detached, shut down. In her apartment she made a pot of herbal tea and filled two cups. It tasted as though it could cure just about anything.
‘‘I’m sorry, Bernie,” she said, standing at her window and gazing out at a blank wall. ‘‘You were sweet to come, but I never should have dragged you all the way down there. It was awful, wasn’t it?”
‘‘It wasn’t so bad. I thought you were going to read.”
“I didn’t feel up to it. That’s not a great room to read in.”
“Well, black candles.”
“It’s funny, but I always expect a black candle to have a black flame. But of course they never do.”
“No.”
“The poems were ghastly, weren’t they?”
“Well—”
“They’re good therapy,” she said. “It’s wonderful that they’re able to bring all that emotion to the surface. And having them perform is a very valuable part of the process. They really put themselves out there that way. Some of those people won’t be the same after a night like this.”
“I can believe it.”
“But the poems themselves,” she said, “are enough to make you weep.”
“They weren’t all that bad. The guy with the guitar—”
“Not all of those poems were his. A lot of them were Emily Dickinson’s. You can sing almost anything of hers to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ And you can sing any and all haiku to ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”
“Really?”
“Sure. ‘Haiku’s such a bore / Sheer pretentious balderdash / Stick it in your hat.’ Try it yourself, Bernie.”
“ ‘Wonder why the Japs / Think they’re writing poetry / They’re just marking time.’ ”
“That’s the idea. Nothing to it, really. ‘Pomp and circumstance / Prairie dogs and cauliflower / Moonlight in Vermont.’ ”
“I kind of like that one, Patience. ‘Prairie dogs and cauliflower.’ ”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should write it down.”
I took a cab home from Patience’s loft. When I got to my door I heard the phone ringing, but by the time I was inside it had stopped. I hung up my blazer. I’d taken off my tie earlier, at the Villanelle, where even without it I’d felt more than a little overdressed. I got it from my pocket and frowned at it, wondering if the wrinkles would hang out. I hung it up to give them a chance and the phone rang.
It was Doll. “Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“What’s the matter?”
“ ‘Film at eleven.’ You must not have seen the news.”
“No.”
“Turn it on now. You have cable, don’t you? Turn it on. Right now, I’ll hold on.”
“What am I supposed to turn on? CNN? Headline News?”
“Channel One. You know, the twenty-four-hour local news channel. Turn it on.”
“Hold on,” I said.
First I had to watch as a professionally sympathetic reporter interviewed survivors at a tenement fire off Boston Road in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Then they cut to a light-skinned black woman doing a stand-up in front of a building that looked familiar. She reported that the nude corpse found as the result of an anonymous tip in a luxurious Upper West Side apartment had been identified as that of Lucas Santangelo, thirty-four, of 411 West Forty-sixth Street. The dead man, an unemployed actor, had no known connection to the owner-occupants of the apartment, a Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Nugent, who were in any case out of the country, according to neighbors in the building.
“Death appears to have been the result of a single gunshot wound,” she said, “but whether it may have been self-inflicted seems to be an open question at this stage. My hunch is that there’s more to come on this one, Chuck.”
“Thanks, Norma, and now for a look at tomorrow’s weather—”
I killed the set and went back to the phone. “Wow,” I said.
“When we went there,” she said, “they must have already hauled him out in a body bag.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t you remember what the old lady was saying about cops in the hallways? What do you think she was talking about?”
“I thought she said some woman killed her husband.”
“So she got it wrong. They hadn’t identified him yet.”
“The address they gave—”
“Way west on Forty-sixth Street. It’s a rooming house. He stayed there for a couple of weeks when he first moved to New York years ago. The thing is, the apartment on West End was never in his name. It was one of those things where he was subletting it from a rent-controlled tenant. That’s how he could afford to live there. Bernie, what are we going to