“I’m like the monkey that was fucking the skunk, podna. I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand. What’s got you burnin’ the 2 a.m. oil?”
“Memo on that transaction in Vail. Stecher wants it yesterday. So, how’s your deal coming?”
“It’s coming.”
“And Diane? She still treating you good?”
“She’s a paranoid schizophrenic with a hundred and eighty IQ who is in all likelihood demon-possessed.”
“That’s a bad fuckin’ combination, Tex.”
“But she can also get a man a managing directorship. If she doesn’t kill him first.”
“Or he doesn’t kill her.”
“Tell me about it. I sometimes think a hit would be a really good idea.”
“You slurrin’ my ethnicity, Tex?”
“Hell no. Last thing I need in my life is a bunch of watered-off paisans.”
“You got that right.”
“Good luck with your memo, podna.”
“’Night, Tex.”
“Hasta luego.”
I stopped in the reception area and looked north through the plate glass windows at Park Avenue. I could just see it, way up yonder — a little building on the west side of the street, and all those beautiful air rights.
I glanced toward the sky. Clouds were moving in. Supposed to snow tomorrow, according to the weather sadist.
I missed Texas all the time but it was during the winters that I missed it most. In wintertime in New York, you see the sun maybe six hours a day and everything is gray and lifeless and depressing and the streets run with slush and even an extra fifteen pounds of clothes are not enough to keep you warm when the wind goes pounding down those canyons made by man and money.
I was soon in the back of a cab careening through the mostly empty Manhattan streets, headed for my tiny one-bed-room apartment near Union Square. The cabbie was attired in the kind of cloth headgear that has its roots in certain nomadic cultures, and he maintained a quiet and continuous cell phone conversation in a foreign tongue as he steered the cab with one hand and outside the tall buildings went by in a blur. I hung on as best I could and wondered if what I’d heard was true, that the most common cause for emergency room admissions in this town is accidents involving taxicabs.
And for aught that it was the wee hours and there were but few souls on the sidewalks, there was the ceaseless and implacable noise of New York, the cabbie mumbling and the radio tuned to 1010 WINS in the background and the sirens in the distance and the squeal of the cab’s tires. New York isn’t so much the City That Never Sleeps as it is the City That Never Shuts Up. So very unlike my boyhood home in South Texas where by that time of night even the coyotes have ceased carrying on and bedded down.
I got out near the corner of Fourth and 14th and paid the fare and walked through the lobby of my building, nodding at the doorman behind the reception desk. I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor and walked down a dimly lit hall lined by doors sporting multiple locks and let myself into 17B only to find my living room couch occupied by an ex-convict from Arkansas who also happened to be my brother-in-law.
Seeing Hiram Redding in New York City at all was almost more of a shock than my system could handle. But here? In my living room? Drinking beer and watching porn with his feet up on my coffee table?
Hiram glanced my way and went back to his pay-perview. He raised his can of Heineken in a mock toast. “What’s doin’, bro?”
I glanced toward the bedroom. Saw the door was closed.
“Hiram? What are you doing here?”
“She didn’t tell you I was comin’?”
“She hasn’t said a word.” I set my computer bag on the floor and shucked out of my coat and walked to the refrigerator. Opened it. I had one beer left. One beer out of the two six-packs that were there when I left the apartment that morning.
Great. I come home at 2:30 in the damn morning to find a convicted killer sitting in my damn apartment, drunker than a damn lord on my damn beer.
I took out the last beer and popped the top. Walked into the living room and dropped into a chair. “I didn’t think your PO would let you leave the state.”
Hiram sipped his beer. “I been a real good boy. Not so much as a parkin’ ticket. I tol’ her I needed to come up here, check on my little sister, since she’d took bad sick and her husband wasn’t lookin’ after her like he should. Even a PO is a sucker for a line like that. You always work this late?”
“If I have to.” I looked him over. Prison tattoos he picked up doing fifteen in Tucker for second-degree murder. Stubble on his chin, just going to gray. Hair long and greasy and combed back. Wearing jeans and a wife beater. Alligator boots that looked to be older than he was. “You planning to stay long?”
“I might.”
“We don’t have a guest room.”
Hiram patted the couch next to him. “Yeah you do.”
“They don’t know what’s wrong with her, Hiram.”
“She done tol’ me that.”
“Could be chronic fatigue syndrome. Lupus. Lou Gehrig’s disease. She can barely lift her arms anymore. Has to take her food through a tube. Her immune system is for shit. She could get carried off by a cold if it was severe enough.”
“She done tol’ me all that too.”
“Your PO has no clue where you are, does she?” Hiram said nothing.
“Hiram? Why are you here?”
Hiram pointed at the television set. “Look at that ol’ boy go. He’s really givin’ it to her, ain’t he?”
“I’d appreciate an answer to my question.”
“She said she thought I ought to meet your all’s next door neighbors. They seem real nice.”
“You’re telling me you’ve met Stu and Carmen?”
“Me and Katy had a cup of coffee over yonder this evenin’. That Stu is one funny sumbitch. He talks like some guy in a gangster flick.”
I took a drink and thought, Jesus H. Christ.
When I was done with my beer I slipped as quietly as I could into the bedroom. Undressed and got into bed. Listened to my wife’s breathing. I used to be able to tell by how she breathed whether she was asleep or not. Anymore, I had no clue.
She ended the guesswork by saying, “I was planning to tell you, Billy. It’s just that he showed up a week earlier than I thought he would.”
“You could’ve called me at the office.”
“You hate it when I call you at the office.”
“I like it better than I do walking into my apartment and finding Mr. Murder-Two drinking my next-to-last Heineken.”
“There’s nothing for Hiram in Arkansas. I’ve been talking to Carmen about him. She thinks her husband can help him out.”
I turned on my side, tried to see my wife’s wasted shell of a body by what little light there was from the clock radio. “Katy, I hate to be the one to tell you, babe, but that is a real bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because the Spagnolettis are mobbed up to high heaven, is why.”
“You don’t know this.”
“Katy. Sweetheart. Everyone knows this.”
“Carmen has talked to me some about their family businesses. They sound very legitimate to me.”
“What businesses would these be?”
“Importing. Or exporting. Or something. I don’t know the details. Carmen says Stu will try to get Hiram hired on, doing some kind of work, maybe over in Queens.”
“Christ.”
“You’re too cynical, Billy. You weren’t that way when we met. You were sweet and trusting. This city, the bank — that woman — they’ve changed you.”
I leaned over and kissed Katy on her sunken cheek. “Well. I reckon. Now you should get some sleep. We both need some sleep.”