'At least, not unless you change your mind,' Ginelli said.
'I won't.'
'You might.'
'What's in the bag?'
'Steaks,' Ginelli said, and took one out. It was a porterhouse wrapped in clear plastic and marked with a Sampson's label. 'Looks good, huh, I got four of 'em.'
'What are they for?'
'Let's keep things in order,' Ginelli said. 'I left here, I walked downtown. What a f**king horror show! You can't even walk on the sidewalk. Everyone's wearing Ferrari sunglasses and shirts with alligators on their tits. It looks like everyone in this town has had their teeth capped and most of 'em have had nose-jobs too.'
'I know.'
'Listen to this, William. I see this girl and guy walking along, right? And the guy has got his hand in the back pocket of her shorts. I mean, they are right out in public and he's got his hand in her back pocket, feeling her ass. Man, if that was my daughter she wouldn't sit down on what her boyfriend was feeling for about a week and a half.
'So I know I can't get my mind in a serene state there, and I gave it up. I found a telephone booth, made a few calls. Oh, I almost forgot. The phone was in front of a drugstore, so I went in and got you these.' He took a bottle of pills from his pocket and tossed it to Billy, who caught it with his good hand. They were potassium capsules.
'Thank you, Richard,' he said, his voice a little uneven.
'Don't mention it, just take one. You don't need a f**king heart attack on top of everything else.'
Billy took one with a swallow of beer. His head was starting to buzz gently now.
'So I got some people sniffing around after a couple of things and then I went down by the harbor,' Ginelli resumed. 'I looked at. the boats for a while. William, there must be twenty ... thirty ... maybe forty million dollars' worth of boats down there! Sloops, yawls, f**king frigates, for all I could tell. I don't know diddlyfuck about boats, but I love to look at them. They . . .'
He broke off and looked thoughtfully at Billy.
'You think some of those guys in the alligator shirts and the Ferrari sunglasses are running dope in those pu**ywagons?'
'Well, I read in the Times last winter that a lobsterman on one of the islands around here found about twenty bales of stuff floating around under the town dock, and it turned out to be some pretty good marijuana.'
'Yeah. Yeah, that's about what I thought. This whole place has that smell to it. Fucking amateurs. They ought to just sail their pretty boats and leave the work to people who understand it, you know? I mean, sometimes they get in the way and then measures have to be taken and some guy finds a few bodies floating around under a dock instead of a few bales of weed. It's too bad.'
Billy took another large swallow of beer and coughed on it.
'But that is neither here nor there. I took a walk, looked at all those boats, and got my mind serene. And then I figured out what to do ... or at least, the start of it and the shape of how it should go afterward. I don't have all the details worked out yet, but that'll come.
'I walked back to the main drag and made a few more calls - follow-up calls. There is no warrant out for your arrest, William, but your wife and this nose-jockey doctor of yours sure did sign some papers on you. I wrote it down.' He took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. "'Committal in absentia." That sound right?'
Billy Halleck's mouth dropped open and a wounded sound fell out of it. For a moment he was utterly stunned and then the fury which had become his intermittent companion swept through him again. He had thought it might happen, yes, had thought Houston would suggest it, and even thought Heidi might agree to it. But thinking about something and hearing it had actually happened - that your own wife had gone before a judge, had testified that you had gone loony, and had been granted a res gestae order of committal which she had then signed - that was very different.
'That cowardly bitch,' he muttered thickly, and then the world was blotted out by red agony. He had closed his hands into fists without thinking. He groaned and looked down at the bandage on his left hand. Flowers of red were blooming there.
I can't believe you just thought that about Heidi, a voice in his mind spoke up.
It's just because my mind is not serene, he answered the voice, and then the world grayed out for a while.
It wasn't quite a faint, and he came out of it quickly. Ginelli changed the bandage on his hand and repacked the wound, doing a job that was clumsy but fairly adequate. While he did it, he talked.
'My man says it don't mean a thing unless you go back to Connecticut, William.'