After the First Death

  “We just want to talk,” she said, and we got out of there.

  We walked to the corner. She said, “You’re sure that’s the one, Alex? Because you have to be sure.”

  “I’m positive. I’d know it anywhere.”

  “Good. I knew we’d find it sooner or later, I had a feeling. Now we got to figure out how to find out where he got it. Let me think a minute.”

  I lit a cigarette. The excitement was beginning to bubble inside me. I wanted to go back to the store and grab the little man by the throat “I’ll shake it out of him,” I said.

  “No.”

  “He’ll tell us. Why not?”

  “No. Wait a minute.”

  I waited.

  “If it weren’t for the damned uniform you could pretend to be a cop,” she said. “But that’s no good now. What do they call them—Army Police?”

  “Military Police. MP’s.”

  “Yeah. Could you be something like that? But not after the bit we been working, it wouldn’t go down right Let me think. Do you have about fifty dollars?”

  “I think so.”

  “Make sure.”

  I checked my roll. I had seventy dollars and change. “It won’t leave much,” I said, “but I’ve got it.”

  “Good.”

  “Why fifty? He said forty.”

  “Forty for the watch. Ten more for him to remember where he got it. We got to scare him and bribe him both. C’mon.”

  We went back into the store. He seemed surprised to see us. He had already put the watch away. He got it out, and I handed him forty dollars in fives and tens.

  “I’ll have to charge you the tax—”

  “No tax,” Jackie said.

  “Listen, I don’t make the rules.”

  “You make the prices. You’d of taken thirty-five and we both know it. You absorb the tax.”

  “Well, I suppose I could do that—”

  “And while you’re at it,” she said, watch in hand, “You can tell us who laid the watch on you, baby.”

  He just looked at her.

  “It was boosted Saturday night” she went on. There was a tough, flat quality to her voice that I had not heard before. “Somebody brought it here Monday morning. You tell me who.”

  “Now, miss, you must be thinking of some other watch. I’ve had this particular watch in stock for over three months, and—”

  She was shaking her head “No.”

  “A lot of watches look alike. Lord Elgin, that’s not an uncommon—”

  “No.”

  He didn’t say anything. He had the money and we had the watch, and it was our move, and he didn’t get it.

  She said, “You got the forty, that’s what you paid plus a profit. All we want is a name.”

  “Believe me, if I could help you—”

  “You’d rather talk to the cops?”

  The round face turned sly. “I have a feeling,” he said, “that if you wanted to go to the police, you wouldn’t pay me forty dollars. The interest you have in this, you don’t want police.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s a private matter.”

  “Everything’s a private matter. Nothing you come across these days is anything but a private matter.”

  Scratch a receiver of stolen goods and you find a philosopher. I said, “All right, so tell him.”

  Jackie looked at me, puzzled.

  “We were at a private party Saturday night,” I said. That’s when the watch was taken. So you can see what that means. It was taken by someone at the party, and everyone there was a friend of ours. At least we thought so.”

  “Ah,” the man said.

  She came in on cue. “Which means we do not want police.”

  “This I can understand.”

  “But,” I said, “we would also like to know who our friends are.”

  “So who wouldn’t like to know this?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A sigh. “If I could help you.”

  “Just a name.”

  “I could tell you a name, and it wouldn’t mean anything, and I could say that this is the only name I know, and then what?”

  “And a description.”

  “So what’s a description? It might fit someone and it might not, and the person who took the watch, if this was the watch you lost, might not be the same person who sold it to me. If this was the watch in question.”

  Jackie looked at him, then at the watch. She handed the watch to me and I put it on. I liked the old band better. I asked him if he had the old band around, and he looked at me for a moment and then smiled. He seemed to be enjoying this.

  Jackie said, “If you don’t give us a name and a description, or if you do and we don’t get anywhere with it, somebody else is going to come here and ask the same questions, and it might be somebody who isn’t as nice as us.”

  “Such threats from such a nice couple.”

  “Sometimes threats come true.”

  “Like wishes?”

  We fenced like this, the three of us, with Jackie carrying most of the load while I picked up a cue now and then and helped her along. She was getting increasingly nervous, and several times I saw her rub the back of her hand over her nose or mouth. Her eyes were watering behind the dark glasses. A rage mounted in me, and I wanted to grab the round little man and hurt him.

  The rage passed, but I reached out mental fingers and pulled it back for another look at it. And I took out another ten dollar bill and put it down on the counter, and he looked at it and at me.

  I said, “That’s ten more dollars for a name and a description. You better take it, and you better deliver.”

  “And if it’s a lie that I sell you?”

  “Then I come back here,” I said, “and I kill you.”

  “Would you really do this?”

  “Is it worth finding out?”

  He decided it wasn’t.

  20

  THE ONLY NAME I HAVE FOR HIM IS PHIL. IT COULD BE HIS name. Who knows? Age, I would say, late twenties. I think he is Italian. Maybe Jewish, but I would think Italian. On the short side. Maybe five-foot-seven. A little shorter than myself, I would say. Dark hair, black, not too long and not too short. No part, just combed straight back. A pointed face like a piece of pie, you know what I mean? Like a triangle. Long nose. Thin lips. Pockmarks on his cheeks and chin. Walks with his shoulders hunched forward. Thin in the body. Very nervous, with the hands moving all the time.…

  When we’d been over it three times, when we had all he had to give us, I told him he should forget he ever saw us. “You shouldn’t worry,” he said. “You were never here, I never met you, you shouldn’t worry.”

  We left the store, walked two blocks, turned a corner, stood waiting for a cab. Jackie was overdue now. She said, “Oh, Jesus, we got to get home. We got to get home. Is it cold out, Alex?”

  “Not very.”

  “I’m shivering. See how I’m shaking? He gave it to us straight, though. He didn’t want to, but he gave it to us straight.”

  “Like you said, we bribed him and we scared him.” She shook visibly again, and I put an arm around her to steady her. “You think he’ll tell Phil?”

  “Are you kidding? Not a chance.”

  “Why not?”

  A cab drew up. She said, “Later,” and we got in. She gave the driver the same false address half a block from her building. I sat back and she shrank against me. I put an arm around her and drew her close. She buried her face against my chest. She was shaking, and I held her tight and tried to steady her. Her whole body kept tightening up, then relaxing, then going tight again.

  It was a long ride in bad traffic. From time to time she would get hold of herself and it was better, but then the shaking and twitching would come back worse than before. She was a wreck by the time we got out of the cab. I tried to talk to her on the way to her building but she was incapable of speech. She held onto my hand and hurried me along.

  Insid
e her apartment, she said again, “You don’t want to see this,” and disappeared into the bedroom. I walked around the living room until she came back. I thought about what it was like to need something more man any person should need anything. A drink, or a woman. I thought first that those needs were different, that they didn’t make one shake that much or sweat that way. Then I decided that they were the same after all, that one hangup is the same as another, that the shakes were always there.

  When she came into the living room she told me that she wished she was dead. I told her to cut it out. She said she meant it. I kissed her, and she started to cry, and I held onto her and kissed her until she stopped.

  I left her sitting on the couch, eyes closed, while I made us some coffee. When I sat down next to her I asked her how she knew the man would not tip off Phil.

  “The same reason he finally told you. He’s scared.”

  “That I’ll come back and kill him? I think I meant it when I said it but—”

  “Not that. You didn’t see his face.”

  “I thought I did.”

  Then you didn’t read it right. When you said that to him he was looking right at you, at your face, and that’s when he got it. He recognized you, Alex. He knows who you are.”

  “Oh, no—”

  “I should of thought of it right away. Maybe I would of been afraid of it. The one thing he doesn’t want is to get involved in a murder. That would put him up tight all around, he couldn’t stand it. So all he can do is put you onto Phil and hope the two of you kill each other or something and that it doesn’t ever get back to him.”

  “He won’t call the police?”

  “Never.”

  “He could call anonymously. Tell them I’m wearing an army uniform, something like that.”

  She shook her head. “He wants you to get away for now. If you get picked up now, he knows you’re going to talk about that watch. All he wants is to keep out of it.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t think he would ever of told us otherwise. You want to know something, baby? People are just too much. When he thought we were just a couple of people who got robbed he wouldn’t even tell us what time it was. But as soon as you’re a murderer, then he wants to give us his right arm on a silver dish. People are beautiful.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Alex? I got to fall out for a little while. I won’t be asleep, just sitting. But I can’t talk. You want to watch the television? Or put on some music on the radio?”

  “Maybe some music.”

  “Something slow and quiet. I had a little more just now than I should of.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ummm.”

  I took the cigarette from between her fingers and put it out. She sat virtually motionless for a little over an hour, now and then nodding her head slightly in time to the music. When she came up out of it she asked me for a cigarette. I lit one for her. She took two puffs on it and gave it back and asked me to put it out. I did.

  She said that I must hate her. I said I loved her, and we went to bed.

  21

  SHE SAID, “YOU SLEEP, BABY, I GOT TO GO OUT FOR A WHILE. I’ll be back. You just sleep.” I dozed for a few more hours. She had not returned when I finally dragged myself out of bed. I showered, then poked around in the medicine cabinet until I found her little electric razor and shaved with it. I was hungry, but the cupboard was bare. I made myself a cup of coffee and took it into the living room.

  There wasn’t much to read, just a stack of paperbacks. A couple of novels about American nurses in the Far East. Had my Jackie wanted, in the years before needles and commercial love, to tend the sick? To comfort the wounded? There was a reprint of a big best seller and a few sex-fact books, including one psychoanalytical study of a prostitute. I skimmed this last, but I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. The words didn’t register. I put the books back and made more coffee.

  We were going to find this Phil. Someone had hired him, and we would find out who and why, and we would wrap it all up and hand it to the police and it would be over, all of it.

  I was very certain of this now. Before I had possessed the knowledge of my own innocence and little more than that. There was no place to get started, nothing but random facts and inferences that refused to add up to anything concrete. Jackie had changed this. Because of her, we knew who sold my watch. That gave us a handle, and we could pull the rest of it along.

  She was out now, talking to people, finding out who this Phil might be.

  I lit a cigarette. Once I was cleared, it would be no great problem getting a university job again. I had been a good scholar and a good teacher. They would want me back. Of course there were wasted years, and they made a difference. I had been close to a departmental chairmanship, and now it was unlikely that I would ever rise that high. I was starring fresh, in a sense, and starting at a less than tender age.

  The hell, it hardly mattered. I’d have a job again, I’d do my work again, I’d be a person again.

  My mind played with plans. Should I stay in New York? There was an undeniable appeal in the idea of a little college town somewhere in New England or the Midwest, a comfortable retreat away from the smell and taste of New York. But the city had things of its own going for it. It was a place to hide, a place where people let you alone.

  But I didn’t have to hide any more.

  Of course a small town might be a better place for someone trying to shake a drug habit. I remembered having read that the worst danger for cured addicts was a return to old haunts, that this made it all too easy for old patterns to reestablish themselves. In another town, where heroin was presumably hard to find, where she didn’t know the source of supply—

  All of which, I told myself, was stupid sloppy romanticism. I was confusing loneliness and gratitude and mutual back-scratching with something deeper and more permanent. Stupid.

  I kept getting hungrier and she kept not coming home, and after a while I wrote out a note for her and left it on top of the coffee table. I had to walk all the way over to Broadway to find an all-night diner. I had a couple of hamburgers and a plate of french fries and still more coffee. I walked back to the place. I had left the door unlatched, and it was still unlatched, and the note was on the coffee table and Jackie wasn’t home yet.

  It was past six by the time she unlocked the door and came in, and I had gone through a full pack of cigarettes by then. I couldn’t keep from worrying. I got all the worst images—Jackie tracking down Phil, and he with a knife in his hand, and she with her hand at her throat, and the knife flashing. Jackie picked up for possession of heroin, arrested, clapped in a cell Jackie hurt in any of a thousand idiot ways. But she came home, and I went to her and kissed her and told her I had worried about her.

  “Worried?”

  “You were gone so long.”

  “I thought you’d still be sleeping.”

  “No, I’ve been up for hours. I went out and got something to eat a little while ago. Where were you?”

  “I had to find out about this Phil. You know, look around, talk to people. And then I had to work a little, you know, and I had to find a dealer and make a buy. The stuff I used before was the last of what I had around, and I had to work for awhile and then buy some more. And—”

  “I had some money.”

  “Only twenty dollars.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been enough?”

  “I like to buy for a few days at a time. And I don’t want to take money from you, Alex. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “You went to bed with me and then you went out tricking.”

  “You think I wanted to?”

  “You went to bed with me and then—”

  Her face fell apart She said, “Alex, you got no right, you got no goddamn right!” And ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. I heard the lock click. I went to the door and tried to tell her I was sorry. She wouldn’t answer me. After a
few minutes I heard the shower running, and I returned to the living room and walked around. I tried to sit down but couldn’t stay still, so I got up and smoked and wore out the rug.

  When she came back smelling fresh and clean and wearing a different dress, I told her again that I was sorry.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I didn’t think.”

  “No, I was the one didn’t think, Alex. I figured you would know why I went out. It was my fault for saying anything.” She scooped up her purse and headed for the bedroom. I followed her. “But you can’t be jealous or anything. It’s not like when we make love. It’s what I do, that’s all. It’s who I am.” She turned to me. “You hate me now, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “But you hate what I am.”

  “Not even that.”

  “Because I can’t help what I am, Alex. I don’t like it and I’m not proud of it but it’s what I am.”

  The history professor’s wife in the little college town, dressing the children and bundling them off to school, mingling with other wives at faculty teas, sitting up nights proofreading my books and articles. How I had miscast this girl.

  “I found out about this Phil,” she was saying. “That’s not his name but a lot of people call him Phillie because he comes from South Philadelphia. His name is Albert Schapiro. He’s not Italian, he’s Jewish.”

  “You’re sure he’s the one?”

  “Pretty sure. I asked around, and he sounds right.”

  “Is he a killer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he must have killed Robin.”

  “I guess so.” She took an envelope from her purse. “I want to stash this stuff now. Then I thought we could go find Phillie. Somebody said they heard he was staying in a hotel at Twenty-third and Tenth. You want to go?”

  “Now?”

  “He’s probably there now. It would be a good time.”

  I wanted him. Oh, how I wanted him. “Let’s go,” I said.

  That afternoon we had been a prostitute and her man. Now we were a prostitute and her client. Jackie knew the hotel, she had worked there now and then when the Times Square area was too hot, and the desk man seemed to remember her. The hotel was filthy, the lobby cluttered with winos. The desk man had a bottle of Thunderbird in an open drawer. I signed Doug MacEwan’s name on the registration card and paid the man $5.75 and we headed for the stairs.