Los Angeles was as Karp remembered it: compared to the City it was warmer, sported brighter colors, and the crazy people were in cars rather than stumbling down the street. The sun was impossibly high in the sky when he arrived at his hotel, a unit of one of the tackier lodging chains. It was on a gritty side-street off Sepulveda, convenient to the brake job and bodywork district, and was what he could afford on the miserable per diem paid by the New York D.A.’s office, which did not approve of foreign travel for its agents—except, of course, for the D.A. himself, who was out of town being famous half the year.
Karp felt cranky and disoriented and knew he would sleep badly. He didn’t like to fly or drive. He liked to walk.
He remembered jet lag from the days of his marriage, when he had made the coast-to-coast trip several times a year to visit his in-laws. They paid. He went to the window of his room and looked out past the tiny balcony to the heat-shimmering parking lot and the freeway beyond. He opened the window and the thick air of L.A. summer flowed around him, a melange of smog, chile, eucalyptus and eroded mountains.
It jogged his memory again, and he found himself thinking about Susan, and the uncomfortable occasions he had spent as a guest in her parents’ house in Bel Air. Four years ago, she had gone back to California. She hadn’t actually left him. She was going to get a Masters degree at UCLA. It was a very modern arrangement.
He tried to remember her as she had been in their apartment in New York, and found that he could not, that the image that came to his mind was the nineteen-year-old cheerleader he had married. He remembered a round, open face, a dusting of pale freckles, the red-gold ponytail swaying, the long, tan California legs flashing as she leaped on the sidelines at basketball games. That was before he screwed up his knee.
A perfect girl. A perfect marriage. Right now he should be living here, in Westwood or Beverly Hills, after a successful pro basketball career, probably a partner in her father’s law firm, probably a couple of kids. He felt his chest tighten. That had been one of their jokes: He wanted five boys, so he could coach. He’d be wearing white Guccis now, and doing deals for sitcom stars.
Would it have made any difference if he had stayed? Once again Karp experienced the feeling of hopeless confusion, and an embarrassment bordering on hysteria, that came over him when he recalled the breakup of his marriage. It was like a parody of the sixties, something out of a TV soap: husband preoccupied, wife runs away and joins lesbian commune.
He had turned all that off, he thought, put it out of his mind by an act of will, crumpled it up like a sheet of legal bond and sunk it in the trash can. But when he thought of seeing Susan again, his gut knotted. Did he still care, or was it shame? It was shame. He knew in his heart that he would never have thought of seeing his wife again had it not been for Marlene’s ultimatum.
Karp closed the window and opened his briefcase. He took out a picture postcard that had arrived at his New York office the previous week. On one side it had a picture of the midway at Santa Monica Pier, full of tourists, and on the other a phone number. He sat down on the bed and dialed it. Two rings and then the phone was picked up at the other end. Nobody said hello.
Karp said, “This is Roger Karp, Mr. Impellatti.”
After a pause, a voice said, “You in town?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Alone?”
“Right. Where are you?”
“You got the card there?”
“Yes.”
“Look at it. You see the guy with the red shirt with the kid? He’s got a balloon.”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“I’ll meet you tomorrow at twelve noon where that guy is standing. Be alone.” With that the phone went dead.
Karp was impressed. As a connoisseur of paranoia himself, he thought that Little Noodles had come up with a neat method of arranging a meeting so that somebody listening in on the conversation wouldn’t know where it was.
This conversation was cordial compared with the next one Karp had, which was with his mother-in-law. She slammed the phone down when he identified himself. When he called again, she informed him that this whole mishegas was his fault, as was her husband’s recent heart attack, that if he had stayed in California, and had a nice home, and joined a temple like a decent Jewish husband, instead of living in a crummy apartment in that crazy place with God knew what kind of people for neighbors, so he could chase momsers, he should be ashamed of himself, and so on and so on.
Karp waited for a pause in the guilt-bath and asked for Susan’s address. After some hesitation, and some artful lying on his part, he extracted a rural address in Ladero, California, a small town in the mountains above San Jose.
Karp’s third phone call was to an old law-school friend with a practice in L.A., to get the no-fault papers drawn up. He spent the rest of the day by the pool, went to bed early, tossed around for a couple of hours, and then watched movies on TV until four in the morning. He got up at ten, breakfasted in the motel coffee shop and then called V.T. Newbury in New York, the man he had left in charge of the Bureau.
“V.T.? It’s me.”
“The Incredible Hulk? How’s California? Are you snorting cocaine amid the perfect oiled bodies of blonde starlets?”
“Yeah, right. What’s happening at the store?”
“Karp, you’ve been gone a day, what could be happening?”
“So I’m nervous. What’s Bloom doing?”
“Not much. He came to work this morning in a silk peignoir and white satin mules. Besides that, nothing new. Did you connect with your guy yet?”
“Yeah, I’m meeting him in a couple of hours. How do you like the agony of command?”
“My respect for you grows hourly. I signed a bunch of leave slips and a purchase order for a new copier. I feel like Erwin Rommel. Speaking of which, you might have a word with Roland when you get back. He seemed a little miffed he didn’t get the deputy slot.”
“Yeah, I figured he would. It’s kind of hard to explain the situation. Roland thinks hard work and kicking ass is the way to get ahead. But you’re the only guy I got Bloom won’t touch.”
“Hey, I work hard.”
“When you feel like it. Your family and their friends also control about a trillion dollars in political money, which is why you’re golden with the D.A. Meanwhile, I got to go. Is Marlene around?”
“No, I saw her leave with those two cops she’s got working for her. Oh, I almost forgot, Guma wanted to talk to you. Let me switch you over. Bye … hey, and get some sun, take it easy.”
Buzzing and clicking and then Guma’s heavy voice was on the line.
“Butch, how ya doin’? Getting any sun?”
“Why does everybody ask me that? Yeah, sun up the ass. What d’you got, Goom?”
“I talked to Tony Bones. He’s in town.”
“Goom, you ever think that hanging around with wise guys is not a particularly smart move, assuming you’re interested in staying in the D.A. business?”
“Butch, I could give a shit it’s a smart move or not. What am I, bucking for bureau chief? I’m trying to impress fucking Bloom? I was putting goombas in jail when he was in finishing school. You too, come to that, so don’t you give me any horseshit about Tony Buonofacci. I know him from when we’re both snot-nose little guineas in Bath Beach. We used to hustle chicks together down Cropsey Avenue, for chrissake.”
“Goom, stop with this old neighborhood crap! Half the guys he’s whacked out got the same story. You think he shoots East Side Presbyterians?”
“Hey, did I say he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer? But one, he’s based in Miami now, which puts him off our turf. Let him shoot all the sun tans he wants! And two, he knows if I ever get the chance, I’ll hang his ass, and no hard feelings on either side. He’s a pro—he’ll get the best lawyer in town, he’ll try to fix the jury, and if he loses he’ll go down without a peep. Meanwhile, he’s a paisan, and it’s getting so there’s not many of us left.”
“Wait, Guma, I got to wring out my hankie,” said Karp, laughing. “So tell me, what does Tony Bones have to say that I would find interesting?”
“Just that the word is that Harry Pick went apeshit when Little Noodles disappeared. He started stirring things up, as only Harry can, and among the things he stirs up is a little hood named Carmine Scalliose, who it looks like is the last guy to see Noodles in the City. This is in a spaghetti joint on Grand, two days after Ferro got his. Apparently, Noodles walks up to him, gives him a big smile, and starts schmoozing like crazy, which is weird, because him and Carmine have never been such great friends.
“So after a while he leaks out that Harry Pick’s after him. He don’t know why, but he saw Harry give him the shot, he says, up at Nyack.”
“What’s that about, ‘the shot?’”
“I don’t know, some kind of gesture—you know, like kids going ‘bang-bang.’ But Noodles thinks it’s for real—he’s a dead man. So he panics, he splits, he hides—”
“He hides from Harry in Little Italy?”
“Yeah, I know, it’s like hiding in Harry’s Jockey shorts, but here’s the thing: He tells Carmine he’s going to Puerto Rico—even shows him the ticket. So he gets Carmine to drive him to Kennedy: bon voyage, Noodles.”
“Knowing, of course, that Carmine will go straight to Harry.”
“Like shit down a chute. So Harry tears up PR, looking for him, for a couple of days. Then he starts thinking it’s a scam. Tony thought it was pretty amusing, Harry in PR, and all the time Noodles is in L.A.”
“Wait a minute, Guma—Tony knows Noodles is in L.A.?”
“Shit, Butch, everybody knows he’s in L.A. After he got back to the City, it took Harry twenty-four hours to get wise to the switch. You think he don’t have people in the airports? Tony says he’s got Jimmy Tona’s outfit looking for him out there. Harry’s pissed, Butch. Maybe in Nyack he was just dicking around, but now it’s serious, you know? I mean, Noodles knows where all the bodies are buried.”
“That’s probably not a figure of speech, is it?”
Guma chuckled, a sound like marbles running down a bathtub drain. “I doubt it. You’re in a bind, son.”
“So it seems. It’s a shame I’m going through all this to bring Noodles back, and he doesn’t even make a case to nail the shooter and Harry.”
“What d’you mean, he was driving the … Oh, right, no corroboration.”
“Right, it’s too bad Noodles was an accomplice. Of course, Harry doesn’t know we don’t have a corroborating witness. We might try to play with that, assuming I can bring Noodles in in one piece. You have any Sicilian wisdom to convey on that?”
“Yeah, stay away from the cops. Noodles goes anywhere near a jail, he won’t get much older. Which he knows.”
“Uh-huh. He does seem a hair paranoid about me being alone.”
“I don’t blame him. Look, you got a meet set up yet?”
“Yeah, in about an hour and a half.”
“OK, make the contact, then get in a car and drive like a sonofabitch someplace where they won’t look for you. Lay low for a couple of days and I’ll get something together, bring you both in.”
“What are you talking about, Guma? Lay low, my ass! I’m going to pick up Impellatti, drive to LAX, get on a plane, and come home.”
“Butch, you’re not listening. Listen to me! You think Harry Pick would lose sleep over wasting a planeload of people to get this guy? You remember why they call him Harry Pick? No planes, and stay out of big towns. Hotels ain’t such a good idea either. Can you think of any place you can hide out? Like in the country?”
“Yeah,” said Karp, after a moment’s pause. “I just thought of a place they’ll never look.”
“What do you mean, the doll’s a dead end?” snapped Marlene. Peter Balducci sighed. “Marlene, for now, a dead end. I’m not saying something couldn’t turn up.” He and Raney were in Marlene’s office at the end of a long and frustrating day. He looked at his partner for support, but Raney had his chair tipped back against the wall, staring up at the high ceiling, watching the smoke from his cigarette and Marlene’s curl and twine up to the high ceiling.
“Like I told you on the phone, I saw this guy, what’s-his-name, the doll guy …” He checked his notebook. “Schlechter, he’s got a place on Madison, a doll expert. He recognized the maker. The doll’s Belgian, made about nineteen-ten. He said there’s only about fifty of them around.”
“Eleven grand a copy,” said Raney.
Balducci snorted. “Yeah, can you believe it?”
“Did he know how many of them were in the city?” Marlene asked.
“No, and he didn’t sell that particular one, either. But he gave me a list of the kind of collectors who could touch an item like that.” He passed a sheet of paper to her across the disordered desk. “Fourteen names. Three were out of the country. I checked out all the others. Nothing.”
“What, ‘nothing’?”
“Nothing, nothing. None of them got a doll like that missing. None of them got a record with anything more than a parking ticket.”
Marlene looked at the list. The addresses were all Silk Stocking East Side or upper West Side. “How do you know none of the dolls was missing?”
Balducci rolled his eyes. “Christ, Marlene! We don’t know these folks had a doll like that. Just they could’ve had. We had to check them out because we could’ve got lucky. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, officer, that’s the one that cousin Reginald the sex fiend ripped off last June.’ Besides that, what am I supposed to do? People who can pay eleven grand for a doll, you don’t just walk in and toss their place.”
“What are you telling me, Pete? Above a certain tax bracket we don’t have sex killers?”
Balducci glowered at her and got to his feet. “Marlene, you know damn well I don’t think that. Now come on! We’re two people, we got a full load besides this crap, we’re not gonna follow every citizen that could’ve had access to an expensive doll. Not until we know something else about who we’re looking for.”
“He’s big, he’s white, he wears black clothes, and he’s got short, blond hair,” said Raney.
The others looked at him, dumbstruck for a moment. “How the hell you know that, Jimmy?” Balducci demanded.
Raney let his chair drop down with a crack like a gunshot. “Because while you were talking to the doll collectors, I went back to Lucy Segura’s neighborhood and hung out. There’s a playground, a couple of schoolyards. I figured if the little sister saw him, he had to be in some public place where he was hustling her. I mean, he didn’t pick her up at her door, right? So I found a couple of kids playing basketball in a schoolyard on One-sixteenth. They remembered seeing a guy with that description talking to a little kid three days before Lucy disappeared. They thought he was a priest.”
“Kids!” snorted Balducci. “They’ll tell you any damn thing …”
“Right, so I cruised the fast-food joints on One-sixteenth and up Lex. The day manager at the MacDonald’s also remembered a guy in black and a little girl. They came three, four times. Guy bought a meal for the kid and himself. He wouldn’t have recalled it, but the guy was so big. Maybe six-four, three hundred pounds. Black raincoat, black suit, and fedora. He doesn’t remember if he had a dog collar on or a regular shirt.”
Balducci frowned. “Maybe it was a priest, Jimmy. Maybe it was a priest with another little girl.”
“It’s the guy, Petey.”
Balducci looked at Marlene for support, but she was gazing at Raney with admiration, who was gazing back with a similar expression.
Balducci shook his head. “Right. It’s the guy. An arrest is imminent. You two figure it out. I’m going home.”
After Balducci left, Marlene said, “Your partner seems grumpy.”
“Yeah, he can get that way. He’s just P.O.’d because he wants to can this case, and I don’t. We’re gonna get that guy.” He smiled at her.
He’s got a nice smile, thought Marlene, returning it. “Well, I’m glad you’re with me on this,” she said. “How are you going to handle it?”
“We’ll nose around the buildings where the doll people were, see if anybody’s seen a big blond dude.”
“What if they haven’t?”
“Then Pete’s right—it’s square one again. Hey, we got lucky. There’s no guarantee our luck’s gonna hold.”
Marlene nodded and sighed. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess.” She looked at her watch. It was six-ten. “Anyway, time to go home.” She stood and started stuffing her briefcase.
“Can I drop you off?”
“Don’t you want to get home yourself?”
“Haven’t got one. I share a place with a couple of other cops in Jamaica.”
“OK. I just have to drop some things off at the Bureau office. I’ll meet you on the Leonard Street side in ten minutes.”
Marlene expected the Bureau office to be deserted this late in the day, but the lights were on and she heard the sound of typing. She threw some files in an in-basket for filing. At the sound, the typing stopped and Dana Woodley stuck her head up over a partition. She looked startled.
“Dana? Hey, it’s quitting time. This is civil service, you know?”
Woodley smiled sheepishly. “Jest finishin’ up some briefs.”
“Yeah? Who’s making you work so hard?” Marlene looked over the partition. On Woodley’s desk was an open ream box of 100 percent rag paper, the kind used for dissertations. A few dozen sheets of neat typing were stacked at its side.
“A little moonlighting, Dana?”
Woodley blushed deeply. “Yeah, I, ah, put up these cards? At all the colleges? This ’un here got to be done Friday. I won’t get in no trouble, will I?”
“Over this? Hell, no! We had a clerk here once ran a real-estate business on office time for twenty years. Retired a millionaire, I heard.” Marlene looked at the other woman closely. Her lip was trembling, and she was obviously close to tears.
“Dana, I meant it. I’m not going to rat you out.”
“No, gosh, it ain’t that! I’m just goin’ crazy with Carol Anne.”
“Carol Anne? But I thought you had that great day care….”
“Yeah, I do, but she’s started actin’ real strange, like, she has these turrible nightmares, like she never done before. And she cries somethin’ fierce when I drop her off in the mornin’. And last night, she was playin’ with her dolls and shouting, and when I went over to see what she was doin’, she had the little Ken and Barbie there with their clothes off, and she was makin’ them do it. And the language, filthy words, comin’ out of that little mouth. It purely broke my heart. And I got to work, to save any money at all, don’t I? So I got to, I got to …”
Here the woman broke down in sobs. Marlene went around the barrier and placed her arm around Woodley’s shoulder. “Dana, it’s OK, kids go through stuff like that,” said Marlene soothingly, thinking at the same time that she actually had no idea whether that was true.
“I don’t believe it,” said Woodley through her sniffling. “Somebody at that center been putting evil in that child’s head.”
“Did you talk to them about it? The center, I mean.”
“Oh, no!” Woodley said, shocked. “I jes couldn’t, Marlene. I’d be so ashamed. And I cain’t take her out, not right now when I’m jes startin’ to get a little ahaid.” More crying. Marlene comforted her, and found herself, to her own surprise, volunteering to ask about the day-care center.
Raney was waiting for her outside the D.A.’s office entrance on Leonard Street, at the wheel of a ten-year-old Karmann-Ghia, bottle green except for the left fender, which was primer red. The passenger seat, she learned as she climbed in, was rotted to the springs and covered with a dirty tan chenille bedspread.
“Gosh, Raney,” she said, “I thought you were offering me a ride in a real po-lice car, and now this. Does it go?”
“Better than most cop cars, but of course you don’t get the genuine cigar and puke smell. I’ll make it up to you some day. Where to?”
She gave him her address and they turned north up Centre Street. The early summer night was warm and Raney had the window open and the stereo playing a tape. Chopin flowed out of expensive speakers. Marlene added up the junker car, the expensive stereo, the classical music, the cop driving: It made an intriguing sum. It made her curious.
Raney drove aggressively and fast, squirting the little car in front of cabs and around trucks, barreling through intersections on yellow lights. While he drove, they talked, the inconsequential chat of strangers—shop, personalities, the damn City. Nothing personal.
In a few minutes they were in front of Marlene’s loft building on Crosby Street, a grim looking industrial structure on a narrow road strewn with debris. “You live here?” Raney asked doubtfully.
“Yeah. Why, you think it’s unsuitable for a classy broad like me?”
Raney grinned and shrugged. “Hey, what do I know? I’m just a working stiff from Queens.”
“Me too. I went to St. Anthony’s in Ozone Park.”
“No kidding! I went to Curran. You go straight through? We must know a lot of the same people.”
“No, I got a scholarship to Sacred Heart.”
Raney drew back in mock awe. “Hey, hey! Very fancy. I’m impressed. I never had a Sacred Heart girl in my car before. I guess you don’t kiss on the first date.”
She tried to summon up an appropriate cold look at this remark, but as she got out of the car she felt her mouth twitching into a copy of Raney’s crazy grin. “You think this is a date, Raney,” she said through the window, “you spent too much time with the nuns. Let’s keep it professional, hey?”
As she unlocked her door, she realized that the vibes in that car had owed nothing to the professional. She recalled that nasty old tingle, no mistaking it. Why am I a sucker for the bad boys? she asked herself. And speaking of bad boys, she wished Karp would get home. Is he divorced yet? she wondered. Am I going to be a respectable married lady, married to a rising legal bureaucrat? Is that what Butch has turned into? She shook her head to straighten out her thoughts. Don’t be crazy, Marlene, she said to herself, knowing it was advice she rarely took. As she walked up the stairs a tune popped into her head. It was “Bonnie Light Horseman,” an Irish ballad about a girl who loved a dashing cavalry man. Who of course has dashed off to the wars, never to return. Marlene, control yourself, she thought. But the tune wouldn’t go away.
“I brought you some food,” said the Bogeyman. He handed the girl a white paper bag. She opened it and started chewing listlessly on a cheeseburger. She was sitting on a bed in a small room on the ground floor of a brownstone. The Bogeyman had one just like it, down the hall. This room had in it a bed, a hooked rug, a small deal table that supported a color TV, and an armchair. The TV was tuned to a cartoon show. There was one door and one window, which was barred with a heavy grille.
The Bogeyman sat in the armchair. “Are you happy here, Brenda?” he asked gently.
“Do you got any ice cream?” she replied.
“Yes, we can get you some ice cream. How do you like your dolly?”
Brenda glanced at the doll, shrugged, then turned back to watch the cartoons. It was a twenty-four inch French porcelain doll, dressed for winter in green velvet, with a muff of real sable.
“Not every little girl has a nice doll like that,” he said. Then, after a pause, “You know I gave a nice doll to another little girl, and I got in trouble.”
She looked up at this. “Who? Emilia?”
“No, not Emilia. Is Emilia your friend?”
“Yes, but I hate her. Can she come to our house and play?”
“No, not today. Anyway, I got in bad trouble with my mother, ’cause this little girl lost my doll. My mother yelled at me. And she spanked me. On my heinie. With a strap.”
The girl’s eyes grew wide. Then she giggled. “Your momma can’t spank you. You a big man.”
“No, no. Your mother can always spank you, if you’re bad. She’s always your mother.”
“My momma mean,” said Brenda. Then, “Do I live here now?”
“Yes.”
“Could I see your momma?”
“I don’t think so,” said the Bogeyman. “Maybe later. After the uncles.”
“What’s uncles?”
“Men who tickle you. After the uncles tickle you, you can see my mother.”
“Is she nice?” asked Brenda, doubtfully.
“Sometimes she’s nice,” said the Bogeyman. “But sometimes she’s a witch.”
Anna Rivas awakened to the sound of music and, rolling over, discovered Felix was gone, as usual. Anna was confused about that part of Felix. On the one hand, she wished that he would stay over on nights when they were together, and had hinted shyly to him that it would make her happy, but he was always gone. No note, no farewell, just gone. On the other hand, it was part of the mysterious romance of the relationship—the dark stranger appearing and leaving unpredictably. Anna had read a lot of romantic novels.
She stretched luxuriously and wriggled, remembering the previous night. She sniffed the pillow where his head had rested and retrieved a faint whiff of the heavy cologne he favored. Her body was still tacky with sex. She sighed and began her day.
As she drank her coffee and watched the morning news on the TV, there was a knock on the door. Anna opened it and Stephanie Mullen came in, dressed in a thin bathrobe under which she was obviously wearing nothing. Anna observed that the bathrobe was none too clean.
“Hiya, cutie,” said Stephanie. “Look, I hate to bother you, but I’m trying to get the boys off to school and I’m out of milk.” She came into the one room that served as the parlor, dining area, and kitchen. “Boyfriend take off?”
“Yeah, he had an early meeting,” said Anna. “I’ll get the milk.”
“Thanks. A meeting, huh? I hope he’s up to it. You guys didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Anna felt a blush rising on her face. Stephanie saw it and laughed. “Hey, I couldn’t help noticing. The damn walls are thin, you know? You gonna see that guy much you ought to get the bed bolted down or something. I could sell tickets.”
“Please, Stephanie, you’re making me embarrassed.”
“Sorry—hey, look, nothing to be ashamed of. The guy’s a stud, so enjoy!”
Anna said nothing, but busied herself with cleaning up her breakfast. She liked Stephanie, ordinarily, and respected her as someone more experienced in the world, but she did not care for the implication that she was having herself serviced by Felix, like some animal. As she handed Stephanie a quart container of milk, she said, “He’s … it’s not just that, you know. He’s just wonderful. Exciting. Romantic. I can’t believe it … me! It’s crazy, but …”
Stephanie looked at her closely. “You really fell for this guy, huh? What’s he do for a living, by the way?”
“Oh, he’s in business. He’s some kind of big international executive.”
“Is he? Well, I’m glad you’re happy, but …”
“But what?” Anna was disturbed by the expression on Stephanie’s face.
“Nothing. I guess I’m naturally suspicious. You know, you work in clubs, in the record business, you get like a sixth sense about dudes. This guy you got … I don’t know. Look, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but there’s like, something off about him, dig?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna. But, in her heart of hearts, she did.
Felix Tighe was selling a living room set on credit, which was what he did for a living, besides being a burglar. Of course, it was just temporary, until he could put together a really big operation, something that involved flying first class and wearing nice silk suits and having a Mercedes with a car phone. Felix hadn’t figured out what those guys who had those things did, or where they kept the really good-looking girls, the ones from the magazines. You sure didn’t see any of them around his usual haunts.
While he waited for this better life, his current job was at least adequate. The commission was decent, he got the use of a company car, he got to cheat people, which gave him a kick, and it gave him an excuse for wandering through neighborhoods during the day.
The neighborhoods were not that hot—the one he was in now was the part of Queens known as East New York—but Felix had learned that even fairly poor families had some hockable little item: a gold cross, a set of silver spoons, that he could pick up without much effort. Or pills. He could get rid of any number of prescription sleeping pills or diet pills at Larry’s.
Like this woman here, fat as she was, might have an interesting medicine chest. Felix watched with amusement as she pawed through the samples of fabric. Selling didn’t take much: just a lot of soulful staring into their eyes, and appreciating their good taste. A coo, a wink, and there it was, $695.95 for a living room set, Spanish Renaissance in crimson velvet, nothing down and thirty-six months to pay, only 21 percent interest, and a contract that said that if they missed even one month, they had to come up with the whole principal or the stuff would be dragged away. But right now all the bitch was thinking about was the nothing down and having the furniture, so that maybe her old man or somebody would look at her the way Felix was looking at her, like she was a person.
The woman sat poised with pen in hand over the contract, stretching her little moment out. She was talking about how her little dog had died.
She was thinking about getting another one. Felix smiled and invented a little dog of his own. He didn’t mind old ladies, up to a point. It was always amazing to him how people could get through fifty, sixty years of life and stay so dumb, so pluckable.
Suddenly, for no reason he could think of, the image of his own mother flashed into his mind. His mother didn’t know what he did for a living. She thought he was a big-time executive, which stopped her from nagging him, but made it difficult to hit her up for money. She had money, that was for sure, and friends with money. Not for the first time, Felix began to think about how he could get his hands on some of it, or maybe use her contacts to set himself up in something with a little more class. But if he did that …
The woman signed the contract and held it out to him, smiling, flapping the pages slightly, like a five-year-old back from the first day of school with a finger painting. Felix took it from her, his smile blank, his eyes elsewhere. The woman felt the first stirrings of disappointment.
“When will they deliver, you think?” she asked brightly, trying to recover the mood.
“Soon, a couple of days. I’ll call you,” he growled, and made his escape. Outside, he paused and shook his head. No, Ma was for emergencies, like this burglary business, or the odd hundred “loan.”
Whether she believed his success story or not, he didn’t know, or care. He only knew that he couldn’t ask her for anything serious or accept anything from her that would give her an edge on him. He stopped, startled. Where did that thought come from? His Ma loved him. He was her favorite boy. But he knew if he ever got dependent on her she would get him involved in that church of hers and he couldn’t hack that. That was it. He turned off those thoughts, which were starting to make him nervous. He was good at that, shutting off thoughts.
When he wanted to remember things, he wrote them down. In the car he noted the sale down in the small black diary he always carried. He used a fine-pointed marker pen and wrote in tiny capitals, like the lettering on engineering drawings. He looked over the display of the week’s appointments. Each completed task had a tiny check next to it. “Date w. Anna” was checked. “Take care of M. /move out.” M. was Mary, his wife. That was checked. He had taken care of her. “Date w. Denise” wasn’t checked. It was written in the slot representing this coming evening.
Therefore Felix did not tarry in the neighborhood after making his sale. He drove quickly back to Manhattan, to Steve Lutz’s apartment on Tenth Street. There he showered and dressed carefully in his best suit and tie. He had all his stuff at Lutz’s now, in suitcases and cardboard boxes. He could tell Lutz was starting to get pissed off, but he didn’t care. Lutz was a pussy, one, and two, he would be moving in with Anna soon.
He checked himself in the full-length mirror. The suit was a real Armani and the tie had cost thirty-five dollars. Denise had bought both for him, for his last birthday. She was pretty good to him, all things considered. Although she would never give him any money, she didn’t mind buying him stuff. And she didn’t want anything from him, anything permanent, except she was loopy about keeping it quiet, which was why when Mary had followed him that time and freaked out he had to put her away, lock her up and pound on her head and scare the shit out of her. He didn’t understand that too well, since Denise seemed otherwise to be a pretty sophisticated old broad. Why should she give a shit? Unless she had lied to him and she really was still married. Something else he couldn’t understand was why Mary had gone batshit. It wasn’t the first time he had played around, so …
As he thought about this, and about seeing Denise, Felix became increasingly nervous. His palms began to sweat and his stomach started to spin over. This was a familiar feeling and he knew how to deal with it. From a suitcase he took a large plastic jar and shook from it into his hand two Gelusil and two yellow Valium tablets. He threw them down and swallowed them dry. Before he hit the street both his stomach and his nerves had begun to relax. Felix, of course, had no more interior life than a salamander, so that he never wondered why this liaison affected him this way, and why he continued to make himself available to Denise.
By the time he arrived at the East Side hotel that was their usual rendezvous, he had managed to cast an almost romantic light on what he was about to do, almost Boy Scoutish in a way, the equivalent of helping an old lady across the street. This did not last as long as his trip up to the twelfth floor in the elevator, for by the time he stepped out he was excited and sick at the same time, with his sex throbbing and the sour taste of bile in his mouth.
As always, the door to the room was open; as always the room itself was dim: the lights off, the curtains drawn. The scent of her was heavy in the air. Her face was a white nimbus framed by coils of thick black hair. Pale, soft arms reached out to him and he heard her deep laugh. His breath came in gasps now, as he tore off his expensive clothes and threw them to the floor. He heard a sound, a whining sob, and barely understood that it was coming from his own throat.
She threw the covers aside and he saw her naked body, saw her wide hips roiling and her thighs lolling apart. With a cry he flung himself on her, his eyes tight shut. As his body moved spasmodically, his mind became totally blank, as if he were in a deep sleep fragmented by nightmares. In an hour or so, he would find himself neatly dressed, walking in the street in a state of lassitude and exhaustion, and remember that he had had a date with Denise, and that he could now go to an expensive store and buy something for himself. There would be scratches on his back sometimes, and he would recall someone shouting in his ear a man’s name, one that was not his own. But of the thing itself, he retained no memory.