The Long Fall

“Yeah,” Mimer said. “He’s crazy over that woman.

Margaret, I think her name is . . .”

I skipped Zebriski and went straight to Luke Nye. Nye was a pool hustler who played in private tournaments around the city and up and down the East Coast. If you gave a moray eel a couple of hundred million years he would evolve into Luke Nye.

“Hey, LT,” Nye said over the line. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“Tryin’ to clean up my act.”

“You callin’ about Tim?”

“Yeah. How’d you guess?”

“He came to me yesterday and asked if I knew a detective could help him with somethin’ that wasn’t quite on the up and up. I heard you weren’t in the life anymore, but then I figured you could always say no.”

“Was my name the only one you gave him?”

“You’re one of a kind, LT.”

I COULDN’T SEE a flaw, only smell one. And the smell was all physical.

“Hello?” Tim Moore said through the phone.

“How many numbers in the lock on your briefcase?”

“Three.”

“There’s a variety store a block or so north of Bleecker on the east side of Hudson,” I said. “It’s called Iko’s. Set the lock to six-six-seven and leave it there for a Joan Ligget.”

“Should I put your money in it, too?”

“Yeah. Do that,” I said. “Now give me what you got.”

Fifteen minutes later I was entering Zephyra Ximenez’s number.

“Yes, Mr. McGill?”

“Have somebody pick up a briefcase at Iko’s and leave it with the guys at the front desk of my office building, ASAP.”

SHELLY AND DIMITRI were sitting down to dinner with their mother when I came in. I had called again, and so Katrina made the service coincide with my ETA. I was carrying the briefcase, less my five-thousand-dollar fee.

“Hi, Daddy,” my daughter said just a bit too loudly.

Dimitri grunted and I nodded to him.

Katrina is the best cook I’ve ever met—bar none. She can make anything. That night she’d prepared red beans and rice with a spicy tomato sauce and filled with andouille and chorizo sausage. In little dishes arranged in the middle of the dining table she had set out grated white cheese, chopped Bermuda onions, green olives, and diced jalapeños—seeds and all.

I pulled up my chair at the head of the table, setting the briefcase beside me. I like a good meal. Katrina beamed from the opposite end and for a brief span I forgot our differences and disconnections.

“Smells great, honey,” I said. “How you doin’, D?”

“Okay, I guess,” Dimitri mumbled.

“How’s school?”

“Fine.”

“You need anything there?”

He shook his head. That meant that he wasn’t going to talk anymore.

But I didn’t care. I was thinking about the young woman of Scandinavian descent whom I had loved passionately for nine months, with sporadic recurrences for a year or two after.

What had Tim compared it to? A forty-eight-hour bug. Our love was more like a couple of years of consumption on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It took us that long to recover. Though the symptoms were gone, I was often reminded of them at dinner.

“I’m going to take a special course in African-American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”

She went on to regale me about the political commitment and supposed naïveté of Paul Robeson. It seemed that everything Shelly did was intended to make me happy. Sometimes I wondered if it might be a mercy to tell her that I wasn’t her real father.

She was still talking when Twill entered the dining room. AccomÛ€ng room.panying him was a skinny, teenaged, white waif-child with ash-blond hair and the saddest pale eyes. I had only seen pictures of her as a prepubescent girl but I would have recognized Mardi Bitterman if she were retirement age.

“Mom, Pop,” Twill said brightly. “Sis, Bulldog,” he said to his siblings. “This is Mardi, a friend of mine from school.”

“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible.

“Late for dinner,” Katrina chided. “Now sit, both of you.”

I could tell by her expression that Katrina wasn’t happy with an unannounced guest. But she knew from past experience that if she complained Twill would leave—which would turn my mood sour.

Twill sat Mardi next to Shelly, knowing that his sister would immediately take the child under her wing. My daughter engaged the wounded wraith of a girl. After a few minutes they were gabbing, newfound friends. Shelly talking loudly with broad facial gestures, and Mardi whispering, sometimes even partially covering her mouth.

Katrina had lost her Mona Lisa smile with a stranger at her table. I doubt if Dimitri’s mood would have changed if we were in the middle of a nuclear war. The girls seemed to be getting along, and Twill, as usual, was ebullient and lively.

“So what’s happenin’, Pop?”

“Lookin’ for a guy in Brooklyn, and a client came in today to get me to talk to somebody givin’ him grief.” I didn’t mind talking about work in broad swaths. This made my job seem mundane and served to lessen any interest my family might have shown.

“You readin’ anything good?” he asked me.