"Burke ... " She must have been as uncomfortably aware of the lagging conversation as he, because they began speaking at the same time. He indicated for her to go ahead."No, you," she said.
They were saved further awkwardness by the boys' arrival. Having seen Burke's car parked out front, they raced into the house, filling it with welcome racket and the unique smell of sweaty little boys. They dropped their jackets and backpacks and crowded Burke, jostling each other to get near him.
After a quick snack, he took them into the backyard. This was their routine. Following his visit with Nancy, he did something with David and Peter alone. The boys got to choose the activity. Today they decided on batting practice.
"Like this, Burke?" the younger, Peter, asked.
His stance was atrocious, but Burke replied, "Just like that.
You're getting the hang of it, slugger. Choke up on your bat just a little. Now let's see what you can do."
He pitched a ball that hit the bat, not the other way around.
Peter whooped and ran their makeshift bases. At home plate, Burke gave him a high five and a swat on the butt.
"We're going out for Little League. Maybe you could come to one of our games, Burke," David ventured hopefully.
"Just one? I planned on getting a season ticket." The hair he teasingly ruffled was the same coppery red their father's had been.
And because the smiles they beamed up at him were replicas of Kev's, a lump formed in his throat. He might have made a fool of himself if Nancy hadn't come to the back door just then and called the boys in to wash up.
"Dinner in fifteen minutes," she told them.
"See ya, Burke." "See ya, Burke," Peter said, parrotting his older brother as they traipsed toward the rear of the house.
"You're great with them," Nancy observed.
"It's easy to be great with somebody else's kids. I understand it's tougher with your own."
"Why didn't you and Barbara have children?"
"I don't know. Just never got around to it. There always seemed to be a good reason to postpone them. First, a shortage of money."
"And then?"
"A shortage of money." He meant it as a joke, but it fell flat.
"I don't know what I would have done without my sons. Kevin is still alive in them."
Solemnly, he nodded with understanding. Then, realizing that his right hand was flexing, he stilled it and said quickly, "I'd better shove off.
I wouldn't want to make the Future of Baseball late for open house."
"You're welcome to stay for supper."
It was an obligatory invitation. She always offered, and he always declined."No thanks. Barbara will be looking for me." "Tell her I said hi."
"Will do."
"Burke." She glanced down the hallway toward the bathroom, where the boys could be heard arguing. Then, abruptly bringing her focus back to him, she said, "I don't want you to come back."
He didn't think he'd heard her right."What?" Even after she repeated it, he was dumbfounded.
She drew a deep breath and pulled herself up straighter. Obviously she had given whatever she was about to say a great deal of thought. As much as she had dreaded saying it, she had made up her mind to do so now and was bracing herself for it.
"I can't be around you, can't even look at you, without thinking of Kev. Every time I see you, it's like going through the whole ordeal again. Each time you call or visit, I cry for days afterward. I get angry, feel sorry for myself. It's a setback that I barely recover from before I hear from you and have to go through it again."
She rolled her lips inward and paused to regroup emotionally."I'm trying to build a life without Kev. I tell myself that he's lost to me.
Forever. And that I can live with knowing that. Just when I'm almost convinced, you show up and ..." Tears overflowed her eyes. She dug into her pocket for a tissue."See what I mean?"
"Yeah, I see what you mean." He didn't even try to disguise the bitterness in his voice."It hurts you to serve coffee to the man who made you a widow."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." He brushed past her and went through the door.
"Burke, please understand," she called after him."Please."
He stopped on the walk and turned back. But when he saw her tortured expression, his anger evaporated. How could he be mad? She hadn't made this decision to hurt him. This wasn't about him, it was about her.
It was for her self-preservation that she'd asked him not to return.
"Hell of it is, Nancy, I do understand. In your situation, I'd feel exactly the same way."
"You know what you've meant to me and to the boys. We know what you meant to Kev. But I "
He held up both hands."Don't lay a guilt trip on yourself over this.
Okay? You're right. It'll be best this way."
She sniffed and blotted her nose with the tissue."Thanks for understanding, Burke."
"Tell the boys ..." He tried to think of something she could tell them to explain why he, like their father, was abruptly disappearing from their lives.
A sob shuddered up through her chest."I'll handle it. They're amazingly resilient." She gave him a watery smile."After all you've done for us, I hate the thought of hurting you. If it makes you feel any better, this is very difficult for me. I feel like I'm severing my own right arm in order to save my life. You've been a good friend."
"I still am. Always." Softly she said, "I can't move away from it until I let it go, Burke."
"I understand."
"The same should go for you. When are you going to let it go?" Several seconds ticked by. Then he said, "If you ever need anything, you know where to find me."
barbara's car was in the driveway when he reached home. She would be pleased that, for once, he was home on time, even early. Guiltily, he had hoped that the volleyball tournament or some other activity would have kept her at school for a while. He needed some down time, some solitude.
The day had begun with Pat's double-barreled bad news. Then Nancy Stuart told him, essentially, to get lost and stay that way. Today, even a mild argument with Barbara would be too much to handle. A minor disagreement, one cross word, might upset some delicate balance within him. He feared that on his present emotional yardstick, there would be only a hair's breadth between irritation and outrage.
He entered through the back door, calling her name. She wasn't in the kitchen or in the forward rooms of the house, so he went upstairs.
When he reached the landing, he heard the TV set in the bedroom. Water was running in the shower.
But when he went into the bedroom, he saw that he was only half correct The shower was running. But the voices he'd heard weren't coming from the television set.
Crossing the bedroom, he went through the connecting door into the bathroom. It was foggy with steam. Burke yanked open the glass door of the shower.
Barbara was against the tile wall, eyes closed, mouth open, legs wrapped around the furiously pumping hips of the short, stocky boys' football coach from the middle school.
With a surge of feral fury, Burke grabbed the guy with both hands and jerked him from the shower stall. The coach lost his footing on the slippery, soapy tile and would have fallen had Burke not been holding him by the neck.
Barbara uttered a sharp scream, then clamped her hands over her mouth as she watched her husband slam her lover against the bathroom wall several times before starting to pummel him with his fists. Working like pistons, they hammered into the man's flesh, making slapping sounds against his wet skin.
He was younger than Burke by fifteen years, well muscled and perfectly conditioned, but Burke had the element of surprise on his side.
Even so, he didn't fight with any particular stratagem. He was maddened by a need to cause pain, to spread some of the suffering around, to make this rutting son of a bitch hurt as much as he was hurting. There was satisfaction in the crunch of cartilage and the splitting of skin and the giving of soft tissue against his ramming fists.
He had reduced the guy to a quivering, blubbering, begging mass before delivering the coup de grace. He kneed him in the balls with the impetus of a locomotive, which caused the coach to scream in agony and slide down the wall to the floor, where he lay cradling his injured manhood between his hands and weeping. His battered face streamed mucus and blood and tears.
Breathing hard, Burke bent over the sink. After washing his hands and sluicing his face with cold water, he came upright and saw Barbara's reflection in the foggy mirror over the basin. She had put on a robe, exhibiting some semblance of shame, but she hadn't shown any concern for her wounded lover, which surprised Burke. Didn't she care for him at all? Maybe not. Maybe she'd taken a lover just to get his attention. And maybe he was flattering himself.
"Feel better now?" she asked, heavy on the sarcasm.
"No," Burke replied honestly as he dried his face with a hand towel.
"Not much."
"Are you going to work me over, too?"
He turned away from the sink and looked at her, wondering when she had turned so snide and unapproachable. Had she always been that way?
Or had years of dissatisfaction and unhappiness made her into the bitter woman confronting him now? Either way, he hardly recognized her as the bride he'd started a life with. He didn't know this woman at all, and he saw nothing there that he cared to know.
"I'm not even going to honor that question with an answer." "You've abused me, Burke. Just not with your fists."
"Whatever." He stepped around her and went into the bedroom, where he reached beneath the bed for his suitcase, into which he began emptying his bureau drawers.
"What are you doing?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"Don't think for one minute that you can file for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Our problems began long before " "Before you started wall-banging other men in our shower?"
"Yes!" she spat."And he isn't the first."
"I'm not interested." After cramming a few items from the closet into the suitcase, he latched it.
"Where are you going?"
"I haven't the faintest."
"But I know where I can find you, don't I?"
"Right," he replied, letting it go at that. He'd be damned before defending his work ethic to his cheating wife."As for filing," be my guest, Barbara. I won't contest any charges you lay on me. Say I'm a sorry provider, a brute, say I'm queer. I couldn't care less."
He glanced around to see if there was anything he'd overlooked, and it saddened him to realize how easily and quickly he had packed. They hadn't lived together in these rooms, they had merely resided. He was walking away with nothing personal. He had packed only the bare essentials that could have belonged to anyone. He was leaving behind nothing of value to him. Not even Barbara.
He wasn't even certain the building would still be there. But he found it squatting between similar buildings, all stubbornly withstanding the encroachment of development around them.
The escalating tourist trade was rapidly destroying the uniqueness of New Orleans, which was the attraction that caused tourists to flock to the city in the first place. It was a paradox that defied logic.
Burke would have hated to find this building destroyed, because, for all its signs of aging, it had character. Like a dowager who clung to fashions of decades past, it wore its age with dignity and an admirable air of defiance. A section of the ironwork was missing off the second-story balcony. The front brick walkway was buckled. Weeds sprouted from cracks in the mortar, but there was an element of pride in the pot of pansies on each side of the gate, which squeaked when Burke pushed it open.
The first door on his left was designated as belonging to the building manager. Burke rang the bell. The man who answered wasn't the landlord he remembered from years before, but this one and the one in his memory were virtually interchangeable. The apartment behind the stooped, elderly gentleman was a stifling ninety degrees and smelled of a cat box. In fact, he was holding a large tabby in one arm as he peered curiously at Burke through the rheumy eyes of a lifetime alcoholic.
"Do you have a vacancy?"
The only thing required for leasing an apartment was a hundred dollar bill to cover the first week's rent."That includes a change of towels on the third day," he was told by the landlord who shuffled up the stairs in his slippers to show Burke the corner apartment on the second floor.
Basically it was one room. A shabby curtain was a nod toward privacy for the commode and tub. The bed was a double that dipped in the middle.
The kitchen amounted to a sink, a narrow shelf, a refrigerator not much larger than a mailbox, and a two-burner hot plate that the landlord believed was in working order.
"I won't be doing much cooking," Burke assured him as he accepted the key.
A black-and-white TV set chained to the wall was about the only amenity that had been added since he had rented here nearly twenty years ago after leaving his hometown of Shreveport to accept a job with the N.O.P.D.
Before he could find more suitable lodging, he had leased a temporary room in this building and wound up staying eighteen months.
His recollections of it were hazy. He hadn't spent much time in the apartment, because he was at the station nearly every waking hour, learning from the veterans, volunteering for overtime, and catching up on the paper-shuffling that was the scourge of policemen around the world. He'd been a young crusader then, committed to ridding the world of crime and criminals.
Tonight a less idealistic Burke Basile drew a hot bath in the antique claw-footed tub and climbed into it with an uncapped bottle of Jack Daniel's black. He drank straight from the bottle, watching dispassionately as a cockroach the size of his thumb scuttled across the water-stained wallpaper.
When a guy catches his wife in flagrante delicto with another man, the first order of business after beating the shit out of the other man and buying a bottle of whiskey, which he intends to drink from until it's empty is to reassure himself that he can still get it up.
So, with his free hand, he brought himself erect. Closing his eyes, he tried to replace the image of Barbara fucking the football coach with a fantasy that would sustain his erection long enough for him to enjoy it and bring him to an ego-restoring climax.
In an instant, there she was in his mind's eye: the whore in Duvall's gazebo.
He rubbed every bad thought from his mind and focused on the woman in the snug-fitting black dress, her hair as dark and glossy as a raven's wing, her breasts kissed by moonlight.
Her face was indistinct. In his mind, he brought it closer. She gazed back at him with sultry eyes. She spoke his name. She stroked him with a soft hand. An even softer mouth caressed him. Her tongue He came, cursing blasphemously through bared teeth.
It left him feeling weak and dizzy and slightly disoriented, but that could be as much from the hot water and whiskey as the sexual release.
It was comforting to know that he was still a functioning male. But on an emotional level he felt only marginally better.
Well on his way to being good and drunk, he climbed out of the tub and, wrapping one of two thin towels around his middle, sat down on the edge of the bed to reflect on his future.
He supposed he should be contacting a divorce lawyer, freezing bank accounts, canceling credit cards, all the things people do for spite and self-protection when their marriage becomes a statistic.
But he lacked the wherewithal to enter that kind of legal fray.
Let Barbara have it all, whatever the hell she wanted from the spoils of their life together. He'd salvaged all he needed, a few changes of clothes, his badge, his nine-millimeter.
He reached across his pile of discarded clothes on the bed and picked up the pistol, weighing it in his hand. It was from this gun that he'd fired the bullet that had killed Kevin Stuart.
His personal life was for shit. So was his career. He no longer nursed illusions about valor and duty. Only fools believed in that crap.
Those standards were outdated and didn't apply to contemporary society.
When he enrolled in the police academy, he had fancied himself a knight, but the Round Table was history before he even began.
Burke Basile was a pariah, an embarrassment to the Narcotics Division for shooting one of his own men, then for demanding justice when no one else seemed to give a damn.
Wayne Bardo was free to kill again, and he had.
Duvall was ensconced in his ivory tower with his servants, and his rich friends, and their expensive whores.
Meanwhile Burke Basile's expressions of sympathy were being rebuffed and his wife was screwing younger men in his own house.
Again he hefted the pistol in his palm. He wouldn't be the first cop, dejected over the futility of his work, to eat a bullet. How long before he'd be missed? Who would miss him? Pat? Mac? Possibly.
Or, secretly, maybe they'd be glad he had solved their problem for them.
When he began to stink up this horrible little room, when the land lord's cat began scratching at the door, they'd find him. Who would be surprised that he'd taken his own life? He had destroyed his marriage, they'd say. Gossip would get around that he had caught his old lady, the one with the great body, doing the wild thing with another man in Basile's own shower. Poor schmuck. They would shake their heads and lament the fact that he had never fully recovered from killing Stuart. That's when all his troubles had started.
While Stuart's widow struggled to keep food on the table for her children, unscrupulous lawyers and criminals threw lavish parties to celebrate their lawless successes. Ol' Burke Basile couldn't take that.
He couldn't handle the guilt anymore.
So, bang. Simple as that. It occurred to him that he might be suffering a bad case of selfpity, but why the hell not? Wasn't he entitled to a little self-analysis and regret? He'd been deeply wounded by Nancy Stuart's decision, although he admitted it was the right one for her. She was holding onto her life with both hands.
Eventually the pain of Kev's death would abate, she would meet someone else and remarry. She didn't blame him for the accident, but his visits were bound to stoke her most painful memories.
He wanted to think of Barbara as a cheating bitch who'd been unwilling even to try to understand the hell he'd gone through over his partner's death. But that wasn't entirely fair. She certainly wasn't without flaws, but he hadn't exactly been an ideal husband either, even before the fatal shooting incident and certainly not since.
The marriage should have ended long ago, putting both of them out of their misery.
He'd made lousy choices all around. Bad choice of wife. Bad choice of career. What the hell had all the overtime hours and all the hard work been about? He had accomplished nothing. Nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. He had killed Kev Stuart.
Damn, he missed that mick! He still missed Kev's quiet logic, and his stupid jokes, and his unshakable sense of right and wrong. He even missed his bursts of temper. Kev wouldn't have minded dying in the line of duty. Actually, that was probably how he would have preferred to go. What he wouldn't be able to tolerate was that his death had gone unavenged. The criminals responsible for it had gone unpunished by the system of law that Kev had dedicated himself to uphold. Kevin Stuart would have had a hard time accepting that.
And that was the thought that sobered Burke Basile like a cold shower.
He set the bottle of Jack Daniel's on the rickety nightstand, and, alongside it, his pistol. Removing the towel from around his waist, he stretched out on the lumpy bed and stacked his hands beneath his head.