“I should never’a gone out on my own,” Victor said.
“That’s exactly what I was talking about,” Bobby said, “you can’t second-guess your life. So you fucked up, you took a fall, you’re still what, fifty, fifty-five?”
“Forty-four,” Victor said.
Thinking, Jeez, the fucking sad sack looks sixty, Bobby said, “See? Forty-four is like what twenty-four used to be. With vitamins, all the new shit with doctors, everybody’s gonna be living to a hundred soon.”
Victor, looking at his watch, said, “Fuck, I gotta get back to work. So what brings you around here anyway? You just wanted to shoot the shit or what?”
“No, it’s a little more important than that.” Bobby leaned forward, making sure the young guy reading the Daily News at the next table wasn’t listening. “I got a job to discuss.”
“A job we did?”
“No, a job we’re gonna do.”
Victor stared at Bobby for a few seconds, like he was trying not to laugh, then said, “Come on you’re joking, right?”
“Does this face look like it’s joking?
“What’s this, April fools? Come on, Bobby, give me a fuckin’ break, all right?”
“I’m serious, man. I came to you first because I know you’re good and I know I can trust you. But if you don’t want to hear me out I’ll go talk to somebody else.”
Bobby wanted to reach across the table and slap him, get him focused.
“All right, so tell me,” Victor said, trying not to crack up. “What’s this job?”
“I wanna knock over a liquor store,” Bobby said.
Now Victor couldn’t hold back. He started laughing, but it quickly turned into a cigarette smoker’s hack. Finally, he recovered enough to say, “A liquor store? Jesus, you’re too much, Bobby.”
Bobby still wasn’t laughing, or even smiling.
“Come on, Bobby,” Victor said in that scratchy voice. “A liquor store?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Bobby said. “That time we were shooting pool downtown what, seven, eight years ago, you said you wanted to work together again someday, right? Well, this is fuckin’ someday.”
Victor was staring at Bobby like he felt sorry for him. Bobby had seen this look a lot from strangers on the street, usually old ladies. One time an old lady asked Bobby if she could help him carry his bags home from the supermarket. Bobby wanted to fuckin’ belt her.
“You can’t walk,” Victor said. “You know that, right?”
The waitress came over with Bobby’s cherry cheesecake. Bobby took four full bites of cake then said, “So? Are you with me or not?”
“Come on, man,” Victor said. “Weren’t you just listening to me?”
“You know,” Bobby said, chewing, “the old days you would’ve jumped if I told you I had a job to pull.”
“The old days was a long fuckin’ time ago. You’re in a wheelchair and the doctor took some cancer out of my throat last year. They found a couple of spots on my liver they’re watching – they said if it spreads down there, that’s it – I’m a goner.”
Bobby stared right into Victor’s yellowish eyes. The cancer didn’t surprise him – he knew there was something wrong with the guy. He said, “You know what I do every day now? When I’m not watching the fucking lineup on TV, I’m out in Central Park, shooting pictures of the broads in bikinis. I’ve got hundreds of pictures of boobs and asses, lined up on my walls like a fucking porno museum. Now you know that’s not me, right? You know that’s not what I do.”
Bobby realized that he was talking too loud. People at other tables were looking over at him like he was crazy. Then Victor, looking at Bobby like maybe he thought he was crazy, too, said, “What’s this? You a photographer now or something?”
“Why? You want me to take some pictures of your girlfriend? I’ll make her look so good they’ll put her in Penthouse.”
“You couldn’t make my girlfriend look good,” Victor said. “To make her look good you’d have to shoot her with the fuckin’ lights out.”
Bobby and Victor stared at each other seriously for a few seconds then they both started to laugh. After a while they stopped laughing, but when they looked at each other they started again. Finally, they got control of themselves. Bobby felt like it was old times again, like he and Victor were twenty-five years old, shooting the shit in some Hell’s Kitchen diner.
Victor, still smiling, said, “If you want to see some good-looking ass you should check out the whores they got workin’ in this hotel.”
Bobby knew Victor was just trying to change the subject but played along anyway, saying, “What? They got some good-looking hookers here?”
“You kiddin’ me? These chicks ain’t the needle whores they got dancin’ on the stages on Queens Boulevard, you know what I’m saying? These are some high-class models they bring in here for the insurance faggots. You know what I’m talking about – call girls, escorts.”
“Escorts, huh?” Bobby was getting a new idea. “They come here a lot?”
“Every fucking night.”
“Yeah? And you’re the bellhop here, right? I guess that means you take people up to their rooms.”
“Why?” Victor asked.
Bobby smiled, said, “Tell me something else. Can you get me some room keys?”
Six
She’s a looker, yeah, probably. Jimmy’s not known to pass on a piece. It’s what got him into a fix more’n once, a looker. If you’re asking because you’re interested, remember what she’s doing with you before you fall in love.
Max was in the Modell’s sneaker section, trying on a pair of Nike running shoes. He liked the way they fit, but there was no way he was buying them. They were on sale for seventy-nine bucks, but Max never paid discount for anything. Nah, he’d rather go to some classy store on Madison Avenue to get them, even if it cost him double.
As he was trying on another pair, Max sensed movement next to him. He noticed that the briefcase he had put down next to him – with the ten thousand dollars, the extra set of keys to the apartment, and the code to the alarm with instructions – was gone. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw Popeye, wearing the leather jacket with the hole in it, walking away down the aisle at a normal pace, heading toward the stairs.
Suddenly, Max realized that Deirdre was dead – there was no turning back. Even if he wanted to call off the murder, he couldn’t. He still had the phone number where he’d reached Popeye, but there had been a lot of background noise, and he’d had a feeling Popeye was at a pay phone somewhere. No, it was definitely over. By six P.M. Deirdre would be gone forever.
Max doubted that he’d miss her very much, but this wasn’t his fault. Deirdre was the one who’d changed, not him.
Max had met Deirdre in 1982 at a Jewish singles weekend at the Concord hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Back then, Deirdre was an upbeat, outgoing, friendly, big-chested girl from Huntington, Long Island. Max was living alone in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, working as a twenty-four-thousand-dollar-a-year mainframe computer technician, and he decided that Deirdre was the best thing that had ever happened to him. After a few months of dating, he took her out for drinks at the bar at the Mansfield Hotel on Forty-fourth Street. It was a classy place, lots of books in the lounge, made Max feel well-read. Paula, the little blond barmaid, brought him his third screwdriver. He could see Paula understood he was a guy of wealth and fame, like the Stones song, what the hell was the title? Then Max, feeling nice and lit, thought, What the fuck? and popped the question to Deirdre. Six months later he was kissing her under the huppa at a synagogue in Huntington. They had a few happy years together – reasonably happy, anyway – living in a one-bedroom walk-up on West Seventy-seventh Street. Then Max left his job to start his own company. As his business started to take off, their relationship went downhill. They moved out of the walk-up, into a doorman building on the Upper East Side, and Deirdre slowly turned into the wife from hell.