I could hear him thinking of how to respond. Brian was a loud thinker at the best of times and this wasn’t one of those. Brian was a doer. I let him off the hook. “Look, forget I said that. Just do it. It’s important to me.”
“Sure thing, I’ll get somebody right-”
“Not somebody, Doyle. You. I want you for this, please.”
“You know, Boss, you’re more of a pain in my ass now than when you really were my boss, you know that?”
“Yeah, but the pay’s better.”
I left it at that and clicked off.
I sat and stared up at Delgado’s building. On the second floor, I saw a chubby-faced little girl staring blankly out her front window. She reminded me of another little girl I’d met once a long time ago. That little girl’s mom, a nickel and dime crack whore, had been beaten to death in a dreadful SRO hotel called the Mistral Arms. The last time I saw that girl, on the day her mom was murdered, she was sitting in a wobbly chair with a one-eyed cat in her lap. She fed him from a tin can. She had the same blank expression on her face as the girl across the way. Maybe I was reading too much into her expression, maybe that wasn’t Delgado’s daughter at all. Maybe, but I knew in my gut it was his kid.
TWENTY-FOUR
I undressed and showered. The shower wasn’t so much to rinse away the sweat and grime, but to wash off the remnants of the people with whom I’d shared the day. It’s no wonder that good cops sometimes turn to the darkness. When you spend more time with the worst people imaginable than with your family, it rubs off on you. You can’t go down into the sewer and not come up smelling like shit yourself. If I could have scrubbed out the linings of my lungs, I would have. I remembered talking with Mr. Roth about the camps, about how he said the worst part of it all was the breathing.
“Yes, there was smoke,” he said, “lots of smoke and the stink of burning flesh and hair, but it wasn’t all smoke. There was ashes too, Mr. Moe, ashes of the dead falling like snow. You could not help but breathe it in. You would wonder sometimes, who it was you were breathing in. It was better not to dwell on it. If you would dwell on such things, it was all a man could do not to rip his own chest open or to throw himself onto the electrified fence. It was better to think of the small things like surviving.”
Only a man like Mr. Roth, a man who came out the other end of Auschwitz, could call surviving a small thing. But I don’t suppose all the scholarship and study by those who didn’t live through it could make sense of it. I never judged things Mr. Roth told me about his experiences in the camps. Who was I to judge, after all? And some truths can’t be argued.
I had seen three more hate-mailing scumbags that day, but my heart wasn’t in it. My lies were unconvincing and I barely listened to the answers to my questions. There was just something about Jorge Delgado that sang to me. He lit me up like a neon Christmas tree and I couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it was that he wasn’t simply another run-of-the-mill misogynist or misanthrope. He wasn’t the typical griper or whiner. He didn’t feel sorry for himself or wronged by the world. He wasn’t a narcissist. No, he was something much more dangerous: a believer, a believer with a bad temper. But it wasn’t Delgado I was thinking about when I got out of the shower.
Still damp, I stood naked, staring at myself in the mirror and saw for the first time what I had become. I was thin and pale. I could see something in my future, brief as it might be, that I could never have imagined: frailty, my arms and legs as easy to snap as dried twigs. For the first time in my life I felt old. I didn’t want to think about the implications of old, especially if this was as old as I would ever get. I found self-pity especially unattractive. It’s what I hated about the people I’d spent my day with, but there I was, feeling cheated somehow. I turned away. As my Bubbeh used to tell me, “It is one thing to say oy vey — oh, woe-and something else to say oy vey iz mir — oh, woe is me.”
The phone interrupted my sad reverie. In a moot gesture, I wrapped the towel around my waist and rushed to answer. I wouldn’t have cared if it was a phone scammer calling. I just needed to speak to someone, anyone to help pull me out of the hole I’d been digging for myself.
“Hey, Moe.” It was Nick Roussis.
“Nick! Glad you called.” And I was. “What’s up?”
“Like I said I would the other night, I been keepin’ my eyes and ears open.”
I was confused. “Huh?”
“About the murder, you know? I said I would listen and I also sent out some feelers.”
“Then I take it you heard something.”
“You always was pretty smart that way, Moe. There’s no gettin’ anything by you.”
“I didn’t know Greeks were big on sarcasm.”
“Sure, it’s like democracy, we invented it.”
“Okay, Socrates, what did you hear?”
“You busy tonight?”
“I guess I am now,” I said.
“Come by the Grotto around eight. There’s somebody I think you should talk to.”
“Okay, as long as you don’t make me eat that shitty pizza.”
“Moe, you don’t show up, I’ll have pies delivered to your house for a week.”
“Now that’s a threat that scares me. I’ll be there at eight. Thanks, Nicky.”
“See you then.”
I hung up and was pretty curious about who it was Nicky wanted me to talk to. Sometimes I thought I would live as long as I was still curious. I bet a lot of cats had that same thought as they breathed their dying breaths.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Grotto was standing room only. I had been here before on many such late spring nights when I was a kid. Back then, in ancient times, before shopping malls, iPhones, or texting, it was a place to meet friends or girls or to go on tentative first dates. A lot, maybe too much, about the world had changed to suit me, but there was something comforting in seeing the faces I saw there that night. Kids might dress differently than they did when I was young, but all the technology in the world couldn’t beat the awkwardness and hormone-fueled behavior out of them. Girls still whispered in each other’s ears and giggled. Boys still strutted about trying to get noticed.
I thought of Pam and ached, not because I missed her, but because I didn’t. I hadn’t really thought about her in days. Carmella had done that to me. That was her particular brand of magic, or her curse. She had done it to me the first time I saw her in the lobby of the Six-O precinct over twenty years ago. The immediacy of attraction wasn’t mutual. I think the first thing Carmella ever said to me was, “Yo, you got a problem?” Which was followed with some crack about her not needing some middle-aged guy stalking her. Not exactly the start of a beautiful friendship. I was married to Katy then, happily so, though the first hairline cracks between us were beginning to show.
Carmella was the classic bad drug, my bad drug: once she came back to town, she blotted out the rest of the picture and all I could see was her. My reaction to her was chemical, reflexive. Even though I was pissed off at her for withholding Alta’s personal effects from me and for skipping out without an explanation, I couldn’t wait to see her again. My anger heightened the electricity between us; it always had. It was potent, this dance we did, unhealthy, but powerful. I guess, it’s why Carmella left me to go to Toronto in the first place. And now my being sick brought it to a whole new level. How could Pam compete with that? Suddenly, I wasn’t quite as wistful about the kids on their first dates. I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked to the door at the Grotto marked “Employees Only.”
Nick Roussis was sitting at his desk, his back facing the door. He didn’t seem to be conscious of me standing
