I made my entrance with a shrieking wind hurling snow at my head and shoulders, like W. C. Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer, then shut and locked the door behind me. Timmy was in his thermal underwear and was holding a steaming mug full of something that smelled like the mouth of the Brahmaputra at midday.
'You weren't there. Neither was Jack Lenihan.' 'Weren't where? How about a slug of that smelly stuff?' 'The Watering Hole. I slogged all the way over there, and all I found were two pharmaceutical salesmen from Utica feeding gin to a pimply youth with staples in his ears and poster paint on his eyelids. I asked him if an art supply store had blown up, but his gentlemen friends told me to buzz off, so I left. The bartender said he hadn't seen 'Miss Donald' for days.'
I removed my boots, which were making fog, and dumped them on The
New York Times Magazine spread out for that purpose in the front hall. 'I didn't say I was at the Watering Hole, and anyway, that bartender is an idiot. I can't stand this town any longer. When are we leaving? Is the airport still open? We could be on the beach at Grand Cayman by dawn.'
'Come on, you don't really hate Albany, except in winter, what with your having grown up in semitropical New
Jersey. We go through this every year, and then spring comes and you go chirp-chirp, Isn't the Northeast grand? How tedious it must be in those tepid places with no change of seasons.' You can't have it both ways, lover.'
He led the way back to the kitchen and ladled out two bowls of chili.
'Of course I can have it both ways. I can spend November through March in Guadeloupe, then you wire me when the annual ice age alert has been lifted and I rush back to pick you a daffodil and unclog your frozen fuel lines. I'll be warm, and you'll be glad to see me.'
'Generous of you.'
'Why aren't we rich? Did you buy a lottery ticket today?'
'Yes, but you won't like it.'
'Don't tell me. You played eighteen-eighteen again. This chili's good. I like it when my head sweats into my dinner.' 'That number's going to come up someday, and I'll be the only winner. A million flat, and no going halvsies with a corset manufacturer from Garden City.'
'Tell me again what eighteen is-your Aunt Moira's shoe size?'
'On her eighteenth birthday Aunt Moira played number eighteen on a punch board at the Poughkeepsie Elks lodge and won a twelve-pound Spam. Since then eighteen has always been a lucky number for the Callahans. It's simple mathematical probability that eighteen-eighteen will come up sometime in the next five hundred years. Some Callahan is going to get stinking rich, and with a little luck it'll be me.'
'Do we have any Molsons left?'
'The refrigerator is right over there.'
'My question concerned inventory, your department. I wasn't suggesting we play Ozzie and Harriet.'
'I never know with you. You have all these residual heterosexual inclinations.'
'Male presumption of entitlement, Timothy, has nothing to do with sexual orientation. It is a characteristic of certain moody, confused men-homo or hetero-who never left their mommies. I am not one of them.'
He got up and brought me a beer. I grunted benevolently. He sat down again and picked at his chili.
'Let's make a deal,' he said after a moment. 'You quit acting churlish with me and I'll quit acting churlish with you. I understand that you hate the cold weather, and you're between cases, and you're bored with Albany, and with me, and with yourself-and that the AIDS situation has put a crimp in your normal abnormal outlets. But all this tension is getting me down, and there's no point in both of us being miserable. I know you feel too rotten to act sweet naturally, or even just civil, but do me a favor and fake it part of the time. I'll be grateful, and I'll bet you'll feel better too.'
''What? What's that you say? You want me to periodically hide your precious inner feelings? As if after all these years Dr. Joyce Brothers' column turned out to be simpleminded charlatanry?'
'Yes, bottle up your negative emotions in a neurotically unhealthy way. For my sake. Just off and on until spring. Your springtime emotions I like a lot.'
I took a long swig of beer. 'I don't know, Timothy. I have to tell you, this is a bolt out of the blue. Your proposition is not something I ever dreamed I'd be faced with when we began sharing hearth and home and Vaseline jar.
I'm going to have to give this one a lot of thought.'
'Don-I'm serious. Really.'
I ate the chili and drank the beer and grimly considered what he had said.
As usual, he had me. A student of Jesuits, Timmy could play fast and loose on the larger matters, up to a point, but on the conduct of human affairs he was pathologically astute and rational.
I said, 'Look, I know you're right. I hate this town in winter with its wind and cold and sooty snow, and all those moral pygmies in charge of the place. But taking it out on you is unfair, and I'll try moderately hard not to do it anymore. Try, I said. A small maniacal outburst once in a great while is still okay, right?'
'Of course. It's all right with me if we both remain human. Thank you.'
'You're welcome. Now get me another beer.'
'Get it yourself, Kramden,' he said, and laughed but didn't get up. I got myself another beer.
'Where were you this evening anyway? Were you really out at Faxon's all that time? You let on as though you were at the Watering Hole.'
'Unh-unh. You drew that demeaning inference, but what I said on the phone was the truth. That I was at Faxon's waiting for Ned Bowman to show up because there was a corpse in my car. Which there was.'
'What? You're not really serious. You look serious.' I was loading the last of the chili onto a slice of George's famous whole-grain wheat bread, using a second slice of George's famous whole-grain wheat bread as a bulldozer.
I said, 'This stuff is good and good for you.'
Timmy's mouth was open but he wasn't eating. 'Who was it?'
'Jack Lenihan.'
'No.' It was.
'Mother of God!'
'That was my thought, or the Presbyterian equivalent thereof.'
'He was dead?'
'Oh yes.'
'How did he die?'
'On purpose, though not his own, I think. He'd been conked with a tire iron or something.'
'Holy Jesus! And he was in your car when you went to pick it up?'
'In the back, atop the lowered backrest.'
'But-how did he get there?'
'I have no idea. Ned Bowman is handling the investigation.'
'Is there more to this than you're telling me?'
'A lot, no doubt. But I don't know what it is, and my interest in it is only a little more than academic. Nobody has paid me money to look into the matter, and anyway I'm not taking on any job-especially a cop case-that would require my moving around out of doors any time before Easter. I've been thinking about it, and I might do some security stuff to pay my share of the mortgage and distract me from morbid self-absorption. Maybe sit behind a mirror in a drugstore rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude with one eye and spotting elderly shoplifters with the other. But that poor guy in my car is Bowman's problem. It's got nothing to do with me.'
'But you knew Jack Lenihan.'
'I met him once. I remember him vaguely.'
'Herb's pool party, the Fourth of July.'
'Right. We talked for a few minutes. About politics, I think.'
'Really? I thought Jack never discussed politics. He was embarrassed about his family and its sordid past.'
I cleared the table while he ground the coffee beans. Until I met Timmy I'd always thought coffee was a mineral that occurred in nature as tiny crystals and was mined like coal. I said, 'Who's his family?'
