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"I'm trying to tie some things up."
"Would you rather another night?" She looked at a distant spot in the restaurant.
"No, I'll do everything I can to be there."
"You'll do everything?"
"What time? I'll be there. I promise."
"They're not easy people to deal with, are they? You don't always get to set your own schedule, do you? You don't have control over everything when you lock into Tony Cardo's world, do you?"
"All right, Bootsie, I was hard on you."
"No, you were hard on both of us. When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself. I loved you so much that summer I thought we had one skin wrapped around us."
I looked back at her helplessly.
"Six-thirty," she said.
"All right," I said. Then I said it again. "And if anything goes wrong, I'll call. That's the best I can do. But I know I'll be there."
And I was the one who'd just suggested we eighty-six it all and go back to Bayou Teche.
Her dark eyes were unreadable in the light of the candle burning inside the little red chimney on the table.
When I got back to Tony's house, I hid the tape recorder in my closet. The house was empty, so quiet that I could hear clocks ticking. I put on my gym shorts and running shoes, jogged for thirty minutes through the neighborhood and along Lakeshore Drive, then tried to do ten push-ups out on the lawn. But the network of muscles in my left shoulder was still weak from the gunshot wound, and after three push-ups I collapsed on my elbow.
I showered, put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved sports shirt, and walked out by the pool with a magazine just as Tony and Jess came through the front gate in the Lincoln, with the white limo behind them.
Tony slammed the car door and walked toward me, pulling off his coat and tie.
"Come inside with me. I got to get a drink," he said. He kept pulling off his clothes as he went deeper into the house, kicking his shoes through a bedroom door, flinging his shirt and trousers into a bathroom, until he stood at the bar in his Jockey undershorts. His body was hard, knotted with muscle, and beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He poured four inches of bourbon into a tumbler with ice and took a big swallow. Then he took another one, his eyes widening above the upended glass.
"I think I'm heading into the screaming meemies," he said. "I feel like somebody's pulling my skin off with pliers."
"What is it?"
"I'm a fucking junkie, that's what it is." He poured from the decanter into his glass again.
"Better ease up on the fluids."
"This stuff's like Kool-Aid compared to what my system's used to. What you're looking at, Dave, is a piece of cracked ceramic. Those guys are weirding me out, too. We're in my real estate office out by Chalmette, and I'm talking to my salespeople at a meet while the guys are milling around out there by the front desks. These salespeople are mostly middle-class broads who pretend they don't know what other kinds of businesses I'm in. So we end the meet and walk out to the front door and everybody is bouncy and laughing until they see the guys comparing different kinds of rubbers they bought at some sex shop. It's like my life is part of a Marx Brothers comedy. Except it ain't funny."
He put his head down on the bar. "Oh man, I ain't fucking gonna make it."
"Yeah, you will."
"Have you ever seen a set-brain ward at the V.A.? They wear Pampers, they drool on themselves, they eat mush with their hands. I've been there, man, and this is worse."
"I've had dead people call me up long-distance. Do you think it gets any worse than that?" I said.
"You think that's a big deal? I'll tell you about a smell—" He stopped and drank out of his glass. The ice clinked against the sides. His eyes were dilated. "Come inside, I want to show you something."
He picked up the decanter and walked out the side door onto the lawn. Jess looked up from dipping leaves out of the pool.
"Hey, Tony, you forgot your pants," he said, then saw the expression on Tony's face and said, "So it's a good day to get some sun."
I followed Tony across the lawn, through the trees, and past the goldfish ponds and birdbaths and tennis court to the back wall of his property. A hooded air vent protruded from the ground close to the base of the wall.
