“How's that possible?” Steve said.
Cadillac sat down at the kitchen table, sighed, propped his feet on a chair. “A jealous husband was coming in the bedroom door with a shotgun, I was going out the window without my pants. Kansas City. Or maybe St. Louis.”
“What's with the duds?” Marvin asked. Cadillac was wearing dark blue coveralls with a patch on the chest that read: “Rockland State Hospital.”
“Doing a favor for Steve,” Cadillac said.
“Everybody he's asking favors these days.”
“Cadillac's a helluva PI,” Steve said.
“Janitor's more like it,” Cadillac said. “Your doc was there last night, by the way.”
“So you couldn't snoop?”
“Sure I could. Gimme a sandwich and lemme tell it my way.”
Steve put the finishing touches on a panino he'd been working on.
“Last couple nights, I been going through her desk,” Cadillac said. “In-box, out-box. Patient records. Test charts. Lot of mumbo-jumbo. Last night, I come into her office around eleven o'clock, pushing my broom, rolling my cart. Only this time she's still there. Big woman with a sour face.”
“She say anything to you?”
“Not to me. She was on the phone.”
Steve handed Cadillac the panino. “So you left?”
“Hell, no.” Cadillac took a bite, nodded his approval. “I emptied her wastebasket, dusted the counters, puttered around. She just kept on talking. Old black man pushing a broom. You don't get more invisible than that.”
“Who was she talking to?”
“All I know, his name was Carlos, and he was in Mexico.”
Steve's look must have asked a question because Cadillac said: “‘What time is it in Guadalajara, Carlos?' That's what she was saying when I walked in. Then she says she wants a thousand units of replen- something.”
Steve grabbed a pen and a pad. “Replen…?”
“One of those drug names they make up that don't mean nothing. Like Viagra.”
“I don't need it,” Marvin said for the second time that morning.
“So that's it?” Steve said.
“Settle down, boy,” Cadillac said. “When you write a song, you don't give away the story in the first verse.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Like all those songs Gordon Jenkins wrote for Sinatra.” He started singing softly:
“Opposites attract, the wise men claim, Still I wish that we had been a little more the same, It might have been a shorter war.”
“Sounds like Steverino and his lady partner,” Marvin said.
“Can we get back to Kranchick for a second?” Steve pleaded.
“Then the song throws you a curve.” Cadillac resumed singing:
“She knew much more than I did, But there was one thing she didn't know, That I loved her, 'cause I never told her so.”
Cadillac smiled. “There's the surprise. He never had the guts to tell the lady he loved her.”
“Just like our friend.” Marvin turned to Steve. “Unless you told her last night.”
“What happened last night?” Cadillac asked.
“What happened in the hospital last night?” Steve countered.
“Steverino shtupped his law partner,” Marvin said.
“No,” Cadillac said.
“The emmis. Right under the nose of her fiance.”
“Attaboy,” Cadillac said. “Reminds me of the time I was seeing this dancer who was married to a comic. Every night, when he went on the stage-”
“Cadillac! What the hell happened in the damn hospital?”
“All right. Keep your britches on. The doc must not have liked the price. 'Cause she says, ‘Forget it, Carlos. You're not gonna fuck me up the ass.'”
“She said that?” Marvin made a tsk-tsk sound.
“Reminded me of a foulmouthed little mama I knew in Memphis,” Cadillac said.
“Then what?” Steve demanded. “After she argued with Carlos about price?”
“She said something about calling this supplier in Argentina. But Carlos must have lowered the price because she calmed right down and said, fine, she'd wire the money first thing in the morning, and no, she didn't want a receipt. No paper trail. She hangs up and I go out and work the rest of the floor.”
“Replen-something,” Steve said, mostly to himself. “Replen what?”
“Replengren,” Cadillac said.
“How do you know?”
“Because after she left, I came back and emptied her wastebasket a second time. It's my damn job, right?” He reached into his pocket and handed Steve a slip of paper. A crumpled sheet from a notepad with the Rockland State Hospital logo on top, Kranchick's name on the bottom, and what had to be her handwriting in between.
80 mg Replengren X 1000 San Blas Medico
“So what is it?” Marvin asked.
Steve wrote “Replengren” on his pad followed by three question marks. “Something Kranchick doesn't want anybody to know about, and that's gotta be good. You're beautiful, Cadillac. I love you. You, too, Marvin.”
“Forget us,” Cadillac said. “Did you tell the lady that you love her?”
“He told her,” Marvin said. “She didn't say nothing back, and now the schlemiel wants some advice from the Maven.”
“Thanks for being so discreet,” Steve said, rubbing both temples. A headache was brewing.
“So what did you tell him?” Cadillac asked Marvin.
“I told him to get off his tuches. Love don't come along every day, and if you let her get away, you'll always regret it.”
Thirty-nine
SIX-LOVE
The woman is perfected, Victoria brooded.
Which meant what? Made perfect from something less so?
She herself was neither perfect nor perfected. She was, on this Sunday morning, a miserable, lying, self- loathing slut.
She lay in bed trying sort out her feelings. Bruce's bed. With Bruce snoring contentedly beside her.
The avocado crop was saved and Bruce, drained from the night's excitement and a pitcher of rum-and-Coke at dawn, had tumbled face-first into bed, still wearing his jumpsuit and combat boots. The holster and pistol, thankfully, were draped over the railing of a treadmill in the corner of the bedroom.
She woke up angry. At herself.
What have I done?
She had violated her most cherished principles. Honesty, loyalty, fidelity. But why? Did she love Steve Solomon? No, that would be preposterous.
Half the time I can't even stand him.
No way did their relationship fit her well-conceived definition of love. No way was it a rational, synergistic coupling of two people with mutual interests and similar values. This coupling was animalistic, like Judge Gridley's
