From the booth, Barbados looks over blearily. He puts one finger in his ear and jiggles it.
The door opens and lets in a cold gust.
"Sit down," Santos says.
Outside, a car sits at the curb. Pellets of exhaust ride up the back.
"Your car is running," Barbados says.
"I have someone waiting."
"You don't plan on staying long," Santos says.
"This won't take any time at all."
Oliver Schreck slides into the booth and Santos slides in after him.
"Isabel was a beautiful girl. I couldn't be more sorry, Errol."
"You said you're eager to help. How is that, Oliver?"
"Let me come straight to the point."
Barbados nods. "That's a good idea."
Santos stabs a cigarette into his mouth, frowning at the brief orange flame.
"I thought you can't smoke in these places anymore," Schreck says.
“You can't." Barbados leans forward.
‘Isabel was with Nathan last night," Schreck says.
"So what," Barbados says. "They were working, on a brief or something. "
"They were out."
"So they were working late and then he took her home."
"Did your mother say she came home last night?" Schreck asks
Santos.
"Careful," Barbados says.
Santos drapes his arm around the back of the bench. "What are you saying, Oliver?"
"All I'm saying is that they were out."
"That's all you're saying," Barbados says.
"They've been out. A lot."
Santos, bent over the table, rolls the salt shaker in his palms. "That would be quite a mouthful."
"Look at Nathan's hands," Schreck says. "Look at his arms."
Santos has made a fist around the salt shaker. "Nathan has known Isabel for years."
Schreck leans back to look at him. "Isabel was a very beautiful girl. A girl with promise. Maybe she would have been a lawyer herself one day. Nathan was at Coney Island. You saw him there. "
Santos looks across the table at Barbados, who holds out his hands toward Oliver Schreck. "And how do you know something like that?"
"You saw him, Errol. Did you see his hands?"
"How do you know all this?" Barbados asks.
"Did you see the marks on his arms?"
"It doesn't mean anything," Barbados says.
"But it is interesting."
Santos's eyes are locked unseeing on some spot on the wall.
"Errol?"
Santos tilts his head. "It is interesting."
The waitress brings over the coffeepot and a cup and saucer for Schreck. "You want some more coffee?"
Santos's hand is up, warding her off. "We're good."
"I wouldn't mind," Schreck says, and reaches for the cup.
But Santos intercepts Schreck's wrist and brings it down to the table and pins it there. A glass falls to the floor and is smashed. "We're good," Santos says.
The waitress returns to the counter and withdraws behind the coffee urn.
"Why are you trying to give me Nathan?" Santos says.
Schreck lifts his free hand, as if in surrender. "We've known each other a long time."
"You've known Nathan a long time, too."
"We're just talking here," Schreck says.
"I'm glad you brought that up. Why are we doing that?"
"I'm a lawyer," Schreck says.
"Is that what you are?”
"I'm obligated to give you evidence in my possession.”
"You're not, actually," Santos says, "as a point of law.”
"But you're telling us the truth," Barbados says. He looks at Santos. "He's a lawyer. It's the truth. He says it is."
"Absolutely," Schreck says. "I'm done here."
Barbados says, "Because you do have the right to remain silent."
"What are you, reading me my rights?"
"Don't look so worried," Barbados says. He is grinning openly. "Did you understand that part?”
"Am I under arrest?"
"Are you with me, Oliver?"
"No, I'm not."
"You have the right to consult an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning now or in the future. Do you understand that?"
"You guys are fucking with me.” Schreck smiles at one face then the other. "I haven't done anything wrong."
"Don't count on it," Santos says.
"If you cannot afford an attorney," Barbados says. "One will be provided for you without cost.”
Schreck is sputtering. "I am an attorney."
“Is that so?" Barbados says.
Schreck begins to smirk. "Though I do have a lawyer."
"Who might that be?"
"But it's Nathan."
Silence erupts among the three of them, as if they've all Just realized their part in the farce, that they could have gone right to this part, skipped the rest.
Schreck laughs with relief. "You guys are fucking with me."
Santos's eyes are dull with grief. "We could never use this conversation," he says.
Schreck lifts a shoulder. "I see a man in need."
"That's not why you're here," Barbados says.
Santos is shaking his head. "I know Nathan Stein."
"No, Detective Santos, I don't think you do."
But Santos does know Stein. He sees with perfect clarity a picture of Nathan with his arms around him and his new wife, the three leering drunkenly, smiles pasted and eyes gooey. He catches Nathan watching from the East Hampton living room across the patio, observing through two glass doors as they fucked in the yellow bug light of their room. Behind them, writhing on the wall, their silhouettes a pair of underwater swimmers dolphin-kicking in embrace. The shadows of moths flying overhead like a mute flock of birds.
They slept in that house where he lived, the weekend house listing on a hill pale and blind. Nathan had brought Santos shopping for the bed. The matching sheets, the night tables. Pick a pattern for the carpets, he'd said. Ralph Lauren. Givenchy. Nathan and his rubber-banded rolls of C-notes. Nathan was responsible for his own supply of companionship, and he summoned them one by one to his second-floor room. Agency maid. Waitress. A toll collector. Dime-store clerk. And all of them something good to look at, disarming, razor-tongued, schooled in unarticulated sorts of street intelligence. Nathan made his opening moves as in chess, well rehearsed, without hesitation, feigning interest in their mundane and clocked days. And then he offered an invitation to a swim and then dinner and then a drink on the pool deck. And then. Then night became a holiday, a celebration in honor of Nathan's catch. The speakers filled the surrounding woods with music. The four of them laughed and drank in the gurgle of the pool and the hum of its filter and the slish of Santos's new wife as she passed beneath his feet and emerged in the shallow end scaly and slick as a reptile, and Santos looked up, to the window where Nathan Stein passed with his night's reward.
And all this time there had been Claire. The lonely Claire left at home, the serious Claire left studying, loyal Claire in Louisiana to visit family and friends. Or sad Claire, merely left. Santos would have been happier with her, with any of the Claires, happy enough, as Nathan was so obviously willing to let her go.
In the morning Santos woke to find Nathan gone, or going, or just returned.
Stein and antistein.
Not actually Stein but a cardboard construction. A life-size figure of a celebrity, the kind you stand with to have your picture taken; a celebrated figure who once, many years before, when you were a child, might have been your best friend. The kind with a father for whom your mother works, cleans, takes dictation, performs duties and functions shrouded in obscure and pleasurable forms of compensation. Vases and wood boxes. Stereos.
Santos had known him most of his life, and yet in law school Stein became a kind of celebrity to him, and to Santos's sisters and parents. Hours behind schedule, he would drive up to Washington Heights in the famous father's sleek and expensive cars, a different one every month, a Mercedes, a Lincoln, a Cadillac, another Mercedes, but not the Rolls, never the Rolls. He would come straight from court where, dressed like a dandy, he'd assisted the maestro, ready on his tongue-he could hardly get through the door before it fell out of him-an impossible story about Milton's latest client, the drug dealer or thief or rapist whose guilt was beyond question but whose rights were invariably violated by the police. The Santos family rolled their eyes. Even the mother, Milton's secretary of twenty-five years, as though she hadn't been there, hadn't helped prepare the motions, taken them down, collated them, glanced them over, passed them to Nathan herself in the well of the courtroom; as though she hadn't witnessed Milton Stein's angle, Nathan's angle too now, Stein & Stein's best and most successful defense: the irrelevance of guilt in a court of law.