“What’s the matter?” Stark asked.
“I thought I’d wait.”
“For what?”
“For you to see if you got enough to do the job.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry,” Mortimer said quickly, nervously, like a guy covering his tracks. “It’s just that my friend, he’s anxious to get moving on this thing, so if you can’t do it, he needs to know.”
“I can’t read it now,” Stark told him. “I have an appointment.”
“Okay,” Mortimer said weakly. He stepped away from the door. “So, you’ll let me know when…”
“I’ll be back here at midnight,” Stark said. “You can call me then.”
“How about if I just come by,” Mortimer asked.
“You’re not going home now?”
“Dottie’s on the warpath. I’m giving her a little time to cool.”
Stark looked at Mortimer doubtfully. “Why is she on the warpath, Mortimer?”
Mortimer looked like a guy caught with his hand in the till. “This other broad,” he sputtered. “She thinks I got this other broad.”
Of all the answers Mortimer could have given, Stark thought, this was the most ludicrous, and because of that, he knew that it had been yanked from a mind unaccustomed to deceit.
“I see,” Stark said coolly.
“She’s real hot about it,” Mortimer added with a sideward glance.
“No doubt,” Stark said, though he knew that this, too, was ridiculous, since everything Mortimer had ever said about his wife suggested that she was a woman who asked little and demanded nothing, a dull, moonless planet that revolved around Mortimer in an orbit that never varied in its shape or speed.
And so the question was why had Mortimer bothered to concoct such a shallow, pointless, and transparently absurd lie. The only possible answer was that he’d done so in order to conceal some deeper and more dreadful falsehood.
Stark hated both the question and the answer. He looked at the envelope Mortimer had just given him and felt sure that something was seriously wrong in this whole matter of the missing wife.
“The woman,” he said. “Did you know her?”
Mortimer looked as if he’d just been hit with an electric shock. “The one who’s missing?” he asked. “No, I…”
“But she’s your friend’s wife, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And yet you never met her?”
“I met her,” Mortimer said. “But I didn’t really know her.”
“So you’re not involved in it,” Stark said. “In her being missing.”
“Me?” Mortimer’s face froze in shock. “How could I be involved?”
“I don’t know, Mortimer,” Stark told him. “Maybe you and the woman are… close.”
“Close?” Mortimer yelped. “You mean like… close… like that?”
“Maybe she’s the woman your wife is worried about.”
“No!” Mortimer blurted out. “Nothing like that. I never really knew the woman. She don’t mean nothing to me.”
Stark let Mortimer squirm for a moment, then said, “All right. Come back around midnight.”
Mortimer looked like a schoolboy suddenly released from the clutches of a disapproving teacher. “Okay,” he said hastily, then turned away and trudged back down the stairs.
Watching him, Stark recalled how emphatically Mortimer had denied any connection to the missing woman it was his job to find. If this were true, he thought with a renewed and steadily sharper sensation of disturbance, then Mortimer was in Lockridge’s position, hired to find a man who could find Marisol for another man, in this case, Mortimer’s “friend.” But who was this friend, Stark wondered, and was he like Henderson had been, a scorned man, bitter and enraged, the missing wife-if she were his wife-now the sole object of his boiling wrath.
CARUSO
As he followed Mortimer westward, Caruso thought of the man at the top of the stairs, and the more he thought of him, the more one thing seemed clear. This guy looked a lot more like Batman than the barkeep he’d seen talking to Mortimer minutes before. For one thing, he’d had a book in his right hand. A very old book, like the ones Caruso had seen in movies about rich people who had huge country estates and whole rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with books you never saw in bookstore windows because they’d probably been made for the people who read them and nobody else. He knew that such people were phonies, that they would shake his hand, then quickly wash. He would always be low and dirty and disreputable to such people.
Okay, so forget about the barkeep, Caruso thought, it was this guy he’d love to waste, this smart and arrogant guy, with the fancy book in his fucking hand. He could put a bullet between his eyes and walk away smiling. He imagined doing just that, getting the word from Mr. Labriola, Whack Batman, then coming up behind this fuck and whacking him good. He thought of the shiny thirty-eight revolver he’d bought eight years before and which he kept, fully loaded, in the glove compartment of his car. When the moment came, he knew he’d be ready.
The only problem was that even if Labriola gave him the Big Assignment, he couldn’t be sure if this guy was really Batman. Because if he were Batman, then wouldn’t he want to look like he wasn’t instead of like he was?
Mortimer had made it to the Seventh Avenue subway by the time Caruso had run the various permutations through his mind. By that time he no longer felt certain which of the men Mortimer had visited was actually the man Labriola had hired to find his daughter-in-law, and this left Caruso utterly perplexed as he watched Mortimer descend the stairs to the station, then finally disappear.
Nothing was easy, that was the bottom line, Caruso concluded. Everything required more than you thought it would. More investigation, he decided, he needed more investigation before he could tell Labriola who Batman was and be sure that he was right. But how could he check out two different guys at the same time? That was a real mind twister, and as he made his way down the stairs, still vaguely on Mortimer’s trail, he tried to figure out a way to do it. The obvious answer was that he could hire some punk to keep an eye on one of the guys while he kept an eye on the other, but the punk would want money, and Caruso didn’t have any money, and he knew Labriola wouldn’t spring for an extra dime.
A problem, Caruso thought, as he watched Mortimer step onto the uptown number one, a real fucking problem.
SARA
She’d been lucky, and she knew it. She was lucky because she hadn’t brought the gun. If she had, the commanding voice would have been too loud and insistent for her to ignore. In her mind she saw the little bald man stagger backward as the plume of blood spread across his chest, a look of horrified amazement on his face. One more step, and what she now envisioned would have been real.
And so she had to be careful. That was the lesson she had to learn. She had to check everything out. She had to be street smart. She couldn’t allow herself to be cornered again.
Still, there was no choice but to go on. And so she took the paper from her bag and once again turned to the classified section. She scoured its pages, noting the varied skills she did not possess. She knew nothing of computers, nothing of bookkeeping, nothing of management, nothing of organization. She couldn’t set a broken leg or clean a tooth. She couldn’t fix anything or assemble anything or break anything down once it was assembled. She knew nothing about the theater, nothing about carpentry, nothing about recruitment. She had no experience in retail, had never sold a skirt, a greeting card, a record. The only thing she’d ever sold was herself, her voice, and that was probably long gone.
She folded the paper and considered just how little she’d learned in her life that anyone else could use. She knew scores of old songs, could play a little piano. But so what? The world was full of people who could do these things. The point was to be able to do something that someone else wanted done and would pay you to do. Or maybe just something you had that someone else wanted. Maybe no more than your body.