“I’ve had two tarts and two coffees,” Claire sniffed with dignity.
“Ah,” said Stefan, not knowing what else to say.
“My meter,” Claire stood.
“Marvelous running into you,” he gave her his most radiant smile and she wiggled her fingers at him.
Creep, thought Claire.
Bitch, thought Stefan.
The redhead across the way scissored his lips between two fingers and wondered, What’s a four-letter word for contradict?
By the time she got home the breeze had turned to wind and the Mayor lay in the middle of it out on the lawn. This is the beginning of the end, is what he thought. It won’t get any more summery after this. It will only get less. Before you could run around the johnny pump autumn would be close enough to bite you. That was the thing about summer. It started up slow, taking its fine time getting established, and then once it was there and you just figured out how to cope with it, it would hurry along all willy-nilly right before your very eyes. Rather, he pondered, like life.
Claire commandeered the boat of a car into the drive and pulled it up alongside the house, the way she’d seen Carmela do it. She got a little too close though, and had to disembark on the passenger side. Sliding over, she felt something sticky under her fingers. “Yuck!” she said out loud. It was Freddy’s blood. She spit on her hanky then changed her mind and went into the glove compartment to find some tissues. They were crumpled but she used them, scrubbing with short, disgusted strokes. When she raised the vinyl backrest a crack to get the rest clean, she noticed something in there glitter. Sure enough, it was some sort of gadget—no, it was a cufflink. A cufflink in the shape of a roulette wheel! The Erie Lackawanna freight train roared through the neighborhood, obliterating everything but the green, green leaves on the trees.
Claire sank to the ground beside the Mayor. Her fingers, he noticed when she touched him, were clammy and trembling. “What does it mean?” she asked him, burying her face in his fur. “What on earth does it mean?” She didn’t want to go on into the house just yet. She had to think. It meant, she supposed, one of two things: Carmela or Freddy. Carmela was out. She might not be in her right mind but she was not crazy. At least not that crazy. Was she? Good Lord, of course not. Claire remembered Carmela as a very little girl. She would wheel Michael and herself around the neighborhood in their broken-down stroller. She’d hated them fiercely but she’d kept a good eye on them. It could never have been Carmela. Freddy. Claire put her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes around and around. Who knew what he was capable of. She was going to have to tell Zinnie about this. The Mayor barked. She opened her eyes. There was Johnny Benedetto looking at her from his car. He was pulled up on the wrong side of the road, one fine dark arm crooked handsomely out the window.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Still hanging out with your rich friend?”
“Oh, boy. I’m not in the mood for this.”
Johnny made a sour, disgruntled face and pretended he was feeling his chin for stubble. He wasn’t always, she noticed, the handsomest of dons. It didn’t make her like him less, it made her like him more. At least he wasn’t continually intimidating. He could be occasionally vulnerable.
“I like you a lot better,” she said. “You’re more my type.”
“Oh, yeah?”
With that one shot of honesty he seemed to return to his complacent, obnoxious self.
“And now I’m very sorry I told you that,” she told him, annoyed.
“Yeah, well, that’s you all the way: give an inch and take back a yard.”
“Am I? Am I really like that?”
“I don’t know. Are you? What do you do, piece together who you are with your lover’s odd remarks?”
“Jesus, I don’t know.” She patted the Mayor’s head. “Are you my lover?”
“I’d like to be.”
She looked up at him. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
“Tell.”
“I found this stuck in Carmela’s car seat.” She handed it to him. “And don’t go thinking it must be Carmela, because I happen to know that it couldn’t be. So forget about it. But she’s been seeing—”
“Fred Schmidt.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Those two have been painting the town. And they’re pretty stupid if they think they’re being sneaky. Then they’ve got that cabbage following them around everywhere they go. He sticks out like a sore thumb, with that red hair.”
Claire stared at him. “Who?”
“The jealous boyfriend.”
“Carmela has another boyfriend?”
“No. Freddy does. The one who’s always hanging around here. Looking in the windows in the middle of the night. At first I thought he was spying on Zinnie. Then I figured out it was Carmela he had a case on. The jealous bartender. You must have seen him.”
“Now I know who Iris von Lillienfeld was talking about.”