Red gave her an unembarrassed once over. He straightened up. “Now this,” he took her hand in his, “this is more like it.” He led Claire to the seat overlooking the bay and stepped back to admire her one more time. The Mayor took to Red right away. The man smelled of crab meat and beer, one respectable combination. He snuggled right in at Red’s old bare feet. This was the sort of chap who’d pass you half his dinner under the table. The man had class.
Claire was one minute setting up fashion shots along the railing with those twinkling lights across the water, one minute snatching glances at Johnny, admiring the friendship that shone from the two men. Her past was sometimes like a curse. She couldn’t do anything without all the art directors in her history nodding approval or shaking their bygone heads in veto. You really had to watch how you whiled away your time, didn’t you, because it was always going to be there influencing you. Johnny and Red were catching up on old times. She stared into the black water. How rotten it was that it had to have been a murder to bring him into her life. For the first time, she imagined the murder as it must have happened, the enormity of it, that moment of absolute clarity when that little boy Miguel must have known it was too late, it had gone too far, from bewilderment to fear to pain to certainty. She shuddered. Johnny didn’t even look at her. He took off his jacket and laid it on her lap without breaking his conversation with Red. Claire turned her face away so that he wouldn’t see her eyes fill up. She never cried and she was shocked at herself. Outside of the tears of her nightmare she’d be stuck to remember the last time. Angrily, she swallowed the tears back inside of her eyes, bending over and letting the ones that were already there drop to the floor while she fished for her bag. She didn’t know why she felt she should be ashamed. It just caught her off guard that such a small gesture of concern from Johnny could bring that on. She liked that he watched her without appearing to, though. Physically, she liked everything about him. Right down to that smug fat lower lip. Why did he have to be a cop? Why, in fact, was he a cop? Because she didn’t want him to be. The pretty flowers on the table turned to plastic just as they always had been. Life, Swamiji had told her time and time again, is all the way you look at it. What she had to do was simply grab hold of the table and not let her confusion show. What had happened yesterday, she realized, had not helped her state of mind.
She’d been down in the cellar doing laundry. Almost sure she heard the phone, she stuffed the dress she’d been wearing in with the others about the same color and ran upstairs in her underwear. The phone hadn’t been ringing, or at least it had quit ringing by the time she’d got there. She wandered listlessly up to the second floor and into the bathroom. Whenever she saw a shut-tight shower curtain she would poke her head in just to see if Janet Leigh was in there. She wasn’t. Wondering what on earth to put on, she walked outside and hesitated outside Carmela’s bedroom. In all that topsy-turviness Carmela wouldn’t miss one pair of pants. She went in and looked around. What a mess. Dust balls as big as your fist tumble-weeded in the draft from the hallway fan. Rumpled clothes were all over the place. Claire held up a potential candidate. No, she laid it gingerly back in place. That was a blouse. There you go. She saw a pair of almost ironed white jeans and picked them up. The front door slammed. Uh-oh, she stood still guiltily. Maybe one of them had forgotten something and would be leaving again right away. There was a shuffling noise on the stairway. She jumped silently into the closet, closed the door, and held her breath. How humiliating to be caught sneaking Carmela’s precious clothes! Vicious sibling battles reared their long-forgotten heads. She went rigid with fear.
And it was Carmela all right. There was no mistaking that cackle. But who was she with? Another muffled laugh and she recognized Freddy. Freddy? What was he doing up here?
“I’m telling you she went out,” Freddy was saying. “I let it ring thirty times. Anyway, I’m sick to death of her holier-than-thou attitude.”
Claire heard something rip and Carmela cry, “No!” She was just about to throw open the closet door and come to Carmela’s rescue when the pair dropped to the floor. She could see them through the downward-tilted slats in the door. Freddy thrashed away. Carmela was underneath him. She was down on all fours, drooling convivially onto a kit of electric rollers.
“What do you got that mug on for?” Johnny’s voice brought her back to the present. “Like you’re off in la-la land.”
“Close enough,” she said. Red was watching her, too. He held a Spalding ball which he kept shooting from one hand to the other. She’d seen eyes like that once before. On a hundred-and-six-year-old parrot. The waiter came over and whispered something in his ear. He took off with an agility that surprised her. The moment he was gone Johnny picked up his chair and turned it facing her. He sort of loomed over her.
“So what’s the story with this Stefanovitch guy?”
“Huh?”
“You know who I mean. The guy with the mansion you’ve been hanging out with.”
“I haven’t exactly been hanging out with him. We jogged once for five minutes.”
“And went to his jazzy party, right?”