“Give you a chance to find out how tough you really are, though. Cons always like to test the bodybuilders, you know? See if they can back it up. Some guys at Cedar Junction be real proud to have Mr. Universe punking for them. ‘ ’
Jo Jo had been sitting on his cot. He stood now and walked to the bars.
“What do you want, Stone?”
“I want to help you, Jo Jo. I want to find some sort of deal fo.r you.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe you shouldn’t have to go down alone for u us -r nrk r this. Maybe if we talked about what kind of business you are doing with Hasty Hathaway. Maybe you might be able to tell me something about Torn Carson’s death, or Lou Burke’s.”
“I don’t know nothing about
that.”
“Too bad,” Jesse said.
Jo Jo walked to the back wall of the cell and turned and walked to the barred door again.
“What kind of deal?”
“Depends what I hear, and how good it is.”
Jo Jo walked to the back wall and turned and leaned on it, looking at Jesse.
“So I spill my guts to you and you don’t promise me nothing.”
Jesse smiled.
“Works for me,” he said.
“No deal,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse waited.
“You can’t even get me for Tammy, no way you can prove it.”
Jesse waited-.
“If I did know something, I’m not going to fink out without something better than you’re offering.”
“You need a little time,” Jesse said,
“run this thing over in your mind, think about how your life is going to go from now on. i’ll come back in a while and see you.”
“I got to know what the deal is,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse turned and left him there standing alone in the dim light at the back of his tiny cell, the tape recorder silently waiting on the floor by the folding chair outside the bars.
away had already mixed the first of their two evening Manhattans.
Hasty went as he always did to the living room and she brought the drinks in, as she always did, on a small silver tray someone had given them at their wedding. She put the tray down on the coffee table.
She felt weak, as if she’d been ill, but steady’enough, quiet inside now that the thing had got out.
Hasty took his drink and sipped some without waiting for her. Then he took a Polaroid picture from his inside pocket and droppec! it faceup on the coffee table.
“Oh God,” she said.
“I got this in the mail this ,morning.”
She nodded.
“Explain it to me, please.”
Her husband’s voice was thin and very tight. His face was white, and there were vertical grooves in his cheeks.
The hand holding the Manhattan was trembling slightly.
She felt the weakness open beneath her and it was as if she would slump into it and disappear. She didn’t want her drink.
R stood on the tray in front of her with the short thick glass beaded slightly and the amber light showing through it. She shook her head gently. She couldn’t go through it all again.
“Explain.” Her husband finished his drink.
“I need you to explain.”
She stared at her hands folded in her lap. They looked foreign to her. Her knees looked remote and unconnected to her. Her living room, in the house where she had lived for most of her adult life, looked like a museum room. Not hers, not anyone’s. Why would someone make a chair like that? Why would someone sit in it?
Her husband’s voice was so tight it seemed half strangled.
“Now, I want to know now.”
“Jo Jo,” she whispered.
It was so soft he couldn’t hear her. He leaned forward.
“What?”
