Down Here (12 page)

“I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about
asking.
That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

“She didn’t ask me—”

“She didn’t
ask
you anything, sweetheart. She
told
you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

“I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t
see
what she was talking about, right?”

“Not with her sitting—”

“Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something
bothers
a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised
more
young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re supposed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There
is
no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t
seen
it. And you can’t say you
like
big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

“So what you said about habit . . . ?”

“Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

“She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

“Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than
not
that, I mean.”

“Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“That
she
can’t tell, either.”

“Huh?”

“Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl
was
interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you,
being
you, don’t do anything.

“Now
she’s
confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

“I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

“‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

“What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

“And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

^“
Y
ou got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

“Me?”

“Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

“Read it to me.”

“It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

“Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

“Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our conversation, and I would like to have another. And to hear more about your project. Call me.’”

“Was it signed?”

“Yes. Just the letter ‘L.’”

“Okay, can we just—?”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you what else, remember? Okay, first of all, after the word ‘torta,’ there’s the Internet symbol for a smile.”

“Like one of those happy-face things?”

“No. It’s just keystrokes, like from a regular typewriter. You take a—”

“Never mind, kid. Sorry to have interrupted you. What else?”

“After she says ‘for sure,’ there’s an exclamation point. And where she says she enjoyed your . . . conversation, there are three periods between the two words, like a pause.”

“Like you just did?”

“Egg-
zact
-lee!” he said. Dealing with my slow learning curve, the kid had learned to take his happiness where he found it . . . just like his mother. “The only other thing is, the letter ‘L’ that she signed it with? That was in lowercase, with no period after it.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Well, it could . . .” he said, doubtfully. “But there’s no way to tell. Some people use that lowercase ‘l’ to stand for ‘love,’ some people use a lowercase initial to be modest, or even to be . . . submissive, I think. But with e-mail, you can never really tell, because people write it and send it off so fast, they never check what they type. So sometimes you think something means something, and all it means it that whoever wrote the e-mail was sloppy.”

“Not this one,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Whatever she is, she’s not sloppy.”

“Oh. Well, you want to answer it?”

“Couldn’t I just call her? That way, she’d know I got her message.”

“You could, sure. But the message just came in, and it’s almost midnight.”

“I see what you mean. Anyway, I’m not supposed to have her home phone number—it’s not listed.”

“The e-mail came from her home account,” Terry said. “So we have that now, too.”

“What good does that do us?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. But the Dragon Lady says she might be able to tell us some things from the headers and the IP number—”

“Terry . . .”

“Sorry! I just got . . . Anyway, sure, you can answer her. But if you do it now, she’ll know you’re awake, and she might want to IM. You can’t do that from your computer—the one we left there—not without me there. She’d know pretty quick you weren’t used to doing it.”

“Doing it? I don’t even know what it
is.
”

“See?”

“Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, T. Would she have any way of knowing when her mail was received?”

“Not unless you have the same . . . Ah, never mind, the short answer is no.”

“Okay, let me think for a second. I have to go meet someone tomorrow night, so it can’t be then. For her, I mean. How about this? We send her a message around three in the morning . . . like I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the computer and found her e-mail.”

“That’s easy. All I have to do is queue it to . . . Never mind,” the kid said, cutting himself off again. His learning curve was a lot flatter than mine.

“All right, how about this, then: ‘Me, too. All counts, except the gym. I’m meeting a source tonight, but I’ll call you at work, okay?’”

“That’s cool,” Terry said. “You’ve got the e-mail rhythm down just right.”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“How do you want to sign it?”

“Uh, how about ‘J.P.’?”

“Caps, with periods—like initials?”

“Perfect. Thanks, T.”

“Hey, this is
fun.
And it’ll give Clarence another excuse to talk to the Dragon Lady, too.”

I
t was just going on eleven the next morning when I dialed her number.

“Hi!” she said, when they put me through. “Boy, you keep late hours.”

“More like erratic ones,” I told her, setting the stage.

“I was planning to call you if I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “I realized, as soon as I sent the e-mail, that you might not check it for days. Some people don’t.”

“That’s me,” I admitted. “Only it’s weeks, not days. I don’t get a lot of e-mail at that address; mostly, it just comes to work.”

“I’m surprised, with that sexy picture of you on the site,” she said, teasing.

“Don’t remind me,” I groaned. “That was the publisher’s idea. They said there has to be a photo on the book jacket, anyway, so it would be better if . . .”

“I think it’s cute,” she said.

“You and my mother,” I said. “That’s about it.”

“Mothers are like that, aren’t they?”

“I guess they all are,” I said, thinking that was the biggest lie that had ever come out of my lifelong liar’s mouth.

“‘Meeting a source.’ That sounds so mysterious. But I guess, when you think about it, that’s what I am, too, right? A source.”

“I hope not.”

“What do you mean?” she said, softly.

“It’s . . . kind of complicated,” I said. “I’d rather tell you in person.”

“All right. Not tonight, I know. Tomorrow?”

“Just name the—”

“Can you pick me up after work? I know the traffic is hellish at that hour, but it would be a real treat not to have to ride that miserable subway. Especially this time of the year.
Double
-especially on a Friday night.”

“No problem. Is there a place to park around there?”

“You won’t need one. Just be out front—you have the address, yes?—at seven.”

“Oh. Sure. I thought you meant we’d eat someplace close to where you worked, and then I’d drive you home.”

“Would you prefer that?”

“To what?”

“To what I have in mind.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Journalist’s instincts,” I told her.

S
ands hadn’t mentioned a specific time to Pepper, and Max wanted to get there early enough to plot out the first race, anyway. I scored a prime parking spot around back, right near the entrance closest to the grandstands.

We bought a program and found seats about midway up and over to the left side, facing forward. The grandstand was more than three-quarters empty. Over an hour to post time—all the tote board showed was the morning line.

I started working on the program, Max watching avidly. I’d taught him to handicap years ago, and he understood all the arcane symbols I used to make notes. But what he was really checking was to see if my scientific method squared with his mystical one. Between gin rummy and casino over the past twenty years, Max was into me for a good quarter-mil. He wasn’t any better at picking horses, but his faith was too pure for him to be deterred by mere experience.

There was nothing I liked in the first. A sorry collection of pacers going for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse. You could claim any of them for four grand, and the only sure thing was that there wouldn’t be any takers.

But there was one that drew my eye in the second—a shipper from the Midwest that looked good on paper. I noticed she was a front-runner, with a nice clean stride. No breaks on her program, unusual for a trotter. She always seemed to tie up a bit in the last quarter and get shuffled back, unless the pace was leisurely enough for her to hold on at the end. She was coming out of Sportsman’s Park—a five-eighths-mile track, favoring closers—but Yonkers is a quarter-mile, with a very short run to home.

The mare I liked was in a twenty-K claimer. A couple of the other horses had pretty decent last outs, so I expected her to go off at a nice price. I wasn’t crazy about the post she’d drawn, but, with her early speed, I thought she could grab the rail from the five-hole before the first turn.

I put a big question mark at the top of the first race, then drew a box around the one I liked in the second.

Max made a circling gesture.

I nodded agreement. We’d wheel the Daily Double, putting the five horse in the second race against all the entries in the first. If my horse won the second, we’d have the Double. But even then, it didn’t mean we’d show a profit. The Daily Double wheel was eight bets. At a deuce per, we’d have to win
and
get a payoff of more than sixteen bucks to come out ahead.

You might think, what kind of Double
wouldn’t
pay off more than that? But if the crowd liked one of the horses in the first race well enough to send him off real cheap, the chalk-players might be spinning
their
wheels, too. So we could win and still end up short.

Max knew all this. He held up his hand, for “Wait!” I nodded agreement—we’d see if the money got distributed nice and even on that first race before we made our play.

Max took the program from me and started working on that first race, paying special attention to each horse’s mother’s name.

I spotted Sands a few seconds before he saw me. He had a giant paper cup in one hand; I was pretty sure it wasn’t popcorn.

I stood up, like I was stretching. Sands walked past us, then sat down at an angle, so he could watch us without turning his head.

I strolled over, sat down next to him.

“Who do you like in the first?” I said.

“I see you brought a friend,” he answered.

“He’ll stay where he is, if you want.”

“Is he who I think he is?”

“Yeah.”

“I
heard
about him for years. Friends of yours, stories get so wild about them, people never seem to know if they’re real or not.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Some of your friends, people don’t even know if they’re
dead
or not,” Sands said, dropping his voice.

“People don’t know a lot of things,” I said. “But it never seems to stop them from talking about them.”

“Nobody’s doing a lot of talking about her now.”

I knew he meant Wolfe. “Meaning they
do
know something?” I said.

“You’re too cute for me,” Sands said. “I get enough of that on the job. The way things are today, the smart guys are wearing their vests on backwards. Why don’t you go back to your friend? I’ll let the place fill up a bit before I stop by.”

M
ax and I each bet a sawbuck on his pick in the first. Or, I should say, we bet twenty bucks together—if we didn’t go partners, it wasn’t any fun for either of us. Max came back from the window with a ten-dollar wheel on the Double, too, meaning we had a hundred invested, total.