Invasion of Privacy

Upstairs, the window of my tape machine was blinking a single message. I played it back. Nancy , saying she’d waited until two-thirty before taking a cab home and what the hell had happened to me?
    When I was connected to her number, the outgoing announcement clicked on, but as I started my own message after the beep, Nancy broke in. “John, where are you?”
    “Home.”
    “What—”
    “It’s a long story, Nance.”
    A pause. “John, is something wrong?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean your voice. It doesn’t sound right.”
    I cleared my throat. “How’s this?”
    “Uh-oh. Something bad happened, didn’t it?”
    “This mean I can’t fool you even over the telephone anymore?”
    “It must. What’s wrong?”
    “How about if I drive to your place and we talk there?”
    “I don’t have anything much for us to eat.”
    I suddenly noticed the scent of the slaughterhouse coming off my clothes. “I’m not very hungry.”
    “There’s still some of that chicken soup left over from Friday night?”
    “That’d be fine. See you in thirty minutes.”
    “Thirty? It shouldn’t take you fifteen without traffic.”
    I was already out of my suit jacket. “I need to shower and change first.”

    Inside the kitchen, I could smell the soup simmering in the crockpot. Renfield kept his distance, sensing something the shower hadn’t washed away. Nancy first looked up at me, then laid the right side of her head against my chest, arms around my waist.
    “You seem sound of wind and limb.”
    I said, “Just barely.”
    Nancy tilted her head back, then broke the hug. “Meaning, you’re the one who could use some cuddling tonight.”
    “I came close this afternoon, Nance. Real close.”
    Her eyes grew troubled, then she smiled without showing her teeth. “The soup can wait. Let’s bring some wine into the living room, and you can tell me about it.”
    I said I thought that would be a very good start.

21

    A fter I told Nancy as much as I could about what had happened, we made our way to the bedroom. A few hours later, while she dozed, I got up and went quietly into the kitchen for some water. The phone rang, startling me, and I answered it instinctively. “Hello?”
    “Cuddy, that you?”
    “Primo, what’re you doing, calling me here?”
    “Look, I been burning the fucking wires to your condo there and getting squat. If your girlfriend answered, I would’ve hung up.”
    “That doesn’t—”
    “Besides, I figured we still had kind of an emergency on our hands, you know?”
    No question there. “Okay. So tell me.”
    “Things suck, but I’m still alive.” The whooshing sound as he breathed. “After my guys took care of the cleanup, I figured I oughta let this friend of ours—the coordinator?—know that everything hit the fan.”
    “And?”
    “And he’s bullshit, what do you think, but he believes what I told him because he wants to believe it.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    “That Rick and Coco found a lead on their own and left me a fucking message. When I picked it up, I went straight to the slaughterhouse and found what I found.”
    “Primo, how would they know to go there in the first place?”
    “Account of they asked me in advance to show it to them, give Coco a door key, in case they wanted to use the meat locker for entertaining somebody.”
    Smart. “Somebody like Alfonso DiRienzi?”
    “I had a brainstorm there, I think. I told this coordinator that it was just possible the fucking feds had made Rick and Coco somehow and decided to send our organization a message by whacking them, so we were going to have to be real careful, here on out.”
    “Only the feds wouldn’t do that.”
    “Hey-ey-ey, some other time I’ll tell you about these former friends of mine would argue the point, they were still alive to speak their piece.”
    “And you think the rogue-cop story sounds better than what we came up with?”
    “Yeah, but it’s not gonna buy you and me much time. I was able to convince our coordinator that Rick and Coco oughta stay on ice for a while at the funeral home, till we could hand the Milwaukee people a better result.”
    “Primo—”
    “Look, don’t say it again, all right? You ain’t gonna give up DiRienzi even if you do find him. Fine. You fucking spook that rat from wherever he is, though, and it’s open fucking season on him, far as I’m concerned.”
    I didn’t much like what I was about to suggest, but I couldn’t see any other way to be