displayed the slightest emotion. Obviously, he and Auntie Lil did not even begin to approach in strangeness the weirdos this guy was used to transporting.
"Why, that's brilliant!" Auntie Lil exclaimed, leaning forward to tap the seat divider with approval. "You're wasted driving a cab," she declared.
"Yes, back home in my country I was very, very good at tracking down people," the driver answered cryptically. "No one ever got away from me," he added, leaving T.S. to imagine himself at the mercy of some sort of escaped death-squad leader.
"Where do they take the bodies?" Auntie Lil asked. She did not really want an answer from the driver. She was merely, as usual, thinking out loud. "The medical examiner's office, that's where. Am I right?"
"Yes, ma'am," the driver assured her. "I saw it on a 'Kojak' rerun."
"How could we get in there?" Her voice trailed off and she stared back over the spires of the Upper East Side with intense concentration. They were passing over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and Manhattan lay behind them, its newer buildings shining with bright metallic splendor beneath the sparkling skies of the sunny autumn day. What a shame to die on a day like this, T.S. thought. Even the New York air smelled clean, for a change.
Auntie Lil was silent, searching for a solution. Since T.S. and Auntie Lil had been soul mates for all of his life, he knew what she was thinking at exactly the same time the idea came to her.
"No," he said firmly. "I won't ask her."
"Oh, Theodore." She turned to him and clutched his sleeve, beseeching him for help. He rather enjoyed seeing her beg.
"Lilah knows everyone," Auntie Lil cooed. "And you know how fond of you she is. She's probably been dying for you to telephone her."
"How do you know I haven't been taking her dancing every single night of the week?" he asked grumpily, annoyed at her accurate inference.
Auntie Lil did not bother to answer. They both knew where the truth lay.
T.S. stared out his window and watched a subway train cross the Manhattan Bridge in the distance. Lilah. She moved in a different world, a world of money and meaningless titles and men who owned businesses and women who always looked at least twenty years younger than their age.
He had always been a confident, prepared man in control. But around Lilah, T.S. often felt inexplicably inferior and clumsy. As much as his dreams secretly centered on Lilah, she made his present reality strange and unsettling. He did not like being out of control of his heart, his head or his tongue. So, no, of course he had not been taking Lilah out dancing every night of the week. In fact, he had not seen her at all in months. And Auntie Lil knew it.
Auntie Lil always said that he needed to learn how to live, but just saying so wasn't enough for T.S. Sometimes, he longed for someone to show him how to live. And sometimes he longed for the courage to be different from the stiff and inflexible but capable man that he had been for so many years.
"I could call her," Auntie Lil offered with as much humbleness as she could muster. Even she knew that she was treading on some very thin ice. She liked Lilah almost as much as T.S. liked Lilah, but she had no desire to hurt her beloved nephew.
"No, I'm a big boy. I can certainly call her." There. He'd said it. Now he'd just have to follow through.
"Tonight?" she demanded. Boy, she never knew when to stop pushing her luck. That was probably why she was so damn lucky.
"Okay. Okay. Tonight." He shifted his legs uncomfortably and sighed. Already his palms were starting to sweat.
CHAPTER THREE
T.S. spent the early part of the evening devising ways to put off the phone call to Lilah Cheswick. It was amazing how inventive he could be when desperation drove him to it. He began by retracing the steps of his cleaning lady earlier that day, but since she took perverse pleasure in being even cleaner than him (a near impossibility) there was not a single speck of dust to discover throughout his ruthlessly organized and sparsely furnished apartment. Alarmed by his restless activity, Brenda and Eddie followed him the entire time, meowing ceaselessly for more food just in case he suffered a temporary lapse of memory and they got lucky. They didn't—T.S. had put them both on strict diets since they resembled seals more