Lawrence Block - Hope to Die

"And next time you'd turn him down."

She nodded. "No matter what. Whether he'd go to jail or get his legs broken, I'd turn him down."

"But this time you'd send the money." I drank some more coffee and said, "You know, I think you're right."

"I'm right for me. What's right for me isn't necessarily right for you."

"This time it is. I'll call Michael."

But not just then; it was, as she pointed out, four in the morning in California. I didn't ask her what time it was in Paris.

I was relieved to have the decision made, but I felt less sanguine about the whole business as the morning wore on. My mind kept fussing with it like a kitten with a ball of yarn, and I had to remind myself over and over that I'd made up my mind.

And I was forever checking my watch, wishing it was time to make the call, anxious to get it over with. But I kept putting it off, first reluctant to chance waking him, then deciding against calling while they were at breakfast. It evidently wasn't something he wanted June to know about, so why make him take the call in another room? I could wait and reach him at the office.

T J came up around eleven, wearing khakis and a polo shirt but carrying yesterday's clipboard. He'd made notes on his trip to Williamsburg and went over them with me. The house was a three-story brick rowhouse sheathed thirty or forty years ago in garish asphalt siding. "Musta been some salesman," he said, " 'cause everybody on the block went for it. Made it a real Neighborhood Uglification project."

The siding had been stripped from the lower two floors at 168 Meserole, and they were working on the top floor. The brick underneath was going to need repointing, and a good deal of repair work, but even in its present state it looked better than what had covered it. They were doing a similar kind of work inside, deleting the improvements of previous owners and tenants, tearing out the partitions that had divided the original floor-through apartments into smaller units, pulling off the pressboard paneling and dropped-ceiling tiles, taking up the worn linoleum. The plaster was scheduled for removal from the exterior walls, to expose the brick. The three apartments would be loftlike open-plan layouts, but some half-walls were planned, to hold bookshelves and display paintings.

"Be nice when they finish it," he said. "They artists, so they need their work space. They all workin' together. Time I got there, Peter was down on the first floor, scrapin' ugly wallpaper off one wall they fixin' to keep, an' two of the others was up in Peter's place on the third floor, workin' on the brick. They got these little masks over their mouths an' noses, keep the dust out of their lungs, an' they got plaster dust coverin' the rest of them. Looked pretty comical, but I figured a buildings inspector be seein' that all the time, so I held back and didn't laugh."

Peter had the third floor to himself, he said, and he wondered if they'd put him up there because they figured he needed the exercise. He was fat, no question, but it didn't seem to slow him down any. He went up and down the stairs without getting out of breath, and he didn't have that apologetic manner that so many fat people seemed to have.

"You see him," he said, "and you say to yourself, man, this is one fat dude. You around him a little while, an' what happens is you forget he's fat. It slips your mind. And then later on, like, you spendin' time with one of the others an' then you see Peter again, and you're like, Damn, he's fat! Like you never noticed it before, 'cept you did."

I knew what he meant. I'd observed the same phenomenon with several other people, not all of them overweight. One is blind, for example, another missing an arm. The common denominator, I think, is self-acceptance, and the result is as he described it. Because they accept it, whatever it is, you stop noticing it.

Peter Meredith's therapist may not have been able to save his client's relationship with Kristin, or to trim him down to a size 42, but it sounded as though he could claim a certain degree of success.

Marsha Kittredge and Lucian Bemis had the second floor. She was a blond Wasp princess from Beaufort, South Carolina, and he was a tall gaunt black man from South Philadelphia. She was a painter, he a sculptor, and T J had decided that, once upon a time, her great-grandfather had owned his great-grandfather.

The ground floor's occupants were Ruth Ann Lipinsky, another painter, the only native New Yorker in the group, short and dark and intense, and Kieran Eklund, a painter and printmaker, who'd been doing something unspecified in Manhattan during T J's visit. T J'd thought he might stick around until Eklund got back, so he could get a look at him, but it turned out the others were going to meet Eklund in the city. They'd been anxious to clean up and get out of there, which may have prompted Peter Meredith to give T J a hundred-dollar handshake.

"Made me suspicious," he said. "Man gives you money, you got to figure it's so you'll look the other way. Started to wonder what I wasn't meant to see. Then I remembered who I supposed to be."

"A city employee."

"You right, Dwight. Man in my position, they got to pay you even if they ain't done nothin' wrong." He sighed. "Good business to be in," he said, "if only the uniforms wasn't so lame."

When I finally picked up the phone and called him, Michael was in the car, on his way to a client. "I'll make the check out to you," I said, "and put it in the mail this afternoon. For five thousand dollars. You write your own check to him, or better yet- "

"I was thinking of making the check payable to his employer."

"That's exactly what I was about to suggest. Not because we don't trust him, but because the canceled check will be proof of payment."

"That's a good point," he said. "I can even say as much to Andy if he takes offense. But to be perfectly frank about it, as far as I'm concerned it's because I don't trust him."

I got out the checkbook and wrote out a check for five thousand dollars payable to Michael Scudder. I looked up his address, addressed an envelope, and folded a sheet of notepaper to wrap the check so that it wouldn't be visible through the envelope. I don't know why, I can't imagine that a lot of postal employees hold envelopes to the light, looking for personal checks they can steal.

And it seemed to me I ought to write something on the sheet of paper. I sat there trying to think of something to say. Everything that came to mind struck me as redundant or foolish or both. I decided to face the fact that I didn't have anything to say to my boy, to either of my boys, and I wrapped the check in the piece of paper and tucked it in the envelope, sealed it and stamped it and held it out and looked at it.

T J was sitting on the couch, turning the pages of an art magazine. He hadn't said a word in a while.

"I'm sending five thousand dollars to my son in California," I said.

He didn't look up from the magazine. "He probably be glad to get it," he said.

"It's not for him. It's for his brother in Tucson. Andy, his name is. He embezzled money from the company he works for and if he doesn't pay it back he'll go to jail."

He didn't say anything

I picked up the envelope, held it in my hand. It didn't weigh much. One stamp would carry it all the way across the country. I said, "I could get the money from the bank, squirt lighter fluid on it and set it on fire. It'd make about as much sense."

"Blood," he said.

"Blood?"

"Thicker'n water."

"So they tell me. Sometimes I wonder." I got to my feet. "I'm going to drop this in the mail," I said. "You want to wait here?"

He shook his head, closed the magazine, stood up.

I mailed it in the box on the corner, thinking what an act of faith I'd just performed, expecting the post office to transport it three thousand miles and actually deliver it to its intended recipient. Yet it seemed far more likely that the letter would get there than that the check inside would do any good.