The thought of it made Dom feel clammy and his face contorted like he was smelling really bad milk and he instinctively reached for his groin, making sure everything was still in place, protecting it.

  Then his cell phone rang.

  He checked caller ID. Blocked. It might be Fred Gelman, he thought. Checking in on his progress regarding Rick. He liked dealing directly with Fred. Then he could talk to him about the apartment. Douglas probably didn’t even mention it last time.

  So he answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Dom?”

  It wasn’t Fred. It was a woman.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Mae Stark.”

  It took him a second, then it flashed.

  “Hey, how are you?”

  “Good.”

  “How’s the book?”

  “Coming along.”

  “Guess what I’m doing?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Surveillance. Tailing a guy.”

  “Cool.”

  “He just picked up a transvestite in the meatpacking district, now they’re driving somewhere.”

  “To do what?”

  “Use your imagination,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “Hey,” he said, “if you were here now you could use the camera. It’s not easy taking pictures and driving at the same time.”

  “That’s tempting.”

  “It could be for your book,” he said. “Research.”

  Dom had to goose it to get through a light to keep up with the Saab.

  “So how about it?”

  “What?”

  “You want to join me? There’s plenty of room in the front seat.”

  “What’s he doing now?” she asked, avoiding the invitation.

  “Not much,” Dom said. “Just driving around with a transvestite in the car.”

  “Is she cute?”

  “Hard to say. Personally I don’t understand the attraction. Either you go with a woman or a man, but this in-between stuff? Anyway, for me, three holes are better than two.”

  There was silence on the line. Dom was afraid he might have said something offensive. She quickly allayed his fears.

  “Great line,” she said.

  She must have been writing it down in her notebook. The nitty-gritty. Dom was full of it. The grittiest nitty around.

  Dom focused on Rick. The Saab was easy to tail, but traffic was thin in this part of the city and it would be harder to be discreet. And the hookers kept leering at him, coming up to the window whenever he stopped at the corner.

  “Who are you following?” she asked.

  “Can’t say,” Dom said. “Confidential.”

  “He do anything bad?”

  “Not yet. Just curious. Wait,” he said. “The guy just stopped.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I said wait.” Dom put the phone down on the seat.

  He drove past the Saab, averting his head, and pulled up a few cars in front. Dom adjusted his side mirror and watched the hooker get out and ring one of the bells at a ratty six-floor walk-up across the street. He spoke into the intercom, then signaled for Rick to come. Rick got out of the car.

  “Dom.”

  He heard the tinny sound of her voice coming from the phone. He picked it up.

  “Hold on,” he said. “They’re going inside. This is when I coulda used you. I gotta put the phone down again.” He picked up the camera and got a few shots of Rick crossing the street, looking around nervously, and then walking into the building.

  “Was that the camera, the whirring sound?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What size lens you have?

  “Mine’s big,” he said.

  “Don’t be infantile, Dom,” she said. “I’m trying to get all the details right. The details are the most important part of a book.”

  “It’s 800 mm,” he lied. He only had 200 mm because that’s what the kid he bought it from had been able to steal, but he wanted the 800 mm—the white one, like the photographers had at football games. “The motor gives me ten shots per second. It’s almost like a movie.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” she said.

  He could hear her breathing as she wrote. He liked her breathing.

  “What are you doing now?” she asked.

  “Sitting,” Dom said. “A lot of what a cop does involves sitting.”

  A parking spot opened up down the street and Dom pulled in. He adjusted his side mirror so he could see the front of the building.

  “Back when I was a cop,” he said into the phone, “I worked Vice for a while. I used to hang around here, mostly at night, playing cat and mouse with the ‘girls.’ It wasn’t much of a game.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s hard to move quick in spike heels,” he said, “especially on cobblestones. A few of these guys were probably athletes in high school. In sneakers they’d outrun me. Now they have tits bigger than my grandmother’s.”

  “It’s sad, I guess.”

  “You don’t think that way as a cop,” he said. “If your cop thinks that way, he’d be wrong.”

  “My cop’s a she.’”

  “Well, maybe it’s different, then,” he said. “I don’t know how a woman cop would feel. Soft and wet, I guess.”

  “Dom,” she said, scolding him.

  “Sorry. Hey, I should be here for a while. Usually an appointment is for an hour. You could grab a cab and pop over. I could tell you stories. Details. Nitty and gritty.”

  “Another time, maybe,” she said. “But can I call you?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I’m more authentic in the flesh.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Dom,” she said. Then she hung up.

  She was something. Smart. He wasn’t used to that. The women he knew couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Actually, they could walk and chew gum, but unfortunately that was the thing they were most proud of.

  Dom got out of the car and casually made his way to the Saab, like he was admiring it. If Mae were there, they could have pretended they were a couple thinking about buying one.

  Oh, Honey, it’s just what we need. It’s us. Whattaya say, Dom?

  There were several loaves of Wonder Bread in the back seat, some newspaper, and a piece of pipe taped to some wood in the shape of a gun.

  He went back to the Caddy and got inside.

  Wonder Bread.

  Somehow the bread, the newspaper, and the pipe in the shape of a gun all fit together. He just wasn’t sure how. Dom went over his cases as a cop, trying to think if this resembled anything he’d worked on before. Wonder Bread and a pipe kind of shaped like a gun a kid would make to play a game with.

  He checked the mirror. No movement from the door. Rick was still in the apartment, doing God knows what.

  Rick was on the ropes. Dom could feel it. Rick was ready to go down. Dom had to make it look that he was the one to do it, the one responsible for putting Rick down for the count. Then Fred would be indebted to him, get Dom the apartment. With a terrace. So he could sit outside and have drinks with Mae.

  He closed his eyes for a minute. He patted the pocket inside his jacket. The videotape was still there. Detective Bliss enters, twenty-two minutes go by, Detective Bliss leaves.

  What did you do in those twenty-two minutes, Detective Bliss?

  Or, more to the point, what could you prove you didn’t do?

  Dom smiled. He wasn’t quite sure yet how it was going to play out with the tape. But he figured something would present itself. You have an edge on a guy, you know something he doesn’t know you know, you have to use it, take the advantage, and then knock the guy through the ropes and out of the ring.

  * * *

  Rick followed Jasmine up to the fifth floor. The smell lingering in the hall was a pungent mixture of incense and urine. There was a window at the end of the hallway that was painted over in green and cast a sickly pallor over the walls and floor. A bicycle was chained to a rusting radiator. It was missing its seat, both tires, the gears, and the chain. A bicycle skeleton, its flesh ravaged, as if by ravenous ants. It reminded Rick of how in Westerns they always had those cow skulls in the desert, a signal that bad things would happen if you went any farther.

  Bring them on, Rick thought. Bring them all on.

  Rick was ready.

  The door was unlocked. Jasmine pushed it open.

  “After you,” he said.

  Rick hesitated.

  “Don’t worry,” Jasmine purred. “Harriet won’t bite. Or, at least she won’t bite hard.” And he gave a girlish giggle.

  Rick walked in the apartment. It was decorated like an old fashioned New Orleans whorehouse. Floor lamps with fringed shades cast a lurid reddish light on walls covered with striped wallpaper. Heavy red velvet curtains cascaded in front of the windows. There was an overstuffed Victorian couch on one wall done in the same red velvet. And against the other wall was a divan on which lounged a large, bald man in a silk dressing gown. In his red gloved hand he held a black cigarette holder on which was pinioned a smoldering cigarette, the thick smoke drifting straight up in a dense, narrow stream. His other hand rested on his chest, a ring sporting a bulbous stone arranged elegantly over his gloved index finger.

  “Se llama Rick,” Jasmine said. “Tiene dinero. Quiere una pistola.”

  Harriet nodded, then cast a lazy eye on Rick.

  “Rick,” Harriet said, rolling the “r,” letting the word drip off his lips like warm fudge. “Rhymes with lick.”

  Harriet laughed like an old woman who had just won at bingo.

  “What about the gun?” Rick said. “I’d like to get out of here before I get a rash.”

  Harriet looked deeply hurt, as if Rick had just snubbed the Ritz cracker canapés he had worked so hard to prepare.

  “And why, Rick, should I sell you, of all people, a gun?” Harriet asked.

  “I’m a friend of Jasmine’s. I’m a really nice guy. And my son was murdered recently.”

  Harriet shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. You should be more discreet, Rick,” Harriet said. “You should remain anonymous. Just plain Rick. If I choose to endow you with one of my rods, I want my conscience to be clear. I won’t be pleased to read in the periodicals stories of vengeance orchestrated with what was once part of my arsenal. I want to be able to sleep at night. You understand, I hope.”

  “Sell me a gun because I’ve got two hundred dollars in twenties. And because you’ll never see or hear from me again.”

  Harriet raised his eyebrows.

  “Aren’t you the fickle one. How does Jasmine feel about that?”

  Jasmine hung his head and turned to the wall, a delicate flower.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “We haven’t known each other that long.”

  “It doesn’t take too long to get to know someone. Oscar Wilde said he knew more about a person after meeting him for ten minutes than that person knew about himself.”

  This was a strange kind of game, Rick thought. At once both perverted and sublimely elegant. More interesting than selling luggage.

  He softened, sensing this was a better approach.

  “I feel Jasmine needs more from me than I am able to give right now,” Rick said.

  “That’s too bad,” Harriet said, “because I am thinking I have no pressing need for such a paltry taste as two hundred dollars. But what I do need is for Jasmine to be happy. Can’t you see how sullen she is?”

  Rick nodded.

  “No. Really look at her,” Harriet commanded.

  Rick looked, saw Jasmine, the leopard top he wore now showing its age, not fitting him properly, something there, some subtle slope of the shoulders or shape of the hips that didn’t let the clothes hang quite right, that belied Jasmine’s true gender. The wig exuding a sheen Rick didn’t see in the street, an unnatural gloss. Jasmine’s feet were not dainty, his chin too strong. No posturing or pouting could undo it. Rick suddenly felt so sorry for this man, undone by these tiny details. Not like Rick, who could hide everything, who could spend years in luggage without anyone knowing how much he despised it, every new model, every improvement in retractable handles and wheel bearings and synthetic leathers and latches. But he understood that sense of being completely trapped inside his skin. Because Rick was trapped inside his life, inside a locked bag, banging to get out, locked inside and screaming silently to get out.

  He bit his nail.

  “Don’t do that,” Harriet said.

  He stopped. He looked at Jasmine and smiled

  Jasmine hesitantly smiled back.

  “Good,” Harriet said. “Now, R-r-r-ick, this is like one of those fairy tales you read in school. I am the queen and Jasmine is my daughter, the princess. But Jasmine is unhappy. She has not laughed in years. I have sent word throughout the kingdom that anyone who can make the princess laugh will get whatever they wish for. In your case, I assume that would be a heater for the price you offered.”

  “What kind?”

  “A nine-millimeter Baretta with a spare clip,” Harriet said.

  “Is that good?” Rick asked.

  “It’s a beautiful thing,” Harriet purred. “Now, R-r-rick, are you willing to give it a try?”

  “And what would make princess happy?”

  “Oh, that would be cheating. Besides, I’m not sure myself. As you know, it’s not easy being a princess.”

  Rick nodded, surprised at the way he accepted all this, the ease he felt here.

  “I guess I’ll have to use my imagination,” Rick said.

  “That’s what it’s there for,” Harriet replied, and a Cheshire-cat grin spread across his face with salacious abandon. Rick sensed that Harriet’s mouth had been in places he could never possibly imagine.

  Rick turned to Jasmine, walked over to where he stood, still curled against the wall. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, felt a hard edge of bone through the thin material of his shirt, felt Jasmine shudder at his touch. Rick ran his finger up Jasmine’s neck, along the distinct line where the thick pancake base left off and his bleached, pallid skin began, like a border between two countries on a map, two countries at war with each other. He could see the veins in Jasmine’s neck, a cluster of craters under his cheekbone (the palimpsest of teenage acne) now only partially hidden by the almond-hued powder, the scarlet lipstick outlined with dark pencil, the tiny stubble of a mustache that had sprouted insidiously since his morning shave, giving him, Rick thought, no end of heartache.

  Jasmine gradually warmed to Rick’s touch and eased away from the wall. He turned and Rick faced him now, a helpless creature, trapped in some tremulous world where nothing was solid, nothing held together.

  “Hi,” Jasmine said in a high, soft, timorous voice, like it was his first day at a new school.

  “Come here,” Rick said.

  Jasmine walked into his embrace. Rick held him close, stroking his hair, which felt crudely synthetic. They stayed that way for several minutes, Rick feeling Jasmine’s breath growing softer, deeper, happier. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Harriet must have sensed his indecision.

  “As Queen, I really shouldn’t be abetting you like this,” she said. “But you’re trying so hard, R-r-rick, I just can’t help myself.”

  Harriet reached behind one of her satin pillows and pulled out a remote control. He aimed it across the room, to an unseen stereo, and a moment later lush violins filled the loft, muted trumpets, a harp, the drummer on brushes, then a soft, sultry voice singing above the strings.

  “Jeri Southern,” Harriet said with a touch of reverence. “The forgotten angel of song.”

  Harriet leaned back and closed his eyes.

  Jeri Southern sang in her wistful contralto, her voice rising gently above the lush strings.

  Be still, my haunted heart.

  Rick knew what to do now. He took Jasmine’s hand and curled his fingers around it. He placed his other hand at Jasmine’s back, and together they moved slowly about the room, dancing gently to the music. Rick had not danced in years, resisting Ellen’s requests at weddings and parties until she finally stopped asking. But here he moved freely, with ease and lightness.

  The song stopped, but they stayed together a few minutes longer. Rick rubbed his face against Jasmine’s crudely rouged cheek and thought about his son, Ben. His dead son Ben, who never seemed to have a weakness, but now was dead, who moved through his life without courtesy, without care, while Rick fled from conflict, never sent food back, even if the chicken was pink or the fish burned to a crisp, for fear of … always for fear of. Rick clung tightly to Jasmine, his cheek against the stiff hair, and thought about his defiant son who constantly reminded Rick of his own weakness. How many times he hated his son, a dark hatred that emerged when Rick saw Ben’s swagger, the amoral curl of his lip. Hatred because the boy left no entrance for Rick, no possibility of connection. He wanted to slap Ben. No, he wanted to hold his son’s head in a sink full of water, his neck bucking as the air started to burn and burst from his lungs, then let him up just long enough to breathe, then shove him down again, using all his weight to keep his son’s face submerged until Ben weakened, until he gave in, until he promised to start over, start over from when he was just a baby and they would find a way to make it work, for them to be together and then they would hold each other tight, both desperate never to let go.

  Father and son.

  But that wouldn’t happen now, because Ben was dead and Rick was dancing with a sad transvestite.

  Look at me, Ben. I’m like you now.

  I don’t give a shit.

  He kissed Jasmine gently on the cheek and released him. He turned to Harriet, about to ask for the gun, and saw it was already being offered him, dangling nimbly from one of Harriet’s gloved fingers like the last petal left on a rose. He took the money out of his pocket and held it out. Harriet eased it from his fingers and slipped it in down the neck of her gown.

  Rick took the gun. It was a lot heavier than the rusted pipe. The metal was smooth and cold, the lines elegant and fierce.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No, Rick,” Harriet said. “Thank you.”

  Rick smiled at Jasmine, thought of blowing him a kiss, but decided that would be patronizing. Instead he gave him one short wave of his hand.

 

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