Abbey answered the door. “Well, hello, papa,” she said.
She was young; that was the most significant thing about her. She had borne two children but still managed to retain a kind of teenage ebullience. Everything she said, she said with enthusiasm; every gesture had a synaptic energy of its own. Her lithe body made Reardon feel dense and heavy. Just being around her made him feel tired.
Reardon removed his hat. “Hi,” he said. He did not feel like the bouncy, lovable, garrulous old grandpa he knew she expected him to be.
Abbey took Reardon by the arm and escorted him into the living room of the apartment. It was a place of pastels. Pastel blue walls. Pastel upholstery on the chairs and sofa. Even the paintings were pastel, little girls in soft-colored dresses, their cheeks lightly flushed with pink.
“You look tired,” she said after they had both sat down. “Have you been eating regularly?”
Reardon tried to make a joke to please and relieve her. “I eat regularly, six times a day,” he said, smiling ludicrously as he patted himself on the stomach.
“Weight becomes you,” Abbey said.
Suddenly Reardon remembered her at Millie’s funeral, remembered the pained expression that had passed over her face when Timothy had performed his counterfeit of grief. Impulsively, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.
“Well, thank you,” she said lightly, but Reardon could tell that something in his gesture had alarmed her.
“I have moments…” Reardon heard himself say, knowing that his sudden gesture of affection had surged up from that other part of him that frightened him with its power. “I have moments…” he began again, but the rest of the sentence died in his mouth.
“What?” she asked, clearly concerned now.
“Nothing.”
“Are you all right?”
Reardon tried to smile. “Yes, I’m all right.” He felt sorry that he had lost control, had imposed himself upon her light-heartedness and goodwill.
“Really?” Abbey said. “You sure?”
Reardon forced a laugh. “Of course, of course. Can’t an old man kiss a lovely young lady?”
“Sure,” Abbey said brightly. She leaned forward and kissed him. “Can a young lady kiss a great-looking father-in-law?”
“Sure,” Reardon said.
“Timothy will be in in a moment,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”
“Irish whiskey.”
“I’ll get it.”
She left the room, and Reardon could hear her talking to his son in the next room. There seemed to be some urgency in their voices, but he could not tell what it was all about. He looked down at his hat. Gray and weathered, it looked incongruous on the expensive chair with its lavender silk upholstery. He felt like an intruder, a poor relation swept up to their apartment by some sudden calamity – fire or flood or worse. He did not belong there with the luxurious furniture, the marble and the lace and the delicate vases with flower designs. In his life he had been invited to such rooms only when a dead body lay on the floor, its blood silently staining the Oriental rug.
“How are you, Father?” Timothy asked as he entered the room. He wore a dark-gray pinstripe suit. Below the coat a vest was drawn primly over his stomach. His tie was pulled tightly against his throat as if he were going to a corporate board meeting. He had recently taken to calling Reardon “father,” rather than the more familiar “papa.”
“Hello, Tim,” Reardon said.
“How are you?” Timothy sat down in a chair opposite Reardon and sipped casually from a martini glass.
“Fine. Where are the children?”
“At the symphony.”
Reardon nodded, wondering who had taken them, since both parents were at home. But then, he recalled, times were different now; people could be hired to do such things.
“Well, do you like being back at work?” Timothy asked.
Reardon nodded.
Timothy took a long, dark cigar from his coat pocket and handed it to Reardon.
“No, thanks,” Reardon said.
“What? My father turning down a good cigar?”
“I’ve quit smoking.”
“Really? Well, give it to one of your associates.”
Associates? thought Reardon. “No,” he said, “keep it.”
“Very well,” Timothy said. “I don’t smoke them, as you know, but I thought you might like it. Very expensive, you know.”
“It would probably be too strong for me, anyway,” Reardon said dryly.
Timothy slapped his knees lightly and smiled. “Well, now, how are things on the force?”
“Same as always.”
“Murder and mayhem, I suppose.”
“The usual.”
“Ever thought of an early retirement?”
Here it comes again, Reardon thought. “I like to work, Tim,” he said. “I don’t want to retire. I’ve told you that before. What would I do? What is it you think I would do if I retired?”
“Anything,” Timothy said. He raised his arm and gently massaged the back of his neck while he stared absently into Reardon’s face.
“No,” Reardon said. “I’m not looking forward to retirement. I’ll leave when they make me leave.”
“Still the same old hardtack,” Timothy said.
“Maybe. Is my whiskey almost ready?”
“Sure, Abbey will bring it in shortly. We don’t drink Irish whiskey around here, so you should take the bottle with you when you go. It just sits here. Nobody drinks it.”
“I have a bottle at home,” Reardon said. He did not want his son’s Irish whiskey, or his son’s financial support for retirement, or his son’s way of life.
Timothy nodded and leaned back in his chair. He seemed as exhausted and impatient with their conversation as Reardon was.
“How’s your work coming?” Reardon asked dutifully.
“Fine, fine,” Timothy said. “But sometimes I think our firm should employ some detectives to help us with some of our cases. You know, old-fashioned street cops like yourself who can slice through all the rhetoric and get to the meat of the thing.”
“The what?”
“The rhetoric,” Timothy said, “slice through the rhetoric.”
Reardon nodded.
“Some of the lawyers on my staff are ineffective at investigation and research. Everything has to be laid out for them.”
Reardon nodded.
“They aren’t self-motivated. They have to be told everything. No initiative.”
Reardon nodded. “Maybe so,” he said.
That night Reardon had the first dream he could remember in many years. He was sitting on a beach in the fog, smoking a cigarette, when a woman’s body floated quietly up on shore. She lay face down at his feet, the top of her head resting easily on the tip of his shoe. Her hair was long and red and she was wearing a flowered dress. A tide gently swept a single strand of pearls from under her neck and then drew it back again.
In the dream Reardon was not at all shocked or frightened by the body. It had seemed to come on shore as naturally as a wave, and he stared at it without emotion, as if it were no more than a brightly colored shell. His eyes moved calmly over her dress. He noted the flowers in the design, small red rose buds alternating in diagonal lines with rows of pink dogwood petals. He remembered that he had seen this same dress in a shop window at the corner of 60th Street and Second Avenue almost twenty-five years before and had almost bought it for his wife’s birthday. He wondered how many such dresses had been made and in how many shops they had been sold. He bent over and started to look for a label, but in so doing he touched the woman’s bright-red hair, and a blade of terror pierced his loins and drove upward into his brain. Instantly he tried to run, but the hair transformed itself into a claw and seized his hand and began dragging him into the water. Frantically he tried to pull free, but the claw gripped his hand like a steel vise, and by the time his first scream broke through the fog he was waist-deep in the sea. His eyes ravaged the shore for someone to rescue him, looking for help, overturning garbage cans and stripping wharves. They burned off the surrounding fog and split open the dunes and overturned the cottages behind them, but still there was no one to save him. His last scream was stifled by the salt water flooding his mouth as he went down.