Hope to Die

TWENTY

I'd told him I wanted to sleep on it, but I didn't get all that much sleep. Elaine and I were up talking until late, and when she got up around seven she found me in the kitchen with a pot of coffee.

"It's not the money," I said.

"Of course not."

"Except in a funny way it is. The amount's a factor. If it was five hundred dollars, I'd write out a check and put it in the mail. I wouldn't have to think twice."

"Uh-huh."

"And if it was fifty thousand dollars, well, I still wouldn't have to think twice, because it would be out of the question. But five thousand's right in the middle, small enough to manage but big enough to notice."

"We can afford it, baby."

"I know we can afford it."

"We wouldn't have to liquidate assets, or tighten our belts. We've got it in the bank."

"I know."

"But then again, you just said it. It's not the money."

I drank some coffee. I said, "He's the one that looks like me, you know."

"I know."

"Michael takes after his mother. He's heavyset, too, like the men in her family. Andy looks like his father."

"He could do worse."

"I think he drinks like his old man, too. I wonder how many DUIs he's had, how many cars he's cracked up. I don't know what the hell I should do."

She poured herself some coffee, sat down across the table from me.

"If he had to take after me," I said, "it's a shame he didn't go all the way and get on the cops. Then he could steal with both hands and not worry about the consequences."

"You were never a thief."

"I took money that wasn't mine. I generally found a justification for it, but people generally do. Look at Andy. He was just borrowing it, he was going to pay it back. You know, all I do is keep going around in circles. I don't want him rotting in an Arizona jail, and I don't want to buy his way out of it, either."

"It's tricky," she said. "But it's your call."

"What if it were yours?"

"That's hard," she said, "because it's not, and it shouldn't be."

"What would they tell you at Al-Anon?"

"Not to be an enabler," she said without hesitation. "That I'd be doing him no favor by getting him out of a jam. That all I'd really achieve would be to keep him from getting the lesson. That he'd never be able to change his behavior until he experiences the consequences of it. That, wherever he was supposed to go, he'd get there faster without my help."

"So there's your answer. You wouldn't send him the money."

"No, I'd send it."

"You would? You just said- "

"I know what I said. But there's another principle, and that's that every dog gets one bite. He may have done this before, but this is the first time he's come to you."

"He didn't come to me. He told his brother- "

"He told his brother not to call you, but at the same time he put his brother in a position where he had to call you. So in that sense he came to you."

"So you would send him the money."

"And I'd tell him it was the last time."

"He'll fuck up again."

"Of course he will."

"And next time you'd turn him down."

She nodded. "No matter what. Whether he'd go to jail or get his legs broken, I'd turn him down."

"But this time you'd send the money." I drank some more coffee and said, "You know, I think you're right."

"I'm right for me. What's right for me isn't necessarily right for you."

"This time it is. I'll call Michael."

But not just then; it was, as she pointed out, four in the morning in California. I didn't ask her what time it was in Paris.

I was relieved to have the decision made, but I felt less sanguine about the whole business as the morning wore on. My mind kept fussing with it like a kitten with a ball of yarn, and I had to remind myself over and over that I'd made up my mind.

And I was forever checking my watch, wishing it was time to make the call, anxious to get it over with. But I kept putting it off, first reluctant to chance waking him, then deciding against calling while they were at breakfast. It evidently wasn't something he wanted June to know about, so why make him take the call in another room? I could wait and reach him at the office.

T J came up around eleven, wearing khakis and a polo shirt but carrying yesterday's clipboard. He'd made notes on his trip to Williamsburg and went over them with me. The house was a three-story brick rowhouse sheathed thirty or forty years ago in garish asphalt siding. "Musta been some salesman," he said, " 'cause everybody on the block went for it. Made it a real Neighborhood Uglification project."

The siding had been stripped from the lower two floors at 168 Meserole, and they were working on the top floor. The brick underneath was going to need repointing, and a good deal of repair work, but even in its present state it looked better than what had covered it. They were doing a similar kind of work inside, deleting the improvements of previous owners and tenants, tearing out the partitions that had divided the original floor-through apartments into smaller units, pulling off the pressboard paneling and dropped-ceiling tiles, taking up the worn linoleum. The plaster was scheduled for removal from the exterior walls, to expose the brick. The three apartments would be loftlike open-plan layouts, but some half-walls were planned, to hold bookshelves and display paintings.

"Be nice when they finish it," he said. "They artists, so they need their work space. They all workin' together. Time I got there, Peter was down on the first floor, scrapin' ugly wallpaper off one wall they fixin' to keep, an' two of the others was up in Peter's place on the third floor, workin' on the brick. They got these little masks over their mouths an' noses, keep the dust out of their lungs, an' they got plaster dust coverin' the rest of them. Looked pretty comical, but I figured a buildings inspector be seein' that all the time, so I held back and didn't laugh."

Peter had the third floor to himself, he said, and he wondered if they'd put him up there because they figured he needed the exercise. He was fat, no question, but it didn't seem to slow him down any. He went up and down the stairs without getting out of breath, and he didn't have that apologetic manner that so many fat people seemed to have.

"You see him," he said, "and you say to yourself, man, this is one fat dude. You around him a little while, an' what happens is you forget he's fat. It slips your mind. And then later on, like, you spendin' time with one of the others an' then you see Peter again, and you're like, Damn, he's fat! Like you never noticed it before, 'cept you did."

I knew what he meant. I'd observed the same phenomenon with several other people, not all of them overweight. One is blind, for example, another missing an arm. The common denominator, I think, is self-acceptance, and the result is as he described it. Because they accept it, whatever it is, you stop noticing it.

Peter Meredith's therapist may not have been able to save his client's relationship with Kristin, or to trim him down to a size 42, but it sounded as though he could claim a certain degree of success.

Marsha Kittredge and Lucian Bemis had the second floor. She was a blond Wasp princess from Beaufort, South Carolina, and he was a tall gaunt black man from South Philadelphia. She was a painter, he a sculptor, and T J had decided that, once upon a time, her great-grandfather had owned his great-grandfather.

The ground floor's occupants were Ruth Ann Lipinsky, another painter, the only native New Yorker in the group, short and dark and intense, and Kieran Eklund, a painter and printmaker, who'd been doing something unspecified in Manhattan during T J's visit. T J'd thought he might stick around until Eklund got back, so he could get a look at him, but it turned out the others were going to meet Eklund in the city. They'd been anxious to clean up and get out of there, which may have prompted Peter Meredith to give T J a hundred-dollar handshake.

"Made me suspicious," he said. "Man gives you money, you got to figure it's so you'll look the other way. Started to wonder what I wasn't meant to see. Then I remembered who I supposed to be."

"A city employee."

"You right, Dwight. Man in my position, they got to pay you even if they ain't done nothin' wrong." He sighed. "Good business to be in," he said, "if only the uniforms wasn't so lame."

When I finally picked up the phone and called him, Michael was in the car, on his way to a client. "I'll make the check out to you," I said, "and put it in the mail this afternoon. For five thousand dollars. You write your own check to him, or better yet- "

"I was thinking of making the check payable to his employer."

"That's exactly what I was about to suggest. Not because we don't trust him, but because the canceled check will be proof of payment."

"That's a good point," he said. "I can even say as much to Andy if he takes offense. But to be perfectly frank about it, as far as I'm concerned it's because I don't trust him."

I got out the checkbook and wrote out a check for five thousand dollars payable to Michael Scudder. I looked up his address, addressed an envelope, and folded a sheet of notepaper to wrap the check so that it wouldn't be visible through the envelope. I don't know why, I can't imagine that a lot of postal employees hold envelopes to the light, looking for personal checks they can steal.

And it seemed to me I ought to write something on the sheet of paper. I sat there trying to think of something to say. Everything that came to mind struck me as redundant or foolish or both. I decided to face the fact that I didn't have anything to say to my boy, to either of my boys, and I wrapped the check in the piece of paper and tucked it in the envelope, sealed it and stamped it and held it out and looked at it.

T J was sitting on the couch, turning the pages of an art magazine. He hadn't said a word in a while.

"I'm sending five thousand dollars to my son in California," I said.

He didn't look up from the magazine. "He probably be glad to get it," he said.

"It's not for him. It's for his brother in Tucson. Andy, his name is. He embezzled money from the company he works for and if he doesn't pay it back he'll go to jail."

He didn't say anything

I picked up the envelope, held it in my hand. It didn't weigh much. One stamp would carry it all the way across the country. I said, "I could get the money from the bank, squirt lighter fluid on it and set it on fire. It'd make about as much sense."

"Blood," he said.

"Blood?"

"Thicker'n water."

"So they tell me. Sometimes I wonder." I got to my feet. "I'm going to drop this in the mail," I said. "You want to wait here?"

He shook his head, closed the magazine, stood up.

I mailed it in the box on the corner, thinking what an act of faith I'd just performed, expecting the post office to transport it three thousand miles and actually deliver it to its intended recipient. Yet it seemed far more likely that the letter would get there than that the check inside would do any good.

We got two Cokes and two slices of Sicilian pizza at the corner of Fifty-eighth and ate our lunch standing up. My Coke tasted cloyingly sweet, and I asked the counterman if he had a wedge of lemon. He gave me one of those little plastic packets of lemon juice, and I decided that would only make things worse. I looked into the glass and said, "Thicker than water."

"So they say."

"You have any family, T J?"

"Not since my gran died."

I knew she'd raised him. He'd said as much once, and that her death was the last time he'd cried.

We finished our slices and looked at each other, and I motioned to the counterman for two more. We worked on them, and T J finished his Coke. I told him he was welcome to the rest of mine, but he didn't want it. We'd both been silent for a while, and not just because we were busy eating.

And then he said, "I could have a daddy. No way to know."

I didn't say anything.

"My mama came home an' had me," he said, "an' then she sickened and died. I don't remember her at all. I wasn't a year old when she passed. Gran told me about her, showed me pictures of her, said how she loved me, which maybe she did an' maybe she didn't. Far as my daddy, my gran said all she knew about him was he was dead. He was killed, she said, but as to whether or not that's true, I couldn't tell you. Gran coulda made that up, or maybe it was what my mama told her, but Mama made it up."

On the sidewalk, a man walked by having a spirited telephone conversation. He didn't have a cell phone, however. The mouthpiece he was half-shouting into was that of the receiver of a pay phone, a foot-long strand of cable still attached to it. I'd seen him before, wearing the same mismatched pants and suit jacket, the pants several inches too short for him, the jacket's sleeves too long. He walked around like that all the time, carrying his private phone, telling whoever was at the other end of it all about the KGB and the CIA and the hidden truth about the Oklahoma City bombing.

Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to him.

"I'd say he was a black man," T J said. "Bein' as I'm what you could call medium dark. Other hand, my gran was a good measure darker, and my mama, best I recall from the pictures, she was dark like my gran. So my daddy coulda been more on the light-skinned side. But it ain't like mixin' paint. You never too sure what's gonna come out. Could be he was as dark as my gran. Could be he was white. No way to know."

"No."

"Could be my mama herself didn't know," he said. "Gran didn't say she was wild, but she was real young, an' I'd guess she was wild. Could be she was a workin' girl, could be I was a trick baby. No way to tell."

Later we were sitting in the park going over what he'd learned in Williamsburg- which, all in all, wasn't much. None of the people he'd seen were physically right for the part of the third man. Kieran Eklund was still possible, but only because he hadn't been ruled out yet.

But you could just about rule him out on the grounds that people who work day and night restoring a neglected house, digging out old mortar, scrubbing bare brick with muriatic acid, scraping walls and sanding floors, are just plain not the type to create elaborate charades leading to multiple homicide. Putting that kind of effort into a house in the shadow of Bushwick Terminal and equidistant from two low-income housing projects might cast doubts on their judgment, but it still made them all extremely unlikely killers.

"And he's not just nuts," I said. "He's calculating. I wish there was money in this."

His eyebrows went up. "Last I heard, we had a client."

"I don't mean money for us. Money for him. Nobody puts something like this together for revenge, or out of bloodlust. The whole thing's too cold. There's got to be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow."

"That's what Lia thought. You startin' to think she was right?"

"No."

"Didn't think so. Only money's the house, right? An' it goes to Kristin, and she our client, so we know she ain't guilty."

I'd had guilty clients in the past, but I didn't have one now. But how did we know the house was the only asset? And how did we know everything went to Kristin?