“Bail or bond?” he tried to crack wise as he left. It didn’t work.
The Pole was bossy and informative, giving remarkably precise times and details of my comings and goings.
Naïma was hurried out of bed for questioning and arrived looking worried and hollow-eyed.
They even visited Dad’s room, where Tony Bennett was warbling, “If we never meet again...”
“What are yis havin’?” Dad asked the cops. Then: “Have you a light on that bicycle?”
They went away and left him alone.
They took me with them.
Two days later I was home again. George went bail, with nothing proved or decided either way. The eight hoodies couldn’t be found, obviously, although George and Noureddine were working on it. If those guys were from Astoria, they were dead meat. If they were from elsewhere, I was.
I was just thinking about lots of fresh coffee when I heard the door chimes and saw Jessica hobbling toward the door. I could see Pepe pretending to trim something with shears in the garden. Sean was slumped in a sofa, not sure whether he was more angry with me than he was sorry for himself. I spoke to him little. I didn’t know how.
Jessica ushered four people into the hall, all looking like Jehovah’s Witnesses on the way to a ball. They said they were real estate brokers, sent by Eddie to visit the house, swore blue that someone had given them an appointment.
It was certainly beginning to look like a plot. I felt more like Hamlet by the minute.
They checked out the house, came back to the hall again, and asked to see the cellar. I said there was no cellar. They informed me there was an extensive cellar. I changed my tune and asked Jessica to get the key. She shuffled off to the kitchen and returned after a while looking purple and perplexed. There was no sign of the key.
“Surely you have a second key,” said one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I hate people who use the word surely.
“No surely about it,” I answered. “The door is reinforced, for the wine, and Dad lost the key before he lost his mind, or shortly after. There was one key left, in the kitchen, always in the same place. Nobody’s been down there for a long time, the wine was my father’s baby.”
I didn’t tell them about my own (poor) taste in wine, or the fact that Pepe thought the marquis on the bottles was my father.
George arrived just then, got the measure of the scene, and hooshed them out the door to their fancy car, saying, “It’ll take a locksmith, it’s reinforced. We’ll call you already.”
Jessica joined in then, and Sean. “This house is in mourning!” they shouted. “Get outta here!”
The suits were so astonished, they just left, saying they’d need an appointment to visit The Two Way Inn.
“Visit it,” said George. “Anyone can. It’s open from dawn to dusk.” Then to me, he said, “What harm can it do? You’re not married to ’em. Yet.”
George spent the rest of the day calling the locksmith, calling Noureddine, keeping me on the wagon, and driving me to my bank, where a young man in a bad suit and eyeglasses told me the Swamp Rat had cleared out all of our accounts. I thought I caught a glimpse of the bank manager observing me through sanded glass somewhere, but George said I was paranoid. “Ye goin’ perrenawd on me,” was what he said.
The young man looked at me as if to say, Ya ain’t the first and ya won’t be the last.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said George, which wasn’t how I’d describe it.
Back home Jessica fed us, then I tried to reach Eddie in Vancouver. It took me awhile to hunt up the number, and it cost me a great deal to dial it. Sean sat and watched. I’d never have managed it if George hadn’t been there. Now I knew how my mother used to feel.
There was no reply. I didn’t think it funny he wouldn’t even have a servant, or an answering service.
We contacted several retirement homes for my dad. I thought there might be a problem with proof of income and all that, but George said it was best to have a place ready in case the worst happened.
“So what’s the worst can happen?” I asked.
“You in the clink,” said George. “The rest of the family can manage for themselves, your dad can’t.” Sean didn’t look like he agreed much.
A locksmith friend of George’s was due to turn up after work the following day and tackle the cellar door. I was all for cancelling him and forgetting about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but George thought we should go through the motions, at least till we contacted Eddie.
A lady came out from a home to check Dad out. I thought this untimely haste. She went up and explained to him exactly what she was doing there.
“No bother at all. Work away,” he replied, as if he’d understood everything. Then he said, “What time is the tea? I’d eat a scabby child off the floor.” He leaned over and put on Richard Harris singing “MacArthur Park.”
The retirement home lady and George had gone when I went up to spend ten minutes with Naïma before she left.
“He’s very restless,” she said. “Something’s upset him. He’s been through his box three times already.”
We agreed he might have understood about the retirement home.
As we settled him and fluffed his pillows, I noticed something odd on the white sheet, under his ass. It was a warm key.
“The ship’s name was Murphy and the boat’s goin’ up a hill,” he said, looking at me and giggling.
It turned out to be the key to the cellar, of course.
The Pole was in place and a thick fog had crept in from the river when George came by for a nightcap, later. I was sitting in my TV seat, as usual, watching nothing.
“Is The Two Way Inn running itself these days?” he asked.
“They’ll rob no more and no less, they know the score.”
I told him about the key. He was enthusiastic.
“Let’s do it,” he said, “before those assholes in the suits come back.”
Armed with flashlights and warm pullovers, we headed down there. I thought we might bring up a few bottles of real wine as well.
The cellar had more rooms than the ground floor, since some of them had been made into smaller spaces for storage. I reckoned nothing down there but the wine would be usable after years in dust and damp. Even the central heating and air-conditioning had been installed in a building off to the side of the ground floor, so nothing varied the conditions down here. You could feel the fog oozing in from the street and garden. I noticed a half-dozen shed snakeskins.
George was going through the wine and I was giving a last check to each corner, when I almost stumbled on something soft that gave with my foot. It stank.
There were two bodies, one lying flung over the other. By their clothes, I could tell that the one underneath was a woman, the one on top a man. I gagged. George came running.
Before I even got a proper look at them, he waved me upstairs to call the cops.
I didn’t think they’d believe me this time.
We all waited for them in Dad’s room. I was still coughing stuff out of my throat.
“Throw it up,” said Dad, “the chickens’ll ate it.”
“I quit,” said the Pole.
“So do I,” I replied.
I tried calling Eddie one more time. There was still no reply. I was beginning to think I knew where he was.
The cops took me with them again. It was more complicated, although they probably reckoned that even if I’d killed the Swamp Rat, it was still manslaughter and not first-degree murder. Much as I disliked her and wondered what she’d done with my money, I wished it was neither.