Swan Dive

coattails, I said, ”I’ll be over to you in an hour. Unless this afternoon would be easier for you?”
    She exhaled loudly. ”All right. An hour. You know the address.” She hung up before I could ask her what apartment number, but you can’t have everything.
    I chose a short-sleeved sports shirt and some running pants with pockets and elastic waist to spare the need for a belt. For ten minutes, I watched out my windows, front and side. My car looked the way I left it, and I couldn’t see anyone I didn’t want to meet. I hobbled down the stairs and out the door.
    After three blocks, the walking began to loosen up my injured parts. I felt nearly good by the time I hit Copley Place , an extravagant hotel-shopping mall complex that helps demarcate established Back Bay from the transitional South End. Just inside the Westin Hotel entrance is a magnificent fountain area, with contrived twin waterfalls that delicately and perpetually drop shimmering walls of wetness into the retaining pool below. As I got on the escalator that splits the waterfalls, I saw a man with torn, rolled-up pants carefully place the last layer of stained outerwear on the edge of the pool. He waded in, scooping up the coins that the tourists had tossed in, presumably while making their own wishes.
    A middle-aged woman in designer clothes was standing in front of me on the escalator. Watching the man and wagging her head, she said, ”Can you imagine anyone actually doing that?”
    I said, ”Maybe he hasn’t eaten for a while.”
    She looked at me as though I’d just accused Ronald Reagan of pedophilia, then turned away and clumped up the steps until she reached the backs of the next highest bunch of people. By the time I reached the top, a security staffer in a golf blazer was calling for backup on a walkie-talkie, and I wasn’t feeling so good anymore.
    Goldberg’s block stood basically as I remembered it, though less of it was actually standing since the last time I was there. Her address was a gray brick building with a veneered steel front door someone had tried peeling back without success. Ignoring an old, jammed buzzer, I pushed a bright nickel one. I waited two minutes, then pushed it again. There was a clanking noise, then the door opened. The woman behind it was perspiring and she said, ”Don’t be so impatient. I had to come down from the loft, you know.”
    ”If I hadn’t called first, how would you have known who it was?”
    ”If you hadn’t called first, I wouldn’t have come to the door at all. You want to talk down here or upstairs?”
    ”Down here” looked like a bombed-out German aircraft plant. ”Let’s try upstairs.”
    She secured things behind me, including a bolt like the one the natives used to keep King Kong on his side of the wall. ”Come on then.”
    We went up a central, industrial-strength spiral staircase for the equivalent of four floors, then through a sealable trapdoor into her loft. The windows, or more accurately, the skylights, angled sixty degrees away from the roof, bathing the huge studio with sunshine. There were a dozen pieces of hewn furniture, in varying stages of completion, scattered around the room. She seemed to specialize in hardwood kitchen and bath cabinets.
    Goldberg walked toward a thickly upholstered but gut-sprung armchair that was obscured by a nearly finished floor cabinet that must have weighed fifty pounds. She bent over and hoisted the cabinet to chest level.
    ”Can I give you a hand with that?”
    ”I can manage.” She moved it off to the side without apparent effort and then flopped into the chair. Pushing forty if not past it, she was wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned and old army camouflage pants. Both were as covered with sawdust as the floor around her. Her hair was short, parted in the center and combed to the sides like an 1890s judge. She said, ”Homicide or Narcotics?”
    ”Neither. My name’s John Cuddy. I’m the guy the cops thought was the killer.”
    Tugging on an earlobe with her left hand, Goldberg slid her hand down the chair’s fanny cushion. She came up with a survivalist knife about a foot long. ”You have another gun, I’m dead. You don’t, you are.”
    I lowered my rump onto the third rung of a ladder beyond threatening range. ”Nice trick, but if you think somebody’s going to try to take you, it’s usually better not to be caught sitting down.”
    ”What do you want?”
    ”Somebody set me up for the killing.