Early One Morning…

“A Mexican standoff,” Mick Ballou said. “I’ve often wondered why they call it that. Have you any idea?”

“No.”

“If Kristin were here,” he said, “she’d take out her iPhone and consult her Google and provide a full explanation in the wink of an eye. The world is a strange place and growing stranger by the day. There was no Google twenty-five years ago, and no iPhones either. But men have always told stories, and that was a good one. Did he ever make trouble again?”

“Steffens? As far as I know, he stayed on his side of the river. There was a state or federal task force that took on the courthouse gang in Hudson County, and a batch of Jersey City politicians went to jail, but I didn’t see his name in the papers. Then sometime after that, it must have been a dozen years ago, I got an unsigned card one Christmas. Santa Claus looking down at a plate of milk and cookies and taking a belt from a hip flask. It had a Jersey postmark, and I had the feeling it might have been from him.”

“Is he still alive?”

I shook my head. “He’s been gone, oh, getting on for ten years now. A one-car accident on the Garden State. Three o’clock in the morning, and he hit a bridge abutment head-on at something like seventy miles an hour. No skid marks, so he never tried to stop. And he went through the windshield, so he couldn’t have been wearing a seat belt.”

“Suicide, do you suppose?”

“Be hard to rule it out. He’d had emphysema for a couple of years, and had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. He would have had a gun around the house, and he certainly knew how to use it, but maybe he just went for a ride and made his move on the spur of the moment. Put the gas pedal down, take a hard left, and let the cops clean up after you.”

Somewhere along the way he’d returned his bottle to the back bar and came back with a liter of Evian water. And there we sat, two old men up past our bedtime, talking and drinking water.

“You think ’twill come out even,” he said. “With the ends trimmed, and tied in a bow. The murderer found out, and dealt with in a satisfying manner.”

“Like a television program.”

“Even there,” he said, “they’ll surprise you now and again. The villain goes free. But your man was found out, wasn’t he? Do you suppose he had occasion to kill anyone else? In Jersey City?”

“No way to know.”

“And who’s to say we’re not better off in our ignorance? What dark things did he do in the years after he killed the man and woman in the Village? He moved across the river and found a new life in politics, but did he have a use for the gun in that new life?”

“We’ll never know,” I said, “but when the time came to pick it up he remembered how to use it.”

He drank some water. “All those years,” he said. “Where do they go?”

“Might as well ask where they come from.”

“But we never question that, do we? Tomorrow’s always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out. The people you spoke about, some of them are gone.”

“Yes.”

“Jim Faber. Shot dead, wasn’t he?”

“By a man who mistook him for me.”

“Oh, that was a bad time. There were a lot killed in this very room around that time.”

“There were.”

“Did you blame yourself for his death?”

“Probably. What helped was his voice in my head, telling me to cut the crap.”

“Ah. The woman, the one who cut her auburn hair. Did the two of you ever get together again?”

“Twice, maybe three times. After Jan and I were finally done with each other, and before I reconnected with Elaine. Donna and I would get to talking, and there’d be a current in the air, and we’d wind up in her canopy bed for an hour or two. Then she got married and moved away, and I think I heard that she got divorced.”

“And Jan is gone.”

“Yes.”

“I remember she wanted you to get her a gun. Did she ever use it?”

“No,” I said. “She let the cancer run its course. But she found it a comfort to have the gun, in case she decided to take that way out.”

“You were the one she turned to. But you’d long since broken things off.”

“She brought me my clothes,” I said, “and I gave her back my set of keys, but it turned out we weren’t quite done with each other. That took a while longer. We really cared for each other, so we kept trying to make it work, until it was just too obvious that it wouldn’t.”

“Ah.”

“Who else? I got together with Dennis Redmond now and then, for a meal or a cup of coffee. I called him a couple of times when I had a case I thought he might be able to help me with. But then we lost track of each other. I figure he must be retired by now.”

“Like the other one.”

“Joe Durkin. We became close over the years, but he was on the job and I wasn’t, and that puts a limit on just how close you can get. He’s working security for a Wall Street firm now, and between that and his city pension he’s doing okay.”

“But you don’t see much of him.”

“Not too much, no. That bar Redmond liked, the Minstrel Boy? Last time I looked it was gone.”

“Places come and go.”

“They do, and the leaves fall from the trees. Bare ruined choirs—that was Shakespeare’s line, from one of the sonnets.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t know where I got the idea it was Keats. Jimmy Armstrong’s dead. He lost his lease and moved a block west, and then he died, and somebody else took over and changed the name. The new place had a dish I liked, an Irish break fast they served at all hours, but then they changed the menu, so that’s gone too. Theresa’s is gone, in case you were hoping for a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. Same with Dukacs and Son. There’s a chain drugstore filling the space where both of them used to be, Duane Reade or CVC, I forget which. I don’t know what became of Frankie Dukacs, whether he died or just lost his lease.”

“He moved to Nova Scotia,” he suggested, “and became a vegetarian.”

“I suppose it could happen. After Billie Keegan quit tending bar for Jimmy, he moved to California and started making candles. And Motorcycle Mark married a Gujarati girl from Jackson Heights and moved somewhere upstate. Putnam County, I think it was, and the two of them are running a day-care center. He stayed sober, he shows up at St. Paul’s every couple of months. He’s still got the Harley, but these days his regular ride is an SUV.”

“And the other one with the bike?”

“The other—oh, Scooter Williams? Last I heard, he was still living on Ludlow Street and enjoying the sixties. It’s become a very desirable neighborhood now, believe it or not. Piper MacLeish got out of prison a couple of years ago. They let him out early, sent him home to die. No idea if Crosby Hart is alive or dead, but Google could probably find him, after it tells us why they call it a Mexican standoff. What else? Tiffany’s has been gone for years. The coffee shop on Sheridan Square, not the jewelry store. That’ll be doing just fine as long as there are Japanese tourists to shop there.”

“And the Museum of Natural History? Where you met with himself? It’s still in business, is it not?”

“Last I checked. Why?”

“Because,” he said, “there ought to be a place for a couple of old dinosaurs.” And he picked up his glass. There was nothing in it but water, but all the same he held it aloft and gazed through it at the light.