Aine, so she said, “Are you guys gonna talk Spanish all night? Because if you are, I’ve got better things to do.”
The Gaucho leaned over the bar and began chatting with Aine about the latest movies she’d seen and her favorite color and did she like to walk hatless in spring rain, all the stuff he thought a woman liked to hear. Aine was in fact flattered by his attention. She was well aware of the adage that held if you wanted to succeed with a lady, you treated her like a whore, and vice versa. She knew he was treating her like a lady, which meant he suspected she was a whore, but that was okay with her. It was the thought that counted.
On the other hand, The Gaucho had no idea she was a working girl. In his eyes, she looked like a well- scrubbed Irish girl from one of the suburbs, albeit one of these anachronistic hippie types who ran around without underwear. There was something sharp and snippy about her, qualities he liked in a woman. Qualities he had found in Eileen Burke, who did not, alas, seem too terribly interested in him. He looked at his watch. The detectives were now ten minutes late.
“Listen,” he said, “I know you’re here with your boyfriend and all…”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Aine said.
“Oh, well good,” The Gaucho said. “I have an appointment here—in fact they’re late—but it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to discuss our business, and then I thought maybe you’d like to go for a drink someplace quieter than this, what do you think?”
Aine looked him dead in the eye.
Green eyes clashing with brown eyes, sparks flying.
“Sure,” she said, and smiled like an Irish shillelagh, whatever that was.
As coincidence would have it, Eileen Burke walked in just then.
EMILIO SHREWDLY CALCULATEDthat the other guy who came in some five minutes later was either a civilian like Palacios or a detective like Livvie. He was absolutely positive now that the girl with the reddish-brown hair was Olivia Wesley Watts.
All three of them had moved to a table over by the phone booths. From where he was still sitting at the bar with Aine, who had her legs crossed and who was nursing a very sugary non-alcoholic beverage, Emilio could not hear a word of their conversation. This was unfortunate because he was sure they were discussing the blood diamonds hidden in the basement from which Livvie had escaped earlier today.
They were instead discussing cocaine.
So were the three men in the living room of a tenement flat half a mile uptown.
SUZIE Q. CURTISwas never permitted to sit in on any of these brainstorming sessions between her mastermind husband and his two rocket-scientist associates. Her job was to keep them supplied with food, like the women in theGodfathermovies. Although to see those movies, you sometimes got the feeling the gangsters in them were as interested in cooking spaghetti with clams, or sausage with peppers, as they were in killing people. Just nice homey fellows who if you looked at them cross-eyed, they would slit your throat.
Her husband and his cronies were talking about killing some people tomorrow night.
Listening from the kitchen, where Suzie was making tuna fish sandwiches with slices of tomato on them, she could hear their conversation clear as a bell.
“We go in shootin,” her husband was saying. “Never give them a chance to frisk us.”
“Cause then we’d be at a disadvantage,” Constantine said. “If we let them frisk us.”
She could just imagine him twitching and grinning.
“Exactly,” her husband said. “We know she’ll be there with the coke, she’d be stupid not to bring the coke when we went to all this trouble setting this up. We mow everybody down, grab the coke, and split.”
“She’ll have goons with her,” Lonnie said.
“How many? Two, three? Even half a dozen? We got the element of surprise on our side.”
“That’s right,” Constantine said. “Nobody’s gonna expect us to come in shootin.”
“Exactly!” Harry said, and laughed. “Who’d think we could be that stupid?”
Me, Suzie thought, and sliced another tomato.
HE HAD TAKEN HERinto the back room of his shop, where there were all sorts of sex toys. She had seen all of them before, of course—there was nothing she hadn’t seen or done—but she looked at them all agog and amazed like an Irish virgin, and pretended to be shocked when he asked her to put on a leather merry widow and thigh-high leather boots, so where’s the whip, honey? she was thinking. It turned out he wasn’t into the dominatrix scene, after all; it was just the opposite. He merely wanted to see what a nice Catholic girl like Aine would look like all dressed up like a whore.
She figured she wouldn’t break his heart just yet.
She’d go along with it, let him believe she was Cathleen the Colleen for a little while longer. Then she’d tell him she was a working girl, bro, and ask him for a deuce. Or whatever the traffic would bear.
Instead, he started talking about himself.
She kind of found this interesting about him.
The way he opened up to her.
He told her he was a spy named The Gaucho.
Shutup,she said, aspy?
Verdad,he said. Or Cowboy, I’m sometimes called.
Boy, she said, a spy.
For the Police Department, he said.
So what it was, he was a snitch, was what it was.
She didn’t say this to his face.
She let him talk.
And, of course, like all men, he wanted to show her how important he was.
So he told her he had been instrumental in uncovering valuable information that would lead the police to a big drug bust tomorrow night at midnight in the basement of an apartment building on Culver Avenue.
3211 Culver, she thought, but did not say.
Midnight, she thought.
That’s when it’s going down.
Midnight tomorrow.
A hun’ fifty keys of coke will change hands, he told her.
Three hundred thousand dollars will change hands, he told her.
So she didn’t ask him for any money, after all.
He had given her enough already.
And besides, it was kind of nice to make love instead of to be fucked all the time.
I FOUND THE LETTERSfrom her the night before.
I knew right then I had to kill him.
We kept a gun in the house. I don’t know where Lester bought it. I think in a pawnshop someplace downtown, near his office. He bought it when the first of our children was born. Lyle. When he was born. We’d heard there’d been a kidnapping in Smoke Rise, many years ago, at the King estate, on the water. Douglas King. So we figured we needed a gun. I don’t know whether Lester registered the gun or not. Frankly, I didn’t care. Lester was a councilman, he often took liberties. I mean, he parked in clearly marked No Parking zones, he went through red lights when he’d had a little too much to drink, he was a great one for breaking the rules. He felt he was privileged, do you know? A city councilman. Only this time, he broke one rule too many.
I know I’m not a beautiful woman, but I’ve always been a good wife. To think of him with a nineteen-year- old girl—how could he? I had to kill him. That was all I knew. Never mind confrontation, never mind asking for explanations, never mind forgiving him, I wanted him dead, I wanted to kill him. I knew he’d be going directly to King Memorial after his trip upstate. I knew what time he’d be getting there. I knew all this, he’d told me all this on the phone. The only thing he hadn’t told me was that a young girl was in bed with him.
The gun was in the safe in his study. Same place I found the letters. The desk in his study. I wasn’t looking for the letters, I was looking for his appointment calendar. Because we were supposed to go to a dinner party that Sunday when he got home, and I had the time written in my calendar as six o’clock, which sounded early, so I wanted to check it against his calendar, to make sure. But I couldn’t find it anywhere on his desk, his calendar, so I started looking through the drawers, and that was when I found the letters, at the back of the middle drawer to the right of the kneehole, buried under a stack of papers.
