“Well, I got to admit she’s a good-looking girl,” Ryan said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Another week or so, when she gets her money,” Mr. Perez said, “she’s gonna be even better-looking, isn’t she?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Ryan said.
Raymond was grinning now. “Wants to fuck him a rich lady for a change. Shit, I don’t blame him.”
“They’re no worse or no better,” Mr. Perez said, and looked at Ryan again. “I don’t blame you, either. It’s none of my business what you got in mind for Miz Leary, once we’re done. As long as it’s her you intend to fuck and not me.”
“I hope I’m not offending you,” said boyish Jack Ryan, “but I think if I had a choice…”
Mr. Perez smiled and Raymond Gidre laughed out loud and Ryan said he’d keep in touch and left. In the silence, then, Mr. Perez sipped his drink.
He said to Raymond, “You feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“That boy’s gonna try and run with it,” Mr. Perez said. “I don’t think he knows it yet, but he’s gonna try.”
Mr. Perez visited Denise Leary on Tuesday, after she got home from work. He spent forty minutes with her while Raymond Gidre waited outside in the rented car. Raymond watched people coming and going in and out of the apartment complex and studied some of them very closely, but he did not see any niggers.
At seven-thirty Ryan called Mr. Perez at the hotel.
Mr. Perez told him it went about the way he’d expected. He’d left the agreement with her and would call in a day or two. There was nothing to do now but wait. Ryan tried to ask questions. How did she react? What’d she say? But Mr. Perez told him to save it, he was going out for his supper.
Ryan had decided not to bother Denise this evening, so he didn’t call her until the next morning at eight. He’d ask her if he could pick her up after work, get something to eat and go to a meeting.
There was no answer.
At noon he drove out to the A&P in Rochester and found out Denise wasn’t working today. She’d called in sick.
He called her several more times that afternoon and evening. On what he had decided was his last try, at ten o’clock, Denise answered the phone.
“Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.”
“Why?” She sounded all right. Calm.
He had to settle down. For all he was supposed to know, she could have been anywhere. “I was worried about you.”
“Were you, really?”
“I stopped by the grocery store, they said you were home sick. I kept calling and there was no answer.”
“That was nice of you,” Denise said. “Can you come over?”
“Now?”
“Yeah, if you can. I’ve got an awful lot to tell you.”
17
THE WHALES WERE down from the wall, the sketches of the grays and humpbacks off California. In their place, in flowing black
“Then what?” Ryan said.
He was in one of the director’s chairs. Denise came out of the kitchen with two glasses of red pop and found room for them on the low table with all the paint tubes and ceramic pots.
“I identified the body,” she said. “Driving down, I was pretty nervous, I didn’t know what it would be like. But the way they do it-they showed just his face on a television screen-it wasn’t bad at all.” She picked up the pottery ashtray heaped with cigarette butts and went back to the kitchen with it.
“The police were there?”
“A detective, we went to his office. No, first I called a mortuary and took care of that, then I went to the police station.”
“Do you have money? I mean for the burial?”
“He’s going to be cremated,” Denise said. She came back in with the ashtray, her eyes moving briefly to the wall. “I’m still working on my new motto.”
“I see that. How were the police?”
“Polite, official,” Denise said, sitting down in the other chair. “They asked questions-when I’d seen him last, that kind of thing. I can’t believe it. I mean, the way I found out, a man I don’t know. I didn’t read a thing about it, I guess I didn’t see the papers at all for about a week. Mr. Perez had a picture of me he’d cut out, an old one from when I was at State they must’ve got from my mother. I don’t know where else.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Fine.” She was lighting a cigarette. “You mean nervous? I just can’t believe he’s dead. It’s over and I don’t have to do anything about it. I must live right, huh?”
“What did this Mr. Perez say?”
“He said something about a property or assets I’m entitled to, if I’ll sign an agreement. But Bobby didn’t own property, anything of real value.”
“Maybe,” Ryan said, “it isn’t property the way you think of property, real estate. You said assets. It could be stock, something like that.”
“He didn’t own stock. I doubt if he even knew what it was.”
“Somebody could’ve left it to him.” Ryan was edging in. “His dad or somebody?”
Denise was staring at him, making up her mind about something.
“We’re not talking about a normal, ordinary person,” she said. “As far as I know, he didn’t have a dad, or a mother. He was a street hustler, he was an addict, an armed robber. He was… he killed people.”
“You knew that?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know, I suppose. I didn’t want to know and I didn’t ask about much. I drank. He was arrested, he was always being arrested, and if he was convicted they’d send him to a state hospital. He had a history of mental illness. He’d come out, I wouldn’t see much of him. I guess he lost interest. Usually I’d hear he was living with somebody.”
Ryan shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. Denise was still looking at him.
“Did you read anything about him in the paper, that you remember? Bobby Leary?”
Ryan hesitated. “I don’t know, I may have.”
“The best way to describe him,” Denise said, “picture a black heroin addict who killed people. But the reason we didn’t hit it off, he was shorter than I am.”
Ryan smiled. “Come a long way from Bad Axe, haven’t you?”
“Almost full circle,” Denise said. “But I’m sure as hell not going back.”
“I heard a minister one time at a meeting,” Ryan said. “He’d lost his congregation, they found out he was drinking and kicked him out, after about twenty years. He said if it hadn’t happened he could have gone another twenty years being a minister, preaching, giving the sermons, and never look at himself and find out who he really is.”
Denise said, “Is that me?”
“It’s where you are,” Ryan said. “You’re not Mom’s little girl anymore, or a drunk, or married to an addict who kills people. You’re you, without a label.”
“None of the other shows?”
“I don’t see anything,” Ryan said. “You could’ve been a nun before. What difference does it make?” He took a sip of red pop and let her think about it.
“Sometime, if you want,” Denise said, “I’ll tell you about him.”
“Who?”
