Small Town

“Yes I do. John, maybe you killed her and maybe you didn’t, but what you have to know is I don’t care. I honest to God don’t care.”

“You don’t care if—”

“—If you killed her or not. No, I don’t. I care about you. I want them to drop the charges, I want you to be out from under this cloud. I want everyone in the world to know you never killed anybody. But I don’t have to know it because it doesn’t matter to me. You think maybe you killed her? So fucking what? I love you just as much if you did. Maybe more, for all I know.” She raised her eyes to him. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked them away. She said, “Can you take me to bed? I need to come. Can you make me come?”

When it was time for her to go he went downstairs with her, walked her to Eighth Avenue. An empty cab sailed by, not even slowing down.

“Didn’t see us,” he said. “Too busy talking on his cell phone.”

“Listening to bad music,” she offered.

“And munching on raw garlic. I don’t think it was the right cab for you. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I guess you’ll be busy, won’t you?”

“Does it bother you?”

“No, I think I like it. I’ve got work to do, but I think I’d like it even if I didn’t. Friday’s the one you’re turning into a girl, right?”

“That’s the one, but what I’m really doing is teaching him that he’s kinkier than he thought he was.”

“Well, so am I, evidently, because I’m already looking forward to hearing about it. I expect a full report.”

“And while I’m doing him, I’ll be thinking how I’m going to get to tell you about it.”

“And I’ll be imagining it, writing scripts for you in my mind. Here’s your cab. I’ll see you Saturday, okay?”

She nodded, kissed him.

He said, “I’m glad we found each other.”

“Oh, baby,” she said. “How could we help it?”

twenty-nine

The eye-opener, Jim Galvin had to acknowledge, was probably a mistake. If you waited awhile, if you had a decent breakfast in your belly, eggs and rashers and a link or two of sausage, and here it was getting on for lunchtime, surely no one would begrudge a man a drop of the hard stuff. If you held out until midafternoon, that was even better. But when that first one went down the hatch before breakfast, or instead of breakfast, well, that didn’t look so good. There it was, John Jameson’s finest, in your belly and on your breath, and no one who smelled it was going to mistake it for altar wine.

On the other hand, nothing else really got you going after a bad night. He knew men who swore by Valium, said it straightened you out without knocking you out, and left your breath discreetly unscented. But he also knew a man who’d developed a Valium habit and almost died trying to get off it. Poor bastard wound up in Beth Israel hospital, where they told him Valium detox could be tougher than heroin. Thanks all the same, but I’ll stay with the whiskey. It’ll kill me, too, in its own good time, but at least it’ll taste good going down.

Last night had been a bad one, though it had seemed good enough while it was taking place. A few bars, a few old friends, a few new ones, and a couple of laughs. A feeling of abiding love for the old friends, for the new friends, for the whole human race. A sense that it wasn’t such a bad old world after all.

Grand thoughts, grand feelings, and there were only two ways he knew of that a man could get to have them. Have a fucking jelly doughnut for a brain, or have a couple of drinks.

He’d had the latter, and now he felt as though he had the former, and that the jelly was oozing out of the doughnut. So he took down the bottle and filled a six-ounce jelly glass halfway full. And picked it up and looked at it, like you’d look at — what? An old friend? An old enemy?

He drank it down. Just the one, just to take the edge off, just to lighten the load the least bit.

He had breakfast around the corner on Avenue B, in a Ukrainian place where they didn’t worry any more about cholesterol than he did. He had salami and eggs and crisp hash browns and three cups of lousy coffee, and by God he felt fine by the time he walked out of there.

Now he had to figure out something to do with the day.

He was off the clock. Maury Winters had given him a lot of hours, first rooting around for the writer, Creighton, and then doing some background checking on a couple of prosecution witnesses in a robbery case. The robbery case pleaded out, with a better deal resulting in part from a lead he’d developed, so he had to feel good about that, and Maury was probably feeling good about him.

But he hadn’t been able to turn the trick for Creighton.

He’d figured there was probably a limit to what he could accomplish, given that you didn’t need psychic powers to know the writer was guilty. Lady walks into a bar, walks out with a guy, and wakes up dead, you don’t reach for the tea leaves and the crystal ball. You pick up the guy, and he goes away for it.