Out of the Easy(11)

I heard the piano as I approached the door. I stopped and leaned against the railing to listen. Patrick played so expressively that I often learned more about him from how he played than the things he told me. Despite our friendship, there had always been a low fence between us. I couldn’t figure out if I was the one who put it there, or Patrick. This morning he was playing Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was happy, peaceful. It amazed me how some people could touch an instrument and create something so beautiful, and when others tried, like me, it just sounded like mangled noise. I knocked on the door and the piano stopped abruptly.

“Happy New Year!” I said, holding up a bag I had packed in Willie’s kitchen.

Patrick’s glossy blond hair was disheveled and he still had imprints of waxy lipstick on the side of his face.

“Ah, now I see why you’re playing romantic Rachmaninoff. Got lots of smooches at midnight, did you?” I said, pushing past him into the house. Something about the lipstick bothered me.

“No, it was after midnight. I think people felt sorry for me because of this.” Patrick turned the left side of his face to me. A large bruise, the color of a plum, swelled across his temple into his hairline.

“Patrick! What happened?”

“What happened? You clocked me with a book. Don’t you remember?”

I sucked in a breath. “Oh, Patrick, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. I told everyone I beat up a thief who was trying to rob an old woman on Bourbon,” said Patrick. “I’m a hero.”

Patrick was a hero, to me anyway. When he was six, his mother left Charlie and ran off to the West Indies to marry a sugar baron. Charlie was devastated but did right by Patrick and raised him well. Unlike me, Patrick held no grudge against his mother, just shrugged and said he understood. He looked forward to his trips to the West Indies to see her. Charlie treated Patrick more like a colleague than a son. They built the business together and, until recently, worked side by side every day.

Mr. Marlowe sat in the living room on a chair near the window, clutching a tattered heart-shaped box that once held Valentine chocolates. “That’s new,” I whispered to Patrick.

“I don’t know where it came from. He won’t let go of it,” said Patrick. “Even sleeps with it. But I don’t care. At least he’s staying put.”

A few months before, Patrick’s father went through a period where he would get up in the middle of the night and try to leave the apartment in his pajamas. Patrick installed locks on the door that could only be opened with a key, but then Mr. Marlowe tried to climb out of a window. Willie got some medicine from Dr. Sully that helped, but now Mr. Marlowe rarely spoke.

“Happy New Year, Charlie!” I said, bending down and putting my hand on his knee.

His milky blue eyes slowly wandered over to my face. He stared at me with such a blank expression that I wondered if he even saw me. He squeezed the pink satin box against his chest and turned his head away.

“Do you know what’s inside the box?” I asked Patrick.

“I have no idea. Like I said, he won’t let me near it. I couldn’t even comb his hair today. Look at him. He looks like Albert Einstein.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll comb his hair.”

I crossed from the living room under the wide arch into the kitchen. I waved the twenty-dollar bill at Patrick and put it under the cookie tin on the shelf above the sink. “From Willie, via Dora’s toilet tank.”

“How bad was it this morning?”

“It wasn’t horrible,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee and unpacking the bag. “Sticky floors. Evangeline was cranky and threw a shoe at me. She’ll be in the attic for five days.”

“By the look on your face, I thought it was something really bad,” said Patrick, teetering back on the kitchen chair.

“There is something bad,” I said quietly over my shoulder from the stove. “Really bad.”

“What?”

“Remember that nice man from Memphis who came into the shop yesterday?”

“Of course. The rich football-playing poet,” said Patrick.

“Yeah, him.” I turned around from the sink. “He’s dead.”

Patrick’s chair thumped down against the floor. “What?”

I brought my coffee to the table and sat down. “He died in the Sans Souci last night.”

“Where’d you hear about it? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Willie told me, but said she didn’t know any details. I just can’t believe it. Cokie talked to the bandleader, and he said that Mr. Hearne just slumped over and died at the table.”

Patrick crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow.

“Exactly. Did that man not look fit as a fiddle?”

“I’ll say he did,” said Patrick. “I would have taken him for a Vandy football player now. Did he end up buying anything yesterday?”

“Keats and Dickens. And the man had a bankroll something huge, along with a Lord Elgin watch and an expensive fountain pen.”

“Keats and Dickens, huh?” said Patrick. “That doesn’t sound like a mess of a man.” Patrick turned away from me. “It’s a shame. He seemed like such a nice man.”

I nodded. “Thanks for covering for me about the college stuff. I would have been embarrassed after he assumed I was at Newcomb.”