Melanie looked at Gerald on the floor. She said, “I don’t mean him.”
17
Jackie didn’t see Ray Nicolet until she came off the elevator in the airport parking structure, Tuesday afternoon. He said, “We have to stop meeting like this,” deadpan, posed against the front fender of a Rolls.
She was supposed to smile, so she did; because he was young, he was having fun being a cop, and because she had to be nice to him. She could smile, too, at his swagger, coming to take the wheels from her in his cowboy boots, a gun beneath that light jacket, stuck in his jeans.
“I thought you’d be waiting in Customs.”
“We don’t need to bring them in,” Nicolet said. “This is ATF business. How was your flight?”
“Smooth, all the way.”
“I imagine you’re glad to be working again.”
“You’ll never know,” Jackie said, walking with him now along the row of cars.
“We have the money here?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Anything else? Weed, coke?”
“No, but I can get you some.”
“I’ll toke once in a while if it’s there,” Nicolet said. “You know, like at a party. But I won’t buy it, it’s against the law.”
He placed the wheels in the trunk of the Honda and brought the flight bag in the front seat with him. Jackie slipped in behind the wheel. Opening the bag he said, “Three-ten PM,” and gave the date and location, where they were. “I’m now taking a manila envelope from the subject’s flight bag. The envelope contains currency . . . all the same denomination, one-hundred-dollar bills. Now I’m counting it.”
Jackie said, “What’re you doing?”
He showed her the mike hooked to his lapel, then pressed the palm of his hand over it. “I’m recording.
“You said you were letting this one go through.”
“I am. Don’t worry about it.”
“Then why’re you being so official?”
“I don’t want any surprises. Every step of this goes in my report.”
She watched him count the bills, dab each one with a green felt-tipped pen, and describe where he was putting the mark, “. . . on the first zero of the numeral one hundred in the upper left corner.” He finished and said, “I’m putting the currency back in the envelope, ten thousand dollars. The subject will deliver the money in . . .”
Jackie said, “A Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag,” smoking a cigarette now.
“A Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag.”
She gestured to several bags on the back seat.
“A large black bag with handles and red lettering,” Nicolet said, took the recorder from his coat pocket, and turned it off. “Okay, we can go.”
“You’re not coming with me, are you?”
“I’ll be along,” Nicolet said. “What time you have to be there?”
“Four thirty. I’m meeting a woman.”
“What’s her name?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Will you be alone?”
“Don’t worry about it. The woman leaves, somebody’ll be on her.”
“But you’re not going to stop her,” Jackie said. Nicolet had the door open and was getting out. “Are you?”
He stuck his head back in. “Why would I do that?”
Max got to the mall at four, parked by Sears, and went in through the store. He’d stop and see Renee, talk to her, get that over with. Tell her he had to leave if she started one of her monologues. All that time he could never think of anything to say to her, she never had trouble talking to him. Always about herself.
Jackie had said four thirty. Watch the way it works. A woman would come up to her table or sit at the one next to it. There would be lots of people, she said, the cafe area busy from noon on. If he came early, look for her at Saks.
The sign on the showroom glass said DAVID DE LA VILLA in dark green, with dates.
A white cloth covered the library table in the center of the gallery, the walls hung with green paintings, the busboy’s cane fields, Renee peering naked from one. . . .
Too small to see from the entrance, through the showroom glass, but that’s where she was— on the wall to the right, the third canvas. Max entered. The olive pot just inside seemed to hold the same cigarette butts, gum wrappers, the Styrofoam cup—no more, no less. He saw Renee.
Coming out from the back with a tray full of cheese and crackers. She looked up and saw him and looked down again.
He said, “Renee?”
She said, “Oh, it’s you,” placing the tray on the table, centering it.
He wondered how he could be anyone else standing here.
“It’s nice to see you too.”
She avoided looking at him now. “I have an exhibit opening at five.” Getting that tray exactly in the center, an inch this way.
“I know,” Max said, “but I’d like to talk to you.”
“You can’t see I’m busy?”
“With the cheese and crackers,” Max said. “I know they’re an important part of your life.”
“What do you want?”
He hesitated. The busboy was coming with a silver tray and a coat over his arm. Max waited, looking at Renee waiting for the busboy. Renee wearing a gauzy white gown to the floor he thought of as a flower-child dress, or the kind women dancing around Stonehenge in the moonlight wore. Renee making up for lost time. Max thinking, Like all of us. Now David de la Villa arrived with a tray of raw vegetables surrounding some kind of creamy dip. He placed the tray on the table and put on the coat, a tux jacket, an old one, over a yellow tank top he was wearing with jeans frayed at the knees. He said to Renee, “Is he bothering you?”
Nothing here made sense. What if he
“We’re talking,” Max said.
Renee shook her head. “No, we’re not.” And her pert little cap of black hair moved, a sprig of earth-mother green in it, no strands of gray showing, they were gone. She turned to leave, green loop earrings swinging. “I told him we’re busy.”
“You heard her,” the busboy said.
Max stood there puzzled, staring at this freak in the tux staring back at him, but aware of Renee leaving them and he said after her, “It’s important.”
She paused long enough to look back and tell him, “So is my show.”
Familiar? I’m working. Well, I’m working too. I’d like to talk to you. I’m busy. I’m filing for divorce. . . .That might get her attention. He turned to the busboy, who irritated him more than anyone he could think of in recent memory.
“You know what you look like?”
“Yeah, what?”
The guy standing hip cocked, waiting.
Max hesitated. Because the guy could look whatever way he wanted, he was the show, he was putting the art lovers on and making out. . . .
“I see you around here again I’m gonna call security,” Max heard that irritating fucking busboy say and almost stopped. “Have them throw you out.” But he kept going. The bond for first-degree murder, if you could get one, was fifty thousand.
Four thirty on the dot, Jackie picked up a couple of egg rolls and an iced tea at China Town and walked past
