“I get the feeling he might have some other guy working this thing.” Mortimer stopped and waited, but Stark continued to stare at him without expression. “You ain’t seen no sign of that, right? Some other guy?”
“Why would you think your friend had a second man?” Stark asked.
“I don’t know,” Mortimer answered. “Just a feeling that-” He stopped again, staring now into Stark’s stony features. “Anyway,” Mortimer said quietly. “That’s where I’m at in this thing.”
“Which is where, exactly?”
“Where I said. I don’t think I’m getting the straight story.”
“So your friend is lying to you?”
“Well, maybe not exactly lying. Just not telling me everything.”
“There’s no difference between those two,” Stark said sternly.
Mortimer saw something register darkly in Stark’s face, a look he’d never seen before, that of a man who’d suddenly glimpsed another man’s demise, knew the hour and the manner of his impending death. “I wish I could get you off this thing,” he said.
“It’s too late for that.” Stark said it grimly.
Mortimer glanced down the darkened corridor that led to the right and noticed a black curtain hung across it.
“What’s the matter?” Stark asked sharply.
“Nothing,” Mortimer answered.
“In that case,” Stark said. He opened the door and a wide swath of light passed over them, deathly pale, with swirling flecks of dust. “Unless there’s something else.”
Mortimer faced Stark in the mottled light. “No. Nothing.” A grave premonition swam into his mind, the dreadful sense that he would never see Stark again. “Sorry for how this turned out,” he said.
For an instant, he thought he saw something move across Stark’s face, some glimmer of affection shaded by regret. Then it passed, and Stark stepped back into the shadowy depths of his apartment, and closed the door.
Mortimer had never been so coldly dismissed, but there was nothing to be done about it. And so he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs, where he turned right, thinking that he could use a drink, maybe a little talk with his best friend, Abe. At the corner he glanced back toward Stark’s apartment, recalled the black curtain that hung over the corridor, and wondered if his first suspicion could possibly be correct.
The light changed, but Mortimer remained in place. He knew he had to focus on the situation, and so, walking now, he started first with a chronological arrangement of events, recalling how Caruso had brought up the missing wife. No. It hadn’t begun there. It had begun with his owing Labriola fifteen grand, and what that meant was that everything that followed was his fault. If he hadn’t bet on Lady Be Good, he’d never have gotten into this position. But Lady Be Good had been a good bet. Several of the old stoopers at the track had told him so. So, when you looked at it, it was really their fault for giving him a bad tip. He shook his head, realizing that he’d done it again, gotten completely off the track.
And so he started again, this time carefully recalling the stages by which he’d gotten into this bind. Sure, it came back to owing Labriola fifteen grand, but that really didn’t matter now. What mattered was that at the end of the process, everybody would be okay. Except the woman, of course, because what happened to her didn’t really matter. Why should it, because when you got right down to it, it was all her fault anyway. If she hadn’t taken a fucking hike, none of this shit would have happened.
Bullshit, he thought. He shook his head at the absurdity of his own conclusion. It wasn’t the woman’s fault at all. Like everything else, it was his fault, goddammit. Every fucking bit of it was his fault and nobody else’s. He’d gotten into debt with a rotten old hood, then tried to pay off that debt by lying to Stark and cheating him, and now he had to fix it because Stark had gotten wind of something screwy in this thing, and God only knew what dark and bloody thing he’d done to the guy he’d caught following him.
Mortimer’s mind raced through the grim possibilities-everything from kicking his ass to cutting his throat-but he couldn’t determine the likelihood of Stark doing one thing over the other.
But the real question, Mortimer decided, was why Stark had done anything at all. What threat had he perceived in the guy he’d caught tailing him? He was just an ordinary guy, according to Caruso. And yet Stark had gone after him hammer and tongs.
Why?
The answer came with such force and certainty that the word itself escaped Mortimer’s mouth and hung in the late-morning air like a strand of Marisol’s coal-black hair.
Lockridge.
TONY
He couldn’t stop thinking about Sara, about the fact that if something really had happened to Eddie, then she was in more danger than he could possibly have imagined. Before now he’d feared that one of his father’s goons might strong-arm her. It might stop at intimidation, or it might involve grabbing her arm and giving it a painful squeeze. All of that would be wrong, he knew, and none of it would ultimately work. You didn’t keep a wife that way. Well, some people did. His cousin Donny kept Carla that way. And, of course, his father had ruled with the same iron fist. But he did not want to be his father, or have a wife who lived with him the way his mother had lived with the Old Man, cringing, terrified, reduced to shadow, a mere reflection of her dread. He wanted Sara the way she was when he’d first met her. He wanted the young woman who’d stood alone before an old piano and sung her heart out. Her courage astonished him suddenly, the sheer grit she’d had to have just to do what she’d done that night. He had taken that brave young woman, so perfect, and chipped away at that perfection, coaxing her to the suburbs, reducing her to baby factory-or at least trying to-and then, when no babies came, he’d rubbed her face in this failure, as if she were the one who’d done everything wrong, she the one who’d ruined his life.
He went to his car and drove away, leaving his employees to fend for themselves. Suddenly it didn’t matter if they came in late, lay down on the job, misplaced some form, or sent a load of fish to the wrong restaurant. He’d run the business the way he’d run his marriage, under the sword of his father’s instruction. You have to show the people who work for you that you’ve got the muscle, his old man had told him. You have to show that woman who’s boss.
And so he’d done that, Tony thought. For sixteen years he’d worn the pants, laid down the law, gotten his way. And now he’d reached the end of the way he’d gotten, the barren crossroads of his life.
He drove aimlessly along Sunset Highway, all the way to Montauk Point, where he stood on the beach and watched the waves tumble one after another onto the vacant shore.
It was noon by the time he returned home. He hadn’t intended to go there. There were bars and diners where he could have sat through the afternoon, the night, even the early-morning hours. And yet, here he was, staring at the empty house, the gray, cheerless windows, imagining the bedroom where she’d never sleep again. But dire as that reality was, it was not nearly so dark as what might yet happen to Sara. He knew that she’d wanted only to leave him. She’d taken not a dime of his money. She’d left the Ford Explorer in the driveway. What else could her message have been but that she wanted nothing of him and nothing of his. She had wanted only to be rid of him and had probably never guessed that anyone else might be looking for her. Certainly she would not have dreamed that the Old Man would have hired some thug and set him loose like a dog in the woods.
Something moved behind his car. He twisted to the rear and peered through the back window, where he saw Della coming toward him.
“Hi, Della,” Tony said as he got out of the car.
A thin smile labored to hold its place on her lips, then expired. “I need to talk to you, Tony.”
“You want to come inside?”
She shook her head.
“Okay,” Tony said. “What’s on your mind?”