“What happened to it?”

“Who knows? Gone, I guess. Look, Vic, you’re all right. You do what you got to do, that’s up to you, but Joey, what you were saying in that deposition thing about me. You’re off base. I didn’t whack him.”

“Who did?”

“Beats me. But you find out who it was, you give me the name, that’s all you got to do, and I’ll take care of it.”

“You want to help me, Derek, you tell me who hired you twenty years ago.”

“I can’t. Leastwise not now. Maybe if things change. But I’ll tell you this, it wasn’t him who did Joey. That I can promise. It wasn’t him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. He’s dead, for a long time now.”

“Dead?” That didn’t make sense. Too many people still cared too much for the guy who set up Tommy Greeley to be long dead.

“So, Victor,” said Manley, “now, you gonna leave me alone?”

“No.”

“I ought to wring your frigging neck.”

“Next time,” I said, “that would be preferable.”

“Yeah,” he said with an appreciative chuckle. “I bet.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. It don’t look like there is nothing I can do. But I got to find something, some way to get out of this, don’t I? Take the pressure off, take care of my kid in Jersey. You know, in a life turned to shit, he’s the only bright spot. I need to take care of him. Leastwise, I got the insurance, right?”

“Health insurance?”

“You are a smart-ass.” He reached out a hand and I shook it. Then he pressed himself to standing. “Take care of yourself, Vic. Be careful, right? Don’t expect you’ll be seeing my mug again.”

“You’re not going to…”

“I got to do something, don’t I?”

“You’re really not going to…”

“Desperate situation, desperate measures.” He laughed lightly, leaned out of the alley and scanned the street beyond.

I felt sorry for him just then, as sorry as you could possibly feel for a man who had just placed your balls in a vise and twisted the handle. But as he looked both ways and then hitched up his pants, shot his cuffs, slid out of the alley like a boy sneaking out of trouble, he didn’t seem so formidable, or so rotten. All his life he had tried to short the system, and though he had a bit of a run, nothing had worked out in the end like he had hoped, starting with a rough-up that had turned into a murder, and now here he was more than twenty years later with nothing left but his sad resignation and his failures. And the only answer he could fathom was a life insurance policy with his son as beneficiary.

I wondered if maybe, like with Joey, what had happened two decades ago at the waterfront had ruined Derek Manley too. That strange traumatic event was like a Charybdis whose dark swirl sucked in and destroyed everyone who ventured too close to it, starting with Tommy Greeley and moving outward. And I was getting closer, not close enough yet to glimpse the root of that swirl of destruction, but close enough to feel its pull. And it felt to me, just then, that it was Tommy Greeley himself who was pushing me into its nihilistic grasp.

Chapter 30

I LIMPED INTO the hospital to visit my father, leaning precipitously, my face as green as Seussian eggs. I put on a smile as I struggled through the lobby. What Manley had done to me was bad enough, I didn’t need some overeager first-year resident to code me right then and there. But he looked like he was having an attack. And I did, I had no doubt. Every step was a new little agony, and Manley’s gift was just the capper on the beating I had taken the night before. This case was getting less and less fun by the hour.

“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said the nurse at the desk in front of the fourth-floor elevators. “Before you go in to your father, Dr. Hellmann would like to talk to you.”

Well, that made me feel a whole lot better.

“We’re concerned about your father’s condition, Victor,” she said, her sincere face showing sincere concern, her eyes staring at the chart she held before her like a shield. “We’ve tried two different courses of antibiotics, but his infection is not reacting as we had hoped. Apparently he has a stubbornly virulent strain.”

“It’s my father,” I said. “I could have told you that from the start.”

“I like your father.”

I was taken aback. “You do?”

“He’s crusty, sure, but sort of soft inside.”

“You’re talking about my father and not a baguette?”

“I think he’s sort of sweet. What happened to your forehead?”

“A golfing accident,” I said as I smoothed my hair over the cut.

She tilted her head, examined me for a moment as if I were some obscure abstract sculpture that made not a whit of sense, and then shook her head. “If there’s no improvement in your father’s condition we’re going to try a new antibiotic, Primaxin, which has more universal coverage. The pulmonary specialist has told us this drug has gotten good results in similar cases, but we can’t be certain this will work either.”

“Is there anything I should be doing? Anyplace I should play the squeaking wheel to make sure something gets done?”

“We’re doing everything we can. Really. And” – she smiled – “I’ve made sure everyone knows that the patient’s son is a lawyer.”

“Does that help?”

“It’s like a plate of tofu.”

“It sticks in your throat and makes you gag?”

“No, Victor. It might not help, but it can’t hurt.”

“I heard that line differently.”

“I had a good time the other night.”

“So did I,” I lied. Oh, stop it, you would too.

“You haven’t called back.”

“Work has gotten pretty intense.”

“Looks like it, from the way you’re standing.”

“I had a run in with an angry debtor.”

“I thought the reason you didn’t call back was my cats. I got the sense maybe you weren’t a cat person.”

“I’m not, actually.” Think, think. “It turns out I’m allergic.”

“Really?”

No. “Yes.”

“That’s too bad. They’re so cute. They have pills for that, you know.”

“Isn’t it hard to get their little mouths open?”

“Is that a joke?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She stretched the word out, widened her eyes, made me feel every inch the fool. “If it doesn’t get better soon, Victor, you should know that we’re going to have to take more drastic action.”

“You’re talking about my father now, not the cats.”

“Right. That’s what I wanted to tell you. He’s having a harder time breathing, his respiratory rate is above where we’d like to see it, and there is only so much oxygen we’re able to put through the nasal canula. We might have to put him on a mask and, if things get any worse, a ventilator. Try to keep him from talking too much, or getting upset, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.” She wrinkled her nose at me and then walked off. I watched her as she leaned over the nurses’ station to drop off the chart, her back arched, her left leg held straight out, the toe of her white sneaker pointed. I supposed they taught ballet out there in Ohio, taught it with much sincerity.

My father was sleeping fitfully when I entered his room, his mouth open, his breaths short and wet, his hand looking like a dead bony carp as it lay atop his sheet with its pulse oxymeter clip in place. His oxygen level was eighty-six, his respiratory rate was twenty-three, his heart rate was still over a hundred. All bad signs. I sat next to his bed, checked my watch, decided not to awaken him. Dr. Mayonnaise had told me to keep him from talking too much or getting upset and both had been occurring with regularity during my visits as he continued to tell to me, with a peculiar urgency, the story of his long-lost love. Maybe tonight he’d sleep through the hour of my stay, give us both a rest.

No such luck.

He awoke slowly and then started when he saw me, as if I were some emissary from a darker world come to claim him.