Al Sarrantonio - Cold Night

He looked at Izzy, who had taken his cue from Mona and smiled happily. "Bye-bye, P.I.," he said.

He was getting his boarding pass when he was paged over the loudspeaker system.

He took the courtesy phone and Izzy said, "Paine?"

"Change your mind?"

"Maybe." In the background, Mona was yattering at him as usual; finally Izzy just yelled, "Shut up!" and came back on the line.

"I'm thinking maybe we can deal." Paine imagined him fingering his gold chains over his blue bikini swim trunks. "I'm thinking-"

Mona's voice sounded, close by, and Izzy yelled at her. "Give me the phone, motherfucker!" she shouted.

"Get away, bitch!" Izzy told Paine to hold on and the fight continued until Mona began to scream, "You opened up my lip again, motherfucker! How am I going to work?" "Sorry," Izzy said into the phone. "I give you something, you give me something, Paine. Here's yours: Paterna, Druckman, Steppen, all the same man. Now tell me: you sure Paterna's dead?"

"Is that what you want?"

Silence on the other end.

"Paterna's dead. Somebody hung him a couple of days ago, made it look like suicide."

"He called me a week ago, said someone had threatened to kill him."

"You thought that's who I was?"

"Yeah."

"Did Paterna call you after Morris Grumbach committed suicide?"

"Grumbach didn't kill himself. Whoever called Paterna told him he'd killed Grumbach."

"Do you have any idea who it was?"

"You give me one, Paine. Know any cops in New York or L.A. you trust?"

Paine thought of Petty's friend Ray. "One on each end."

"You sure? This is nasty stuff we're talking about here. I've been living on this for twenty-five years."

"I can take care of you."

"Come and talk."

Paine started to answer, but the phone went out. He called the number back, but no one answered. The last thing he had heard was Mona calling Izzy bad names in the background.

The car ride was even less pleasant the second time. The sky had turned from high phony blue to low, angry clouds.

It was sticky and hot. Paine's jacket stuck to his arms. The back of his neck felt like smog had pooled there. To his left, somewhere, was the big ocean that washed California, sought to purify it, but he didn't have the time to let it wash him clean.

The first drops of smog-laden rain spattered his windshield as he topped the hill within sight of the house. He braked where he was and pulled inconspicuously to the curb. Three LAPD cruisers and an ambulance were parked at various angles around the front. The first had done a movie brake job, leaving tire marks on the street and fishtailing till the front of the car pointed at the gate. The others had performed less perfect versions of the maneuver. A news crew was out of its van, its lights making an angry, rainy afternoon into bright daylight as two body bags were carried from the house over the sad trampled garden and into the tomb doors at the back of the ambulance. Following the body bags, fully aware of his moment of television immortality, strutted a plainclothesman bearing two clear-plastic bags filled with coils of rope crudely noosed at the ends.

"Shit," Paine said.

Inconspicuously, he backed the car down the hill and drove back to the airport.

The bags filled with Ginny's clothes were back on the chair.

He went into the apartment. He heard her in the kitchen, moving things around; she came out into the living room and blinked at him and said, "Hello, Jack."

It was not the same way she had said, "Good-bye, Jack."

She had a mug of coffee in her hand, and she became aware of it. She began to sip from it, changed her mind and lowered it.

"I just made some," she said, not looking at him, indicating the kitchen with her free hand.

"Your little deal fall apart?"

She looked down at the mug of coffee, and then she raised her eyes and looked at him directly. She was trying to be defiant, but it wasn't working and she knew it.

"We started fighting by the time we got to Roger's place in Montauk," she said. "He. ."

"It was his fault?" Paine said, a sarcastic edge in his voice.

"We. . fought. Look, Jack. I came back because I've thought about a lot of things and-"

"Forget it, Ginny."

"I thought about us really trying to make it work. If the two of us just give in-"

"We've been through this. Forget it."

Now she was defiant. "Goddammit, Jack, what do you want me to say?"

"I've thought a lot about this, too, and I want you to finally admit to yourself that you don't love me." She started to protest but he continued through it. "You've never loved me, Ginny. That's the problem, it's always been the problem." He singled each word out. "You don't love me. You've never been able to admit that to yourself. You always thought that if you messed with me a little more, changed me around a little more, that I'd be what you wanted. You've never looked at me and said, 'Here's Jack Paine, he's really fucked up, but I love him.' I never tried to change you, Ginny. I saw you that first time, and I fell in love with you, and that was it. I took you, Ginny, but you never took me."

There were things she was going to say. She ran through her gamut of expressions, from anger to denunciation, ending on the verge of tears.

"It's done, Ginny," he said to her quietly.

She stood with the coffee mug in her hand, and Paine wanted, as badly as he had wanted to put the gun to his head or the bottle to his lips the night before, to go to her and put his arms around her and say, "Yes." He wanted to say, "I still love you, and I'll try to change, I'll try not to be fucked up anymore and we'll try to make it work." But he knew what would happen if he did that. Someday he would see that frozen look on her face again, the one that said, "Go ahead, pull the trigger, get it over with," and he would pull the trigger for her. Finally, he would have changed for her, and he would no longer be her failure and she would be rid of him because she would possess him in the way she had always desired, which was to possess him so that he no longer possessed himself. She would own, not a piece of him as Barker did, but, in the end, all of him.

"Please go, Ginny," he said, and she stood a moment more and then she put the mug of coffee down and walked to the bags of clothes and gathered them up in her arms and opened the door and was gone. Paine heard the elevator work, but this time it was not leaving to take her away from him. It was simply leaving.

He walked to where she had put her coffee mug, and as he picked it up some of the coffee spilled out onto the carpet. He thought of Gloria Fulman and her Persian rug.

He went to the kitchen, and he poured the coffee into the drain, watching it spiral down to the depths of the earth, and said, "Good-bye, Ginny."

He showered California off his body, then dressed in a suit and tie and went to his car.

He drove to the Bronx in the dark. No stars to look at through the windshield tonight; a little of that low, angry, hot weather had followed him across the country. The back of his neck was pooled with sweat again. Muggy was muggy.

There was a white car far back that might be pacing him. He slowed, trying to lure it past, but it stayed stubbornly back. On the Major Deegan Expressway it disappeared from his rearview mirror, but when he got off he spotted it again, mounting the off-ramp as he turned onto Fordham Road at the top. The car was a BMW or Mercedes.

He waited ten minutes in the shadow of a White Castle hamburger joint, but it didn't pass. Then he pulled out conspicuously, hoping to flush it out. It was gone.

Thompson's Funeral Home was only two blocks from the Bronx Zoo. Paine pulled into the driveway, past the sign. The signs on funeral homes are all the same, bright white bordered in black. You don't have to read the name to know where you are.