Small Town

“If Mr. Shevlin was off for a dirty weekend,” she said, “with the cute little widow from 12-J, I could see where Helen could be a real pain in the ass.”

“I gather she’s persistent. Next thing she did was walk over to the Boat Basin, because maybe she got the same idea about the Inland Waterway.”

“And there it was.”

“No, it was gone.”

“So where’s the mystery?”

“She went over the next day, or whenever it was, just to make sure. And it was back again.”

“So he came home.”

“Except he didn’t. Never showed up at the apartment building.” Lowell said, “I say he’s living on the boat.”

“And not telling his office where he is? And sleeping there, when he’s got a big two-bedroom apartment half a mile away? And wearing the same clothes every day?”

“Well?” she said. “What’s the explanation?”

“Damned if I know,” he said. “That’s what makes it a mystery.” thirty-one

SHE WAS ATthe gallery, going over some numbers, when she became subliminally aware of a familiar voice. And looked up, and there he was, standing with Chloe in front of one of Jeffcoate Walker’s more alarming visions and encouraging her to tell him what the painting meant to her. He had his back to her but she recognized the jeans and the deep green polo shirt, recognized the V-shaped body, tapering from broad shoulders to a tight little butt.

She felt a tingle, and a less welcome tremor of anxiety. She was supposed to go to his place tonight, and here it was two in the afternoon, and here he was, in her space. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a right, and she’d been planning on inviting him to see her workspace and examine her stock-in-trade, but this was unex-pected, and the least bit unsettling.

She got to her feet, glided over there, planning her opening line, but he sensed her approach and turned. “Chloe was showing me around,” he said. “You looked completely engrossed in what you were doing. I didn’t have the heart to disturb you.”

“I think I’ll wait and let my bookkeeper work it out,” she said. “I keep adding it up and getting different totals every time.” She turned to Chloe and smiled, and Chloe got the message and found something else to do.

She showed him a couple of paintings, then took him to the back office. “That’s Chloe,” she said.

“I figured that out for myself,” he said. “And I don’t blame you a bit.”

“Even if she works for me?”

“Even if she works for the FBI.”

“She’s yummy, isn’t she? Would you like to fuck her?”

“It never entered my mind.”

“Because you probably could. The three of us together, or I could just wrap her up with a bow and send her to you for your birthday.”

“The gift that keeps on giving.”

“She’s got rings in her nipples, too. And big soft titties like bowls of cream.”

“You trying to get me hot?”

“Uh-huh. What brings you here, anyway? I’m supposed to come over tonight and tell you a story.”

“My turn first.”

“Your turn for what? Oh, to tell me a story? Did little Johnny get into mischief last night?”

“Never left the house. Worked all day, ordered a pizza, and worked some more.”

“Is there any leftover pizza?”

“Ate it for breakfast.”

“Greedy pig.”

“We can order more tonight.”

“No,” she said, “pizza’s like revenge, it’s better cold. What’s the story you’re going to tell me?”

“I’m not going to tell you anything. You have to read it yourself.”

“I don’t . . . you finished the book?”

“The first draft. I’ll have a couple of weeks of tinkering to do before I’m ready to show it to Roz. But you could read it now, if you wanted.”

“You’re sure you wouldn’t mind?”

“I’d like it,” he said. “In fact I couldn’t wait to find out if you wanted to, and that’s why I’m here. I don’t know if you’d want to close early—”

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll tell Chloe to lock up when she’s ready to go home. You and I are out of here.”

H E S E T H E R U P at the table with the manuscript and a cup of coffee. He’d run spell-check, but that didn’t work if the mistake was a word in its own right, and at first she circled typos in red pencil so he’d find them more easily. But that slowed her down, and she decided she’d catch them when she read it through a second time.

For now she didn’t want anything to get in the way of the story.

And it was a good story, the protagonist richly human, like John but unlike him, the other characters sharply drawn, the prose and dialogue deceptively simple, transparent as glass. Early on she was overly conscious of who had written it, aware that she’d have to offer an opinion, and that kept her from getting as completely drawn into the story as she would have. But that changed, and everything else fell away, and there was nothing but the perfectly real world of Harry Brubaker.

She read for a couple of hours, until the letters started moving around on the page. She looked up, and he was on the couch with a magazine. She was a third of the way through, she told him, and she didn’t want to stop, but she thought she probably had to.

“It took months to write,” he said. “I shouldn’t expect you to read it at one sitting.”

“I want to, though. But I don’t want to skim. I want to read all the words. It’s wonderful, honey.”

“You really think so?”

“Oh, yes.” And she told him some of the things she liked, and his aura seemed to expand with each thing she said to him. At length he told her she’d better stop, that she wouldn’t be able to find enough good things to say about the rest of it.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s your turn.”

“To what? To tell you a story? Gee, I don’t know. I’d feel self-conscious, little old me presuming to tell a story to a big old super storyteller like you.”

“Force yourself.”

“Well,” she said. “Okay, then.”

And she recounted the events of the previous evening. The first time she’d done this, telling him last Saturday what she’d done with Franny the night before, her excitement had been held somewhat in check by the fear that he’d turn jealous or spiteful. He’d liked her stories before, but now she was relating current history, and maybe he’d find that threatening.

But he hadn’t, and now she felt at ease, enjoying her own story and his interest in it. Then the phone rang, and he let the machine answer it, then moved quickly to take the call when he heard Maury Winters’s voice.

He picked up and said, “Hello, Maury?” Then he listened for a long moment and said, “No kidding.” And he mostly listened, interjecting other uninformative one- and two-word responses. It seemed like a good time to go to the bathroom, and when she got back he was off the phone and on his feet, standing at the bookcase with the little turquoise rabbit in his hand.

Suddenly she knew, but she waited for him to tell her.

“They dropped the charges,” he said. “Fabrizzio called a press conference and made an announcement. That way she gets to talk about new evidence and the commitment of the district attorney’s office not only to prosecute the guilty but to safeguard the rights of the innocent. Maury says when you beat them it never hurts to let them look good.”

“But how did—”

“That detective, the drunk I couldn’t say enough bad things about. Maury let him go, but the guy did some extra work on his own. He thought of a question to ask the bartender at the Kettle, something nobody asked him before, because why should they when they had a picture to show him? It’s complicated, but Maury says his final bill’s going to include a big bonus for the guy, and I said we should include a case of his favorite poison while we’re at it, because I owe him a big one.”

“You’re off the hook.”

“Completely.” He kissed the rabbit, put it back in front of its dish of cornmeal. “When I turned down that last plea offer,” he said, “I had the thought that I was setting myself up for disaster.

That I was pushing it that extra inch, and now they’d find new evidence, and it would be the kind of evidence that would kill me in court. Because that’s the way you’d do it in fiction. The guy has damn near everything, a Get Out of Jail Free card, and that’s not enough, and the next thing he knows he’s screwed, and it’s his own fault. I told myself come on, you’re not writing this, it’s not fiction, but I was still a little worried.”

“And now you can stop worrying.”

“I really can, can’t I? I’m glad I finished the book before I heard.

So that there was still that underlying little bit of tension.”

“Quite a day for you,” she said. “You finished the book and the state dropped charges. The only thing I can think of to follow that is a blow job.”

A F T E R W A R D S H E S A I D , “I was in the middle of a story, but somehow I get the feeling I should save the rest of it for another day.”

“It would give new meaning to the word anticlimactic. ”

“But there’s something else I could tell you. It’s a story one of them told, and it hasn’t got anything to do with sex. Or maybe it does. It’s hard to tell.”

“Oh?”

“What it really is,” she said, “is a mystery. Maybe I should ask your detective friend about it.”

“Now you’ve got me interested.”

So she told him the story Jay McGann had told, about his Aunt Kate’s friend Helen and the missing Mr. Shevlin.

“He’s living on the boat,” he said. “Except why would he?

Scratch that, it doesn’t make sense. I know. He took off, went out of town for the summer, and one of his friends is taking his boat out for him.”

“They’re not like dogs,” she said. “You don’t have to walk them twice a day. And he was funny about his boat. He wouldn’t even let Helen onto it.”

“A busybody like Helen? I can’t say I blame him. You’re right, it’s a mystery.”

“I wonder if I should tell somebody.”

“You could tell this guy Galvin, but not unless you wanted to hire him to investigate. Which would make you more of a busybody than Helen.”

“It would, wouldn’t it? Maybe I should just let it go.”

“You could tell a cop,” he said, “if you knew one. I know a couple, but I’d just as soon not see them again. Besides, this is up on the Upper West Side, right? If he lives near the Boat Basin.”

“West Eighty-sixth Street is where he lives.”

“Or lived.”

“You don’t think . . .”