A Few Minutes Past Midnight Read Free Page B

office,” I shouted as the elevator vibrated past the fourth floor.
    He nodded.
    “How are you?” I called, aware of the sorrow in his voice.
    “Ain’t misbehaving,” he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said. Jeremy’s grammar was always perfect except when he took poetic license.
    I finally hit the sixth floor. The door opened and there stood Juanita the fortune-teller. Juanita’s real name wasn’t Juanita. She came from a good New York Jewish family. She had married a wholesale tie salesman when she was young. He died and she married a mildly successful shirt manufacturer and raised a family. Then husband number two died. Till she was a widow for the second time, Juanita had hidden the fact that she had what she called “the visions.” She could tell things about people from touching them or just thinking about them. Sometimes the visions just came unbidden.
    Her kids were grown. Her last husband was dead and Juanita had been reborn, so to speak. She had an office in the Farraday and a reasonably healthy business. Most of her clients were Mexicans, with a scattering of Greeks and a dash of Dutch and refugees from the Balkans.
    I was convinced Juanita had a real gift, but it carried with it a curse I had experienced on more than one occasion. Whenever Juanita predicted my future, it turned out to be right—but her predictions couldn’t be figured out till after the future had come and gone. Jeremy found this particularly interesting. I didn’t. Jeremy and Juanita’s clients had a better tolerance for her obscure gifts than I did. Usually, I tried to avoid Juanita.
    This time I couldn’t. She helped me open the elevator door, her beads jangling, her dark long dress dangling. She played the role.
    “I had a vision about Harold Stassen,” she said.
    Stassen, the governor of Minnesota, was a serious contender for the next Republican nomination for president.
    “Saw him, clear as I see you now,” she said. “In the living room of that mobile home he lives in. His wife was there, one of his kids. He was reading a newspaper. You know what the headline said?”
    “No,” I answered.
    “Stassen will never be president,” she said.
    “You planning to relay this information to him?”
    “Not my business. I’m going down for something to eat,” she said. “You want me to bring you something?”
    I held the door open for her.
    “A couple of tacos from Manny’s,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my wallet.
    “On me,” she said. “I’m feeling generous. I just got a big tip from Al Kazinzas.”
    “Fish Market Al?”
    “That’s the one,” she said with a smile. “I told him he was going to die.”
    “And he gave you a big tip?” I asked, stepping out of the elevator and letting the door close.
    “I said he was going to die at the age of ninety-six in a gondola,” she said as the elevator started down. “He said he would stay away from gondolas. But, Toby, if you’re meant to go down in a gondola, there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”
    “I’ll remember that,” I said to her upturned face as she reached the fifth floor.
    “Oh God,” she said, suddenly remembering something. “Had a vision about you.”
    “I don’t want to hear it, Juanita,” I said.
    “I’m buying you tacos. You can hear my vision. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “You’ve got ten reasons,” she said. “They’re all wrong, but you’ve got to go through them. Like the trials of that Greek.”
    “Kazinzas?”
    “Hercules.”
    “Hercules with a bad back.”
    She was almost out of sight below me, but her voice came back.
    “The truth will be at the grave.”
    “Whose?” I called.
    “ Ich veis , who knows?” she said. “I just see this stuff. I don’t know what it means. Oh, one more thing. You’ll slip on a dead woman.”
    “What woman? What name? Where?” I asked.
    But she was gone.
    The sign on the door to our outer office had been changed again. Shelly was forever changing it in