"Isn't that nice? The man is 'pressed." He doesn't have time to help the cops. We're only trying to solve a homicide here. But let's put that on hold 'cause the man is pressed. "
"Your sarcasm's withering me, Ramos. Anyway, I already told Sal everything I know. If you want, we can go over it all again, but I don't have time to come down there now."
"What's a matter? Afraid to face me, let me see your eyes?"
"I think I work better with Sal," I said.
"I'll call back later on."
"Sal's soft on you, Barnett. But I'm not. You're playing games. I don't like games."
"What kind of games do you think I'm playing, Dave?"
"You got your own thing going here. they got a word for that. 'Hidden agenda." I aim to find out what yours is." I didn't say anything; I couldn't. His smart cop's instinct was telling him I wasn't straight.
"Well?" he asked.
"Well, what?"
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
"Is this when I'm supposed to break down and confess?"
"Watch it, sucker."
"Is that a threat, detective?"
"Take it any way you want. But hear this: I don't buy your story. I think you know where the roommate is.
Sooner or later I'm going to find missing Missy Kimberly, and when I do I'm going to find out about you. Turns out you've been lying, I'm going to fry your ass. All I gotta say for now. Sal'll be back in an hour."
He hung up.
I started walking uptown. My conversation with Ramos had shaken me up.
What am I doing wrong? I asked myself. How am I giving myself away?
Frank was right. The cops were going to be a problem. Even if we brought off the blackmail and collected the money, Ramos and Scotto were not conveniently going to go away I stoppe@ at Penn Station to call Frank at his gallery.
"Better get back to the hotel quick," he said.
"Kim's they wasted Rakoubian." waiting for you.
"What?" ,I just got off the phone with her. She was on her way to see him when she noticed patrol cars in front of his place. There was a crowd on the street. She edged in and asked what was going on. Seems your fat friend fell or jumped out of his window. My bet is he was pushed."
"Frank!"
"Steady, Geof. And save your regrets. I told you this could happen:
They're playing hardball. After what you did this morning, I'm not at all surprised."
"Kim told you?"
"Yeah. Poor Arnold. Pissed on by all those fancy dogs. She also told me about the Duquaynes. You guys played them great."
His compliment was nice, but I was still thinking about Rakoubian.
Suddenly I wished I were out of the whole goddamn mess.
"What if they'd come for him when Kim was there?" I asked.
"They'd have heaved her out the window too!"
"Point is, they didn't run into her. Like I told you last night, we're on a roll. Last night Kim taunted Mrs. Z. This morning you taunted Darling. Rakoubian caused them a lot of trouble. If you were in the same spot, you'd have killed him too."
I was quiet.
"Wouldn't youg"
"No," I said.,No, Frank, I most certainly wouldn't."
"Look, Geof, I don't condone what they did. But there's one plus here-I predicted how they'd behave, which tells me I've got a good handle on them, which tells me the plan is working, and we should proceed without delay."
Back at the motel I found a badly shaken Mrs. Lynch.
"Sure, Adam was awful. Slime. A real piece of crud. But to waste him like that.
She was pacing while I lay on the bed. Her hands were nervous and she was dripping sweat. Strangely, seeing her so upset actually reassured me. She and Frank talked casually about "wasting" people; now, at least, she was expressing pain.
"I mean he couldn't do anything to them," she said. She stopped, turned to me.
"He wasn't threatening them. He didn't have the pictures anymore."
"He could identify Darling. I guess that was the reason," I said. "I know." She started pacing again.
"Like that's what this is all about. Shows of force and all that kind of crap. God, I hate them. I hate them more than-" She stopped.
"I'd like to see them die, Geof. I really would. Rolling on the ground, you know, in the dirt, their bellies split open, their hands grasping at their guts, trying to keep them from spilling out. Crying, whimpering, dying painfully. That's what I'd like to see."
She became calm then, as if that thought, that awful vision, satisfied her rage. Her shaking stopped. The sweat dried on her forehead. Her fingers were cool when, a few minutes later, she sat beside me and began to stroke my neck.
We made love, showered, then went out to look for a place to eat. On Tenth Avenue Kim spotted a Cuban restaurant. She wanted to go there, wanted to be reminded of Key West. It turned out to be a strange hybrid, Chino-Latino or Cuban-Chinese. We ordered dishes from both sides of the menu, ate pork asado with chopsticks and poured black beans over our Cantonese rice. For five minutes we were amused, then the joke began to pall.
"Why are we putting ourselves through this?" I asked her.
"Why don't we go back to Florida and forget it? Just forget it. "
She gazed at me, her eyes pinning me down. I felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.
"It's getting too rough," I told her.
"I don't know if I can handle much more." She nodded.
"I know what you mean. I feel awful about Adam too."
"Maybe we shouldn't have turned him in, Kim. Oh, I know it might help us marginally. But to turn him over, set him up for slaughter. I put down my chopsticks, shook my head.
"Listen, Geof"-her voice was tender-"you're a sensitive guy and I love you for that. But we're both going to have to toughen up." She smiled.
"Know what your problem is? I think you give up hatred too easily." She patted my hand.
"Anyway, there's nothing we can do for Adam now. We can only go forward and hope for the best-do what we have to do."
After dinner we wandered down to Forty-second Street, merging with the crowds. The neon flashed, the porn stores were open and the hustlers worked the mob. Kim grasped my arm. I looked at her. We listened to their propositions, laughed them away. Then at the apex of Times Square she broke free to face the empty intersection alone. She stood there on the sidewalk, staring at the signs. As she spoke she seemed to glow.
"I love this cesspool. Makes me feel good. Triumphant almost. As if places like this, which people say are so degrading, are the only places I feel I'm really alive. Know what I mean, Geoffrey? It's so damn human down here, like there's nothing phony, no false front. Here you can feel what it means to be a human being. It's the opposite, isn't it, of sitting in a church?"
The moment she said that I felt that she was right. The city swirled with criminality, and we were part of it, part of the great greedy grasping mainstream, competitors in the endless struggle for gain.
She was right about another thing too, the feeling she described of triumph. You could be predatory and sexual and still hold your head high because you weren't pretending nly human, as she said, to be anything else. You were o stripped of all hyp?crisy. There was something wonderful about that, liberating, clean. I began to glow myself.
And so, as I strode with her amid that overheated crowd, my cameras bobbing against my chest, I no longer felt like an observer, a photographer, but like a player in the game.
I woke up in a sweat, disoriented, confused. But when I opened my eyes the room was dark. I reached for Kim. She wasn't there. I called out her name. No answer. I sat up.
She wasn't in the bathroom either. Has she left me? Deserted me aizain? Maybe I was still asleep, trapped in a nightmare. Bl;t of course I wasn't. And her suitcase was still in the room. But not the
set of clothes she'd worn the day before. I looked at my watch. It was 5:35 A.M.