Park Lane South, Queens (14 page)

Johnny led her past the milling immigrants, past the clatter of stalls set up in a flea market. “You want some-thin?” he asked her. “Go ahead. You want a toothbrush? They sell those real fancy jobs from Italy. No? How about a phone? Hey, don't laugh, they're dirt cheap down here.”

They crossed the broad boulevard full of flashy cars. The Mayor rubbed against her ankles as they scooted across—Lord, he hated these teeming places with a passion. Self-consciously, Claire stayed a step behind Johnny. She was afraid he'd notice all the pink she had on. She'd put on the pink with the hope in the back of her mind that she would run into him, and now she was afraid he'd see right through her: pink was a complimentary tone for women over thirty. Men were not dumb.

Johnny held the door open for her. It was a little wooden place right on the water, the only one. The rest were all confined to the other side of the boulevard. They walked through a room devoted to tourist accompaniments: carved sea captains from Maine, conch shells from the Bahamas and spaghetti bowls from Napoli. Claire felt him watching her apprehensively. She smiled a little too brightly. It was the first time they'd been that close. Right there in the middle of the shop she took a good whiff of him. She could have stood there for the rest of the night. One more room was the restaurant area, and the next, through a mobile of shells, was a broad dock with netted jars of candles on rough hodgepodge tables. Paper lanterns were clothespinned to the telephone line. The moon was a lopsided egg smack on top of the bay.

“Can't bring no dogs in here, bud,” a skinny-assed waiter whooshed past them.

“It's all right, Guido.” An old man in a Yankees cap stood up from the table nearest the cash register. “They're with me.” He put his arms around Johnny with his eyes and shook his head. “So you finally remembered the way to Brooklyn, eh? Get over here!” He gave Johnny an affectionate clobber, then put him in a headlock. Johnny grinned from ear to ear.

“This old battle-ax is Red Torneo,” Johnny laughed. “Red. Claire Breslinsky.”

Red gave her an unembarrassed once over. He straightened up. “Now
this,
” he took her hand in his, “
this
is more like it.” He led Claire to the seat overlooking the bay and stepped back to admire her one more time. The Mayor took to Red right away. The man smelled of crab meat and beer, one respectable combination. He snuggled right in at Red's old bare feet. This was the sort of chap who'd pass you half his dinner under the table. The man had class.

Claire was one minute setting up fashion shots along the railing with those twinkling lights across the water, one minute snatching glances at Johnny, admiring the friendship that shone from the two men. Her past was sometimes like a curse. She couldn't do anything without all the art directors in her history nodding approval or shaking their bygone heads in veto. You really had to watch how you whiled away your time, didn't you, because it was always going to be there influencing you. Johnny and Red were catching up on old times. She stared into the black water. How rotten it was that it had to have been a murder to bring him into her life. For the first time, she imagined the murder as it must have happened, the enormity of it, that moment of absolute clarity when that little boy Miguel must have known it was too late, it had gone too far, from bewilderment to fear to pain to certainty. She shuddered. Johnny didn't even look at her. He took off his jacket and laid it on her lap without breaking his conversation with Red. Claire turned her face away so that he wouldn't see her eyes fill up. She never cried and she was shocked at herself. Outside of the tears of her nightmare she'd be stuck to remember the last time. Angrily, she swallowed the tears back inside of her eyes, bending over and letting the ones that were already there drop to the floor while she fished for her bag. She didn't know why she felt she should be ashamed. It just caught her off guard that such a small gesture of concern from Johnny could bring that on. She liked that he watched her without appearing to, though. Physically, she liked everything about him. Right down to that smug fat lower lip. Why did he have to be a cop? Why, in fact, was he a cop? Because she didn't want him to be. The pretty flowers on the table turned to plastic just as they always had been. Life, Swamiji had told her time and time again, is all the way you look at it. What she had to do was simply grab hold of the table and not let her confusion show. What had happened yesterday, she realized, had not helped her state of mind.

She'd been down in the cellar doing laundry. Almost sure she heard the phone, she stuffed the dress she'd been wearing in with the others about the same color and ran upstairs in her underwear. The phone hadn't been ringing, or at least it had quit ringing by the time she'd got there. She wandered listlessly up to the second floor and into the bathroom. Whenever she saw a shut-tight shower curtain she would poke her head in just to see if Janet Leigh was in there. She wasn't. Wondering what on earth to put on, she walked outside and hesitated outside Carmela's bedroom. In all that topsy-turviness Carmela wouldn't miss one pair of pants. She went in and looked around. What a mess. Dust balls as big as your fist tumble-weeded in the draft from the hallway fan. Rumpled clothes were all over the place. Claire held up a potential candidate. No, she laid it gingerly back in place. That was a blouse. There you go. She saw a pair of almost ironed white jeans and picked them up. The front door slammed. Uh-oh, she stood still guiltily. Maybe one of them had forgotten something and would be leaving again right away. There was a shuffling noise on the stairway. She jumped silently into the closet, closed the door, and held her breath. How humiliating to be caught sneaking Carmela's precious clothes! Vicious sibling battles reared their long-forgotten heads. She went rigid with fear.

And it was Carmela all right. There was no mistaking that cackle. But who was she with? Another muffled laugh and she recognized Freddy. Freddy? What was he doing up here?

“I'm telling you she went out,” Freddy was saying. “I let it ring thirty times. Anyway, I'm sick to death of her holier-than-thou attitude.”

Claire heard something rip and Carmela cry, “No!” She was just about to throw open the closet door and come to Carmela's rescue when the pair dropped to the floor. She could see them through the downward-tilted slats in the door. Freddy thrashed away. Carmela was underneath him. She was down on all fours, drooling convivially onto a kit of electric rollers.

“What do you got that mug on for?” Johnny's voice brought her back to the present. “Like you're off in la-la land.”

“Close enough,” she said. Red was watching her, too. He held a Spalding ball which he kept shooting from one hand to the other. She'd seen eyes like that once before. On a hundred-and-six-year-old parrot. The waiter came over and whispered something in his ear. He took off with an agility that surprised her. The moment he was gone Johnny picked up his chair and turned it facing her. He sort of loomed over her.

“So what's the story with this Stefanovitch guy?”

“Huh?”

“You know who I mean. The guy with the mansion you've been hanging out with.”

“I haven't exactly been hanging out with him. We jogged once for five minutes.”

“And went to his jazzy party, right?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Was he with you for the whole party?”

“Tch.”

“I mean did he go off and leave you alone for any amount of time?”

Then it hit Claire what he meant. He wasn't quizzing her about her private life. He was trying to find out if Stefan was … if Stefan had … oh, really! “It couldn't have been Stefan who stole my cameras. He was at the party the whole time.”

“Did you see him the whole time?”

“Well, no. He was the host. He had people to entertain.”

“So he was around the whole time.”

“Yes. No. He was gone for twenty or thirty minutes at one point. But he was with my sister.”

“Mmm. The brassy one.”

“She's not brassy.”

“Okay, she's not.” He lit a cigarette.

Claire battled with herself for five seconds and then lit one herself.

“My sister is very interested in art.”

“Uh-huh.”

Claire smoked her cigarette. She certainly didn't have to explain anything to him.

“And you?”

Claire looked at him with puzzled eyes.

“You like ‘art'?”

She smiled. “Look, Stefan's a very nice man.”

“With lots of cash.”

“What's wrong with money? Do you have something personal against money? Or are you asking me an actual, direct question?”

Johnny leaned back in his chair till it almost tipped over. He studied the boats.

“And how do you know that I was at that party anyway? Is someone following me? Are you having me watched?”

Johnny leaned across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Darlin', there's no one watching you but me. Got that?”

Claire felt her insides.

Red came back armed with three plates of baked clams and a tunnel of lemon wedges. “Guido!” he shouted. “Bring us some bread. And a couple a beers.” He laid his finger alongside his nose. “And then bring us a platter a calamari … with plenty a hot sauce!”

On the way home, the Mayor threw up. It wasn't too bad. Claire heard him give a couple of dry heaves on her lap and she yelled for Johnny to pull over, quick. He swerved onto the shoulder, then into the parking lot from Lookout Reach. They stood over him, concerned parents, as he relieved himself of buttered pretzels, shrimps, some
basta chorta
, and quite a few horseradished clams.

“Better out than in,” philosophized Johnny as he went to fetch a box of tissues from the car.

“It's all right, your honor,” Claire soothed him. “You're better now.”

“Atta boy,” Johnny encouraged him, “atta boy.” He didn't want a repeat performance back in the car. “C'mon. Let's walk him a little bit down to the edge.”

They trolleyed across a narrow cement crossway after the dog and took off their shoes. His honor, good as new, went on ahead to scavenge for mussels. The cars behind them in the parking lot weren't empty but you couldn't see anybody in them, either. Claire worried for a moment that it would give Johnny ideas, but he just walked along beside her not saying too much, telling her a little bit about Red and how he'd come into his life and listening when she finally opened up and told him how Michael had died. Then he wanted to know about the men in her life. She told him briefly, in headlines, accentuating her own stupidity, not sparing herself at all.

“And how come you never married either of them?”

“Stupid I am. Dumb I'm not. It was pretty obvious, even to me, that I'd set myself up as the victim in both relationships.”

“Yeah. Well. You can't be a survivor until you've been a victim first.”

“I guess that's true.” After what Zinnie had told her about his wife, she knew exactly what he meant. “That's what happened to you, too, wasn't it? I mean in your marriage?”

“Look, don't go asking questions like that, all right? I don't want to talk about it.”

“Well, excuse me! I thought I heard somebody say they just wanted to talk to me. I thought that was the point of this entire venture. Rest assured, I'll never bring it up again. Or anything else for that matter.”

“Why do you have to keep going on and on about it? You can't just let things drop? You got to hang on to the negative?”

“Ah. The old pot-calling-the-kettle-black routine.”

“So now you're gonna be pissed off.”

“It doesn't mean that much to me to piss me off!”

“Good!”

“Fine!” And it was fine. He was just what she
didn't
want. She had no intention of falling for him in the first place. Nor he, apparently, for her. They marched back to the car. Relieved, she opened the door, the Mayor jumped in, she leaned over to hook up her sandal. He grabbed her around the waist from behind. She swung around to belt him and landed with her mouth on his, a drawn out whirl into oblivion so far away and intoxicating that when he let her go, she almost fell. He drove her home as they'd come, without saying a word.

Claire bolted awake in the wee morning hours. She'd been dreaming that someone had found her cameras. It was so real that she was more surprised than depressed when she sat up in bed and realized where she was. She pulled a nightgown over her nakedness, got out of bed, and padded downstairs. All the fans were in high gear, hot air gusts tearing through the house cooling nothing. The Mayor, asleep on the kitchen floor, put up both ears.

“Hi ya. Locked in?”

He loved this girl. You never knew what she was going to do.

“Come on, then. Sit out on the porch with me for a while. I had a dream. Shall I make us some toast? A little cinnamon toast wouldn't hurt, would it? I'm so confused about this cop. A cop. Just what I didn't want. What was it Swamiji used to say? Whatever it is that you fear will come at you as though magnetized. He really knew his stuff, that swami.”

The Mayor waited politely while she fidgeted around the kitchen stocking up, then they headed for the porch. Together they sank into the hammock and heaved a sigh. This was really the place to be. They had her up in the attic nowadays. She had a nice cot with a feather quilt in the box window but it wasn't the porch. Now this was terrific. She with her thoughts and he with his rocketing heartburn. The spider on the rail had already rebuilt his web. He must just love this spot. Birds of a feather, she supposed. The rabbits in their cages began to scuffle. Claire covered the Mayor's mouth and his infernal whimperings for more toast. “Who's that?”

The screen door opened and there stood Michaelaen in his bathing trunks. “I
knew
I heard somebody up,” he rubbed his eyes with a fist.