“Well, it’s all part of life,” said the other woman, backing the two of them through the door. I was happy to let them go.
When the ushers finally cleared the room, I followed Amanda and Roy out to the parking lot. I let them get a little ahead of me. Amanda walked with her back straight and her shoulders level, with a fluid, feminine roll to her hips. It made me want to follow her out to Montauk and back. But she stopped and turned around, held Roy’s arm and waited for me to catch up.
“Thanks again, Sam,” said Roy.
Amanda pulled off a pair of old-fashioned black kid leather gloves a fingertip at a time. When they were off, she opened and shut her fists as if restoring circulation.
“I think Bob wants a native guide,” I said to both of them.
“Ick,” said Amanda.
“He seemed all right,” said Roy, looking at me for confirmation.
“Could be some business for you.”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
Amanda looked around the parking lot, presumably for her car.
“We’re going to get a little breakfast,” she said. “Care to join us?”
“Yeah,” said Roy before I could answer, “Sip and Soda. Best waffles in town.”
He looked genuinely excited.
“Sorry,” I told them, “got to wrap up here. Some other time.”
“You sure?” asked Roy, face bright and eager as a Midwestern regional sales manager. “I always order Amanda the blueberry Belgian waffle with a side of bacon. Don’t I? It’s her favorite.”
Amanda cocked her head at me, her face neutral.
“That’s a lot of trust to put in a person. Ordering your breakfast,” I said to her.
“Some people you just trust with certain things,” she said.
Roy looked at her.
“Some people you trust with everything,” he said, then looked at me. “I keep telling her that.”
He smiled with the sort of self-effacing beneficence you like to see in priests. I smiled back.
“I’ll take a rain check. You guys go ahead.”
They drove away in Roy’s Audi—bigger and darker than Amanda’s—leaving me alone with the hard light of autumn trying to bust out from the cloud cover and the rest of the afternoon to torture myself with conflicting urges and pointless self-analysis.
The little Aztec lady at the coffee place on the corner didn’t know Arnold Lombard Co. Neither did the tough woman from Brooklyn with the pretty skin and chipped tooth who ran the cash register. Luckily, a gang of gnarly old regulars, who hung around in the afternoon doing crosswords and lying about their investment portfolios, did.
“Used to be across the street there where what’s-his-name opened his real-estate office.”
“Sinitar.”
“Yeah. Joey Sinitar and his brother. Builder’s kids. Don’t know if they actually
All the guys smiled as if they had the inside scoop on the Sinitar boys.
“Lombard’s dead.”
One of the guys shook his head.
“Ain’t dead.”
“Somebody told me he was dead.”
“Come as a big surprise to Arnie.”
“You know him?” I asked him.
The old man had dry silvery eyes and the complexion of roughed-in stucco.
“More or less. Kind of a stiff. Sold real estate and life insurance. Mostly to locals. Drove a Lincoln Continental, ’bout the size’a the Queen Mary.”
“Had a daughter.”
“Yeah. Looked like him. All nose. No sense of humor.”
“Know where he lives?” I asked.
They all looked at each other, seeing who wanted to field the question.
“Florida,” one of them finally said.
The guy in the know shook his head again. I waited.
“Ain’t in Florida.”
“What’re you, his biographer?” said one of his buddies.
“Well?” I asked.
“Lives with his daughter. Nobody’d marry the poor thing.”
“Nose like a masthead.”
“More like a banana.”
“In town?”
“Village. Over near the hospital.”
“Got a place in Florida, but never goes there.”
“Hah.”
“But he’s definitely not dead.”
“How do you know?”
The guy in the know let it all sit there for a few seconds to build suspense.
“I saw him yesterday at the pharmacy.”
“What’re you doing in there, Charlie? Buyin’ Ex-Lax?”
“Trojans.”
They all grinned into their coffees. I thanked Charlie and paid for their next round of Hazelnut. The Brooklyn woman thought the largesse ridiculous, but she wasn’t a sensitive girl.
I pulled the street address to Arnold Lombard’s house out of a disheveled phone book shoved under the payphone at the back of the coffee shop. It was an easy walk over toward the hospital, so I walked.
It was a single story, asbestos-shingle bungalow painted white with black trim and leggy, dejected-looking shrubbery. In front of a tiny single-car garage was a boxy, early sixties Lincoln Continental covered with a tan canvas tarp.
Green algae was growing up from the bottom of the wooden storm door. There was no doorbell, so I knocked. I picked the blue-plastic-wrapped
It was a woman with a hatchet-shaped nose thrust forward like an angry remark. On either side were gentle, watery blue eyes. Her dark brown hair hung in a loose perm past her thin neck and tumbled down around wiry shoulders. She wore a ragged baby blue tank top, bra-less, baggy, dark blue sweatpants and dancing slippers. I guessed her to be around forty-five. The smell of too much time spent indoors spilled out around her, warming up the autumn air.
She looked at me in a tired, kind way.
“Yes?”
I stuck out my hand. She took it without hesitation.
“I’m Sam Acquillo. Here’s your
“How nice,” she said.
“Is this where Arnold Lombard lives?”
“What can I help you with?”
“It’s kind of a long story. Is he in?”
She stood a little straighter.
“Now that would depend entirely on your story, Mister … Acquillo. Italian is it?”
“Italo-Canuck is the way my father put it.”
“We’re Jewish.”
I didn’t know where to go from there, but she was patient with me. She put a hand on her hip and leaned on
