No Good to Cry Read Free

golden.”
    I left her on the front porch, headed out back to get my car.
    Ralph Gervase, dead.
    I stopped walking as I recalled that Jimmy had invited me for lunch with him and Ralph that afternoon. He’d asked me to meet them at our new office in a three-story building on Farmington Avenue—we occupied the second floor, Jimmy huffing and puffing his way up one flight of stairs, a glowing Lucky Strike bobbing in the corner of his mouth—and the three of us would go for a bite at some local eatery. Now, thinking about that invitation, I bit my lip. I’d dug in my heels, refused because, like Gracie, I disliked Ralph Gervase.
    â€œChrist, no, Jimmy, that man looks at me like he wants to kill me.”
    Jimmy had dismissed that. “You got an imagination, Rick boy.”
    â€œNo, he’s hateful.”
    Talking with Jimmy on the phone, I’d been ready to do battle over his newfound friendship with the old veteran, but backed off. “No,” I’d told him, “I got things to do.”
    I’d lied. I had nothing to do. Jog around town, maybe go for a swim at the Farmington College pool, prepare a lesson for the one-night-a-week class I taught there in Criminology. Perhaps review a fraud case I’d been wrestling with. Dawdle the afternoon away. No, eating a sandwich while the mean-spirited Ralph glared at me across the table was not a good idea.
    â€œC’mon, Rick.” Jimmy had urged.
    â€œNo.”
    Ralph Gervase, dead now from a mugging. Ralph Gervase, recently moved to Hartford from a great-niece’s home in White Plains, New York. Without options—I believed the man hadn’t a friend in the world—he’d moved into a boardinghouse filled with old veterans, restless wanderers across America, casualties of a war that ended decades in the past. Ralph ended up in Hartford because he had a distant cousin in the same rooming house, another ailing veteran who died the day after Ralph moved in with his battered cardboard suitcase, a plastic ShopRite bag containing a six-pack, and the work dungarees he wore day in, day out. A small, wiry man, his bullet head with cloudy eyes always a little too red, he strutted around like a bantam rooster, his voice a mosquito whine, always standing too near so that you recoiled at his rancid tobacco odor.
    Jimmy and Ralph had bumped into each other on the sidewalk outside our office. Jimmy was headed for cigarettes at a Quik-Mart. Ralph, so Jimmy confided, had just shoplifted a pack of Camels from the convenience store and nearly collided with him. They’d known each other in Vietnam for a couple of months near the end of the war, but had never gotten along. “A weasel,” Jimmy confessed to me. “No one trusted him. We all thought he’d buy lunch with friendly fire one day.”
    â€œHe sounds delightful,” I’d said at the time.
    Jimmy smirked. “Christ, how you talk.”
    He didn’t like Ralph, a crusty drunk even less politically correct than Jimmy himself, though Jimmy’s biases were couched in an engaging humanity that somehow gave him a pass. But he held a confused loyalty about old Nam veterans, especially the ones he’d served with. Which was why he hung out—“Not often but just enough”—with the old-timer.
    After that first encounter Jimmy insisted Ralph meet me. A big mistake, immediately evident. Ralph harbored ugly attitudes carried from his younger days in the jungles of Nam. The stink and horror of the underground tunnels of Cu Chi. So here, unexpectedly, he found himself sitting across from the dreaded yellow peril—yellowish peril, perhaps—a forty-year-old man in a Brooks Brothers suit merrily chomping on a salty potato chip and downing a salt-free margarita at Moe’s Southwest Grill. Jimmy hadn’t told his old army buddy that his younger partner in solving routine insurance fraud in the Insurance Capital of the World was that