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By Root 419 0

week later I came home from the gym and found an envelope under my door. It had no return address on it, but the scent of perfume told me who it was from. The letter had a postmark from Bimini and had been sent three days after Vivian and the Colonel left Williams and me standing on the beach up in Edgewater. I looked over my shoulder to see if Hackbart was sneaking up on me with a lasso, but there was no one there, so I locked the door behind me and opened the letter. It was written on stationery from a hotel named the Beachcomber.

Dear Jack:

Please write back to me as soon as you receive this letter. I am so worried about you. I know you don’t believe me, but I really do love you. I hope you can come and see me someday. What happened to Williams? My father is very concerned that he was picked up by the police. Please contact me as soon as possible.

Love always,

Vivian

I read the note again a couple of times just for effect, then tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. Then I sat at the little table in the kitchen and wrote a reply.

Dear Vivian:

I’m doing fine, and business is great. I’m even training Susan again. You remember her, don’t you? Tell Dad I said hello and how’s his old hammer hangin’? Williams? I’m afraid his health has taken a turn for the worse. Tell your dad he’d better start looking for a replacement. Try the ape cage at the Havana Zoo. You might find somebody there with the right qualifications. Stay in touch, but not by phone—the cops may not be through with me yet.

Love,

Jack

After things had settled down and nobody showed up to kill or arrest me, I decided to take a trip to New York, just to get out of Miami for a while before business picked up again. I decided to drive. I could have flown, of course, but I wanted to feel the distance. It had been five years, and while hardly anybody thinks of New York as a holy city, anyplace is holy if that’s where you were born, if that’s the first place your spirit will fly to when you die. I had the feeling that when my time came, mine would fly to New York, but now I had business there. I was going home, and I wanted it to take a while. As it turned out, it took longer than I figured, because somewhere in the middle of Georgia, the T-Bird snapped a fan belt. That set me back a day, but I didn’t care. It was early in September, and most of my clients—rich, traveling bastards that they were—were still out of town.

Despite the continuing protests of the Thunderbird, I made it to New York about eight o’clock on a Friday night, in the middle of a thunderstorm that would have done justice to Miami, so I checked in to a motel out in Queens, ate dinner at an all-night Greek diner that I remembered from the old days, and later on fell asleep watching the Jets give the Dolphins a good preseason whipping. Some things never change.

I spent the next day visiting a few old friends, some of them from the college days and a few from the cop days. I went to a bar named Chauncey’s in the West Village where police and firefighters used to hang out and sat at the bar and drank one drink too many. All the old guys from my other life were still there, and they treated me like the prodigal son. The bartender still remembered me, and that’s always a good sign. Still, when I left the bar that night and walked through what’s left now of Little Italy, I understood for certain that I really didn’t belong there anymore. Sure, you can go home again. You just can’t stay there for very long.

I wandered around Manhattan for a while looking for the New York I had known, but I couldn’t quite find it. It seemed always just out of reach, always a potential, a remembered scent, lingering maybe just around the next corner. Oh, most of the places were still there. The noise was the same, and the crowds and the pigeons were all there, but somehow I felt like a ghost. I walked a lot. I walked looking for a sense of nostalgia I couldn’t find, and I felt, finally, somehow traitorous for not having found it. I walked uptown to Fifty-ninth Street where Central Park begins, then turned east