“Yes, I do. You said you’d tell me. So tell me.”

“We think he’s a dealer.”

“Drugs.”

Mel nodded. “We just know his name. Gabe and I. We knew his name.”

“You guys aren’t even on the drug squad. How do you know about him?”

Mel looked back toward the bar and the pool tables, where everybody had resumed their games and conversations. “They found a body a month or so ago, in an alley off Barton Street. Gabe and I, we were called in on it. It looked like a hit, an execution.” Mel raised his right hand, the index finger extended, and touched his head just above his ear. “One shot, here.” He brought his hands together and stared out the window as he spoke. “We asked around, the usual people on the street, and they were scared. These guys, they’re usually pretty tough, but this time they weren’t acting that way for a change. Somebody told us a guy named Grizz did it. That’s all we had, his supposed name, his street name. Plus that he’s a dealer, and he scares the hell out of a lot of people who don’t scare easily. Gabe was doing some stuff on his own, checking out the guy in the alley, looking for some connection we could use. I told you I can’t do undercover anymore, but Gabe did. He made some contacts on the street, working on his own.”

“So why was this creep at my door this morning asking about Grizz? If this Grizz scares people so much, why is this guy looking for him?”

“What did he look like, the man asking for Grizz?”

“Asking? He was demanding. He was something else too.”

“Desperate?” Mel said.

That wasn’t the word I was looking for. I pictured him again, unwashed, bearded, dressed like a street bum, pushing against the door, more frantic than intimidating, more pleading than threatening. I recalled his face, and how he didn’t get angry when I refused to let him in or when I told him I didn’t know anybody named Grizz. Did he know Gabe? Did Gabe call himself Grizz? Boy, that hardly made any sense, but …

“Hey.” It was Mel.

“What?”

“I asked you twice.”

“Asked me what?”

“How old this guy was, the one looking for Grizz. Where were you just now?”

“Thinking.”

Mel’s eyes softened and he lowered his voice. “About Gabe?”

I nodded. I was always thinking about Gabe.

Mel sat back. “We can talk about this some other time, okay?” He looked around and leaned toward me again.

“Sure.” Now I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabe, and about something Mel had just said. “This guy, Grizz.”

“What about him?”

“Where was he shot?”

“Where was who shot?”

“The guy you think was killed by Grizz.”

“I told you. In an alley.”

“Not there. Where did the bullet go?”

Mel looked at me as though I had just asked what brand of underwear he wore, before raising his finger and touching his temple again. “Like I said. Here. Why?”

“That’s the same place Gabe was shot, isn’t it?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“That’s what you said. Gabe was shot once the same way, wasn’t he?”

“Josie, what the hell are you getting at?”

I didn’t know. That’s what I told Mel. I didn’t know. I only knew, and I was more certain of this than ever, that my husband had not killed himself, that he had been executed while kneeling naked on a blanket, waiting for me to arrive and love him.

I finished the coffee, told Mel to take care of himself, and asked him to wait until I left. I didn’t want anybody at Tuffy’s to see me leave with a man. I especially didn’t want them to see me leave with a cop.

14.

I had avoided reading newspapers since Gabe’s death, but over the next three days I scanned them for news about Wayne Weaver Honeysett. The first day’s coverage reported that a man’s body had been found beneath the lift bridge and police were investigating it as either a suicide or homicide. What was the other option? Natural causes? The victim’s identity would not be released until his next of kin had been notified, but he was believed to have been a resident of the beach strip.

The following day, the newspaper carried a much smaller story, saying only that the police were investigating the possibility of foul play in the death of the man found beneath the lift bridge on the beach strip. “Foul play”? It sounded like something an announcer might say when covering a baseball game on television. Crushing a man’s head to the thickness of a sheet of paper was well beyond “foul,” no matter how it happened.

That evening, it rained in the manner that told me summer was on its way back home to Florida. It wasn’t the soft, warm rain of an August afternoon, but the hard, cold rain of a September night, arriving early and unwelcomed.

The rain and cool weather made me feel desperate enough to call Tina. Her husband, Andrew, answered. Most men named Andrew are called, at some point in their lives, Andy or perhaps Drew. Andrew is always called Andrew, except, I assume, when he is called Dr. Golden.

Andrew informed me that Tina was either shopping or visiting the anthropology museum, and he said it with a total absence of irony in his voice. These two activities, after all, bookended the values of Tina’s life: either filling her head with things to talk about at bridge parties or filling her closet with Prada to wear to the bridge parties.

Andrew told me he was very sorry to hear about Gabe, whose company he said he had always liked, which struck me as an unnecessary and unusual thing to say, then promised to inform Tina of my call “the minute she returns.” Dr. Andrew Golden, I suspected, had the bedside manner of a kitchen appliance.

Minutes after I hung up the telephone, the damn thing rang again, and I assumed that Appliance Andy had contacted Tina on her mobile phone and she was calling me back. On a silly impulse I picked up the telephone and said, “So what’d you buy me?”

Instead of hearing Tina’s giggle, followed by a shopping list, I heard a male voice with a distinctive leer in it saying, “What would you like?” I know a leer is a facial expression and you’re not supposed to be able to hear one, but the leer was definitely there.

Naturally I asked who it was.

“Who would you like it to be?” the voice asked.

Damn. Get rid of one pervert and another takes his place.

I hung up the telephone. It didn’t ring again. Not even from Tina.

The following day, a story in the newspaper confirmed that the man whose body had been found beneath the lift bridge had been Wayne Weaver Honeysett, a former jeweller and prominent businessman who had suffered from depression since the collapse of his once-thriving business and the death of his wife. His two daughters were arriving from out of town to attend his funeral service. Police, the report said, were still trying to determine how he had died, which I found either chilling or amusing, depending on my mood and the time of day.

Tina called at noon, apologizing for not getting back to me sooner and asking what I wanted. I told her I wanted to know how she was doing. She said she was well. I said, “Good,” and hung up. When the telephone rang less than a minute later, I assumed it was either Tina or Pervert Number Two. Talking to either was equally uninteresting to me, so I let it ring.

Later, Mel called a couple of times, “checking in,” he explained. Harold Hayashida called as well, to ask if I had seen the newspaper reports and if I could recall anything else about the night that Honeysett, if that’s who it was, spoke to me from beneath the bridge like the troll my father had teased me about when I was a child. I answered “Yes” and “No,” in that order, then asked if the police still believed it had been suicide.

“That’s the general consensus,” Hayashida replied.

“Is that the same as a verdict?” I asked.