Act of God

said, “One thing {hat might help.”
    Houle looked harder at me again. “What’s that?”
    “Time. It’s been a while since I lost my wife, and over time, it gets easier.”
    He nodded, the eyes starting to fill.
    I said, a little quickly, “You ride it out, somebody else can matter again.”
    Houle rubbed the back of his wrist across his nose “Yeah, thanks.”
    Watching him dam it in, I really didn’t want to stay or say much more, but I couldn’t be sure Cross thought to tell him something he might not have realized on his own. “One last thing, Mr. Houle?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Both Abraham Rivkind and Rush Teagle were killed by fireplace pokers.”
    “Fireplace...?”
    “Pokers. And as I said, it might be that both Rivkind and Teagle had relationships, sexual relationships, with Darbra Proft.”
    He just stared at me. “So?”
    “So you did, too.”
    Houle stared some more, then started. “What? You mean...?”
    “I don’t know what I mean, but I don’t think it’s only coincidence. I think you ought to be careful, just in case.” He worked his hands together, like he was washing them rather than praying with them. “Jesus, you mean like... hire a bodyguard?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t even know you well enough to give you advice. And I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily-But it’s something that comes to mind, and I wasn’t sure you saw it.”
    Houle swallowed hard. “Another Ex-Lax.”
    “What?”
    A few tears, the eyes bewildered. “Another laxative. God taking them so he can really shit on you.”
    I stood up, said again I was sorry for his loss, and left him, Roger Houle now looking not that much different than he had the first time I’d met him.

    The address Cross had given me for Howard Ling was m Allston. It turned out to be a brick building just off Brighton Avenue with a hardware store on the street level and three floors of apartments above. I found a metered space a block down, then walked back, the entryway next to the hardware having an unlocked outer door and just the word LING and an oriental character handwritten under the middle buzzer.
    Instead of pressing the button, I climbed the stairs. The second floor smelled strongly of garlic, the next like the vent from the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. There was only one doorway on that third floor, so I knocked. I heard a kind of growling, more human than animal. I was about to knock harder when the door opened, a hissing voice saying something in a language that might have been Chinese.
    Looking into the apartment, I saw the kid with the dreadlocks standing in front of me, the one Rush Teagle had called “Hack.” He wore black jeans and no top and held one of those small, strawed boxes of Gatorade in his hand. Behind him, an Asian man in his forties was lying on the couch. The man wore just a strappy T-shirt and boxer shorts. One leg was half off the bed, the sock half off the foot, and one arm was up and around the neck, as though he were trying to put himself into a half nelson. The man was snoring irregularly and giving every indication of sleeping off a monumental drunk.
    The kid didn’t like me at his doorstep, but the way he looked behind him told me he didn’t like the man being awakened even more.
    Quietly, I said, “Why don’t we step outside, Howie.”
    In the hissing voice, he said in English, “Don’t call me that.”
    “Fine. Outside still looks better.”
    Another look over the shoulder. “AH right, all right.”
    He did something to the door lock with his free hand, h,en came out, closing the door behind him so that it barely picked shut. The corridor had a black rubber runner tacked own here and there with carpet staples, the runner buckling the beginning and end of each flight of stairs. The walls ere plaster and painted pumpkin-orange, but there were ‘1ough crumble spots that the white showed through, like on a damp vegetable.
    Howard Ling said, “What do you want?”
    First things first. What should I call you?”
    “Hack. That’s my name.”
    “Not according to the police, Hack.”
    “They need the righteous one for their paperwork, that’s like their problem, not mine. I didn’t have anything to do with Rush getting killed, man.”
    “Kind of an abrupt segue, don’t you think?”
    Ling took a sip of his Gatorade. “I don’t know what to think.”
    “You and Rush and the other two were supposed to do a gig on Saturday night, right?”
    “We already told the cops