Nobody's Fool

cleaner’s usually stayed there until he needed them again.
    â€œSpiffy,” Wirf said without much interest. “I’m not sure I’d even bother with socks. You don’t want to overdress.”
    â€œSpoken like a man with only one foot to freeze,” Sully said. “Let’s go.”
    Wirf stood, looked at the television all the way across the huge living room. “You need a remote control for this thing,” he observed.
    Sully looked around the room, did a quick inventory. He needed a lot of things. A remote control wouldn’t even make the list. Still, he had the impression, indeed had felt it as soon as they’d entered, that there was something different about the flat. Nothing was missing, nothing misplaced so far as he could tell, yet it still felt different, somehow. An atmospheric shift, he decided, of the sort that always registered after one of Clive Jr.’s unauthorized visits, except that Clive’s presence was easy to detect because of his aftershave. This was a more subtly sweet smell that he couldn’t quite place. It smelled like something young, he finally decided.
    Or maybe it was just his own absence he was smelling. A week of norank work clothes piling up on the floor of his bedroom closet. Which reminded him that in two days, the first of the year, he was supposed to be permanently absent from this flat. “Where’s this apartment I’m supposed to look at?” he asked Wirf.
    â€œOn Spruce,” Wirf said. “Two fifty a month.”
    â€œOne bedroom?”
    â€œTwo.”
    â€œI don’t need two, really,” Sully said, pulling on his parka over his suit coat. The bottom of the parka came about eight inches above the bottom of the suit jacket.
    â€œJesus Christ,” Wirf said. “You don’t own an overcoat?”
    â€œWhat would I do with an overcoat?” Sully said. “Two-fifty a month is more than I pay here,” Sully said.
    â€œYou could stay in jail,” Wirf suggested. “That’d solve your housing problem. I could spring you for weddings and funerals.”
    â€œI make more money in there, actually,” Sully said. During his six days of incarceration he’d won over two hundred dollars playing cribbage with three different cops.
    Together the two men made their slow way down Sully’s front stairs, Sully limping and groaning, Wirf stumping and puffing. “I hope all the others aren’t cripples,” Wirf said at the landing.
    In point of fact, Hattie’s bearers were not an able-bodied crew. In addition to Wirf and Sully, there were Carl Roebuck, who had a quadruple bypass on his recent medical résumé; Jocko, whose knees, ruined by high school football, had twice been replaced and sometimes clicked audibly; and Otis, who got red-faced getting into and out of cars. And Peter, thank God. On short notice they couldn’t have done much better without recruiting women. Old Hattie’s casket would have been in safer hands with Ruth and Toby Roebuck and Cass and Birdie at the handles. In feet, Sully could think of only two women in town who wouldn’t have been a physical improvement. One was his landlady and the other was in the casket they were going to bear. But custom was custom, and custom, in this case, demanded six men, never mind in what condition.
    Thinking of his landlady, Sully decided to look in on Miss Beryl, whom he hadn’t seen since the morning he’d discovered her covered with blood. According to Peter, who’d looked in on her a couple times, she was doing fine. “You know my landlady?” he asked Wirf.
    â€œI’m her attorney,” Wirf said.
    â€œNo shit?”
    â€œI need a few paying customers to offset my pro bono work.”
    â€œMeaning me?”
    â€œNo,” Wirf said. “You’re my pro bonehead work. You I do strictly for laughs.”
    Sully ignored this, knocked on Miss Beryl’s door and opened it all in the same motion, calling, “You still alive in here, old woman?”
    Miss Beryl was not only alive but dressed for the funeral. She had her hat on, in fact. “I thought you were still in the hoosegow,” she said.
    Sully entered, Wirf following reluctantly, unused to barging into the living quarters of elderly women without invitation.
    â€œI’ve got a good lawyer,” Sully explained. “He can spring me for funerals.”
    â€œJust the ones