school.”
“He’s still pretty young.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Mr. Mandel glared at me and then pressed the bottom of his fork into the little crumbs of sugar that had fallen from the cake to the plate.
“Mr. Mandel,” I began.
“Listen,” he said wearily. “We talked enough last night. We’ll talk again. For now, let’s just enjoy our coffee.”
“Sure.”
We enjoyed our coffee for five tense minutes. At the end of that time Mrs. Mandel came in, wearing a padded floral bathrobe and black Chinese slippers. She said her good-mornings and offered me breakfast.
“He doesn’t eat,” her husband informed her.
“But you should,” she said. “You’re so thin.”
Our discussion of my weight was cut short by Josh’s appearance. He was wearing a ratty plaid bathrobe, the original belt of which had apparently been lost and was replaced by a soiled necktie. His hair was completely disheveled, his glasses sat halfway down his nose and he cleared his throat loudly. Ignoring us, he poured himself a cup of coffee. He cut a piece of crumb cake which he ate at the counter, and then announced, “I’m starving.”
The rest of us, who had been watching him, transfixed, came back to life.
“Good morning, Josh,” his father said acerbically.
“Good morning,” he replied crankily.
“What do you want, Joshie?” his mother asked.
“Scrambled eggs,” he said, “with cheese. And matzoh brei. And sausage.”
“Sausage he wants with matzoh brei,” Mr. Mandel said, smiling at me. I smiled back, feeling like a complete intruder.
Josh smiled at me, too. That smile packed a lot of meaning and it was lost on no one. “How did you sleep, Henry?”
“Fine,” I replied.
“Not me,” he said. “I missed you.”
Mr. Mandel said, “You say this to hurt your mother.”
“Shut up, Sam,” Mrs. Mandel snapped. “Get me the eggs out of the refrigerator, Josh.” She turned to me and said, in a quavering voice, “You eat, too, Henry. You’re too thin.”
Mr. Mandel rose noisily from the table and left the room. Somewhere in the house a door slammed shut. Mrs. Mandel looked at us and said, “He’s — it’s going to take time.” Then she began to weep.
I called Tony Good, got his answering machine, and left a message that I wanted to see him. Josh came into the room and sat on the ottoman at the foot of my chair.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Business,” I replied, not wanting to have to explain Tony Good to Josh. There were enough Tony’s in the world — Josh would encounter one of them eventually. “You’re full of little surprises,” I added.
“You mean about not sleeping well.”
I nodded.
“They have to get used to the idea,” he replied, but his eyes were uncertain.
“You’re right.” We looked at each other. “I have a confession to make “
“What?”
“I never told my parents.”
He cocked his head and stared at me. “You didn’t? Why not?”
“I guess the easy answer is that they died before I got around to it,” I replied. “But the honest answer is — I was afraid.”
He scooted forward on the ottoman so that our knees touched and said, “I can’t believe you’re afraid of anything.”
“No? Well, I try to stay outraged and that keeps me from being afraid. But-” I put my hand on his leg, “-I don’t think that’s going to work with how I feel about you.”
He put his hand on mine. “You’re not afraid of me.”
“Not of you,” I replied, “for you. I can’t stand the idea that anyone or anything might hurt you.”
He smiled and seemed, suddenly, older, quite my equal. “Don’t think of me as a job, Henry. You don’t need a reason to love me.”
Just as I got to the door of Larry’s house, it opened and I found myself face-to-face with a young woman carrying a clipboard.
“Excuse me,” she said, and stepped aside to let me pass. Larry was standing behind her with two mugs in his hand. “Goodbye, Larry,” she told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Thanks Cindy.”
“Goodbye,” she said to me in a pleasant tone.
“Goodbye,” I answered, puzzled. When she left I asked Larry who she was.
“My travel agent,” he said, heading into the kitchen. I followed him. “Where have you been?”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“My question gets priority,” he replied, rinsing the mugs in the sink and setting them in the dish rack. In his Levis and black turtleneck he looked spectrally thin.
“It’s sort of a long story.”
“Tell me while I fix myself something to eat. Do you want anything?”
Mrs. Mandel’s ponderous breakfast was sitting in my stomach. “No.”
I told Larry about the previous night’s proceedings while he constructed an omelet. He brought it to the table where I joined him. Before he ate, he swallowed a fistful of vitamins, washing them down with cranberry juice. He cut an edge of the egg and ate it, chewing slowly but without much apparent pleasure.
“Josh sounds like a very smart boy,” he said when I related
Josh’s parting comment to me.
“Don’t say boy. It makes me feel like a child molester.”
Larry smiled. “Twenty-two is several years past the age of consent,” he replied. “And you should stop thinking of yourself as an old man.’’
“I suppose. Anyway, I’m relieved that Josh didn’t have anything to do with Brian Fox’s murder.’’
Larry set down his fork. “You’re still thinking about that?’’
“Do you remember the night Jim Pears tried to kill himself?” I asked.
“How could I forget,” he replied, grimly.
“The phone rang three times. The first time it was a drunk who told me that Jim was innocent. The second time it was the jail. The third time the caller hung up before I could answer.” I poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table. “I thought that the first caller was Josh.’’
“Why?” Larry asked, finishing his meal.
“I’d talked to him earlier and it was clear he wasn’t telling the truth about where he’d been when Brian was killed. I just thought, I don’t know, that he was trying to relieve his guilty conscience, but — ‘‘ I sipped the coffee, “ — this guy flirted with me.”
“Really?” Larry asked, amused.
“It was strange in the context. But I still thought it was Josh. Well, Josh did call that night, but he was the third caller, the one who hung up before I could answer the phone.”
Larry’s eyebrow arched above his eye. “Do you know who the first caller was?”
“I think it was Tony Good,” I replied.
Larry looked at me closely and said, “Why?”
“Something he said at the Zanes’ party as you were leaving with him. Some words he used were the same words the first caller used,” I said, remembering that on both occasions Good had said, You’re kind of cute, Henry. You gotta lover! “And the way he insisted that I take his number. What I don’t understand, though, is why Tony Good would know anything about Brian Fox’s murder.”
