“He’s very angry.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen this before, Mortimer.”
“I know you have.”
Mortimer’s answer seemed clipped, as if he were hurrying away, on the run himself in some way, seeking someplace to hide no less desperately than the missing woman.
“I think we need to talk,” Stark said. He waited for Mortimer to offer something that could quell his growing misgivings. Then he said, “My house. Three-thirty.”
“Okay,” Mortimer said weakly.
Stark hung up the phone, returned the notes to the plain manila envelope, and placed the envelope in the top drawer of his desk. He could feel something evil stir around him. It coiled in the fractured handwriting of the notes.
He closed the drawer, walked to the window, parted the thick curtains, and looked out at the street. Years before he’d done the same from his hotel window in Madrid and seen Lockridge standing by a lamppost, smoking, with one hand sunk deep into the right pocket of his black leather jacket, his freckled fingers no doubt caressing the blade he would later use on Marisol.
MORTIMER
Mortimer stared disconsolately at the television. The Yankees were losing, but he didn’t care. He had no money on the game, but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He had bigger fish to fry than a Yankee win, even if he stood to gain a few bucks in the deal. He had bigger fish to fry. A dreadful sense that Stark had caught on to something, the dark edges of the deal.
“You gonna be home for dinner tonight, Morty?”
He glanced across the room to where Dottie stood, draped in a sleeveless floral housedress, leaning on one flabby arm, her pendulous breasts, as Mortimer saw them, all but touching the floor.
“I don’t know for sure,” he said.
Mortimer returned his attention to the game and tried to put everything else out of his mind, all the thoughts that were rolling around inside his head, banging against his skull like stones. He didn’t want to think about Stark, or what Stark might be thinking, or how what Stark was thinking could affect him. He wanted to think about a horse that won, a bet that netted him a bundle. But his horses had always lost, and he’d netted nothing, and this dreary conclusion turned his thoughts to death.
He was going to die very soon, and he knew that this was a big deal, and yet he seemed unable to focus on it. He was going to die soon and he didn’t have a nickel of life insurance or a nickel in savings, and in fact was in hock to the Prince of Darkness for fifteen grand, and even this seemed little more than a small bump in the road. The problem was that he kept thinking about his life rather than his death. How small and drab a thing it had been. How little he’d gotten out of it. Within a few months it would be over, and yet what exactly was this life that would soon end? What had it amounted to? Nothing, Mortimer concluded, absolutely nothing. But that conclusion did not bring his speculation to an end. Instead, the problem only got larger. If he was nothing, then why was he nothing? That was the one question he wanted answered. How had he come to this bleak place, and was there any way he could escape it, however briefly, before the final curtain fell?
“You can’t give me no idea?” Dottie demanded.
“No.”
Dottie jerked her hand from the doorjamb, clearly irritated. “How about you give me some idea, Morty,” she said. “So I know to make dinner or not make dinner, you know?”
“Don’t make dinner,” Mortimer told her. He knew she was glaring at him, but he didn’t care. Bigger fish to fry, he thought, than a pissed-off wife.
He rose, walked to the door, and yanked his jacket from the wall rack beside it. By then Dottie had swept up behind him in a flutter of garish colors, menacing as a huge, angry parrot.
“Where you going?” she demanded.
“Out.” A sudden pain streaked across his stomach. “Shit.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Dottie said, though with neither sympathy nor concern, his pain just another source of irritation.
He was amazed at how unnerved it made him, this single stinging cramp. “Fucking gas,” Mortimer answered. He placed his hand on his stomach and squeezed. “I gotta go.” He started to open the door, but Dottie closed it.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Morty?” she asked.
“Tell you what?”
“If something was wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wrong, I mean, with us?”
Wrong with us? Mortimer couldn’t imagine such a question. Nothing had ever been right with them. Their marriage had been a long slide down a muddy chute, love and passion only things they saw in movies, people rushing toward each other through woods or on the beach. For as long as he could remember, Dottie had been dull and overweight, like himself, and when he thought of them together, he thought of comic figures, people in commercials. Human jokes.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” Dottie insisted. “If something was wrong?”
She looked at him silently, waiting for his answer, and he saw that he’d lied to her so often, she expected only lies, and even thought of them as kindnesses.
“There’s nothing wrong, Dottie,” he growled as he stepped out into the corridor.
“Okay,” Dottie said with a shrug, then softly closed the door.
And so, seconds later, he was standing on Eighty-sixth Street, the usual crowds rolling up and down the busy thoroughfare, but utterly alone in their midst. He had always been alone, he knew. Movies talked about guys who stood alone, and it was supposed to be a good thing, but when you got hit by cancer, or got some other really awful news, when death or something almost as bad stared you in the face, you yearned for someone to share the dark tidings, maybe feel a little bad for you. They didn’t need to lend you money or overdo the pity. You just needed to know that it was bad news for them too.
He thought of the one person in the world who’d probably feel that way. It wasn’t Dottie. And it wasn’t Stark It was Abe who’d looked sad when he’d told him about the cancer, looked sad and poured him a round on the house and then said he could drink for free until he died.
What a guy, Mortimer thought to himself with a surge of true devotion to Abe Morgenstern, my best friend.
DELLA
The phone rang. Della picked it up.
“I just wanted to let you know I’m still okay,” Sara told her.
Della thought of Leo Labriola, felt again the hard grip of his fingers on her wrist, the bite of the pen, and knew that her friend was not in the least okay. She could warn her, but what would be the consequences of that? What if the Old Man found out about it? There was Nicky to think about. And her daughter. And Mike. You save one person, you put another in danger. Because there seemed no way to act rightly, she said only, “That’s good, Sara.” She added nothing else, because the important thing was to get off the line as quickly as possible, learn as little as possible about where Sara was or what she was doing. That way, if Labriola really used muscle, she’d at least have a weapon against him, the fact that he could squeeze and squeeze and she still wouldn’t know any more about Sara than she already knew, and so there’d be nothing he could get out of her.
“Have you seen Tony?” Sara asked.
Labriola’s warning sounded in Della’s mind, If she calls, don’t tell her nothing.
“Listen, Sara, Nicky’s sick. He had a fever this morning, and I got this appointment, so…”
“Sure,” Sara said. “Sure, Della.”
“I’m sorry to rush off like this but, you know…”
“I understand,” Sara said. “Take it easy, Della.”
The click of the phone swept over Della in a deep, relieving wave. But then the wave receded, and the relief turned to accusation. Her friend was being hunted by a vicious old bastard who’d stop at nothing, and she, Della, could do nothing to warn her. She had mentioned Labriola’s visit to no one, not even Mike, and she’d lied to Tony, though at least he’d figured that out and so knew without a doubt what his father was up to. None of that removed the stain of her cowardice, however, the fact that she’d not only betrayed her friend but that she was at this very moment being drawn deeper into that betrayal.