No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

  I did, the ten of hearts. He put the deck away. He said, “The harder you try to figure out an illusion, the easier you are to fool.”

  I said, “We’ve done this one—Lincoln’s collar.”

  “We have? Never mind, then.”

  I said goodbye. When I got to my car, I got a call from Bay. He told me to open the glove box. I did and there was the ten of hearts. I asked him again how he’d done it.

  “There can only be one answer—the card was already in your car.”

  “Then how did you get me to pick that card?”

  “That’s the magic.”

  I watched a slide show on Mickey Pfeiffer’s Web page, Pfeifferlife, to remind myself what he looked like. He was stocky and looked to have a low and dense center of gravity, like he’d be impossible to knock off his feet. He was mid-fiftyish, I’d guess, with a thin brown crew cut and tiny blue eyes closely set in a beefy face. His ubiquitous smile was all business—forceful and fluorescent. There were dozens of photos of Mickey with this or that professional athlete and with an assortment of South Beach celebrities. Mickey and his lovely wife with the governor; Mickey in a cowboy hat at the Republican National Convention; Mickey shaking hands with the Israeli ambassador. Mickey had a taste for snug vests, ostentatious watches, and expensive cigars.

  Knives & Forks was spacious and sleek, with white tables, a gleaming white-tiled floor, white leather chairs and bench seats. There were several tall clear glass vases of elegant white calla lilies on the glass and granite back bar. I was led to my table by the hostess, Sinead, who urged me to enjoy my meal. I asked her where she was from. “The accent,” I said. “British?” She told me she was a Saint. “I’m from Saint Helena. In the South Atlantic.”

  “You’re the first Saint I’ve ever met.”

  I told Thatcher, my waiter (Thatcher?), that I’d like an Innis & Gunn, and I watched the muster of young professionals relaxing after work at the bar. Many of the gentlemen wore bespoke suits, their starched shirts opened two buttons at the collar. Others, the single guys who had gone home after work to freshen up, wore these graphic Ed Hardy T-shirts—lots of geishas and skulls. The ladies, for the most part, had straight, shoulder-length hair, wore silk and satin sheath dresses, and drank blue martinis. The men leaned toward the women—all the better to hear them—and the women’s earnest smiles revealed spectacular dental work.

  Thatcher returned with my beer and enthusiastically recommended the evening’s entrée special, the pan-roasted Niman Ranch leg of lamb. “It rocks,” he said, and he kissed the tips of his fingers. Mwah! When I ordered an iceberg wedge and the crispy pork bellies, I could see that I’d lost his respect. He didn’t even bother to say, Excellent choice. He didn’t bother to write the order down. I handed him the menu and asked him if he’d seen Mickey Pfeiffer this evening. He pointed with the menu to an empty and secluded corner booth. “That’s Mr. Pfeiffer’s table.”

  The lights dimmed just a bit, and I heard Charlie Parker playing “Ornithology” on the sound system. I noticed a handsome couple at a table about fifteen feet away. She had pushed her salad dish away and sat with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. He said something, and when she did not respond, he leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and stared at the ceiling. He tapped a finger on the table like he was saying, Sign here, and here, initial here, sign, sign, initial, and sign. He had that five o’clock shadow the fashion models affect in New Yorker ads. His short blond hair was combed forward and rose to a quiff like the Gerber baby’s. He looked like a Cal or a Kim. I could see that he was not being forthright with her. She looked hurt and confused.

  When I want to know what a person’s thinking or feeling, I mimic, as discreetly as I can, his facial expressions, his gestures, mannerisms, his posture, his general behavior. If you mirror a person’s behavior, you’ll see that you become infected with her emotions, and you’ll be better able to imagine her thoughts.

  Cal leaned toward the woman and spoke, his arms spread, his palms up. He was asking her, begging her, to please be reasonable, please. She sat with her arms folded across her chest, taking rapid, shallow breaths and staring at her impenetrable future in the unblemished white linen tablecloth. I leaned in to my table, spread my arms, palms up. I looked over and saw Cal shaking his head deliberately, telling her she must have known it would end like this. Cal’s been seeing Brigid here on the side for eighteen months. Mondays and Thursdays after work and the occasional weekend indulgence up at Chalet Suzanne or tucked away at his friend Gordon’s cottage on Big Pine Key. She knew he was married, of course, unhappily so, he had claimed. “My wife and I have an understanding.” A year and a half wasted on this sorry son of a bitch. Has one word he’s ever spoken been truthful?

  I looked over and saw that she had a tissue squeezed in her hand and her shoulders were trembling. Cal had sprinkled a mound of salt on the table and was trying to balance the shaker on its edge in the pile. Thatcher brought my salad, said, “Bon appetite!” and slipped away without asking if I’d like another beer. When I looked back, Cal had actually bared his teeth and was now pointing a finger in Brigid’s face, and I knew that she had threatened a phone call to the wife. Cal dropped a couple of bills on the table, stood, and walked away. He did not even give Brigid the dignity of appearing to walk out on him. Brigid stifled her tears. I hoped she’d gather her things and go home, and I worried that she might end up at the bar batting her eyelashes at the fellow in the Tommy Bahama aloha shirt.

  And then I saw Mickey Pfeiffer himself, standing by the hostess station, talking on his cell phone. Blazing smile. Expansive voice. He held his forehead with a thumb and finger as he listened. His pink linen shirt was untucked, rolled at the sleeves, unbuttoned at the collar. He wore white trousers, blue loafers, and a braided leather necklace. The lenses of his red-framed glasses were softly tinted. Every so often, as he talked, Mickey rose up on his toes. He signaled Thatcher to fetch him a drink at the bar and deliver it to his table.

  By the time I finished my meal—really quite wonderful—I had decided to introduce myself to Mickey, remind him of the fund-raiser we’d mutually attended, say something in lavish praise of his prodigious philanthropy, and see what happened. Maybe he’d ask me to join him for a drink, and maybe I’d still be there later when Jack Malacoda and his dreary entourage arrived. But before Thatcher returned my bill, I saw Kevin Shanks, out of uniform, stroll into the restaurant with the elegant Mandy Pfeiffer, Mickey’s radiant wife. She sat with Mickey, gave him a peck on the cheek. Shanks gave a casual salute, a quick bow, and made his way to the bar.

  I called Carlos. I told him where I was and whom I was looking at. Carlos told me this was Kevin’s extra-duty assignment—Pfeiffer’s bodyguard and security chief.

  “There’s a lot you don’t tell me, Carlos.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t need to know.”

  “Friends don’t let friends wander in the dark.”

  “Get the leg of lamb.”

  Brigid had slipped away while I was preoccupied. I signed my check. Knives & Forks had added an 18 percent tip, thus screwing Thatcher out of the 2 percent more I would have given him, which was fine with me. I stopped to ask Sinead if she’d seen a woman in a black dress leave in the last few minutes.

  “Linda?”

  “Linda?”

  “She came with Kim Swain, but he left in a huff a while ago.”

  “She’d been crying.”

  “She’s a big girl.”

  I looked at the bar and didn’t see Tommy Bahama. “Did she leave alone?”

  “Would you like her phone number?”

  Red had left a Post-it on my door telling me he’d be at a fortieth birthday party for Nikki S. over at the NA house on Lantana. Django let me tickle his belly for a few seconds before he looked reassuringly into my eyes and bit me. When I asked him if he knew who might have unrolled the paper towels, he blasted off for the bedroom. I remembered the call from Georgia. I poured myself some c
ognac, put on Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, slumped into the couch, and listened to Georgia’s distressing message. Her husband, Tripp, had apparently fallen off the ship, was lost at sea, and was presumed dead. “Wylie, what am I going to do?” He’d gotten up at dawn like he always did, went off for his stroll around the deck, and vanished. She and the boys were now in Martinique dealing with forensic bureaucrats and criminal investigators. I called but found that her voice mail was full.

  So I was lying awake in bed later, trying to imagine exactly what you would have to do to fall over a railing on the promenade deck and plunge fifty or so feet into the water. Django was asleep and wheezing serenely on my neck. I thought of Brueghel’s Icarus splashing, unnoticed, into the sea and of Auden’s poem about the old masters and how they were never wrong about suffering, and how Tripp’s drowning would have happened while the officer steering the ship whistled a melody that his father had taught him and watched a frigate bird hover over the bow and while the cook fired the grill in the galley and while someone else was brushing his teeth or was slipping out of bed, trying not to wake the baby, and while, on the sundeck, a Catholic priest reading his breviary, watching the sunrise, thought he heard a forsaken cry and listened, shrugged, checked his watch, and walked to the dining room.

  I gave myself ten more minutes, and if I wasn’t asleep, I’d get up and read. Django slid off my neck and onto the mattress, but didn’t wake up. I saw the ten of hearts, on the ceiling, I thought, but my eyes were closed, and that’s when I realized that Bay had figured out what had happened at the Halliday house, why none of the neighbors saw anyone enter or leave the place—the killers were already inside.

  14

  I bounced Django’s Ping-Pong balls across the living room until, at last, spent from the chase, he surrendered, curled up on the terrazzo floor, stared up at me, closed his eyes, and made me disappear. I sipped my coffee and for no reason at all thought about Red, and realized I had no idea where he bathed or carried out his other ablutionary and expurgatory affairs. The phone rang and Django stretched himself into a bow. Dad told me that he had once seen an eight-millimeter movie after the war that featured a zaftig brunette with bobbed hair having intercourse with various dogs, one of which, he was sure, was a blue heeler. He said he would like for me to purchase that film for him, if I wouldn’t mind. I’ll also need a screen and a projector, he said. I asked him if he was out of his mind, which I shouldn’t have.

  On my way to the car I asked Red, “Where do you, you know, where—”

  “The outdoor showers on the Boardwalk and the public restroom.”

  “That works for you?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Well, in an emergency—”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  I drove to the Barnes & Noble at Maplewood Plaza to pick up a novel that Inez thought I would like. An Air of Baffled Silence was ninety-two-year-old Pilar Lamb’s first book. I read the opening sentence, “You don’t lie unless the truth is dangerous,” and I bought the book. I thought I’d sit and consider what I knew about the Halliday killings. Jake Karbowski, local gadfly, had set up his office, as usual, in a corner of the café. He’d commandeered the only large table, as usual, and set up shop beneath the mural of famous coffee-drinking authors. He had his laptop, his printer, his phone, and his engraved nameplate on the table. Jake is a conspiracy theorist, attends every city and county commission meeting, and posts a cranky blog, Everything’s Jake. I bought him a coffee and pulled a chair up to his table.

  Jake said, “I’m gonna take out the Goldman Sachs assholes.” He put a finger to his temple and depressed his thumb.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “And the AIG, BP—all the fucking thieves.”

  “That’s crazy talk, Jake.”

  “If this were China, you know what would happen? They’d frog-march those cocksuckers out to the middle of a soccer stadium and shoot the motherfuckers in the back of the head.”

  “Calm yourself; you’ll have a stroke.”

  “They steal us blind; they bankrupt their companies, and they get bonuses!”

  “You’d only get the first one shot, and you’d be arrested.”

  He smiled. “I misspoke. I’m going to have them taken out. I’ll be sitting right here at my desk, sipping a nonfat vanilla latte.” His phone boinged. “I have to take this,” he said.

  I stood.

  He told me, “This conversation never happened.” He turned his back on the room, looked up at Franz Kafka, and said, “Talk to me.”

  I took an empty table by the window and noticed that I had a voice mail from Georgia. The cops aren’t buying her story. She and the boys are being held in Martinique for questioning, and their ship has sailed. The cops, for some reason, suspect that Tripp may have arranged his own disappearance and that she may have known about the plan. Can you imagine that? They’re calling me an accessory, she said. Do I look like an accessory? A pearl necklace is an accessory. I called back but got no answer. Mailbox full.

  Someone had left a printout of a Craigslist personals ad on my table after folding it into an airplane. I smoothed it out and read:

  My name is Karma. My lips drip as hunneycome. My mouth is smoother than virgin olive oil. I been divorced & am curintly involved with someone, but would like out of it. Could you be my way out? I have 3 kids: I aborted one when I was 14. One I lost to DCFS, and one that live off and on with me and the daddy when he is outta jail. I am curintly dancing at a gentlemen’s club, but my dream job would be to cut and style hair at the mall. I have cheated on all the sorry men in my life before but would like to change this. Would you like to be my first faithefull relationship? Please write.

  If Karma’s ad were to appear on a college board exam, you might be asked the following questions:

  1.Karma’s opening remarks echo, one might even say “parody,” what great masterpiece of literature?

  a. Tom Jones

  b. Beloved

  c. Song of Songs

  d. Hiawatha

  2.How many children did Karma actually have?

  a. 3

  b. 6

  c. 2

  d. Insufficient evidence to ascertain

  An older couple in matching tropical-themed cabana outfits were now talking to Jake, asking him about local restaurants and scenic attractions. They’d assumed he was the café’s concierge, I suppose. You don’t lie unless the truth is dangerous. Was Inez sending me a message? Surely not. What did she even know about the Hallidays and Shanks and Malacoda? I opened the novel to a random page and read the first complete sentence: “While her husband was dying on the floor of a florist shop, Nan James was at home getting herself ready for their big night out—dinner at Creola’s and dancing at the Ballroom of Romance.” Brueghel and Auden all over again. I thought I should probably read the book as soon as I could. I don’t believe in the efficacy of magical thinking, but what I do like about this kind of pre-logical, associative thinking I was engaged in is that it will lead you to places you would never have gone on your own. And who doesn’t love a surprise? And, anyway, who said that logic was thinking? It’s only one kind, and a dull one, at that. I do believe in coincidences because they happen, but they don’t happen for any meaningful reason. Events coincide because we notice. The synchronicity is in our heads. And then I looked up from the book and into the café walked someone I recognized but couldn’t place, and she was walking toward me. She smiled and took a seat across from me. “You never called,” she said.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Ms. Curry.”

  She folded her hands together on her purse and smiled brightly. “Why do you dislike me, Wylie Melville?”

  “Just a gut reaction.”

  “I grow on people.”

  “So does fungus.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.” I asked her how her book on the Halliday case was going. She told me she’d moved on to a juicier story. Sex, drugs, and corruption. She asked me if I’
d heard of Mandy Proia. I hadn’t.

  “Mandy Proia doing business as the Melancholy Intimate Dance Academy.”

  I still had no idea, so Perdita explained that when Mandy’s obtuse and well-lubricated husband, Arnie, found out after only ten years in business that the only dance Mandy did was the supine samba, he threatened to kill her. Said so in front of witnesses at Gino’s Deli, and then he clubbed her with a hard salami, appropriately enough, and had to be restrained by Gino’s sons.

  “So did he kill her?”

  “He vanished. Three months ago. Without a trace. Until last Friday when a meat-cutter at Señor Carne found a human leg in the freezer—still in its cotton Dockers pant leg and wearing a tube sock and a penny loafer. This morning the medical examiner’s report identified that leg as having belonged to one Arnold Proia. And I think the tube sock tells you all you need to know about the late, lamented one.”

  Perdita’s source told her that Mandy’s dance card had been signed by some of the county’s most illustrious and influential citizens. Judges, politicians, cops, lawyers, and so on.

  “And you believed this guy?”

  “I saw the list.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “A brilliantly executed blow job.”

  “Please!”

  “There’s nothing some horn dogs won’t surrender for oral sex. It amazes me. It amazes all of us girls, actually.”

  “I assume that no arrests have been made.”

  Perdita said that she was told by the police chief himself that there was no proof that a crime had been committed. “I told him he had to be kidding. He said, ‘Where’s the rest of him?’ I said, ‘You think he might be out there hopping around?’”