Except for the waitress and cook, the Waffle Depot was deserted. We sat in a booth in the far corner. All three of us had sunglasses on, both to disguise ourselves and to protect our eyes from the fluorescent lighting that lit the room like John Boehner’s tanning bed. Our caps were pulled low.
“Are you sticking your gut out on purpose?” Barack said.
“Are you talking to me?” I asked.
“I wasn’t talking to Steve. Steve has one percent body fat. Isn’t that right, Steve?”
“One-half of one percent,” he said.
“Is that healthy?” I asked.
Barack shrugged. The forty-fourth president was in pristine shape as well—not one-half of one percent body fat, but close enough for government work. He’d been out in the world, kayaking, parachuting, and (probably) kickboxing in underground fight clubs. Meanwhile I’d been at home, staring at the rowing machine in the basement and occasionally hopping on the treadmill.
Steve yawned. There were dark circles under his eyes.
Our waitress, a short woman with dark hair and a pierced nose, stopped by to take our orders. Her name, according to her name tag? Tina. She poured a coffee for Steve. Barack and I stuck with water.
Just before she turned, Barack told her she looked familiar. “You work the graveyard shift, right? I think I’ve seen you closer to breakfast before. Must be some long nights.”
She smiled. “I thought I recognized you from somewhere. Not from here, but from…well, I shouldn’t even say it out loud, it’s kind of ridiculous. You just look like someone famous, that’s all.”
“Barack Obama?” he said with a smirk.
“You must hear that all the time.” She stepped back and sized him up. “He’s a little younger than you, though.”
Barack’s smirk dropped. “Maybe you can help me out. There was a guy in here Tuesday morning. Eating by himself. A white guy with white hair, a little taller than my friend here. That ring any bells?”
She shook her head. “I was busy from start to finish. It was all a blur. There was a wrestling show in town. Those guys have big appetites—triple, quadruple omelets. One of them destroyed the men’s toilet. Just destroyed it.”
“Which wrestler was it?” I asked.
Barack glared at me.
“Anyway,” I said, “the guy that was in here. He comes here all the time. He’s a conductor, for Amtrak.”
“Oh!” she said. “Finn. Always sits at the counter, always orders decaf.” Her face dropped. “Y’all cops or something?”
I realized that, yeah, we probably did look like cops. Three guys with short hair and sunglasses, two of us in suits. Me in the aloha shirt, looking an awful lot like Magnum P.I. Only thing missing was the mustache.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Is Finn in some kind of trouble?”
Barack and I looked at each other. She hadn’t heard about the accident.
“There was an incident,” he said. “The railroad sent us. We’re just talking to people. Nothing formal.”
“I get it. You want to know if I could smell alcohol on his breath, or if he smelled like reefer.” She leaned down. “Half the people who come in on my shift are coming here straight from the bars. Even worse on a Friday or Saturday night.”
“Except tonight,” I pointed out.
“It’s still early,” she said. “The bars don’t close ‘til two.”
We all looked up at the clock. It was only half past ten. It felt much, much later.
“But Finn,” she continued, “I would have noticed if there was anything funny about him. You can’t walk around in a uniform smelling like liquor—it’d be like a pilot walking onto a plane with a bottle of Jack Daniels. People tend to notice those sorts of things.”
“So what do you remember about him? Tuesday morning. Did he seem nervous?” Barack asked.
Tina shrugged. “Everybody’s a little squirrelly these days, ain’t they? I think we all got a little ADHD.” Her eyes went to Steve, who was checking his pulse again. Barack asked if she’d seen Finn Wednesday morning, too, but she hadn’t. Just the morning before the accident.
I asked, “You didn’t happen to see him with a bag of—”
Barack kicked me hard under the table.
“I wasn’t going to say heroin,” I whispered through my teeth, though I don’t think Barack—or anyone—heard me.
“He did have a bag,” Tina said. “Now that you mention it, yeah. It was a black bag, you know, like for the gym—”
“A duffel bag?”
“That’s right. He usually didn’t bring nothing in, but that night he had this black duffel bag. Kept it real close by, too. Kind of strange, if you ask me. He coulda just left it in his car.”
“In this neighborhood?” I asked.
“What’s wrong with this neighborhood?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing at all.”
As soon as she left us, I turned excitedly to Barack. “A duffel bag. That’s something, right?”
“It’s not nothing. That doesn’t, in and of itself, necessarily mean it’s something.”
I pulled out my phone to call Esposito, but Barack told me to hold up. “The lieutenant hasn’t called back. If she does call us, then we can ask her if they found a duffel bag near the tracks or at the motel. Until then, there’s no point. If you call someone and leave a message, you wait for them to call you back. You don’t keep calling, and calling, and calling, and leaving more messages.” He paused, then added, pointedly: “Unless your goal is to annoy them.”
Steve wasn’t listening to us bicker. He was in another reality completely, a reality that I wished I could slip into.
Our waitress brought out our orders. Barack and Steve had both ordered grilled chicken breasts. They weren’t looking at their plates, however. They were staring in horror at my plate as I reached for the bottle of Heinz 57.
“Are there even hash browns under that mess?” Barack asked.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said. My hash browns were—in the parlance of Waffle Depot—“hot and bothered” (i.e., covered with cheese, onion, diced ham, and jalapeño). Seven hundred and forty calories, all gristle and grease. This was what I’d been doing to myself for months now. Jill had caught me more than once eating Ben and Jerry’s straight out of the pint, in my boxers and undershirt in the middle of the night. I only had the foggiest of memories of even getting out of bed. It wasn’t sleepwalking, but it was something close to it.
“How can you eat all those carbs?” Steve said. It was good to see him slip back into our realm and make conversation, even if he was being a little snot.
“Calories are good for you,” I said between massive bites. “They give you energy.”
“Caffeine gives you energy.”
I looked into his eyes, half-shaded by drooping eyelids, and then down at his coffee cup, which he’d just emptied for the third time in under twenty minutes. “And how’s that working out for you?”
He didn’t say anything.
While we were waiting for the check in silence, Steve stared deep into what was left of my shredded potatoes like he was looking at a Van Gogh. I was seriously beginning to worry about his state of mind. Could we trust him with his weapon?
“You’re hungry,” I told him. “Have the rest of my hash browns. A couple of extra calories isn’t going to hurt you.”
He picked up a fork and stuck it into the mess on my plate, tentatively, like he was poking a dead animal with a stick. He took one bite…and then another. Before I could tell him to slow down, the plate was empty. He even licked it clean. He seemed to spring to life afterward, but it didn’t take a psychologist to know he was being eaten alive by guilt. He was an impressive physical specimen, I’d give him that. If swearing off carbs and being constantly run-down was the cost, though, I wasn’t sure the trade-off would be worth it. Us old fogeys need a little padding. Otherwise our skin begins to hang in folds over our curtain-rod bones.
Barack noticed the dour look on my face. “We’ll get to the bottom of this thing. Don’t worry.”
“There’s no way you can guarantee that,” I said.
“I didn’t guarantee it. I just have faith.”
“Here comes the hopey-changey stuff,” I said, affecting my best rural Alaskan accent.
“Don’t go negative on me, Joe.”
“We need to be realistic. What are we doing? What are we really doing here?”
“Right now, I’m visiting the little boys’ room,” Barack said, sliding out of the booth.
I was about to say I’d go with him, but Steve was already on his feet before I could get a word out. I was left there, my mouth hanging open like a schmuck.
“What’s that, Joe?” Barack asked, straightening his suit jacket.
“Never mind,” I muttered.