“So Tommy wasn’t your dealer?”

“No. Really now, Victor. How did you ever get that idea?”

“Something in the way your husband looked at you. Like he wanted to protect you from the past.”

“Ah, yes. See, I was right about you. My husband, Victor, is more than a mere spectator to my life. He is a collaborator. When we first met we were like two shy flowers, waiting for the sun to open our blooms. We found our sun in what we created together. We would spend nights writing in our journals, not saying a word and yet so totally connected. He would read what he had written and I would read what I had written and it would be the same. Not the words, Victor, but the emotion, the intensity, the yearning. We were everything, one to the other. We still are, but it is different now. We are no longer so connected. He finds his art in the law, his little theories that so excite the men in suits, and that allows me the freedom to search for my own.”

“Was Tommy part of that search?”

“Tommy Greeley was a worm. Pure and simple. Now worms have their uses, don’t they? They aerate the soil. They help us catch fish.” She thought for a moment, she bit the corner of her lip. “But still they are worms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, Victor. What is there to understand? I’ve heard you described as a worm too. And yet I find there’s something about you. A spark I’d like to explore.”

I tapped my stomach with the side of my fist. “Just a touch of gas.”

Her light line of laughter. “Maybe that is it.”

“So who is it that described me as a worm? Your husband?”

“That would be tattling. But you can tell me something. Who is it who is so interested in our worm Tommy Greeley?”

“Me.”

“Yes, you, for whatever reasons. Probably because you are paid. That is what I’ve heard about you, Victor. Money, money, money. But if that were true there would be Rockefeller on your wall and not Grant. But someone else cares too, yes?” Her eyes brightened as if she was eager to gain a salacious piece of gossip. “Who is so interested in our friend Tommy? Who?”

I took a sip of my drink.

“You refuse to tell me?” she said.

“I am nothing if not circumspect.”

“Of course you are, you’re Jewish.”

“That’s actually almost funny.”

“Tell me about the girl. Kimberly, was it?”

“That’s right. Kimberly Blue.”

“Such a pretty girl. She works for you?”

“No.”

“She sleeps with you?”

“Stop.”

“Oh, I can see the answer in your eyes. Pity for you. So, then, she works for or sleeps with the man who is interested in Tommy, yes? Victor?”

“Did your husband send you to ask me all these questions?”

“My husband doesn’t send me.”

“Too bad.”

“Don’t be clever, Victor. Clever is like a sports car with a leaking gasket. It only takes you so far and then, well. But you” – she cupped her hand and placed it on my cheek and my jaw tingled – “you could go so far, if only you wanted. I’d like you to do me a favor, Victor. Do you think you could?”

“It depends on what it is.”

“It always does. This is small. I am looking for some notebooks. Four to be exact. They have been missing for a long time and it is as if, without them, I am missing a limb. I am in the midst of a great endeavor, the endeavor of my life, really, and to complete my task I need those notebooks.”

“Why would I be in a position to find them?”

“I sense things, it is my gift, and I sense you will. In your travels. And I’d like you to return them to me. Will you? Please?”

“Sure, if I find them.”

“And only to me.”

“Ahh, you mean not leave them for you at your husband’s office.”

“Who could ever imagine you were such a quick study? Good, that is settled. Now, Victor, it is your turn.”

“My turn?”

“We had a deal. I’d tell if you tell. So tell me, Victor, what is it that you really want from life?”

I thought about it for a moment. It was a hard question, harder still when you weren’t sure why it was being asked. I drained the rest of my drink and snapped my head at the burn of it and tried to come up with an answer and failed and realized that was what I wanted after all.

“Answers,” I said after a long hesitation.

She leaned toward me. “To what questions?”

“It varies from day to day. Some days I want to know the purpose of existence. Some days I want to know why it seems everyone else is happier than am I. Some days I wonder why God doesn’t seem to go very far out of his way to help those who need it. And some days, most days, I simply want to know why my laundry place keeps using starch on my boxer shorts.

“Victor.”

“Every week I say, ‘No starch, no starch,’ and the lady, she nods yes, yes like she understands, but she doesn’t understand. Why doesn’t she understand? It’s a mystery all right.”

“So what’s today’s great philosophical question, Victor? What is the answer you are looking for today?”

“Today’s question? Today I want to know what the hell happened to Tommy Greeley and why.”

She turned her bright green eyes away from me and bowed her head. There was a puddle of condensation on the bar. She moved her finger across it, her bright red nail leaving a strange trail, up, down, swooping around like a pen on a page. Her expression took on the same serious cast it had taken when she was writing at my desk. I moved my gaze away from her face toward those strange squiggles she was leaving in the damp. I tried to follow the movements of her finger, tried to decipher the strange glyphs she was forming, as if they had great meaning, as if maybe all the answers I had said I was searching for could be found right there.

And as we both stared down at the bar the edges of our foreheads touched.

“I get the feeling, Victor,” said Alura Straczynski, her voice soft, her breath warm, “that you are going to be fatal.”

Chapter 37

I WAS DRUNK and I was horny and I thought it more than passing strange, considering what a bad combination those two are, how often they pop up together. Pop up, get it? I did, and I thought it hilarious. I repeated it out loud as I staggered toward my apartment, “Pop up. Pop up,” accompanied by my demented laughter. They say your judgment is the first to go but I’d say it is your sense of humor.

I was laughing at my little pun but all the while, through my drunken fog, I was trying to figure out what I had just been through with Alura Straczynski. It appeared for some reason she wanted to learn of Eddie Dean’s identity. And it appeared she wanted to tell me, she was desperate to tell me, of her peculiar artistic goal of turning her life into a shimmering dream. And it appeared she thought I had something of hers, her notebooks. And finally it appeared, yes it did, that most of all what she wanted was to slip into my sheets.

I am not one who thinks that deep down everyone wants to screw my ears off. You know the type who do, those square-jawed boys who see in every glance, every smile, every nonhostile gesture an invitation. I am not that guy, I’m neither handsome enough nor smooth enough to be that guy, and my chest isn’t hairy enough to be a proper setting for the obligatory gold medallion. Yet, even as she told me of those marvelous early moments with her husband, I had the strange sense that Alura Straczynski was angling to create her own marvelous moments with me. It was in the way she held her head, the way she smiled at me, the way she put her hand on my cheek. And once, when she was whispering in my ear, some funny secret about a man at the other end of the bar, something seemed to catch on my lobe. Was it her teeth? Wowza. Mrs. Justice Jackson Straczynski. When I realized what was going on I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Two, three more drinks, tops, just to be polite, and then I was out of there, yes I was. Out of there.