but not too heavy. They smelled good too. You’d come out of the water and wrap one around you. It was just about perfect.”
“When was that?” Billy said.
Walter shrugged. “A while ago.”
“You wasn’t alone. I can sure see that.” Ike tilted his head sympathetically. Respect for Walter’s privacy forbade him from speaking his thoughts: “Everything comes back when you see that orange towel. The good and the bad. It all comes back. I can see it in your face right now.”
Instead, he looked at the ceiling and said, “Best one I can remember was New Orleans, summer of ’49. She was a whore, you know, but she was a high-class woman. Told me she was twenty-four. Come to find out she wasn’t but seventeen. No matter. Woman like that make an old man young and a young man feel a lot older.”
“Lucky she didn’t kill you,” Billy said, heavy lids showing more of his sad brown eyes than usual.
“Man, she made me feel like I never did before and have not since,” said Ike.
“I thought this was about towels,” Billy said.
“I’m getting to the towels. When I was done, which was none too quick, I was soaking wet. I was covered with my sweat and hers. And we’re in this hotel room with a big open window and doors leading out to a little terrace. Had a fan, but damn sure no air conditioning. It was hot and sticky too. She stood there by that open window and the moonlight shined off her in a way that made her look like, I don’t know what-an angel, a statue like you see in a museum-except I knew she was never no statue. Never seen a woman beautiful as that. Next thing I know, she had a towel and sat down beside me on the bed and went to wiping me off. That’s the best towel I ever had.”
Walter said, “Hell of a way to get old.”
Ike nodded. “I was half your age at the time, but I growed up a lot that night.”
Billy suddenly stood up straight behind the bar, surprising Walter and Ike with his height. Unslouched, he was a different man. “My mother used to put a clean towel on the bathroom door every time I took a bath.”
“Your mother?” said Walter.
“What’s wrong with that? She took a towel out of the closet and hung it up on the bathroom door. It was clean and it smelled good. Every time I took a bath. Anything wrong with that?”
Walter’s eyebrows jumped.
Billy bent toward him: “You want to hear about towels? Wrapped around people’s heads after they got their brains beat out behind some warehouse? Towels all covered with blood so you didn’t know what color they were? Believe me, Walter, I seen plenty of towels.”
“I like your momma’s towel fine,” said Ike.
“Write it up, Billy,” said Walter.
“What?”
“New Orleans, Aruba, mom.” And to the general satisfaction, that’s what he wrote on the rimless blackboard leaning against the mirror.
St. John
Walter was happiest on St. John, with the heat and the quiet, the privacy, and the pace. He was at his best on his deck, looking out at the rock. Whenever he came back, Clara said, “Walter? You have a good trip?” If he had, he’d tell her so. If not, he said, “Good to be back.” That was enough for her. She lived in his house and she felt that she knew the man. She was old enough to be his mama.
He was glad to be home, but he couldn’t get Isobel out of his mind. Three days in her apartment had yielded Walter a dozen names. He’d taken them from the pictures obscuring her kitchen walls. Each picture was tagged with a name, one or more street and e-mail addresses, and cell and landline numbers. He had their stories in his head. He worked without notes. He kept no records.
Isobel lived on West End Avenue, in an elegant building with a full-time, uniformed staff. Her sixth-floor apartment overlooked 84th Street. It opened into a short foyer with the kitchen on the left, the living room straight ahead, and a hallway ending at two bedrooms side by side, each with a full bathroom. The wall between the kitchen and living room had a chunk taken out and an archway constructed. Two large, potted trees guarded the archway. The kitchen floor was dark red tile. The rest of the floors were parquet. Her furniture was costly but thrown- together, comfortable everywhere. Live plants in all rooms. Piles of books, periodicals. Two very large living room paintings filled with big, colorful, abstract shapes faced each other across the room, the 84th street windows between them. Her bedroom was the place for family photos and personal displays: intricate seashell designs arranged in frames, a child’s Tower of London.
The other bedroom was crammed with books. They were stuffed into bookshelves, piled on tables, stacked on the floor. The beds were made and the kitchen was spotless. Even the recessed light fixtures were dust free. “Isobel had help,” he thought. He liked the place, except for the artwork.
“Lovely joint,” he said. “You mentioned that your people are not poor.”
“Obviously not,” said Isobel, opening the refrigerator, not looking up. While the coffee brewed they sat at the kitchen table. She filled him in on her “perfectly ordinary” past.
Maurice Gitlin, her father, traded-in the great tradition of Englishmen who roamed the globe seeking to buy cheap and sell dear. He’d involved himself in deals pertaining to just about everything legal, and rumors persisted that from time to time he may have lost sight of the line. “Prosperity is the mother of invective,” he counseled Isobel whenever she asked if the stories about him were true.
Isobel spent much of her youth in Fiji, but called London and Paris home as well. She was into her teens before she realized that only some people had homes in the South Pacific, England, and France. After Oxford University, where she learned to trade on her village-girl accent and treat her stammer as less than a problem, Isobel felt an itch to try America. She’d visited many times. At twenty she enrolled in the Western Classics program at St. John’s in Annapolis. There she spent five years reading Plato, Virgil, Kant, Dante, and Nietzsche. She also wrote a regular column: “Sex and the Serious Student.” It was extremely popular, exciting much mail. She was thought “witty yet substantive,” “frank and irreverent,” “self-contained,” and “strangely, refreshingly modest.” She responded to letters from graduate students with references to the classics, judiciously laced with reader suggestions on how to find G-spots and execute blowjobs, and she was not averse, on occasion, to finding out for herself.
Isobel asked to be titled Associate Editor of the publication, which had, over time, been called many things, most recently Freethinker. Then she went to New York and applied for a job at the New York Times. Her editorial background and roots got her in, she told Walter, then added, “And my father, of course, has always been a help.”
They spent the rest of that day immersed in Isobel’s files. Of all the survivors, the ones on the kitchen walls seemed most promising to Walter. Isobel gave him details of their lives and losses. She knew a lot. She’d even tracked down most of them in their present circumstances. A few were hard to find, but she had a list with addresses for nearly all. Walter had a professional’s appreciation for Isobel’s work. Murder was a state, sometimes even a local, crime. Every cop involved in one jealously guarded territory. Homicide was the top of the pyramid for cops. After chasing car thieves, burglars, bad-check bouncers, and wife beaters, every policeman in America yearned to catch a homicide. Small-town cops looked on such a happening as if they had won the lottery. They dreamed of solving a killing. They saw themselves in the papers and on the evening news, famous just like the football coaches and NASCAR drivers. Big city detectives saw big news murders as career builders. They sought them out like Infantry officers; eager for a star, they seek out combat. However, just because a killing is notorious, just because it makes the New York Times front page, doesn’t mean it gets the attention of the best homicide detectives in the business. Jurisdiction was the whole ballgame. In Dallas, nearly half a century after the fact, they still smarted at losing the JFK murder to the feds.
Walter’s work took him to so many jurisdictions, he had a real sense of the differences in police competence. He did not like to make judgments. It’s just that he knew the importance of experience. He knew a murder like that of the little girl in Colorado, the beauty queen barely out of her toddler years, would have been solved in a New York minute- in New York. As it was, with an investigation lost in the boondocks of the west, he was just as sure no one
