Lights Out Read online

  They sat on the bench. Jack glanced around, took in the signs, the guards, the prisoner sitting on the other bench with a toothless old woman. He licked his lips. “Is everything okay?”

  “Okay?”

  “Besides the food, I mean. You’re not being … mistreated, or anything?”

  “I’m in jail for something I didn’t do. Is that okay?”

  “It’s horrible-worse than horrible,” Jack said, laying a hand on Eddie’s knee. “But aside from that.”

  A C.O. got up. “Knock off the fag shit.”

  “We’re brothers,” Eddie said, raising his voice slightly, within the acceptable limit.

  “So?”

  There was no use arguing: Eddie had learned that in the first few weeks. Jack had already removed his hand anyway. He didn’t look quite so good now, and the sweat stains were spreading.

  The other prisoner was watching them. Eddie had seen him playing cards in the rec room. His name was Louie. He smiled at Eddie. Eddie ignored him.

  Eddie and Jack lost the thread of the conversation, fell silent despite the wall clock ticking away the time they had together. After a while Jack licked his lips again and said: “There’s nothing new, Eddie. I’m sorry.”

  Eddie had known that the moment Jack came in the room. Nothing new meant that JFK still hadn’t been found. And finding him was only step one. Without a confession from JFK, without some statement that he was responsible and that Eddie had had nothing to do with the dope on Fearless, there was no hope of a retrial.

  “Mandy?”

  “Disappeared.” Jack stared at the unpainted cement floor. “We still don’t know if she was in on it anyway.”

  “Why else would she go overboard?”

  “Maybe she just knew the load was there and took off when she saw trouble coming.”

  Without warning me, Eddie thought. The implication of that was clear, had been clear from the beginning, although it meant less and less as time went by.

  “We’ve had this discussion,” Jack went on, glancing at the toothless old woman and the prisoner named Louie before looking again at Eddie. “Mandy doesn’t matter. What matters is JFK. No one saw him leave the island. Brice hasn’t even been able to find out what his real name is, if he has one.”

  “Why did he try to raise us on the radio?”

  “Because you were running off with his investment. We’ve been through this too.”

  “But he got cut off.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Jack shrugged.

  “The radio was in the bar. Someone must have seen him. The question is who.”

  Jack sighed. “The question is where did he go.”

  “Maybe he went to France.”

  “France?”

  “He speaks French.”

  Silence. One of the C.O.s removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard. “Brice charges two hundred a day,” Jack said.

  “Borrow,” Eddie said, his voice rising over the acceptable limit. “Borrow on your seven and a half percent.”

  The C.O. put his glasses back on, gave Eddie a red-eyed glare.

  Jack’s voice rose too. “Seven and a half percent of what?”

  “Fucking can it,” said the red-eyed C.O.

  “Galleon Beach,” Eddie said, more quietly.

  Jack shot Eddie a quick and angry glance. “The bank foreclosed last week.” He looked away. “Packer’s finished. Trimble, with his pious little scruples, finished him.”

  “He’s a good man.” Trimble had given Jack a thousand dollars to retain Brice.

  “He fucked us,” Jack said. “All because …” He went silent.

  Eddie leaned forward. Their faces were very close. “Are you blaming me?” he said.

  Jack didn’t answer. The prisoner named Louie smiled at Eddie again.

  “Are you?”

  “Let’s not argue,” Jack said. Eddie smelled alcohol on his brother’s breath.

  “Get me out of here,” he said.

  “I’m trying, Eddie.” Jack’s voice broke.

  They sat together on the bench while the hands on the wall clock circled toward the end of the visiting period. Jack shook his head. “Everything went to shit so fast.”

  The C.O.s rose the instant the minute hand touched twelve for the second time. “What’s happening?” Jack asked.

  “You have to go.”

  “God.”

  They got up, embraced again. “Hang on,” Jack said. “At the very worst …”

  “Say bye-bye,” said a C.O., coming closer.

  “At the very worst what?” Eddie said.

  “Please take this the right way, Eddie. Five to fifteen, but at the very worst it means you’ll be out in less than four, with time off for good behavior. It’s bad, I know. But you’ll only be-”

  Eddie squeezed his brother’s arm as hard as he could. “Get me out of here.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder.”

  Jack hadn’t known the meaning of the very worst. Brice couldn’t find JFK and sent his letter informing Eddie of the closing of the investigation a month or two later. By that time it didn’t matter. Louie and the Ozark brothers got Eddie in the showers a week after Jack’s visit. Less than four swelled to the full fifteen. Jack never returned to the visitor’s room. He sent food packages at Christmas and Eddie’s birthday for a few years, then just at Christmas, then not at all. That was understandable too.

  “Where can I drop you?”

  Eddie opened his eyes. Ram was looking at him. They were on a bridge, stuck in traffic. Ahead lay Manhattan. Eddie had never been there, but it couldn’t be anything else. The tops of the towers were hidden in the clouds. The snow had turned to rain, steaming the windows of the cars.

  “Two-twenty-two Park Avenue,” Eddie said.

  “You live on Park Avenue?”

  “That’s where you can drop me.”

  “I’m not going uptown.”

  “Anywhere’s fine.”

  “Washington Square?”

  “Sure,” Eddie said, although he had no idea where it was.

  Ram drove across the bridge, got stuck in more traffic by a river. “It’s funny,” Ram said, “when I saw you shaved your head and all, I got the idea you’d been with us, maybe not too long ago.”

  “With you?”

  “A convert.”

  “It’s ringworm,” Eddie said.

  There was no further discussion until Ram stopped by a grassless park and said, “Okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  Eddie got out. “Take this,” said Ram, handing him another bag of Holesome Trail Mix. He drove away. There were two bumper stickers on the back of his car. One read: “Krishna amp; Co.-Food for the Soul.” The other: “This car climbed Mt. Washington.”

  Rain fell, cold and hard. Eddie crossed the street. A woman was sitting on a scrap of cardboard with a baby and a sign: “Homeless and hungry. Please help.” Eddie handed her the trail mix.

  He had walked twenty or thirty blocks and was soaked to the skin before he realized that the description on the cardboard sign applied to him too. The thought had an odd effect: it filled him with a sense of well-being, made him smile. Everything was going to be all right-unlike the woman and her baby, he could always win money in swimming pools.

  12

  Two-twenty-two Park Avenue might have been one of the towers Eddie had seen from the bridge. It was all steel and glass, joined together at right angles, the top ten or twenty stories disappearing in the clouds. On the sidewalk below lay a man in a soggy blanket. He didn’t have a baby, just a sign: “Please help.” His eyes met Eddie’s. The look in them was as bad as anything Eddie had seen inside. That puzzled him. Out of Holesome Trail Mix, he reached into his pocket and found the $1.55 remaining from his gate money. The man made no move to take it. Eddie laid the money on the blanket, leaving himself with the two hundred-dollar bills, and followed a woman wearing a trenc
h coat and sneakers through a revolving door into the lobby.

  The lobby was probably the grandest room he’d ever been in. It had a fountain with water spouting from the mouth of a bearded sea god; a marble floor, marble walls, and a huge chandelier hanging from a ceiling several stories high; and at the far side, gleaming banks of brass elevators. Men and women dressed in suits and carrying briefcases got on and off in a hurry, funneling through a gap between two velvet ropes. Eddie was almost across the lobby when he noticed the two men in chocolate-colored uniforms standing at a desk in the gap between the ropes and realized it was a security check. He stopped dead.

  Relax, he told himself. He had passed through thousands of security checks, what was one more? And this one: like a child’s notion of security, with the silly uniforms and velvet ropes. Besides, you’re a free citizen, not an inmate. So: move. But he didn’t want to go through that security check, had to force himself to take those last steps.

  “Pass, sir?” said one of the security guards.

  “What?”

  The security guard’s eyes gave him a quick once-over. Eddie understood how he must have appeared in his soaked windbreaker, chinos, sneakers: much closer to the man in the blanket than to the ones with the suits and briefcases.

  “You need a pass,” said the security guard, dropping the sir.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Do you work here?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your business?”

  Eddie almost replied, “I’m looking for work,” before he realized the guard wanted to know what business he had in the building.

  “I’m here to see my brother,” Eddie said. “He’s got an office. Suite 2068.”

  “One moment. Sir.” The guard opened a book. “What name would that be?”

  “J. M. Nye,” said Eddie. “And Associates.”

  The guard ran his finger down a page, eyes scanning back and forth. “Don’t see it,” he said.

  “It might be 2086.”

  “That’s not the problem.” The guard turned the page. “The problem is there’s no J. M. Nye, period. Ring a bell?” he asked the other guard.

  “Nope.”

  The first guard spoke into a portable phone, too quietly for Eddie to hear. He put down the phone, shook his head at Eddie. “Nope.”

  “I know he was here at one time,” Eddie said. “Maybe he’s left his new address.”

  “We don’t keep information like that,” the guard said, glancing over Eddie’s shoulder. “Everybody’s always moving. This is New York.”

  People in suits were jamming up behind Eddie. The chocolate guards, without being aggressive about it, were blocking his way. He wasn’t going to get past this play-school security check.

  Eddie went back through the grand lobby, through the revolving door, into the street. The man in the blanket noticed him, tried to make eye contact again. But this was New York, where everyone moved. Eddie would have to move too. He kept going.

  Eddie had never been in a tower like 222 Park Avenue before, had seldom been in an office building of any kind, but he’d seen a lot of urban-drama type movies in prison, pseudo-experience he now relied on. He walked around the building until he found a parking garage, as he’d expected. He went down the ramp. A man in a glass booth watched him.

  “Forgot my briefcase,” Eddie said without stopping, the way some actor, Lee Marvin maybe, might have done it.

  The elevator door opened just as he got there. A good thing, in case the man in the booth was still watching. Eddie stepped in and pressed number twenty. The door slid closed; the elevator rose, but only to G, where it stopped. The door opened. Two women got on. Beyond them, Eddie could see the security check. One of the guards turned and looked his way. He blinked as the door closed.

  The women were well dressed, well groomed, angry inside. Eddie was good at knowing things like that; he’d had to be. The door opened at twelve and the women got out.

  “The residuals are a joke,” one said.

  “No one’s laughing,” answered the other.

  Eddie rode the rest of the way by himself, looking at his bald and damp reflection on polished brass.

  Bing. Twenty. The door opened, not, as Eddie had expected, into a corridor, but directly into a reception area hung with paintings, full of flowers. Werner, Pratt, Olmsted, Larch and Groot, read a plaque on the wall, but Eddie had no idea what they did.

  A man in a gray-flannel suit, yellow tie, and candy-striped shirt sat at the desk, tapping at a keyboard. “Sir?” he said.

  “Is this twenty sixty-eight?” Eddie said.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Or maybe twenty eighty-six.”

  “They don’t exist,” said the man. “This whole floor is Werner, Pratt. It’s simply two thousand.”

  “My brother’s office was here. J. M. Nye. And Associates.”

  The man looked blank. A phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. He was very polite. Eddie wanted to knock his computer off the desk, not hard, just a polite little toppling. Instead, he picked up a phone book lying on the desk, looked up J. M. Nye and J. M. Nye and Associates, found listings for neither. He closed the book. The man on the phone reached for it and tucked it in a drawer.

  Eddie returned to the lobby, hopping over the velvet rope on his way out. The security guards didn’t notice. Anyone already inside was presumed to be safe. That was another thing that differentiated this security check from the ones Eddie knew.

  He stood outside the revolving door, lost in thought. He wasn’t aware that he was standing over the man in the blanket until he felt a sharp kick against his ankle. He looked down.

  “This is my spot,” said the man, not seeming to recognize Eddie at all. “Fuck off.”

  Eddie didn’t like the implication, even though he’d already made the comparison himself, and he didn’t like being kicked. He recalled what he had done to the last man who’d kicked him. But Eddie did nothing this time. The man was protected by his blanket and his sign.

  An hour and a half later, Eddie was in Brooklyn, standing outside 367 Parchman Avenue. It was a dirty brick building a few stories high, without a homeless man, revolving door, marble lobby, or security check. There was just an outer door and an inner door, with a row of buzzers in the square hall between them. Eddie checked the label on Prof’s mailing tube and pressed buzzer three. Nothing happened. He pressed it a few more times, then tried the inner door. It opened.

  Number three was at one end of the basement corridor. The corridor was dark and full of smells-fried food, spilled beer, cigarette smoke. TV voices came through the door of number three. Eddie knocked.

  “Who is it?” A woman’s voice, impatient.

  “Ed Nye,” Eddie said, and started to add, “a friend of Prof’s.” The door opened before he could finish.

  “I know who you are.” The woman was tall and lean. Eddie didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a red terrycloth robe, not the reindeer sweater she’d had on in Prof’s photograph. She’d also seemed rounder in the photograph, and darker of hair and complexion, at least the way he remembered it. But he wasn’t sure how well he remembered it, especially since there’d been a little mixing in his mind of her image and the image of the woman in the porn shot that had been taped beside it.

  “Tiffany?” he said.

  “That’s me.” She had dark eyes, intelligent, alert, even excited, he thought, although he didn’t know what there was to be excited about.

  Eddie searched for some way to begin, found none, said, “Here,” and handed her the cardboard tube.

  “What’s this?”

  “From Prof. I said I’d mail it. But I was in New York anyway, so …” He took a step back, delaying his departure only to think of the phrase that would take him to good-bye.

  Tiffany put a hand on his forearm, a long white hand, nails painted red. “You’re not running off, are you? You’ve come all this way. At least I can give you coffee.”

/>   “No, thanks.”

  She didn’t remove her hand. “Please. Prof would be really pissed if he found out I didn’t even give you coffee.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. She let go.

  He followed her inside. She locked the door, slid two bolts into place. That gave Eddie a bad feeling. Cool it, he told himself.

  But the apartment did nothing to take the prison feeling away. For one thing, it was small. No hall, just a kitchen he was already in and a bedroom off it. For another, it had no windows. Light came from a fluorescent strip over the stove and the TV glowing by the unmade bed. It could have been midnight. Those reindeer sweaters had led him to expect something better. He glanced around for some sign of the two kids and saw none.

  Eddie sat at the kitchen table. Tiffany boiled water, spooned instant coffee into unmatched cups, poured. Through the bedroom doorway he heard the TV voices.

  “Milk and sugar?” asked Tiffany.

  “No, thanks.”

  She came behind him, leaning over to put his cup on the table. He smelled her, felt her breast press lightly against the side of his head. “Back in a sec,” she said.

  She went into the bedroom, closed the door. Eddie sipped the coffee. That first sip was good. On the second he realized it tasted like prison coffee, the same brand exactly. He drank it anyway, listening to the TV voices, fainter now. He thought he heard Tiffany’s voice too, maybe on the phone.

  The door opened. Tiffany came out, her hair brushed, smelling of something floral.

  “How’s the coffee?” she said, sitting down on the other side of the table. It was small, about the size of a cafe table for two.

  “Good.”

  She added three spoonsful of sugar to her own cup and stirred with her red-tipped finger. “This is great,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Really. Having you here is almost like, having him. Isn’t that weird?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “How is he?”

  “Doing all right.”

  “But what’s he doing, what’s he thinking, what’re his plans?”