Ed McBain - Fiddlers

Parker could just imagine.

‘And she fell right into my lap,’ Geoffrey said, rolling his eyes. ‘I mean, talk about letting the fox into the chicken coop.’

Genero figured he’d got that backwards.

Parker was a little envious. Beautiful, uninhibited fifteen-year-old coming to work in your father’s restaurant? His own father had never even owned a hot-dog stand!

‘How long did she work here, would you know?’ he asked.

‘Of course I know! Two years. Left when she was seventeen. Went to manicuring school to get a license. Never heard from her since.’ Geoffrey hesitated. ‘Best two years of my life,’ he said, and sighed longingly.

Parker almost sighed with him.

* * * *

That Friday afternoon, as they sat at an outdoor table on the sidewalk of a place called Rimbaud’s in a small town perched on a river upstate, eating ice-cream sundaes and sipping thick black espressos, she said, out of the blue, ‘Chaz, from now on, I don’t want to charge you.’

He looked across the table at her.

And suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears.

She was so startled, she almost began crying herself.

‘Chaz?’ she said. ‘Chaz?’ and reached across the table to take his hand. ‘What is it, honey? Please, what is it?’

He shook his head.

Tears spilling down his cheeks.

He took out a handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes.

‘I wish I’d met you sooner,’ he said.

‘Any sooner, you’d be a pedophile,’ she said, and smiled across the table at him, and kept holding his hand.

He began laughing through his tears.

‘Are you doing this because it hasn’t been working for us?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘It has been working.’

‘I meant… the sex.’

‘Oh, that’ll be fine,’ she said airily, ‘don’t worry about it. We just need more practice at it.’

He nodded, said nothing.

‘We’ve just met each other,’ she said, enforcing her point. ‘We have to keep at it, is all. Learn each other. We have plenty of time.’

He still said nothing.

“The sex is nothing, I’m ready to wait forever for it to work,’ she said. ‘You want to know why? Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met. Some guys, in the middle of the night, they like to start complaining about their wives, you know? I know you haven’t got a wife, I’m just trying to explain something. They do that because they suddenly feel guilty about being in bed with a whore. So they blame it on the wife. The wife does this, the wife doesn’t do that, it’s all the wife’s fault.

‘Other guys, they like to tell you how brainy they are, or how macho they are. Middle of the night. This is because they’re paying to get laid, and they want you to realize they don’t have to pay for it if they choose not to, they are really something quite special, and they want you to appreciate this. Some of them, if you don’t appreciate how marvelous they are, they start smacking you around. Those are the ones who are so very marvelous that they may knock out a girl’s teeth or break her arm or suddenly pull a gun or a knife on her. Those are the ones you get the hell out of there fast. Run out in your panties, run out bare-assed, just get out before this truly gets dangerous. You weigh a hundred and ten pounds, and the gorilla in bed with you weighs two-fifty, never mind the Marines coming to the rescue.

‘I’ve never been to bed with anybody like you, Chaz,’ she said, and reached across the table, and took both his hands in her own again. ‘Never. You never try to show off, you never brag about yourself, you never tell me you have an IQ of three hundred and twelve, or biceps measuring eight inches around. You’re just… so full of life, Chaz. Just so… nice… and… gentle… and… and…

‘You always treat me like a lady, Chaz. Always. Well… that’s because I’m a whore, right? I know that. Always treat a lady like a whore, and a whore like a lady, right?’

‘You’re not a whore, Reggie.’

‘You keep saying that, I’ll start believing it.’

‘Believe it,’ he said.

‘Chaz,’ she said, and paused, and looked across the table at him, and said, ‘do you trust me?’

‘Completely.’

‘Then tell me what happened last night.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. When last night?’

‘Where’d you go, for example? What’d you do?’

‘I had some business to take care of. I told you.’

‘Late at night? You didn’t get back to the hotel till…”

‘Yes, Reggie. Late at night.’

‘Please don’t get angry with me. I’m only trying to…’

‘I’m not getting angry.’

‘Was that really a nightmare you had, Chaz?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because, the way you were clutching yourself…”

‘It was a nightmare, Reg.’

‘… you seemed to be in pain.’

‘It was a painful nightmare.’

‘You’ve got a lot of pain pills in the bathroom, Chaz.’

The table went silent.

‘Chaz? What are all those pills for?’

‘I sometimes get headaches. Remembering Nam.’

‘Headaches in your belly?’

‘Let it go, Reg.’

‘Don’t get angry, please don’t.’

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Where are you going tonight, Chaz? What business do you have to take care of tonight? That’s stopping us from staying at a bed and breakfast up here?’

‘Old business.’

‘You told me this would be the end of it…”

‘It will.’

‘The end of what , Chaz?’

‘All this old business.’

‘What old business? Chaz, if I’m not a whore, then trust me, okay? Let me help you with whatever…”

‘I’m all right, Reggie. There’s nothing you can do to help, believe me.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘Believe me.’

She looked into his eyes.

‘Believe me,’ he said again.

She wished she could.

She wished she didn’t feel that something very terrible was going to happen very soon.

* * * *

‘Christine and I were both fresh out of college,’ Susan Hardigan told them. ‘Both of us very young, and very arrogant, and I fear not very attractive.’

She was sitting in a wheelchair in fading sunlight, a fading woman herself, in her late sixties now, they guessed, frail in a blue nursing home robe and woolly blue slippers, her gray hair pulled to the back of her head in a tidy bun. They suspected she had never been a pretty woman, but age had not been kind to her, either. Her crackling mind came filtered through a quavering voice, and she sat wrinkled and shriveled, as if cowering from death itself.

They had found her name on a stack of letters in Christine Langston’s desk, the most recent dated April 24, almost nine weeks ago. They had called ahead and asked if they might come talk to her, and an administrator at the Fairview Nursing Home had told them that would be fine if they made the visit a short one. The drive out to Sands Spit had taken a bit more than two hours. Now, at seven in the evening, they sat on a porch in a wide bay window, dusk falling swiftly around them.

‘And you’ve kept your friendship all these years?’ Kling asked. He sounded surprised. He was still young enough to believe that friendships fell into clearly defined periods of a person’s life: Childhood, High School, College, Grown Up. He couldn’t quite imagine a friendship that endured into a person’s old age, perhaps even to his death. But here was Susan Hardigan, who had known Christine Langston when they were both young teachers at Warren G. Harding High School in Riverhead.

‘Yes, all these years,’ she said. ‘Well, we don’t see each other all that often, especially since I began having trouble with my legs. But we correspond regularly, and we talk to each other on the phone, yes. We’re still very good friends.’