“I’ll get a job, we’ll get a place.“
“I love you, Dek,” she said-and laughed. Her face was wet, her nose was running, but she laughed. At my stupidity, I thought.
“Why are you laughing?” I screamed, furious at her mocking. “I can take care of you.”
A couple, walking by, moved closer to the curb.
Maris looked at me, her reddened eyes wide at my sudden rage. And then she tugged at her door, ran inside, and slammed it behind her.
I never saw her again.
Thirty-five
For a day and a half, I moved slowly through the turret, numbed by images of Maris flashing nonstop, like an old newsreel, against the back of my brain. Over and over, I saw Leo and me walk her home, those first days of that distant January. I saw how, after hardly any time at all, Maris and I found excuses to hang back, too awkward to name why we wanted-no, needed-to be alone. Again and again, I saw Maris hurry to step in front of me, to stop me with a smile, and ask me to a dance. A hundred times I heard her laugh at the thrift store as she held up my floral necktie. And a hundred times I chafed anew in my itchy wool suit as we walked to the school. Over and over, I found the new softness of her lips in the dim light of a straw-shaded lamp in a two-flat basement and felt the urgency of all the afternoons that followed as we raced to her apartment.
The day of Lillian’s funeral came again, lush and heavy with spring. Again I breathed in the mingling of newly cut grass and funeral wreaths, life and death, and later, the lighter scents of roses and Ivory soap on Maris’s skin as we moved on her bed and her face changed from tears to a strange sort of acceptance to something I could not understand at all.
Once more I felt my lungs fill with relief as I watched Maris, stern-faced in concentration, cutting our initials onto Kutz’s trailer, surrounding them with a heart and abating my guilt.
I again felt the heat of August and the wetness of her tears through my shirt before she ran, forever, from the stupid boy that I was.
I saw those things, and little else, as I moved through the turret. Gray daylight darkened into nightfall and lightened once again into gray, but I was barely aware. Time was passing as bundles of memories, separated only by such ragged little bits of oblivion as I could snatch, sleeping in the chair, on the bed, or on the floor. Always, though, the reality of the present jerked me awake, after but a few minutes, with the same oxygen-robbing sense of loss. There would be no more days and weeks and months and years of pretending that Maris was alive somewhere, and happy. Maris was dead.
I was aware, from time to time, of my cell phone ringing. Leo told me later that Amanda finally gave up calling and rousted him out of a meeting downtown at Sotheby’s. He picked her up at the Art Institute, and together they drove out to the turret. He said they banged on the door for twenty minutes before I came down, and then only to open the door an inch.
“She’s dead,” Leo said I said, through the crack in the door before I slammed it shut.
“This is about old love?” Leo said Amanda asked, when they got back to the Art Institute. It was the first time she’d spoken since they left Rivertown.
“No,” he’d said to Amanda. “This is about old guilt.”
At six o’clock the next evening, I came out of it enough to fumble for my cell phone and listen to my messages. There were twelve: seven from Amanda, four from Leo, and one from Dina, the hostess at the Scupper on Windward Island. There were none from cops.
I grabbed clean clothes and my gym bag and went out to the Jeep. An ancient orange Ford Maverick with a bad muffler and a broken headlight followed me too closely to the health center, but it hung back in the darkness as I parked in my usual spot, next to the doorless Buick.
Farther back in the lot, the thumpers-petty criminals in training-were in their last hour of lounging by their cars. By eight, they had to turn the parking lot over to the drug dealers so that serious crime could commence. I made a show of leaving the door of the Jeep ajar so that even the dumbest of the thumpers wouldn’t be tempted to cut the tape, or worse, the little remaining plastic on the side curtains. I even set the Discount Den radio up high and loose on the dash. There was no need for any of them to crack an unhealthy sweat looking for it in the cold air.
I ran four pounding miles, punishing my lungs and my legs and cultivating rage until I was sure I knew how to use it. Rage hones me sharper than does self-pity. Then I showered, put on fresh duds, and went to the Jeep. The Discount Den radio sat on the passenger seat, examined and rejected.
Leo put on a show of being delighted to see me when he answered his door.
“I seem to have picked up a tail,” I said, gesturing toward the irregular rumble of badly tuned exhaust coming from the street.
Leo moved to the front window as I took off my coat. “Orange Ford Maverick with one headlight?” he asked, pulling aside the shade just enough to peek out.
“That’s the one.”
“Benny Fittle.” He laughed, letting the shade fall back.
“That sallow-faced kid who rides around on a scooter, writing parking tickets?”
He smiled. “Amanda and I noticed him yesterday, parked down the street from the turret. You sure he’s a tail? One headlight is awfully obvious.”
I sat in one of the slipcovered chairs. “I’m a murder suspect.”
Leo took it as a joke. “Not much of one, if the only surveillance you can attract is a meter man in a Maverick,” he said, alliteratively. “Want a beer?”
I apologized when he came back with the Pilsner Urquells. “I’m sorry I laid it on you that way.”
“I figured she was dead years ago,” Leo said, although his eyes said different. He was ever my friend.
“She is now.”
“And you’ll never forgive her for it?”
“I wish she’d called, just once, after that August.”
“You better call Amanda.”
“I will, but first I need help from you.”
Ma was at church, playing bingo, so we stayed in the front room, drinking beer and eating remnants of bridge mix from the previous night’s film festival. Only the hard nuts, the petrified pellets sure to crack dentures, were left.
I told it to him sequentially, beginning with the fact that Reynolds, the blueberry watchman, was really Severs, the Iowa cop.
“A dead cop,” I finished.
Leo took a long pull on the Urquell. “Severs killed Maris?”
“Dillard and Patterson might think so, but I have doubts. Severs stuck around at least a month after Maris disappeared. That’s a long time to risk hanging around after killing somebody.”
“Severs was a patient man. It took him until Christmas to track Maris to Rambling.”
“True enough,” I said.
“And he never did find the money.”
“Not if he never did find that key.”
“The key to nothing.” Leo forced a small grin. “Then the last Kovacs caught up with Severs and killed him?”
“Unless it was me.”
His eyebrows danced. “You weren’t kidding? They really suspect you of killing Severs and of having the money?”
I pointed at the window shade.
“And that’s why Benny Fittle is tailing you?” His lips broke into a wide grin. “Benny Fittle is going to crack this case? Benny Fittle?” He laughed then, louder and louder until he almost lost his beer, through his nose.
“They’ll still send out bulletins on the Kovacs brothers.”
Leo wiped his mouth with one of the cocktail napkins Ma set out on film nights. “With all that money missing, surely you deserve a greater effort than Benny Fittle.”
“I’m figuring Dillard called Rivertown’s finest, asked them to put an obvious tail on me. Benny Fittle is temporary, a shot across my bow to let me know they like me for killing Severs and grabbing the money. They’ll get an order to search the turret, comb through all my assets.”