“
Abatangelo tasted his wine. “I know his kind,” he said.
“They had waiters at Safford?”
“Our little man Massimo,” Abatangelo explained, “bears more than a passing resemblance to my old man.”
Eddy sat back and drummed his fingers on the table. “What’s going on, guy?”
Abatangelo stewed for a moment. “Sorry,” he said. “I got hit in the face at Dominic’s with ancient history. Nina Napolitano called me ‘Vince’s boy.’ ”
“Biologically speaking- ”
“Fuck biology. I just spent ten years in lofty self-examination, all expenses paid. I know what I know and what I know is, I ain’t Vince Abatangelo’s boy in any way that means anything.”
His delivery was over the top, he sensed it himself. Eddy leaned forward and put his hand on Abatangelo’s wrist. “Let it go.”
Abatangelo shrugged apologetically. “You’re right.” He leaned back into his seat and made a come-forth gesture with his hand. “So, regale me. The gang. How are they?”
Eddy obliged with a brief rundown. Steve Cadaret from all reports remained free in Southeast Asia, doing the bohemian fugitive bit. Mickey Bensusan had found God in Palm Desert courtesy of an Aryan beauty named Malika. Joey Bassinger died of a heart attack freebasing in a motel room near Yosemite, of all places. Jimmy Byrne, the Company’s skipper, who’d been apprehended at sea the same night the arrests on the beach went down, remained in prison, where, unless the political winds turned, he would grow old and die.
“Poor Cap,” Abatangelo offered.
“You did what you could do,” Eddy said.
“Maybe. Any event, you left out Shel.”
Eddy removed an envelope from his coat pocket and passed it across the table. “I’m not sure I approve of this, incidentally.”
The envelope contained a printout on coarse gray paper. The text bore the heading LACHELLE MAUREEN BEAUDRY, AKA SHEL BEAUDRY, and listed several recent addresses.
Abatangelo regarded it like a seven-year-old with a valentine. “Any trouble getting this?”
“Seventy-five bucks,” Eddy said. “If that’s trouble.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Whatever,” Eddy said. “Truth is, this wasn’t any trouble for me, but it was to the guy who got it for me. Seems he had to rely on vehicle registrations to get those addresses.”
“That’s a problem?”
“You’re not supposed to get vehicle registration information except for service of process. You lie, you surrender a fifty-thousand-dollar bond. But Shel, she’s got no property in her name. Doesn’t have any credit to speak of, and her last job ended over a year ago. So the last resort was DMV. Bingo. Turns out she has her name on a truck. To cover his butt, my guy filed a phony small claims action with a due diligence affidavit saying he tried to serve her but couldn’t. He’ll file a Request for Dismissal in a couple weeks. That should cover it.”
“If it doesn’t,” Abatangelo said, “I’m good for the hassle.”
Eddy laughed. “Oh yeah? You got fifty grand lying around? Forget about it. Let trouble come looking for you. Meanwhile, as long as we’re playing show-and-tell, hand over the letter you got. I want to read this thing for myself.”
Abatangelo thought it over, then obliged, feeling guilty for the trouble he may have caused. Eddy tore Shel’s letter out of the envelope and read it as though looking for his own name. After a moment, with a puzzled expression, he glanced up from the page and said, “Living out in B.F.E.? That’s-?”
“Bum Fuck Egypt,” Abatangelo replied.
“Oh, right, right.”
Their salads arrived with a fresh basket of bread and the two bottles of wine. Massimo did not bring them. In his stead he sent a stocky busman with a tooth missing. His bow tie was crooked and his shirt had elbow stains.
“From now, you want, you say Oscar, anything,” the man announced.
Oscar popped both corks and disappeared. Eddy said, “Next time, we eat Chinese, just to spare you these little flashbacks, okay?”
He returned to Shel’s letter, finishing it shortly and folding it back into its envelope. He passed it back across the table and attacked his salad. Abatangelo continued studying the addresses. With a little concentration, you could make out which one was most recent. He’d head out as soon as dinner was over, use Dominic’s car, get a map of the area once he was out there.
To Eddy, he said, “So what did you think? Of her letter, I mean.”
“Read between the lines,” Eddy said with a shrug. “Read deep. Then read a little deeper.”
“That bad?”
“Bad as that,” Eddy said through his food. “Worse, maybe. You know how she is.”
“I did once.”
“Now, now. Don’t pity yourself. It’s unlucky.”
“You saw her,” Abatangelo said.
“That I did,” Eddy confirmed.
Eddy had bumped into Shel by accident six months earlier in Antioch. His brother-in-law had a repair shop on the Delta Highway. Eddy went out to help him on weekends. While buying himself a hero in Safeway, he spotted Shel at the checkout. It’d been great for a minute or two, then increasingly edgy and odd. They talked at most ten minutes.
“She really seem that bad?” Abatangelo asked.
Eddy groaned. “You’re like a little kid, know that? We’ve been through this. She says it herself in the letter. She’s attached. To a loser.”
“Loser how?”
“Something about the way she was talking, I dunno, it just had crank written all over it. It’s very big among the white folk out that way.”
Eddy looked up to see what impression he’d just made. Abatangelo obliged him with, “Don’t get fooled. The guy’s being a loser could just mean he’ll be easier to cut loose.”
“He’s a cranker,” Eddy repeated.
“So?”
Eddy was outraged. “So? I seem to remember a little lecture I got once from a certain Daniel Abatangelo. The speech went: Steer clear of crankers. They’re loose on deck. They’ll fuck you over just to get it out of their system. They shit where they eat.”
“I said that?”
“Put money on it.”
“Well this is about Shel, not crank. And Shel is a girl who believes in Fate. Which is just another way of saying she doesn’t expect much. You End Up Where You Started. I began to see a lot of that in her letters before she stopped writing. It bothered me then and it bothers me now. But it doesn’t surprise me. This crankhead of hers, he’s nothing but a project, you watch.”
Eddy puffed his cheeks. His eyes suggested a certain mystification. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. Okay. Maybe so. What I know about women you could fit inside a pea.” He stared at his salad, licked his teeth and shook his head. “You ask me, though, she ain’t free to walk away the minute you show up.”
Abatangelo tried to form a picture of this in his mind. The task proved the better of him, for reasons he preferred not to address. He asked Eddy, “Any suggestions?”
Eddy chortled. “I
“I got permission to see you.”
“Because I sweat blood to make it that way. I’m the perfect parolee.” He finished his salad. Tearing off a chunk of bread, he sopped up the dressing off his plate. “Besides which, you’ve got a job,” he said. “Incidentally, I checked
