Bloody River Blues

feeling really bad.She hugged me and . . . It just sort of happened. I really was going to tell you. Really, man. But last time you were in, you were so, you know, upset about your friend . . .”
    “She isn’t for me,” Pellam told him.
    “No, no, she likes you. I know she does.” Wait. Would this make him feel better or worse? “What happened . . .”
    “Donnie, I’ve got no claim on her.”
    “I talked you up afterwards.” He said this cautiously.
    Pellam was sitting down in the chair. “I wouldn’t’ve come by today if I was mad.”
    Buffett could think of nothing to do but extend his hand. They shook solemnly, and Pellam seemed amused by this formal gesture of apology. “I need some help, Donnie.”
    “Anything. You name it. My buddies still hassling you? I’ll get them off your case, John. Don’t worry. I’ll call the mayor if I have to.”
    Pellam looked over the untouched dinner tray. Donnie followed his eyes. He asked, “Break bread?”
    “Haven’t eaten in a day.”
    “Help yourself.”
    It wasn’t bread, it was soup, rice, and red Jell-O. Pellam ate the soup, Buffett, the rice. They split the saltines and divided the Jell-O into two bowls.
    “You know, don’t you,” Buffett said, “Jell-O really sucks?”
    “Uh-huh.” But Pellam seemed hungry. And with milk poured over it the Jell-O was not bad, though Pellam didn’t get much milk; he had the fork and Buffett had the spoon.
    One cube slipped away from Buffett and he chased it off the tray and onto the sheet and blanket. “Shit.” He cocked his middle finger against his thumb and flicked the cube into the wall. It left a pink wound on the wall and splatted on the floor. The men laughed.
    Pellam told Buffett about an old record of his uncle’s, a comedy record from the fifties. Who was the guy? Del Close, he thought. It was called How to Speak Hip. There was this routine, he explained, about a man who gets hung up on Jell-O. He keeps eating these bowls of Jell-O and ordering more. Going from restaurant to restaurant. Everybody’s staring at him. What flavor was it? Strawberry, he thought. Or raspberry. “It’s to teach you the expression ‘hung up on.’ You know, like beat talk was a foreign language.” Pellam said that he had listened to the record a hundred times when he was a kid. He loved the Jell-O routine.
    Buffett smiled politely, waiting for the punch line, but apparently there was none.
    “You have to sort of hear it,” Pellam said. “And be in the mood.”
    “No, it was funny,” Buffett said quickly. Today, at least, he was Pellam’s toady.
    But Pellam seemed to have lost his taste for humor—as well as for Jell-O and for conversation. He wiped his face. He nodded to the bedside table and said, “I guess I better do it. Let me see that phone for a minute, would you?”
    THE U.S. ATTORNEY was in court when the call came in.
    The secretary buzzed Nelson’s office and asked, “There’s a man on three. He says it’s important. When will Mr. Peterson be back?”
    “Take a message, darling,” Nelson snapped. He returned to a lengthy set of interrogatories.
    “It’s a Mr. Pellam and he says—”
    Click.
    “Mr. Pellam, Mr. Pellam . How are you? This is Mr. Peterson’s assistant, Nelson Stroud. Is there something I can do for you?”
    “I want to talk to Peterson.”
    “Is this about the Crimmins situation?”
    Pellam said that it was.
    “Well, is there anything I can help you with?”
    “Where is he?”
    “Mr. Peterson? He’s in court. He won’t be back for several hours.”
    “Oh.” There was a long silence. Nelson gripped the phone hard and believed that if he breathed too loud, he would blow away the fragile phone connection.
    “You’re a lawyer?”
    “Assistant U.S. Attorney for the—”
    “Okay. I want a meeting.”
    Bingo!
    “Fine, absolutely fine. You name a time, you name a place. Whatever.”
    “Your office, I’d like it to be in your office.”
    “Sure, that’s fine. Tomorrow? Tomorrow morning?”
    “Sure, tomorrow morning. Only . . .”
    “What is it?”
    “Only there’s a problem. I need some assurance from you.”
    “Assurance, assurance, of course.” Nelson’s hands were vibrating. This was the big time, this was negotiating with vital witnesses, and he was terrified. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
    “I want some guarantee that I won’t be prosecuted,” Pellam said.
    “Why would you be prosecuted?”
    There was a pause. “Because I