whose life revolved around her rooming house and the people who live there. On the next layer down I found that she's had a lifelong love affair with the state of Florida, not the drab place where she lives, but the fantasy Florida of the travel brochures and the television commercials, the white beaches and the emerald water, the orange groves and Disney World. Under that I found a deep pride in her former profession; years ago in Buffalo, New York, she was a well-respected nurse. Buffalo, that was the next layer down, and when I reached it, it almost froze me stiff. Buffalo, with its snow, and ice, and freezing winds; and on that level of Bertha's mind I found a reservoir of hate. She hates Buffalo, she hates the cold weather, and she hates the years that she spent there. That time includes the years of her marriage, and she hates her husband, too. Late husband. She hated him when he was still alive, and even though he's been dead for twenty years, she hates him still. In her mind he comes across as an inconsiderate, domineering son of a bitch, but for Bertha the worst of his sins is that he never moved her to Florida. Harry was an actuary with the Metropolitan Life, and when they first were married she told him how much she despised the cold, and sleet, and snow that battered Buffalo every winter. She begged him to get her out of there, and he promised that he would. He promised her the Florida of her dreams, and that was the part she could never forgive, for he never delivered. The years went by, and every year there was another reason why they couldn't move south. There was Harry's job, there was his ailing mother, there was the cost of moving. Each year he came up with something else-once he actually announced that he was allergic to oranges-and after a while it was clear to Bertha that Harry wasn't going anywhere. She knew now that he had never intended to fulfill her dream, and that for as long as he lived she would be stuck in Buffalo.