Epitaph Read online

  Now, however, he was neither. A man, older than William-which these days was saying something-sat on a bent bridge chair just inside the front door. He wore a faded prayer shawl across his shoulders and an unmistakably sullen expression across his face. Well, why not. William supposed he'd be just a little sullen too if the only people he talked to all day were next of kin. Off to the right a half-covered aluminum table supported a lone bottle of Mogen David. Used cups, some crumpled, some half filled, surrounded the bottle like a stillborn litter. Maybe it was unavoidable-in the Moses Greenberg Funeral Home, everything looked like death. There were other men there-who, by the way, didn't look so hot either; one against the far wall, another two engaged in conversation, whispering to each other as if plotting something dangerous.

  William was late.

  "Friend or family?" the old man by the door asked him without really bothering to look up.

  "Friend?" William replied, as if asking, thinking that there really ought to be a third category for these kinds of occasions, old acquaintance maybe.

  "Well, you're late. The service is over."

  "Sorry."

  "You don't have to apologize to me. I just work here. And you don't have to apologize to the family, because there is none. Not here, anyway. You're it. Except for the landlord." He nodded at the man leaning against the wall. "Put a yarmulke on."

  William reached into a wooden bin where yarmulkes of the kind Mr. Brickman wore on the High Holy Days lay in a soft multicolored heap. He picked a black one, black for death-Jonathan Weinberg's Bar Mitzvah it said in faded gold letters on the inside-then placed it on his head, just over his bald spot, okay, more of a region these days, and walked into the parlor.

  A simple closed coffin lay at the front of the room.

  I'm sorry, William thought when he'd walked past the empty seats to the end of the aisle. I'm sorry it ends like this, Jean. Like this. I'm sorry the seats aren't filled for you.

  And then, touched by this feeling of pity, this notion that maybe Jean had meant more to him than he'd realized, he decided to open the coffin. To say his goodbye face-to-face.

  He peeled back the top section; heavy and unoiled, it opened with a wrenching screech.

  It was Jean. It wasn't Jean.

  That was the only way to put it. And for a brief moment, he wasn't exactly sure why. After all, the features seemed just about the same: those thick eyebrows, the hollow cheeks, the drooped lip. Of course, he was dead. No doubt about that. But it was more than that, something else entirely. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen him, walking out of the office with a single box under his arm, why hello there, Jean, and then, like that, he understood. Jean had never been defined by his looks. He'd been defined by his, well… passion. For his work, for his regrettable parade of cases. Remember? Give him a new one and he'd get all lit up with a kind of perverse expectation, the way a house cat gets when its dinner lands by a half-open window. He'd just about lick his lips, Jean would. Then it would be days, weeks, of peek-a-boo, of coming and going, of in and out and where's he gone to, with the occasional glimpse of sly exultation as the case unfolded, as it turned to red, a euphemism Jean had coined due to his peculiar habit of changing files as a case progressed. The first file white, the last red, and the irony, William was convinced, firmly intended. For white was the color of innocence, something his clients could rarely claim, and red the color of penance, something they rarely did. But if his cases weren't exactly admirable, his passion was; at the very least it made him top-shelf at what he did. It made him Jean. Death had robbed him of the only thing that made him recognizable.

  His hands, delicate hands for that body, were crossed over his chest like an Indian chief who'd died in battle, the kind that Randolph Scott was always running across and warning stupid white settler number eight million and one to leave alone. It was bad juju to touch a chief on his way to the underworld. Of course, no one ever listened to him, and before you knew it, half the Apache nation was out looking for their scalps. And now William wondered if he'd been just a little stupid himself. He wasn't the only one. As he reached down and took Jean's left hand in his, shaking goodbye for the last time- "Sir! Sir!" William jumped; the sudden sound tore through the silence like a siren. It was the old man; he'd followed him in. "Close the coffin, sir! Close it! We don't open coffins here without permission." His face was flushed; power had been usurped. "Closed coffin. Those were the directions." Where was Randolph Scott when you needed him? "You have to ask permission…" Down went the lid. "Closed," William said. "You have to ask…" the old man muttered, shaking his head and walking back out through the entranceway. William followed him; the old man back on his chair again, rigid and unforgiving. The landlord came over to introduce himself. His name was Rodriguez. Only he wasn't the landlord after all- just the janitor. "I just said I was the fuckin' landlord. The Jews don't respect you unless you own something, know what I mean." Jean had asked him to take care of things if something happened to him. "What exactly did happen to him?" William asked. "Heart attack," Rodriguez said and slapped his chest. "The doctor came too late. He was already gone." "Heart attack," William echoed. Rodriguez hadn't known whom to invite to the funeral. "He didn't have any family, did he?"

  "No. He didn't have any family." William thought of that tattered picture; had Jean still kept it with him? held together with Scotch tape, taped and taped so that it became like a laminated ID, which, in a way, it was.

  "Just another old guy with nobody," Rodriguez said. "No offense. There's a lot of them in my building-breaks my heart, right. So I put a notice in the paper, okay? I figured if anyone cares, if anyone knows him, maybe they'd come. Like you."

  Rodriguez was wearing a yarmulke too, but inside out: Sarah Levy's Bat Mitzvah his head said. He asked how William knew the deceased.

  "We used to work together," he said.

  "Yeah-I thought it was you."

  William must have looked puzzled.

  "He's got this picture in his apartment. You, him, and some other guy," he said. "By a door-the Something, Something Detective Agency, right?"

  "Three Eyes."

  "Right. The Three Eyes Detective Agency. How long ago was that?"

  "Long time ago."

  "No shit. I bet you could tell some stories, huh?"

  "Sure. Lots of stories."

  He asked if William wanted it-the picture. There were other things in Jean's apartment too-he could take his pick.

  William was going to say no, was going to say that he didn't want anything of Jean's, but then he thought the picture might be nice after all. "Okay," he said.

  "Let's go."

  "Now?" "Yeah. Now." "What about the burial?" "Cremated," he said. "That's what he wanted." Cremated. Off to some furnace to be burnt up. Like his wife and children went. If they weren't buried, he wouldn't be buried either. He would have wanted it like that, William guessed. Just like that. "So," Rodriguez said. He'd gone back for the half- drained bottle of Mogen David. "What do you say?" "I'll meet you there." "You'll meet me there. Why's that?" "I have something to do." He did have something to do; it had just come to him. "Have it your way. Fifteen-twenty-two Beech Avenue." William said fine. He'd be there in just a little while. When he walked out, the schedule board said Silverman, M.-4:30 P.M. Out with the old, in with the new. The Puerto Ricans were right where he left them, still leaning on wheel-less cars, their radios pouring out the same lyrics, more or less, that they were before. Screw her booty… The boy with the red headband was sharing a tender moment with the smirking girl. He was shoving his hand down her pants, and humping her up and down in time to the music as she whispered into his ear. William stood across the street, staring at them. Do something, he thought. You came back, now do something. Anything. But he didn't of course. Instead he suddenly felt like he did late at night when he'd wake to the sound of the TV he'd forgotten to turn off, something shrill and insistent on, buy this, order that, and him suddenly helpless and immobile, too weary to cros
s the carpet to turn it off. The TV was simply too far away to do battle with; and now, so were they. The street before him might as well have been a river; he was too old to swim it.

  Then the boy saw him. He smiled, and ran his tongue across his girlfriend's ear. They both giggled. William, like something unimportant and ugly, had just been dismissed.

  He turned and walked back up the street, his shadow just a stunted half-moon of gray, as if his sudden shame had just made him smaller.

  FOUR

  When Rodriguez turned on the light in Jean's apartment, bits of brown scattered in all directions as if a gust of air had just attacked the last leaves of autumn.

  "Roaches," Rodriguez said, in a tone that somehow mingled disgust and admiration. "I hate them, but what can you do?"

  William had found Rodriguez in his first-floor apartment at 15-22 Beech Avenue, slumped in front of his TV set with the empty bottle of Mogen David in his hand. There'd been no need for Rodriguez to buzz him through-the front door of the apartment building was permanently kicked in, the intercom suspended from the wall by one naked wire. When William knocked on his door, Rodriguez had screamed at him-I'll fix the hot water when I'm good and ready, comprende?

  It's William, he'd said, from the funeral, and Rodriguez said come on in.

  He was watching a program with the TV set on mute. Didn't matter. Someone had slept with someone's sister's husband; that's what it said right there for everyone to see, right next to this sad and angry-looking threesome. Something like that anyway-William's eyesight not being what it used to be, someone's sister's husband or sister's brother or sister's father. Anyway, someone was guilty of something. The man in the middle of this glum trio casting sullen glances this way and that, looking like he wanted out, wanted to be anywhere but there. William knew the feeling; it came with getting old, it was what getting old did to you, but the only place you could go was no place.

  Not today though-today you could go here. To Jean's apartment.

  It was a small one-bedroom situated on the third floor, actually a studio in the shape of a blunted L. In the real estate section it would be found under charming, but in the harsh light of day it looked like what it was-destitute, which is what's left when charm flies out the window.

  Rodriguez asked him what it was like-being a detective.

  "It was okay," William said.

  He'd given him the picture-the three of them, Jean, Santini, and himself. Santini smiling, pointing to the freshly painted letters on the door-Three Eyes, the name had been his idea; beside him Jean, dark and dour, his cheeks pinched in like one of those faces from Buchen- wald; then, of course, himself, looking frankly bewildered and completely unsure of everything.

  "Sit down," Rodriguez said. "You want a Bud?"

  "No. No thanks." But then he sat down anyway, not because he wanted a beer, although he didn't not want one either, but because he was tired, or because his knee was killing him, or because he'd simply been asked. Take your pick.

  About that knee. Acute arthritis, the doctor said. It would, the doctor continued, get worse, striking him at any moment it cared to, in any number of joints, without any warning at all. One day it would come to stay. But then one day is always one day away. And that's how old people live.

  Rodriguez asked him if he ever killed anybody. "What?" For a second William saw the little girl and all that blood again.

  "On a case. You ever kill anyone on a job?"

  "No," he said.

  "You never killed anyone? Some detective you were. You ever shoot someone?"

  "Shoot?" William said. "Sure."

  "Yeah?" Rodriguez looking suddenly eager now. "What with? A Magnum?"

  "A camera."

  "Huh?"

  "I took pictures."

  "Pictures? What for?"

  "For wives. For husbands."

  "Oh."

  "Sometimes they didn't trust each other. Sometimes they were right."

  "I get it," Rodriguez said. "You caught them fucking around."

  "Yes." Them. The ones who looked at the floor, at the windows, at the desk, anywhere but at him, who talked about this, about that, but rarely about it, not at first, and sometimes not for longer so that he finally had to pull it out of their mouths like pieces of rotten tooth. He had cheaters and Santini had the missing in action. Jean? Jean was different. Jean had the kind of clients that paid the mortgage. He could not only spot guilt at fifty paces-he could embrace it like an old pal. Wiseguys, loan sharks, number runners, dope peddlers, and political goons tended to carry his card around in their wallets. Anyone who needed a bagman or a bogeyman or some queer stuff they could use to strong-arm someone else-they all came to Jean. It was his earlier career in reverse: instead of helping the innocent go free, he helped the guilty-as-charged instead. An avenging angel of sorts, but not the cherub kind-more like the one who'd skipped out on heaven and set up shop lower down. It was, maybe, a declaration on his part: If the world was intrinsically evil-and everything he'd seen in the camps had shown him it was-then wasn't it his job, his duty as a citizen of the world, to help it along? If the world was hell-bent on going to hell, he might as well hitch a ride, and as long as he was hitching a ride, he might as well take it all the way to the last stop. There was always, after all, plenty of evidence both ways. And as Jean was fond of saying, you find what you look for.

  "You want that license?" Rodriguez asked him. A yellow license fastened to the wall: Jean Goldblum, Private Investigator, certified by the State of New York.

  "No thanks."

  "You got one too?"

  "Somewhere."

  "Okay. Now you got a matched set."

  "I don't want it."

  "Suit yourself. What about that?" Rodriguez asked him. He pointed to a brown cardboard box barely peeking out from beneath the bed.

  "What's in it?"

  "Junk."

  "No thanks."

  "Maybe it's not junk. It's junk to me. But to you?"

  "No, Rodriguez. No thanks."

  "Right. The drapes?"

  "What?"

  "The drapes. Maybe you could use them-you strike me as a guy who could use drapes. But I can't give them to you-I gotta charge you."

  "I don't need drapes."

  "You could always use drapes. How old are your drapes?-I bet you don't know."

  Like TV, William thought. Rodriguez was like the TV he'd wake up to at night, like one of those shriller in- fomercials: buy this, order that, send away for this. Click…

  "I don't need drapes. I don't need a box of junk. Throw it into the incinerator. I don't want it."

  "Sure," Rodriguez said. "Why didn't you say so?"

  But when William left, he took the box of junk with him.

  Rodriguez carried the box down the hall for him. William heard the sounds of television, the mutter of a dog, the padding of slippers. When they passed the door closest to the elevator, it opened, slowly, cautiously, and a head crowned with the whitest hair William had ever seen peeked out to look at them. Rodriguez turned to say something, the head withdrew like a tortoise before a predator, and the door slammed shut.

  "Mr. Weeks," Rodriguez said, and shrugged. "He's a little crazy, you know. Senile…"

  "Sure."

  Rodriguez carried the box all the way to the front door. Happy to be rid of it, he probably would've carried it all the way through Flushing and back to Astoria. But he stopped in the dilapidated lobby where a woman was vacantly rocking a baby carriage back and forth and two Indian children were kicking each other with silent glee.

  Rodriguez said: "It's all yours," and handed him the box.

  "Thank you," William said without really meaning it, as he nestled the box into the crook of his arm. He turned to the door where a blinding afternoon sun was streaming through the glass like oncoming high beams.

  He shielded his eyes; bits of dust swirled past his face.

  "Hey."

  William turned back: Rodriguez had his hand out, palm up, waiting
for one of those street shakes William didn't understand, the box beginning to feel all of a sudden very heavy, like a burden now, as Rodriguez grasped his hand and showed him how it's done, like the handing off of a baton in a relay race. Only he'd never catch up, not now.

  "Take it easy," Rodriguez said. He turned back into the lobby.

  And William, walking out into a heat that nearly slapped him, thought that he'd shaken hands twice today but that only one counted, only he couldn't figure out which one. Thinking that Jean's hand had already been like the hand of a ghost, so white, so cold, and wondering if such things actually existed, ghosts and such, if perhaps right this minute Jean was somehow near him, hovering, like smoke.

  William suddenly realized he'd been thinking out loud; a young girl in shorts was staring up at him with a kind of disgust. He'd been speaking out loud and no one had been listening, an old man talking to himself. But then, that's what old men do.

  FIVE

  A dark yellow twilight was slanting in through the window, the kind of light a flashlight makes when its battery is about to die. All in all, perfect mood lighting for a serious drinking binge.

  Shame to waste it, William thought. So he wasn't.

  He wasn't just drinking, though-he was reconnoiter- ing, searching his apartment for signs of life, seeking like radar any intrusions into the sedentary. There: a not insubstantial pile of mail shoved under his door, a dewy- eyed beauty staring back at him from a picture frame on the TV table, a child's drawing pinned to the door of his refrigerator. Of course, the mail-Have you considered a retirement home in the Poconos? Think you're too old for insurance? Congratulations William Riskin, you've just won… was written by computer. The dewy-eyed beauty was long gone. And the child's drawing was by Mr. Brick- man's granddaughter. I told Laurie to do one for you, he said, because you don't have any.