"Bert?" she heard someone say.
He must have covered the mouthpiece. Sudden silence on the other end of the line. There was someone with him. A woman? It had sounded like a woman.
Melinda was wearing only bikini panties and high-heeled pumps. She stood in partial silhouette just inside the bathroom door, her naked breasts larger than they'd seemed when she was fully dressed, the smile on her face again. "Do you have a toothbrush I can use?" she asked.
"Uh . . . yes," he said, his left hand covering the mouth-I piece, "there should be … I think there's an unopened one I … uh … in the cabinet over the sink . . . there should be a I new one in there."
She glanced at the phone in his hand. Arched an eyebrow. Smiled again, secretly. Turned to show her pert little behind in the skimpy panties, posed there for a moment like Betty Grable in the famous World War II poster, and then closed the bathroom door again, blocking the wondrous sight of her from view. "Eileen?" he said.
"Yes, hi," she said, "is there someone with you?"
"No," he said.
"I thought I heard someone."
"The television set is on," he said.
"I thought I heard someone say your name."
"No, I'm alone here."
"Anyway, I'll make this short," she said. "Karin . . ."
"You don't have to make it short," he said.
"Karin thinks it might be a good idea if the three of us . . ."
"Karin?"
"Lefkowitz. My shrink."
"Oh. Right. How is she?"
"Fine. She thinks the three of us should get together sometime soon to talk things over, try to . . ."
"Okay. Whenever."
"Well, good, I was hoping you'd … I usually see her on Mondays and Wednesdays, how about. . .?"
"Whenever."
"How about tomorrow then?"
"What time?"
"I've got a five o'clock …"
"Fine."
". . . appointment, would that be all right with you?"
"Yes, that'd be fine."
"You know where her office is, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"Headquarters Building, fifth floor."
"Yes."
"So I'll see you there at five tomorrow."
"I'll see you there," he said, and hesitated. "Been a long time."
"Yes, it has. Well, goodnight, Bert, I'll. . ."
"Maybe she can tell me what I did wrong," he said.
Eileen said nothing.
"Because I keep wondering what I did wrong," he said.
Her beeper went off. For a moment, she couldn't remember where she'd put it, and then she located it on the coffee table across the room, zeroed in on the sound as if she were a bat or something flitting around in the dark, reached for the bedside lamp and snapped it on - they used to talk to each other on the phone in the dark in their separate beds - the beeper still signaling urgently.
"Do you know what I did wrong?" he asked.
"Bert, I have to go," she said, "it's my beeper."
"Because if someone can tell me what I . . ."
"Bert, really, goodbye," she said, and hung up.
There were children in swimsuits.
The fire hydrant down the block was still open, its spray nozzle fanning a cascade of water into the street, and whereas not a moment earlier the kids had been splashing and running through the artificial waterfall, they had now drifted up the street to where the real action was. Outside the building where the blue-and-white Emergency Service truck and motor-patrol cars were angled into the curb, there were also men in tank tops and women in halters, most of them wearing shorts, milling around behind the barricades the police had set up. It was a hot summer night at the end of one of the hottest days this summer; the temperature at ten p.m. was still hovering in the mid-nineties. There would have been people in the streets even if there hadn't been the promise of vast and unexpected entertainment.
In this city, during the first six months of the year, a bit more than twelve hundred murders had been committed. Tonight, in a cluttered neighborhood that had once been almost exclusively Hispanic but that was now a volatile mix of Hispanic, Vietnamese, Korean, Afghani, and Iranian, an eighty-four-year-old man from Guayama, Puerto Rico, sat with his eight-year-old American-born granddaughter on his knee, threatening to add yet another murder to the soaring total; a shotgun was in his right hand and the barrel of the gun rested on the little girl's shoulder, angled toward her ear.
Inspector William Cullen Brady had put a Spanish-speaking member of his team on the door, but so far the old man had said only five words and those in English: "Go away, I'll kill her." Accented English, to be sure, but plain and understandable nonetheless. If they did not get away from the door of the fifth-floor apartment where he lived with his son, his daughter-in-law, and their three children, he would blow the youngest of the three clear back to the Caribbean.
