THE DAWN CAME up sunless and rainy. I had fallen asleep only an hour earlier. I had tried everything to cause sleep, a couple of bones, bourbon. I tried reading about the Civil War, but I couldn’t concentrate on General Beauregard’s movements along the Rappahannock, and the carnage of Second Manassas took me near despair.
I dressed for the endless rain in rubber boots and an army poncho and took Jellyroll for a walk in Riverside Park. Knowing something was wrong, he hung close and did not stalk squirrels.
When Billie left a year ago, she said life with me was too easy, that it was sapping her ambition. I told her life could be harder. I could attend law school nights in the Bronx; I could take a day job with a major corporation and work weekends loading concrete blocks. She thought I was kidding. Dreamy moments, I had even considered the fanciful future, fatherhood, domesticity, rustic summers in an Adirondack cottage, the young ones splashing in the lake. I held out hope that one day she would return. I didn’t believe that business about sapped ambition, but I didn’t press her. She’d come back one day, and then it wouldn’t matter. I helped her move her stuff to Sullivan Street, and the moving done, she said she hoped I’d take Jellyroll, since there were no grassy parks in the Village. That wasn’t the real reason either. We both knew that by then Jellyroll had become my dog. Dog owning in Manhattan is such demanding work that it almost requires the absence of ambition.
It was April 29, Duke Ellington’s birthday, but it didn’t feel like spring at all. New buds were nothing more than stunted little kernels on the tips of wintry branches. Jellyroll and I waded through the mud and the wind all the way up to Grant’s Tomb. Grant rests beside his beloved wife beneath a marble dome on its own little island in the traffic. Poor Ulysses S. He was not a drunken lout; he was a brilliant, sensitive general prone to bouts with melancholy over the nature of his profession, which he expressed in letters to his wife. Those written after the slaughter at Cold Harbor are particularly heartbreaking. Jellyroll peed on a shiny black cannon, shook himself, and looked into my eyes. His said, what are we going to do now?
Suddenly I knew what I’d do. I didn’t weigh the pros and cons, view alternatives from each perspective, then, as usual, do nothing. I would get whatever it was Billie wanted to give me last night. She meant it for me. It was mine. Jellyroll cocked his head suspiciously. There were problems, all right. What was it, this thing she wanted me to have? Could I carry it on my person, or would I need a U-Haul? Would I recognize it when I saw it? I decided that whatever it was would be in her studio where she’d wanted to meet me. I had no key to the studio, but I knew where she kept a spare set of keys. Hanging on a nail by her kitchen door in her apartment, where she was murdered.
I would need to enter surreptitiously and leave without a trace. How? I needed an experienced person, someone familiar with criminal technique. But I didn’t know anybody with those credentials. Except my lawyer.
My lawyer had been evicted from his office several months ago, but he was never there anyway. I called the pool hall. The deskman, Davey, told me, yeah, he was there all right. He was playing nine-ball for twenty bucks a game with Too Louis, a porky scumbag who at forty lived with his mother, who probably paid him to hang around the pool hall instead of around her.
Jerome’s Billiard & Snooker Academy, East Fourteenth Street, third floor, up a set of granite stairs worn concave by the tread of academicians, a red flashing neon sign that said _iILLIARDS. I could hear the magic click and fall of phenolic spheres and the gasps of pain when they didn’t fall. I inhaled nostalgically. I gave up The Game a while back. It’s far too demanding and, like life, too revealing of character flaws. But I missed it. I even felt a twinge of sadness when I saw my old cue stick. My lawyer was leaning on it morosely.
A small clot of spectators, some who didn’t give a damn, some who only pretended not to, others who openly settled up side bets and talked out the comers of their mouths. Regulars, most of them, bored, looking for action of any sort, nodded at me. Among the spectators stood Winky, by the drinking fountain. They called him Winky because he had this savage tic in his left eye that screwed up the whole side of his face, the result, someone unreliable had told me, of his father’s attempt to kill him with a cue stick when he was four.
“Your friend’s a dumb fuck, Artie,” said Winky.
“I know.”
“He’s spottin’ Too Louis the seven ball and the break for twenty a game. Is that dumb fuck or what? How come we don’t see you no more?”
“I’ve been working hard.”
“The SPCA’s gonna get yer ass under the Dog Labor Act.”
Too Louis was taking aim on the seven ball, his pay ball, a long-rail cut with a danger of scratching in the side, but he missed it. He left the seven hanging in front of the corner pocket. The eight was about to fall in the opposite pocket of its own accord, and the nine, my lawyer’s pay ball, was a duck in the side. My lawyer stepped to the table.
“Think you can handle that, pal?” asked Too Louis too loudly.
“I can handle anything you got, Louis,” replied my lawyer. “Except your person.”
“A fin says he don’t get out from there, the dumb fuck,” said Winky out the comer of his mouth.
“Winky, a child could get out from there.”
“He can’t get out with a crowbar.”
“Okay, a fin,” I said.
My lawyer stroked the seven, stopping the cue ball neatly, shot the eight in with a touch of high right English and rolled down for the nine, straight in the side. He aimed, stroked it—and missed. It jawed between the points of the pocket, where it died. Too Louis giggled, hiked up his seeds, waddled to the table, thighs chafing, and pounded it in. I handed Winky his fin. “Dumb fuck,” he muttered.
Winky had a point. Was this the man I came to consult on a delicate matter of criminal advice, a man who gives away a bad spot to a shark, then gags the pay ball straight in the side? My lawyer let two tens flutter to the table, where Too Louis scooped them up with fingers more like toes. “Wanna go again?” he asked my lawyer. “Yer only eighty bucks down. Yer comin’ back.” His eyes were all greed. If my lawyer had said yes, I would have walked.
“No thanks. Go out and buy yourself a truckload of Cheetos.”
The spectators dispersed in search of new action.
“Hello, Counselor,” I said.
“Artie. Did you happen to see me miss that duck?”
“Yes.”
“It must be this cue of yours.”
“Warped, huh?”
“How else to explain it?”
“I need your advice.”
“Do you mean in the legal sense?”
“No, in the illegal sense.”
“Step into my office. Hey, Davey, can I use the office for consultation with a client?” he called to the deskman.
Davey nodded. “Good shot.”
My lawyer led me around the back of the desk area and through a door that I knew led to the repair shop. A naked light bulb bounced on the end of its cord when my lawyer pulled the string. There were stacks of disabled cues piled against the back wall along with buckets, mops, and brooms. The room smelled of glue. We sat on the workbench, careful to avoid disturbing a lovely custom cue clamped in the vise.
“Do you remember Billie Burke?” I asked.
“Sure. Took pictures of bums. You two used to be thick.”
“She was murdered last night.”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course not.”
“As your attorney, I’m behooved to ask.”
“I got a phone message from her shortly before she was killed. She said she had something to give me.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“No?”
“No, but I want it.”
“Where is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Bit vague on the specifics.”
“It might be in her studio. There’s a set of keys to the studio in her apartment, but that’s where she was killed.”
“Are you telling me you want to break into the scene of a murder in order to steal property belonging to the deceased?”
“That about it.”
“Forget the whole thing and smoke some of this.”
“Well, thanks anyway,” and I got off the workbench.
“Where is this apartment?” my lawyer asked.
“Sullivan Street.”
“Old building or new building?”
“Old.”
“Elevator?”
“No, stairs.”
“What floor?”
“Fifth.”
“Doorman?”
“No.”
“Street door locked?”
“Yes.”
“Basement?”
“Yes.”
“Fire escape?”
“Not on her side. Wait, there’s a dumbwaiter.”
“A dumbwaiter? Where?”
“In the basement. It runs from the basement through each apartment. I just remembered, they use it for garbage.”
“As your attorney, I advise you to eschew narrow places.”