bathing suits, but the “villa” available shared a wall with a next-door neighbor. Maybe that was a villa in Florida; in Chicago, we called it a goddamn duplex.
Our life in Boca Raton was fairly simple. I rarely played golf, though we had country club privileges (our house was part of a “neighborhood association”), because golf was a social pastime I had put up with for business purposes. I’ve always had better things to do than hit a little ball with a stick and chase the ball and then hit it with a stick again. Nor did I go fishing; I’d caught plenty of big fish in my time, but not the aquatic kind—fishing, it seemed to me, existed solely to provide the world with a more boring pastime than golf. My wife loved to garden, and I loved to watch her bending over in ours; she had a green thumb, and a great ass for an old gal. I told you I was a randy old bastard. Or is that sweetheart?
Anyway, my days were spent in a lawn chair, watching the boats go by, sipping rum and Coke, reading, occasionally accompanying my wife shopping, just as she would more than occasionally accompany me to the track. Evenings it was often cards, bridge club with my wife, poker with my buddies, retired cops, mostly. Since I’d only smoked during the war and was a mild drinker, my health was excellent, save for the sporadic aches and pains, never quite escalating into arthritis or bursitis, that a son of a bitch with as many healed-over bullet and knife wounds (even a machete scar) as I have ought to expect after a lifetime of merriment.
I had also started to write the memoirs of which this is the latest installment; but I had not yet come to the realization that writing those memoirs would become my salvation. That a man who had lived a life as eventful as mine, who was no longer of an age where that eventful life could be further pursued, could find, if not meaning, relief from the malaise of old age, in reliving that life. Besides, I had a fat advance from a publisher.
So I was noodling on a yellow pad, when the Texan strolled up, blotting out the sun like an eclipse with a pot belly.
“You’re Nate Heller, aren’t you?” With that drawl, only the word “pardner” was missing.
“I’m Nate Heller,” I said, and I was, even if I was Nate Heller in sunglasses, a Hawaiian-print shirt, chino shorts, and sandals. No trench coat or fedora, despite the goofy pictures I’d posed for, for
Anyway, the Texan. He was as big as…a Texan. He wore a multicolor Hawaiian shirt that looked like a paint factory drop cloth, unlike my own tasteful purple and white affair. A young guy—maybe fifty-five—he wore new blue jeans and wrap-around black sunglasses, and his hair was white at the temples and suspiciously black everywhere else and curly and dripping with more Vitalis than a Sam Giancana bodyguard. He had a bucket head and a shovel jaw, and the hand he extended was smaller than a frying pan.
I just looked at it.
He took no offense, just reeled in his paw and sat on the edge of the deck chair next to mine, sort of balancing precariously there, asking, after the fact, “Mind if I sit myself down?”
“Who else is gonna do it for you?”
He grinned—his teeth were as white as well-polished porcelain bathroom tiles; caps or dentures. “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Heller.”
“Maybe you should’ve hired a detective.”
An eyebrow arched above a sunglass lens. “That’s partly why I’m here.”
“I’m retired.” That was the first time I didn’t use “semi”; dropping the prefix was either an admission to myself, or maybe just a lie to cool this Texan’s interest.
“You never answered my letters,” he said. He pronounced “my” like “mah.” Like a lot of Southern men, he managed to sound simultaneously good-natured and menacing.
“No,” I said, “I never did.”
“Least you’re not pretendin’ you never got ’em. Did you read ‘em?”
“About half of the first one.”
A motorboat purred by, pulling a shapely blonde whose hair was made even more golden by the sun; the blue water rippled, and so did the muscles on her tummy.
“The rest you just pitched,” he said.
I nodded.
“Left messages at your office. You never answered them, neither.”
“Nope,” I said, speaking his language.
“Thought when I come up with your home number, there in, where is it? Forest Park? Thought we’d finally connect. But you got one of them tape machines. Pretty fancy hardware.”
I gestured with my rum and Coke. “That guy James Bond, in the movies? He was based on me.”
He chuckled. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. Your name turns up in the damnedest places.”
Peering over my own sunglasses, I said, “I know you’ve come a long way, Tex. So I’m going to do you the courtesy of lettin’ ya speak your piece.”
“And then you’re gonna tell me to haul my fat Texas ass out of here.”
“I would never insult a man’s home state.”
“You knew her, didn’t you?”
“Who?” But I knew who he meant.
He stared at my sunglasses with his sunglasses. “Anybody but me ever track you down, on this subject?”
“…No.”
“I mean, you been talked to enough. I dug back through the files. There was a time you gave plenty of
