Willy got up also, feeling he'd dropped the ball. "I'm sorry," he admitted. "I lose sight of the good things sometimes. Maybe I've been at this too long."
Louisa straightened, sending her comforted daughter back to her room and escorting Willy back into the hallway. "It's okay. I wouldn't want to do what you do."
Willy tried one last question at the front door. "The reason I asked about the dealer earlier is that there was a bag of heroin next to Mary's body. It had a mark on it, a red devil. I was hoping you might know who sold that brand."
A crease appeared between her eyes. "I don't know about the brand, but you're wrong about it being heroin. Mary shot up speedballs last."
Willy looked her straight in the eyes. "You're sure of that? No chance she changed or decided to experiment?"
But Louisa Obregon stood her ground. "No, she wouldn't. She used to shoot heroin, back in the old days, but before she kicked everything, she only did speedballs. It was a thing with her, cutting the heroin with coke. She said she'd never do straight horse again."
Which made Willy wonder if in fact she had.
Chapter 7
Willy Kunkle hadn't spoken with or seen Andy Liptak in over a decade. Close friends once, having met fresh off the plane in Vietnam, they'd actually been an unlikely pair from the start. For one thing, unusual in a military friendship, they weren't in the same unit. They'd bumped into one another purely by chance, had immediately discovered their mutual New York backgrounds, and had hit it off before being pipelined to their final assignments: Andy to a supply company, and Willy to the closest thing that bizarre war ever had resembling a front line-or, in his case, beyond it. During their time in country, they kept in touch, spent their off-duty time together, and bonded over the standard fare of overpriced alcohol and underage women. The fact that they endured utterly different experiences in the war both helped keep their connection alive while they served and explained its erosion afterward. What to Willy turned out to be a crucible of cruelty, violence, fear, and loss had amounted to little more than an interesting stint in an overseas warehouse to Andy, even though all this occurred during the war's chaotic waning days. The contrasting aftereffects were predictably undermining to a relationship based primarily on escapism.
And that didn't even factor in Mary.
Willy had brought Mary to the city shortly after their marriage, largely as a gift to her. It had been her first trip outside of Vermont, not counting a few quick illegal border crossings into Canada to get booze during her youth, and she'd been predictably overwhelmed by both New York's vast, flat expanse and the millions of people inhabiting it. Beginning the trip shy and intimidated, she'd ended up loving the twenty-four-hour vitality and diversity of the place.
Meeting Andy Liptak had merely been part of the schedule, and at the time not something of any great significance. Andy had been gregarious as always, but with a newfound man-on-the-make charmer's sheen that had encouraged Willy in his belief that some memories, and most people, were best left in the past. Liptak had hit the ground running back in New York, using his contacts and entrepreneurial savvy to start up a variety of businesses, and he'd developed into the sort of man Willy had come to loathe, all the more so in this case since Andy had survived Vietnam without a scratch, while Willy, as in a psychological dress rehearsal to the eventual loss of his left arm, had been crippled forever.
After Mary and Willy had returned home, therefore, he'd been disappointed by how impressed she'd been by the very man he'd wished they hadn't visited. As he saw it, she'd fallen prey to all the superficial trappings and mannerisms that merely advertise such people as flagrant phonies.
Not that he was qualified to pass judgment. In the end, drinking hard, increasingly abusive, and hanging on to his job only through Gunther's resented good graces, Willy Kunkle eventually understood that he was functioning as deviously as he'd ever done in the jungle, but with only a fraction of his former skill. His earlier, shortlived pretense in showing an interest in Mary, in what she was doing, and in sharing a life with her, all fell prey to his own toboggan ride straight to the bottom of selfindulgent despair.
Before the final crash, however, he'd acceded to their seeing Andy Liptak again during a couple of the latter's ski vacations to Vermont. It didn't go well. Mary betrayed how taken she was with Andy's world and its trappings, and Willy was all but incapable of hiding his contempt. Traditional jealousy never played a part, and in fact Andy was perfectly behaved throughout, but it didn't matter, given the rift following the last of Andy's visits. Later, after the divorce, Willy had heard that his ex-wife and Andy had linked up in New York, and in a rare moment of lucidity he'd conceded both the logic and the suitability of the match. At the time, he'd thought that Mary might have even found happiness at last.
Which now served to remind him of how wrong he could be.
On the phone, Andy had sounded only surprised and pleased to hear that Willy was in town, and quickly suggested they meet over dinner at Peter Luger's, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Mary's name didn't come up.
Luger's is tucked away in a typically eccentric Brooklyn corner, close to the looming Erector Set span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and right across the East River from Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Seventh Precinct, and Mary's apartment. Willy knew that Andy lived somewhere near Brooklyn Heights, across the sprawling old Brooklyn Navy Yard from Williamsburg, but the coincidence was curious.
He got off the Marcy Avenue subway stop, having stashed his car earlier in an open-air lot near Bellevue Hospital, and doubled back, heading toward the riverbank and the darker, grittier buildings there.
Despite the buffed, shiny, man-made glory of Manhattan's skyline, poking up above the run-down buildings before him, Willy had always been attracted to New York's older, seamier neighborhoods, many of which lined the rivers that had once functioned as commercial arteries and made of the city a world-class port.
New York was still a large port, of course, but not to the standard of its heyday, when every inch of its almost six hundred miles of shoreline was lined with a pier, a dock, a warehouse, or some other shipping facility. As he neared the restaurant, he noticed, here as in so many other places, that the streets were often paved over cobblestones, and sported traces of the short rail lines that had once run between the loading docks and the storage houses.
Now most of that muscle was atrophied-empty, soiled, quiet, and awaiting someone or something with enough money to either destroy it, turn it into condos, or revitalize it commercially. Huge deserted lots lay pinned between the water and the metal fencing put up to hide them from view, and grimy, hulking, factory-style buildings, incongruously detailed here and there with quaint architectural flourishes, sat as if in suspended animation, pending the proper financial kiss to bring them back to life.
Or maybe not.
Willy crossed the intersection, noting a cluster of SUVs, limos, and high-priced cars parked like a circling of frightened upper-class wagons, and entered Peter Luger's front door, blinking to adjust his eyes as he walked straight into the long, crowded bar. The smell of food and beer commingled with a steady rumble of conversation, adding warmth to a setting that he found surprisingly lacking in decor. Aside from the finely worked pressed-tin ceiling overhead, the rest of the place was almost drab.
A shadow separated itself from the crowd before him, still looking like a wrestler in shape and size, but gone adrift around the middle. "Holy Christ. If it ain't the Sniper."