Motherless Brooklyn

She turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn’t carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.

The scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.

She looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. “You jerks killed him,” she said.

Her cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she’d catch her slip on fire-it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already-and that I’d have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette’s-my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.

“It wasn’t us, Julia,” I said. “We just didn’t manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.”

“That’s great,” she said. “That sounds great. You’ve got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?” She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.

I mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.

“Jerktalk!” I said.

She ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn’t be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop’s red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia’s glossy outline.

“You can’t go, Julia.”

“Watch.”

“We need you.”

She smirked at me. “You’ll manage.”

“No, really, Julia. Frank put L and L in your name. We work for you now.”

“Really?” said Julia, interested now, or feigning interest-she made me too nervous to tell. “All I see before me is mine? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I gulped, jerked my head to the side, as though she were looking behind me.

“You think I should come down and oversee the day-to-day business of a car service, Lionel? Have a look at the books? You think that might be a good occupation for the widow?”

“We’re-Detectapush! Octaphone!-we’re a detective agency. We’re going to catch whoever did this.” Even as I spoke, I tried to order my thoughts according to this principle: detectives, clues, investigation. I should be gathering information. I wondered for a moment if Julia were the her had lost control of, according to the insinuating voice on the wire at the Zendo.

Of course, that would mean she missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. Whatever that was, I couldn’t really picture Julia missing it.

“That’s right,” she said. “I forgot. I’m heir to a corrupt and inept detective agency. Get out of my way, Lionel.” She set her cigarette on the edge of the dresser and pushed past me, into the closet.

Inupt and corrept, went the brain of Essrog the Idiotic. You are corrept, sir!

“God, look at these dresses,” she said as she poked through the rack of hangers. Her voice was suddenly choked. “You see these?”

I nodded.

“They’re worth more than the car service put together.”

“Julia-”

“This isn’t how I dress, really. This isn’t how I look. I don’t even like these dresses.”

“How do you look?”

“You could never imagine. I can barely remember, myself. Before Frank dressed me up.”

“Show me.”

“Ha.” She looked away. “I’m supposed to be the widow in black. You’d like that. I’d look really good. That’s what Frank kept me around for, my big moment. No thanks. Tell Tony no thanks.” She swept at the dresses, pushing them deeper into the closet. Then she abruptly pulled two out by the hangers and threw them onto the bed, where they spread over the suitcase like roosting butterflies. They weren’t black.

“Tony?” I said. I was distracted, my eagle eye watching the ash burn longer, the glowing end of the abandoned cigarette inching toward the wood of the dresser.