Ed Donnegan owned almost every three-decker on my block, save for my own, and every ten years, he got around to painting them, and every time he did, he hired a single painter for as long as it took to paint them all, rain, snow or shine.
Lyle wore a ten-gallon hat and a red handkerchief around his neck and black wrap-around Gargoyle sunglasses that took up half of his small, pinched face. Those sunglasses, he said, seemed like something a city boy would wear, and they were his only concession to living in a god-awful world of Yankees who had no appreciation for God’s three great gifts to mankind—Jack Daniel’s, the horse, and, of course, Waylon.
I stuck my head in between the shade and the screen and saw that his back was to me as he painted the house next door. The music was so loud he’d never hear me, so I pulled down the window instead, then stumbled up and pulled down all the others in the bedroom, and reduced Waylon to just another tinny voice ringing in my head. Then I crawled back into bed and closed my eyes and prayed for quiet.
Which meant nothing to Angie.
She woke me shortly after ten by bouncing around the apartment making coffee, opening windows to another fresh autumn day, and rattling through my refrigerator, as Waylon or Merle or Hank Jr. poured back through my screens.
When that didn’t rouse me from bed, she opened the bedroom door and said, “Get up.”
“Go away.” I pulled the covers over my head.
“Get up, ya baby. I’m bored. Now.”
I threw a pillow at her and she ducked and it arced over her head and shattered something in the kitchen.
She said, “You weren’t fond of those dishes, I hope.”
I stood and wrapped the sheet around my waist to cover my glow-in-the-dark Marvin the Martian boxer shorts and stumbled out into the kitchen.
Angie stood in the middle of the room, coffee cup held in both hands, a few broken plates on the floor and sink.
“Coffee?” she said.
I found a broom, began sweeping up the mess. Angie put her cup on the table, bent by me with a dustpan.
I said, “You’re still a bit unclear on this sleep concept, aren’t you?”
“Overrated.” She scooped up some glass and dumped it in the wastebasket.
“How would you know? You’ve never tried it.”
“Patrick,” she said, dumping another load of glass, “it’s not my fault you stayed out until the wee hours drinking with your little friends.”
My little friends.
“How do you know I was out drinking with anybody?”
She dumped the last bit of glass, straightened. “Because your skin is a shade of green I’ve never seen before, and there was an incredibly drunken message on my answering machine this morning.”
“Ah.” I vaguely recollected a pay phone and a beep from some point last night. “What did this message say?”
She took her coffee cup off the table, leaned against the washing machine. “Something like ‘Where are you, it’s three in the morning, something’s really fucked up, we gotta talk.’ The rest I couldn’t understand, but by then you’d started speaking Swahili anyway.”
I put the dustpan, broom, and wastebasket in the pantry, poured myself a cup of coffee. “So,” I said, “where were you at three in the morning?”
“You’re my father now?” She frowned and pinched my waist just above the sheet. “You’re getting love handles.”
I reached for the cream. “I don’t have love handles.”
“And you know why? Because you still drink beer like you’re in a frat.”
I looked at her steadily, poured extra cream into my coffee. “You going to answer my original question?”
“About my whereabouts last night?”
“Yes.”
She sipped her coffee, looked over the mug rim at me. “Nope. I did wake up with a warm, fuzzy feeling, though, and a big smile on my face. Big smile.”
“Big as the one you’re wearing now?”
“Bigger.”
“Hmm,” I said.
She hoisted herself up onto the washing machine. “So, you called me, shit-faced, at three A.M. to do more than check up on my sex life. What’s up?” She lit a cigarette.
I said, “You remember Kara Rider?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone murdered her last night.”
“No.” Her eyes were huge.
“Yes.” With all the extra cream, my coffee tasted like baby’s formula. “Crucified her on Meeting House Hill.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. She looked at her cigarette like it might tell her something.
“Any idea who did it?” she said.
“No one was parading around Meeting House Hill with
a bloody hammer singing, ‘Boy, oh boy, do I like to crucify women,’ if that’s what you mean.” I tossed my coffee in the sink.
Quietly, she said, “You done snapping for the day?”
I poured fresh coffee into the cup. “Don’t know yet. It’s still early.” I turned around and she slipped off the washing machine and stood in front of me.
I saw Kara’s thin body lying in the cold night, swollen and exposed, her eyes blank.
I said, “I ran into her the other morning outside the Emerald. I had a feeling, I dunno, that she was in trouble or something, but I let it go. I blew it off.”
“And what?” she said. “You’re somehow to blame?”
I shrugged.
“No, Patrick,” she said. She ran a warm palm up the side of my neck, forced me to look in her eyes. “Understand?”
Nobody should die like Kara did.
“Understand?” she said again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”
“No guessing,” she said. She removed her hand and pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to me. “This was taped to the front door downstairs.” She pointed to a small cardboard box on my kitchen table. “And that was leaning against the door.”
I have a third-floor apartment with a bolt lock on both the front and back doors and usually two guns stored inside somewhere, and none of this probably deters break-ins as much as the two front doors to the three-decker itself. There’s an outside one and an interior one, and they’re both reinforced with steel and made of heavy black German oak. The portal glass in the first one is wired with alarm tape, and my landlord has fitted both doors with a total of six locks that require three different keys. I have a set. Angie has a set. My landlord’s wife, who lives in the first-floor apartment because she can’t stand his company, has one. And Stanis, my crazy landlord—terrified that a Bolshevik hit squad is going to come for him—has two sets.