Epitaph

FOUR

When Rodriguez turned on the light in Jean's apartment, bits of brown scattered in all directions as if a gust of air had just attacked the last leaves of autumn.

"Roaches," Rodriguez said, in a tone that somehow mingled disgust and admiration. "I hate them, but what can you do?"

William had found Rodriguez in his first-floor apartment at 15-22 Beech Avenue, slumped in front of his TV set with the empty bottle of Mogen David in his hand. There'd been no need for Rodriguez to buzz him through-the front door of the apartment building was permanently kicked in, the intercom suspended from the wall by one naked wire. When William knocked on his door, Rodriguez had screamed at him-I'll fix the hot water when I'm good and ready, comprende?

It's William, he'd said, from the funeral, and Rodriguez said come on in.

He was watching a program with the TV set on mute. Didn't matter. Someone had slept with someone's sister's husband; that's what it said right there for everyone to see, right next to this sad and angry-looking threesome. Something like that anyway-William's eyesight not being what it used to be, someone's sister's husband or sister's brother or sister's father. Anyway, someone was guilty of something. The man in the middle of this glum trio casting sullen glances this way and that, looking like he wanted out, wanted to be anywhere but there. William knew the feeling; it came with getting old, it was what getting old did to you, but the only place you could go was no place.

Not today though-today you could go here. To Jean's apartment.

It was a small one-bedroom situated on the third floor, actually a studio in the shape of a blunted L. In the real estate section it would be found under charming, but in the harsh light of day it looked like what it was-destitute, which is what's left when charm flies out the window.

Rodriguez asked him what it was like-being a detective.

"It was okay," William said.

He'd given him the picture-the three of them, Jean, Santini, and himself. Santini smiling, pointing to the freshly painted letters on the door-Three Eyes, the name had been his idea; beside him Jean, dark and dour, his cheeks pinched in like one of those faces from Buchen- wald; then, of course, himself, looking frankly bewildered and completely unsure of everything.

"Sit down," Rodriguez said. "You want a Bud?"

"No. No thanks." But then he sat down anyway, not because he wanted a beer, although he didn't not want one either, but because he was tired, or because his knee was killing him, or because he'd simply been asked. Take your pick.

About that knee. Acute arthritis, the doctor said. It would, the doctor continued, get worse, striking him at any moment it cared to, in any number of joints, without any warning at all. One day it would come to stay. But then one day is always one day away. And that's how old people live.

Rodriguez asked him if he ever killed anybody. "What?" For a second William saw the little girl and all that blood again.

"On a case. You ever kill anyone on a job?"

"No," he said.

"You never killed anyone? Some detective you were. You ever shoot someone?"

"Shoot?" William said. "Sure."

"Yeah?" Rodriguez looking suddenly eager now. "What with? A Magnum?"

"A camera."

"Huh?"

"I took pictures."

"Pictures? What for?"

"For wives. For husbands."

"Oh."

"Sometimes they didn't trust each other. Sometimes they were right."

"I get it," Rodriguez said. "You caught them fucking around."

"Yes." Them. The ones who looked at the floor, at the windows, at the desk, anywhere but at him, who talked about this, about that, but rarely about it, not at first, and sometimes not for longer so that he finally had to pull it out of their mouths like pieces of rotten tooth. He had cheaters and Santini had the missing in action. Jean? Jean was different. Jean had the kind of clients that paid the mortgage. He could not only spot guilt at fifty paces-he could embrace it like an old pal. Wiseguys, loan sharks, number runners, dope peddlers, and political goons tended to carry his card around in their wallets. Anyone who needed a bagman or a bogeyman or some queer stuff they could use to strong-arm someone else-they all came to Jean. It was his earlier career in reverse: instead of helping the innocent go free, he helped the guilty-as-charged instead. An avenging angel of sorts, but not the cherub kind-more like the one who'd skipped out on heaven and set up shop lower down. It was, maybe, a declaration on his part: If the world was intrinsically evil-and everything he'd seen in the camps had shown him it was-then wasn't it his job, his duty as a citizen of the world, to help it along? If the world was hell-bent on going to hell, he might as well hitch a ride, and as long as he was hitching a ride, he might as well take it all the way to the last stop. There was always, after all, plenty of evidence both ways. And as Jean was fond of saying, you find what you look for.

"You want that license?" Rodriguez asked him. A yellow license fastened to the wall: Jean Goldblum, Private Investigator, certified by the State of New York.

"No thanks."

"You got one too?"

"Somewhere."

"Okay. Now you got a matched set."

"I don't want it."

"Suit yourself. What about that?" Rodriguez asked him. He pointed to a brown cardboard box barely peeking out from beneath the bed.

"What's in it?"

"Junk."

"No thanks."

"Maybe it's not junk. It's junk to me. But to you?"

"No, Rodriguez. No thanks."

"Right. The drapes?"

"What?"

"The drapes. Maybe you could use them-you strike me as a guy who could use drapes. But I can't give them to you-I gotta charge you."

"I don't need drapes."

"You could always use drapes. How old are your drapes?-I bet you don't know."

Like TV, William thought. Rodriguez was like the TV he'd wake up to at night, like one of those shriller in- fomercials: buy this, order that, send away for this. Click…

"I don't need drapes. I don't need a box of junk. Throw it into the incinerator. I don't want it."

"Sure," Rodriguez said. "Why didn't you say so?"

But when William left, he took the box of junk with him.

Rodriguez carried the box down the hall for him. William heard the sounds of television, the mutter of a dog, the padding of slippers. When they passed the door closest to the elevator, it opened, slowly, cautiously, and a head crowned with the whitest hair William had ever seen peeked out to look at them. Rodriguez turned to say something, the head withdrew like a tortoise before a predator, and the door slammed shut.

"Mr. Weeks," Rodriguez said, and shrugged. "He's a little crazy, you know. Senile…"

"Sure."

Rodriguez carried the box all the way to the front door. Happy to be rid of it, he probably would've carried it all the way through Flushing and back to Astoria. But he stopped in the dilapidated lobby where a woman was vacantly rocking a baby carriage back and forth and two Indian children were kicking each other with silent glee.

Rodriguez said: "It's all yours," and handed him the box.

"Thank you," William said without really meaning it, as he nestled the box into the crook of his arm. He turned to the door where a blinding afternoon sun was streaming through the glass like oncoming high beams.

He shielded his eyes; bits of dust swirled past his face.

"Hey."

William turned back: Rodriguez had his hand out, palm up, waiting for one of those street shakes William didn't understand, the box beginning to feel all of a sudden very heavy, like a burden now, as Rodriguez grasped his hand and showed him how it's done, like the handing off of a baton in a relay race. Only he'd never catch up, not now.

"Take it easy," Rodriguez said. He turned back into the lobby.

And William, walking out into a heat that nearly slapped him, thought that he'd shaken hands twice today but that only one counted, only he couldn't figure out which one. Thinking that Jean's hand had already been like the hand of a ghost, so white, so cold, and wondering if such things actually existed, ghosts and such, if perhaps right this minute Jean was somehow near him, hovering, like smoke.

William suddenly realized he'd been thinking out loud; a young girl in shorts was staring up at him with a kind of disgust. He'd been speaking out loud and no one had been listening, an old man talking to himself. But then, that's what old men do.