“There’s no need for that,” I said. “I’ll pick up this one. ”
“No,” Dixon shook his head. “I have a great deal of money and no other purpose. I’ll pay for this. If the police present problems I’ll do what I can to remove them. I’ll have no trouble with Olympic tickets, I assume. Give your Montreal address to Lin before you leave. I’ll have the tickets delivered there.”
“I’ll need three for every day.”
“Yes.”
Lin returned with fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. “Give them to Spenser,” Dixon said.
Lin handed them to me. I put them in my wallet. Dixon said, “When this is through, come back here and tell me about it in person. If you die, have the black man do it.”
“I will, sir.”
“I hope you don’t die,” Dixon said.
“Me too,.” I said. “Goodbye.”
Lin showed me out. I asked if he could call me a cab. He said he could. He did. I sat on a bench in the stone- paved foyer while I waited for it to come. When it came, Lin let me out. I got in the cab and said to the driver, “Take me to Smithfield.”
“That’s a pretty good ride, man,” the cabby said. “It’s gonna cost some jack.”
“I got some jack.”
“Okay. We wheeled down the winding drive and out onto the road and headed toward Route 128. Smithfield was about a half-hour drive. The dashboard clock in the cab worked. It was quarter to five. She should be coming home from summer school soon, if she was still in summer school. Oh, Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me, I come from Montreal with… The cabbie said, ”What’d you say, man?“
“I was singing softly to myself,” I said.
“Oh, I thought you was talking to me. You want to sing to yourself, go ahead.”
23
It was out of the way but I had the cabbie take me to Route 1. I stopped at Karl’s Sausage Kitchen for some German delicatessen and then at Donovan’s Package Store for four bottles of Dom Perignon. It almost took care of Dixon’s expense money. The cabbie drove me down from Route 1 to the center of town, through the hot green tunnel of July trees. Lawns were being watered, dogs were being called, bikes were being ridden, cookouts were being done, pools were being splashed, drinks were being had, tennis was being played. Suburbia writ large. There was some kind of barbecue underway on the common around the meeting house. The smoke from the barbecue wagons hung over the folding tables in a light good-smelling haze. There were dogs there and children and a balloon man. I did not hear him whistle far and wee. If he had, it wouldn’t have been for me. There were white lilacs in Susan’s front yard, and the shingles on the little Cape were weathered into a nice silvery gray. I paid the cabbie and gave him a large tip. And he left me standing with my champagne and my homemade cold cuts on Susan’s green lawn in the slow evening. Her little blue Nova was not in the driveway. The guy next door was hosing his grass, letting the water stream out of the pistol spray nozzle in a long easy loop, coiling languidly back and forth across the lawn. A sprinkler would have been much more efficient but nowhere near as much fun. I liked a man who fought off technology. He nodded at me as I went up to Susan’s door. She never locked the house. I went in the front door. The house was quiet and empty. I put the champagne and the stuff from Karl’s in the refrigerator. I went to the bedroom and turned on the air conditioner. It was ten past six by the clock on the kitchen stove. I found some Utica Club cream ale in the refrigerator and opened a can while I unpacked my delicatessen in the kitchen. There was veal loaf and pepper loaf and beer wurst, and Karl’s liverwurst, which you could slice or spread and which made my blood flow a little faster when I thought of it. I had bought two cartons of German potato salad and some pickles and a loaf of Westphalian rye and a jar of Dusseldorf mustard. I got out Susan’s kitchen china and set the table in the kitchen. She had blue-figured kitchen china and it always made me feel like folks to eat off it. I sliced the liverwurst and put the assorted cold cuts on a platter in alternating patterns. I put the rye bread in a bread basket and the pickles in a cut-glass dish and the potato salad in a large blue-patterned bowl that was probably intended for soup. Then I went in the dining room where she kept the company china and stuff and got two champagne glasses I had bought her for her birthday, and put them in the freezer to chill. They had cost $24.50 each. The store had felt that monogramming His and Hers on them would be “kitsch,” I think they said. So they were plain. But they were our glasses and they were for drinking champagne out of on special occasions. Or at least I thought they were. I was always afraid I’d come in some day and find her sprouting an avocado pit in one. Moving about in her familiar kitchen, in her house where it seemed I could smell her perfume faintly, I felt even more strongly the sense of change and strangeness. The cookouts, the watered lawns, the weekday suburban evening coming on had that effect, and the house where she lived and read and did the dishes, where she bathed and slept and watched the Today show, were so real that what I’d been doing seemed unreal. I’d killed two men in a hotel in London earlier this summer. It was hard to remember. The bullet wound had healed. The men were in the ground. And here, this endured, and the man next door, watering his lawn in translucent graceful curves, didn’t know anything at all about it. I opened another can of beer and went into the bathroom and took a shower. I had to move two pairs of her panty hose that were drying on the rod that held the shower curtain. She used Ivory soap. She had some kind of fancy shampoo that came in a jar like cold cream and had a flower smell to it. I used it. Ferdinand the Bull. There were some Puma jogging shoes, blue nylon with a white stripe, that I used sometimes when I was there for a weekend, and a pair of my white duck pants that Suze had washed and ironed and hung in a part of one of her bedroom closets that we’d come to call mine. The part, not the closet. I wore the Pumas without socks, you can do that if your ankles are good, and slipped into the ducks. I was combing my hair in her bedroom mirror when I heard the crunch of tires in her driveway. I peeked out the window. It was her. She’d come in the back door. I hopped on the bed and lay on my left side, facing the door, head propped on my left elbow, one knee drawn seductively up. My left leg fully extended, toes pointing. The bedroom door was ajar. My heart was thumping. Christ, is that corny, I thought. Heart pounding, mouth dry, breath a little short. I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do. I heard the back door open. The silence. Then the door closed. I felt the apprehension in my solar plexus. I heard her walk through the kitchen to the living room. Then straight to the bedroom door. The air conditioning hummed. Then she was there. In tennis dress, still carrying a racket, her black hair off her face with a wide white band. Her lipstick very bright and her legs tan. The hum of the air conditioner seemed a little louder. Her face was a little flushed from tennis and a faint small gloss of sweat was on her forehead. It was the longest we had been apart since we’d met. I said, “Home from the hills is the hunter.”
“From the kitchen setup,” she said, “it would appear that you’d bagged a German delicatessen.” Then she put her tennis racket on the bedside table and jumped on top of me. She put both arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth and held it. When she stopped I said, “Nice girls don’t kiss with their mouths open.” She said, “Did you have an operation in Denmark? You’re wearing perfume.” I said, “No. I used your shampoo.” She said, “Oh, thank heavens,” and pressed her mouth on me again. I slid my hand down her back and under the tennis dress. I’d
