“You do,” he admits.
She steps close and pulls him by his lapels toward her and kisses him for the first time — a light, slightly chaste/slightly moist kiss on the lips. “You wish you weren’t hopeful, but you are. That’s why I like you.”
She drops his lapels and is on the move again.
“You like me?” he says.
Another look over her shoulder. “Tell no one.”
They stop in front of her building on Chandler Street, a brownstone halfway down a block full of brownstones in a neighborhood that’s not one Bobby would characterize as high-crime but not one he’d call low-crime either. Like the rest of the city right now, it’s riven by tectonic shifts, caught between what it once was and what it hasn’t yet become and might never be. Carmen points out a light on the third floor, tells Bobby that’s her living room.
Their first kiss aside, it’s understood, without ever being said, that he won’t be coming up tonight, and he’s okay with that. His time in Vietnam scrambled his brain when it came to women — all he’d known were bar girls and taxi dancers and the hookers who walked the broad sidewalks outside the Imperial City in Hué and shouted their come-ons in a nearly indecipherable mix of Vietnamese, French, and the hard-boiled English they’d learned from American gangster movies. When he got back stateside, he stuck to strippers and barmaids for his first few years on the force. Then he met Shannon, a woman he was pretty sure, in hindsight, he’d never loved. Shannon was cold and imperious and noticeably unfond of humanity, and Bobby mistook the shine she took to him with his being a person of value — if someone who doesn’t like anyone likes you, doesn’t that render you peerless? It gave him pride, but no pleasure, to have a woman that beautiful and heartless on his arm. To be fair to Shannon, it wasn’t long into the marriage before she grasped that he didn’t love her. Problem was, she loved him (insofar as Shannon could love anyone), and the realization that he’d never really loved her back turned her already selfish heart into a granite nugget. Only Brendan could get in there (and Bobby wondered if that would hold once he started talking back). After Shannon, Bobby went back to wholly meaningless sex. Not with hookers, necessarily, but with women who expected sex to be just as transactional as he did.
When he got clean, he stayed away from anything that triggered his twin predilections for self-destruction and self-loathing, and for a long time that meant steering clear of the kind of women with whom he’d most often kept company.
Now, standing in front of Carmen Davenport’s building, holding both her hands by the fingers as she tells him she had a nice night and he agrees that he did too and they both smile goofily and wonder if they should try another kiss, he realizes that what scares him about her is what scares him about all intelligent women — that she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; never did. Doesn’t know where he’s going; never had a clue. He feels, at his essence, that he is a baby who was dropped by a stork and is still falling toward a chimney. Everything else he shows to the world is costume.
They try another kiss, deeper this time, longer. Bobby is embarrassed to feel a slight tremor rippling through his body and hopes Carmen can’t feel it too. What is he, fucking twelve?
When she breaks the kiss, her eyes are still closed. He watches them open, and the pale green looks back at him with that calm intelligence that scares the fuck out of him.
“Call me tomorrow.” She heads up the steps.
“When?”
“Surprise me.”
He waits for a bit after she gets inside before he heads to the subway.
At home, he’s barely through the door when his sister Erin, the actuary, comes down the hall wanting to know where he’s been.
“I been out. Why?”
“Work called, like, five times.”
“They leave messages?”
“Yeah.”
He waits, but Erin just stares at him.
“What did the messages say?”
More staring. Erin’s never forgiven Bobby for introducing her to her ex-husband. Or for staying friends with the poor guy after she left him.
She walks away. “Said to call them back.”
He goes to the phone table by the stairs and squeezes into the little seat as he dials. When he gets through to Pritchard, he says, “What’s up?”
“You know that kid, Rum Collins, we brought in the other day?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he limped in here, blood all over his pants, and said he wants to tell us what happened to Auggie Williamson.”
“So take his statement.”
“He’ll only talk to you.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Yeah?”
“This kid’s pissed his pants. I mean, literally. He says the one thing we gotta promise him is we won’t send him back out on the street.”
“Okay. He say why?”
“Yeah. Because she’s out there.”
18
Around the time Bobby and Carmen Davenport are ordering their first round of drinks at Jacob Wirth, Mary Pat Fennessy is watching Rum Collins and another stoner supermarket employee share a joint on the back of the loading dock of the Purity Supreme. Mary Pat is parked next door under a tree in the lot of a Henry’s Hamburgers that went under in ’72 when someone took a couple of the burgers to a lab and discovered they were a whole lot of horse and very little cow.
Two cars in the Purity Supreme lot — Rum’s Duster and a Chevy Vega that Mary Pat presumes belongs to his dope-smoking buddy. Everyone else is gone, including the security guard. They set the alarm inside, pulled the grates down, and locked them; that’s the full extent of the night security for the Purity Supreme.
Rum’s buddy produces a roach clip, and they huff the remainder of the joint, looking like a pair of fish as they do it, then swipe five with each other and walk to their cars. This is the tricky part. If Rum’s buddy lingers by his car or takes too long to start it, the whole plan falls apart. Everything depends on Stoner Pal pulling away before Rum starts his engine.
Stoner Pal gets in his car first, but he doesn’t start it right away. And now Rum is opening his own door and about to get behind the wheel. Mary Pat scrambles out of her car and searches around until she finds a rock the size of a Matchbox car. She hurls it high, like a pop fly, and for a moment she’s not sure if she threw it with any accuracy. But then she hears the distant whap of it hitting the roof of Rum’s Duster.
Rum gets out of his car. Stoner Pal, oblivious, guns his engine to life. He rolls down the window and asks Rum something. Rum is looking at his car roof. He looks around for any nearby trees. He holds up a hand to tell his friend it’s all okay.
And Stoner Pal drives off.
Rum looks around the parking lot. For a moment he even seems to be looking beyond the Purity parking lot into the old Henry’s Hamburgers parking lot. But he doesn’t look hard and he doesn’t look long.
He gets back in the Duster. Turns the key in the ignition. The engine rumbles to life.
And dies.
He tries again. This time there’s a noticeable lag before the engine kicks over.
And it immediately dies.
His next four tries get nowhere. Just a high-pitched whirring noise as the engine tries to engage with an empty gas tank. After she siphoned out all the gas, Mary Pat poured in a pound of brown sugar for good measure. The only way Rum Collins’s orange Plymouth Duster is leaving that parking lot is by a tow truck.