they’re calling it. Not that I care about medical terms. They’re just words, right? And anyway, depending on who you’re talking to, the diagnosis seems to change every few months. Could be a form of dementia. Could be something to do with nerves. For me, of course, things have also shifted over the last couple years. It’s no longer equal between us. I still pay the bills. I do the grocery shopping. I cook a lot more now than I ever did, and I drag out the vacuum cleaner once a week, though once in a while I forget. Every night I thank the God I don’t believe in for Carmen. All I know is what I have to do to keep things on an even keel, which, let me tell you, is plenty.
I met Loretta just after I got out of the Marines. That was in 1973. I was letting my hair grow down to around my shoulders, partly as a statement about how I’d been used and abused by the military, and also because everyone in my neighborhood was doing the same thing. That was when I had lotsa hair, mind you. I was going back to school in Berkeley and Loretta was in my psychology class. Brown eyes, a tiny bounce in her step. I think she fell in love with me because I seemed so serious compared with the other men on campus. They were nice enough kids, I thought, but all they really wanted was to stay alive and smoke as much dope as humanly possible. Basically, they wanted to steer clear of Vietnam. That was their major, and I couldn’t blame them for that. I was glad to be done with it, too.
Loretta liked that I was different, that I’d been to war, seen it with my own eyes. She was against the war, of course, but she wanted to hear about it, how we trained, what we did once we got over there. I told her some stuff, but I kept most of the grisly bits to myself. Even then, I felt a need to protect her, I suppose. She was so innocent. Also, I didn’t much want to see that movie all over again. Once I mentioned my buddy Sam, a black guy from Biloxi. I loved Sam. We went through Basic together. We ate together. We slept together. Even chased after the same Vietnamese girl in a bar in Saigon one time. Sam was my guiding star. I’d do anything for Sam. But then one day we were on patrol and he was walking point, and he got a little too far out in front of us. A runty, undernourished kid—all of them looked like that—rose up out of the brush and shot him in the back. He never saw it coming. We carried him all the way back to the helicopter, but it was too late. He just closed his eyes and bled out. I sobbed for three whole days. I wished it had been me instead of him. And that’s when I began to see how pointless it was. That’s when I stopped believing.
“Why did the rabbi die?” Loretta asks me now. She’s already asked me once.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Somebody hates him?”
“Maybe, sweetheart. Probably so. Every human being I’ve ever met hates somebody sometimes, right?”
“I don’t hate.”
“No, that’s true, you don’t. But you’re an angel, so you don’t count.”
She grins. “You married an angel.”
I nod, start dropping forks and knives and spoons back in the drawer one at a time. Clink, clink, clink. “Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it was just a simple accident. He could have had a heart attack. That’s what the cops think.”
She points a finger at the side of her head, like it’s a loaded gun. “Cops don’t think,” she says. For some reason, this notion makes her very happy. She starts to giggle.
I give her a disappointed look. “I don’t know where on earth that came from,” I say.
Later, when the lights of Hollywood are twinkling in the distance and the apartment is finally still, I slip off my shoes and snuggle up next to her on the couch. “Shove over, Loretta. For an angel, you take up a helluva lot of room, you know.”
She starts to giggle again, then takes my arm and wraps it gently around her shoulder. “You love me,” she says, as much to herself as to me.
“You better believe it.”
“I want a cookie.”
“We don’t have any more.” This is a lie, but I’m worn-out and there’s no point getting up and rummaging around in the kitchen. “How about I get you a cookie tomorrow?”
She nods. “All right.”
“Hey wait. How about you pretend that I’m your cookie?”
She turns to me. “You’re not a cookie,” she says.
After I put her to bed, I go into the other bedroom, which I’ve sort of made into an office. Beyond my computer, there’s not all that much worth looking at on the desk. A picture of my parents on their wedding day in 1938. They’re standing arm in arm on some stone steps in front of the rabbi’s house where they were just married. August in the Bronx. Ain’t got a barrel of money, but who cares? This is their moment. They don’t know about the war that’s coming their way. There’s so much they don’t know. They’re so young and innocent it hurts to look at them.
Right beside the photo is another one of my late brother, Sy. He’s sitting bare-chested in his sailboat, a cigar nestled in his hand. He’s got a grin on his face as if he’s just heard the best joke ever. The sun is shining, and you can almost feel the wind in his hair and the sea bobbing all around him. That’s the sum total of my mementos. Oh, except for one other thing. On the wall in front of me is a framed eight-by-ten photograph of a little boy.
His name is Enrique Avila. He disappeared while walking home from school. He was eight years old, and it was one of the first cases I ever took on. Also the most painful, because I never found him. He just vanished, it seemed, like smoke into the air. No clues, no witness, nothing. That was nearly forty years ago, and still, whenever I’m in his old neighborhood of Alhambra I can’t help myself. I’ll drive up and down the quiet, residential streets. I’ll stare at vacant buildings, at stores that weren’t even there back then. And I’ll wonder what the hell happened, what did I miss.
Enrique is kind of my son, I guess you’d say, since Loretta and I never had one of our own. Every so often I try to conjure him up. He’d be well into middle age by now if he were still alive. He’d have a beer belly, maybe a wife and a couple of kids and a mortgage. When I look at his picture, I don’t see him as a big achiever; he would probably never be the smartest kid in class, or the fastest sprinter. He wouldn’t win the spelling bee, and his project in the science fair would be routinely overshadowed by others. He might go to the prom, but he’d never be the homecoming king. You can tell he was destined to have a happy, normal life. An uneventful life even. And that would have suited him just fine, if he had lived.
It’s after nine, but I’m sure the lieutenant will still be up. He never sleeps.
The phone barely rings before he answers. “Malloy,” I say, “it’s Amos Parisman.”
“I know. I’ve got caller ID.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t. I wanted to let you know though, I ignored your advice and went to see Dr. Ewing today.”
“And?”
“And everything you told me was right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That she was beautiful, and that she wouldn’t tell me squat.”
“Why don’t you ever listen, Amos?”
“I’m stubborn that way, Bill. And I’m an old man and probably an embarrassment to every detective who ever walked the earth. Anyway, I forgot to ask you yesterday whether your boys found out what drugs the rabbi was on?”
“Oh, we got a list from the wife. Nothing to get too excited about: Blood pressure. High cholesterol. An anti-depressant, but he stopped taking that a while ago.”
“And they were all prescribed by Dr. Ewing?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t recall. Might