Grief Street

think?”
    “No doubt she’s with her Sodality ladies. You should bring her here with you sometime.”
    “I as’t her a couple times.”
    “And what did she say?”
    “She says, quote unquote, I abhor the prospect of sudden death. Ain’t that some kick in the groin?”
    Johnny Kay laughed his father’s laugh. Kowalski joined him.

Thirty-two

    B y ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, I was back on Route 9-W heading south for the city. Charlie had come up the mountain in the Jeep after me, bringing with him a bundle of mail for Father Morrison. No faxes, though.
    Charlie had been given a cup of coffee by an utterly silent Father Morrison. He had watched as the priest threw away piece after piece of the mail—the new issue of the Catholic Messenger, and all envelopes not addressed to him by hand. That left only notification of a Saturday afternoon softball game in Central Park between Jesuit teams from Holy Cross and St. Ignatius Loyola up on the East Side. Which Father Morrison discarded with a grunt.
    My unmarked department car had weathered the nigh* parked in front of the general store in the village. I noticed some scratch marks on the driver’s side door, though, and how the window was gooey and smeared.
    “The black bears around here get curious about a strange vehicle, same as people get,” Charlie had explained. “They have to check it out, you know. I’ve seen them do it. They hoist themselves up against the side of the car and nuzzle the window glass, staring inside and sniffing all over. Makes an awful snotty mess.”
    Some of Charlie’s pals had come out from the store in a group to check me out, at a distance. They were cracker barrel types, codgers who had spent all their lives in the Catskills; by their expressions, I saw how they harbored general suspicions about folks from down in New York. I overheard one say to the rest, “Looks like he don’t sleep the sleep of the good.”
    True enough. In my hermitage cell the night before, I had fallen to sleep with a montage of faces and voices filling my dreams, confirming what the cracker barrel boys suspected.
    God’s really pissed off at you... Tell me something you remember, besides that I am a guy with one ear missing, which you don’t even know how that happened... Who can you trust when your back is turned?...We need a rodef shalom... This killer made a deep incision sideways across the crown of the head, then he sliced down the sides and under the chin and tore off the face... These boys, they’re the established injustice... Charm school makes you think — if you don’t hate violent creeps enough, you wind up being just another violent creep... If it takes the devil himself to make us remember where we come from, and the promises that brought us to this place — amen, I say, amen!
    Now, cruising down the dream of the Hudson River valley, I thought of Creepy Morrison and our talk under the mountain stars. And ringing in my head were the words he whispered to me as I left him, an hour ago: You can close your eyes to reality, boy, but not to memory.
    I stopped at the same Mobil gasoline station with the public telephone I used the other day to call up Ruby and tell her I was on my way. This time, there was no answer after twelve rings. Not even after twenty.

    Ruby had arrived shortly before ten o’clock. It was now half-past the hour, and she was still sitting in the diploma-Walled client waiting room of the law firm of Ashton, Baker, Vennum & Vennum. She had walked east across Forty-third Street, entering Grand Central Station and passing on through to the Lexington Avenue side and the Chrysler Building, where the law firm occupied the twenty-eighth floor. Ruby was there to see the last of the quartet of partners—Vennum the younger, who was thirty minutes late and counting.
    She thought idly about her baby’s name. Patrick if it was a boy, or Patricia if it was a girl? Nathan or Natalie? Francis or Frances?
    And what of this attorney’s name? In the same way a man named Jeeves is born to be a butler, is a man named Vennum destined for the law?
    A tall black woman with a thin waist and expensive clothes glided into the waiting room from behind a mahogany door. She wore a cream-colored silk suit over a yellow-and-green blouse patterned with a Gauguin image of a sloeeyed island woman and lions slinking under palm trees. She smiled and said to Ruby, “Mr. Vennum can see you now.”
    Ruby placed both hands on the arms of her