The Gutter and the Grave Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Johnny’s is a friend of mine,” she said dubiously. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
    “Maybe you’d better listen to why I’m here first.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “Your husband is dead. Someone shot him.”
    The reaction is always the same. I would rather swim underwater and attach nuclear weapons to Russian battleships than tell a person a loved one is dead. There is nothing funny about death. It always hits a person right between the eyes, an awesome shock that knocks the breath from the chest and suddenly fills the eyes with agony. Nor is the reaction any different when a person is faking. It is almost impossible to tell fake shock from real shock, and so the reaction to news of death is always the same.
    Christine Archese reeled back from the blow of my words. I might just as well have struck her. Her mouth opened, and her head jerked back, and then her eyes were knifed with pain, and she brought her hands together in a sudden unconscious gesture and she said, “No!”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    She began crying then, suddenly and fitfully. The big breasts heaved, and the strong woman was not that anymore. She was a little girl faced with irremediable sorrow. The tears streaked down her cheeks, and she looked for a handkerchief and found none, and then she ran from the room and into the kitchen and unashamedly bawled into a dish towel. I sat in the living room. The rain outside had stopped. The apartment was silent except for the agonizing sound of Christine Archese weeping in the kitchen. I wished I had a drink.
    She came back into the living room in a little while. Her mascara was streaked and her face was red andswollen. But she was a woman with good facial bones, and crying did not rob her of the near-beauty that was hers. She sat opposite me very primly and very stiffly. It seemed as if she were trying now to cover what she considered an unforgivable breach in a behavior pattern she had long ago established for herself. This was not a delicately feminine woman. This was not a petite, pouting, fragile china doll who blushed prettily and insisted on candle-lit sex on clean sheets. This was a big woman, peasant stock, a woman who filled every corner of a bed, a woman who had not wept in a long time. And so now, coming back into the living room, she sat with her back stiff and the big bosom thrust forward high and proud, her knees and feet close together, her chin lifted, the fine bones of her face glistening wetly.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. She was not apologizing to me. She was apologizing to herself.
    “It’s not a sin to cry,” I said.
    “Isn’t it?”
    “Not when you’ve lost someone you loved.”
    “How do you know?” she said.
    “I’ve lost,” I told her.
    “And have you cried?”
    “I’ve cried.” Our eyes locked. “Yes, I’ve cried.”
    “Who killed him?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Johnny?”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because you said he was in trouble. Did he kill Dom?”
    “I don’t know.” I told her about the initials on the wall, and she listened attentively, nodding all the while, her hands clasped on her firm lap, her shoulders back.
    “I don’t think Johnny did it,” she said when I had finished. “Why should he?”
    “Did he tell you why he wanted to find me?”
    “The cash register thefts, do you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “He told me. He certainly didn’t suspect Dom.”
    “Did Dom ever discuss the thefts with you?”
    “No.”
    “Isn’t that a little odd?”
    “Well, you see…”
    I didn’t see, and I was waiting to see, but a knock sounded on the door just then. Christine rose to open it. I didn’t see who was standing in the doorframe. I knew only that it was a woman, and then Christine threw herself into the girl’s arms and began wailing again. Together, they went into the kitchen, and I heard her yelling, “Dom is dead, oh my God, what am I going to do,” and the other woman tried to hush her and console her, and