Settling deeper into his chair the visitor removed a leatherette memo book and a mechanical pencil from his breast pocket. “They call me Buck, and so can you.”
“Thanks, Buck. How about a refill?”
“No problem.” The visitor filled Karl’s glass three quarters full this time, still poured nothing for himself. “Is Tildy going to be here later? Are you expecting her at any special time?”
“Nope.”
“We figured to have heard from her by now. She left us in kind of a hurry, you know. Not a word.”
“So you work for the ball team, is that it?”
“The corporation has many different interests.” The visitor looked at his watch. “You think I might be able to talk to her, umm, say tomorrow?”
“Not likely. Tildy, see, she’s on kind of a vacation. Her old man croaked just a while ago and she’s been wound pretty tight over that.”
“Yeah, Tildy’s a sensitive girl.” Scribbling something on the pad. “So maybe this isn’t the best time to bother her, but we do owe her some back pay and we’d like to settle up as soon as possible, no hard feelings. You tell me where she’s staying and I can get that check to her right away.”
Karl tried to speak in mid-gulp and spilled bourbon down inside his shirt. “Damn surprise check, huh? Now you talkin’. And we can use the money, yes sir. I just knew there was somethin’ fine all ready to pop up like that today. You know how every once in a while you’ll wake up with a feelin’? Like maybe you had a dream was meant to show you …”
“Where do I find her.” The pencil hovered.
“Tell you what. Seein’ as how you all’d like to get your paperwork squared away, whyn’t you let me have the check right now and be done with it? I could hold it for her till she gets back.”
The visitor flinched, doodled interlocking circles on his pad. “Well, it’s not … It’s not that simple. Before I can, umm, actually … Before I can write anything up I have to discuss a few minor details with her. Per diem expenses, that kind of thing.” The circles expanding now, moving unevenly across the page. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t trust you in terms of holding the money. But … I think I will have one with you.” He grabbed at the bottle.
“Come on ahead, amigo. I’ll go get the radio from the other room and we can listen to some tunes.”
“No, that’s okay.” Shivering at his first sip.
“No trouble. I’ll just plug her in over there.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. Really.”
“Sure. I was only thinkin’ we might have a little party. Got a ways to go on that bottle yet.”
The visitor looked disconsolately at what remained in his glass. “If you don’t mind an observation on my part, Karl, you seem a little nervous.”
“No shit. Mite keyed up, huh? Probably just lonesome is all, cooped up in here.”
“Have you heard from Tildy at all? A postcard?”
“Nah. We don’t get much in the way of mail around here.”
“I hope you won’t get hot, but I have to ask this: Has your wife left you? Did she take a walk on you, Karl?”
“You’re pissin’ on the wrong hydrant there, Buck.” Karl lurched out of his chair, gestured sloshingly with his glass. “You got business with Tildy, you wanna ask me some questions, I don’t mind. But don’t you go pullin’ my chain. I got as much dignity as the next sucker. Goddamn right. Now both of us on the road, me and Tildy been separated a lot, but we got a solid understandin’ and we got plans. Hell, she called me from New York last night just to hear my voice.”
The visitor leaned back and arranged his hair, catching his reflected profile in the windowpane. “She give you the address of the hotel?”
A vague sense that he had left the door to the lion cage open flapped at the outskirts of Karl’s mind. “Never said she was at no hotel.”
“Didn’t you?” The visitor topped up Karl’s glass.
Lounging amid shadows and smoke at the Kenilworth, Tildy and Christo argued over where to go for dinner.
“Anyway, I don’t like Greek food,” Tildy said. “It’s too greasy.”
“I heard you the first time.”
She stretched herself across the bed until her palms were resting on the warped brown floorboards. She wore a green baseball cap, flowered panties and a plastic lei rescued from a garbage can.
“I love these little pork chops,” Christo said, petting her shoulder blades.
A photographic rendering of this scene, the kind of grainy enlargement brought into a courtroom and mounted on an easel, might be advanced as the image of two young citizens in a state of postcoital entrancement. That would be an unscrupulous frame-up. In truth, bodily contact had been negligible. Tildy was bewildered, having expected more, some show of possessiveness after she’d spent a second night at the Chemikazi loft.
“How about seafood? You got to like shrimp.”
Tildy jumped up, shook herself. Balanced on the balls of her feet, one arm shielding her breasts, she scanned the twilight street framed by the open window.
That New York mystique had thus far escaped her. Another city just like the others; bigger, with each rudiment carried to a further extreme, but adding up to not very much. A cannon and a peashooter, were pretty much the same.
“What are we doing in this fleabag anyway?” Tildy wanted to know. “There’s all the money from Pierce for the grass we brought up, but then you hole up here like you just got out on parole.”
“What is it you want, a place with a view of the park? I can send you on a tour to the Statue of Liberty tomorrow, if that’s what you’re after.”
“Don’t strain yourself missing the point, Jimmy. This was supposed to be a holiday. I left all my aches and pains to go on a spree, but here I am with the mildewed room and the cold hamburgers and I might as well be back on the road with the Cougarettes. So what’s the story? Am I being punished for getting it on with Looie?”
“We got no ties. You don’t owe me one little crumb of fidelity. And don’t call me Jimmy.” Christo spoke in freeze-dried tones. “Far as the money goes, that’s my business, my score. It’s capital. Always I’d build a little roll, then fritter it away, but this time I’m going to make the right moves. Nothing to do with you one way or the other.”
“So you’re a pretty conventional asshole after all. You make with that gaudy outlaw routine, but it’s all a shuck.”
“Wish you could see how you look coming on all righteous in panties and a plastic lei.”
“Get bent.”
There followed several minutes of arctic, high-tension silence. Then Christo gently asked if she still wanted to go out and eat. Tildy replied that in her present mood whether they huddled mutely in the room or went for an all-night hike, stopping for beer and pretzels in every bar en route, was of no interest at all to her.
Before Christo could counterpunch, there came a vehement pounding at the door. Just as glad of the interruption, he slid off the bed. “Probably room service with our lobster Newburg.”
Tildy buttoned herself into Christo’s denim jacket as the door opened. A pop-eyed individual in a rumpled trench coat darted into the room and pointed his finger like a gun.
“Bingo. How’s the little shortstop getting along?”
“Vinnie.” She spoke the name with tired, unsurprised disgust.
“Vinnie?”
“Vinnie Sparn, ex-manager of the Cougarettes.”
“Want me to bounce him?”
Vinnie backed toward the window, staking out some territory. “I see I came at a bad time. Sorry to spoil the party but it can’t be helped. Sure, I could come back later, but think how I’d feel having to start all over again ’cause you’d skipped out in the meantime. After coming all this way to find you.”