The Donzerly Light (22 page)

A face without a smile.

Twenty

Shorted

It was becoming a ritual of sorts. Jay and Jude, out for a nice meal while Steve and Bunker held down the fort. Usually lunch, but this time it was dinner, at the Hudson River Club, Jay’s choice a plating of duck breast over greens, and Jude’s a perfectly charred strip steak paired with rosemary potatoes and summer squash.

But ritual or not, it was no ordinary meal, because it had been no ordinary day.

“Poor bastard,” Jude commented, sawing chunks of his steak off while images of that Wednesday’s main happening spun in his head. He’d heard most of it from Bunker, who’d gotten the lowdown from someone at Braintrust who had been witness to the entire thing. Argument, accident, the whole shebang. Including Jay’s presence, front row and center. “Was it as bad as I heard? The guy’s head split open and brains running out and all?”

Jay stabbed greens with his fork and fed them into his mouth. He chewed and said nothing.

Jude understood—almost. His buddy hadn’t wanted to talk about the incident all day. Not at the office, nor on cab ride to dinner. He’d spoken to no one about it, it seemed, and to Jude that wasn’t
too
strange. His parents had been killed in a car accident, after all. Not like what had happened in front of Trinity Church, albeit, but, well, cars were involved, so his reticence on the subject could be somewhat expected.

But on the other hand, it wasn’t like someone his buddy knew had been the one squashed.

Still, Jude would let it go. He had given it a shot. Had tried to get his buddy to open up about it. Let it out. Wasn’t shit like that supposed to be good for you? Maybe if he decided to try analysis for kicks someday he would get the true blue on that. But for now, it didn’t matter. He didn’t have to talk about the accident. There were more important topics he could broach.

“Guess who called today,” Jude said, wiping a smudge of potato from his chin with his napkin.

“Who?” Jay asked, his interest threadbare. At least Jude wasn’t on the former topic anymore.

“Ever hear of Lou Carillo?”

Jay had. “Developer, right?”

“Built the Castleton Towers in Philadelphia, the Harvey-Gray Trade Mart in St. Louis. He’s got two hotel projects going in Vegas right now.”

“I thought Vegas was dead.”

“If Lou Carillo is there, it ain’t.”

“So he’s very green, is what you’re saying.”

“Makes Teddy Malone look like a pauper,” Jude said, sipping his Jack and Coke. “Green indeed, Grady. Green and interested in us.”

Jay nodded. Business was still business. He could focus on work. On making green. That would keep his mind off things that were futile to trouble over. Futile. Right. There was nothing he could do, or could have done. What happened, happened. Mitchell, the bald man. Past history now. Just get on with things. Make some green. Some more sweet green.

“How interested?” Jay asked.

“He wants to meet us,” Jude told him. “All of us.”

“When’s he coming by?”

Jude shook his head. “We’re going by. His place, this Friday night.”

“Just us?”

“He’s having a party. Wants us there. Said to bring dates if we want.”

“Huh. This is a new one.” Jay took one more bite of duck, then pushed the plate away, his appetite still meager after that morning. But it would come back. It would.

“You ever been to a party given by a guy more than half way to a billion?” Jude asked. He knew Jay hadn’t, and neither had he. “I’m expecting gold goblets and platinum toilet seats.”

Jay nodded and actually smiled. A normal expression it was. But that morning on the bum’s face the opposite had seemed so...abnormal. He had stopped smiling. Right after the photog had taken his picture. Why? Of all the things in the world to force the grin from his face, why that? Why not the indignant demands of the bald man? Wasn’t that enough of a reason to slap a dour mug upon him?

Questions, Jay thought to himself, his own smile flattening now. All there were about the bum, and the things he did, were questions. How had the bald man known that his pocket had been picked, without knowing how it had been picked? How could Sign Guy do what he did? Steal, bequeath, kill? Where did his power to do so come from? Questions. So many questions.

And still the one that troubled Jay most of all. Why could he not turn away from any of it? Was it fear of the bum? Maybe. Was it want of the dream? Maybe. But...

...but it felt like more than that. He feared the bum, but he was not afraid of him. Passed him every day, in fact. And the dream? He had it. Riches. Green. More money than he would ever need, and more coming in all the time. He could walk away and never worry about things financial again. And still he stayed in the orbit of the bum, not too far, not too close, just...in proximity. As if he was supposed to be close by. As if there was some reason for him to stay. But what reason could there be for that?

He hated this. Hated wanting to know things he could not know. Like he’d thought while seated at the counter of Greenie’s Diner so long ago now, recollecting briefly the burning want of an explanation for his parents’ death, sometimes there just weren’t answers. And damn if this still wasn’t one of those times.

“Sir?”

Jay looked up from his wandering thoughts and saw the waiter standing very properly at their table, hands folded behind his back.

“Are you finished, sir?”

Jay looked at his plate, and thought, yes, I am finished. With that, and with questions that could not be answered. He would chew on them again, he was certain, but for now he was done. For now it was doing no good.

“Yes. Take it away, please.”

The waiter gathered the plate and smiled at Jude, who was still working on his jazzed-up American fare.

“Dessert tray in five minutes,” Jude told him.

“Certainly,” the waiter said, and was turning to leave when Jay stopped him and handed him a one dollar bill.

“Can you bring me change for that, please?” It was Jude’s turn to spring for dinner, so there would be no chance to bring coins into his presence here, and unless he stopped on the way home or went out later, neither of which he was inclined to do, he was going to have to get the next day’s pick right here and now. As yet it hadn’t come that day, not that there had been much opportunity—just some spilled change from their receptionist’s purse scattered about his feet as he came in after the...happenings, and the forgotten coins mounded in the change bowl of the candy machine up on sixteen, where he’d gone that afternoon for a sugar pick-me-up when lunch seemed too much a chore. And neither opportunity had been fruitful. Just random piles that were heads and tails. Two strikeouts.

So this it would have to be, and when the waiter approached their table a minute after taking the single to an unseen register, as Jude talked on and on about Lou Carrillo and his money and how the vision was for Vegas to be a family destination someday, Jay readied himself. Made himself ready to know what he would know, ready to see the heads, ready to get the next days pick. Ready to carry on the dream.

“Here, sir,” the waiter said, placing the small platter of coins on the table and backing away.

“There’s talk of like five thousand room hotels, Grady, and theme parks and shit,” Jude was saying as he ate. “Vegas could be another Disneyla...”

But Jay didn’t care what Vegas would be, or could be. All he cared about at the moment was the tray of change the waiter had brought him, a mix of coins upon it. Two quarters, three dimes, four nickels. No pennies, because who needed pennies anymore? Well, right then Jay would have taken pennies. Five pennies, six pennies, ten pennies. Any number of the little bronze rounds if they would have all been heads. Because what was on the tray was certainly not all heads. The nine coins were distributed very randomly upon the small silver slab that contained them.

Jay reached out and took the coins in hand, hoping that his touch might do the trick, while somehow knowing that it would not. But still he held them, and pressed his flesh tightly upon them before letting them fall onto the tray.

Jude stopped talking and eating for a moment and spied his buddy doing something with the change he’d requested. “What’s the matter, Grady? You get shorted?”

Looking at the arbitrary mix of heads and tails that had come to rest on the tray, Jay wasn’t so sure that he hadn’t.

Twenty One

Headless Wonder

Something was wrong.

It was after eleven in the evening and nothing had happened.

“So this guy has lots of money?” Christine asked Jay as she came out of the master bathroom and laid next to him on the bed. She was wearing a silk nightshirt so sheer that the dark buttons of her nipples showed through like a pair of eyes gaping with surprise.

“Yeah,” Jay answered. He lay in a pair of boxers, one hand behind his head and the other at his side, clenched tight around a mix of coins.

Christine brought her knee up and rested it on his thigh, her nightshirt riding up over her bare hips as she did. She began to play with his chest hair, something she had come to know he liked. A touch that got him going. It was that way with him recently, she had noticed. He was becoming some kind of sexual animal, it seemed, any time she touched him. A single touch from her almost always set him off, now. She had even thought that the only time he
wanted
her to touch him was when they were fucking, but that was silly, wasn’t it? They practically lived together, after all (though she still had her apartment at Jay’s insistence), and people who lived together had more than just the bedroom in common, right? Plus he bought her things. Nice things. Clothes, jewelry. God, yes, jewelry. The most gorgeous necklace, diamonds all around. She had wanted this bracelet she saw, too, but he didn’t seem to want her to have that, and so bought her some earrings instead. So they had more than just
sex
. Thinking otherwise was stupid. Just stupid.

“So how should I dress for this party?” she asked him, the soft inside of her thigh sliding up and down his leg. “Seductive or conservative?”

“He’s old and single and a potential client,” Jay told her. “You figure it out.”

Okay, that was a little harsh, but it
had
been a rough day for him. That accident out front of the church and all. Sheesh! How gross that must have been. “Mid thigh, black, tight, no panty lines. That should do the trick.”

Trick. Right. That should do the trick. Rev a rich old man’s engine. Some trick!

But what about the trick that mattered? The trick that wasn’t happening? Where were the damn heads? Where was the knowing? Where the hell was it?

“Black blazer to match,” Christine went on, mentally wardrobing herself for the event still two nights away. “Maybe just a bra underneath. Or a camisole.” She imaged the ensemble. “Or maybe just the blazer.”

Whatever, Jay thought. His mind was elsewhere, dwelling on heads. Heads that hadn’t come at the restaurant, and hadn’t come when he’d made a stop on the way home at the newsstand. Not at the diner where he’d bought a cup of coffee and then left it when the change disappointed, or the market where he’d bought one apple, or from the doorman who’d obligingly broken Jay’s last one for him. They hadn’t come at all, and that made Jay nervous. It made him wonder if they would come again at all. If not...

If not, what would become of the dream?

“I’ve got a new pair of heels that will go really good with—”

“Take these,” Jay said to her. He had rolled onto his side and was holding a handful of change out to her. The change from the doorman, the last he’d gotten that night. “Take these and drop them on the bed.” He scooted back from her, opening up a space on the mattress. It was flat enough, he thought. “Right here.”

“What?”

He instructed her next like a teacher might a kindergartner, hitting every syllable. “Take-the-change-in-my-hand-and-drop-it-on-the-bed.”

The request was odd enough that the tone did not even insult her. He wanted her to do
what
with the change? Drop it? Why?

Well, what he wanted done was kind of, uh, weird, so she decided to partly honor his wish. Maybe have a little fun with him. And so she sat herself up in bed, but only long enough to pull the nightshirt over her head, and then she plopped back down on the mattress, flat on her back and naked as a newborn, and reached over and took the change from her slack-jawed boyfriend.

“Watch this,” she told him, and proceeded to put the quarters from the change—three of them—on the smooth and golden skin of her stomach just below her navel, all in a row from left to right, discarding the rest onto the mattress. “I saw a belly dancer do this once and it got me so hot.” And then she began flexing the taut muscles beneath her flat stomach, tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing, creating creases and folds in her tan skin that drew the coins in, and then pushed them back up. Tighten and relax, fold and crease, in and up, again and again, until she had a rhythm going and the trio of quarters were tumbling up toward her breasts in slow and seductive motion.

Only Jay found no seduction in it at all, and angrily slapped the coins from her body, and threw those which she had put on the mattress across the room. She cringed, and brought her hands up to cover her face, thinking he might strike her there. But he did not, and she felt the bed shift as his weight lifted off of it, and when her hands came down from her face all she saw was him stalking out of the bedroom.

Twenty Two

Empty Handed

Nine fifteen, Thursday morning, they were all at their desk, each inhabiting their own leg of the X, when Jude lowered the paper he was reading and said, “The world is made of money, boys. It swims in the sea like fishes.”

Jay looked instantly up from the grouping of random coins he had been dropping again and again on the
Journal
folded on his blotter.

“What are you yakking about, Duffault?” Steve asked, one eye on the clock and the other on Jay.