at Brady, hands on her nonexistent boy hips. “This is not the life I pictured for myself when I was in the fifth grade.”
“Me, either,” Brady says quietly.
He watches her putt away, on a mission to rescue an old lady who’s probably going crazy because she can’t download her favorite mock-apple pie recipe. This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up.
Why would she not?
After all, it had sort of been her idea.
12
As Brady is slapping yellow 50% OFF stickers on old Quentin Tarantino movies and Freddi is helping out elderly Mrs. Vera Willkins on the West Side (it’s her keyboard that’s full of crumbs, it turns out), Bill Hodges is turning off Lowbriar, the four-lane street that bisects the city and gives Lowtown its name, and in to the parking lot beside DeMasio’s Italian Ristorante. He doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know Pete got here first. Hodges parks next to a plain gray Chevrolet sedan with blackwall tires that just about scream city police and gets out of his old Toyota, a car that just about screams old retired fella. He touches the hood of the Chevrolet. Warm. Pete has not beaten him by much.
He pauses for a moment, enjoying this almost-noon morning with its bright sunshine and sharp shadows, looking at the overpass a block down. It’s been gang-tagged up the old wazoo, and although it’s empty now (noon is breakfast time for the younger denizens of Lowtown), he knows that if he walked under there, he would smell the sour reek of cheap wine and whiskey. His feet would grate on the shards of broken bottles. In the gutters, more bottles. The little brown kind.
No longer his problem. Besides, the darkness beneath the overpass is empty, and Pete is waiting for him. Hodges goes in and is pleased when Elaine at the hostess stand smiles and greets him by name, although he hasn’t been here for months. Maybe even a year. Of course Pete is in one of the booths, already raising a hand to him, and Pete might have refreshed her memory, as the lawyers say.
He raises his own hand in return, and by the time he gets to the booth, Pete is standing beside it, arms raised to envelop him in a bearhug. They thump each other on the back the requisite number of times and Pete tells him he’s looking good.
“You know the three Ages of Man, don’t you?” Hodges asks.
Pete shakes his head, grinning.
“Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.”
Pete roars with laughter and asks if Hodges knows what the blond said when she opened the box of Cheerios. Hodges says he does not. Pete makes big amazed eyes and says, “Oh! Look at the cute little doughnut seeds!”
Hodges gives his own obligatory roar of laughter (although he does not think this a particularly witty example of Genus Blond), and with the amenities thus disposed of, they sit down. A waiter comes over—no waitresses in DeMasio’s, only elderly men who wear spotless aprons tied up high on their narrow chicken chests—and Pete orders a pitcher of beer. Bud Lite, not Ivory Special. When it comes, Pete raises his glass.
“Here’s to you, Billy, and life after work.”
“Thanks.”
They click and drink. Pete asks about Allie and Hodges asks about Pete’s son and daughter. Their wives, both of the ex variety, are touched upon (as if to prove to each other—and themselves—that they are not afraid to talk about them) and then banished from the conversation. Food is ordered. By the time it comes, they have finished with Hodges’s two grandchildren and have analyzed the chances of the Cleveland Indians, which happens to be the closest major league team. Pete has ravioli, Hodges spaghetti with garlic and oil, what he has always ordered here.
Halfway through these calorie bombs, Pete takes a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and places it, with some ceremony, beside his plate.
“What’s that?” Hodges asks.
“Proof that my detective skills are as keenly honed as ever. I don’t see you since that horror show at Raintree Inn—my hangover lasted three days, by the way—and I talk to you, what, twice? Three times? Then, bang, you ask me to lunch. Am I surprised? No. Do I smell an ulterior motive? Yes. So let’s see if I’m right.”