"Not a beer," said Sam. "Some ice cream maybe?"
"Can't help ya there," said Fred.
"Another time," said Aaron, and as Fred climbed out and lifted his old bike from the trunk, he looked through the windshield at the darkening ocean and the thickening sky. Young and unresigned, he saw with fear and sorrow the closing jaws of mortality in the sealing of the seam between them.
Tarzan Abramowitz leaned over Ivan Cherkassky's shoulder and failed to notice that the older man was shrinking from his nearness, from his breath. The killer peered down at the photocopied page from Lucia's reservation book, and said, "Jesus Christ, where to start I can't tell nothing."
Cherkassky just pulled hard on his scooped-out face; in the exaggerated shadows from the desk lamp, it looked like pieces of nose and chin might come off in his hand. He studied the names and numbers and check marks and cross outs on the sheet of paper, looking for some logical pattern that would make everything come clear. He found instead the same carelessness and disorganization that so often irritated him in America.
"Too he doodles," the thin man said at last, pointing to spirals and solar systems at the corner of the page.
"Is boring job," said Abramowitz. "Stand there, have to smile."
"Smile, feh," Cherkassky said. "And look, sometimes there is phone number, sometimes there is not."
There were thirty-two tables at Lucia's, and eleven of them, according to the reservation book, had turned at eight p.m. on the evening that Suki was supposed to have died. There were reservations under Cardenas and Berman, Woods and Pescatello, under Robertson and under Katz; these had contact numbers written next to them. Two tables, regulars presumably, were booked by first name only. Some reservations had hotel names appended, with initials duly noted so that the concierge might get his kickback. In all, there were six tables booked for two, one three, three fours, and a six. The maitre d' had scratched off each name as the tables had been filled; no note was made of parties that were incomplete.
Abramowitz said, "Is useless, so many people."
Cherkassky picked up a fountain pen. It was silver and engraved and wrote with elegant precision. He started crossing people out "Is not so many. Hotels, forget hotels. Tourists. Tourists matter nothing."
That left eight tables.
He put question marks next to the regulars. "These," he said. "Only first name. Local people. Maybe her friends. We eliminate the others to find out."
Now it was down to six parties with phone numbers written down. "These you call," Cherkassky said.
"Call?" said Abramowitz. The prospect made him uncomfortable. He was handy with a knife or crowbar or wire, but talking was not what he was good at.
"Is bad too many people see you," said Cherkassky. "You call from pay phone and ask for her."
"Ask for her? But—"
"Someone will be afraid," Cherkassky said. "Will be afraid and make mistake. You will hear. One thing in America you can depend. Someone will be careless, will trust too much. Will make mistake."
Chapter 35
"You gay?" said Sam Katz to the realtor who was driving them around Key Haven the next morning.
Sam was sitting in the backseat. He leaned forward and spread his elbows near Bert's shoulders, his eyes meeting the young man's in the rearview mirror.
The realtor had short moussed platinum hair above jet black eyebrows. He had a diamond stud in his right ear and wore a shirt of polka-dotted silk. "Well yes," he said, "I am."
"Very nice," said Sam. "We're gay too. Been together, what is it now, honey—forty years?"
Bert stroked the chihuahua in his lap and stifled a grimace. "Fawty-one."
"Forty-one years," the realtor said. "Me, I've been lucky if a relationship lasts the weekend. And you've been out all that time?"
"Out?" said Sam.
Reluctantly, Bert picked up the thread. "New Yawk. Ya know, the Village. No one gave a shit."
"Here neither," said the realtor.
"Except my father," Sam rolled on. "I thought he'd plotz. My boy, my Sam, a faygela. Took years before—"
"Sam," Bert cut him off, "this gentleman doesn't really wanna hear the story of our lives."
"Au contraire," the realtor said. "I'll bet you were at Stonewall. It's like a link to history."
"There," said Sam. "You see? Now where was I?... Forty years he does this to me, makes me lose my train of thought..."
It was a weekday and the streets were as quiet as a suburb anywhere. Houses crouched behind hedges of buttonwood and jasmine, awnings threw parallelograms of shade across mute windows. Here and there a yard crew worked, a pool man stood beside his truck and wrapped himself in underwater vacuum-cleaner hose.