Angela smiled, said, “I just heard Max talking about Popeye.”
“And how does Max know a guy like this ‘Popeye’?”
Angela shrugged.
“Is he the guy with the gray hair and the screwed-up mouth I saw a sketch of on the news?”
“I really don’t know anything else,” Angela said. “I mean I guess it could be the same guy.”
Bobby looked her up and down again, said, “Wanna sit down?” and Angela said, “Sure.”
As Angela passed by Bobby caught a whiff of her perfume and said, “You’re wearing Joy.”
“Yeah,” Angela said, smiling. “How’d you know?”
“I bought some of it for an old girlfriend one time. I love that smell.”
Bobby watched her sit down on the couch. He liked the noise her leather skirt made when she crossed her right leg over her left. She was exactly the type of girl Bobby would have gone crazy for before he got shot. He would have taken her to one of those classy Italian restaurants downtown in the West Village, then to some club on Seventh Avenue, and then back to his place for an all-night screw fest.
“This is a really big place you got here,” Angela said looking around. “You live here all by your own self?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. Then he lifted himself up in his wheelchair to do a pressure-relief and said, “But I’ll probably sell it one of these days and move into something smaller.” Noticing an empty pizza box on the coffee table and glasses half-filled with soda on the end pieces he said, “Sorry it’s such a dump.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Angela said. “If you want to know a secret, my apartment’s a real mess too.”
Bobby was staring at Angela’s mouth, loving how when she stopped talking her lips stayed slightly apart. He said, “So you know why Max wants this Popeye guy to kill me, don’t you?”
“No,” Angela said.
“You don’t know anything about the pictures?”
Angela shook her head.
“Well,” Bobby said, “I sort of took these pictures the other night of you and your boss… in that hotel room.”
Bobby was watching Angela’s reaction closely. She seemed genuinely surprised, but he couldn’t tell for sure.
“You’re saying you were the guy who-”
Bobby nodded.
“And you took pictures of me and Max…”
The funny thing was, it almost seemed the idea was getting her hot. He nodded again.
“I can’t believe this,” Angela said, but not in an angry way. “What are you, a detective or something? Did somebody pay you to follow us?”
Bobby laughed.
“No, it was just chance. It could have been any two people. It didn’t have to be you and your boss.”
“I don’t get it,” Angela said. “Why would Max want somebody to kill you?”
“Well, the meeting we had yesterday… I’m not really sure how to put this. I went to Max with a business proposition. I’m a businessman, like he is – except my business is a little different than your boss’s.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you would. Let me put it this way – I was trying to squeeze some money out of him. It was just a racket I got involved with because I had nothing else going on and it got a lot bigger than I ever thought it would.”
“A racket? What kind of racket?”
“Taking pictures of people fucking in hotel rooms and trying to blackmail them.”
“That’s amazing,” Angela said.
“What is?”
“That you could be so honest about something like that. I mean a lot of guys would’ve made up some bullshit story. You just sat there and told me the truth. I can really respect that about a person.”
Bobby liked that. “Thanks.”
“I mean, I have to admit I’m a little embarrassed that you have those pictures and that you saw me… you know… but on the other hand I can understand why you did it.”
“But you don’t have to worry,” Bobby said, “once your boss pays me the money I’ll throw out all of those pictures and the negatives. They won’t wind up on the fuckin’ Internet if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about stuff like that. I really don’t care about Max. As far as I’m concerned he can go rot in hell.”
“Really?” Bobby said, loving how she said hell. You could almost feel the flames. “I thought… I mean, going by the way you two looked that night…”
“I made a huge mistake,” Angela said, looking at her lap. “It’s the story of my life – things just seem to get really fucked up. I was on the rebound, you know? Max kept asking me out and asking me out and finally I just said yes. I guess I just thought he was a different person than he turned out to be.”
Her accent had become full-blown Irish, and had a trace of little-girl-lost in there too, a sucker punch for most men, and for Bobby, who hadn’t felt anything for a woman since Tanya, it was a K.O.
“Did he pay this guy Popeye to kill his wife?”
“I don’t know for sure, but after hearing him on the phone today… I’m almost positive he did. He was going crazy for me, getting really obsessed, you know? I kept telling him it was nothing serious and that we should end it. But he wouldn’t get the message and then he must’ve gone ahead and got this guy to kill his wife. Believe me, if I had any idea anybody was gonna get hurt there was no way I would’ve stayed with him.”
Angela uncrossed her legs then crossed them again, her leather skirt making that rubbing sound. Her bottom lip was moist and, he didn’t know if it was just him or something about the way she was sitting, but her bust looked bigger than it had when she walked in.
“But you were with him the other night,” Bobby said, “after his wife got killed.”
Angela looked away for a moment, toward the front door. When she turned back, tears were streaming down her cheeks and her face was all scrunched up and ugly.
“I was afraid,” Angela said, her voice cracking. “I wanted to break it off, but I’ve only had my job for a few months and he told me if I didn’t keep going out with him he’d fire me and give me a shitty reference. And I was lonely, I guess. Maybe you can’t understand, but women get desperate when they get lonely. They do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. Plus my mother was putting a lot of pressure on me.”
“Your mother?”
“My mother died a while ago and she was, you know, real salt-of-the-earth.”
Bobby loved how she pronounced it sall-t. She could even make a condiment sound sexy.
“She had a hard death,” Angela went on, “and before she passed, she held my hand and begged me to find a good man someday, not to end up alone.” She took a tissue from her bag, dabbed at her eyes, then said, “Maybe you can’t understand it, but my mother always had a lot of control over me.”
“Actually, I know exactly what that’s like,” Bobby said.
“You do?”
“My mother and I were very close.”
“I’m sorry,” Angela said.
“Oh, she’s not dead. She’s in a nursing home. I still go visit her all the time, but she’s really out of it.”
“I think that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life,” Angela said, starting to cry again. “A son who visits his mother in a nursing home.”
Bobby was feeling something he’d never thought possible – he was feeling noble, like a fucking good guy. He had no idea how that had happened, but he kind of liked it. He saw himself like Tom Cruise in that flick, Born On The Fourth of July, having fucking dignity in his disability.
“I only go a few times a week,” Bobby said.
“A few times a week! I hope when I’m old I have a son like you who’ll always love me.”
Now the tears were starting to flow freely down Angela’s cheeks. Bobby noticed that the tissue she had was drenched so he wheeled into the kitchen and returned with some paper towels. He gave one to Angela and she dabbed her eyes a few times and said, “I have a confession to make. There’s something I lied to you about before and I feel really bad about it.”
“Shoot,” Bobby said.
“See, the truth is, I could’ve called to tell you all of this instead of coming here. But after I saw you leave the office, I just couldn’t stop thinking about you. I thought maybe if I came over here… I don’t know… I just thought maybe something could happen between us. Believe me, I usually don’t do stuff like this – I mean get so forward with guys – but after all the hell I’ve been through lately I figured things couldn’t get much worse than they already are. I just think you’re a very attractive man and… I feel like such an idiot. I should probably just go home now.”