SIX

THERE WAS A message from Crystal waiting on my phone machine. She had lost her first match to Gracie Cobb. She said she missed me, and she left her number. I called it.

“Liberty Bell Hotel, your gateway to freedom. Marcia speaking. How can I help you?”

“Crystal Spivey, please. Room three thirty-eight.”

No answer. I explained to Marcia that Crystal was playing in the pool tournament held in the hotel ballroom. “Could you send a message to her?”

“Well, sir, my records show that she checked out at noon.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“Thank you for calling Liberty Bell, your gateway—”

The phone rang soon after. I snapped it up.

“Is he eating it?” Mr. Fleckton. I had forgotten entirely about the New & Improved problem. His voice had a panicky edge. “Don’t hold anything back, Artie. I can take it.”

“Well, actually, he showed considerable interest this morning,” I lied.

“You mean he ate it?”

“No, but he sniffed it. I took that as a hopeful sign.”

“Jesus, that’s wonderful. He sniffed it. Yes, that is a hopeful sign. Call me anytime day or night if he eats it. We can shoot at a moment’s notice.”

“Okay.”

Now what? I tuned in WBGO, the area jazz station, and listened nervously to a special on early Louis Armstrong. I heard “Azalea” and “Weatherbird,” and they still seemed fresh and modern, but I wasn’t really concentrating. I was thinking about Trammell Weems. In law school, I had found his utter contempt for sacred cows attractive. Even though I had had an inkling back then that rebellion wouldn’t sustain one forever, I dug the stance of the outsider with a sense of the ridiculous. Now I began to feel sad, but not exactly for Trammell. Somehow, sitting there in my morris chair listening to Mr. Armstrong, I linked Trammell and my youth. Both were dead. Nothing is sadder in life than the tendency of time to pass. Let alone of humans to sink in deep water.

The phone rang.

“Hello, Artie. Did you hear? Can I come up?”

“Of course! Where are you?”

“Around the corner.”

 

She carried a plastic garment bag over her shoulder and her cue case in the other hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but whether from crying or driving, I couldn’t tell. We waited to speak until Jellyroll finished his effusive greeting. Meanwhile, I took her stuff, hung the garments in the hall closet and leaned the cue case against the wall.

Then we embraced.

“Who told you?” I asked.

“Uncle Billy called. He’s very upset. He loved Trammell.”

She sat at the dining-room table. I made her a BLT. She didn’t speak as I did so, just sat sadly petting Jellyroll. I wanted to know what exactly she felt.

“Something’s wrong, Artie,” she said finally.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly…It doesn’t feel right.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Trammell’s death. I feel scared.”

“Scared? Why?”

“Artie, people are following me. I know they are. Sometimes I think they want me to know they’re back there, like they’re making it obvious.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Do you believe me?”

“Sure, if you say so.”

“I hoped you would.”

“I didn’t know he was a banker. Did you?”

“Yeah. He got indicted in Miami for fraud. We lived together then. Trammell and two other guys owned a bank. They loaned money to each other and skimmed off the interest.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. All charges got dropped. Trammell knew they would. He was never worried. That was the first time I left him.”

“Because you didn’t want to be married to a white-collar criminal?”

“That, and other things I don’t feel like talking about right now. I’ve tried to feel sad that he’s dead, but I can’t. I feel sad for myself. I was just a girl when I married him.” She began to cry. She said something else, but it got lost. “You know what I was to him? I was a fuck-you gesture. Trammell Weems—of the great Weems family—married a pool player from Sheepshead Bay. That was a laugh. Even her name was a laugh! Crystal Spivey. Let’s take our clothes off and get into bed.”

“Sure.”

And so we did. But we didn’t make love, we just held each other. “Can he come up?”

“Sure.”

Jellyroll floated up onto the bed and began licking her face. I told her he’d keep doing that until her cheeks were gone, so she should call him off when she’d had enough. “Crystal—”

“Hmm?”

“Do you want to get out of town for a couple days?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I have a neighbor upstairs who owns a place in Fire Island.”

“I went there once. A bunch of us rented a share in Kismet one summer.”

“Jerry’s place is in Lonelyville.”

“Sounds wonderful. Can I stop and see Uncle Billy on the way?”

“Sure.”

I phoned upstairs. A woman answered.

“Hello,” I said, “I’m with the Sierra Club.”

“Just a minute.”

“Hi, Artie, what’s up?”

“Can I rent your Fire Island place for a few days?”

“Cash?”

“Cash.”

“Come on up. But if you see any strangers on the stairs, don’t stop.” Jerry was holed up in his apartment to skip the process servers. He was wanted by the SEC to testify in the matter of something or other. I never ask. Nobody was lurking on the stairs.

Jerry answered my coded knock in a terry-cloth bathrobe. He was barefoot, tousled, and his eyes looked like burnt holes in a smallpox-infested Army blanket. The guy couldn’t have passed for fifty. He was twenty-six years old. He opened the door wide enough for me to sidle in. Two years ago, he was pulling down two hundred grand a year. I used to feed his cat while he jetted off to merger acquisitions and subordinate debentures. There were summer homes and boats, cars and fancy women in short black dresses, but then the bottom dropped out, and the Jerrys of the financial community plunged into a narrow pit.

His apartment was identical to mine, a one-bedroom in a prewar building undistinguished except for the view. From the western windows, Jerry and I could see all the way north to the George Washington Bridge and the bend in the river beyond. Looking south, we could see to the World Trade Center. But Jerry had the shades drawn tightly against the view. Except for bars of daylight beneath the shades, the only light in his living room came from a flickering, muted TV. Until my eyes adjusted, I didn’t even see the young woman sprawling on the leather sofa. She, too, wore a frumpy robe and no shoes.

“Artie, this is Fritzi Kellior.”

She waved unenthusiastically. She was even more unkempt than Jerry, but gradually, in the TV light, I could see that her features were long and patrician. Her short, unwashed hair was expensively cut. Humphrey Bogart caught my eye. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Jerry and I quickly settled on a price for three days. Jerry asked me if I wanted to buy the place. I said no. “That’s right. You don’t own anything, do you? Except a dog.”

I just let that slide by. “Have you ever heard of Trammell Weems?” I asked.

“Yeah. Glub-glub,” Jerry said.

“What about before the glub-glub?”

“What about it?”

“What did he do? The paper said he was a banker.”

“Yeah, right,” said Fritzi.

“Ponzi banks. There probably used to be an honest man at VisionClear Bank and Trust, but he died in the last cholera epidemic. The interesting question is, who pulled the strings? How high did it go? You know?”

“No. How high did what go?”

“The cover-up.”

The intercom buzzed. Jerry went off to answer. Fritzi stared blank-eyed at the TV. Bogart staggered through the purgatorial thicket blabbering about gold. Jerry hustled back. “We gotta split. That was the super. I paid him a hundred bucks to tell me when they’re on the way up. Well, they’re on the way up.”

“Shit!” said Fritzi Kellior.

“Use my apartment.” I tossed him the keys. “I’ve got a friend staying there. I’ll try to deflect them.”

“You will?” said Jerry. “Jesus, thanks, Artie.”

“I’m sick of this,” muttered Fritzi as they beat it out the door. “I’m real sick of this as a way of life.”

I gathered up vodka bottles, glasses, and an empty orange-juice carton, dumped them in the sink, and hurried back to the living room to see what I’d missed—Fritzi’s panty hose and pumps. I had had a brief affair with a woman who had once worked for Salomon Brothers, long before they got busted. She told me that exposing toe cleavage was bad form for a woman on the fast track. It was simply not done. I tossed Fritzi’s shoes into the dark, cluttered bedroom. The banditos were slithering down the banks of the ravine after Bogart. He was finished.

The doorbell rang.

I peeped out the view hole. A little guy in a rumpled blue seersucker suit, no tie, stood in the hall. “Mr. Gerald Thwactman. I have a subpoena from Federal Court for the Southern District in the case of—”

I opened the door. “He’s not here.”

“When will he be back?”

I wondered how official this guy was. He didn’t look like he carried much clout, but you can’t always tell in New York. However, if he were a cop, he’d already be inside, and I’d have footprints on my face. He looked like an out-of-work actor, and I felt sorry for him standing there, snapping a manila envelope against his thigh. “I’m house-sitting for Jerry. He left this morning for Hawaii. His father had a stroke. Paralytic, apparently.”

He didn’t even pretend to believe me. He just sighed. “Tell him sooner or later they’ll send the cops.”

I told him.