“I don’t, I mean, I’m sorry.”
“Shut up, Victor.”
From the front seat Wayman laughed like a little maniac, first a hoot and then a series of loud snivels.
“This friend is very special to me, do you understand, and I like to keep track of who she is with.”
“She? A her?”
“You are a bright one, aren’t you. This friend of mine,” said Mr. Rogers, “she has this way of… let’s say attaching herself to people. I don’t want her to attach herself to you.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“We aren’t talking,” he said sharply. “I’m talking. Who I’m talking about is Ronnie Ashland. It is all part of the same thing. And what I’m saying is you stay away from her.”
“Veronica?”
“I assume you heard me, then. Any part of what I said you didn’t understand?”
“Why? What’s she to you?”
“He wants to know why, Wayman.”
“It’s not such a swift idea to ask why ‘round here,” said Wayman.
“I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Rogers in a sweet voice. “Because if you don’t I’m going to hurt you.”
Wayman let out his scary, sniveling laugh again.
“I’m going to hurt you bad.”
“That’s why enough for me,” I said quickly, almost gaily.
“Good, Victor. Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. Take us home, Wayman.”
“Yessir, Chauncey.”
Mr. Rogers took another sip from his glass of the councilman’s scotch. “You know, Victor, the extra twelve years really do make a difference.”
Wayman pulled the limo into the same spot we had been parked in before and killed the engine. Mr. Rogers finished his drink, put the glass back in the bar, and lifted up the panel.
“I never want to see you again, Victor, so be sure to remember all I told you this evening. If I leave one of my calling cards you’ll know it and I hope for your sake you’ll also know enough to be scared.”
He got out of the car and held the door open for Wayman, who skipped out of the front seat and leaned through the open door and smashed me in the face with the back of his hand.
I grasped my head in my hands and dropped it between my knees. Pain shot from my cheek to my groin and my eyeball stung so much I thought he had popped it and the fluid was running down my cheek. I opened my eyes through the pain and saw a blurry car floor and, with relief that my sight was still there, I heaved loudly and started to vomit.
Wayman remained leaning in the open door as I puked. “Tell me something, Vi’tor Carl,” he said. “You gots to pay more for two first names?” Then he laughed his sniveled laugh once more.
I was still bent double, hand covering my eye, gasping for a clear breath, when Henry came back to the car. “Aw, mon,” he said. “Him a-chucking in the car.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
“Aw, shit, mon, him a-chucking in the car. Councilman Moore, he won’t be liking that at all, mon.”
“Just fuck off.”
As he drove away from the corner the limo’s windows and the roof opened electronically, letting in the cool of the night. The fresh air only made it worse.
19
MY RIGHT EYE WAS swollen thick and pretty by the morning, with a dark swath sitting directly atop my cheekbone, fading into a brownish stain that ran like coffee down my cheek. The night before I had fallen into bed with an ice cube wrapped in a towel and that might have helped for a while, but I still woke in my suit pants and shirtsleeves, the towel empty, my sheets wet, the faint taste of vomit in my teeth. When I saw my eye in the mirror I wanted to heave again.
“What happened to you?” asked Ellie when I came into the office that morning.
“I walked into a door,” I said.
“Looks like the door had a left hook.”
“Just do me a favor, all right, Ellie,” I said. “Call up Bill Prescott’s secretary over at Talbott, Kittredge and ask her to send over a copy of the report by some jury-polling service he commissioned for the Moore and Concannon case.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “By the way, I have that address you asked for, the address of Winston Osbourne’s daughter.”
She handed me a handwritten note with an address in Malvern. Malvern, big lawns and old money in the heart of Chester County. I had never been there, but I knew there were horses in Malvern, horses and gentlemen farmers and old stone houses. It was Radnor Hunt country. Not too many synagogues in Malvern, I would bet.
“Perfect,” I said. “Send a copy of our judgment to the Chester County Sheriff’s Office and tell them we think Osbourne’s Duesenberg is parked at that address in Malvern. Get the serial number from the file and tell them we want it seized, immediately. Pay any fees required out of the account.” It was nice to have an account out of which to pay any fees required. Solvency felt better than I ever thought it would.
“What should they do if they find it?” she asked.
“Just have them grab it and hold it for me. I’ll decide then.”
I was behind my desk when Beth came in. “Don’t ask,” I said in response to her query.
“Did you fall down the steps?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
“Were you drinking last night?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you having a problem?”
“Yes, but not with my drinking.”
“If you’re having a problem there are people you can see.”
“Stop it, Beth. With what I drink I’d die from hypoglycemia before I became an alcoholic.”
“That eye looks nasty,” she said. “Let me get you something.” She left the office for a moment, coming back with a wet paper towel. “Now close your eyes.”
She patted the wet towel to the puffed flesh just above my cheekbone. I meant to tell her not to, but the cool of the towel was so soothing. With my eyes closed and the dabbing coolness and Beth’s perfume, a sweet and floral mixture that reminded me of someone, I couldn’t remember who, but someone with whom I had once been in love, the whole mixture of sensations took me right out of that office, right out of my present. I was disappointed when she finally stopped.
“That was great,” I said.
She gave me the towel and I continued to dab, but now I was back in my office, back in my life, and it didn’t feel half so good. “How’s your investigation going?” she asked.
“I’ve been called off.”
“By who?”
“By Moore and Prescott and my client.”
“I bet you were called off by Moore and Prescott and your client sort of went along.”
“Sort of.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Exactly what I’ve been told to do,” I said. “Absolutely nothing other than cashing my checks.”
“Nothing is pretty hard to do sometimes,” she said.
“Not this time,” I didn’t want to tell her about Chuckie Lamb’s threats or Mr. Rogers’s warnings. She’d look at the situation perfectly sensibly and have me do something like tell the police or withdraw from the case and I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted to do was to stay far away from trouble and I knew how to do it, too. I would ask no more questions about Bissonette’s murder or the missing quarter of a million. I would sit quietly at the trial and collect my fees and each night go home, alone, like a good little boy, and wait for my prosperity. I would make no waves. That would satisfy Prescott and Jimmy and Chuckie and the strange Mr. Rogers. What I wanted to do was to forget the complications that were rising like flood waters about me. What I wanted to do was float safely through the fall into winter and put all this behind me. What I wanted to do was…
My phone rang.
“There’s someone here to see you,” said Rita, our receptionist.
“You’re supposed to tell me who is here to see me,” I said into the phone. “That’s in the job description.”
“Well, whoever it is, he looks like a short Rasputin if Rasputin had eaten too much chocolate pudding.”