“Yeah,” I said, “you hide your disdain so well.”
“Oh, like I give a shit what the rich boy thinks of me. . . . I need to talk to you about some other, uh, information. Can you get back here tonight? By yourself?”
“I’m so tired, Kenny.”
“It’s important.”
“Tomorrow morning?” I said. “You’re open at ten, right?”
“Eight.”
“Eight?”
He looked down the bar and shrugged. Keep the customers satisfied.
Lapthorne came out of the bathroom. Kenny looked over at him, then back at me. “Didn’t even wash his hands,” he said under his breath.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, he was only in there five seconds. Probably too appalled to piss.”
“Faggot,” said Kenny.
“Nice little man,” said Lapthorne, as we came onto the sidewalk outside the Crown. I smiled—what a Long Island thing to say.
Kenny had fifty pounds on Lapthorne, and they were roughly the same height, but “little” was the epithet applied to tradesmen who’d performed nicely for a reasonable fee—in this case, the ten bucks Lappy had lain on the bar as we said good night. Y chromosomes, what a pain.
“I’m just up here,” said Lapthorne, waving to a black Porsche Carrera halfway up the block. “Shall I drive you home?”
It was the acme of automobiles: black with a red interior, smooth and fast. A perfect scarab.
There was something reassuring to me about Lapthorne’s whole aesthetic. Like it would make the ugly stuff go away, the scary stuff. I wanted an anchor. Anything.
I closed my eyes and saw Sembles and all those flies. Felt sick again. Took a stumbling step forward.
Lapthorne wrapped his arms around me, putting my head on his shoulder. “You have to take it easy,” he said. “You’ve seen terrible things today.”
“Don’t think about anything,” said Ellis, and I felt her hand on the back of my head, stroking my hair.
Lapthorne smelled good, and I just wanted to let my whole weight liquefy against him, to relax and let somebody else take the helm for a while.
I stiffened and pulled away. “It was my fault,” I said. “The whole thing.”
His hands were still on my shoulders. “Let’s just get you home. I have some things to eat in the car. Some port. You just need to be someplace safe and warm and have a drink and stop thinking about it. I’ll drive you. Everything will be all right.”
So Ellis got in back and I curled up sideways on the passenger seat, knees tucked up under my chin, and the sound of the car and the way the seats smelled was just like in my dad’s 911 when I was a little kid, when everything was still okay and we were still a family and I hadn’t done anything wrong yet, and that made me want to start crying but I stopped myself and just gave directions, and they were both thankfully quiet other than that and I didn’t have to say an extraneous word.
As soon as I walked into the apartment, Dean’s absence hit me so hard I did start to cry, and the next thing I knew they’d wrapped me in a blanket with the greatest kindness and propped me against a couple of pillows on the sofa, Lapthorne giving me an honest-to-God handkerchief.
He and Ellis conferred quietly in the kitchen while I just rested there with my eyes closed.
I could hear snatches of the conversation, Lapthorne saying “a terrible shock, of course,” and Ellis, in counterpoint to Lapthorne’s bass, emphasizing the word “concern” a few times.
While he went back down for the port and some Stilton, she found three of Grandmama’s Dare’s small glasses, the ones etched with a thin line of tiny leaves that they used to use for orange juice.
Ellis sat next to me and Lapthorne poured a dollop for each of us.
It was a tawny, not the deep ruby I was expecting.
It started out tasting like a syrup distilled from golden raisins, but then it was reincarnated as butterscotch, and finally metempsychosed to hazelnuts. I swallowed, and it made my throat feel like it was being warmed by the hot sun in some rocky and treeless country bordering the sea. “Jesus,” I said.
Ellis swallowed her own taste. “Outstanding,” she concurred.
“Do you have any apples?” asked Lapthorne, and I pointed him to a pair of Granny Smiths in a basket on top of the icebox. He pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut them into wedges, then sliced the thin strip of core from each.
“Okay,” he said, handing a piece to me and to Ellis. “Take a bite of this and then another sip after you’ve swallowed it.”
Now the port tasted smoky: an inhalation in the woods outside Salzburg on the kind of October afternoon which, as Cheever once remarked, made you “realize your sweater was thin.”
“Like truffles,” said Ellis, “or what truffles should taste like.”
We tried the Stilton, then more tawny—now it was caramel, clear as a bell, with a finish like cider boiled down to an intensity of fruit.
“Feel a little better?” asked Lapthorne, while Ellis held my hand.
I shivered. “I just want to rewind everything. Make it not have happened.”
“You’re not allowed to talk about it tonight,” he said. “Family tradition. Tonight let’s just have a drink and talk about anything else . . . furniture.”
Lapthorne kicked off his shoes and sat Indian style, looking around the room. “This place is a perfect setting for the two of you . . . completely unexpected but totally right, somehow. You were always a cool little kid, chère cousine. I’m glad you grew up so well, and from what dear Ellis tells me, I very much approve of your taste in spouses.”
He clinked his glass against both of ours, looking each of us in the eye as he did so.
We just talked about nothing for a while, and the port and cheese mellowed everything. I felt safe and warm and tired, listening to Lapthorne ask about Dean’s railgrinder, and how we’d found the apartment, which he liked so much, and Ellis took over, explaining things when I faltered, charming Lappy with tales of our college adventures.
“You guys should sleep in our room,” I said at one point, and Ellis said she’d go deal with the bed.
Lapthorne topped off my glass. As he handed it to me, he asked, “Are you really happy?”
“Today?” I took a deep sip.
“Not today. Generally. It seems like you’re happy . . . you have a husband who adores you, so I’m told . . . you live in a wonderful place . . .”
“Here?” I looked around the room, comparing it with the elegance of his own digs.
“Yes, here. It’s quite handsome, with some wit to it. You’ve made it your own.”
“With the Naugahyde?”
“I’m enjoying the fact that you haven’t succumbed to the tyranny of chintz.”
“Too broke.”
“You make it seem okay. Enviable. I’ve always wondered what I’d do without money. Don’t really think I would have survived it with your style.”
“I don’t think I could survive being rich,” I said.
He laughed.
I put a hand over my mouth so I could suck in a yawn through clenched teeth. “Not kidding,” I said. “I don’t have the moral fiber for wealth. I’d start taking Ayn Rand literally and implode with a noxious bang. Too self-centered.”
Lapthorne’s smile glittered on the edge of laughter, and he refilled my glass.
“Now, see?” I said, taking another sip. “You make a much better rich person. So elegant, to make sure someone else has enough—very Japanese. I haven’t poured you anything all night.”
“You don’t, ah . . . miss it?”
“Money?”
He nodded.
“Always wanted a pony. Didn’t get one. Porsche would be nice. Other than that, it’s pretty much okay. Long as you’ve got enough for gas . . . the occasional bridge toll.”
“You look exhausted,” he said.
It was eleven, and Ellis made me get up so she could make me a little nest on the Naugahyde. She carried out sh
eets, a great pile of pillows, and an old leaky down puff.
They tucked me in and turned off the lights.
The minute I closed my eyes, I felt as though a dark velvet canopy was being pulled over me, while I fell backwards into a whirling spiral of black on black.
I woke up groggy, standing up slowly before I slumped into the kitchen to start the espresso. Lapthorne came out of the bedroom, looking remarkably alert. He was bare-chested, dressed in a pair of those handsome old boxers from Brooks Brothers that button up the front and have a little bow from the drawstring in the back.
“Oh God,” I croaked. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those damn people who are perky in the morning. Ellis is perky in the morning. Drives me crazy.”
I twisted open the espresso handle and dumped the grounds into the garbage, then gave up and decided to shift my attention to the “big coffee” side of the machine. We were looking like we needed at least a carafe of the stuff.
“If it helps to set your mind at ease, I feel like utter shit,” he said, raising his arms and yawning.
I snuck a look at his belly and had myself a little nonmarital moment, then got busy with the coffee. I put eight slices of wheat bread in the broiler and set up a tray with sweet butter and a jar of Rose’s Lime Marmalade, flipped the bread, grabbed three small plates and butter knives, and brought it all out to the table.
I went into the bathroom and set about looking for toothpaste. We had pressed our tube of Crest down to the last molecule, but then I spied Lappy’s toilet kit, saddle leather with a tiny “LST” embossed in gold, and figured he wouldn’t mind spotting me some dentifrice.
I unzipped the thing and rummaged around, taking out his shaving brush and little wooden tub of soap, his wicker-wrapped flask of lime aftershave from the Bahamas, and some small brown dropper bottles with hand-lettered labels on the side. One said “elder flower (eyes),” one was marked “Mouthwash (C.H.),” one said “antiseptic,” and then there was a peppermint oil.
When I came back out, Lapthorne was wearing his khakis and folding up my bedding. He shook out the down puff with his back to me, long ridges of muscle tightening alongside his spine. Lucky Ellis.
“Coffee?”
Ellis wandered out amongst the living. “My God,” she said, “dreaming is like cubist television.”
I cued up a few Brandenburg concerti and the three of us tucked into breakfast, finishing off two pots of coffee, all of the marmalade, and lots more toast. When we were done, I dressed for work—cold enough out that I grabbed my old Red Sox cap and shoved it in my back pocket.
The day was clear with an achingly blue fall sky, and they dropped me off at the door of the Crown.
CHAPTER 38
Daylight spilled into the bar with me, making the three old guys already at the bar squint in pain and Kenny pause the swirl of his string mop. I wanted to thank him for the toast, for the Shirley Temple, and all his kindness the day before, but he started in first.
“Little Lord Fag-leroy left town yet?”
What the hell do you say to a greeting like that? I didn’t answer him, just moved over to the jukebox and fumbled in my pocket for a couple of quarters. I thumbed the dial in the glowing machine’s dashboard, making the heavy-paged song list flip to the left.
“Got some real hokey crap here, Kenny,” I said. “You put any new 45s in this thing since ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’?”
“Don’t go knocking that Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler. Man’s a fine musician and true patriot.”
“Oh please.”
“Like your pinko ass knows the first thing about music.”
“My pinko ass will forget more about music than you’ll ever know.”
He smiled. “Oh, g’waaan . . . punch me up some Ray Charles. ‘America the Beautiful.’ Might learn something.”
“I will not play cheesy-travesty Ray with my last two quarters. You want to hear Mr. Charles, you get something decent of his in this thing, something without that damn Mormon-Mantovani string section.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter, tossing it toward me in so fine an arc that it spun, winking silver, and seemed to hang in the air. I snapped it down in a quick fist.
“Good eye,” he said.
I ignored him, pushed in his coin, and kept looking through the list. “Some night I’m going to sneak in here and fill this thing up with Joni Mitchell and Hendrix. Fifty-fifty because I wanna make sure to piss you off and I don’t know which one you’d hate more.”
“Just push that B-17,” he said.
“In your dreams.”
“C’mon . . . it’s my all-time favorite.”
I punched two buttons and Merle Haggard came on, saying how he was tired of this dirty old city, was gonna walk off his steady job today.
“Truce,” I said.
Kenny jumped in with a smooth baritone on “and your so-called Social Se-cur-ity . . .” singing on to the end while he mopped.
I didn’t comment.
“Aw, honey,” he said, putting the mop back in its holder-bucket, “there’s hope for you yet.”
“Stop insulting my relatives, I might even play ‘Muskogee’ for you.” I queued up some nice twangy old Bob Wills and took a seat at the bar.
“Didn’t mean any disrespect, Maddie.”
“So the whole preppy-boy thing gives you a pain—I can understand that—but he’s an okay guy despite the trappings,” I said. “Now what’d you want to tell me?”
He didn’t answer, just stood there wiping the bar.
“Bar’s clean already, Kenny.”
He leaned in, conspiratorial, point of his elbow touching down in the moisture webbing up across the wood. “Night Sembles was killed?”
I waited.
“I know where Schneider was,” Kenny said, “and he couldn’t have done it.”
“That’s not what you were going to tell me,” I said. “Not what you wanted me to come back for, last night.”
“Says who?”
“Don’t jerk me around, Kenny,” I said. “I brought up his name what, twice? Three times? If you already knew, you would have told me then. Before Lapthorne and Ellis showed up.”
“I wasn’t sure of it. By the time you’d have come back, I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Big party at the Hotel Syracuse . . . the Benevolent Association throws it every year. Schneider was there the whole damn time, like always. And I mean until late.”
Sure, I thought, because he was no doubt blowing rails of coke with Vomit Girl every other second. Probably danced up a goddamn storm, the two of them.
“So it’s not him,” I said, deflated.
“Cheer up,” he said. “Doesn’t rule him out, entirely . . . I think he’s got a finger in the pie.”
“Like what?”
“I’ve been asking around,” he said. “Something’s up with the guy. Has been for a long time. Not married. Family’s got no money . . . too young for a government check, but he’s living awful high for a guy who hasn’t done a lick of work since before your asshole buddy Jimmy Carter was running the country down. Snowmobiles and a couple of new Harleys. Big-screen TVs.”
“Cracker heaven,” I said.
“Got his house all paid for, I hear.”
We’d danced around the purpose of my being there for long enough, my own fault, but I was late for work and started to get pissy. “So maybe he’s dealing coke,” I said. “If his girlfriend’s anything to go by, the guy does so much of it, it’s amazing they’ve got a nostril left between them.”
“Listen, way things go around here, if he’s dealing anything, one of my old boys would know by now. Can’t be a regular thing for this long and him not busted. Cops around here aren’t perfect, but we don’t stand by for that shit. Not from another cop, specially.”
Bob Wills started up on “Twin Guitar Boogie,” crowing “Awwwww take it away, Leon, take it away . . .”
“What’s it got to do with the Rose Gi
rls?” I scrubbed my hand through the air, impatient, like I could clear away the small talk.
“You heard he was fired, am I right?” said Kenny, leaning in even closer. “Heard he was maybe getting a little heavy-handed with the, uh, the brothers?”
“You know that’s what I heard. We talked about it in here with Dean when this all started.”
“Well, now I hear he retired. Told ’em they could all go to hell. Didn’t give a reason, officially. Friend of mine saw him drunk one night later on and Schneider laughed and said he didn’t need to work ’cause he’d be getting regular infusions of cash for the rest of his born days. Sitting pretty in the catbird seat, he said, just like winning the Lotto.”
“So?”
“So he went his merry way about three months after your Rose Girls, right when they were pressing him hardest to sew it up. He just walked off that case and never looked back. . . .”
I stared him down, not liking the sneaky little smile in one corner of his mouth, how he was so obviously savoring the best-for-last detail before letting it go.
“Don’t be a tease, Kenny. It’s not becoming.”
“Last night I asked around some more, after I talked with you. My boy tells me some of the evidence maybe went missing, when they tried to hand everything over to the guy who stepped in as primary.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“Photos, Maddie. The pictures and the negatives, too. Not a one left in the file. Never signed out. Just poof”—he snapped his fingers—“and they’re gone.”
He slapped a quarter onto the bar and slid it toward me, smiling and batting his eyelashes. “Now get your little butt off that barstool and play me some got-damn Ray Charles, why don’tcha.”
I stared at him, trying to get my head around that—what it could mean.
Was Simon’s file the stuff that had been lifted from the evidence room? Did he take them? Did Schneider? Were they hooked up somehow?
I poked at the idea of shy, rotund Simon as a criminal mastermind, which seemed about as likely as Maria Callas joining the Symbionese Liberation Army.
A Field of Darkness Page 24
