The Bright Silver Star (37 page)

Mitch promptly flopped down on his knees and started scooping out more sand for the moat. “How long are you planning to stick around, Esme?”

“Until they release Tito’s body,” she answered quietly as she continued molding the castle walls with her hands. “I want to take him back to Bakersfield and bury him with his parents.”

“That’s a really nice idea,” Mitch said. “Listen, there’s something important I need to talk to you about. The night Tito died, do you remember when he came home and was rummaging around in his closet before he went back out?”

Esme didn’t respond for a moment. Just kept fashioning the castle wall with her shapely hands. “I remember,” she finally said in a voice that came from somewhere on the other side of the ocean.

“It was his script he was getting. He must have mailed it to me on his way up to Chapman Falls that night. I just got it today. It really does exist, Esme.”

“How is it?” Becca asked eagerly. She seemed vastly more excited about Mitch’s discovery than Esme, who’d scarcely reacted at all.

“I have to tell you, I was pretty knocked out by it. Honestly, it’s terrific. He called it
The Bright Silver Star.”

Esme sat back on her haunches now, swiping at the hair in her face. “I never once saw him working on it. He must have done it when I was asleep.” She let out a heavy sigh, her breasts straining inside the tiny bikini top. “Tito did get up a lot in the middle of the night. The poor thing had such awful nightmares.”

“I have it back at my house,” Mitch said, climbing to his feet. “I’ll go get it for you right now.”

“No, don’t,” Esme said abruptly. “I mean, please don’t. Tito wanted you to have it.”

“It’s your property, Esme.”

“He gave it to you.”

“But this is something of great value. You can get a lot of money for it.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t even want to read it. It will just make me sad. I’m tired of being sad, Mitch. Can’t you understand that?”

“Sure I can. Only, what am I supposed to do with it?”

“Something good,” she said simply. “Something decent. You’re a smart man. You’ll know what to do.”

“Getting a little dry here,” Becca announced, taking their empty water pails down to the water’s edge to fill them.

“Can we talk about something personal?” Mitch asked Esme.

“If you’d like.”

“Did you know that Tito was gay?”

The actress peered at him curiously. “You must think I’m a total bimbo, asking me that.”

“No, not at all. It’s just . . . Will told me that you didn’t know.”

“Will was wrong.”

“He said that’s what Tito told him.”

“Then Tito lied to him,” she said, her voice growing heated now. “I
always
knew he was gay. It was obvious. Gay is gay.”

“And yet you stayed together,” Mitch said. “Why?”

“I loved him. Is that so hard to understand?”

“Not to me,” said Becca, returning now with the water pails. “I think you guys were really great together. And I always will.”

“Besides,” Esme added, her face darkening, “after what I went through with Daddy dearest, Tito and me just seemed kind of . . .”

“Kind of what, Esme?”

“Normal.”

“How much did Tito know about that?”

“Not a thing.”

“Why, were you afraid of what he might do to Dodge?”

“No, not really.”

“Then what was it?”

“That was the past,” Esme explained. “I don’t like to go there— there’s never anything back there that’s any good. So I never, ever look back. Only forward.”

“Is that why you never went after your dad?”

“You mean like call the law on him or something?”

“No need to do that,” Becca spoke up, her own sunken eyes getting a steely look. “His current punishment is much worse.”

Esme nodded her head in grim assent.

“What punishment is that?”

“Daddy has to live with himself,” said Esme.

“Each and every day,” Becca added.

Mitch let this one go. He didn’t tell them that Dodge seemed to have no regrets, no remorse, no functioning conscience at all. Esme and Becca both needed to believe that he did, and Mitch wasn’t about to take it from them. They had so little else to cling to. “Esme, why did you come back here this summer?”

“I thought Dorset would be good for us,” she replied, shrugging her soft shoulders. “I was wrong.”

A pair of kids on jet skis went hurtling past them now, shrieking with high-decibel delight. Mitch sat back on his ample haunches, watching them. “Look, maybe we ought to talk about Tito’s script again in a few days,” he suggested.

“No, Mitch,” Esme said. “I don’t ever want to talk about that again. Just promise me one thing, okay?”

“Of course. Anything.”

“His fans deserve to know who Tito really was. Tell them. It can’t hurt him now.”

“What about you? It can hurt you.”

“No, it can’t,” Esme said softly as she continued working on their castle, her wet hands fashioning its walls higher, higher, and still higher. “Nothing can hurt me anymore. Not a thing.”

C
HAPTER 16

“H
EY
, T
INA-LONG TIME
no see.”

“Mitch, it has been
too
long!” Tina’s round, pink face lit up with motherly delight as she planted wet kisses on both of Mitch’s cheeks. She was a chubby, bustling little strawberry blond in her fifties. “Now tell me,” she commanded him, gazing up, up at Des. “Who is this lovely creature?”

“Say hello to Desiree Mitry.”

“Welcome to my restaurant, Desiree.”

Des smiled at her. “Thank you, I’ve heard a lot about it.”

The Port Alba Café was on Thompson Street a block below Washington Square Park, next door to a shop where men sat playing chess with each other. It was a tiny café—no more than a dozen tables, all but one of them filled. Young families with small children were eating there. Several couples. One very dignified old man in a white suit who sat alone, sipping an espresso. There was a mural of a fishing village on one wall, a tiny bar with glasses in an overhead rack. The ceiling was of stamped tin. Wonderful smells were coming out of the kitchen.

Des had on a dress for the first time in ages, a sleeveless little yellow knit thing that clung to her hips and bootay for dear life. She wore sandals with it, gold loops in her ears, her grandmother’s pearls, a bit of lipstick. She had even painted her toenails, which she almost never did. But this was a special night. She was out on a genuine New York City date with the man she loved.

Mitch wore a white oxford button-down, khakis, and Mephisto walking shoes, which was the same damned thing he always wore. But for this occasion his shirt and trousers were actually pressed and his mop of curly hair combed. He looked positively grown-up.

Tina seated them at the empty table by the window and brought them a bottle of chianti, a loaf of warm, crusty bread, and a platter filled with little plates of antipasti—grilled sardines, white beans in extra-virgin olive oil, marinated calamari salad, fresh buffalo mozzarella with basil leaves and tomatoes. After Tina had poured them each a glass of wine she went to fetch her husband, Ugo, a grave, scrawny little man who was the chef. Ugo solemnly shook hands with Mitch and asked him if he wanted the usual.

“For two,” Mitch said, beaming at Des. “If that’s okay with you.”

“What I’ve been waiting for, boyfriend.”

Ugo disappeared back into the kitchen.

Mitch reached across the table and took her hand. “You are a total hottie, you know that?”

“Um, okay, I’m thinking maybe I should put on a dress more often.”

“That’s funny, I’m thinking about taking it off of you.”

“You’re awfully frisky tonight, sir. Happy to get away from Dorset?”

“I’m just excited about spending the night here with you,” he said, attacking the grilled sardines.

Des spooned some calamari onto her own plate and dove in. “That was our deal. And a deal’s a deal, right?”

“Whatever you say, Master Sergeant.”

Des gazed over at the mural of the fishing village, loving it even though she was fully aware that Professor Weiss would pick it to pieces. The proportions, angles, placement of cast shadows—all were wrong, wrong, wrong. “So this was your place, am I right? You and Maisie.”

Mitch lowered his eyes, nodding.

“You haven’t been back here since she died, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.” His eyes met hers now. “Is this okay, us coming here?”

“Mitch, it’s more than okay. It’s an honor.”

They had gone through the entire antipasto platter and a half bottle of wine by the time Ugo emerged from the kitchen with a battered copper skillet full of spinach fettuccine. Tina laid warm plates
before them and he spooned it out. Ugo had a whole Alfredo thing going on in there with the homemade green pasta and fresh spinach—lots of cream, butter, and melted cheese. Total sin. Especially when Tina was done grating even more cheese onto it.

She hovered there anxiously as Des tasted it. “You like?”

“No, I love.” Truly, it was the best pasta Des had ever eaten. It positively melted in her mouth.

Thrilled, Tina left them to it.

“Have you figured out what to do with Tito’s script?” she asked Mitch as they ate.

“I’m going to publish it,” he replied. “I’ll write an introduction that expands on the article I wrote after he died. I’ll go into the real deal of what happened to him, complete with the transcript of Will’s confession. Esme wants it that way. Whatever money it earns will go into a college scholarship fund for kids in the barrio where Tito grew up. And if someone wants to buy the movie rights, the same deal applies. Sound good?”

“Sounds real good, Mitch.”

“Des, what do you think will happen to Dodge?”

“You mean with the law? My guess is he’ll cop to malicious mischief, get off with six months probation.”

“No jail time?”

“I wouldn’t think so. He
is
a pillar of the community, after all,” she pointed out dryly.

Mitch sat back from his plate. He had a troubled look on his face. “I’m thinking I don’t believe in what I believed in before.”

“Which was? . . .”

“Dodge is a really, really bad guy. He’s done horrible things to Esme, to other girls, to his business competitors, his friends. He gets a slap on the wrist and is basically free to dust himself off and start all over again. Will, meanwhile, was a decent guy who fell in love with the wrong person, lost his head, and now he, Tito, and Donna are all dead. Where is the justice here?”

Des patted her mouth with her napkin and said, “First of all, you’re wrong. Will wasn’t a decent guy, he was a stone-cold killer.”

“And Dodge?”

“Total human scum, I’ll grant you.”

“So where’s the justice?”

“You don’t win them all. That’s why I have such a clean kitchen floor.”

“Okay, you just lost me.”

“Bella gets down on her hands and knees and she scrubs when she’s upset. You watch old movies about giant bugs—”

“Not always. Sometimes they’re about giant crustaceans.”

“And I draw pictures, or at least I used to. I don’t know
what
to call the stuff I draw now. Actually, I do—I call it crap. My point is, we all deal in our own way. That’s real life.”

“Well, it sucks,” he grumbled, sipping his wine.

“Sometimes it does. Other times, it can be pretty damned perfect.”

“Like when?”

She put her hand over his and squeezed it. “Like right now.”

The Tavern was on Horatio and Washington, right around the corner from Mitch’s apartment. It had sawdust on the floor and very little in the way of decor. In past days, it had been a saloon favored by the neighborhood’s big burly meatpackers. Now it was filled with bright, boisterous young writers, artists, actors and grad students. A lot of them hadn’t paired off yet and were assembled in groups. A lot of those groups were mixed. Des saw black faces, Asian faces, all sorts of faces.

It was not, repeat not, a proper dance club. But it was a place he liked and it did have a jukebox. Since he’d insisted on buying dinner she got the drinks while he edged his way warily over to the juke, a look of sheer dread on his face.

She was at the bar fetching them two frosty mugs of New Amsterdam draft when she heard that opening blast of horns—the one that belongs to no other song than “Respect,” followed by that slamming guitar riff, and then by the lady herself. And now Aretha was singing about what
she
needed. And Des was gliding her way across the bar toward Mitch, their eyes locked on to each other, and there
was no one else in that crowded place, just them. She put their beers down on the juke and raised her arms up high into the air, bumping hips with the boy, feeling the music and the wine and . . . and . . .
Damn,
what
was
he doing with himself? Passing a kidney stone? And where was he going with those two clumsy feet of his? Did he not
even feel
the beat?

But, hey, he was dancing his dance and no one was staring or caring. And he was so damned cute.

Besides, it wasn’t long before they were back at his place and they were in each other’s arms in his big brass bed. He was still worried about her shoulder but she kept telling him not to be. They made sweet love deep into the night while the sirens and the car alarms serenaded them, and the refrigerator trucks outside the packing houses
beep-beep-beeped
as they backed up and the cabs went
tha-thunk-ker-chunk
over the steel plate Con Ed had put over the hole in the street.

And for some strange reason there was a special urgency that had never been there before for either of them. Together, they found something new and even more fantastic that night in Mitch’s bed.

“Now you’ve felt it,” he murmured at her as the early light of dawn approached, Mitch stroking her face gently. Truly, he was the most loving man she’d ever been with.

“Felt what, baby?”

“The energy of the city.”

“I thought that was the energy of you and me.”

“Maybe we had a little something to do with it,” he admitted, immediately falling into a deep sleep with his mouth open.