Rhode Island Red (19 page)

“No, don't bother,” I said quickly. “There's my other line. I'll call back.”

I took my gun out of my bag and rubbed it along the quilt in a kind of burnishing stroke. I'd gone over Larry's instructions a hundred times, wondering if I'd ever understand the lure of these cold and weighty enigmas called guns.

Mine was unloaded now; the clip was in the bureau drawer. But I'd logged a number of hours over the past few days standing in front of the vanity mirror and studying myself as I slid the weapon in slow motion from my purse; as I aimed it and pouted like Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde;
as I held it at my hip and pretended to be Wyatt Earp; as I ran from one end of the room to the other spraying imaginary bullets and grotesquely mouthing the word “muthafuckaaah” like a drug dealer in one of those death-in-the-ghetto movies.

I lay down on the bed, the Proust book open on my stomach. Damn, what I wouldn't give for a warm madeleine just about now. And a cup of china black from that piss-elegant tea shop on the rue Christine.

My mind drifted back to the afternoon Henry and I had spent making love, drinking a shamelessly overpriced bottle of wine from the Loire and looking at a book of photographs of Paris in the 1950s. What if we'd met then? I'd asked him, being whimsical. Perhaps, I'd speculated, he'd be a soldier of fortune and I an emigré beatnik. We'd spend our days drinking bitter coffee and collaborating on books, and our nights listening to Juliette Greco in the darkest café in town.

This is why I love you, Henry had said when my flight of fantasy was exhausted. Your imagination. I wish you could have met my grandmother.

Before I knew it, I was asleep.

I swallowed my ethics and went into the park that night. I sat quietly on a bench, switched on my Walkman and listened to a tape I'd patched together months ago—Bud playing
Parisian Thoroughfare
, Lady's exquisitely rethought
These Foolish Things
, Coltrane's version of
Violets for Your Fur
, you know, the old goodies. I allowed myself to get thoroughly chilled, so that coming inside again would be all the sweeter.

I had a beautiful, if lonely, dinner: a little liver-onion-tomato turnover and a tandoori chicken to die for, and to all intents and purposes the entire bottle of the creamiest white Châteauneuf du Pape I'd ever pulled from a vintner's shelf.

I walked back slowly to the hotel and went directly to the elevator bank, across from the piano bar. I pressed the up button.

Just as the elevator doors opened, a song flew out of the darkened lounge and stabbed me in the back of the neck.

Lord, why do good pianists use
Funny Valentine
like a weapon, like Cupid's arrow dipped in grief?

I thought at that moment—well, I was thinking many things at that moment. Please God, make it all not true. Make Walter alive again. Let me be at home drinking coffee from that big yellow cup I love. Please God, let me turn around this minute and see Henry standing there, healthy, grinning, explaining, arms out to hold me against the heady, oaken scent of his soft blue overcoat. Please God, if you can't let me forget him or forgive him, then let it feel good when I blow his damn kneecaps off tomorrow. Please God, if I don't find somebody to talk to—be with—tonight, I'm going to pass away from loneliness.

Help me, Ernestine. Tell me what to do
.

“You like jazz, Mr. Thorn?” I asked.

“Take it or leave it,” he said. “Who is this?”

“I met you a few days ago. You know, the smash-up in love with the asshole from Rhode Island.”

“Aubrey's friend! What's happening, Nanny?”

But before I could tell him, he went on: “I'm usually better than that with voices, being an old bartender. But my trick was to put a face with the voice. You don't sound black on the phone. No offense, but, know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Hoover said the same thing when I called to warn him about the Panthers.”

“What do you need tonight?” he asked after an appreciative chuckle. “The answers to tomorrow's mafia quiz?”

I didn't speak for a minute.

“Hello?” Thorn called into the receiver.

“Yeah, I'm here, I'm here.”

“Where's ‘here,' Nanny?”

“A bar. At the Gramercy Park Hotel.”

“You didn't find asshole there, did you?”

Again, I fell silent.

“Hey, smash-up, you still there?”

“Yes. No, asshole's not here. I'm calling you for—to thank you for your time. How about a drink?”

“At that old folks home?”

“Sure. There's a little brown boy singer goes on soon. His feet haven't touched the ground in fifteen years and he's real cute.”

“I didn't think you knew any of my people, girlfriend.”

“Oh, Mr. Thorn,
you're
the one from Indiana, remember? Not I.”

I had time to fix my make-up and walk around the block a couple of times before Justin's cab pulled up at the door of the hotel.

I reached into the taxi window and paid the fare before he had a chance to.

“Nobody has paid
me
to do anything in a long time,” he said as we went through the revolving door of the lobby. “You made my fucking night.”

“No problem. I'm flush.”

“Sold your story to the
Enquired
?”

“No. I've turned to crime—like everybody else. The bar's this way.”

We settled in with our drinks—Dewars with a water back for Justin, Grand Marnier for me.

I had called Justin Thorn out of some weird survival instinct. Somehow I knew it was him I needed to talk with tonight, not Aubrey. Justin, though he baited and patronized me, had become a confidant. But with a twist: there was only so much I could tell him. I had to hold certain things back, in a word, lie. The miraculous thing was, he knew that, and yet here he was.

“How bad a bad guy are you, Justin?” I asked after a few minutes of small talk.

“What do you mean, sweetums? Sex or the job?”

“The job. You know, you work with some pretty persuasive people. You kind of have to do what they tell you, right? I mean, what I'm asking is have you ever—”

“Killed? Me? Oh, child, please! I run a tits and ass joint and make sure the bartenders don't steal them blind. It's just a job and a pretty good one, considering. Come to think of it, it's too bad your boyfriend couldn't just look at it that way. You'd both be a lot happier now if he had.”

“Henry, you mean. Yeah, maybe so. But I don't see how our paths ever would have crossed if he had just been one of the boys.”

“You'd be surprised, baby. A lot of them that look like cute Mr. Guido from Jersey have got them some brown sugar on the side. And would kill anybody who messed with it.”

“Well, that's nice for them. But I don't want to be nobody's ‘on the side'.”

Justin snorted. “That's something only a smash-up would say. I'm an aging homosexual. Wasn't for the side, I'd never have a boyfriend.”

I toasted him with my snifter, deferring to his wisdom, but not swallowing it whole.

We fell silent when the good-looking singer made his appearance. “Girl, he
is
special,” Justin whispered to me. “I knew Aubrey wouldn't have any dumb smash-ups for friends.”

After the set was over, I asked the bartender to freshen our drinks. I felt there was so much more to say to my new buddy, but I didn't know how to say it. So I sat listening to his horror stories about life in the closet that is Indiana, and the glory of stepping off the Greyhound and into the seamy Times Square night lo those many years ago. I guess Justin needed a buddy, too.

“What did you really want to tell me tonight, Nanny?” he said at last.

I shook my head. “I don't know. Maybe I wanted to run my lecture on Charlie Parker past you.”

“That would be a waste.”

“Why? Who do you like?”

“Luther.”

“Figures,” I said, laughing a little. “Henry likes jazz a lot, you know. That's kind of how we met. If I ever see him again, there are a couple of … old records I want to give him.”

“I bet I bet that's why you're trying to hunt him down.”

My hand was creeping involuntarily toward my purse. It was all I could do not to take out the gun and show it to Justin. But I wasn't sure what the point of that would be. Did I want to show him how tough I was or did I want to beg him to take it away from me and bury it somewhere? Was I asking him to endorse my plan or talk me out of it?

I withdrew my hand and turned the bag clasp side down on the bar.

“All I can say is, he's lucky it's you and not Aubrey,” Justin said, laughing diabolically.

He reached over and handed me one of the paper napkins from the pile next to the container of maraschino cherries. My eyes were a little wet. I hadn't even known it.

We sat through another show. The singer blew a kiss our way at the end of his last number. Justin caught it and put it in his breast pocket.

It was late.

“Well, thanks for the date, Nanny,” he said as I called for the check.

I removed a hundred dollar bill from my bag and pushed it toward the bartender.

Justin took note of it and smiled. “Scared of you.”

“You should be. Not too many unemployed smash-ups throw around bucks like this,” I began, “but I only—”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “You know what the president say—‘Don't ask. Don't tell.'”

“Good night, Justin. Kiss Aubrey for me.”

It was very late. And I had promised myself I'd get to bed early. Tomorrow was going to take just about all the strength I had left.

But on the other hand, what difference did it make? I knew I wouldn't sleep.

CHAPTER 16

These foolish things

I went to the flower market, to a small stall just around the corner from the apartment where Walter murdered Inge. I bought two dozen yellow roses at the wholesale price. Our lady of the flowers, all in black. That was me. I had on the same Norma Kamali that I'd worn to my grandmother's funeral, and the much prized leather jacket Aubrey had bought me when one of her mysterious investments went platinum. The little felt cloche hat I had bought just two days ago. If I looked like a mob widow who also happened to be a fashion model, so much the better. On my wrists were the cheap leather bracelets that had belonged to Charlie Conlin.

On the cab ride north, up Eighth Avenue, I tried to settle on an opening line. What, exactly, would be my first words when Henry opened the door? Would I have the gun already drawn? It was a tough call. Besides, I couldn't stop thinking about Walter this morning. His touch. His breath. His laugh. Those goddamn WASPy loafers of his, with all that blood on them, floated across my vision again and again.

All the death. All the devastation. The violence. The betrayals. I was of it now. Walter had made me part of it. Henry had made me part of it.

If I could have it all back the way it was before this insanity started, here's what would happen: I'd sit Walter down over a hamburger and a beer and tell him it wasn't going to work out for us, the best thing he could do for himself was find himself another woman. And as for Henry, our affair would begin at a smoky club somewhere. I'd go out with him for a while, sleep with him, travel with him, live with him, love him with my life.

But that was all make believe. The reality was that Walter was dead. The reality was that Henry had tricked me, used me, wrecked my life—shit, I was ready to blow a hole in his neck because of all those things, wasn't I? And yet the reality was that I still loved him, and maybe I wanted to blow the hole in him because of that too.

My history with Walter, my passion for Henry, my guilt and rage—all of it jumbled and boiled and bubbled over there in the back seat of that taxi.

I stood on the curb outside the hotel until I could pull myself together, then I went in.

The sleepy, balding man behind the desk rubbed at his eyes as he watched me approach, as if he thought this lady in black with all the yellow flowers might be part of his dream.

“Mr. Dameron ordered flowers?” he asked after I'd stated my business.

The concierge looked a little confused and I didn't blame him. It was only a quarter to seven in the morning.

“No,” I said with a Mona Lisa twist of the mouth. “They're from me.”

He regarded me for a moment and then, finally getting it, tentatively returned the smile.

“I'll just call up.” He reached for the phone at the edge of the counter.

“No, don't,” I said softly, placing my hand over his. “It's a surprise.”

Concern clouded his face for an instant. And I took the opportunity presented by that second's worth of hesitation to place a folded twenty in front of him.

“It's 810, right?”

“Yes ma'am. 810.”

I took the elevator up.

The Inn was still sleeping. I could almost hear the collective toss and turn of every sleeper behind every closed door, breathing gagged and heavy, dreams troubled, saturated with last night's mistakes.

I leaned on the bell of 810 and kept up the pressure until I heard shuffling from within.

“Yes? Who's there?” he called, sounding crazy in that roused from sleep way.

I mumbled an utterly incomprehensible response that ended with “the front desk.”

He repeated, “Who's there?”

And I repeated the same nonsense syllables, but much louder this time, and with an edge of high handed impatience.

He bought it. There was the sound of the safety chain sliding away from its cradle, and then the click of the dead bolt.

The door swung open a second later. And before he could speak again, I thrust the flowers into his arms.

He was wearing dopey patterned flannel pajamas, looking for all the world like a kid who'd misplaced his teddy bear.