"You're telling me."
"No, listen. He's a machine, and so is this big black car he drives. It sounds terrible, and I'm sure it is, but Toby gets his strength from the car. Neither of them can do much of anything if the other isn't around."
"Who?" I was getting confused.
"Toby and the car. It's like Hercules and Antaeus. Remember Antaeus?"
"Sure. He had to keep his feet on the ground. Hercules totaled him by lifting him first. A little like sumo wrestling."
"Well, that's like Toby in the show. In the car or around it, he's invincible. But get him away from it and he's just normal. And if you keep him away from it long enough, he begins to get very weak."
"Weak barely describes it." The waiter delivered the entrees with a flourish: lamb for me and something that was all vegetables for Eleanor.
"A lot of people watch it." She used her salad fork experimentally to pick up something long and green.
"A lot of people eat zucchini, too," I said. "That doesn't make it any good."
She chewed a minuscule amount. Eleanor believed in tiny bites, spaced far apart. Something to do with the digestive juices that she'd attempted to explain to me over a number of meals. It had taken months to make her understand that thinking about my digestive juices actually slowed their work.
"If High Velocity were a vegetable," she said a trifle maliciously, "it would be a zucchini. A long, racy, highly phallic zucchini with metallic pinstripes."
"That's very enlightening." My lamb tasted like plywood. It had to be me. The Black Forest Inn's lamb is good enough to make you feel that sheep are superfluous.
"So," Eleanor said, "who's the girl?"
I put down my utensils. "Is this why we're here? So you can conduct a pop quiz on my personal life?"
"You're the one who brought her up," Eleanor said. She exhaled slowly and laid down her fork. "No," she said. "We're here because I wanted to see you."
"A girl got killed," I said. "No, not that girl, another girl. She got beaten to death. And she was a friend of Toby's."
"Friend. That sounds like a euphemism. And what about the other one?"
"She's a euphemism, too. It's the career of the nineties. Professional euphemism. You can get a degree in it now."
"Dispensing with my jealousy for the moment, you're saying that you think Toby might be involved."
"I guess. I don't know. Do I look like I know? Toby's complicated."
"He's an actor," she said as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.
"He's a white-knuckle sadist."
"Gosh," Eleanor said. She never swore. "And he looks so sweet."
"I wanted to see you, too," I said.
She waved it away. "Simeon, do you ever wonder whether this is a healthy profession?"
"You mean as in I could get killed?"
"As in you have to hang around with so much scum. You can't touch pitch without getting dirty, or something like that."
"It's not exactly like that."
"But you know what I mean, and anyway it's the Bible."
The waiter arrived. He laid a third 7-Up in front of Eleanor as if the glass containing it were the Holy Grail, plunked my white wine down with a blunt thud, and retired. Every table in the restaurant fell quiet, the way a room full of people will sometimes. Eleanor occupied the silence by lining up her silverware in more precisely parallel lines. They were already as parallel as a railroad track.
"I'll bet you were a champion at dodge ball in elementary school," she said. "Do you know how long we've known each other?"
"Eight years, seven months."
"And twelve days. And you still duck the issues."
"What's the issue?"
"See?"
"Swell. The issue of the moment is whether I can do my job without being corrupted. Maybe not. And then, maybe I'm corrupt already."
"We're all corrupt. That's the point we're supposed to work backward from."
"Eleanor, you sound like John Calvin."
"The average kid sees twelve thousand murders on TV by the time he's ten."
"He?"
"Or she." Eleanor shook her head impatiently. "If nits were a cash crop, you'd get rich picking them. Simeon, we're too old to waltz."
"And if that metaphor were any more mixed, it'd be an omelet. Cognac?"
"Oh, bull," she said, startling me. "I've never heard so much hot air."
"There we are," I said. "So that's why they call it the Windy City."
"Fine. Get some cognac. Get a whole bottle."
"What do you want from me, Eleanor? Somebody's dead."
"A lot of people are dead."
"Here," I said, holding out my bread plate. "Have a nit."
"Simeon." She put her hand on mine. "Why does it have to be you?"
"It doesn't. Somebody will do it, maybe. But I saw her." I gently bent Eleanor's index finger back. "All her fingers were broken. Three times."
"Maybe you think your fingers won't break," she said, giving mine a jerk upward. "Maybe you think you can't lose blood."
"We are talking about me getting killed?"
She knocked her precise silverware arrangement cockeyed. "You idiot," she said. "Of course we are."
"I love you, too." I reached over and straightened the two remaining forks. The upwardly mobile woman at the next table laughed tinnily.
"How come men can laugh boom-boom-boom and women sound like goats?" Eleanor said. "How come men can chew gum and women look like cows when they do it? How come it's okay for men to get wasted and throw up, but a drunk woman embarrasses everybody?"
"I love you, too," I said again.
"Maybe people have a higher expectation for women," she said, looking everywhere in the restaurant except at me. "What a pain in the rear."
I didn't say anything.
Eleanor lifted an edge of her plate and let it drop onto the immaculate white tablecloth. The delicate muscles of her jaw worked, once and then again. "What a total, unadulterated, one-hundred-percent pain in the ass," she said.
12
It may have been one p.m. to the rest of the world, but to Saffron it was early morning.
She lived in the kind of neighborhood where they park on the lawn. The dry swimming pool was half-full of trash. I'd had to knock four times before a thick moan of protest announced that she was coming to the door. There was a prolonged fumbling with multiple chains and latches inside, a muttered expletive or two, and then the door swung open four inches, and Saffron peered out into the sunlight. Her chin rested on the taut chain.
"I paid the rent," she said. Then she focused. "Oh, shit. It's you." She pushed at the door, but it wouldn't close.
"The old foot in the door," I said. "It's amazing how many people still let you get a foot in the door."
"Listen, I just went to bed. How about you get out of here and come back next week? Or maybe Labor Day." She gave the door an exploratory shove.
The apartment behind her was dark, and I could hear the hum of a window air conditioner, part of a night person's standard insulation against the day. A door closed behind me, and a youngish man with vivid pimples decorating a pasty complexion beneath slicked-back black hair walked quickly across the courtyard and toward the street. He gave me a nervous glance. It seemed like a pretty furtive apartment house, all things considered.
"Saffron, I'm coming in, and you're going to talk to me."
"Fuck off," she said, shoving again at the door. It didn't budge. Her puffy face suddenly arranged itself into the expression of a four-year-old headed for a tantrum. It wasn't pretty.
"I could knock this door in with one hand," I said. "Then you'd have to talk to me, and you'd have to get your door fixed, too. Why don't you do it the easy way?"