Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

“Meaning there’s no checking out?”

Tentative laugh. “Meaning there’s no refund. Regrettably.”

Eddie called the Mount Olive Extended Care Residence and Spa.

“The account,” he was told, “is paid up to the thirtieth.”

“What’s the monthly rate?”

“Three thousand dollars.”

“Mr. Nye would like to pay for a year in advance.”

“I’m afraid we have no discount mechanism in situations like that.”

Eddie waited for her to add “regrettably.” When she did not, he said, “Cash a problem?”

“Cash is never a problem, sir. Checks are the problem.”

Then there was nothing unburned or unpacked but the phone and the bottle of Armagnac. Like cognac, Jack had said, but snobbier. Eddie sat by the fire with the bottle in his lap, facing away from the window. He had noticed those blue skies. He didn’t drink, just sat with the bottle in his lap.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” he said.

“Jack?” It was Karen.

“No.”

“Eddie. You sound so much alike.” There was a pause. He could feel her thinking, as though the electric impulses in her brain were somehow feeding into the wire. “Is Jack there?”

“No.”

“When will he be back?”

Eddie searched for the right sort of lie, settled on one, opened his mouth to utter it only to find he physically could not. Something was choking him. He was all right as long as he didn’t speak about Jack. He saw himself in the mirror, completely distorted.

“Eddie?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you and I’ve had a little misunderstanding.”

“Have we?”

“I’d like to clear it up,” Karen said. “Maybe I could see you.”

Eddie said nothing.

Karen said: “Could I come over?”

It hit him then: the desk clerk had called her, told her that Jack was checking out. Why not? She was some kind of cop, and it was an obvious cop move.

“Why don’t I come over there?” Eddie said.

“Over here?”

“What’s your address?”

She gave it to him.

“See you in an hour,” Eddie said.

Eddie called down for a cardboard box, wrapping paper. He opened one of the canvas bags and counted out $230,000. There was a knock at the door.

He opened it. The bellman. “Can you wait a minute?” Eddie asked him, taking the box and the wrapping paper.

“Certainly, sir.”

Everyone was calling him sir all of a sudden, as though money had a smell. Eddie closed the door, leaving the bellman in the hall. He put the $230,000 in the box, wrapped it, wrote Karen’s address on the front, adding, “From Windward Financial Services,” gave it to the bellman.

“I’d like this delivered right away,” Eddie said. “By you.” He gave the bellman fifty dollars.

“Right away,” said the bellman, but there was no “sir.” Maybe fifty wasn’t enough.

The bellman left. Eddie counted out another $36,000, for the Mount Olive Extended Residence and Spa, dropped it in a shopping bag. What else? He remembered Raleigh, and then forgot him.

He counted the rest: $488,220.

Eddie stuffed it into the backpack, threw the canvas bags on the fire, slung on the pack. He looked around the room. He had taken care of Jack’s obligations and destroyed the records of any possible financial impropriety. That didn’t make him feel any better. He hadn’t belonged in Jack’s world and Jack hadn’t belonged in his. Bringing them together had been a mistake. He toyed with the idea that the two worlds had come together within him, due to circumstance, and therefore it was no one’s fault. A bad idea. Jack was dead and the fault was his.

Eddie picked up the Armagnac bottle and was on his way out when he noticed the Monarch lying by the couch. He tossed it in the fire. Then he went down to the street, where Jack’s car was waiting. A uniformed man held the door for him. Eddie gave him money.

“Nice day, isn’t it, sir?”

Eddie glanced up at the blue sky. It hurt his eyes. He drove away from the Palazzo with Jack’s heat on full blast and the icy feeling on the back of his neck.

He was out of the northeast and out of Armagnac before the obvious lines lit up in his brain.

The man hath penance done,

And penance more will do.

Then he couldn’t get rid of them.

Karen de Vere knelt in front of the fireplace. She saw a half-burned canvas bag, warped computer disks, ashes. Mostly ashes. She pinched some in her fingers and sniffed them.

“Smell anything?” asked Raleigh Packer.

“The end of your parole.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re going back to finish your sentence. What else?”

He reddened. “Why? I cooperated, didn’t I?”

Raleigh was whining. Karen didn’t like whiners. “With no result.”

“I did everything you asked. I tried.”

“Try harder.”

“How.”

“Think of where he might have gone. You know him.”

“Yeah, I know him. He’s out romancing a prospective client, or sucking around for tips, or having a few down at the Seaport or some place like that. He’ll be back soon.”

Karen blew the ashes off her hands. Raleigh was wrong. Jack Nye was gone, period. She was left with a fireplace full of ashes, $230,000 in well-used currency, and no case against him. And a question: why had he run? She could understand running and not paying, or paying and not running; she couldn’t understand running and paying.

No explanation. No note with the money, not even his business card. Just a scrawl on the wrapper: “From Windward Financial Services.” Karen had compared it to samples of Jack’s handwriting, found it didn’t match. She wished she had a sample of Eddie Nye’s handwriting too.

“Are you trying to tell me that he’s taken off?” asked Raleigh.

“No interpretation required,” Karen said. She poked at the ashes with the toe of her shoe, saw something red and charred. She picked it up: a fragment of the cover of the Monarch Notes guide to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“Taken off?” said Raleigh. “And not coming back, you mean? The fucking bastard.” He pounded the wall, although not hard enough to hurt himself.

“I’m sure it’s nothing personal,” said Karen, dropping the fragment in her bag.

“The fucking bastard,” was Raleigh’s only reply.

Karen waited on a bench. A guard in a gray uniform sat at the other end, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. Through the closed office door across the room came a laugh that made her think of crows. Then the door opened and a red-haired man in denim came out. He reminded her immediately of Goya’s portrait of Charles IV of Spain. The guard rose. The red-haired man nodded toward her-it was almost a bow-and smiled. He had beautiful teeth but was missing a canine. He left the waiting room with the guard following close behind.

The receptionist said: “You can go in now.”

Karen entered the office, smelled a piney smell she didn’t like. She handed her card to the man behind the desk. He studied it. She studied him. He looked like Santa Claus gone sour.

“Take a pew, uh, Miss de Vere,” said Floyd K. Messer, M.D., Ph.D., sliding her card across the desk. “I haven’t heard of this agency of yours, but I made some calls and apparently it’s legit.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Messer blinked, sat farther back in his chair. “I’m a little pressed for time,” he said, “what with this bit of business we’ve got lined up for tonight. So if you’d tell me how I can help you.”

“What bit of business?”

Messer looked surprised. “Wasn’t there a lot of media outside when you came in?”

“I didn’t see any.”