I took a fast shower after Angie’s and came back into the living room to find her rummaging through piles of her clothes. She wore a pair of black boots, black jeans, and no shirt over her black bra as she went through a stack of T-shirts.
“Mistress Gennaro,” I said. “My, my. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.”
She smiled at me. “Oh, you like this look?”
I let my tongue fall over my lip and panted.
She came over to me, a black T-shirt hanging from her index finger. “When we get back here later, feel free to take it all off.”
I panted some more and she gave me a beautiful, wide grin, mussed my hair with her hand.
“Sometimes you’re sorta cute, Kenzie.”
She turned to walk back to the couch and I reached out and caught her around the waist, pulled her back to me. Our kiss was as long and deep as the first one we’d had in the bathroom the night before. Maybe longer. Maybe deeper.
When we broke from it, her hands on my face, mine on her lower back, I said, “I’ve been meaning to do that all day.”
“Don’t control your impulses next time.”
“You’re fine with last night?”
“Fine? I’m great.”
“Yes,” I said, “you are.”
Her hands came down my cheeks, rested on my chest. “When this is over, we’re going away.”
“We are?” I said.
“Yes. I don’t care if it’s to Maui or just down the street to the Suisse Chalet, but we’re putting a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and ordering room service, and we’re staying in bed for a week.”
“Whatever you say, Mistress Gennaro. You’re the boss.”
Donald Yeager took one look at Angie in her black leather jacket, jeans, boots, and Fury in the Slaughterhouse concert T-shirt with the rip over her right rib cage, and I’m quite sure he started composing his letter to the Penthouse Forum on the spot.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Mr. Yeager?” she said. “I’m Candy Swan from WAAF.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” she said.
He opened his apartment door wide. “Come in. Come in.”
“This is my assistant, Wild Willy.”
Wild Willy?
“Yeah, yeah,” Donald said, hustling her in and barely glancing at me. “Nice to meet you and shit.”
He turned his back to me and I came in behind him and shut the door. His apartment complex was a pale, pink brick building on Montvale Avenue, Stoneham’s main strip. The building was squat and ugly, two stories high, and probably housed about sixteen units. Donald’s studio apartment, I assumed, was representative. A living room with a foldout couch that spilled dirty sheets from under the cushions. A kitchen too small to cook an egg in. From the bathroom off to the left, I could hear the steady drip of water. A scraggly roach ran along a baseboard by the couch, probably not looking for food so much as lost and disoriented from the mushroom cloud of pot smoke that hung over the living room.
Donald tossed some newspapers off the couch so Angie could take a seat under a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide poster of Keith Richards. It was a photo I’d seen before, taken back in the early seventies. Keith looked to be very stoned—surprise—and leaned against a wall with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the omnipresent cigarette in the other, wearing a T-shirt that bore the words JAGGER SUCKS.
Angie sat down and Donald looked up at me as I threw the bolt lock on his door and removed my gun from its holster.
“Hey!” he said.
“Donald,” Angie said, “we don’t have a lot of time here, so we’ll be brief.”
“What’s this got to do with AAF, dude?” He looked at my gun and even though I hadn’t raised it from its place down by my knee, he recoiled as if he’d been slapped.
“The AAF story was bullshit,” Angie said. “Sit down, Donald. Now.”
He sat. He was a pale kid, emaciated, with bushy yellow hair cut short and sticking straight up off his apple-shaped head. He looked at the bong on the coffee table in front of him and said, “You guys narcs?”
“Stupid people annoy me,” I said to Angie.
“Donald, we’re not narcs. We’re people with guns and not a lot of time. So, what happened the night Anthony Lisardo died?”
He clapped his hands over his face so hard I was sure it would leave welts. “Oh, man! This is about Tony? Oh man, oh man!”
“This is about Tony,” I said.
“Oh, dude!”
“Tell us about Tony,” I said. “Right now.”
“But then you’ll kill me.”
“No we won’t.” Angie patted his leg. “I promise.”
“Who put the coke in his cigarettes?” I said.
“I don’t know. I. Do. Not. Know.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
I cocked the pistol.
“Okay, I am,” he said. “I am. Put that thing away. Please?”
“Say her name,” I said.
It was the “her” that got him. He looked at me like I was death itself and cringed on the couch. His legs rose off the floor. His elbows tightened against his sparrow’s chest.
“Say it.”
“Desiree Stone, man. It was her.”
“Why?” Angie said.
“I don’t know.” He held out his hands. “Really. I don’t. Tony’d done some shit for her, something illegal, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He just said stay away from the chick because she was bad fucking news, buddy.”
“But you didn’t stay away.”
“I did,” he said. “I did. But she, man, she came over here, like, supposedly to buy some weed, you know? And, man, she, I gotta tell ya, she, well, wow, is all I can say.”
“She screwed you so hard your eyes spun,” Angie said.
“My toes spun, man. And, like, all’s I can say is, well, she should have a ride named after her at Epcot. You know?”
“The cigarettes,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, right.” He looked down at his lap. “I didn’t know,” he said softly. “What was in them. I swear to God. I mean, Tony was my best friend.” He looked at me. “My best friend, man.”
“She told you to give him the cigarettes?” Angie said.
He nodded. “They were his brand. I was just supposed to leave them in his car. You know? But then we went driving and ended up down at the reservoir, and he lights one up and goes out into the water, and then he gets this funny look on his face. Like he’s stepping on something and he don’t like the way it feels? Anyway, that was it. Just that funny look on his face and he sorta touched his chest with his fingertips, and then he went under water.”