LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I’m fine,” Decker mumbled out. He sounded winded himself. Rina noticed his choppy breathing.

      “You’re not fine! Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?”

      “It was hot in there,” Decker said. “That’s all.” He willed his legs to stop but they wouldn’t.

      “Stop, will you!” Rina cried out.

      Her voice—so desperate. He slowed his pace and said, “I just wanted to take a walk.”

      “You just came back from a walk.”

      “I wanted to take another one,” Decker said. “What the hell is wrong with that!”

      His voice sounded foreign—full of rage. Full of fear.

      “I need to be alone.”

      “Peter, please …” She grabbed his arm. “I love you. Tell me what’s wrong!”

      Decker stopped abruptly, picked her hand off his arm, and kissed her fingers. “I’ve got to be by myself now. I’m sorry, Rina, but please leave me alone.” He dropped her hand and ran off.

      Six hours to kill with fifteen dollars and twenty-two cents spending cash. Decker had left the credit cards in the bedroom, so checking into a motel for the night was out of the question. Not that he’d do it, but he wished he had the option. He found a cab at Fourteenth and Fifty-eighth, slid onto the black bench seat and ran his hands over his face.

      The cabbie was Indian or Pakistani—chocolate-brown skin with straight black hair and a name with a lot of double o’s and ini’s in it. After a minute of waiting, the driver said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

      The “sir” came out like serrrrr. A rolling tongue gathers no moss. Decker felt mean and punch-drunk, realized he was probably scaring the poor guy.

      “What’s there to see around here?” he growled.

      “See?”

      “Yeah, see,” Decker said. “Any interesting sights around here?”

      “Around here?” the cabbie said. “Here is very, very Jewish area.”

      Very, very came out veddy, veddy.

      The cabbie went on, “Not much to see except Jews, but you can see a lot of them.”

      Decker said, “There a public library around here?”

      He needed someplace to think, someplace to figure out how to disappear for two days.

      “There is Brooklyn Central Library,” the driver said. “It is located in a very pretty park. Shall I take you there, sir?”

      Decker told him to take him there. The cabbie was bent on giving a guided tour.

      “I go by Flatbush Avenue. A very, very long time ago, I thought it was the longest street in Brooklyn but it is not. Bedford is.”

      The avenue at best was unremarkable, at worst it exemplified everything wrong with inner cities—old crumbling buildings, trash-strewn vacant lots, and gang-graffitied tenement housing. But the cabbie seemed oblivious to this, kept on talking about how Manhattan was for the rich, but Brooklyn was where the real people lived. Decker wasn’t sure whether he was jacking up the fare by taking a longer route or was just one of those rare, friendly guys.

      “Brooklyn Museum is in Prospect Park, sir. The same architect that designed Central Park in Manhattan designed Prospect Park. A very, very pretty park. You can go boating, but not now. It is tooooo cold.”

      Whatever the driver’s reasons were for the tour, Decker wished he would shut up. He had to calm down and the sucker was making him veddy, veddy antsy.

      He had to calm down.

      Of all the people to meet.

      Maybe it wasn’t her. Just maybe it wasn’t. There could be dozens of Frieda Levines. (Levine? He’d remembered it as Levy or Levin.)

      Frieda Levine—a common Jewish name, it could be equivalent to Mary Smith. But even as he tried to convince himself otherwise, he knew it was no use.

      The picture. That old, old picture.

      It was definitely her. Decker had sharp eyes, had matched too many disguised faces to too many mug shots not to see it.

      Just age the damn face.

      The cabbie stopped the lecture for a moment.

      “Where are you from?” he asked.

      “Los Angeles,” Decker said.

      “Oh, L.A.,” the driver said. “Very, very good. If you want I can show you Ebbets field where your Dodgers used to play.”

      “Just take me to the library.”

      “Not much to see,” the cabbie went on, “a housing project now. But some people are very, very sentimental.”

      “I’m not.”

      “Are you interested in architecture, sir?” the driver said. “Or perhaps real estate? Two days ago I took a rich man to see the brownstones on Eastern Parkway. He was very, very impressed.”

      Decker tightened his fists and said, “Just the library.”

      “While you’re here, you should see the Grand Army Plaza. It has a very, very big arch.”

      “I’ve seen loads of arches at McDonald’s.” Decker scowled.

      “Oh, no,” the cabbie answered. “This one is not like that. It is much bigger. And older too.”

      “I’m not interested in seeing any arch—”

      “It is a very nice arch.”

      Decker enunciated each word. “Just take me to the library.”

      “We drive right past the arch to the library—”

      “All right, show me the friggin arch!”

      “Well, if you do not want to see the arch—”

      “I want to see the arch,” Decker said. “In fact, I want to see the arch so badly that if I don’t see the arch, someone will pay.”

      Decker looked in the rearview mirror. The cabbie’s mouth had frozen into an O. He steered the taxi by the arch, then took Decker to the library. Throughout the remaining portion of the trip, he didn’t say another word.

       4

      This was the alibi: He’d suddenly remembered an important detail to a very important case and he had to use a pay phone because it would have been a breach of ethics to let anyone else overhear him and he had to get in touch with Marge at the station house because someone’s life depended on it, well, not only someone’s life but the whole California judicial system—

      Then Decker thought: Even the most complicated phone call in the world wouldn’t explain an absence of six hours. God’s judgment day around the corner and his mind was full of half-baked lies.

      The night held a bitter chill, dampness oozing through his clothes and into his bones. His toes and fingers were as cold and stiff as marble. Used to the temperate zone all his life, he had blood the consistency of rubbing alcohol.

      He came to the street, then the house. Lights shining through the windows, smoke undulating from the chimney. And the smells. He dreaded the people but the structure looked so damned inviting. Approaching the door, he turned up his collar, tried to mask his face as best he could. Just in case she happened to be there.

      As he stepped onto the porch, he pulled his scarf over his head.

      So they’d think him psychotic. Who the hell cared?

      Rina swung

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