“If you’ll just excuse us for a moment, Donnie,” said Bob, emphasizing the name as if it were an insult. “Sandy and I were having a rather personal discussion.”
“Sandy and you? Personal? I don’t think so.”
“Donald, stop it now,” said the woman. “This is ridiculous. He just bought me a drink.”
“Shut up and let me deal with this jerk.”
“That’s no way to talk to a lady,” said Bob cheerfully. “In fact, I think it would be better for everyone if you would just go home now and leave us be.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Absolutely,” said Bob, a peculiar smile on his face, peculiar because it wasn’t meek or conciliatory in the least, which made it all the more infuriating.
The man took a step forward.
Sandy shouted out, “Donald, no.”
The man cocked his fist.
I rose from my seat, ready to do what I could to stop the massacre. Fricasseed Bob, no doubt about it. We’d be scraping him off the walls.
But then Bob shifted to his left, bent down, and exploded upward, slamming his elbow smack into Donnie’s face with a crack that sounded like a line drive to center field.
There was a crystalline moment of stunned silence in the bar when everything stopped, when everyone froze, when nothing yet had been sorted out and the disastrous possibilities seemed endless.
And then a shriek, a holler, and the scrape of a chair skidding away as Donnie collapsed to the floor, hands over his nose, blood leaking through his fingers.
Bob reached a hand out to Sandy.
She slapped his hand away, dropped down to minister to Donnie, cradled his head in her arms. “Sweetie? Donnie? Are you all right, Donnie? Sweetie? Say something, please.”
“My nose,” moaned the boyfriend. “He broke my nose.”
Bob took it all in impassively. When the bartender reached over the bar to grab for him, Bob shrugged him off. He backed away, winked at me, and left the bar, vanishing before anyone could stop him.
The bartender and I both rushed outside after him. We scanned the streets veering away from the corner, first Lombard, then Twentieth. Empty, vacant, Bobless.
“Who the hell was that?” asked the bartender.
“That,” I said, “was Bob.”
Back inside, Donnie was still on the floor, sitting up now, one hand over his nose, his white shirt splattered with his own blood. Sandy was holding him, hugging him, straightening his hair.
One of the old men leaned over. “Let me see it,” said the man.
Donnie removed his hand. His nose was an amorphous blob.
“It’s broke,” said the man, his voice high with delight. “Broke, broke, broke. No doubt about it. I seen enough of them. The hospital’s just down the street. You ought to get that thing fixed.”
We helped him onto his feet, helped him out the door. He pushed us away when we tried to help him further, and he and his girl, both of her arms around him now in support, walked slowly toward the bright lights of the emergency room.
I paid the bill, searched the area to no avail, shrugged, and went home. Bob was waiting in front of my building. He leaned against a wall, his arms were crossed, he seemed to be insufferably pleased with himself.
“Are you insane?” I said to him.
“I just did Donnie the biggest favor of his life.”
“You weren’t interested in Sandy?”
“Please,” said Bob. “I prefer a little more substance on the bone.”
“So then it was all a setup.”
“Their relationship was in dire straits, it needed some juice. Years from now, when the two of them are celebrating their wedding anniversary, with their children all around, they’ll think back on the most important day of their lives, the day they recommitted themselves to their future together. They day he fought for her, the day she rushed to his aid.”
“You set him up and then you broke his nose.”
“I try to help,” said Bob.
“But you broke his nose.”
“That, I’m afraid, wasn’t part of the plan. Accidents happen, Victor, remember that. Sometimes even the best of intentions go awry. But often the accidents work out for the best. Think of Donnie with his new nose. It will enhance his features, don’t you think? Lend his face the character it was sorely lacking.”
“What gave you the right?”
“We are all fellow travelers. We don’t have the right to turn away.”
“So you step in whether they want you to or not?”
“I do my part.”
“You are insane,” I said.
“Like a rabid fox,” said Bob. “But let me ask you this, Victor. Whom did you help today?”
As I said, he had a hobby. And he was right, I hadn’t done a teacup’s worth of good that day. And he was probably right about Donnie and Sandy, too. They had seemed closer, with Donnie holding back the blood from his nose and Sandy wrapping her arms about him, much more the loving couple. And the broken nose probably would improve Donnie’s appearance and, after it was set, maybe improve his sinuses, too. Who knew, maybe Bob was just what they both had needed. But still, I saw the blood leaking between Donnie’s fingers, the blood splattered on his fine white shirt, dripping onto the floor. And I couldn’t help but wonder if the answer I was looking for, the answer to a killing I was still trying to solve, was there in the blood.
I was just then in the middle of the François Dubé murder case, and I sensed that Bob was somehow in the middle of it, too – that was why I had taken him to the bar, why I had swiped his fingerprints. The Dubé case was the usual type that falls upon a lawyer’s desk, a case of murder, of protested innocence, of history and dentistry and the best of intentions gone all to hell. Not to mention the gratuitous sex and the gratuitous violence. Not to mention.
Yet for me it was a case about more than a lone woman dying in a whirlwind of her own blood. It also started me to thinking about the benefits and costs of involving yourself in other people’s lives. When are we compelled to help? When does a helping hand turn meddlesome? And when does meddling turn murderous? The questions proved to be more than idle, they proved to be a matter of life and death.
Mine, for instance.
But it didn’t start with Bob, no. His role would be crucial, yes, but he would appear later in the story, he was not there at the beginning for me. No, for me it started with a cashier’s check in the amount of five hundred dollars from another self-centered son of a bitch, François Dubé.
2
“Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Carl,” said François Dubé in his strong French accent. “Can I call you Victor?”
“Sure,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”
“Vic?”
“Victor.”
“I am so grateful that you came.”
“You sent us a cashier’s check for five hundred dollars to pay for this meeting,” I said. “We’re not here as a favor.”
“But still, Victor. I feel better already. It is as if hope has returned to my life.”
“I’m just a lawyer, Mr. Dubé.”
“But where I am now, I do not need a priest, I do not need a doctor. Where I am now, only a lawyer can help.”
I’ll give him this, he was right about that.
François Dubé looked like the scruffy college professor all the girls fall in love with their sophomore year. Maybe that’s why I was wary, because he was better-looking than me, but I don’t think so. Or maybe it was because he was French and had all those curlicues and accents attached to the letters of his name, like some baroque affectation, but that didn’t seem to be it either. No, I think it was a visceral reaction to his very persona. I could feel the danger in him, the violence. It was in his eyes, pale blue and unaccountable, with a bright golden flaw in his left iris that seemed to light demonically. It was in his scarred hands, clutching each other as if to keep them from lurching angrily about. Yes, true, it might also have been the prison jumpsuit, I am not immune to such subtle cues, but for the record let me state, something about him put me on guard. And did I mention he was French?