He sensed something was wrong as soon as his fingers curled around the front doorknob. Mercer instantly regretted ditching the P-38 pistol for fear he and Jordan would be searched following their escape from the Lauder Science Center. There was a slight vibration coming through the door, and even as he realized what was happening, his wariness waned and anger flowed in.
The door was unlocked, most every light in the house was on, and the wireless speakers were belting out a raucous Gene Krupa drum solo from the 1938 Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert. There had to be twenty people dancing in the open-plan living room and around the billiards table that occupied what should have been the dining area. Others stood on the antique spiral staircase that corkscrewed up to the second- and third-floor balconies overlooking the atrium, their feet tapping in time to the primal drumbeat. And in the middle of it all was Harry White, resplendent in a zoot suit straight out of an old gangster movie. He twirled one elderly woman into the arms of a gentleman while a second blue-hair waited her turn in his studied embrace. He saw Mercer and mouthed, “Oh shit.”
Harry’s new dance partner must have sensed his consternation because she turned and saw the youngest man in the room by three full decades in the company of an even younger woman. They had just come in the front door, and while the pretty woman looked confused her handsome friend looked beyond mad.
Dev Hindle, who had been standing with his wife, Marta, at the second-floor library balcony, recognized the home’s rightful owner and quickly retreated to the stereo rack in the rec room to kill the throbbing big-band swing. Judging by the look on Mercer’s face, Dev realized that old Harry hadn’t gotten permission to invite the Oaklawn Retirement Community’s Saturday Socialistas over for a midweek dance. Dev knew Harry from when they both worked for Potomac Edison and had met his young friend Philip Mercer at a local bar called Tiny’s on a few occasions.
The silence crashed in on the party as soon as he muted the stereo. A few people muttered their surprise, but most looked at their watches and assumed it was time to return to the bright yellow bus for the ride back home. No more than a minute after Mercer opened the front door to find Harry re-creating scenes out of Cocoon, the last of his guests shuffled past a still-irate homeowner. And then a couple in their seventies who had been necking in an upstairs bedroom came down the stairs in a breathless huff.
Mercer glared at Harry when the trysting couple dashed past, the man’s collar smeared with lipstick and her knee-high support hose down around her ankles.
“In my defense,” Harry said when the door closed after his last guest, “you weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow.” His voice sounded like railroad spikes drawn across a rusted iron plate, a rasping sound earned through sixty-plus years of cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s.
“And you weren’t supposed to use my house as the venue for some golden years bacchanalia.”
“Bacchanalia?” Harry scoffed dismissively and rubbed a hand through his silvery crew cut. “Only a few of us had anything stronger than sugar-free diabetic punch, and there’s no way Betty Norris let Jim Peters get past second base.”
“Mercer, what’s going on?” Jordan asked peevishly. She was pale and trembled, and he realized she was spiking a fever. “Who is this?”
“Sorry. This is my, ah, my—” Mercer paused, trying to decide how to describe his best friend. “Harry White.”
The old lothario didn’t miss a beat. “I was his Harry White. From now on I will be your Harry White.”
“Harry,” Mercer continued. “This is Jordan Weismann. She grew up knowing Abe Jacobs.”
Despite the drinks he had doubtless consumed, Harry detected an undercurrent in Mercer’s voice. “What happened?”
“Abe’s dead,” Mercer said, exhaustion suddenly making his eyelids feel like stones. The shoulder he’d scraped leaping from the bucket loader suddenly started to ache too. “He was shot in Minnesota. His lab in Ohio was blown up and his house burned down. The shooters nearly got Jordan and me a couple of times.”
“Ah, Christ,” Harry spat. “I only met him once, but I liked the old guy.” It was lost on Harry that he was fully ten years older than Abe Jacobs had been. In fact he was twice Mercer’s age but somehow saw the two of them as contemporaries.
White pulled a half-crushed pack of Chesterfields from the pocket of his baggy suit pants and was about to light it when he caught Mercer’s disapproving glance. They’d both made sacrifices recently, and he was still getting used to it. He stuffed the pack and an old Zippo back into his pocket.
“Jordan,” Mercer said, turning to her, “give me a few minutes to make sure one of the guest rooms is done up and you can hit the sack. You need to take some meds for the pain or you’ll never sleep, and I’ll get some ibuprofen for that fever.”
She said nothing. Her eyes, usually bright and inquisitive, were dull and listless. She finally showed a spark of interest when movement caught her attention. It was coming from down a corridor that ran past the kitchen and Mercer’s home office to a set of back stairs. The movement was accompanied by the click of something hard against the marble floor. From the shadows of the dimmer part of the house emerged what appeared to be a parti-colored child’s golf bag laid on its side with four stumpy legs for support. At the rear end was a tail that flew at half-mast, while at the front was a blocky head with a silvered muzzle the length of a toucan’s bill and two enormous ears that swept the ground with each tottering pace.
“Is that a basset hound?” Jordan asked of the decrepit canine.
“That’s Drag — he’s half basset, half Hoover canister vacuum,” Harry said proudly. “Drag, come here, boy, and meet your future stepmother.”
Nearly twenty years earlier, Mercer had found Harry on a bar stool at Tiny’s the first night he’d moved into the neighborhood, when he had gone out as a distraction from unpacking. A decade later, Harry had found Drag rummaging around a Dumpster behind that same seedy dive. Mercer had always felt that he had drawn the short stick in this deal, while the mangy dog had won the damned lottery, especially since developers had recently bought Harry’s nearby apartment building, evicted all the tenants, and torn it down to make way for a secondary parking structure for a local mall’s expansion. For the past five months Drag and Harry had been Mercer’s houseguests, and since Harry had yet to start looking for a new place and Drag didn’t appear too eager to move either, he suspected the pair had now morphed into permanent roommates.
Drag ambled over to Jordan, who bent at the knee and extended a hand. Because of his sensitive nose, the dog had already determined she was okay though devoid of any decent food scents, so he ignored her proffered hand and flopped next to her like a walrus, exposing his ample belly for immediate attention.
“He’s adorable,” Jordan said despite her mounting misery, a chunky plastic bracelet jangling as she scratched Drag and the hound’s leg went into paroxysms of pleasure.
“Don’t let him hear you say that or he’ll never leave you alone,” Harry said. He turned to Mercer. “Don’t you have work to do, innkeeper?”
Mercer called Harry a bastard under his breath and climbed the antique corkscrew stairs to the second floor while his octogenarian friend and his broken-down dog helped Jordan forget the past fourteen hours. He had never been more grateful to the unlikely duo than he was right now.