Evan Hunter - Romance

They clinked glasses and drank.

A white man at a nearby table was openly admiring them. Rosa Lee noticed this, and turned her eyes away, just like she’d done in the South when she was a little girl. No sense inviting rape, she’d been taught back then, and it had stuck with her all her life. Wasn’t a white man on earth could be trusted. Black man sees Rodney King getting beat by white cops on television, the black man says, “So what’s new? This’s been going on all along, only difference is we finally got pictures of it.” White man sees Rodney King getting beat on television, he says, “Oh, how terrible, those cops are beating that poor black man,” as if this was something didn’t happen every day of the week in every city in America, white cops beating on a black man. Or messing with a black woman. Putting their hands inside a black woman’s blouse. Doing even worse things to a black woman, touching her where they had no right touching, just because she was in their custody.

“I called last night, y’know,” she said. “Wanted to make sure you said ten o’clock for church.”

“Yes, I got the message,” Sharyn said.

“So why didn’t you call back?”

“I got in late. I called this morning, soon as I…”

“Where were you?”

“Out.”

“Who with?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Dinner.”

“Where?”

“In the Quarter.”

“Dangerous down there. You shouldn’t be going down there at night.”

“The Quarter? It’s mostly gay, Mom.”

“Not all of it’s gay. There’re places in the Quarter a person could get hurt.”

“Well, not where we were.”

“Where were you?”

“A restaurant called Petruccio’s.”

“Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Too much garlic in Italian food,” Rosa Lee said.

“Why’d you pick an Italian place?”

“ He picked it.”

“Who’s he?”

“Man named Jamie Hudson.”

“I don’t know him. Do I know him?”

“No, Mom.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“At the hospital.”

“He a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. You staying home tonight?”

“Actually, I’ve got another date.”

“Tomorrow’s a workday, you should stay home tonight, get your rest. How you gonna help sick people, you runnin aroun all the time?”

“It’ll be an early night,” Sharyn said.

“Where you going?”

“For Chinese food.”

“I like Chinese,” her mother said. “Who with? This doctor again?”

“No, another man.”

“What’s his name?”

Sharyn hesitated.

“Bert Kling,” she said.

“Bert what?“

“Kling.”

“What kind of name is that?” her mother said.

“It’s just a name,” Sharyn said.

“That’s some kind of name, all right. How do you spell that name?”

“With a K.”

“K-L–I-N-G?”

“Yes.”

“That’s some kind of name.”

“Good afternoon, ladies,” the waiter said, materializing suddenly at their table. “May I bring you some menus?”

“Yes, thank you, please,” Rosa Lee said. “I’m so hungry all at once, aren’t you, Shaar?”

Shaar.

She had the sudden impulse to tell her mother that Bert Kling was a white man.

She squashed it like a bug.

Thieves knew all about coincidence.

They knew that if they were holding up a mom-and-pop grocery store at the same time a blue-and-white rolled by, that was coincidence and they were looking at twenty in the slammer.

Cops knew about coincidence, too.

They knew the dictionary definitions of coincidence by heart: “To occupy the same position simultaneously.”

Or: “To happen at the same time or during the same period.”

Cops knew that ninety-four percent of the people who got killed in this fair nation of ours got killed because they happened to be occupying the same position simultaneously as a person with a gun or a knife or a baseball bat. To put it yet another way, they happened to be at the same time or during the same period where something terrible was about to occur, like having their brains bashed out or their livers surgically removed.

Cops believed that every encounter on the face of the earth was coincidental.

Take it or leave it.

Bert Kling happened to be sitting in a booth with two beautiful black women in a restaurant called Pagoda Palace at nine-fifteen that night, coincidentally alone with them because Arthur Brown had excused himself not a minute earlier to go to the men’s room.

It was coincidental that two white men were sitting in the booth opposite theirs.

It was further coincidental that two black men walked into the restaurant at that moment in time and began following the headwaiter to a booth just beyond theirs.

All coincidence.

Then again, Kling wouldn’t have been sitting here with Sharyn Cooke if a hostage cop named Georgia Mowbry hadn’t got shot in the eye on the twenty-ninth of March, an event that had caused him and Sharyn to meet coincidentally the very next morning. Georgia getting shot had been a coincidence in itself; she’d just been standing there in the hallway, talking to the assigned hostage cop, when the door to the apartment opened and the guy inside started shooting.

Cops didn’t want to hear from coincidence.

Cops knew that shit happened.

Nothing happened for a minute or so.

The headwaiter seated the two black men, and asked if they’d care for something to drink, and the two men respectively ordered a Scotch on the rocks and a Corona and lime, and the headwaiter padded away. The man facing the front door — and coincidentally the table at which Kling sat across from two black women — glanced in their direction, and then said something to his friend, and then stood up immediately and walked to where Kling was sitting with his elbows on the table, smiling, in the middle of a sentence.

What he was saying was that he’d had the feeling all through the Packer Q&A that the actress thought she was playing a role on television.

“I had the feeling…”

“This dude bothering you?” the man said.

Last Saturday’s race riots were still on everyone’s mind. Lots of people had died in Grover Park last Saturday. Blacks and whites. The memory of this was part of the equation. The memory was part of this coincidental happening that was about to evolve at a frighteningly fast pace.

“Everything’s cool, man,” Caroline said.

She’d been married to Arthur Brown for a good long time now, and she was used to his size and his authority, used to feeling protected when he was around, not only because he was a cop but also because he was a loving, caring husband. But she didn’t for a moment feel threatened in any way when the black man appeared at their table. In fact, she figured the man thought he was being a Good Samaritan, two black women sitting alone here at a table, hankie sits down across from them, intruding on their space, the brother was making sure everything was all right.

But he wasn’t going away.

“It’s cool, really,” she said, and smiled in dismissal.

“Ain’t enough white women in here for you?” the man asked Kling.

“These are friends of mine,” Kling said.

“You hear whut I ast you?” the man said.

“It’s okay, we’re…”

“Hey!” one of the white men in the booth across from them yelled. “He told you he knows them. Fuck off.”

The black man turned. His friend was already coming out of the booth up the aisle. It was starting.

Kling didn’t know who threw the first punch. It didn’t really matter. He knew only that suddenly the two white guys and the two black guys were tangling, and he saw a gun in somebody’s hand — too damn many guns in this city, in this country, in this world — and he shouted “Police! Drop the gun!” and that was when he spotted Brown coming out of the men’s room at the far end of the restaurant and breaking into a run the moment he realized what was happening.