Saturday, March 17
Ike put my Darjeeling tea and a Ghirardelli chocolate on the table. It was almost closing time. The street was empty and so was his coffee shop. “How’d your visit with that crazy girl go?” he asked.
I patted the chair next to mine and he dutifully sat. I was tired from the long drive but I needed company. “It went fine,” I said.
He unwrapped the chocolate for me. “I’ll tell you one thing-if you’d bamboozled me the way you bamboozled her, I don’t think I’d be inviting you to my prison cell.”
“I wouldn’t accept your invitations if you did,” I said.
We both laughed. It’s hard to say whose laugh was sadder.
He slid the flat square of chocolate across the table on its foil wrapper, like a bribe. “You played that Aubrey McGinty like a fiddle, just like you play everybody else, me included.”
I broke the chocolate in two and slid the big half back to him. “You’re giving me way too much credit.”
Ike nibbled like a gerbil. “You and me are so much alike it’s scary,” he said.
“Alike? How are you and I alike?”
“Underrated and overlooked,” he said. “These young business-types that prance in and out of here every morning-to them I’m nothing but the old black guy who pours their coffee. Not a damn one of them knows I taught high school math all those years, that I probably taught their own mamas and daddies, that in a roundabout way I’m responsible for their own big-shot success. Old black guy pouring the coffee, that’s all I am.”
“And me, Ike?”
“You’re Morgue Mama. Keeper of the musty-dusty old files. What everybody forgets, is that behind that sour, tea-sipping frown you wear like a TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT sign, resides the shrewdest damn woman in Hannawa, Ohio.”
“What a lovely compliment.”
“I meant it to be. Aubrey McGinty was so impressed with her own sick genius, she couldn’t see you had a hundred times the brains she did. Hundred times the curiosity and a hundred times the guile.”
Ike got up and locked the door. He grabbed a whole handful of Ghirardelli chocolates from the counter and sat back down, resting his legs on an empty chair. “You ever ask her why she killed those men?” he asked. “The real, deep-down-in-the-soul reason?”
“I don’t have to ask her. I know why. At a very early age she learned that bad people take what they want from good people. So why shouldn’t good people take what they want from bad people?”
Ike nodded in slow motion. “You think she sees herself as a good person?”
“Aubrey is a good person,” I said, “except for that bitter little knot in her brain that kills people.”
Ike unwrapped another chocolate for us.