Infernal

  Jack shrugged. “It’s blasphemy for a blues band to start on time.”

  Tom hoped they never came on. He wanted to talk to Gia, learn all about her. Something he couldn’t do if the band really cranked up.

  “Do you like blues?” Gia said.

  “I like all kinds of music.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Really? How about opera?”

  “Love it. Tristan and Isolde is my favorite.”

  Not necessarily true. He used to hate opera, but part of the politics of his judgeship included attending an endless line of functions and fundraisers. Too many of them included nights at the opera, or the ballet, or at an art museum. Boring as all hell, but his wives, all three, had loved the affairs, loved mingling with Philadelphia’s haul monde. Those were the times they appreciated being the wife of a judge.

  Along the way, mostly through osmosis, Tom had managed to become an esthete manqué, absorbing enough culture to blow highbrow smoke when the situation called for it.

  As Gia’s eyes lit, he sensed this might be one of those situations.

  “I love that one too,” she said. “The Merry Widow is another of my favorites. It’s at the Met now.” She cocked her head at Jack. “But try getting your brother to go. He hates opera.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Jack said. “I like opera just fine… it’s just the singing and all the gesturing I don’t like. Lose those and do it in English and I could be a major fan.”

  Gia laughed and leaned against him. “Stop it.”

  Jack turned to him. “Gia’s an artist—she sees things in opera and ballet that I can’t.”

  “That’s because you don’t lend yourself to the experience,” Gia said.

  “Artist?” Tom said. “Have you had a show?”

  Still smiling, she shook her head. “I hope to someday, but it’s commercial art that pays my bills—advertising, book covers, that sort of thing. Between assignments I’m working on a series of fine-art oils for an eventual show.”

  Time to score some points, Tom thought as he nodded.

  “Speaking of fine art, Gia, may I say that you are a vision straight out of a Botticelli.”

  Her cheeks colored. “What a sweet thing to say.”

  He didn’t mention that he was trying to picture her posed as Botticelli’s Venus.

  “Botticelli…” Jack said, snapping his fingers and looking perplexed. “Botticelli… isn’t that the tropical plant place down on Sixth?”

  “Ignore him,” Gia said with a laugh. “He loves to play the philistine.”

  “Are you sure he’s playing?”

  Her fingers wrapped around Jack’s hand. “I’m sure.”

  Tom repressed an insane urge to grab those intertwined hands and yank them apart. Gia should be holding his hand.

  He took a sip of his vodka and forced himself to lean back.

  What was the matter with him? Why was he so… so smitten with this woman? Yes, that was what he was: smitten. He’d been under her spell since the instant he’d laid eyes on her. Why?

  Maybe it was genetic. Jack was obviously smitten too. Maybe Gia emitted a pheromone that interacted with the genes they shared.

  She added, “But he really does not like opera.”

  “Or ballet,” Jack said.

  Gia nodded. “Right. Hates ballet.”

  Jack said, “Hold on now. I don’t know about hate. Don’t I go to The Nutcracker with you and Vicks every year?”

  “And every year you doze off during the first act.”

  He shrugged. “It’s always the same story. I know how it ends.”

  Gia looked at Tom. “And to be honest, your brother’s not too crazy about modern art either.”

  “I like lots of modern art. I just don’t like linoleum patterns and drop cloths passing as art. Who’s that guy who does all those big splatters?”

  “You don’t mean Jackson Pollock?” Tom said, trying to worm his way back in.

  “That’s the one. Pollock. Gia can paint rings around him.”

  Gia gave Jack an appraising look, then turned to Tom. “I take that back. He is a philistine.”

  And then the two of them leaned together and laughed. The sound was acid, etching the chambers of Tom’s heart.

  The way these two looked at each other, laughed with each other, and seemed to communicate on their own private wavelength filled Tom with a boundless longing. He’d never had that sort of easy intimacy with a woman—no, not just intimacy… friendship. He’d never thought it mattered, never cared enough to miss it. But seeing his brother so bonded to a woman like Gia, sharing something precious, timeless, and so uniquely theirs… it awakened strange feelings within him… strange because he’d never experienced them, never known they existed, wasn’t even sure what they were.

  One feeling he did recognize: envy.

  He wanted that for himself. He couldn’t remember any woman ever looking at him the way Gia looked at Jack. But he didn’t want just any woman to look at him that way, he wanted Gia.

  The waiter arrived then with the appetizers. Tom had ordered the craw-dad soup—crayfish in a thick brown broth he couldn’t identify.

  Delicious.

  “A delightful decoction,” he said. “Anyone wish to partake?”

  Gia’s eyebrows rose. “Decoction? Really?”

  He’d used the term loosely and she’d caught him. Obviously she knew her way around a kitchen.

  Before he could backtrack, the house lights went down and a voice announced Jesse Roy Bighead Dubois and his band. As the musicians filed onstage and picked up their instruments, a tall black man took the microphone and introduced himself.

  The singer said, “Our first song is dedicated to a fellow in the audience. No, wait. Not just dedicated—about. I wrote it for him and about him. I won’t point him out because his deal is slipping through the cracks. He’s a ghost, my friends. You don’t see him unless he wants you to. But he’s out there now, among you. The song’s called the ‘R-J Blues.’ The music comes from Elmore James, but the words are mine. This one’s for you, Jack.”

  A piece of cajun shrimp stopped halfway to Tom’s mouth.

  Jack?

  He looked across the table and knew immediately from his brother’s tense posture and uncomfortable expression that he was the Jack Bighead was talking about.

  Jack… a ghost who slips through the cracks? This was going to be interesting.

  Bighead gave his band the count and then they ripped into an up-tempo blues. Tom immediately recognized the wailing slide riff of Elmore James’s version of “Dust My Broom.”

  Then Bighead started to sing.

  I wake up ev’ry mornin, feelin troubled all the time

  You know I wake up ev’ry mornin, feelin troubled all the time

  Gotta find me a repairman, who can fix my worried mind

  Goin down the corner, find this guy I heard about

  Gonna drop a dime on Ma Bell, call this guy I heard about

  Gonna tell this guy my problem, see if he can help me out

  Well I give him all my money, every cent and that’s all right

  Yeah, the repairman took my money, every cent but that’s all right

  He went and fixed that problem, and now I sleep so good at night

  Don’t go messin with this fella, or you’ll find a world o’ hurt

  You mess with the repairman, you could find a world o’ hurt

  You may think you’re havin’ dinner, but you’ll get yo’ just desserts.

  This guy might be an angel, but he could be the devil too

  Yeah, Jack might be an angel, or he could be the devil too

  Only thing I know is, you don’t want him mad at you.

  Tom sat mesmerized as the song closed with a slide guitar solo and the sparse audience gave up an appreciative round of applause. Was that about his kid brother?

  And then he saw Gia lean close to Jack’s ear. Tom caught her whisper.

  “I don’t know what you did for that
man and I don’t want to, but to have that kind of effect on a life, to make someone want to sing about you… that must be indescribable. I can see why you keep going back for more.”

  And then it all came together.

  Dad’s remark about calling on Jack if he needed someone to watch his back… then that character Joey this morning asking Tom if he could “hack” what Jack hacked… and now this blues singer talking about a ghost named Jack who slips through the cracks, and singing about a “repairman” named Jack…

  Somewhere along the line Dad had come up with the idea that Jack was a repairman… an appliance repairman. But the “R-J Blues” was about someone who fixed other things.

  R-J… Repairman Jack? Was that what it stood for?

  Had to be. Little brother was some sort of urban mercenary.

  Taking it further, Tom realized that might explain why Jack had needed him to claim Dad’s body. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to claim it—he couldn’t. Because he was probably living under a false identity.

  Ho-lee shit.

  * * *

  FRIDAY

  1

  “Well,” Tom said as they walked away from the grave, “that’s it then. Still hard to believe he’s gone.”

  Jack only nodded. He felt drained, emotionally and physically spent.

  He was now an orphan. That had struck him like a blow as he’d watched his father laid to rest beside his mother.

  Gia clung to his arm, wiping away tears for a man she’d never met. Vicky held her mother’s hand, cheery but bewildered.

  Everyone else had left. Tom’s current wife, Terry, a shapely brunette about ten years his junior, had fled the chill to wait in their car.

  During the past twenty-four hours Jack had encountered a dizzying array of new names and faces. The parade of mourners telling him how sorry they were, what a terrible tragedy it was, how his dad would be missed. He’d met his sister’s kids and had almost lost it when he saw how closely Lizzie resembled Kate when she was a teen. Like going back in time.

  Tom’s two ex-wives—the oft-referred-to Skanks from Hell—showed up. Their splits from Tom apparently hadn’t lessened their affection for his father. Tom’s two sons from his first marriage and the daughter from his second had come along. Jack still wasn’t sure what name went with what face. Not that it mattered. Small chance he’d see any of them again.

  As they reached the curb at the bottom of the slope, a white Lincoln Navigator raced up and screeched to a halt. Four young black men jumped out, all dressed in snappy-looking suits.

  The tallest of the four, who’d emerged from the front passenger seat, looked at Jack and said, “Are we too late? Did we miss it?” His quick, dark eyes shifted between Jack and Tom. “You guys Tom’s boys?”

  Jack nodded. “Uh-huh. And you gentlemen are…?”

  He stepped forward and extended his hand. “Ty Jameson.”

  He quickly introduced his three companions. The names blurred through Jack’s brain.

  “We’re really sorry about your father. An awful fu—”—a quick glance at Gia and Vicky—”an awful, awful thing to happen to anyone, but your father…” Was that a catch in his voice? “He was one of the good ones. We would have been here sooner but we only heard this morning.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “What’s your connection to my father?”

  Our father, Jack thought.

  “He taught us computer programming back when we were in middle school.” He checked with his companions. “About fourteen-fifteen years ago, am I right?”

  They all nodded.

  Jack tossed Tom a questioning look.

  He shrugged. “News to me.”

  “We belonged to a Boys Club in Camden where he used to volunteer. He donated two PCs—used but still in great shape—and every Wednesday afternoon after school he’d be there to teach the rudiments of BASIC to anyone who was interested. We were interested.”

  The three others nodded. One of them said, “Word. Changed our lives.”

  Jack remembered Dad’s fascination with the home computer, remembered the time he’d bought and assembled an Apple I—back in the antediluvian days when data was stored on cassette tapes.

  Ty nodded. “He infected us with the bug. We joined the computer club in high school, took programming courses there and in CCC. Finally we decided we didn’t need degrees to do what we wanted, so we dropped out and started our own Web design company.”

  Jack nodded toward the big, spotless SUV behind them.

  “Looks like you’re doing okay.”

  He grinned. “More than okay. We flush.” The smile faltered. “Everything I have I owe your dad. Did more for me than my own father ever did. I tried to get in touch with him last year to, you know, thank him and let him know how he’d changed our lives, but he’d moved away.” Ty swiped at a tear starting to roll down his left cheek. “And now he’s gone, and I can’t tell him. He’ll never know.”

  Ty’s voice choked off. Jack heard Gia sob, and he wanted to say something but couldn’t speak past the baseball-size lump in his throat.

  Ty recovered first. He pointed up the hill toward the gravesite.

  “We want to go up and pay our respects, but first…”

  He reached into a pocket and came up with a small gold case. He handed business cards to Jack and Tom.

  “Either of you ever need anything a computer can do—anything—you just give us a call.”

  All four again shook hands with Jack and Tom, then trooped up the slope.

  Jack watched them, trying to get a handle on this stunning revelation. Never in a million years would he have guessed…

  “Can you believe that?” Tom said.

  “I’d like to. I want to.”

  “No, I mean dear old Dad, Mr. Conservative, charter subscriber to the Limbaugh Letter, doing something like that.”

  During his Florida trip, Jack had realized that his father’s conservatism was neither political nor ideological.

  “Dad was mostly a traditionalist. You know, this is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we should go on doing it. But he was never racist.”

  “Hey, he retired because of the company’s affirmative action policy.”

  “Yeah. He told me about that. Called it ‘profiling.’“

  During Jack’s last night in Florida he and his father had had a long, rambling, scotch-fueled talk about all sorts of things. Some of it touched on his career as an accountant.

  “But that’s only half the story. Do you know the hell he caught back in sixty-one for hiring a black guy for his department—the angry calls he got from his fellow employees, calling him a commie and a nigger lover?”

  Tom shook his head, his expression confused, surprised. “No, I—”

  “He told me he wanted to hire this particular guy because, of all the applicants, he was the best qualified. Dad didn’t care what color he was, he wanted the best. So he hired him. The result? The fast track Dad had been on suddenly slowed. That hire cost him promotions and position. I won’t say he didn’t care, because I sensed he was still a little bitter about it. Then in the nineties things exploded when he was directed to hire a black guy over a white guy. Dad refused because this time the white guy was better qualified. He still wanted the best guy. Dad hadn’t changed, but the world had. The former commie nigger-lover was now a right-wing racist bigot. He couldn’t take it, and refused to be part of a system that put ability second, so he opted out.”

  Tom looked hurt, but his tone was angry. “How come he never told me any of this?”

  Jack shrugged. He had no answer.

  He put his arm around Gia’s shoulders and they looked back at the four young men standing around his father’s grave with bowed heads and folded hands.

  Gia whispered, “I guess that’s proof the good a man does isn’t always interred with his bones.”

  Jack, not trusting himself to speak, could only nod.

  * * *

  2

 
When they reached the cars Tom signaled his wife to roll down the window of their Lexus.

  “Terry, would you mind driving Gia and Vicky to the restaurant? You can follow us. Jack and I need to talk.”

  Gia looked at Jack. He shrugged and nodded. This was news to him.

  He held the doors for them—Gia in the front, Vicky in the back—then led Tom to his Crown Vic.