The only good part about falling forward, landing on my face, and sprawling full-length on the concrete was that no one stood there to see. The short sidewalk in front of the door was about four feet below the sod and was reached only via six concrete steps off to the left. I may have been sprawled and scraped and bloody, but I wasn't yet a laughing stock.
"So you got through it." A frowning James Dolan leaned nonchalantly against the building. He waited for me several feet away from the concrete steps and around the nearest corner. At least, he hadn't seen me kissing the concrete.
"No help from you," I said, walking past him. I pivoted. "But why did you lie, Jimmy? I don't care about the police. Why did you lie to me? Why am I hearing about all this from Karlson?"
Although he didn't move an inch, Jimmy wouldn't look at me, and I got the impression that he would gladly have wrestled alligators in the wild instead of answering my questions. A long moment passed, then he glanced at his watch.
"Lunch time," he said without smiling. "Fancy a bite?"
I nodded, though all I had a taste for at that moment was his still-beating heart. I'd give him a little time to get himself together, then I planned to take him apart again—piece by piece.
Jimmy must have been feeling desperate because he drove me to our favorite little no-name pub on East State Street and promptly ordered a drink. I never knew he liked Scotch, but here he swigged down the single malt variety without benefit of water. I ordered the standard diet cola because my conscience was no longer burdened with guilt. The alcohol wouldn't wipe Jimmy's slate clean. Even I knew that.
The no-name place was dim even in the mid-afternoon light. Sawdust or peanut shells or something crunchy littered the floor. I'd never found the courage to look. However, the burgers were good and the service was fast.
We ordered the usual: two double cheeseburgers with bacon and fresh-cut fries. About halfway through his drink, Jimmy gazed at me and then began, slowly, to talk. "There's the world to tell you, Paulette," he said, "but I doubt you're going to believe the half of it. It's all so wound in upon itself that I was afraid to tell you even a little piece because you would naturally ask about the rest. I wanted to tell you, but it wasn't entirely my secret to tell."
He glanced down at the table, then at my hands neatly folded on the edge. For a second, it seemed he considered reaching for one of my hands for luck or for support—or maybe so I couldn't bolt the minute he said something I didn't like. Lucky for him he thought better of the impulse.
"You see, my cousin isn't only my cousin," he said. "She's also my wife."
At that moment my heart started pounding like a jackhammer, and I was afraid Jimmy would be able to hear it. He didn't even glance up, only plowed ahead too enveloped in his own misery to care what I thought of this revelation.
"Two years ago, I went over to Ireland to find my family, and I met Kate," he said. "She's my third cousin twice removed on my mother's side."
I couldn't look at him, so I released my straw from its white paper casing and proceeded to tie that casing into square knots—three of them.
"Before I left to return home, she got into some trouble with the police. It wasn't that she'd broken the law or anything. They thought she knew something about an IRA plot because of a boy she'd been dating."
Next, I pulled the paper square knots apart and set them in a semi-circle equidistant to my drink. Anything so I didn't have to look at Jimmy's face.
"Her family told me it was nothing to worry about, but Kate kept having late-night visitors who threatened her if she told the police what they wanted to know. Only Kate didn't know anything, and the boy was killed in some fight."
Jimmy still nursed his drink. The waitress refilled my diet cola and brought me another straw. I stripped its paper cover and soon created three neat half-hitches in the center of it. So much for hanging with my grandma and learning macramé at thirteen.
Jimmy droned on. "The poor girl didn't know where to turn, so I offered to bring her back with me. She's a computer programmer, so I thought there'd be lots of jobs for her. I didn't know that we'd have to marry to keep her in this country."
He took a long pull on his drink and swallowed. I watched his Adam's apple go up and down but didn't glance at his face.
"I thought maybe I'd have to vouch for her or put her up for a few months," he said. "I promised her mother I'd take care of her. We got here and . . . I couldn't send her back. They'd kill her, so we got married."
He stopped while the waitress dropped off our burgers and fries. We didn't look at each other, but Jimmy kept up his unhappy monologue.
"I figured we could get divorced once she had her citizenship papers, but things got complicated. She's Catholic."
I picked up a long, limp fry and attempted a simple, overhand knot. I almost had it but it broke as I settled the knot. So I ate it.
"We're trying to get the marriage annulled since we never slept together, but the INS could get wind of that and send her back."
I doused my fries with ketchup. Jimmy glanced at his food, took another long pull on his drink, and kept talking.
"After a year, I couldn't think of a way out, so I hired a law firm. They're still working on it, but we filed for the annulment anyway. It goes to Rome."
Jimmy finished his drink and held up the glass to signal the waitress that he needed more liquid courage.
"I didn't tell Karlson about any of this because all I needed was somebody else trying to send Kate home," he said. "I told her to come in the front, but she was sure you'd think the worst. She's a sweet kid, Paulette, honest, and she's in over her head."
I ate another fry smothered in ketchup. "How'd she know about the door?"
"I told her, but not for the reason you think."
"Interesting that you know what I think," I said.
Jimmy got his second drink but didn't taste it right away. Maybe he didn't know if he wanted it anymore. He stared at my face, and I was forced to look back.
"When it started, I told her. We do live in the same house, Paulette. If we didn't the INS would have sent her home already." He reached for his glass of courage, barely swallowing before he took another sip. "You'd be surprised at the number of people who try to get into this country by marrying an American," he said. "We barely got past the review board."
"You said you told Kate when it started. What started?"
"The used condoms in my office wastebasket every Monday morning. They weren't mine. It wasn't as if I scoured my wastebasket, but the smell. . . ."
I picked up another fry but put it down again and took a sip of cola instead. "Okay, so what has that got to do with the door?"
"I wondered how the condoms got there. One day, I actually flipped on the light in my closet and saw some kind of passage back there. I figured that my office was the location for some kind of tryst, so I told Barney."
The waitress came by to see how we were doing, but I shook my head when she wanted to refill my drink. Jimmy took the first bite of his burger.
I cleared my throat. "And he said?"
"He chuckled, said that he'd nail the door shut, and call the cleaning company to straighten everything out. The condoms stopped appearing, and I never followed the passageway. End of story."
Jimmy was right. I was having trouble believing his little confession. That compelling bit about having a wife seemed to stick in my midsection like a butter knife. Only one thing to do. Before Jimmy looked up at me with some Blarney version of puppy-dog eyes, I had to ask my two remaining questions.
"Okay," I said, "you've never been down the passage, so how come the door was latched when I came through today and unlatched, presumably, when your wife came to visit?"
Jimmy looked at me as if I was one clown short of a circus. "Kate latched it after her, of course."
"But isn't it a little dark down there?" I said.
"Not when you flip on the light switch," he said. "I imagine it's quite illuminating."
Witty replies aside, I went for my second question. The one that wouldn't make me appear to be a mental lightweight.
"What about the accounts, Jimmy? Did the Princess steal some of your precious clients?" I wasn't able to stop with that. "And then did you kill her for it?" Once I shoot off my mouth, I can never shut up, so I added, "And if you did, how come you had to use me for your bloody alibi?"
By that time, the tears were running down my cheeks like raindrops in a storm. If I kept up this emotional maelstrom, I would shortly have to seek other employment—probably as a human waterworks.
I stood, almost knocking over my chair, and that brought the waitress over. I shook my head in her general direction.
Taking the clean white handkerchief that Jimmy offered me, I couldn't properly appreciate his neatly embroidered initials in the corner as I blundered my way out the door and walked all the way back to the office. The metric distance wasn't bad, but my mind kept spinning around and around the idea that Jimmy had a wife.
It felt as if that one fact changed everything, as if that little piece of knowledge itself created a time bulge around me—a bubble that left me plenty of time for recriminations and pain.