TWENTY

I’d been on the bottom plenty of times. I’d been in the hole nearly as many, but this was the first time I had to dig straight up from Australia to get a running leap. I fixed myself a dish of crow and knocked on Barry Stackpole’s door.

Nothing stirred on the other side except a CD playing one of those mournful rock instrumentals that made a funeral dirge sound like the Ode to Joy. I knocked again, the earth made another revolution like a fat man turning over in bed, and a series of locks and chains moved two inches from where I’d raised my fist a third time. The door opened to reveal a Dorian Gray face with the cheeks still pink from the razor. His eyes were as alert and lidless as a bird’s. When he saw who it was he took his head out of the gap and swung the door wide.

“I clipped you a good one,” he said. “I guess I’ve still got it.”

“You should’ve seen it a couple of days ago. Receiving visitors?”

He paused only a whisker. “Bar’s open. Come in and gargle.”

I walked around him and he closed up and worked the mechanisms back the other way. He had on a clean T-shirt and jeans; his writing uniform. He’d always said slacks were for writers who didn’t write. They were no good for rubbing smut off a pencil eraser. The T-shirt was blank of advertising and clever repartee. I didn’t think they made them anymore. Maybe he had them built to order.

He led me to his workroom, which had been the living room of the apartment back when a corpse had turned up in it; he’d hung on to the original sofa for horizontal thinking and ditched the rest to make room for a computer desk and related equipment, but hadn’t done anything else to tailor it to his personality. Anyone who didn’t know him might have thought it was a home office in transition toward becoming a living room. He’d stopped wandering, physically, but as to the creature comforts he might still have been living out of a suitcase for all the permanence the place represented.

The bar was a folding card table, with only thin lines of vinyl top showing between bottles and glasses and a faux brass ice bucket with cubes floating on top of the molten remains of their predecessors. He went that way, making no noise in stocking feet, and picked up a pair of tongs. He’d lived like the bachelor he was longer than most men had been married, but he was as fastidious as a spinster about certain things.

“Not on my account,” I said, when he began forking ice into a rocks glass. “I’m riding the water wagon for a little, just to see what the Mormons are shouting about.”

He shuddered a little, then dumped the cubes back into the bucket. “I should’ve seen this coming when they strung lights at Wrigley Field. Next you’re going to tell me they’re breaking up the USSR.”

“Don’t teetotal just for me. I left my hatchet in my other suit.”

“I haven’t had a drop since I woke up with a sore hand and lost most of a morning wondering how come. When I remembered it scared the shit out of me. I’m sorry, Amos.”

“Back at you. I ought to have waited until you were answering your phone before I started leaving my calling card all over town.”

“Not an option. Lefty Lucy keeps a candle burning in front of a clock.”

That made me think of Lee Tan and the perpetual flame she kept going in Buddha’s lap, but I didn’t want to get into that just yet. There was a patchwork Web site glowing on his monitor; I fixed on that, like the weather. “What’s the assignment?”

“Nothing that pays, just doodling. Did you know Lucky Luciano took up knitting after he was deported? Woolen socks, to keep the troops warm at Bastogne. It makes you think.”

“Nobody’s all bad,” I said. “Except maybe Air Supply.”

He remembered the music then, found a slim gray remote among the barware, and switched off the stereo, a cheap Korean job on a steel utility shelf jammed with tattered books on the mob, the same collection of bound unpublished transcripts from FBI taps and flashy best sellers that had accompanied him all over the metropolitan area since Meyer Lansky’s bar mitzvah. The room filled with the swish of traffic on Woodward, the only silence that downtown knew before the little intake of breath between the last factory whistle and the first crackle of small-arms fire after the bars closed at two A.M. He made a vague gesture toward the sofa and we slumped onto opposite ends. The cushion that separated us might as well have been the DMZ.

He read my mind. Everyone I’d spoken to lately seemed to have the gift. “I haven’t had a flashback in better than a year. You?”

“I think about it, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation about something else. Not the same thing. It seems like something I saw in a movie.”

“Shrinks I saw would call that part of the healing process.”

“You saw shrinks?”

“Cable company I worked for answered to Hollywood; analysis was required, like morning calisthenics. Turned out I had issues.”

“Had?”

“I got a clean bill of mental health when I quit the job. I only thought I’d lost bone and tissue. That charge blew away my identity, and I was using the camera and computer to find it. That elbow-patch gang has a sweet racket, like vending machines. You have to keep stocking up on candy bars and self-esteem.”

“Don’t go after ’em. They’re all nuttier than Joe Balls.”

He grinned then, that wolfish display of gums I hadn’t seen in months. “I miss old Joe. He should’ve thrown away the kid and kept the afterbirth. So what do you think, did Joey do it?”

“You? I don’t know. I almost forgot that’s what I was hired to find out. Alderdyce pumped you on Frances Donella. Did he get around to you yet on Randolph Severin?”

“You and I must’ve just missed each other downtown. I couldn’t help him out. No witness to my whereabouts either time.”

“He needs proof. I’m less picky. Where’d you go after you left my place?”

Putting it to him sober I didn’t know what to expect. I pressed my spine deep into the sofa to brace for a looping right.

He didn’t move a muscle, not counting the ones that lifted the corners of his lips. “I drove around for forty-five minutes, an hour. It’s what you do in this town, because they let you. They don’t cap you for speeding unless you mow down a troop of Brownies on a field trip to take in the Monets at the DIA. Then I stumbled upstairs to where we’re sitting and drowned myself in a barrel of malmsey wine.”

“Shakespeare, yet,” I said. “Aren’t we hell.”

He went on smiling for an uncomfortable minute and a half, then suddenly tugged the white cotton glove off his shattered hand and turned both palms to the ceiling where I could see them. The stumps of his missing fingers had healed over without scars, pink as his palms; you wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong with them if you couldn’t count. There wasn’t a cut to be seen. It comforted me as much as the prospect of peace in the Middle East.

I said, “I’ll take that drink now, if the bar hasn’t closed.”

“Help yourself. Two fingers of bourbon for me, while you’re up. I haven’t slugged a close friend in close to forty-eight hours.”

I found eight cubes worthy of the name, divided them between two glasses, filled them halfway, and tipped the bucket to top them off with water. I handed him one and sat down with the other. He frowned at his. “I’m drinking, not swimming. You used to pour it brown.”

“Those two fingers looked kind of lonely at the bottom. Same old toast?” I lifted mine.

“I outgrew the custom.” He drank, wrinkled his face. “You never know who you’re drinking in this town. I taste a little Jimmy Hoffa in this one.”

“They didn’t throw him in the river. I think they built Ford Field on top of him. Speaking of bodies in rivers.” I watched the wall opposite over the top of my glass.

“I talked to Frances a couple of times: once in Halston, once with more ladders than Engine Company Number Nine in her pantyhose. The wiseguys are harder on their women than the Taliban. She gave me zero both times, and she wasn’t smart enough or dumb enough to clam up. She just didn’t know anything. Whenever the conversation got interesting Joey sent her to her room to paint her toenails.”

“Think she stayed?”

“She was working the counter at McDonald’s when he found her. I damn sure do.”

“What about Marcine Logan?”

He lifted his brows and lowered his glass to his lap. “You have been busy. Marcine and Frances weren’t in the same league, and not even in the same sport. That English walnut doesn’t crack.”

“How many times you talk to her?”

“Once is plenty for running full tilt into a brick wall. It was before the big bang. I had two legs and all my digits and the blacks and Colombians were muscling in on the drug trade. When there’s a war brewing, you go to the women for the inside track. She didn’t even pretend to be dumb. She knew she couldn’t pull off an act like that. She had her sights set on Joey long before they made contact; I found that out from her former friends. She only applied for that spokesmodel’s job when she heard he never missed an auto show. If he got sick or had a contract out of town that week, she’d probably have had to settle for the CEO at Jaguar.”

“Why not put in for CEO?”

“Too smart. It’s the ones in the spotlight go down in flames when the heat’s on—insider trading, falsifying stockholders’ reports, blowing up reporters. The ones who stand in the shadows move on to the next prospect. I came to the interview armed with all that, but all the leverage in the world is useless without an opening to insert it. She didn’t cooperate.”

I shook my head. “She only works as a suspect if she sold Joey out and did Frances to throw off suspicion when the case heated back up.”

“She’s no snitch. If she ever was even for a minute, it wouldn’t have been for the usual reasons, money or fear of jail.”

“Advancement?”

He nodded. “If something better than Joey came along.”

“I don’t guess that would be the receptionist’s job at his wife’s design firm.”

“Jesus, you cover more ground than Hurricane Katrina. You talked to her?”

“To both of them. They Tweedledummed and Tweedledeed me square into a corner.”

“Sure she’s just the receptionist?”

“Silent partner, maybe. They’re pretty tight considering the only thing they had in common.”

“Silent partners put up seed money. The pawnshop value on chinchilla coats and jewelry wouldn’t start up a Fotomat.”

“Lee Tan told me Marcine sat in on all their meetings. What if she peddled what she’d heard to the Colombians and blacks?”

He looked at me. “Forget Katrina. You’re global warming. How’d you track down that dragon lady?”

“Lefty Lucy. What do you think?”

“Timing’s right. The new kids on the block shoved the old boys aside like tipping over a shithouse. They had the routes all down, made deals with distributors and customers in an end run around the Sicilians while they were busy raising the ante on their pet politicians to kill RICO in committee. Those old-school hoods never stood a chance. If Marcine was part of that, she’d have had bushels of case dough. Iona was hungry enough for success on her own to put aside a little thing like her prospective partner’s screwing her husband.”

I played with my drink. “I don’t see either of them slipping a line over Frances’ head and hauling back, or capping Severin with heavy artillery.”

“A woman like Marcine would know who to recruit for both jobs. Iona’s Simple Solutions is starting to draw some serious water. If for some reason Iona or Marcine saw that old mess of Joey’s as a threat—” He flipped an ice cube into his mouth and crunched down.

“So they hung a label on Frances and took out Severin so he couldn’t say she wasn’t the snitch. That still leaves his murder flapping in the wind.”

“Maybe she’s not through.”