The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 2

I met Glenn Holtzmann for the first time on a Tuesday evening in April, which is supposed to be the cruelest month. T. S. Eliot said so, in “The Waste Land,” and maybe he knew what he was talking about. I don’t know, though. They all seem pretty nasty to me.

We met at the Sandor Kellstine Gallery, one of a dozen housed in a five-story building on Fifty-seventh between Fifth and Sixth. It was the opening of their spring group show of contemporary photography, and the work of seven photographers was on display in a large room on the third floor. The friends and relatives of all seven had turned out for the occasion, along with people like Lisa Holtzmann and Elaine Mardell, who were taking a course Thursday evenings at Hunter College called “Photography as Abstract Art.”

There was a table set with stemmed plastic goblets of red and white wine, and cubes of cheese with colored toothpicks stuck in them. There was club soda, too, and I poured myself some and found Elaine, who introduced me to the Holtzmanns.

I took one look at him and decided I didn’t like him.

I told myself that was ridiculous and shook his hand and returned his smile. An hour later the four of us were eating Thai food on Eighth Avenue. We had something with noodles, and Holtzmann drank a bottle of beer with his meal. The rest of us had Thai iced coffee.

The conversation never quite got off the ground. We started off talking about the show we’d just seen, then made brief forays into other standard topics — local politics, sports, the weather. I already knew he was a lawyer, and learned he was employed at Waddell & Yount, a publisher of large-print editions of books originally brought out by other publishers.

“Pretty dull stuff,” he said. “Mostly contracts, and then every once in a while I have to write a stern letter to somebody. Now there’s a skill I can’t wait to pass on. As soon as the kid’s old enough I’ll teach him how to write stern letters.”

“Or her,” Lisa said.

He or she was as yet unborn, due sometime in the fall. That was why Lisa was drinking iced coffee instead of a beer. Elaine was never much of a drinker, and doesn’t drink at all these days. And, one day at a time, neither do I.

“Or her,” Glenn agreed. “Male or female, the kid can plod along in Daddy’s boring footsteps. Matt, your work must be exciting. Or am I only saying that because I’ve watched too much TV?”

“It has its moments,” I said, “but a lot of what I do is a matter of routine. Like anything else.”

“You were a policeman before you went on your own?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re with an agency?”

“When they call me,” I said. “I work per diem for an outfit called Reliable and take whatever free-lance work comes my way.”

“I suppose you get a lot of industrial espionage. Disgruntled employees peddling company secrets.”

“Some.”

“But not much?”

“I’m unlicensed,” I said, “so I don’t tend to get corporate clients, not on my own. Reliable gets its share of corporate work, but most of the stuff they’ve used me on lately has involved trademark infringement.”

“Trademark infringement?”

“Everything from fake Rolex watches to unauthorized logos on sweatshirts and baseball caps.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s the street equivalent of writing somebody a stern letter.”

“You’d better have kids,” he said. “That’s a skill you’ll want to pass on.”

After dinner we walked to their apartment and did the requisite oohing and aahing over the view. Elaine’s apartment has a partial view across the East River, and from my hotel room I can catch a glimpse of the World Trade Center, but the Holtzmanns’ view had us badly outclassed. The apartment itself was on the small side — the second bedroom was about ten feet square — and it sported the low ceilings and construction shortcuts characteristic of most new housing. But that view made up for a lot.

Lisa made a pot of decaf and started talking about the personal ads, and how she knew perfectly respectable people who used them. “Because how are people supposed to meet nowadays?” she wondered. “Glenn and I were lucky, I was at Waddell & Yount showing my book to the art director and we happened to run into each other in the hallway.”

“I saw her from the other side of the room,” Glenn said, “and I made damn sure we happened to run into each other.”

“But how often does that happen?” Lisa went on. “How did you two meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The personals,” Elaine said.

“Seriously?”

“No. As a matter of fact we were sweethearts years ago. Then we broke up and lost track of each other. And then we happened to run into each other again, and—”

“And the same old magic was still there? That’s a beautiful story.”

Maybe so, but it was on the thin side. We’d met years ago, all right, at an after-hours joint, when Elaine was a sweet young call girl and I was a detective attached to the Sixth Precinct, and a little less firmly attached to a wife and two sons on Long Island. Years later a psychopath turned up out of our shared past, dead set on killing us both. That threw us together, and yes, Lisa, the same old magic was still there. We stuck, and the bond seemed to be holding.

I’d call it a beautiful story, but since most of it went untold you couldn’t get much conversational mileage out of it. Lisa told about a friend of a friend, divorced, who responded to a personal ad in New York magazine, went to the designated meeting place at the appointed hour, and met her ex-husband. They took it as a sign and wound up getting back together again. Glenn said he didn’t believe it, it didn’t make sense, he’d heard half a dozen variations on the theme and didn’t believe any of them.

“Urban folklore,” he said. “There are dozens of stories like that. They always happened to a friend of a friend, never to somebody you actually know, and the truth of the matter is they never happened at all. Scholars collect these stories, there are books filled with them. Like the German shepherd in the suitcase.”

We must have looked puzzled. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “You must know that one. Guy’s dog dies, he’s heartbroken, he doesn’t know what to do, he packs it up in a big Pullman suitcase and he’s on his way to a vet or a pet cemetery. And he sets the suitcase down to catch his breath when somebody grabs it and takes off with it. And ha-ha-ha, can’t you just picture the look on the poor bastard’s face when he opens the stolen suitcase and what does he find but a dead dog. I’ll bet you’ve all heard at least one version of that story.”

“I heard it with a Doberman,” Lisa said.

“Well, a Doberman, a shepherd. Any large dog.”

“In the version I heard,” Elaine said, “it happened to a woman.”

“Right, sure, and a helpful young man offers her a hand with the suitcase.”

“And inside the suitcase,” she went on, “is her ex-husband.”

So much for urban folklore. Lisa, indefatigable, shifted from personal ads to phone sex. She saw it as a perfect metaphor for the nineties, born of the health crisis, facilitated by credit cards and 900 numbers, and driven by a growing preference for fantasy over reality.

“And those girls make good money,” she said, “and all they have to do is talk.”

“Girls? Half of them are probably grandmothers.”

“So? An older woman would have an advantage. You wouldn’t need looks or youth, just an active imagination.”

“You mean a dirty mind, don’t you? You’d also need a sexy voice.”

“Is my voice sexy enough?”

“I’d say so,” he said, “but I’m prejudiced. Why? Don’t tell me you’re considering it.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve thought about it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, I don’t know. When the baby’s sleeping and I’m stuck here—”

“You’ll pick up the phone and talk dirty to strangers?”

“Well—”

“Remember before we were married when you were getting the obscene phone calls?”

“That was different.”

“You freaked out.”

“Well, he was a pervert.”

“Oh, really? Who do you figure your customers would be, Boy Scouts?”

“It would be different if I was getting paid for it,” she said. “It wouldn’t feel like a violation. At least I don’t think it would. What do you think, Elaine?”

“I don’t think I’d like it.”

“Well, of course not,” Glenn said. “You haven’t got a dirty mind.”

Back at Elaine’s apartment I said, “As a mature woman you’ve got a definite advantage. But it’s a shame your mind’s not dirty enough for phone sex.”

“Wasn’t that a hoot? I almost said something.”

“I thought you were going to.”

“I almost did. But cooler heads prevailed.”

“Well,” I said, “sometimes they do.”

When I first met Elaine she was a call girl, and she was still in the game when we got back together again. She went on turning tricks while we set about establishing a relationship, and I pretended that it didn’t bother me, and she did the same. We didn’t talk about it, and it became the thing we didn’t talk about, the elephant in the parlor that we tiptoed around but never mentioned.

Then one morning we had a mutual moment of truth. I admitted that it bothered me, and she admitted that she had secretly gotten out of the business several months previously. There was a curious “Gift of the Magi” quality to the whole affair, and there were adjustments to be made, and new routes to be drawn on what was essentially uncharted terrain.

One of the things she had to figure out was what to do with herself. She didn’t need to work. She had never been one to give her money to pimps or coke dealers, but had invested wisely and well, sinking the bulk of it into apartment houses in Queens. A management company handled everything and sent her a monthly check, and she netted more than enough to sustain her life-style. She liked to work out at the health club and go to concerts and take college courses, and she lived in comfort in the middle of a city where you could always find something to do.

But she had worked all her life, and retirement took some getting used to. Sometimes she read the want ads, frowning, and once she’d spent a week trying to put together a résumé, then sighed and tore up her notes. “It’s hopeless,” she announced. “I can’t even fill in the blanks with interesting lies. I spent twenty years diddling for dollars. I could say I spent the time as a housewife, but so what? Either way I’m essentially unemployable.”

One day she said, “Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about phone sex?”

“Well, maybe as a stopgap,” I said, “if we couldn’t be together for some reason. But I think I’d feel too self-conscious to get into the spirit of it.”

“Idiot,” she said affectionately. “Not for us. To make money. A woman I know claims it’s very lucrative. You’re in a room with ten or a dozen other girls. There are partitions for privacy, and you sit at a desk and talk on a telephone. No hassles about getting paid. No worries about AIDS or herpes. No physical danger, no physical contact even, you never see the clients and they never see you. They don’t even know your name.”

“What do they call you?”

“You make up a street name, except you wouldn’t call it that because you’d never get anywhere near the street. A phone name, but I’ll bet the French have a word for it.” She found a dictionary, paged through it. “Nom de téléphone. I think I like it better in English.”

“And who would you be? Trixie? Vanessa?”

“Maybe Audrey.”

“You didn’t have to stop and think, did you?”

“I talked to Pauline hours ago. How long does it take to think up a name?” She drew a breath. “She says she can get me on where she works. But how would you feel about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to predict. Maybe you should try it and we’ll both see how we feel. That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Well, what is it they used to say about masturbation? Do it until you need glasses.”

“Or a hearing aid,” she said.

She started the following Monday and lasted all of four hours of a six-hour shift. “Impossible,” she said. “Out of the question. It turns out I’d rather fuck strangers than talk dirty to them. Do you want to explain that to me?”

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t do it. I was hopeless at it. This one dimwit wanted to hear how big his cock was. ‘Oh, it’s huge,’ I said. ‘It’s the biggest one I ever saw. God, I don’t see how I can possibly get the whole thing inside me. Are you positive it’s your dick? I’d swear it was your arm.’ He got very upset. ‘You’re not doing it right,’ he said. Nobody ever told me that before. ‘You’re exaggerating. You’re making the whole thing ridiculous.’ Well, I fucking lost it. I said, ‘Ridiculous? You’re sitting there with the phone in one hand and your dick in the other, paying a total stranger to tell you you’re hung like Secretariat, and I’m the one’s making it ridiculous?’ And I told him he was an asshole and I hung up on him, which is the one absolute no-no because they reach you by calling a 900 number so the meter’s running as long as they’re on the line. The one thing you don’t do is hang up before they do, but I didn’t care.

“Another genius wanted me to tell him stories. ‘Tell me about the time you did a threesome with a man and a woman.’ Well, I’ve got real stories I could have told, but am I supposed to take something that actually happened and share it with this jerkoff? The hell with that. So I made something up, and of course all three people were hot and gorgeous and perfectly synchronized sexually, and everybody came like the Fourth of July. As opposed to real life where people have bad breath and skin blemishes, and the women are faking it and the man can’t get a hard-on.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Forget it,” she said. “It’s good I saved my money, because it turns out I’m unemployable. I can’t even make it as a telephone whore.”

“Well?” she said. “What did you think?”

“Of Glenn and Lisa? They’re fine. I wish them well.”

“And you don’t care if we never see them again.”

“That’s a little harsh, but I’ll admit I don’t see us spending all our free time with them. There wasn’t a whole lot of chemistry operating this evening.”

“I wonder why. The age difference? We’re not that much older.”

“She’s pretty young,” I said, “but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s a lack of anything much in common. You go to class with her and I live a block from them, but aside from that—”

“I know,” she said. “Not much common ground, and I probably could have predicted that going in. But I found her very likable, so I thought it was worth a try.”

“Well, you were right,” I said, “and I can see why you liked her. I liked her myself.”

“But not him.”

“Not especially, no.”

“Any idea why?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “Not really. I could point to things about him that I found irritating, but the fact of the matter is that I’d already made up my mind to dislike him. I took one look at him and knew he was somebody I wasn’t going to like.”

“He’s not a bad-looking man.”

“Hardly,” I said. “He’s handsome. Maybe that’s it, maybe I sensed that you’d find him attractive and that’s what put my back up.”

“Oh, I didn’t think he was attractive.”

“You didn’t?”

“I thought he was good-looking,” she said, “the way male models are good-looking, except not as pouty as they all seem to be these days. But I’m not attracted to pretty boys. I like grumpy old bears.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Maybe you didn’t like him because you were hot for her.”

“I already knew I didn’t like him before I even looked at her.”

“Oh.”

“And why would I be hot for her?”

“She’s pretty.”

“In a fragile, china-doll way. A fragile, pregnant, china-doll way.”

“I thought men went crazy for pregnant women.”

“Well, think again.”

“What did you do when Anita was pregnant?”

“Worked a lot of overtime,” I said. “Put a lot of bad guys in jail.”

“Same as when she wasn’t pregnant.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Maybe it was cop instinct,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t like him.”

“You know,” I said, “I think you just hit it. But it doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a promising young attorney with a pregnant wife and an upscale condo. He’s got a firm handshake and a winning smile. Why would I peg him as a wrong guy?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. I sensed something, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. Except that I had the sense he was listening awfully hard, as though he wanted to hear more than I wanted to tell him. The conversation dragged tonight, but it would have sailed along just fine if I’d told some detective stories.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Maybe because he was so hot to hear them.”

“Like phone sex,” she suggested. “He had the phone in one hand and his dick in the other.”

“Something like that.”

“No wonder you wanted to hang up. God, do you remember what a disaster that turned out to be? For a week afterward I wouldn’t say a word in bed.”

“I know. You wouldn’t even moan.”

“Well, I tried not to,” she said, “but sometimes I had no choice.”

In a Nazi accent I said, “Ve haff vays of making you come.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I suppose ze Fräulein demands proof.”

“I suppose I do.”

And a while later she said, “Well, I wouldn’t call it the best evening we ever spent, but it certainly had a nice finish, didn’t it? I think you’re probably right, I think there’s something sly about him, but so what? We’ll never have to see them again.”

But of course I did have to see them again.

A week or ten days after our first meeting I walked out of my hotel one evening and got halfway to Ninth Avenue when I heard my name called. I looked around and saw Glenn Holtzmann. He was wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.

“They kept me working late today,” he said. “I called Lisa and told her to go ahead and eat without me. You had dinner yet? Want to grab a bite somewhere?” I had already eaten, and told him so. “Then do you want to have a cup of coffee and keep me company? I’m not up for anything fancy, just the Flame or the Morning Star. Have you got the time?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I don’t.” I pointed up Ninth Avenue. “I’m on my way to meet somebody,” I said.

“Well, I’ll walk a block with you. I’ll be a good boy and have a Greek salad at the Flame.” He patted his midsection. “Keep the weight down,” he said, although he looked trim enough to me. We walked to Fifty-eighth and crossed the avenue together, and in front of the Flame he said, “Here’s where I get off. Hope your meeting goes well. Interesting case?”

“At this stage,” I said, “it’s hard to tell.”

It wasn’t a case at all, of course. It was an AA meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. For an hour and a half I sat on a folding metal chair and drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. At ten o’clock we mumbled our way through the Lord’s Prayer and stacked the chairs, and a few of us stopped in at the Flame to take nourishment and other people’s inventories. I thought I might run into Holtzmann there, lingering over the dregs of his Greek salad, but by then he’d gone on home to his little cabin in the sky. I ordered some coffee and a toasted English and forgot about him.

Sometime in the next week or two I saw him waiting for a Ninth Avenue bus, but he didn’t see me. Another time Elaine and I had a late bite at Armstrong’s and left just as the Holtzmanns were getting out of a cab in front of their building across the intersection. And one afternoon I was at my own window when a man who might have been Glenn Holtzmann emerged from the camera shop across the street and walked west. I’m on a high floor, so the person I saw might as easily have been someone else, but something in his walk or stance brought Holtzmann to mind.

It was the middle of June, though, before we spoke again. It was a weekday night, and it was late. Past midnight, anyway. I’d been to a meeting and out for coffee. Back in my room, I picked up a book and couldn’t read it, turned on the TV and couldn’t watch it.

I get that way sometimes. I fought the restlessness for a while, until around midnight I said the hell with it and grabbed my jacket off a hook and went out. I walked south and west, and when I got to Grogan’s I took a seat at the bar.

Grogan’s Open House is at Fiftieth and Tenth, an old-fashioned Irish ginmill of the sort that used to dot Hell’s Kitchen years ago. There are fewer of them these days, although Grogan’s has yet to earn a bronze plaque from the Landmarks Commission, or a spot on the Endangered Species List. There’s a long bar on the left, booths and tables on the right, a dart board on the back wall, an old tile floor strewn with sawdust, an old stamped-tin ceiling in need of repair.

They rarely get much of a crowd at Grogan’s, and this night was no exception. Burke was behind the bar, watching an old movie on one of the cable channels. I ordered a Coke and he brought it to me. I asked if Mick had been in and he shook his head. “Later,” he said.

This was a long speech for him. The bartenders at Grogan’s are a closemouthed lot. It’s part of the job description.

I sipped my Coke and scanned the room. There were a few familiar faces but no one I knew well enough to say hello to, and that was fine with me. I watched the movie. I could have been watching the same picture at home but there I’d been unable to watch anything, or even sit still. Here, wrapped in the smell of tobacco smoke and spilled beer, I felt curiously at ease.

On the screen, Bette Davis sighed and tossed her head, looking younger than springtime.

I managed to get lost in the movie, and then I got lost in thought, caught up in some sort of reverie. I came out of it when I heard my name mentioned. I turned, and there was Glenn Holtzmann. He was wearing a tan windbreaker over a checked sport shirt. It was the first time I’d seen him in anything other than a business suit.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I went to Armstrong’s but it was too crowded. So I came here. What’s that you’re drinking, Guinness? Wait a minute, you’ve got ice in your glass. Is that how they serve it here?”

“It’s Coca-Cola,” I said, “but they’ve got Guinness on draft, and I suppose they’ll give it to you with ice if that’s how you want it.”

“I don’t want it at all,” he said, “with or without ice. What do I want?” Burke was right in front of us. He hadn’t said a word, and didn’t say anything now. “What kind of beer do you have? Never mind, I don’t feel like a beer. How about Johnny Walker Red? Rocks, a little water.”

Burke brought the drink with the water on the side in a small glass pitcher. Holtzmann added water to his glass, held the drink to the light, then took a sip. I got a rush of sense-memory. The last thing I wanted was a drink, but for a second there I could damn well taste it.

“I like this place,” he said, “but I hardly ever come here. How about yourself?”

“I like it well enough.”

“Do you get here often?”

“Not too often. I know the owner.”

“You do? Isn’t he the guy they call ‘the Butcher’?”

“I don’t know that anybody actually calls him that,” I said. “I think some newspaperman came up with the name, possibly the same one who started calling the local hoodlums ‘the Westies.’ ”

“They don’t call themselves that?”

“They do now,” I said. “They never used to. As far as Mick Ballou is concerned, I can tell you this much. Nobody calls him ‘Butcher’ in his own joint.”

“If I spoke out of turn—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ve been in here, I don’t know, a handful of times. I’ve yet to run into him. I think I’d recognize him from his pictures. He’s a big man, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“How did you come to know him, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Oh, I’ve known him for years,” I said. “Our paths crossed a long time ago.”

He drank some of his scotch. “I bet you could tell some stories,” he said.

“I’m not much of a storyteller.”

“I wonder.” He got a business card from his wallet, handed it to me. “Are you ever free for lunch, Matt? Give me a call one of these days. Will you do that?”

“One of these days.”

“I hope you will,” he said, “because I’d love to really kick back and have a real conversation, and who knows? It might lead to something.”

“Oh?”

“Like a book, for instance. The experiences you’ve had, the characters you’ve known, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a book there waiting to be written.”

“I’m no writer.”

“If the material’s there it’s no big deal to hook you up with a writer. And I’ve got a feeling the material’s there. But we can talk about all that at lunch.”

He left a few minutes later, and I decided to pack it in myself when the movie ended, but before that happened Mick showed up and we wound up making a night of it. I had told Holtzmann I wasn’t much of a storyteller but I told my share that night, and Mick told a few himself. He drank Irish whiskey and I drank coffee and we didn’t quit when Burke put the chairs up on the tables and closed for the night.

The sky was light by the time we got out of there. “And now we’ll get something to eat,” Mick said, “and then ‘twill be time for the butchers’ mass at St. Bernard’s.”

“Not for me it won’t,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

“Ah, ye’re no fun at all,” he said, and gave me a ride home. “ ‘Twas a good old night,” he said when we reached my hotel, “for all that it’s ending too early.”

“The last thing I want to do,” I told Elaine, “is write a book about my fascinating experiences. But even if I were open to the idea he’s the person least likely to get me to do it. All he has to do is ask me a question and I automatically look for a way not to answer it.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“I don’t know. Why would he want to talk to me about writing a book? His company publishes large-print editions. And he’s not an editor, he’s a lawyer.”

“He could know people at other houses,” she suggested. “And couldn’t he have a book-packaging operation going on the side?”

“He’s got something going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that he’s got a hidden agenda. He wants something, and he doesn’t let you know what it is. I’ll tell you something, I don’t believe he wants me to write a book. Because if that was what he really wanted he would have proposed something else.”

“So what do you figure he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“Be easy to find out,” she said. “Have lunch with him.”

“I could,” I said. “I could also live without knowing.”

I didn’t see him again until the first week in August. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was at a window table at the Morning Star, eating a piece of pie and drinking a cup of coffee and reading a copy of Newsday that someone had left on an adjacent table. A shadow fell on the page and I looked up, and there was Holtzmann on the other side of the glass. He had his tie loosened and his collar open and his suit jacket over his arm. He smiled, pointed at himself and at the entrance. I figured this meant he was about to join me, and I was right.

He said, “Good to see you, Matt. Mind if I sit? Or were you expecting someone?”

I pointed to the chair opposite mine and he took it. The waitress came over with a menu and he waved it off and said he’d just have coffee. He told me he’d been hoping I’d call, that he’d looked forward to our getting together for lunch. “I guess you’ve been busy,” he said.

“Pretty busy.”

“I can imagine.”

“And,” I said, “I don’t honestly think I’d be interested in doing a book. Even if I had one to write, I think I’d be happier leaving it unwritten.”

“Say no more,” he said. “I can respect that. Still, who says you have to have a book in the works in order for us to have lunch? We could probably find other things to talk about.”

“Well, when my work schedule thins out a little—”

“Sure.” The coffee came and he frowned at it and wiped his brow with his napkin. “I don’t know why I ordered coffee,” he said. “Iced tea would have made more sense in this heat. Still, it’s cool enough in here, isn’t it? Thank God for air-conditioning.”

“Amen to that.”

“Do you know that we keep our public places cooler in the summer than in the winter? If this place was the same temperature in January that it is right now we’d complain to the management. And people wonder why we’ve got an energy crisis.” He grinned engagingly. “See? We can find plenty of things to talk about. The weather. The energy crisis. Quirks in the American national character. Be a cinch for us to get through a lunch hour.”

“Unless we use up all our topics ahead of time.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that. How’s Elaine, by the way? Lisa hasn’t seen her since school let out.”

“She’s fine.”

“Is she taking any courses over the summer? Lisa wanted to, but she decided her pregnancy might get in the way.”

I said that Elaine would probably enroll for something or other in the fall, but that she’d decided to keep the summer open so that we could take long weekends.

“Lisa was talking about calling her,” he said, “but I don’t think she got around to it.” He stirred his coffee. Abruptly he said, “She lost the baby. I guess you wouldn’t have heard.”

“Jesus, no. I’m sorry, Glenn.”

“Thanks.”

“When did it—”

“I don’t know, ten days ago, something like that. She was just into her seventh month. Bright side, it could have been worse. They told us the baby was malformed, it couldn’t have lived, but suppose she carried it to term, even had a live delivery? Would have been twice the heartache, the way I figure it.”

“I see what you mean.”

“She was the one who wanted a kid,” he said. “I got along this long without any, I more or less figured I could go the distance. But it was important to her, so I figured why not. The doctor says we can try again.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know if I want to. Not right away, anyhow. It’s funny, I didn’t mean to tell you all this. Shows what a good detective you are, you get people talking even without trying. I’ll let you get back to your paper.” He stood up, pushed two dollars across the table at me. “For the coffee,” he said.

“That’s too much.”

“So leave a big tip,” he said. “And call me when you get the chance. We’ll have that lunch.”

When I recounted the conversation to Elaine, her immediate response was to call Lisa. She made the call, got the answering machine, and rang off without leaving a message.

“It occurred to me,” she explained, “that she can deal with her grief just fine without my help. All she and I ever had in common was the class, and it ended two months ago. I feel for her, I really do, but why do I have to get involved?”

“You don’t.”

“That’s what I decided. Maybe I’m actually getting something out of Al-Anon. I’d probably get even more if I went more than once every three or four weeks.”

“It’s a shame you don’t like the meetings.”

“All that whining. They make me want to vomit. Other than that they’re great. What about you? Do you like Glenn any better now that he shared his grief with you?”

“You’d have to,” I said. “But I still don’t want to have lunch with him.”

“Oh, you won’t have any choice,” she said. “He’ll keep grinding away at you until you wake up one day and realize he’s your new best friend. You’ll see.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead six or seven weeks passed during which I never caught a glimpse of Glenn Holtzmann, or gave him a passing thought. And then somebody with a gun changed everything, and from that point on Glenn was on my mind more than he’d ever been in life.