There were just a few peanuts left. Dave Tanner rooted around absentmindedly in the bottom of the bowl. I signaled the waitress for another round of Budweisers and held up the bowl for her to see.
Tanner stared across the tables as the girl sashayed away from us. He’d thickened some since our days of humping through Thua Thien province, but he still played a mean game of pickup basketball. And he still sported a crewcut.
Only now he was an institutional bond salesman with a white-shoe Wall Street firm, one of those venerable second-tier outfits you see in the middle of the tombstone ads.
“Too broad abeam?” he asked.
“What?”
“Her ass.”
I shook my head. “She’s a good kid. Studying to be a lawyer.”
We were sitting underneath an oversized red umbrella in the outdoor patio of Cafe Centro on East Forty-fifth, surrounded by a barricade of shrubbery. It was a hazy late afternoon with just a faint breeze stirring. All around us office workers were scurrying home or out to an evening rendezvous. Men in dark suits with stress lines creasing their faces. Women in flowered dresses carrying shopping bags filled with credit card purchases. A couple at the next table were hunched together, deep in conversation. They’d had a few drinks already and, from the snatches of conversation I could hear, the guy was laying a full-court press on the girl to convince her to take him back to her apartment. Their faces weren’t more than a foot apart. They clutched each other’s hands and the intensity of his gaze would have been enough to scald her on the spot.
I brought the subject up first. “About Alicia…,” I said.
“What do you wanna know, old buddy?”
“Tell me what you know about what she was doing.”
He shrugged. “Cops came to see me too. Not too much I could tell them about her. I just saw her once or twice a year. At parties, mutual friends, that kind of thing, you know.”
He stopped talking and stared at the waitress’ breasts as she came to the table. Her body was fleshy but her waist was trim, so she carried some extra inches around her bust and hips. Her breasts were well-rounded and they swung forward as she bent over to pour our beers. She was wearing one of those barely-visible bras, more for support than for coverage. Her thin white cotton blouse didn’t hide very much.
She finished pouring and straightened up, flashing a bright smile, first at Tanner and then at me.
“Care for some more peanuts?” she asked.
“You sure are one hell of a waitress,” Tanner said.
She tossed her head and ran her fingers through her spun-copper hair. “I’m not really a waitress. I’m studying law at Fordham. Next year this time, I’ll be a lawyer.”
Tanner and I exchanged glances. He scratched his head and said, “Not a waitress. Well, I’ll bet you’ll be a hell of a lawyer. Give me your number. I’m going to need a good lawyer sooner rather than later.”
She laughed and tossed her hair again. She wasn’t pretty but she had the kind of submissive air a lot of men like.
“I won’t have the same number when I start to practice law. I’m going back home to Boston.”
“Shame it is,” Tanner said as she walked away, his eyes studying her backside.
“About Alicia,” I prodded him.
He considered for a minute. “I don’t know too much about her life now. It consisted mostly of her job from what I could see. You know how she was. She always put herself into her work, body and soul. She didn’t have time for too much else.”
I took a swallow of beer. It felt good and cold going down. “How was her work going?”
He shrugged and said, “I dunno. Hard to tell-difficult to say. She never told me anything about it.”
Then I asked the sixty-four dollar question. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
He polished off his beer and swiveled his head around searching for an instant refill. “Yup,” he nodded, “if it’s the same one I knew. A guy named Chisolm.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s chairman of a company called Insignia Biotech in Norwalk. A solid, substantial citizen.”
I knew what he was referring to. “How long had they been going out?”
“Maybe a year, I think.”
“Did she ever talk about him?”
“She once told me he satisfied her needs.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“She didn’t go into any details,” Tanner said. “You knew her. She was a gal who didn’t like to talk a lot-to open up, you know.”
I nodded.
I remembered.