Small Town

“Well, take a look,” he said. “Consider the physical evidence.”

She reached out, took hold of his hardened penis, held it gently in her cool hand. “I knew your cock would like it,” she said. “What about your mind? Do you like me as much as before you heard the story?”

“More.”

“Because now you know I’m hot?”

“I already knew that. No, because I know you better.”

“And the better you know me, the more you like me? I wonder if that will be true when you hear the rest.”

“I thought you only saw her once.”

“There are other people. I have a lot of stories, and you might not like them all.”

“Try me.”

“Not tonight. It’s late, and you have a book to finish. And I’ve already cost you a day’s work.”

“I got some work done before Maury called.”

“And you’ll work tomorrow, but when will you stop working? And would you like me to come over?”

“Come around dinnertime. Say six-thirty? We’ll have an early dinner in the neighborhood, then come back here. And Scheherazade can tell me another story.”

twenty-seven

At twilight, a trim gentleman in his later years walked at a brisk pace in Riverside Park, approaching the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. He wore a navy blazer with brass buttons, a pair of white canvas trousers, and a black-billed white cap in the style of a Greek fisherman. He stepped confidently onto the floating dock and walked to his boat, the Nancy Dee. A couple of other boaters saw him and greeted him with a word or a wave, and he acknowledged them with a sort of half-salute, raising his right hand, index finger extended, to shoulder height.

He climbed aboard the ship, and in due course piloted the small vessel away from the pier and out onto the Hudson River.

It would have been simpler, the Carpenter thought, if Peter Shevlin hadn’t gone straight to his boat. If he’d gone home to change first into his idea of what a proper yachtsman ought to wear. But no, he’d gone from the subway to the restaurant and then directly to the Nancy Dee, almost as if he knew this would be his last night at the helm and wanted to maximize his time on the water.

So he’d been wearing business clothes, quite useless to the Carpenter. On the other hand, perhaps it was as well that the man had been bareheaded. A cap might have cushioned the blow.

It had been easy enough to find a blazer. All the thrift shops had them, and he’d been patient enough to search until he found one that was a perfect fit. It was missing one of its cuff buttons, and frayed the least bit at the collar, but that just made it look like a treasured old garment, the veteran of years of faithful service.

The white duck trousers were new, purchased at the bargain store in Greenpoint, along with a fresh supply of socks and underwear. The Greek fisherman’s cap had been harder to find, and he’d decided that any white cap would do, then happened on a store on Eighth Street that sold nothing but caps and had every imaginable kind, including just the one he was looking for. It was a perfect fit, too, which would probably not have been the case with Shevlin’s. The man had had a small head.

Which, minus its teeth, now rested somewhere on the bottom of this very river, wrapped up tightly in plastic along with the tire iron that had served so well to dent Shevlin’s skull and, in due course, to knock the teeth from his jaw. It had done good service, the Carpenter thought, and deserved burial at sea, as did Shevlin, or what was left of him.

The teeth, too, were in the river. No need to wrap them up or weigh them down; they sank like the anonymous pebbles they would soon become. And Shevlin’s hands, rendered unidentifiable, had also been consigned to the depths.

It was, he thought, as if the original Peter Shevlin had ceased to exist, and had been reborn in the person of the Carpenter.

He guided the ship southward, past the piers where several cruise ships lay at anchor, past the floating museum that was the USS Intrepid, past Battery Park City and, beyond it, the site where the twin towers had stood. And on, around the tip of Manhattan Island, and under the three great bridges in turn, Brooklyn and Manhattan and Williamsburg.

Once there had been a prominent jazz musician who had a spell when he stopped playing with other musicians, stopped performing in clubs and concert halls, stopped recording. Instead he would walk out to the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge and play for hours.

Anywhere else in the world, the Carpenter thought, they’d have done one of two things. Either they’d have told him he couldn’t do that, or they’d have all come out to hear him, until the man gave up and went home.

New York had left him alone.

He rather regretted THE loss of the tire iron, now resting on the river bottom with the head of Peter Shevlin. It had served him well, like the saw and boning knife, also consigned to a watery grave. And the hammers, and the chisel. A workman, he thought, was as good as his tools.