of things without much scrutiny, right?”
“Yes,” she said, and looked away. “I didn’t know anybody would be hurt. It was just another free party for me. And for a change, I didn’t have to sleep with anybody to do it.”
Tired laughter ebbed briefly from the television room down the hall. “Back to Wrightsville Beach,” I said. “Jimmy never went out for beer like you said. He was there when Rosen’s boys came in. You must have signaled them somehow. But why didn’t they kill Broda too?”
She blew some smoke at her feet and spoke softly. “After you fought, Charlie Fiora called me at the motel to tip me off that you were on the way. They had just killed Eddie. There wasn’t time to do anything but take Jimmy and leave me behind, to slow you up.” She looked up at me with pleading eyes and began to cry, but I stopped it.
“You can save the crocodile tears,” I said coldly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way Eddie looked, tied up on that bed. His throat had been cut, left to right. You could tell by the entry wound on the left, and by the direction of the skin as it folded out from the slice. Assuming he was killed from behind, that would have to be done by a right-handed person.” I stepped away from the wall and unfolded my arms. “The other night, I faced the man I thought had killed Eddie Shultz. He proved to me that he didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. In fact, before his brains were blown out, he dropped his weapon. And he dropped it from his left hand.” I paused and stared at the cigarette in her right hand, then into her eyes. “You cooled Eddie Shultz.”
The silence between us was heavy and long. Finally she spoke just above a whisper and with her eyes down. “They couldn’t do it,” she said. “They were tough, but even they couldn’t do that, not to a kid. They didn’t know Redman like I knew him. Him and his Nazi friends. They would have queered the whole deal, believe me. He had to die.”
“Everybody has to,” I said. “But nobody has to like that. What were you going to do about me?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice rising. “Jerry just wanted me to keep you occupied until he could figure out what to do.”
“Relax. I’m not going to turn you in. They’d only treat you and set you free. I’d only be doing you a favor.”
“I know what I did was horribly wrong,” she said. “But this program here…. I’m going to clean up.”
“There isn’t going to be any program. Not much longer. Your benefactor is going to be leaving town any day now. When the well dries up, you’re out. You’re a junkie, Kim. That’s your future.”
“I’ll make it,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
MY LANDLORD HAD WEDGED my mail in the screen door of my apartment. The cat nudged my calf as I carried in the letters and sorted them out.
There was a phone bill, which I kept, and a credit card offer, which I tossed. The last item in the stack was from the D.C. government. My application for a private investigator’s licence had been accepted. The notice instructed me where and when to pick it up.
I fed the cat, brewed some coffee, and took a mug of it and a pack of smokes out to the living room. I settled on the couch to read the Monday Post.
Andre Malone’s two little paragraphs were buried in the back of Metro, under a group head called “Around the Region.” He was “an unidentified N.W. man.” He died of “gunshot wounds to the chest and lower abdomen.” Police believed the killing, the article said, to be “drug related.”
ONE WEEK LATER, McGinnes phoned.
“Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnny.”
“Hey, Johnny. Where you at, man?”
“The Sleep Senter,” he said.
“That the place that spells Center with an S?”
“The same.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“The way they explained it to me, it has a double meaning. The sleep sent-her, get it? Like this place really sends her, it’s some kind of out-of-body experience.”
“Clever.”
“Yeah,” he said. “This place is okay. They got a bunch of schmoes on the floor, but they’re an all right bunch of guys. And dig this—they put a fifty dollar pop on the reconditioned mattresses. Fifty big ones, man, for something that’s recession proof. Everybody’s gotta sleep, right, Jim? Anyway, mattresses, electronics, what the hell’s the difference? I could sell