'That quickly?'
'I owned it outright and I sold it for cash. I sold very cheap. The new owners are Korean, and the old guy came to the closing with his two sons and a shopping bag full of money. Remember Petey saying it was a shame Yuri wasn't a Greek, he coulda raised so much cash that way? Man, he shoulda been Korean. They're in a business don't know from checks, credit cards, payrolls, taxes, nothing. The whole business is conducted in green. I got the cash, they got clear title, and they damn near gave birth when I showed 'em how to use the burglar alarm. They loved that. State of the art, man. They oughta love it.'
'Where are you going?'
'Belize first, to see some relatives. Then Togo.'
'To go in the family business?'
'We'll see. For a little while, anyway. See if I like it, see if I can stand living there. I'm a Brooklyn boy, you know. Born and raised. I don't know if I can hack it that far from the old neighborhood. I might be bored to death in a month.'
'Or you might love it.'
'No way to know unless you try, right? I can always come back.'
'Sure.'
'It's not a bad idea to leave now, though,' he said. 'I told you about that hash deal, right?'
'You said you didn't have much faith in it.'
'Yeah, well, I walked away from it. I had a lot of money in it, too, and I walked. I didn't walk, you'd have to talk to me through bars.'
'There was a bust?'
'There was indeed, and they had an invitation with my name on it, but this way even if the guys they caught roll over, which I'm sure they will, they still got no real case against me. But what do I need with the bullshit of subpoenas and all that, you know? I've never been arrested, so why don't I get the hell out of the country while I'm still a virgin?'
'When do you leave?'
'Plane leaves from JFK in what, six hours? From here I drive out to a Buick dealer on Rockaway Boulevard and take whatever he'll give me for the car. 'Sold,' I'll say, 'provided you throw in a ride to the airport,' which is like five minutes from there. Unless you want a car, man. You can have it for like half of Blue Book just to save me the aggravation.'
'I can't use it.'
'Well, I tried. Did my part to try to keep you out of the subways.
Would you take it as a gift? I'm serious. Run me out to Kennedy and you can have it. The hell, if you don't want it you can take it straight over to the car lot yourself, make a few dollars on the deal.'
'I wouldn't do that and you know it.'
'Well, you could. You don't want the car, huh? It's my only remaining loose end. Past few days I saw some of Francine's relatives, told 'em more or less what happened. I tried to leave out some of the horror of it, you know? But you can only sweeten it up so much and you're still left with the fact that a good and gentle and beautiful woman is dead for no fucking reason at all.' He put his head in his hand.
'Jesus,' he said, 'you think you're over it and it comes and takes you by the throat. Point is I told her folks she had died. I said it was a terrorist thing, it happened overseas, we were in Beirut, it was political, crazy people, you know, and they bought it, or at least I think they bought it.
Way I told it, it was quick and painless, the terrorists were killed themselves by the Christian militia, and the service was private and unpublicized because the whole incident had to be hushed up. Some of it's more or less parallel with the truth. Some I wish was true. The quick and painless part.'
'It may have been quick. You don't know.'
'I was there at the end, Matt. Remember? He told me what they did to her.' He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. 'A change of subject,'
he said. 'You seen my brother at any of your meetings lately?
What's the matter, that a delicate subject?'
'In a manner of speaking,' I said. 'See, AA's an anonymous program, and one of the traditions is that you don't tell someone not in the program what gets said at a meeting, or who does or doesn't attend. I stretched a point before because we were all involved in a case together, but as a general thing that's probably not a question I can answer.'
'It wasn't really a question,' he said.
'What do you mean?'
'I guess I just wanted to feel things out, see what you knew or didn't know. Fuck it, there's no way to ease into this. I got a call from the police the night before last. See, the Toyota was registered in my name, so who else would they call?'
'What happened?'
'They found the car abandoned in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.'
'Oh, Jesus, Kenan.'
'Yeah.'
'I'm very sorry.'
