Lying in Ricky Weiss’s bed, an arm under Ricky Weiss’s sleeping wife, Big Rob didn’t struggle too much with whether or not it had been ethical. He wondered if it had been ironic – that this began with an investigation of an alleged cheating husband, and ended with him between a married woman’s sheets – but then decided he was confusing “irony” with another word, one that wouldn’t come to him just now. It didn’t matter what you called it. It was what it was: inevitable. Hell, that wasn’t the right word, either.
It made him ill to be in such an intimate array with a woman he now knew to be complicit in Philly’s death. Complicit? Was that right? Did he even know what really happened to Phil Canella? The drink and the dark and the postejaculatory haze dulled his ability to sum up.
The girls had consumed three rounds of juice and alcohol in various combinations before the six of them moved to a just-liberated and more comfortable round table. Big Rob delivered the promised charm in the form of compliments and jokes and reciprocal laughter. He told adventure stories from years back starring his formerly svelte self on high school lacrosse fields and in the navy and on the police force.
Late in the night, Big Rob was telling how he’d almost invested in the stock of some biotech company – human cloning, gene treatment for cancer, that sort of thing. He spent his money on a boat instead, and all of his friends got rich. “And I don’t even have the boat anymore,” Big Rob said to hearty, high-pitched laughter.
“Ricky and I are gonna be rich,” Peg blurted out, bringing a cranberry-colored drink to her lips almost as if she hoped the glass would act as a muzzle to keep her from blabbing.
“Tell us,” the blonde one named Linda said, demonstrating her faithfulness by a lack of skepticism.
“I can’t tell you all the details,” Peg giggled. “It’s a secret.” She made a not-so-discreet nod toward Big Rob, but when her eyes caught his, they stuck there, and she parted her thin lips in a way that Big Rob found incidentally sexy.
“I’m just passing through town,” he said. “Your secrets can stay here, as far as I’m concerned. What happens in Brixton, stays in Brixton, if you know what I mean.” He winked at no one in particular.
Peg brought them all together in a woozy huddle around the table. “Ricky and I have the goods on this rich doctor from Chicago. And when the time is right, he and me are gonna cash in.” She burped. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Big Rob waved at the waitress for another round and she warned him with a painted nail pointed toward the clock that this was last call. “So, this doctor, what? Has he done something bad?”
Peg’s burp had apparently been a hiccup, and it repeated. “Not yet. He hasn’t done it yet, and that’s all I’m saying.” Big Rob patted her gently on the back, as if that were a folksy cure.
“Well, if he’s going to do something bad, shouldn’t you go to the police before it happens?” asked Jo.
“Shhhh!” Peg said. She reconvened the huddle. “We don’t know for sure he’s going to do anything.” She paused to take control of her rib cage as Big Rob continued to rub her back with his left hand. “But if he does, we’re not gonna let him get away with it.”
“What’s this doctor going to do?” Big Rob asked when he was afraid no one else would.
Peg grabbed a random glass from the waitress’s tray. “I can’t tell you that.” She fought her hiccups with big gulps. “ ’S all I’m saying.”
When the bar closed, Big Rob was the first to offer her a ride home, and when she accepted, the other girls retreated into the darkness of the parking lot behind the echoes of coy good-byes. Big Rob helped Peg into the front passenger seat of his van, and by the time he walked around to the driver’s side, she was already in a light sleep. He stroked her hair and she stirred.
“Are you going to invite me back to your motel room?” Peg asked, her eyelids heavy from drinking and napping.
Big Rob had known from the purposeful way her hand had repeatedly touched his knee in the bar that he would have no problem getting her alone. The trick would be keeping her awake, and he knew one method of doing that was a way frequently practiced between strangers in motels. But he was convinced something had happened at Ricky Weiss’s house, and his offer to drive her home was, first and foremost, an attempt to see the crime scene without a warrant.
“I sort of have a roommate,” he said. “Budget cuts at the home office and all.” She frowned. “Can we go to your place?”
Peg endured a sudden spasm down her spine and knocked her head against the window. “Ow,” she said. “I’m married, you know.”
Big Rob turned away. It seemed chivalrous to him. “Is your husband home?”
“No.”
“Will he be home tonight?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then.”
Big Rob had driven past Ricky’s trailer a dozen times, and he steered the van toward it in silence. Careless. He was only a mile away when Peg said something.
“How do you know where I live?” she asked.
“I don’t,” Biggie said. “It’s a small town. I figured you’d say something if I was going the wrong way.” In her condition, this seemed reasonable. “Is this right?”
“Left up here,” she said, tucking a finger under his shirt sleeve and rubbing the cotton between her fingers. “So what did you say your name was again?”
“Biggie.” He grinned and Peg covered her mouth at the delightful naughtiness of it and them.
They parked in the street and tiptoed in exaggerated silence to her aluminum door. Big Rob expected the place to be messy, but when they pushed themselves inside he found it to be just the opposite, and it struck him that a clean trailer almost seemed kind of upscale – like someplace a movie star passes her time between takes.
They stood there in the space between the spotless kitchen and tidy living room like, well, actors who’d forgotten their lines. The air was a stale combination of chlorine and air freshener. “Do you have anything to drink?” Big Rob asked. As full of liquids as they were, Peg laughed, chose two cans of beer from the refrigerator, and pointed him toward the couch.
He sunk into the sofa as delicately as he could. She put a bony knee against a cushion and, still holding both cans, pressed her open mouth against his. She folded herself into his lap and abandoned the beers to the black-painted coffee table.
He endured their fumbling embrace for ten minutes or more, even enjoyed it in spite of himself. Peg was not the prettiest woman to have sat on Big Rob’s lap over the last twenty years, nor was she the homeliest. He put her in the middle somewhere. Around fifth. But Peg had information about Philly, she may even know something about Philly’s death, and the crazed probing of his teeth and gums by her tongue seemed more than inappropriate. It seemed like betrayal.
But then, James Bond had sexed bad women, hadn’t he? Women who were spies, who were plotting to kill him, who had killed his friends. Hadn’t he? Big Rob was almost sure, although he couldn’t name the films in which it had happened. The early Connerys and the later Moores all ran together in his head even at the most ordinary and sober times. But he was certain James Bond had sexed evil women and allowed himself to enjoy it. Toward a greater end.
His hand reached for the front button of her jeans. At some point in the next hour, they moved to her bed.
Finally, between oddly configured and suffocating clenches during which there was circumstantial evidence of her climaxing, but before he had done the same, Big Rob said to her, “Hon, I can’t lie to you.”
She gave him a puzzled and tired look. “Baby, lie to me,” she said. “Please lie to me.”
“No,” Big Rob said. “This isn’t a game.”
She grunted. Peg wanted to reciprocate, quickly, and go to sleep. But Big Rob knew there would never be a better time to interrogate this witness than right now.
“Something you said. About a Chicago doctor.”
Peg’s eyes snapped open. Her teeth set but didn’t quite meet, the result of an uncorrected, genetic asymmetry.
“I’m looking for a doctor and it sounds like he could be the same man,” Big Rob said.
She squinted into the darkness and imagined a path from the bed to the door.
“It’s okay. Maybe we can help each other.”
She relaxed some and sat up against the headboard. “What do you mean?”
Big Rob backed off the bed and found his pants. He pulled out the illustration that Jackie Moore had sent Philly. “Do you know who this man is?”
She took it and turned on the light. “Oh, fuck,” she said.
“What is it?”
Her mind sorted the possibilities like an old mail machine. “You know Davis Moore?”
“I do,” Big Rob said. “I mean, I know who he is.”
“Fuck,” she said again. Big Rob didn’t know if she was going to say anything else.
“Look, I don’t want your money. Your big payday. You and Ricky. I just want to know who the guy in the picture is and what he has to do with the doctor. Like I said. Maybe we can help each other.”
“So you’re saying, I help you, and you’ll let Ricky and me sell our story to the magazines?”
“Magazines?” Big Rob said. That was their big plan? “Sure. I’ll drive you right to Vanity Fair ’s front door, if that’s what it takes. Look, you said yourself you were waiting for something to happen so you could cash in on your story. Maybe I can help move things along a little bit.”
Peg was very tired and still a little drunk. Given the events of the last hour, the heavy, shirtless man in her bedroom had gained her trust. “That’s Jimmy Spears.”
“The football player?” Big Rob looked at the drawing again. He knew of Spears – he played for the Dolphins. Or maybe the Falcons. He’d heard the name a hundred times since he started coming to Brixton, but like most football fans, he wouldn’t know what the guy looked like without a number and name on his back.
“Jimmy Spears grew up here in Brixton. Davis Moore thinks Jimmy Spears killed his daughter. Ricky thinks Moore is gonna, I don’t know, get revenge or something.”
“No shit?” Big Rob wished Philly were here, then looked down at his mostly naked body and at Peg half covered by a sheet and he almost laughed. “No shit.”
Peg continued. Big Rob recognized the tired, relieved – almost tearful – tone of a confession. “After Moore used Ricky to track down Spears, he sent some guy here – a private eye with a gun, to kill Ricky, and Ricky… well, Ricky wrestled the gun away from him. Here at the trailer. Then the detective started running. He ran to his car.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I saw it. He came here to kill Ricky.” Then, in a confused and tired lapse that shattered Big Rob’s most fragile hope, “It was self-defense. I saw it.”
“Self-defense. I believe you. Anybody would,” Big Rob said. His heart was beating at a speed that would terrify his doctor. “What did Ricky do with the gun?”
Peg climbed out of bed and opened the sliding closet door. On tiptoe, she reached up to a high shelf and pushed aside a number of boxes and single shoes. In the moonlight, the skin on her back was shiny like wet sand. She turned around and presented the gun to him carefully, at arm’s length.
“It’s okay.” Big Rob hooked his pinky through the trigger guard and checked to see if the safety was on, and he set it on top of his folded pants. He took her in his arms and she squeezed him. Her hands were sweaty against his back. Later, remembering this, he would cry.
“So you’re gonna help us?” she asked, sniffling into his ear. “You’re gonna help me and Ricky get our money?”
What could Big Rob say except yes?
That’s when her hand went under the waistband of his boxers.
Big Rob closed his eyes and coaxed himself to the finish. Toward a greater end.