name. To this point, Trilby had watched our exchange out of one eye, face sort of averted, so he could claim he hadn't seen it, if anything bad happened. Now he stuck up his courage to ask who I was.
'A drunk,' said Pigeyes.
It's always strange how that shot can reach me. 'I'm a lawyer, Mr Trilby.'
'Quiet,' said Pigeyes. He wasn't that tall, probably lying when he said he was five ten, but he was built like your freezer, no neck, no waist, a lot of slack flesh on a real solid structure. His anger gave him a kind of aura, an impression of heat. You knew he was there. He was dressed in a sport jacket and a knit shirt, beneath which his undershirt showed. He was wearing cowboy boots.
His partner could see he was hot and edged past him; Gino sunk back toward the door. With the second cop, we started again.
'Dewey Phelan.' He pulled his badge from his pocket and we actually shook hands. Good cop, bad cop. Mutt and Jeff. Fuck, I invented this game, but still I was relieved to be talking to skinny young Dewey here, maybe he's twenty-three, with pale skin, a lumped-up complexion like custard, and that greasy black hair falling into his eyes.
'Now the question, Mr Malloy, you understand what it is, is we kind of think you were trying to go into a hotel room that isn't yours. See? So maybe you could explain that.' Dewey wasn't really great at this yet. He shifted between feet like a five-year-old who had to go tinkle. Pigeyes was back near the door, arm on a filing cabinet, just taking this in with a sour expression.
‘I’m looking for a partner of mine, Officer.' Better the truth. There was only so much I could bluff, and right now everything was concentrated on looking chipper.
'Uh-huh,' said Dewey. He nodded and tried to think of what to ask next. 'Your partner, what's his name? What kind of partner is he?'
I spelled Kamin. Dewey wrote in his little pocket spiral, which he rested on his thigh.
'False personation,' said Pigeyes. Back at the filing cabinets he gestured at the credit card which Dewey was now holding. Pigeyes was going to charge me with the crime of pretending to be someone else.' I had forgotten up to now that the state claimed any interest in who I was or wanted to be.
I looked to Dewey almost as if he were a friend. 'You know, Gino and me,' I said, 'there's some history. But you can explain this to him. It's not false personation when you use somebody's name with their permission. That credit card belongs to Kamin. See?'
Dewey didn't. 'You got this card from him, is that what you're saying? From Kamin?' He looked back to Pigeyes for a second, maybe to check how he was doing. I had the sense, though, I had told them something. There was a little of that light-bulb look in both faces. Bert was Kam, or vice versa. They hadn't known that. 'It's Kamin's card?' Dewey asked. 'Right.'
'And he gave it to you?'
'It's Kamin's card, I came here to look for him, as far as I know it's Kamin's hotel room. I'm sure he'll tell you I had his permission.'
'Well, we'll have to ask him.'
'Natch,' I said.
'So what's his address?'
I'd raised him one too many. I saw that, but not quick enough. Sooner or later, when Bert didn't answer their phone calls, they'd turn up at his place. And the shit would fly when they opened the refrigerator. I tried momentarily to figure how many days it would be until we got to that point and what would happen then.
Dewey, in the meantime, had written down Bert's address and stepped away to chew things over with Pigeyes. Dewey, no doubt, was telling Gino they didn't have any real good reason to hold me and Pigeyes was saying, Like hell, he had me in sweatpants using someone else's name. But even Pigeyes would realize that, given our colorful past, if he pinched me and it didn't hold up, the civil suit I'd file for retaliatory arrest would lead to his immediate retirement.
All in all, I was beginning to figure I'd come out okay, when I heard Gino say, 'I'm gonna get her.' He was back in a blink with the sweet-looking student who'd been at the front desk. I imagined he wanted to review my antics out there with the card, see if maybe she'd give him some handhold on me he had missed. I was wrong.
'This isn't the guy, right?' he asked her.
This office was small and getting crowded, five of us now and most of the space to begin with occupied by Trilby's desk, which was clean but for pictures of his children, all grown, and his wife. There was a U pennant on the paneled walls and a clock. The girl looked around.
'No, of course not,' she said.
'Describe him.'
'Well, for one thing he was black.' 'Who's that?' I asked.
Dewey gave me a warning look, a minute shake of the head: Don't interrupt. Pigeyes told the girl to go on.
'Late twenties, I'd say. Twenty-seven. Kind of receding hair. Athletic build. Nice-looking,' she added, and shrugged, maybe by way of apology for the frank observations of a white girl.
'And how many times have you seen him?'
'Six times. Seven. He's been here a lot.'
I spoke up again. 'What is this, a show up? What'd I do supposedly, steal this guy's wallet?' I was guessing now, earnest if confused.
'Hey, dude,' said Dewey. 'I think it's time for you to be quiet.'
'You're questioning me, you're talking about someone in my presence. Come on, I want to know who.'
'Oh my God, can you believe this guy?' Pigeyes turned away and bit his knuckle.
'Hey, so tell him,' said Dewey. He hitched a slight shoulder. What was it to them? Gino eventually caught the drift. A glimmer struck home.
'Here, fine,' said Pigeyes, 'knock yourself out.' He moved his hammy paw toward the girl. 'Tell Mr Malloy here who we been talking about.'
The girl did not get any of this. She shrugged, farm-plain, a little thick in her white blouse.
'Mr Roberts,' she said. 'Kam Roberts.' 'Your pal.' Across the room, Pigeyes's hard little eyes glowed like agates. 'So now tell us something smart.'
VII
The house in which Nora Goggins and I made our married life was a little square thing, brick with vinyl siding and black shutters, three bedrooms, in a sort of middle-of-the-middle suburb called Nearing. Nora always said we could afford more, but I didn't want it; we had a summer place out on Lake Fowler and that was plunge enough for me. There were so many extraneous expenses — the Beemer, my suits and hers, the frigging clubs. I suppose, in retrospect, it means something that our home wasn't much. Ivy clings to the bricks, plantings that went in when we bought and now have vines thick as tree branches which are beginning to develop bark and sinister tendrils that have found the cracks in the mortar and are gradually pulling the entire place down. When I got the kid, I got the house. Nora cashed out. Nearing will never be glamorous and Nora knows a thing or two about value anyway.
Nora is a Real Estate Lady, you've seen them before, suburban gals dressed to kill at lunch. She could not stand it at home. She limped to the finish line with Lyle, got him into high school, but I could tell that she had done a calculation on some scratch paper somewhere and figured what percentage of her brain cells were dying every day. Even drunk, I sensed a wild, unhappy thing in her that was not going to be tamed. I remember seeing her once; she was in the garden. She had a different homebound passion each year and that summer it was vegetables. All the green things abounded: the cornstalks with their broad leaves like graceful hands, the jungle density of the peas, the ferny tops of asparagus spread like lace. She stood in our tiny suburban back yard with Lyle at her knee and looked toward the distance, a mind full of lonely visions like Columbus, who saw round when everybody else
