by J. S. Cook
I muttered something about Picco’s mother and left it at that.
Chris chuckled. “Still, you gotta admire his dedication. Cup of coffee?”
“Sure.” I walked over to where the group of school teachers had been sitting. They had overturned the table in their haste to get away, and the floor underneath was a wet, sticky mess. I took a tray and started picking up the pieces of broken glass, piling them together for the trash.
What was Picco’s problem, anyway? If this was Philly, they’d come and cart away the dead guy and business would go on as usual. People would be thronging the place, for chrissakes, to see for themselves. I couldn’t afford to be closed, not even for a day. Sure, the Heartache did good business, but I wasn’t so successful that I could stand a loss of profits.
A shard of broken glass sliced into the index finger of my right hand and cut deep. “Dammit!”
“Whoa there, Jack.” Chris’s clean, strong hands closed over mine. “You cut yourself.”
“Aww, it’s nothing.”
“Sure it is.” He held my injured hand gently. “Come into the kitchen, I’ll get that cleaned up for you.”
I waited while he ran the hot water and fetched the first aid kit from the shelf over the sink. “How is it that Dave can slice and dice in here for hours and never get so much as a scratch?” I wondered.
“He’s had a lot more practice.” Chris rubbed my cut finger with a little soap and rinsed my hand under the water. “Cafe’s a mess, huh?”
I remembered the tumult after the vagrant had been stabbed. “They tore out of here like a herd of goddamn elephants.”
He held my hand clear as he reached to turn off the taps. “Aw, customers!” He flashed me a grin. “Who needs ’em?”
In spite of myself, I laughed. “Last time I checked, we do.” I watched as he wrapped a clean dish towel around my hand. “Unless you’ve got some private source of wealth?” Too late, I realized what I’d said, and his face closed down.
“No, Jack.” He concentrated on ripping open a clean dressing. “I ain’t got no private wealth.”
There was silence between us for several long moments. “Chris, I’m sorry.”
He wouldn’t look at me. “Why do you have to keep bringing it up? I told you before. I don’t know anything about that check. I don’t know how it got in the till. I damn well didn’t put it there.” He wrapped my cut finger and tied off the dressing. “How’s that? Too tight?”
“No, it’s fine.” The tap was dripping; I reached around him to turn it off, and he caught hold of my arm on the way back.
“What’s really going on here, huh?” His grip softened, and he slid his palm up my arm. “What’s eating you, Jack?”
“Nothing. I’m just sore about the Cafe being closed.” I was lying and we both knew it. “Having a guy stagger in and die in the middle of the lunchtime rush isn’t my idea of a good time, you know?” Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to confide in Chris. It had been a very long time since I’d confided in anybody, since I’d allowed myself to get close to another person, to lean on someone else. Oh, I knew lots of people around town—nodding acquaintances, mostly, no real friends—but here was someone offering to be there for me, for real. It was a novel sensation.
“Yeah. The Cafe keeps you busy, right? Keeps you from thinking too much.” His other hand slid gently up my left arm, skin against skin, and the casual contact was almost more than I could stand.
“You shouldn’t touch me.” I tried in vain to pull away from him.
“Why’s that, Jack?” His eyes sought my gaze. “Why shouldn’t I touch you? Guys touch each other all the time. Didn’t you ever play sports?”
“I can’t—dammit, Chris, I can’t handle it.” I pulled away, turned my back to him. My heart was going a mile a minute, and I felt dizzy, like if I took one step in any direction, I’d fall flat on my face. Hell, maybe it was loss of blood or something.
“You can’t handle me touching you?” He came up behind me and squeezed my shoulders, leaned into me so close I could smell his aftershave. I couldn’t help myself. I swayed back against him, and as I did, his arms went around my waist so he was hugging me from behind.
It was a real nice feeling, being held like that, having someone’s arms around me, and I’ll admit I gave in to it, but only for a minute. Any more than that would just be making things worse, and I didn’t want to go through that whole thing again—getting, having, only to lose that love and eventually the lover. I couldn’t take it anymore. Another episode like the last one and I’d crawl inside a bottle and stay there, and that would be disastrous. One good drunk would kill me.
I pulled away from him and walked out of the kitchen, but he caught up with me in the middle of the Cafe. Suddenly his arms were around me and I was gazing into soft brown eyes and his warm hands were cupping my face and he was kissing me. His mouth opened over mine, the gentle suction pulling me in to him while his strong arms held me tight against his body. The tip of his tongue teased my lips apart, and a flush of heat bloomed at the base of my belly. I forgot the spilled drinks and the broken glass, forgot everything except the man in whose strong arms I was held, the man who was kissing me with such fervent expertise.
“How did you know?” I pulled back far enough to look at him. “About me, I mean.”
His thumb stroked my bottom lip. “It took a while. You don’t exactly open up, you know?”
“Chris, what are we doing?” I groaned as his mouth pressed into my neck; my hands slid down to cup his backside and squeezed him gently. God, he was beautiful! What the hell was I thinking? “Maybe we better stop.” I forced myself to step away from him. “Anybody could come along and see us.” I smiled at the picture he made: his hair was disheveled from where I’d had my fingers in it, and the pressure of my mouth had turned his lips dark red.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He stroked my cheek. “You’re a right guy, Jack.”
It was a strange thing to say. “What do you mean by that?”
“I can trust you. That’s not something you can say about a lot of guys these days.” He smiled. “There’s a war on—haven’t you heard?”
I laughed. “You’re crazy.”
“Jack… you believe me about the check, don’t you?” He was asking me for something, something I wasn’t sure I could give him. “I swear to you, I had nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah?” There was a heavy feeling in my gut. I didn’t like it. “What about Julie?”
“We’re friends. Jack, you know how it is. It helps to have a woman on your arm, especially in this town.”
“Yeah.” What he said made sense to me, but something about it didn’t ring true. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
“What’s between us stays between us, huh, Jack?” He touched my arm, needing confirmation.
“Sure, Chris. It stays between us.” I moved to clean up the broken glass, and Chris followed me.
“Think Picco’s going to find anything?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to answer his questions, but my mind wasn’t really on the things he said. I was too busy processing the feeling I had deep down in my gut—the feeling that something wasn’t right.
IT TOOK me a long time to get to sleep that night. Usually I slept with the bedroom window open, but now it seemed to amplify even the slightest noises from the street below and all the little creaks and groans the building made when the wind blew. Then I was too hot, so I got up to open the window again; then too cold, so I went to the linen cupboard to fetch an extra blanket. The events of the day kept going around and around in my head like some demented carousel, with people’s faces and voices all mixed together while I drifted in that weird, in-between space that isn’t quite sleep and isn’t really waking. It seemed like Constable Picco was behind the bar, opening all the taps at once, and Chris was walking a beat outside the Cafe door, dressed in a cop’s uniform and swinging a nightstick. Twice I woke up suddenly, convinced someone was standing at the foot of my be
d, and toward dawn I could have sworn someone held me in their arms while I slept. They vanished as soon as I woke up.
There were dreams: the kiss replayed itself, over and over, from different angles and different points of view; Chris was holding me too tight, the tips of his fingers digging into my upper arms, hurting me; the Cafe was on fire, flames licking up the walls, liquor bottles exploding in the heat.
I turned over in my sleep and was on a boat, lying on the deck with my arm thrown across my face to shield my eyes from the strong rays of the sun. Someone else was there, another man. I opened my eyes and saw a slender figure, vaguely familiar to me, wearing sandals and a pair of shorts. I watched him haul on the ropes, the muscles in his back working as he unfurled the sails. His skin was smooth and tanned, and a bead of sweat was sliding down the valley of his spine; something told me it was a body I knew intimately, as intimately as I knew my own, and this made me happy. “We are sailing down the Nile, just as you wished.” He tied off the ropes and stretched out on the deck beside me. “The least you could do is pay attention.”
I took my arm down and smiled at him, reached for him, and pulled him into my arms. The kiss went on and on, growing more heated, more torrid, and my hands pressed flat against his back. I wanted to feel all of him against me. I wanted to press him into me, to join our bodies. “Yes,” he whispered, “yes, this is what I want as well as you.” A wild current of pleasure rose up from my belly and shuddered me apart, and I gave in to it, sobbing aloud.
IT WAS full daylight when I again opened my eyes. The bedside clock said it was a little after nine. I lay there for a few moments, wondering what the hell it all meant, and just then the phone rang.
It was Chris. “Ricketts called you yet?”
“Ricketts? No, why?” Picco had said Ricketts was in Nova Scotia. Was that right?
“Just how much do you hate Picco?”
He wasn’t making any sense. “What?”
“Ricketts is looking for you. He says he called your place, but you didn’t answer. The upshot is, Picco’s in some kind of trouble and Ricketts wants to see you.”
“He wants to see me? What for? I didn’t do anything to Picco.” Maybe Picco blamed me for the dead vagrant. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. From what I’d seen of Picco, he wasn’t too interested in doing me any favors.
“He just asked me to find you and get you down to headquarters.” There was a pause, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “You still in bed?”
“Yes, I’m still in bed.”
“You a man who wears pajamas, Jack?”
“Chris, you like working at the Heartache Cafe?”
“I sure do, boss.” He chuckled. “I sure do. Say, you want me to go down to headquarters with you?”
I thought about it for a moment. If Ricketts intended to ream me out, maybe having Chris along as backup wouldn’t be a bad idea. On the other hand, if there really was something up with Picco, Ricketts was liable to close up like a clam when he saw I’d brought an audience. “Naw, I think I’ll be okay. Listen, if I’m late, can you open up for me?”
“I thought Picco said to leave the place closed. What’s he gonna do if he walks by and you’re open?”
“Unless Picco’s going to make up the difference in lost profits, the Cafe stays open.” A part of me relished the idea of going up against the flat-eyed constable. “He wants to get a court order, let him.”
“Okay.” Chris didn’t sound convinced. “Will do. Call me if you need me.”
“Thanks, Chris.” I threw back the sheets and put my feet on the floor. My shorts were wet and sticking to me.
“Hey, Jack?”
“Yeah?” I pulled the cotton away from my skin. Obviously the things I’d dreamed had felt real enough for me to reach the ultimate conclusion. That hadn’t happened in a long time—longer than I could remember. After what had happened in Philly, that part of me had just gone to sleep, seemingly for good.
“Was it a good dream?”
“Will you mind your own damn business?” I put the phone down, but not before I heard him laughing on the other end.
I got showered and shaved as quickly as I could, and dressed without bothering to eat or even have a cup of coffee. I half hoped Chris might show up early and have a pot waiting for me when I got back from headquarters.
I found Ricketts in his office, sitting behind a huge stack of file folders, which he was paging through in his usual, methodical way. He grunted at me when I came in and waved me to a chair, and I waited till he had finished whatever it was he was doing.
“Stoyles. Something wrong with your phone, is there?”
“Sorry about that. I didn’t sleep well last night. I guess I must have really hit hard.” The remnants of my dream were still with me: the sun’s heat, the man on the sailboat, and that cascading wave of pleasure that had flooded my body. “Thought you were in Nova Scotia.”
“I was. I’m not, now.” Ricketts huffed out an exasperated breath. “Well, I won’t bother trying to dress it up, because what I got to say isn’t pretty.” He handed me a pair of photographs, the usual mug-shot type familiar to police departments all over the world. “Seen either of them before?”
I studied the photographs carefully. The man on the left was almost certainly the vagrant who’d been knifed in my cafe the day before; I didn’t recognize the other one. “Who are they?”
“The dead one was called Johnny Mahoney. Been hanging around Water Street as long as I can remember. His father used to fish up on the Labrador. Had a big schooner, the Three Bells, it was called.”
The face that stared out at me from the photograph was empty-eyed and sullen, the unshaven cheeks hollow with deprivation. “What happened to Johnny?”
“Got into the drink. Well, that would have been just fine if only he’d stuck to plain rum, but he didn’t. People fell on hard times here in the thirties. Lot of these lushes like Johnny couldn’t afford the real thing, so they started drinking whatever they could get.”
It was a story I’d heard all too often, and one I knew intimately. “Like what? Aftershave lotion?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it was wood alcohol, or stuff they brewed up in the basement out of God-knows-what.”
I handed the photograph back to Sergeant Ricketts. “Who’s the other one?”
“That’s Billy Parsons—Bull Parsons, they calls him. Ever seen a mug like that before?”
Parsons was stocky, with a head shaped like a potato and no discernible neck. His nose had been broken, obviously more than once, and his thick, blubbery lips did nothing for his overall appearance. The expression in his eyes was pure, straightforward viciousness.
“No, he doesn’t look familiar.”
“Bull Parsons and Johnny Mahoney spend their time downtown, pestering people for spare change. Once they got enough for a bottle or a few drinks in a pub, they’re gone for the rest of the day. Usually they’re on Water Street, and ever since you showed up, they like to hang around your place. Maybe there’s a lot of foot traffic down that way, or maybe you’re a soft touch.”
I had admitted to giving Mahoney the occasional hot cup of coffee in cold weather, and a few coins when I had it to spare. What was wrong with that?
“Parsons and Mahoney were doing great until Parsons got the bright idea that they could make a lot more money and buy a lot more booze if they took their little racket one step further.”
I didn’t have to ask what he meant; Ricketts’s expression told me everything I needed to know. “Armed robbery.”
“Armed robbery. Now, Stoyles, you know as well as I do that nowadays we got all kinds coming here—oh, present company excepted, of course.”
I tried hard not to laugh. “Skip it.”
“And some people who come here—especially by way of the waterfront—might not enjoy having two bloody stupid layabouts like Parsons and Mahoney sticking them up and taking all their money. You follow me?”
“Sure. So they
got in over their heads and somebody stuck a knife in Johnny Mahoney.” Chances were, whoever had murdered Mahoney was long gone by now, back out to sea.
“Right you are.”
I was confused. “Sergeant, you called me down here because of something to do with Constable Picco.”
“I’m getting to that, just hold your horses.” Ricketts laid the mug shots side by side on his desk. “Parsons and Mahoney had a nice little racket going. Then Mahoney gets killed. Parsons was picked up the next night, walking down Queen’s Road, dead drunk and completely witless. Grieving for his friend, he was—or so he said. Overcome with sorrow. Constable Picco happened to be in the lockup when Parsons was brought in, and the officers who booked Bull Parsons reported a really strange little incident.”
“I’m listening.”
“Have another smoke—do you good.” Ricketts lit it for me before continuing. “In order to reach the cells, Parsons had to walk past Picco, who was standing by the wall. Why he was down there, I have no idea. Anyway, Parsons and Picco looked at one another, and Parsons nodded.”
“So?”
“What I’m going to say to you, Stoyles, isn’t for general consumption. So far I’ve managed to keep most of this out of the papers, but it won’t last forever. Before I say anything, I need to know that you won’t go around shooting off your mouth as soon as you’re out of my sight.” I assured him I’d keep quiet. “What I got to say has to do with Picco.”
“Uh-huh.” Maybe Picco had complained about me. “What’s he done?”
“Constable Picco is in trouble.” Ricketts’s gaze was more intense than usual. “The worst possible kind.”
“I see.” Around here that usually meant he’d gotten some girl pregnant and would have to marry her, but with my history, I could hardly judge a guy for that. “Who’s the girl?”
“What?” Ricketts stared at me like I was nuts. “What girl? Picco? You honestly think Picco’s after getting into some girl’s drawers?”
Probably not. “Well… what is it, then?”
“Picco…. Picco got mixed up in something… something well in line with his duties, but which makes it look like he’s been involved in a certain… matter.”
