Epitaph

TEN

It seemed to William, now very much back in the present and staring at that picture again, that it was from that moment on that he truly became old. You need guilt for that, it's an irreplaceable part of the equation. Suddenly it was as if they'd served him his birthday cake with all the candles on it after years of counting by decade. So many candles he'd never be able to blow them all out. So there'd be no wish for him that year, or any other year either; wishes were for people with futures. The ordinary courage it took to open your eyes and start the day was suddenly no longer there.

Not that the day held much in store for him. It's funny how easy it is to do nothing when you really put your mind to it. How easy it is to sponge off your disability and the various odd job, to pull up a chair and put your feet up and take a nap and never actually wake up. To bet the ponies and clip the coupons and kibitz with Mr. Brickman and quietly settle into a kind of unofficial retirement. To take it day by day, then month by month, then year by year, until you're suddenly sixty-five and you can make it official.

William made his pact; he signed it in blood and he kept it. He became an official lifer, the kind that takes up basket weaving and finds religion; prison breaks were for younger men.

But okay, yesterday had shown him there were definite chinks in the wall, rot in the bars. Break them the day had shouted at him… break them down. Maybe that's what yesterday had really been all about. His run-in with the Puerto Rican-or rather the kid's run-in with him, his ringing up that woman, his staggering journey home, agonized and affronted by the specter of Jean. Break them down. For what had really bothered him wasn't that Jean died, let's face it. It was that he might have died living.

There.

So now his theory, his perfectly reasonable and entirely logical accounting of Jean's last stand, all about rich runaways and big payoffs, could be seen for what it was. A story, a bedtime story, the kind you tell yourself to help you sleep. Why? Because even though he hadn't known Jean well, he'd known Jean well enough.

Sure he had.

First off: A good payoff wouldn't have meant anything to Jean. Jean had always been paid and paid well for what he did, but that was never why he did it. With Jean, it was strictly an affair of the heart; a wronged one, a smashed-to-smithereens one. Santini had once said that every case for Jean was the same case, and that the case was his own. And Santini, for once, had been right; every red file had as much to do with Jean as it did with his criminal of the week. If he was obsessed, and okay, maybe he was, it wasn't with money.

So maybe Jean was trying to impress her, to prick her interest a little so she'd maybe see beyond his eighty- year-old body, just another bit of playacting. Fine. Only impressing people had never been very important to Jean either, had always, you might say, been of zero importance to him. So why change now? And why start saying too much when he'd always said too little?

So okay. Maybe the only people who really knew Jean were the ones in that picture he carried around with him, but William knew this: If Jean said he'd been given the biggest case of his life, it'd be smart to believe him.

There. Almost eighty and almost dead, but some way, somehow, he may just have gotten hold of a live one.

While William had been weaving baskets, Jean was out there weaving cases, and had found one case bigger than anything that had ever come his way before.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it.

And now that he had it, William could forget about it. After all, he had things to do. Sure he did. If he just gave himself a minute or two he could think of something he had to do today.

Of course.

All those horses just waiting to take his money. That huge pile of losing tickets just itching for a few additions from yours truly. If he didn't lose to OTB, who would? They absolutely depended on him. Of course they did.

Okay, this was the problem. It was the horses' names. That was one thing. There he was, giving the racing form the benefit of his practiced eye, and what do you think he saw there?

First race: Prince Jean. Swear to God, right there listed fourth-Prince Jean.

And in the second race: Moses. No, he wasn't kidding-there it was in black and white. Some Israeli owner named Yehudi. An Orthodox jockey maybe? Moses-son of Esther, who must have instilled a lot of guilt in her son about ever finishing second. After all, his track record was strictly first-rate. Moses-listed two-to-one in the second at Belmont.

So now he was really starting to get spooked. Starting to think that maybe there was a message there. Those horses' names-that was one thing.

And his fellow horse-players-that was the other.

Maybe it's the way they looked. Like him. As if they'd given some real thought to things they had to do today and all they'd managed to come up with was this. Like him. Even Jilly-he looked like him too-and Augie, back on his favorite stool with the racing form supporting his elbows like a place mat.

Funny how that had never bothered him before. Odd how it did now. There was this absolute lethargy in the middle of the OTB office that was positively draining. Okay, it was disrupted periodically by the actual races, when the crowd would suddenly and halfheartedly spring to life for about two minutes or so. Then right back to sleep. Think of an old married couple giving it the once for old times' sake. Not that he was an expert on old married couples-he'd had to get old all by his lonesome.

There'd never been a Rachel Two of course-that's a fact. There was very briefly a Catherine Anne, who hadn't lasted long enough to understand why he didn't care to talk about Rachel One. Catherine, a soon-to-be-divorcee, who'd hired him to find out if her husband was cheating on her-yes, he was-and if so, with whom-a fellow schoolteacher at Public School 171, home room and Romance languages. Name of Harold.

Nice girl, he supposed, but without a Chinaman's chance against her. He'd given Rachel the Ford Fairlane, half the profit from the sale of their Elmont home-not much, considering most of it was owed-and a more than generous piece of his still bleeding heart. The absence of her was simply greater than the presence of Catherine Anne. That's all.

Okay… maybe that wasn't all. Rachel had left him carless and homeless (throw in nearly penniless too), but worse yet, she'd left him with the kind of suspicious nature that finally and at last suited his life's work. William's new credo: a cuckold behind every vow, a cheater behind every shade-his included, especially his. This kind of outlook not particularly conducive to trusting long- term relationships. Catherine Anne-a good Irish Catholic who toiled somewhere in the bowels of the Garment Center and no stranger to betrayal herself, soon tired of being asked five times why she hadn't bothered to answer the phone the other night. Or where exactly she'd gone on her day off. Not because it was his right to know, or even really his desire to know (it wasn't like he was in love with her)-but simply because it was now his nature to know. What the scorpion said to the frog after fatally stinging him while being piggybacked across the pond-why the frog asking, why both of them caterwauling to the bottom. And the scorpion's response: Because it's my nature bub, because it's my nature.

And then, he'd known Rachel forever and a day-the kind of history that's pretty much impossible to surmount, especially the day part. His first image of Rachel being a thin blond girl throwing her head back in unabashed laughter on the corner at Martin Van Buren High School. His last image of Rachel being the woman he loved with her legs wrapped around someone else. And in between, more or less, his life.

Catherine Anne, any woman who might be unlucky enough to meet him, deserved better. He deserved worse. William had had to grow old and defeated all alone.

Now, losing his money didn't seem like such a hoot anymore. Now he started thinking again about other things he had to do today. And the only thing he could come up with, swear to God, was you know what.

So there he was again, ruminating about that old geriatric gumshoe Jean. About that tattoo. About the photo of the three of them. Which suddenly, just like that, became a bunch of other photos.

Well, what do you know?

So now, what he had to do today was suddenly clear as day. And while the pain in William's shoulder was still there, still warning him back, the pain in his gut was urging him forward. Break them… break them… whispering insidiously to him and getting him all riled up.

Look at it this way, he said to himself.

At least, it's somewhere to go.