Goldilocks (33 page)

Kit viewed her with fresh eyes, as if a window had been slightly raised in her mind. “Are we alike?”

“I try not to size up people too fast, so I’ll let you answer that.”

In an unsettling way Kit felt she was dealing with another lawyer, one with a stronger case and more trial experience. “You could very easily intimidate me,” she said. “Are you asking me to back off on Barney?”

“Why would I do that?” Louise glanced at the jelly. “Is that strawberry?”

“Yes.”

She spread a generous amount on her toast and said, “I don’t think I intimidate you, Kit. At least not very much. So maybe you’d better tell me exactly what’s on your mind, unless you just wanted to get a look at me. I’m supposed to be Mafia, you know, did Barney tell you?”

“Not in so many words.” Kit smiled archly. “But all Italians are, aren’t they?”

“No,” Louise said, chewing easily. “Some are pretenders.”

Kit lifted her coffee cup. “Shall I get to it?”

“Please. I don’t have that much time.”

“There’s something between you and Barney I know nothing about,” Kit said with quiet concern. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but as a lawyer I don’t like unknown factors. As a woman in this situation, I like them even less.”

“You want to know what Barney is to me. He’s a buddy. I call him when I need him. On occasion he calls me. What we have is private and too basic to explain. It wouldn’t come out right in the telling.”

“If you give me the chance, maybe I can make sense of it.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“But I do,” Kit persisted gently. “Is it sex?”

“A man and a woman, it’s always sex. Barney might deny it, but I won’t. Does that bother you?”

“It’s the emotional attachment that bothers me. Besides, it’s impossible not to be jealous. You’re a beautiful woman.”

“You have an edge. You’re younger.”

“I don’t think too many people would guess that,” Kit said over the rim of her cup. “I noticed something when we walked in. It was you the men looked at first.”

“That’s not necessarily a compliment, is it?”

“But it’s a proof of strength. That’s your edge.”

Both women finished their toast and shook the crumbs from their fingers. The waiter poured more coffee, Louise’s move to cover her cup coming too late. Her hand, Kit noticed for the third or fourth time, was as smooth and slender as a girl’s, the jeweled wedding ring exquisitely demure. The doctor had returned and shot glances at them over his
Wall Street Journal.
The heavy man who had failed to add them up stared shamelessly, his attention evenly divided, as if each were a creature to whom the gods had blown a kiss. Louise cast aside her napkin.

“If it’ll make you feel better, I’ve always been jealous of blondes.”

“I’ve always been jealous of women who look like Sophia Loren.”

“We’re full of compliments, aren’t we? What you don’t understand is we’re not competing. You want to marry Barney, fine. You get a man who happens to be my friend. The only catch comes from statistics. Marriages break up every day. Friendships seem to survive.”

“There’s another catch,” Kit said. “I couldn’t bear not to have all his loyalty.”

“Nobody gets all of anything. Even in the best of marriages people hold back. It’s the same with business deals. Somebody always fudges a little.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“She was like us, but she lacked direction. If Barney marries you, he’ll gladly be making the same mistake all over again, which is why I won’t bother to tell him.” Louise checked her watch, which was as exquisitely demure as her ring and the ice impaling her earlobes. “I’m afraid I can’t stay any longer.”

“If I thought you were leaving for good, maybe I’d breathe easier.”

Louise looked at her keenly. “Somehow I feel that’s all you really wanted to know, how long am I going to be around. So far I’ve been lucky.”

The check paid, with Kit’s gold card, the two women rose in silky unison. As they angled between tables, the heavy man quivered inside the fine cloth of his suit, as if in disguise he were Bacchus, god of the grape answering to the flesh. Neither gave him a glance.

Outside the heat of the morning rushed over them. Each sought her dark glasses against the blinding circle of sun. They descended into the small basin of the parking lot, where their cars squatted in the glare. They halted near Louise’s and faced each other, their eyes hidden behind their glasses. Something remained on Kit’s mind.

“Make it fast,” Louise said.

“I think Barney and I would be good for each other, but I have something else at stake. You wouldn’t hurt the marriage, Lou, I would see to that, but you could jeopardize my career. Any breath of scandal on Barney would taint me.”

Louise’s smile was slow, the irony returning to it. “You’re not worried about me, only the business you think I might be in.”

“It comes down to that.”

Hot sunlight slanted through trees majestic and dauntless against the brilliant sky. In some ways the two women seemed miniatures of the trees. Louise said, “I’ll put your mind at rest. Whether I’m in the business or not won’t matter much longer. I’ve had enough. I’ve also got enough.”

Kit extended a hand. “Thank you for telling me.”

Louise gripped the hand. “Have a long marriage and a spectacular career.”

It was three in the afternoon. The heat was brutal, swarming over John Rozzi like bees as soon as he stepped out of his cool car, attacking him as he huffed up the graded walk toward a house that, to his mind, had too much glass and glare, no protection against people peeking in. He rang the bell and was surprised by the young man in the open shirt and tight poplin pants who let him in with a smile. John glanced around quickly and said, “I’m expected.”

“You John?”

“Yes.”

“I am Mario,” the young man said in precise tones. “Hot out there, huh?”

“Yeah, hot. Cool in here.” John ran a voluminous handkerchief over the fat of his neck, which cascaded over his wilted collar. Mario fluttered a hand.

“You come, OK?”

John followed him over hardwood floors and sheepskin rugs, up some steps to another level, and into a skylit room shadowed by the overhang of trees. A mammoth television was tuned to a soap. Rita O’Dea sat deep in the sag of a canvas chair that looked on the verge of collapse.

“He is here,” Mario said in stilted English, and retreated.

John started to speak but Rita put a finger to her lips and continued to watch the soap until it surrendered to a commercial. She killed the picture with a click of the remote-control device and stared up at him with mild curiosity, her sleeveless frock revealing the shapely heft of her arms and legs. “You’re John.”

“Yes.” He had phoned her earlier from the motel where he was staying. She did not ask him to sit down, so he remained standing. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.

“You’re Rozzi from Springfield.”

“Yes. You probably don’t remember me, but I went to your brother’s funeral.”

“Did you know Tony?”

“I didn’t have the privilege.”

“That’s what it was, John, exactly what it was. A privilege. Sit down.”

He pulled up a bulky hassock and came down on it with a squishing of air. He placed his hands gravely on his knees. “I don’t want to step on toes, Mrs. O’Dea. I don’t want to do anything out of line.”

“Nobody if he’s smart wants to do that. Suppose you tell me the problem, John.”

He glanced around to reassure himself that Mario had left and then leaned forward with his large face sprung out, though a part of it seemed to hang back in deference. In a voice low and raspy, his throat in need of clearing, he explained his problem. Afterward, he drew his hands from his knees and laced his fingers together.

For too many moments, her eyes resting upon him, Rita did not respond, which disquieted him. Finally she said, “You remind me of somebody, same face, same big build. He worked for my brother and then for me. Ralph Roselli.”

“I know the name,” John said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He died of a heart attack shoveling snow off my walk. Good man.” She clicked the television back on. “About the other thing, John, some things
have
to be done. So I got no objections.”

He nodded and rose.

“But,” she said, her attention on the screen, “you were smart to ask.”

He drove back to his motel, which was a few miles outside of Lawrence on Route
114.
The manager sold beer from a cooler, and John bought a six-pack. In his room he ripped open a can and took a long swig, belching when he lowered the can. The room was air conditioned, yet seemed unaired. He was sweating. After stripping down to his underwear and burying his weapon beneath a pillow, he finished off the can of beer and stretched out on the bed.

An hour later the telephone woke him, the ring reverberating in his ear, his bladder in need of relief. He fumbled for the receiver.

The voice said, “John?”

“Yeah.”

“We on?”

“We’re on.”

FIFTEEN

T
HE NEIGHBORHOOD
was noisy, tenement houses full of commotion, too many families stuffed inside, hanging out of unscreened windows, overloading rickety porches. Graffiti blazed from a concrete abutment, blubbery block letters of red and gold, painted one-word shouts of defiance in Spanish. The humidity hung heavy in the darkening air. A woman crossing the street looked as if she would relinquish her soul for a breeze. A boy of four or five opened his short pants and relieved himself on the sidewalk. Louise Baker said, “How long do we have to wait?”

“I told him eight-thirty,” Chick Ryan said. “I don’t want to surprise him.”

They were seated in Chick’s car, which was parked in front of a boarded-up superette, the back of which was burned out. The neighborhood was a block or so away from the one in which she had grown up, a fact that pressed upon her.

Chick said, “Could you live here today, Lou? Could you survive?”

“If I were Hispanic, yes,” she said with certainty. “I’d work, I’d learn, I’d get out.”

Chick disagreed with a dark look. “You were a spic, you wouldn’t have the values we had. We had pride. We had morals, for Christ’s sake. These people got nothing. There’re women on this street grandmothers before they’re thirty. Gives you an idea what’s going on here, no upbringing, no nothing. Did you see the kid piss on the sidewalk?”

Louise said, “Sugar O’Toole used to take dumps in the hallway, remember? Hot weather like this, his mother Millie sat on the stoop in her slip, and the guys would come around to look at her. Your father was one of them. And your sister, I remember, got pregnant in high school.”

“You trying to make me mad?”

“No, just trying to remember how it was.”

“Not like this. Can you smell that coming into the car? These people aren’t clean.”

“That’s the Spickett River, Chick. It blows rank every summer.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” he said. “You want to believe these people are like us, that’s your business. I deal with them every night, so I know better.” He shoved a hand inside his shirt and scratched his stomach. “I’ll tell you what I think of spics. I got more respect for the real niggers, I mean the ones born here.”

“You’re right, Chick. You shouldn’t argue.”

“And now that I think about it, your father never held a steady job in his life.” He laughed. “You people were on handouts.”

“You got it, Chick.”

He checked his watch.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Time,” he said.

He started up the car, flicked on the headlights, and cruised down the street through opposing blasts of stereo music, the tires crunching broken glass, which produced a music more tonal than the other. Faint hues of silver glinting through the ripening darkness proved to be the shirts of youths contemptuously handsome. Spindles of light became the legs of girls.

“Dopers,” Chick told her with satisfaction.

“We live off them,” Louise replied carelessly.

“You maybe, not me.”

“You don’t take a cut along the line?”

“Only what’s due me.”

He took a turn onto a side street, the buildings low-lying and commercial, windowless and roughcast, a solemn loneliness about them all. Turning the wheel with a light finger, he nosed the car into an alley that led to an auto-repair garage with a bare bulb burning over the door next to a stall. Graffiti of the filthy variety marked the facade. Louise said, “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“You’re putting your life in my hands,” Chick said smugly. “You want to change your mind, now’s the time.”

“I trust you,” she said. “Up to a point, of course.”

He drew up in front of the garage, killed the motor and the lights, and listened to vague sounds in the sultry uneasy air. “You know, it’d be better you weren’t here. Something goes wrong I could say I was apprehending him in the commission of a crime.”

“What could go wrong?” she said flatly.

“OK, we’ll do it your way.” He yanked the keys from the ignition. When he started to push open his door, Louise dropped a hand on his arm.

“Tell me about him.”

“Rafael? What’s there to tell? He’s a degenerate. He was younger, he was a hitter, street-gang stuff in New York. He came to Lawrence, became a pusher. I busted him two, three years ago, but made a deal with him when I found out how much business he was doing. What I didn’t know till recently is he was using.”

“Was he high when he came at me?”

“He must’ve been.”

“He’s scared, you said. He ran, right?”

“Yeah, he’s scared,” Chick said. “That’t why we’re meeting on his ground.”

“What makes you think he’ll be alone?” she asked suspiciously.

“He’s got no friends, I’ve seen to that.”

“How’d you get him to agree to meet with you?”

“I told him I want him back in business. I miss the money.”

“OK,” she said. “Let’s get to it.”

Now it was he who held her arm, gripping it tight enough to hurt. His eyes seemed to advance beyond their lids. “This is over, you going to send somebody after me, Lou? I mean, one thing could easily follow another, right?”