Fat Tuesday(23)

"No," Burke replied honestly as he dried his face with a hand towel.

"Not much."

"Are you going to work me over, too?"

He turned away from the sink and looked at her, wondering when she had turned so snide and unapproachable. Had she always been that way?

Or had years of dissatisfaction and unhappiness made her into the bitter woman confronting him now? Either way, he hardly recognized her as the bride he'd started a life with. He didn't know this woman at all, and he saw nothing there that he cared to know.

"I'm not even going to honor that question with an answer." "You've abused me, Burke. Just not with your fists."

"Whatever." He stepped around her and went into the bedroom, where he reached beneath the bed for his suitcase, into which he began emptying his bureau drawers.

"What are you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Don't think for one minute that you can file for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Our problems began long before " "Before you started wall-banging other men in our shower?"

"Yes!" she spat."And he isn't the first."

"I'm not interested." After cramming a few items from the closet into the suitcase, he latched it.

"Where are you going?"

"I haven't the faintest."

"But I know where I can find you, don't I?"

"Right," he replied, letting it go at that. He'd be damned before defending his work ethic to his cheating wife."As for filing," be my guest, Barbara. I won't contest any charges you lay on me. Say I'm a sorry provider, a brute, say I'm queer. I couldn't care less."

He glanced around to see if there was anything he'd overlooked, and it saddened him to realize how easily and quickly he had packed. They hadn't lived together in these rooms, they had merely resided. He was walking away with nothing personal. He had packed only the bare essentials that could have belonged to anyone. He was leaving behind nothing of value to him. Not even Barbara.

He wasn't even certain the building would still be there. But he found it squatting between similar buildings, all stubbornly withstanding the encroachment of development around them.

The escalating tourist trade was rapidly destroying the uniqueness of New Orleans, which was the attraction that caused tourists to flock to the city in the first place. It was a paradox that defied logic.

Burke would have hated to find this building destroyed, because, for all its signs of aging, it had character. Like a dowager who clung to fashions of decades past, it wore its age with dignity and an admirable air of defiance. A section of the ironwork was missing off the second-story balcony. The front brick walkway was buckled. Weeds sprouted from cracks in the mortar, but there was an element of pride in the pot of pansies on each side of the gate, which squeaked when Burke pushed it open.

The first door on his left was designated as belonging to the building manager. Burke rang the bell. The man who answered wasn't the landlord he remembered from years before, but this one and the one in his memory were virtually interchangeable. The apartment behind the stooped, elderly gentleman was a stifling ninety degrees and smelled of a cat box. In fact, he was holding a large tabby in one arm as he peered curiously at Burke through the rheumy eyes of a lifetime alcoholic.

"Do you have a vacancy?"

The only thing required for leasing an apartment was a hundred dollar bill to cover the first week's rent."That includes a change of towels on the third day," he was told by the landlord who shuffled up the stairs in his slippers to show Burke the corner apartment on the second floor.

Basically it was one room. A shabby curtain was a nod toward privacy for the commode and tub. The bed was a double that dipped in the middle.

The kitchen amounted to a sink, a narrow shelf, a refrigerator not much larger than a mailbox, and a two-burner hot plate that the landlord believed was in working order.

"I won't be doing much cooking," Burke assured him as he accepted the key.

A black-and-white TV set chained to the wall was about the only amenity that had been added since he had rented here nearly twenty years ago after leaving his hometown of Shreveport to accept a job with the N.O.P.D.

Before he could find more suitable lodging, he had leased a temporary room in this building and wound up staying eighteen months.

His recollections of it were hazy. He hadn't spent much time in the apartment, because he was at the station nearly every waking hour, learning from the veterans, volunteering for overtime, and catching up on the paper-shuffling that was the scourge of policemen around the world. He'd been a young crusader then, committed to ridding the world of crime and criminals.

Tonight a less idealistic Burke Basile drew a hot bath in the antique claw-footed tub and climbed into it with an uncapped bottle of Jack Daniel's black. He drank straight from the bottle, watching dispassionately as a cockroach the size of his thumb scuttled across the water-stained wallpaper.

When a guy catches his wife in flagrante delicto with another man, the first order of business after beating the shit out of the other man and buying a bottle of whiskey, which he intends to drink from until it's empty is to reassure himself that he can still get it up.

So, with his free hand, he brought himself erect. Closing his eyes, he tried to replace the image of Barbara f*cking the football coach with a fantasy that would sustain his erection long enough for him to enjoy it and bring him to an ego-restoring climax.