Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Much better off.”

“Well, I’ve been to Hoboken before,” she said. “In fact we looked at houses here about a year and a half ago.”

“You bought anything then, you’d be way ahead now,” he said. “Prices are through the roof.”

“We decided to stay in Manhattan.” And then we decided to go our separate ways, she thought but didn’t say. And thank God we didn’t buy a house, or he’d be trying to steal it from me.

“I drove,” he said, “and the fog’s terrible, no question, but I took my time and I didn’t have any trouble. Matter of fact, I couldn’t remember if we said seven or seven-thirty, so I made sure I was here by seven.”

“Then I kept you waiting,” she said. “I wrote down seven-thirty, but—”

“I figured it was probably seven-thirty,” he said. “I also figured I’d rather do the waiting myself than keep you waiting. Anyway—” he tapped the book “—I had a book to read, and I ordered a drink, and what more does a man need? Ah, here’s Joe with our drinks.”

Her martini, straight up and bone dry, was crisp and cold and just what she needed. She took a sip and said as much.

“Well, there’s nothing like a martini,” he said, “and they make a good one here. Matter of fact, it’s a good restaurant altogether. They serve a good steak, a strip sirloin.”

“Also coming back in style,” she said. “Along with the martini.”

He looked at her. He said, “So? You want to be right up with the latest trends? Should I order us a couple of steaks?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “I really shouldn’t stay that long.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I just thought we’d have a drink and—”

“And handle what we have to handle.”

“That’s right.”

“Sure,” he said. “That’ll be fine.”

Except it was hard to find a way into the topic that had brought her to Hoboken, to this restaurant, to this man’s table. They both knew why she was here, but that didn’t relieve her of the need to broach the subject. Looking for a way in, she went back to the weather, the fog. Even if the weather had been good, she told him, she would have come by train and taxi. Because she didn’t have a car.

He said, “No car? Didn’t Tommy say you had a weekend place up near him? You can’t go back and forth on the bus.”

“It’s his car,” she said.

“His car. Oh, the fella’s.”

“Howard Bellamy’s,” she said. Why not say his name? “His car, his weekend place in the country. His loft on Greene Street, as far as that goes.”

He nodded, his expression thoughtful. “But you’re not still living there,” he said.

“No, of course not. And I don’t have any of my stuff at the house in the country. And I gave back my set of car keys. All my keys, the car and both houses. I kept my old apartment on West Tenth Street all this time. I didn’t even sublet it because I figured I might need it in a hurry. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

“What’s your beef with him exactly, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“My beef,” she said. “I never had one, far as I was concerned. We lived together three years, and the first two weren’t too bad. Trust me, it was never Romeo and Juliet, but it was all right. And then the third year was bad, and it was time to bail out.”

She reached for her drink and found the glass empty. Odd — she didn’t remember finishing it. She looked across the table at him and he was waiting patiently, nothing showing in his dark eyes.

After a moment she said, “He says I owe him ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten large.”

“He says.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “But he’s got a piece of paper,” she said. “A note I signed.”

“For ten thousand dollars.”

“Right.”

“Like he loaned you the money.”

“Right.” She toyed with her empty glass. “But he didn’t. Oh, he’s got the paper I signed, and he’s got a canceled check made out to me and deposited to my account. But it wasn’t a loan. He gave me the money and I used it to pay for a cruise the two of us took.”

“Where? The Caribbean?”

“The Far East. We flew into Singapore and cruised down to Bali.”

“That sounds pretty exotic.”

“I guess it was,” she said. “This was while things were still good between us, or as good as they ever were.”

“This paper you signed,” he prompted.

“Something with taxes. So he could write it off, don’t ask me how. Look, all the time we lived together I paid my own way. We split expenses right down the middle. The cruise was something else, it was on him. If he wanted me to sign a piece of paper so the government would pick up part of the tab—”

“Why not?”

“Exactly. And now he says it’s a debt, and I should pay it, and I got a letter from his lawyer. Can you believe it? A letter from a lawyer?”

“He’s not going to sue you.”

“Who knows? That’s what the lawyer letter says he’s going to do.”

He frowned. “He goes into court and you start testifying about a tax dodge—”

“But how can I, if I was a party to it?”

“Still, the idea of him suing you after you were living with him. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it? They got a word for it.”

“Palimony.”

“That’s it, palimony. You’re not trying for any, are you?”

“Are you kidding? I said I paid my own way.”

“That’s right, you said that.”

“I paid my own way before I met him, the son of a bitch, and I paid my own way while I was with him, and I’ll go on paying my own way now that I’m rid of him. The last time I took money from a man was when my Uncle Ralph lent me bus fare to New York when I was eighteen years old. He didn’t call it a loan, and he sure as hell didn’t give me a piece of paper to sign, but I paid him back all the same. I saved up the money and sent him a money order. I didn’t even have a bank account. I got a money order at the post office and sent it to him.”

“That’s when you came here? When you were eighteen?”

“Fresh out of high school,” she said. “And I’ve been on my own ever since, and paying my own way. I would have paid my own way to Singapore, as far as that goes, but that wasn’t the deal. It was supposed to be a present. And he wants me to pay my way and his way, he wants the whole ten thousand plus interest, and—”

“He’s looking to charge you interest?”

“Well, the note I signed. Ten thousand dollars plus interest at the rate of eight percent per annum.”

“Interest,” he said.

“He’s pissed off,” she said, “that I wanted to end the relationship. That’s what this is about.”

“I figured.”

“And what I figured,” she said, “is if a couple of the right sort of people had a talk with him, maybe he would change his mind.”

“And that’s what brings you here.”

She nodded, toying with her empty glass. He pointed to the glass, raised his eyebrows questioningly. She nodded again, and he raised a hand, and caught the waiter’s eye, and signaled for another round.

They were silent until the drinks came. Then he said, “A couple of boys could talk to him.”

“That would be great. What would it cost me?”

“Five hundred dollars would do it.”

“Well, that sounds good to me.”

“The thing is, when you say talk, it’ll have to be more than talk. You want to make an impression, situation like this, the implication is either he goes along with it or something physical is going to happen. Now, if you want to give that impression, you have to get physical at the beginning.”

“So he knows you mean it?”

“So he’s scared,” he said. “Because otherwise what he gets is angry. Not right away, two tough-looking guys push him against a wall and tell him what he’s gotta do. That makes him a little scared right away, but then they don’t get physical and he goes home, and he starts to think about it, and he gets angry.”