“Oh, I’m really sorry about that, Mr. Weinstock. I’m not feeling so well today.”
“Mindy’s mom and I figured something must’ve been up when you didn’t come by the hospital yesterday.”
Suddenly, there was a king-sized knot in my gut. “Is something wrong? Did something happen? Is Mindy — ”
“Calm yourself, Moe. It’s all right. It’s okay. Mindy woke up a little bit more yesterday and her doctor thinks she should be transferred to a place in Westchester County where they have better facilities to handle her condition and rehabilitation. I’m calling because I didn’t want you to get scared if you came here today and found her room empty.”
“So you’re transferring her today?”
“In an hour. I don’t like to do it. She should be by her home, near her friends with her family. That’s what her mother and I think, but the doctors say it’s best and we have to do what the doctors say. We will call you later with all the particulars and let you know when you can come visit.”
“Is Mindy talking yet?”
“Not yet. She seems to recognize us sometimes, Moe. It’s wonderful to see a light in her eyes again. Sometimes when she’s at her most wakeful, you can swear she moves her lips like she’s trying to say words.”
“That’s great news, Mr. Weinstock. Please kiss her for me and tell her I love her.”
“We will do that. Don’t you worry. Like I said, we will call.”
I hung up the phone and headed for the bathroom. I made it as far as the hallway when the phone started ringing again. Did the world have a conspiracy against my bladder or what?
“Hello,” I answered generically, not wanting to offend Mindy’s dad if it was him calling back to tell me some forgotten detail.
“Hello? Since when do you answer the damn phone like a receptionist?” It was Bobby. “Where were you like five minutes ago when I called the first time? Then when I called back I got a busy signal.”
“That was you? I thought it was Mindy’s dad.”
“What? What happened? Did something — ”
I couldn’t take it any longer. “Hang on,” I said, letting go of the phone and racing for the bathroom. A minute later and a few pints lighter, I got back on the line. “You still there?”
“What the hell is going on with you?”
I explained the missed phone call, about Mr. Weinstock’s call, and about the call of nature.
“That’s great news about Mindy.”
“It is. So why are you calling this early?”
“I found Lids,” he said. “He’s safe. I thought you’d wanna know.”
“Good, I’ll go over and see — ”
Bobby interrupted. “You can’t see him.”
“Is he invisible?”
“I said he’s safe, Moe, not home.”
I didn’t like it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like it means. He’s okay. He’s safe. Someone’s keeping an eye on him for me.”
“You don’t even like the guy,” I said. “I practically had to beg you to look for him and now what, you’re watching over him like a mother hen?”
“Yeah, Moe, something like that.”
“Something like that? What the fuck am I supposed to tell his parents? They’re gonna want to get the cops involved.”
“Make up a story. You’re good at that.”
“What’s going on, Bobby?”
“Look, I don’t have time to explain. I’ve got an airport run this morning and I’m already running behind because I wanted to let you know Lids was okay. I’m taking Ronnie Ackerman’s grandma to JFK. You wanna come along? Maybe we can talk about things on the way back.”
I said yes before I thought about it.
“Okay,” he said. “Fifteen minutes. Be down in front of your building.” He was off the line before I had time to change my mind.
I stood there for a moment, the moot phone still in my hand. It wasn’t just that I was stunned by Bobby’s inexplicable transformation from reluctant searcher to guardian angel. It wasn’t about Lids at all, really. What happened is that it finally clicked for me. I understood what it was that had been gnawing at me since the cop woke me up on the side of the Belt Parkway. I thought back to the flat tire, to Bobby fussing with stuff in what should have been an empty trunk. I remembered him making me stay in the car and his keeping the trunk lid shut. I remembered the cop futzing around in the trunk too. I was positive Bobby was going to get arrested. I mean, he was already handcuffed and in the back of the cop car. Then, as if by magic, an accident up ahead forced the cop to kick Bobby loose. See, here’s the thing that came to me: there was no accident anywhere up ahead that day. After the cop split, we drove from Pennsylvania Avenue past Rockaway Parkway, Flatbush Avenue, Knapp Street, past Coney Island Avenue until we got off at Ocean Parkway. Not only was there no accident on either side of the road; there wasn’t even a slowdown. I guess I’d been so freaked out by what had happened between Bobby and the cop that it hadn’t fully registered.
Why had it taken two days to dawn on me? I didn’t have time to worry about it. Usually, I don’t like making excuses, but I had ample cause to be distracted. My girlfriend was comatose. I’d seen two murdered bodies. I’d been tied up, beaten up, nearly run over, and nearly run off the road. A week ago, if you had told me any two of those things would have happened to me over the course of my entire life, I would have called you crazy. So, yeah, I felt comfortable with giving myself a pass. There’d also been a change of plans, only I had no intention of telling Bobby about it.
• • •
I was downstairs in ten minutes, not fifteen. After brushing my teeth and throwing on some clothes, I left my building through a rear exit and found Aaron’s car where I’d parked it. Heading quickly away from the neighborhood, I kept a close eye out for Bobby’s car. For things to work out, I couldn’t afford for him to catch me sneaking away. I imagined Bobby’s perpetual smile curdling when he saw I wasn’t waiting for him in front of my building. His mood wouldn’t improve any either when he’d be forced to double-park his car so he could run into my building’s lobby to ring my apartment buzzer. He’d be pretty pissed when he finally realized that I wasn’t home and that I wasn’t coming with him. I didn’t like pulling this kind of shit on anyone, least of all Bobby, but I didn’t see that I had much of a choice. I had to buy enough time to get over to Ronnie Ackerman’s block before Bobby did.
Ronnie was a Burgundy House brother who lived on East 14th Street off Gravesend Neck Road. He lived there with his parents, his sister — pretty sexy in a gloomy, Sylvia Plath kind of way — and his bubbeh. I knew all of this because Ronnie’d had all of us over for a barbecue last spring. Good thing too. Otherwise, the mechanics of following Bobby around would have been that much more difficult. As it was, I had no faith I would be any good at playing at The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I’d never followed anyone in my life, certainly not in a car, and I understood it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked on TV. I was already behind the eight ball because there was a chance Bobby might recognize Aaron’s car in his rearview if I got too close. My one advantage was that I knew where the trip was beginning and where it would end, so I could afford to hang far back. All I had to do was keep Bobby’s 88 in sight.
I parked down the other end of East 14th Street, away from Ronnie’s house, and waited for Bobby’s car to pass. It took quite a while, or maybe it just seemed that way. If I didn’t believe that Bobby was lying to me or, at the very least, hiding stuff from me, I probably would’ve felt guilty about what I was doing. Guilt came as standard equipment in most Jews, and I was no exception. My uncle used to joke that Jews felt so guilty about everything that when the doctors slapped us at birth we felt like we deserved it. In a paper I wrote about Jewish guilt for a psych class, I claimed it was a perverse expression of cultural narcissism. If it turned out that I was misjudging Bobby, I’d eat my heart out with guilt at some later date. Guilt is good that way — it doesn’t have a shelf life.