The waitress went off. Cord smiled at us brightly.
'You boys talked things out,' he said.
'Relentlessly,' I said. 'Why do you think your wife suddenly ended your marriage?'
'Must we?' Cord said.
'We must.'
'Well, as you've heard Pud suggest, albeit coarsely, our marriage was in some ways a sham. I was able to…' He paused, thinking how to say it. 'Service her, I guess. But in more nontraditional ways.'
'Okay, you were sexually mismatched,' I said. 'You both must have known that for a long time.'
'Yes. I had hoped when we married that I could make a go of it, but…'
'But you couldn't get it up,' Pud said.
Cord looked a little embarrassed. I assumed it was the language rather than the fact.
'Well, you did make a go, after all,' I said. 'How long have you been married?'
'Eight years.'
'Any good ones?'
'Sex aside, yes. Stonie and I were pretty good friends.'
'I'm not sure there is a sex aside,' I said. 'But why now?'
'Why did we break up now?'
'Yes.'
The waitress returned with a cup of hot water, a tea bag, and toast with a pat of butter on each slice and a couple of little packets of grape jelly on the side. Pud said yes to more coffee. I said no.
'You got some kinda pie over there?' Pud said.
'Peach,' she said.
'I'll have a slice. No sense drinking all this coffee without no pie.'
The waitress smiled automatically and went for the pie. Cord dropped the tea bag in his hot water and jiggled it carefully.
'I've asked myself the same question,' Cord said. 'And it always comes back to Penny.'
I waited. He jogged his tea bag, checking the color of the tea. The waitress came back and put a fork and a piece of pie down in front of Pud, put the check down beside it, and left. I picked up the check.
'Penny decided we should go,' Cord said.
'Why did she?'
'I have no idea,' Cord said. 'You, Pud?'
'She never liked either one of us much,' Pud said.
'I don't agree,' Cord said. 'She may have disapproved of you, Pud. All that boozing, and the macho business. But I thought Penny liked me.'
'Guess you were wrong,' Pud said.
'What do you guys know about Delroy?' I said.
'Pretty good guy,' Pud said.
'A fascist bully,' Cord said.
'How long has he worked for the Clive family?' I said.
'Before I showed up,' Pud said.
'Yes,' Cord said. 'He was there when Stonie and I got married.'
'Always security?'
'More or less,' Cord said.
'He'd get me out of the trouble booze got me into,'
Pud said. 'And he'd get Cord out of the trouble his dick got him into.'
'What kind of trouble?' I said.
Pud ate the last bite of his pie. 'Me? Drunk and disorderly. Soliciting sex from an undercover cop-the bitch. DWI. That kind of stuff.'
'What did he do to fix it?'
'Hell, I don't know. I just know he'd come and get me from jail or whatever and bring me home and tell me to clean up my act. And I never heard about the charges again.'
'You?' I said to Cord.
'He's done the same sort of thing for me,' Cord said.
