there. Her voice was taut with worry and she let out a long breath when I told her that I was bringing Billy home.
“Dios mAo,” she said softly. “Thank you, detective, I will be here.” She hung up and I pocketed my phone. I looked across at Billy.
“You want anything else?” I asked. He shook his head. “You ready to go?”
He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at me. His blue eyes were large in his narrow face. “Will you look for him anyway?” he asked.
“I’ll look for him,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
It wasn’t quite noon when Billy and I walked into the I-2 Gallery. The shades were up on the windows and the place was flooded with light and empty except for Ines. There was a half-filled glass of red wine on the long counter and a scattering of papers. A cigarette smoldered in a metal ashtray. Ines’s pink shirt was clean and starched, and her hair was combed and shiny, but her coloring was still off and there were shadows under her eyes. Billy started to say something but she cut him off.
“Upstairs, Guillermo,” she said. Billy opened his mouth again, but Ines pointed at him before he could speak. “Now.” He glanced at me and shrugged and went. Ines sat on a stool behind the counter and sighed deeply. She reached for her cigarette and took a long drag. It smelled like a brush fire. Her elegant fingers slid aimlessly along the countertop.
“The school telephoned this morning,” she said, “to ask if he was ill. He has done this before- several times. But it is always very… worrying. He came to see you?” I nodded. “Why?”
“To ask me why I’d stopped looking for his father.” Ines stepped back, as if balance had deserted her. “I told him he’d have to talk to Nina about that. Or to you.” She puffed on her cigarette and shook her head.
“I am sorry,” she said softly. “Nina should not have… It was a mistake to say that to Guillermo.”
“Maybe you should tell her.”
Ines stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray and picked up her glass and drank half of what was in it. Her laugh was short and unpleasant. “Perhaps you have noticed that Nina is a difficult person to tell things.”
“If not you, then who?”
She shook her head. “It is complicated.”
“Apparently.”
Ines looked at me sharply. “I can do some things for Guillermo, but I am not his parent. I could teach him to use the toilet and to throw a ball. I could show him how to ride a bicycle. I can be sure I am here when he arrives from school, so he does not come to an empty apartment. I can know when he is late… or when he is truant. Those things I can do, detective, but I am not his mother, and I cannot tell his mother what is best for him. On some topics, my opinions are irrelevant.” Her lovely oval face sagged and she drank from her wineglass again. “Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Then you cannot know the complications,” she said, and smiled bitterly. “Perhaps neither one of us can.”
The wineglass was empty and Ines’s eyes were clouded. She leaned heavily on the counter and rested her head on her arms. I saw the razor-straight part in her black hair and I saw her shoulders quiver. There was no traffic in the street beyond the big windows, and it was very quiet in the gallery. There was a new exhibit hanging- massive canvases with large, vaguely floral shapes in deep purples and reds and pinks- and I stood and looked at them while I waited for Ines to raise her head. After a couple of minutes she did.
“I must check on him now,” she said. She took her heavy key ring from the counter, and I followed her to the street. She locked the glass doors and looked at me. “You should not be here when Nina gets home.”
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
22
I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, waiting for word from Neary and thinking about Billy. I thought about the tension in his narrow frame as he looked down from the steps of my building, and of the hurt and confusion etched around his eyes. I remembered what he’d said about his mother, and how, when he knew he’d said too much, he’d made excuses for her and looked to me for agreement. I recalled Ines’s advice to him- to simply fade away- and I clenched my fists. I thought about parents and children, and about how kids survive and at what price. I thought and I waited, but no answers came to me and Neary never called.
Jane appeared late Monday night, bleary-eyed and subdued, and bearing Indian food. She hung her suit jacket on a chair and kicked off her shoes, and we ate mostly in silence. When she did speak it was in angry fragments about her deal, which had hit an eleventh-hour snag over her participation in the company after its sale. The buyers wanted her to run things for two more years, but Jane wasn’t interested. They were insistent and threatening to make it a deal-breaker; Jane was getting mad.
“I don’t come with the copier and the paper clips,” she muttered over her tandoori. “I’m not a piece of fucking office furniture.” She got tired of talking about it halfway through dinner and flicked on the television. She surfed through the channels and leafed angrily through the pages of another fat travel magazine and finished her meal in silence. I carried the trash to the chute down the hall, and when I got back Jane was sitting on the sofa. The travel magazine was in her lap and the TV was off. She was staring at me.
“So, have you figured out what you want to do about this vacation thing yet?” she asked. Her words were quick and taut, as if she’d had too much coffee, and her eyes- though tired in her tired face- were looking for something. Like a fight.
“What do you mean?”
“You said there was a chance your client might reconsider over the weekend- that your job might come back. Are you still waiting for that to happen, or has something else come along?”
I sighed. “Is this really the best time? Don’t you want to get some sleep?”
“Sleep’s overrated,” Jane snorted. “I just want to know where I stand with this trip. How much time can that take?”
I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. I drank some of it and cleared my throat and looked at her over the counter. “We’ve talked about this. We-”
“No, we haven’t. We’ve talked around it- for weeks now. Now I actually want to talk about it.” Her dark eyes narrowed and color rose in her face. “Did your job come back?”
“Not exactly.”
“That’s nice and direct,” she said. Her laugh was short. “Is there an explanation to go with that?”
“Sachs hasn’t changed her mind, but there was a breakin at Pace-Loyette over the weekend, in Danes’s office. I’m looking into that.”
“They hired you?”
“Not exactly.”
Jane’s brows came together. “Has anyone hired you?”
“I told Irene Pratt I’d look into it. And I told Nina’s kid, Billy, that I’d keep looking for his father.”
“So they’re your clients now?”
“It’s more of a pro bono thing.”
Jane shook her head. A tiny smile, equal parts incredulous and bitter, played on her perfect lips. “Pro bono is right. The question is: good for who, them or you?”
“They need-”
“What do you need, John? What is it that you want?”
I put my glass down. “I’ve told you, I don’t think a trip is a bad idea, I just-”
“I’m not talking about the trip anymore,” Jane said. The silence afterward was ringing.
“I was starting to suspect that,” I said, after a while.
Jane’s face darkened. “Don’t be funny,” she said quietly. “Not now.”
“What do you want me to say, Jane?”
