“Bet you never smoked again,” said Walters.
“Charles never did. But I did. See, I was never as smart as Charles. When I came back to D.C. after being away for a few years and Charles saw me lightin’ up, he wouldn’t let up on me, calling me a fool and everything else he could think of in front of the ladies. I stopped smoking soon after.” Wilson cleared his throat. “Charles always did look out for me like that.”
“It’s good to remember it,” said Walters. “That your friend loved you, I mean.”
“Yeah, we were like kin.” Wilson sat up straight. “Bernie?”
“Let me think.” Bernie Walters tapped ash off his cigarette. “Right. The first time I caught Vance smoking was at this dance he was in charge of when he was in junior high. I don’t know what he had to do with it, exactly. He liked to put that kind of stuff on – do the promotion, decorate the gym, all that. I went to pick him up, and I saw him standing outside with a couple of his friends. They were passing a butt back and forth. I got pissed off, not because he was smoking but because of the way he looked with that cigarette. He was holding it up, pitchfork style, the way some women do. I guess he was trying to be… what do you call that, Professor?”
“Cosmopolitan,” said Karras.
“Right, like that magazine. So when I came up on the group, he knew he was busted. He took me aside and asked me not to yell at him right there in front of his friends. Well, I gave him that much. But on the way home I really let him have it. Told him he looked like a damn girl, smoking that cigarette.” Walters regarded the Marlboro between his fingers. “It was dark in that car, but I could see the tears come into his eyes. It hurt him so much for me to call him a girl. Not that he was confused. He knew who he was, even then. No, that wasn’t the problem; the problem was me. If I could have shown just a little understanding, it wouldn’t have been so rough on him, growing up the way he did. Hell, he didn’t even like cigarettes. The only reason he tried smoking at all was because I smoked. He thought… I mean, can you imagine what was going on in his head to do something like that? To smoke a cigarette to try and please your dad? You all ever hear of such a thing?”
“The two of you got a lot of things straight before he died,” said Stephanie. “Don’t forget that.”
“We got some things straight,” said Walters.
For a while no one said a thing. Then Wilson said, “Dimitri?”
“Yeah.”
“Your turn, man.”
“My son was just five years old when he was murdered,” said Karras. “So forgive me if I don’t have any smoking stories for you tonight. But if I think of any, I’ll let you know.”
FIVE
Frank Farrow took the last dinner plate from a gray bus tray and used an icing wand to scrape what was left of a rich man’s lunch into the garbage receptacle by his side. He fitted the plate onto a stack of them and set the load down into the steaming hot water of the soak sink in front of him. He used the overhead hose to rinse off the bus tray and dropped the empty tray onto the floor, where the boy would come and pick it up.
Farrow had dumped silverware into a plastic container called a third. He dripped liquid detergent into the third, filled the container with hot water, and capped it tightly with a plastic lid. He shook the third vigorously for about a minute, then drained the container of suds and rinsed it out. The silverware was clean.
Farrow grabbed the bottle of Sam Adams he had placed on the ledge over the sink. Grace, the waitress with the howitzers, had brought the beer in to him after lunch, told him it was on her for the good job he had done “turning those dishes” during the rush. He watched her wiggle her ass as she walked out of the dishwasher’s room, and he whistled under his breath, because that was what she wanted him to do.
He looked into the brownish water of the sink. The plates could soak for a while. He decided to go out back and have himself a smoke.
He snatched his cigarettes off a high shelf, took his beer, and went to the doorway leading to the kitchen. Bobby, the faggoty young chef who called himself an artist, was boning a salmon on a wooden cutting block. He was gesturing broadly with his hands, describing the process to an apprentice, a kid from the local college who was struggling to stay interested. The other kitchen help, black guys from the north side of town, were walking around behind Jamie the Artist, their hands on their hips, their white hats cool-cocked on their heads, elaborately mouthing his words in mimicry, passing each other, giving each other skin.
Farrow stood in the doorway watching them with amusement. When Bobby looked up, Farrow said, “Dishes are soaking. I’ll be out back, catching a weed.”
“Okay, Larry,” said Bobby with a wave of his hand.
Larry. That’s what they called Farrow in this town.
There was a small alleyway off the back of the kitchen. The owners of the hotel had erected latticework along the edge of the alley’s red bricks. A piece of lattice above, thin with grapevine, completed the camouflage and hid the alleyway from the guests of the hotel who liked to stroll in the adjacent courtyard.
Farrow stood out here on his breaks, smoking, peering through the gaps in the lattice, watching the guests walk in the courtyard, silently laughing at them, thoroughly hating them. Well-to-do white people. There wasn’t anything more pathetic. Khaki pants, Bass Weejuns, outdoor gear, sweaters tied around the neck for those days when the weather was on the warm side but “unpredictable.” They had come down here with their spouses for an overnight at the “quaint” bed-and-breakfast. They’d go “antiquing” around the town, have a nice dinner, wrestle for a couple of minutes in the four-poster bed, go home the next day just as sad and unsatisfied as when they arrived. The point was, they could tell their friends they had spent a quiet weekend on the Eastern Shore. Farrow guessed it was all about making some kind of statement.
He’d look at the husbands, stepping out of the elevator of the Royal Hotel on their way to the dining room, their hands just touching the round backs of their shapeless, overweight wives, and he’d see boredom in their eyes, and something like contained desperation. For them, it had come down to this: They had to spend two, three hundred a night, and drive two hours from the city, just to fuck a woman they no longer desired to fuck. When all the time they’d rather be getting their dick yanked by some stocky Korean woman in a massage parlor for forty bucks.
Then there were the husbands with their trophy wives. These men thought that people looked at them with envy. But the truth was, people looked at them and imagined wrinkled, bony old men struggling to stay hard inside of luscious young women.
Well, that was their problem, not his. But it was funny just the same.
He took a swig of his beer. The day was cold but not bitter. It felt good to be away from the heat of the sink.
Here in Edwardtown he was known as slow-witted Larry. Larry with the black-framed glasses who never met their eyes. Who had gotten the job on the recommendation of Mr. Toomey, the electrician who serviced the Royal Hotel. Larry had never even filled out an employment form.
“I’ll work for half pay if you give me cash money under the table,” said Larry to his boss, Harraway. Larry looked down at his own shoes, chuckled in a humble, homespun way, and said, “Had a little trouble once with the IRS, you understand, and they’re aimin’ to take most everything I earn for the rest of my life.”
“We can do that,” said Harraway. “I’m no fan of the government myself.”
Farrow had been down here in Edwardtown, a small Maryland city thirty miles south of Delaware on the Edward River, for two and a half years. A liberal arts college sat on the northeast corner of the city limits. Outside of town, farmers rotated soybean and corn while their wives worked at the local Wal-Mart, and crabmen made a modest living on the river.