“Check,” said Danny, stubbing out his cirette.
“That cop’s gonna come back around,” said Tony. “You talk to him. Cooperate, just don’t give him anything. We don’t want to look like we’re panicking.” Implicit in this assignment was the notion of Danny’s superior rapport with the fucking black cop.
“You make it sound like we’re the suspects,” I said.
“That’s how this cop made it sound,” said Tony. “It isn’t me.”
“What about me?” I said. “You want me-Criminal Fishrug!-to go with you? I know the place.”
“No,” said Tony. “You go explain to Julia.”
Julia Minna had come back with Frank from wherever he’d gone between the dissolution of the moving company and the founding of the detective agency. She might have been the last and greatest of the Minna girls, for all we knew-she sure looked the part: tall, plush, blond by nurture, defiant around the jaw. It was easy to imagine Minna joshing with her, untucking her shirt, taking an elbow in the stomach. But by the time we got to meet her the two had initiated their long, dry stalemate. All that remained of their original passion was a faint crackle of electricity animating their insults, their drab swipes at one another. That was all that showed anyway. Julia terrified us at first, not for anything she did, but because of her cool grip on Minna, and also how tense he was around her, how ready to punish us with his words.
If Julia and Frank had still been animated, quickened with love, we might have remained in infantile awe of her, our fascination and lust still adolescent. But the chill between them was an opening. In our imaginations we became Frank and loved her, unchilled her, grew to manhood in her arms. If we were angry or disappointed with Frank Minna we felt connected to his beautiful, angry, disappointed wife, and were thrilled. She became an idol of disillusionment. Frank had shown us what girls were, and now he’d shown us a woman. And by failing to love her, he’d left a margin for our love to grow.
In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna-that wasn’t news. But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would do better than Frank, and make her happy.
Or so went dreams. I suppose over the years the other Minna Men conquered their fear and awe and desire of Julia, or anyway modulated it, by finding women of their own to make happy and unhappy, to enchant and disenchant and discard.
All except me, of course.
In the beginning Minna had Julia installed in the office of a Court Street lawyer, in a storefront as small as L &L’s. We Men used to drop in on her there with little deliveries, messages or gifts from Frank, and watch her answering phones, reading People, making bad coffee. Minna seemed eager to show us off to her, more eager than he was to drop in himself. Similarly, he seemed pleased to have Julia on showcase there, under glass on Court Street. We all intuitively gasped Minna’s instinct for human symbols, for moving us around to mark territory, so in this one sense Julia Minna had joined the Men, was on the team. Something went wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna’s old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she’d stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta’s plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street’s assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.
I went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.
“Hello, Lionel,” Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn’t going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.
Julia rummaged in her dresser, her back still turned. I propped myself in the closet doorframe, feeling awkward.
I could make out her labored breathing as she fumbled through the drawers.
“Who told you, Julia? Eat, eat, eat-” I ground my teeth, trying to check the impulse.
“Who do you think? I got a call from the hospital.”
“Eat, ha ha, eat-” I revved like a motor.
“You want me to eat you, Lionel?” Her tone was grimly casual. “Just come out and say it.”
“Okayeatme,” I said gratefully. “You’re packing? I mean, I don’t mean the gun.” I thought of Minna reprimanding Gilbert at the car, a few hours before. You with no gun, he’d said. That’s how I sleep at night. “Packing your clothes-”
“Did they tell you to come over here and comfort me?” she said sharply. “Is that what you’re doing?”
She turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn’t carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.
The scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.
She looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. “You jerks killed him,” she said.
Her cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she’d catch her slip on fire-it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already-and that I’d have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette’s-my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.
“It wasn’t us, Julia,” I said. “We just didn’t manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.”
“That’s great,” she said. “That sounds great. You’ve got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?” She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.
I mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.
“Jerktalk!” I said.
She ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn’t be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop’s red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia’s glossy outline.
“You can’t go, Julia.”