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“She tell you that?”

“She was sober. You could see she hadn’t had anything in a while.”

“How do you tell that?”

“Her appearance. She looks like a different person now,” Ryan said. “It couldn’t have just happened overnight.”

Mr. Perez nodded, accepting that, but still curious. “You say you hung around this place, Uncle Ben’s. She came in to get her driver’s license and you started talking to her. How’d you go about that?”

“I went up to her, I asked her if she remembered me. She said no. I said, Aren’t you Denise Watson? I told her I met her in a bar one time. We had a cup of coffee and talked a little.”

“You tell her who you are?”

“I told her my name, I told her what I did. She seemed nervous then; but I didn’t pull out any papers, so she relaxed.”

“How’d you find out where she lives?”

“I asked her. Well, first I asked her if she’d like to go out sometime. She wouldn’t say yes right away, but before I left she gave me her phone number and told me where she lives.”

“In Pontiac?”

“No, it’s in Rochester.”

“Rochester doesn’t mean shit to me.”

“It’s east of Pontiac,” Ryan said. “The address is on the piece of paper I gave you. With the phone number.”

“You go to her place?”

Ryan paused. “Yeah, I did, to check. Make sure it wasn’t a phony address.”

“But you didn’t go in, huh, and visit?”

“No.” Ryan shook his head. “I was wondering,” he said then, “when you see her you don’t have to mention my name, do you?”

“Why?”

“I mean, if she asks how you found out where she lives. Since she isn’t in the book or anything.”

“I ask you why,” Mr. Perez said, “but you won’t tell me.”

“I just wondered, that’s all. In case I ever see her again.”

“I don’t see any reason to bring you into it,” Mr. Perez said. “Your part’s done. ‘Less she gets drunk and runs away again.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Ryan said. “Once she finds out her husband’s dead, I think she’s gonna be more relieved than anything else.”

“Feel you know her pretty well, huh?” Mr. Perez gave Ryan a little smile to show he understood. “How many cups of coffee you have with her?”

“A couple,” Ryan said. He was being honest and literal and gave Mr. Perez a nice boyish grin in return.

“You interested in her?”

“Well, I got to admit she’s a good-looking girl,” Ryan said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Another week or so, when she gets her money,” Mr. Perez said, “she’s gonna be even better-looking, isn’t she?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Ryan said.

Raymond was grinning now. “Wants to fuck him a rich lady for a change. Shit, I don’t blame him.”

“They’re no worse or no better,” Mr. Perez said, and looked at Ryan again. “I don’t blame you, either. It’s none of my business what you got in mind for Miz Leary, once we’re done. As long as it’s her you intend to fuck and not me.”

“I hope I’m not offending you,” said boyish Jack Ryan, “but I think if I had a choice…”

Mr. Perez smiled and Raymond Gidre laughed out loud and Ryan said he’d keep in touch and left. In the silence, then, Mr. Perez sipped his drink.

He said to Raymond, “You feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“That boy’s gonna try and run with it,” Mr. Perez said. “I don’t think he knows it yet, but he’s gonna try.”

Mr. Perez visited Denise Leary on Tuesday, after she got home from work. He spent forty minutes with her while Raymond Gidre waited outside in the rented car. Raymond watched people coming and going in and out of the apartment complex and studied some of them very closely, but he did not see any niggers.

At seven-thirty Ryan called Mr. Perez at the hotel.

Mr. Perez told him it went about the way he’d expected. He’d left the agreement with her and would call in a day or two. There was nothing to do now but wait. Ryan tried to ask questions. How did she react? What’d she say? But Mr. Perez told him to save it, he was going out for his supper.

Ryan had decided not to bother Denise this evening, so he didn’t call her until the next morning at eight. He’d ask her if he could pick her up after work, get something to eat and go to a meeting.

There was no answer.

At noon he drove out to the A&P in Rochester and found out Denise wasn’t working today. She’d called in sick.

He called her several more times that afternoon and evening. On what he had decided was his last try, at ten o’clock, Denise answered the phone.

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.”

“Why?” She sounded all right. Calm.

He had to settle down. For all he was supposed to know, she could have been anywhere. “I was worried about you.”

“Were you, really?”

“I stopped by the grocery store, they said you were home sick. I kept calling and there was no answer.”

“That was nice of you,” Denise said. “Can you come over?”

“Now?”

“Yeah, if you can. I’ve got an awful lot to tell you.”

17

THE WHALES WERE down from the wall, the sketches of the grays and humpbacks off California. In their place, in flowing black sumi, were the words No More

“Then what?” Ryan said.

He was in one of the director’s chairs. Denise came out of the kitchen with two glasses of red pop and found room for them on the low table with all the paint tubes and ceramic pots.

“I identified the body,” she said. “Driving down, I was pretty nervous, I didn’t know what it would be like. But the way they do it-they showed just his face on a television screen-it wasn’t bad at all.” She picked up the pottery ashtray heaped with cigarette butts and went back to the kitchen with it.

“The police were there?”

“A detective, we went to his office. No, first I called a mortuary and took care of that, then I went to the police station.”

“Do you have money? I mean for the burial?”

“He’s going to be cremated,” Denise said. She came back in with the ashtray, her eyes moving briefly to the wall. “I’m still working on my new motto.”

“I see that. How were the police?”

“Polite, official,” Denise said, sitting down in the other chair. “They asked questions-when I’d seen him last, that kind of thing. I can’t believe it. I mean, the way I found out, a man I don’t know. I didn’t read a thing about it, I guess I didn’t see the papers at all for about a week. Mr. Perez had a picture of me he’d cut out, an old one from when I was at State they must’ve got from my mother. I don’t know where else.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Fine.” She was lighting a cigarette. “You mean nervous? I just can’t believe he’s dead. It’s over and I don’t have to do anything about it. I must live right, huh?”

“What did this Mr. Perez say?”

“He said something about a property or assets I’m entitled to, if I’ll sign an agreement. But Bobby didn’t own property, anything of real value.”

“Maybe,” Ryan said, “it isn’t property the way you think of property, real estate. You said assets. It could be stock, something like that.”

“He didn’t own stock. I doubt if he even knew what it was.”

“Somebody could’ve left it to him.” Ryan was edging in. “His dad or somebody?”

Denise was staring at him, making up her mind about something.

“We’re not talking about a normal, ordinary person,” she said. “As far as I know, he didn’t have a dad, or a mother. He was a street hustler, he was an addict, an armed robber. He was… he killed people.”

“You knew that?” Ryan asked.

“I don’t know, I suppose. I didn’t want to know and I didn’t ask about much. I drank. He was arrested, he was always being arrested, and if he was convicted they’d send him to a state hospital. He had a history of mental illness. He’d come out, I wouldn’t see much of him. I guess he lost interest. Usually I’d hear he was living with somebody.”