I pointed to my Bloomie’s bag. “That.”
“Even better. Well, I guess you can pick it up and walk right out again. Wait a minute.” He frowned. “We’ll leave first. I like it better that way. Otherwise, why are we taking so much time here, et cetera, and et cetera. But don’t get light-fingered after we split, huh?”
“There’s nothing here to take,” I said.
“I want your word on it, Bernie.”
I avoided laughing. “You’ve got it,” I said solemnly.
“Give us three minutes and then go straight out. But don’t hang around no more’n that, Bernie.”
“I won’t.”
“Well,” he said. He turned and reached for the door, and then Loren Kramer said he had to go to the bathroom. “Jesus Christ,” Ray said.
Loren said, “Bernie? Where is it, do you know?”
“Search me,” I said. “Not literally.”
“Huh?”
“I never got past this desk,” I said. “I suppose the john must be back there somewhere.”
Loren went looking for it while Ray stood there shaking his head. I asked him how long Loren had been his partner. “Too long,” he said.
“I know what you mean.”
“He ain’t a bad kid, Bernie.”
“Seems nice enough.”
“But he’s so damn stupid. And the astrology drives me straight up the wall. You figure there’s anything in that crap?”
“Probably.”
“But even so, who gives a shit, right? Who cares if his wife’s a Taurus? She’s a good-looking bitch, I’ll give her that much. But Loren, shit, he was ready to search you. Just now when you said ‘Search me.’ The putz woulda done it.”
“I had that feeling.”
“The one good thing, he’s reasonable. They gave me this straight arrow a while back and you couldn’t do nothing with him. I mean he even paid for his coffee. At least Loren, when somebody puts money in his hand he knows to close his fist around it.”
“Thank God for that.”
“That’s what I say. If anything, he likes the bread too much, but I guess his wife is good at spending it fast as he brings it home. You figure it’s on account of she’s a Taurus?”
“You’d have to ask Loren.”
“He might tell me. But you can put up with a lot of stupidity in exchange for a little reasonableness, I have to say that for him. Just so he don’t kill hisself with that nightstick of his, bouncing it off his knee or something. Bernie? Take the gloves off.”
“Huh?”
“The rubber gloves. You don’t want to wear those on the street.”
“Oh,” I said, and stripped them off. Somewhere in the inner recesses of the apartment Loren coughed and bumped into something. I stuffed my gloves into my pocket. “All the tools of the trade,” Ray said. “Jesus, I’d always rather deal with pros, guys like you. Like even if we had to bag you tonight. Say I had the doorman backing my play and there was no way to cool it off. No money in it that way but at least I’m dealing with a professional.”
Somewhere a toilet flushed. I resisted an impulse to look at my watch.
“You feel comfortable about it,” he went on. “Know what I mean? Like tonight, coming through that door. I didn’t know what we was gonna find on the other side of it.”
“I know the feeling,” I assured him, and started to reach for my shopping bag. I caught a glimpse of Ray’s face that made me turn to see what he was staring at, and what he was staring at was Loren at the far end of the room with a mouth as wide as the Holland Tunnel and a face as white as a surgical mask.
“In…” he said. “In…In…In the bedroom!” And then, all in a rush: “Coming back from the toilet and I turned the wrong way and there’s the bedroom and this guy, he’s dead, this dead guy, head beaten in and there’s blood all over the place, warm blood, the guy’s still warm, you never saw anything like it, Jesus, I knew it, you can never trust a Gemini, I knew it, they lie all the time, oh God—”
And he flopped on the rug. The one that may very well have been a Bokhara.
And Ray and I looked at each other.
Talk about professionalism. We both went promptly insane. He just stood there with his face looming, not going for his gun, not reaching for me, not even moving, just standing flatfooted like the flatfoot he indisputably was. And I, on the other hand, began behaving wholly out of character, in a manner neither of us ever expected I might