Justin glanced Annie’s way and then said, “No, thank you.”
“That’s good,” said Janet Moss as she lit another cigarette, “because I didn’t really want to get up again.”
In a black cage hanging from a stand in the corner of the room, a small yellow bird spread its wings, jumped from one perch to another, pecked the air, let out a series of satisfied chirps, dropped a small white load.
“How did you meet your husband?” said Annie.
“Pure chance,” she said. “I had just happened into a bar to meet a friend—I’ve never been much of a drinker—and there Austin was. I liked his looks right off, and he must have seen something in me.”
A desperate lush, thought Annie, nodding with sympathy.
“Neither of us were exactly young when we met,” said Janet. “We had been around the block a bit, so we both knew how lucky we were to find each other. And then we found this house, bigger than we ever expected, and out of our price range. But I loved it, and they almost threw the mortgage at us. We were giddy, we felt like we had been pulled out of something and saved.”
“Pulled out of what?” said Annie, suddenly curious.
“Out of the muck our lives had become, I guess. Walking into our house the first time after the settlement, it was the richest I had ever felt. It didn’t last.”
“What happened?”
She took a deep, noisy drag from her cigarette. Rising smoke curled in front of her eye as she tried to sort out her past. “What always happens,” she said finally.
Just then, Annie heard the sound of a refrigerator being opened in the kitchen, a rattle of cans, the exhale of carbonation when a pull-top was popped. The canary rustled excitedly in its cage.
“Is somebody here?” said Justin.
“That’s just Eddie,” said Mrs. Moss. “He helps me out. He’s been doing that for five or six years now. It’s good to have someone.”
Annie leaned forward and looked hard at this woman sinking into the chair as if it were swallowing her whole. “It must have been a shock when your husband died,” said Annie. “We heard it was an accident.”
“It was something,” said Mrs. Moss. “We’d been having our problems, that was no secret. We’d been having our problems for a while. That was just the end of them, I guess. It let me keep the house, though.”
“How?” said Justin.
“I had lost my job, and the mortgage had adjusted up. But after the accident, with the insurance and all, there wasn’t really a problem anymore.”
“I guess it all worked out that way,” said a voice from the kitchen. Annie looked up and there was the handyman, that Eddie Nicosia, leaning against the doorframe with a can of Budweiser in his hand, and his hips thrust weirdly forward. He was thin and sharp-faced, with twisted teeth, and his very posture was of a belligerent alpha, which seemed a bit strange seeing as it wasn’t his house to alpha in.
“You want something, Eddie?” said Justin.
“Just a beer,” said Eddie, standing there, rolling his hips and showing absolutely no intention of taking the hint and shuffling off.
“These people have come to talk about Austin,” said Janet. “They want to ask about Austin and the Chase woman. This is her son.”
“Is that a fact?” said Eddie.
“The one that found her dead and bloody on the floor.”
“Oooh,” said Eddie. “That must have been tough for a kid like you.”
“This is a little private if you don’t mind,” said Justin.
“No, go ahead,” said Eddie. “I don’t mind at all.”
“You said you had something to show me,” said Janet.
Justin looked at Eddie a moment more, as if he were measuring something, and then turned back to the woman in the chair. “Apparently, my mother knew your husband,” he said.
“She knew him for a long time, well before I did,” said Janet. “Never let him go, as a matter of fact.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s always someone in the past, isn’t there? And the comparisons never stop. If only…Why didn’t I…With her I could have…Mine is Edgar, Edgar Monelli. Sweet boy. Now he owns a bank. But the whispering disappointments quiet down if the ghosts stay out of the marriage, don’t you think? Edgar had the sense to keep out of our lives.”
“And my mother didn’t?”
“I assumed that’s why you were here.”
“In the back of my mother’s closet,” said Justin, “my brother found some letters addressed to my mother that were kept in a shoebox. There’s no name at the end, just an initial. An A.”
“What kind of letters?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“Try,” said Eddie.
“This doesn’t involve you.”
Eddie gave a little snort and then took a long drink of his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing as the can was drained.
“They look like love letters to me,” said Justin to Janet. “And I wanted to know if the A in the letters was your husband.”
“Not if they’re love letters,” said Janet Moss.
“Excuse me?”
“Let me see,” she said, snapping her fingers.
Justin took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and leaned over to hand it to the woman in the easy chair. She glanced at it just for a second, purposefully not reading it, before handing it back.
“It’s his handwriting, all right. That careful little scrawl. You know how many love letters that son of a bitch sent me?”
“Anything else?” said Eddie.
“Don’t let us keep you,” said Justin.
“I’m not letting you do nothing. Either of you want a cold one?”
“No,” said Justin.
“I’ll just get me another then.” He pushed off the doorframe and headed back to the refrigerator.
“When did you find out about the relationship between your husband and my mother?” said Justin, after Eddie had moseyed off.
“I knew about it. The way you know about things in your bones.”
“Did you catch them at something? Did your husband confess?”
“I just knew.”
“They always know,” said Eddie, back at his spot in the doorway. “The wives. Shit, my first wife could smell it on me afore I walked in the door. I’d be getting out of the van and she’d be hurling them pans at me.”
“How did your husband react to the news of Mrs. Chase’s death?” said Annie.
“He was devastated, disconsolate. He drank to excess. Well, he always drank a bit to excess. This was more than excess.”
“And you?”
“She was in the way. And then she died. And there was hope. And guilt, too, a little, I admit.” She looked at Justin and Annie and then rushed her words as if she had been caught at something. “About being so satisfied at someone else’s death, I mean. I guess you know about that, dearie.”
“I only felt horrible,” said Annie.
“Mostly I was just glad.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” said Annie.
“She put herself right in the middle of what we had. It wasn’t perfect, our marriage, it wasn’t a model, I admit that. But it was ours. And it was all I had. And yet there she came, like she was going to save him. Save him from what? From me? And it went to crap after that. It was never the same, even after she was dead. I thought it might all just go away, but it didn’t. And then, a while later, Austin moved out.”
“He wasn’t living here when he died?” said Justin.
“He was living in town. A new life. He helped with the house, but he wanted to sell it. Wanted me to move into an apartment to save money. The same type of crap apartment I was living in when I met him.”
“And then he died,” said Eddie. “You got anything more? ’Cause I got to get back to work.”
“No one’s stopping you,” said Justin.
“Oh, I’m not leaving Janet with the likes of you two. She’s tired, and there’s no tel
ling what you could push her into. You want me to walk these people out, Janet?”
“I think so. I am tired.”
“It’s time,” said Eddie. He took a step into the living room, leaning forward aggressively from the waist, jutting out his jaw. “Let’s go, folks.”
“We’re almost done,” said Justin.
“No almost about it.”
Justin stood up and calmly turned to Eddie.
“If you give us a moment of privacy, we’ll be out of your hair in a jiff.”
“You ain’t ever getting in my hair, flash. You ever see that sign that says BEWARE OF DOG? Well, I’m the big dog around here.”
Eddie took a step toward Justin in that aggressive lean of his. The two were face-to-face now, staring each other down.
Annie felt an electric thrill ripple through her as the canary chirped excitedly in its cage and Eddie took another step.
38.
ELEPHANT’S EAR
Justin took a hard look at Eddie Nicosia, standing there like a pit bull in front of him, and immediately did the calculation.
It was a weakness, he knew, judging a man by whether or not he could kick the man’s ass, but Justin was still a creature of testosterone and so couldn’t help himself. Whenever things got dicey in the bar, like when those two yahoos came in for Cody, he did the same calculation, gauging weight, fitness, the crazy glint in the other man’s eye. He covered this Eddie Nicosia in weight and fitness, and Justin had some skills to be sure, but the spark in Nicosia’s eye let him know it wouldn’t be an easy or pleasant thing to take him on. Once in Reno he had seen a too-rowdy drunk with the same aggressive posture, the same nasty spark. The bouncer, a guy named Pete, outweighed the drunk by a hundred pounds, but still, before Justin could register the blade hidden in the drunk’s pinwheeling right hand, Pete’s ear was on the floor. From that point on, they called Pete “Vince.”
Justin’s quest for nonattachment in this world only went so far. He weighed his attachment to his body parts against what he could gain by holding his ground, and it wasn’t close. Time to go. He put his hands together and switched on his mask of serenity.
“I understand completely,” said Justin to Eddie Nicosia before turning to face Janet Moss. “Thank you for your time, Janet. We won’t bother you further.”
Janet Moss waved him away, the cigarette smoldering in her grip. “It wasn’t a bother. My marriage was a bother.”
“You two need any help finding your way out?” said Eddie.
“No,” said Annie, standing and looking at Justin with a crease of disappointment in her forehead. “We’re good, really, since that’s the door right over there and we can actually see it from here.”
There was silence between Annie and Justin as they walked past Eddie’s ladder in front of the house, down the driveway to the street, and then up along Mantis Drive toward the subdivision’s entrance.
“You really showed him,” she said finally.
“What did you want me to show him?” said Justin.
“Some gumption, maybe?”
“Gumption?”
“Ever hear of it?”
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“Minnesota.”
“Lot of gumption out there, I suppose.”
“Loads. Wisconsin has cheese, we’ve got gumption. Your father would have put that jackass on his butt.”
“My father’s in jail,” said Justin. “There’s an old Zen saying: Ride your horse along the edge of the sword; hide yourself in the middle of the flames.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know. What did you think about our Mrs. Moss?”
“She’s a disaster,” said Annie. “Bitter, angry, totally drugged out. I liked her.”
“You liked her?”
“Sure. Life hasn’t turned out for her, but still she’s got her house, her boy toy, and her sense of humor.”
“Boy toy? Are they…you know?”
“Absolutely. Couldn’t you see? He stood in that doorway like a rooster guarding his coop.”
“What do you think she was on?”
“Valium, OxyContin, something. And I caught the sweet whiff of pot somewhere, so she’s mixing and matching.”
“I bet old Eddie Nicosia has all kinds of fun stuff in that van.”
“Along with a mattress and shag carpeting maybe. He’s a real handyman. Janet’s a little lost is all. Once she gets her bearings back, she’ll kick that son of a bitch out of her life and get started again.”
“Is it that easy?”
“I’ve always hoped so.”
“Convenient how her husband died so suddenly, leaving her the house and his insurance.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“And she didn’t seem to like my mom much.”
“My God, did she hate her. That was the only true thing that came out of her mouth: the vitriol she felt for your mother.”
“And she said she felt guilty about my mother’s death. You don’t think…”
“I don’t know. When you’re mixed up in some triangle and things go terribly wrong, the emotions are always confusing. I know that firsthand. But there was something about the way she described your mother’s effect on her marriage. It wasn’t like your mom was stealing her husband from her. I’ve been on the other side and know how that would play out. Mostly she would have described your mother anatomically, because for her that would have been the threat. But here it was more like your mother was just getting in the middle of something, of some sort of agreement, and Janet Moss didn’t want her meddling.”
“She said that after my mom’s death, she thought her marriage had another chance. It seems that a lot of people in her orbit end up conveniently dying. How long did she say Eddie had been helping her out around the house?”
“Five or six years, I think it was.”
“Maybe he’s been more helpful than just painting shutters, plying her with pills, and dipping his wick. Maybe I should check him out a bit.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m a barkeep,” said Justin when they reached the parking lot of the Applebee’s. “We have our ways.”
“Thanks for letting me come,” said Annie hesitantly, like she had something else to say but didn’t know how to phrase it. She looked down and kicked at the ground. “It helped a bit to see that the situation was bigger than just me.”
“It always is,” said Justin. “You know Whitman?”
“The candy? The chocolate sampler? What does that have to do with anything?”
“‘For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.’”
“Where did you read that, Junior, on the inside of the box?”
“Exactly.”
“Uncle Walt’s always been my favorite. Sexy, like chocolate. You’ll let me know what you find out about that creep Nicosia?”
“Sure,” said Justin, not meaning it.
He watched her retreat a bit, turn, spin around once to smile and wave good-bye, and then head for her car. He watched the way her back arched, her arms swung, her long legs loped on the asphalt. And he tilted his head in disappointment as he watched her go. This, he knew, was the end of the line for Annie Overmeyer in his life.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to screw her. Of course he wanted to screw her. Justin wanted to screw everything in heels; send a horse by in Manolos and he’d neigh. In fact Justin really, really wanted to screw her. Really. And he sensed he wouldn’t have the urge to be up and out as soon as he caught his breath with Annie Overmeyer, that he wouldn’t mind lingering a bit, talking things through, losing himself in the rough edges of her voice, wincing happily at her defensive jokes. But in the middle of it all, with their arms and legs twisted in a delirious tangle, with those beautiful lips of hers locked onto his, with that straw-colored hair swirling around them both like a pale saffron robe, would she be thinking about him? Or his father? Or maybe both, comparing one with the othe
r? Technique. Size. Yikes. No, Justin was all up for perversion, but some things were just too damn perverse, and that was one of them. It might have been different if he were a different kind of kid and his father were a different type of man, but his father wasn’t, and Justin wasn’t, and this thing wasn’t going anywhere, ever.
And so good-bye, Annie, and good luck.
He was still feeling disappointment at the end of this tender yet ghostly embrace when Eddie Nicosia’s white van rattled out of Mantis Drive and headed south. Justin kicked the bike to life and followed.
Normally Justin would stay as far back as possible from the van, being that a motorcycle was easier to keep track of in the rearview mirror, but Eddie’s van, with its solid back doors, didn’t have a rearview mirror. And the passenger-side mirror was conveniently cracked. So he wasn’t as worried about being spotted as he followed up and down, here and there, along the broad corridors of Montgomery County, all the while doing his best to stay out of the view of the driver-side mirror. Still, it wasn’t as easy as you would suppose. Justin had no idea how many white vans there were in the world until he tried to follow one. There were fleets of white vans on the street, zooming here and there, diving in and out of the lanes of traffic, toting plumbing supplies or flowers, trolling for kids, all of them keeping Justin in a cloud of doubt as to which of these white vans belonged to the louse.
But when he spied what he hoped was Eddie’s white van turn into a parking lot, he caught the plain block letters on the side reading NICOSIA HOME REPAIRS. He slowed down and pulled to the curb.
Eddie was now parked exactly where Justin had figured he’d be parked, in front of a bar. The Kork & Keg was a ragged little roadhouse wedged between a desultory strip mall and a 7-Eleven. Pabst on tap, charred pieces of gristle served with French fried potatoes, Sinatra on the jukebox. The Kork & Keg.
Justin had seen the way Eddie had sucked beer from the can in Mrs. Moss’s living room, absorbing the alcohol as neatly as a protozoan absorbed oxygen. After a hard day’s work at the Moss estate, doing whatever strange things he did there, Eddie Nicosia would certainly head off to his regular joint for a quick pop. And he might stay for a couple of quick pops more. The only thing Justin didn’t know for sure was whether Eddie would leave on his own power or be swept out with the dust and the vomit.
The Barkeep Page 20
