Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [12]
She just sat and looked at me. “Maybe all those things are true.”
I looked back at her. “Maybe they are, I don’t know. But I know that your husband loves you, that’s for sure. I know he could be something, and that he wants you to be too. But he don’t have a fighting chance against Marie, does he? He has to work.”
“Marie works too.”
“You know what I mean, Mrs. Jefko. This has got to end.”
“You can’t make me do anything—I have my own life—”
“I’m not telling you what to do—I’m saying this has to end. And you know it does too. Sooner or later your husband will find out—or you’ll move out to be with Marie, or something. I just mean it won’t go on like it has been.”
I looked at her face and I saw that she hadn’t been thinking that far ahead, although the odds were that Marie had. Then she asked me what she should do, and I said I didn’t know. I told her the only reason I was there was that I didn’t want to be the one to tell her husband, that I thought she could try again with him, maybe move to a different place. “Talk to someone, the two of you together. I don’t know. But something.”
“You don’t look like Dear Abby.”
“What do I look like?”
“You look like a nasty, cold man. And I think you should get out of my house.”
I thought so too. There wasn’t anything else I could say. I didn’t have the right words, and she understood that. I went back downstairs and back to my office. When I saw the kid a few hours later, I told him that his wife wasn’t involved with any other man as far as I could tell.
A couple of days later, he grabbed me outside of Mama Wong’s. He told me his wife had told him the whole story, even about me being there. His eyes looked bad, and he wanted to go in two different directions. “Mr. Burke, I know why you went to see her. You should have told me yourself. You ain’t no fucking marriage counselor. It’s my problem, and I can handle it.”
“All right, kid. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you’re sorry. You did it all wrong. You should have just told me.”
“Look, kid—”
“Hey, fuck you, okay? How much I owe you for the last work?”
“Two hundred.”
The kid looked at me, trying to make up his mind. He finally did. “Well, you can go scratch for that money, Burke. I ain’t paying you. You didn’t do your fucking job. How’s that?”
“Okay, kid,” I said, and just walked away. I knew he was staring after me but, like he said, I hadn’t earned the money.
Mama Wong got a letter for me from the kid a few weeks later. As soon as I saw the return address, I knew what had happened. I went to see the kid in the Tombs, wearing my nice pinstripe with an attache case full of file folders and business cards in case the guards wanted proof I was a lawyer. But they didn’t give a damn. They were holding the kid for homicide—his wife. He looked all right when they brought him down to the interview room, calm and relaxed, his hands full of documents. “Mr. Burke, my lawyer says I’m going to trial on this in a few weeks. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“What can I do now?”
“Nobody can do nothing now. I did what I had to do, what I thought was right. Just like you did—just like she did. I just got to clear something up first. About my car.”
“What about the car, kid?”
“I don’t want the lawyer to have it, okay? He already got paid too much by my father. My father don’t know any better—he wants me to cop to manslaughter or something, says I’ll only get a few years. I don’t want a few years.”
“You want me to investigate . . . ?”
“I don’t want you to do nothing, Mr. Burke. I understand a few things now. Not everything, but a few things—enough. I just want to get everything in order, make things right.”
“What things?”
“Those things that are left. Nothing ever would have worked out with Nancy anyway