Her voice still bore the same strain he’d heard when she’d fled the bar.
“It’s Abe,” he said. “Morgenstern.” He waited for her to respond, but she offered nothing. “You okay?”
“Yes.” Her tone was very nearly metallic.
“You remember telling me that you lived in a hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that singer, the one I told you about, the one who died? She had a place in the Village, not far from the bar,” Abe said. “She had a month left on her rent. So, the thing is, I thought you might want to stay there instead of where you are.” He could not interpret her continued silence, so he took a bold swing. “It would be free until the end of the month. I don’t know . . . I mean . . . what your . . . situation is . . . but staying at a hotel, that’s expensive, right?”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.
From her voice, he couldn’t tell if she were suspicious or mystified, felt him a threat or just an enigma.
He wasn’t sure himself, he realized. Maybe it was that little charge he’d felt at his first look at her. Or maybe it was the strain in her eyes, the trembling in her hands, the way her voice turned icy when she’d said “Forever,” then left the bar.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just that . . . there’s this room, and I figure, who better to have it for a few weeks than—” He stopped and tried to ease her with a quick chuckle. “Than another torch singer.”
Another silence.
“So, you want to take a look at it? I could meet you there, show you around a little. Tomorrow morning, maybe, before I go to the bar.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
Abe gave her the address, then took a chance and said, “May I ask you a question?”
A pause, then, “All right.”
“Are you . . . is something—” He stopped, thought better of his question, and decided on another direction. “Whatever it is, you can beat it, Samantha.”
He heard a soft breath through the line, though “Thank you” was all she said.
EDDIE
He checked the address, then the nameplates, confirmed that one was blank.
What now?
Nothing, Eddie decided, but wait.
And so he sat down on a cement stoop across the street, watching as the late-afternoon pedestrians made their way down Nineteenth Street. He had never actually lived in the city, nor ever wanted to. Manhattan was not his kind of place, and the people could hardly have been more different from himself. First off, they were educated. Everyone who lived in Manhattan, he supposed, had gone to college. His cousin Patsy had done that. She’d gotten a scholarship to Columbia, then landed a big job with a law firm whose offices were on Park Avenue. At Christmas parties back home, she tried to be nice to everybody, but despite the effort, she looked as if she were in a dentist’s waiting room rather than at home with her family. You could tell she wanted to get back to Manhattan, to her smart, well-dressed friends. Because of that, the cousins usually started talking about her once she’d left. They called her stuck-up and snooty and said she should just stay in the city if she thought she was so great, so much better than the people who’d never left the old neighborhood. But Eddie had never added his voice to their condemnations. If anything, he’d felt sorry for Patsy, sorry that she’d let go of something that seemed precious, the hold of family, which was, he thought, the fortress you lived in, and which kept you safe. That was it, he thought now, that was what made him jumpy in Manhattan and eager to leave it as fast as he could. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel at home in the city. It was that he didn’t feel safe when he was out of his own neighborhood, away from his own kind, didn’t feel that he could just be Eddie Sullivan . . . and survive.
His gaze drifted up the building, then along the line of windows on the fifth floor, hoping to get a glimpse of the man who’d been hired to find Tony’s wife. He imagined him as a tall, thin ice pick of a man. They had a tendency to look like that in movies, but Eddie knew the guy could just as easily be short and pudgy. The thing he had to keep in mind was this guy might be dangerous, might be capable of anything. That’s what a bad man was, Eddie thought, a guy who would do anything if the money was right or he was scared not to do it, a guy who lived without a line. Eddie couldn’t fathom how such men went through their days with no sense of limits. He’d never been sure of what he wanted to be, only that he didn’t want to be