Duplicate Keys Read Free Page B

longer than any friends of their friends. Alice put her fork down. “I don’t know,” she said. “And we haven’t done anything, have we? Where are they going to be buried? How will they get there? Is there going to be a funeral? Who’s going to take care of the apartment? I don’t even know what time Susan is getting here tomorrow. Should I sit outside her building and wait for her? She could come any time.”
    “And talk to the press,” said Ray. “They’ve been ringing the phone off the hook. I put it on the service for tonight, but I bet when I call there’s going to be fifty messages.”
    “Rolling Stone?”
asked Alice.
    “And everyone else, believe me.”
    Alice didn’t say anything. Noah lit up another joint and said, “I didn’t think Craig was doomed for a moment. Crazy, yes, doomed, no. Yeah, he did all that stuff, especially cocaine, and I bet none of you knew that he tried heroin that time he was in California.” Alice remembered when Craig was in California. “But he was always looking. Never missed a trick. Once he had me on the back of his motorcycle, that BMW, and we must have been doing about ninety, and he bent down and lit his cigarette on the cylinder casing. I never felt in danger for a moment, but I can’t tell you why. That same trip, a bug flew into his sunglasses and broke the lens. We just laughed about it and taped it up.”
    “Just because you’re a fool,” said Ray, “doesn’t mean he wasn’t.”
    “I don’t know about that. I will say, though, that I’d rather be on the back of that motorcycle doing a hundred than in almost any cab in New York.” He inhaled deeply from the joint that only he and Ray were smoking and went on, “It just always seemed that if there was anyone with eyes in the back of his head and the reflexes to get out of trouble, it was Craig, you know?”
    “That’s what was so weird about this,” said Alice, realizing it for the first time. “I think the reason I couldn’t believe what I saw was that there didn’t look like there had been any trouble. That’s just the word. Something more subtle than no struggle, no trouble of any kind, as if nothing bad had taken place. When you’re little, sometimes other kids have these rubber spiders and things, and you get shocked before you know it. Well, this was just the opposite. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t get shocked, even with the smell. And then, this afternoon, I felt funny, but as if I had the flu. Maybe I should have touched one of them.”
    “There wouldn’t have been any smell,” said Ray. “Not so soon.”
    “Well, there was.”
    “After, what, eight hours? You’re imagining things.”
    “Well, I’m not going to argue about it.”
    “Oh, God,” said Rya. The conversation died.
    Taking the last spoonful of bean curd, Noah said, “Just the other day we were rehearsing for this gig. Just setting up, really. That new guy, Zimmerman, the one Craig hired for percussion a few weeks ago, spilled a glass of water on the stage. No one saw but me. He hit it with his sleeve or something. Craig went over to fiddle with the amps. His guitar was on, and he had one hand around the neck, and he reached for one of the dials and lifted his foot. I opened my mouth to call out to him, and shit if he didn’t step just to one side of the water, and then he put his other foot just in front of it. I mean, you don’t know if he would have gotten a shock, but I thought to myself, there’s a lucky guy, there’s the classic example of a lucky guy.”
    “And then he chewed Zimmerman out and practically fired him on the spot, didn’t he?” asked Ray, who hadn’t been there.
    “You know Shellady. Patience wasn’t exactly his middle name.”
    “Not hardly,” agreed Ray.
    “I just think it’s the most awful thing.” Rya had thrown herself back against the giant gray pillows of Ray’s sofa. “We all do,” said Noah. “Shhh.”
    “Did anyone call Zimmerman?”