The Caveman's Valentine Read Free

was
fancy.
”
    “Oh yeah.
Fancy
white car. And where was this fancy white car again?”
    “Down there.”
    “Down
there?
You’re pointing at this tree.”
    “I mean, on the other side of this hill.”
    “Oh. But didn’t you say you were lying right here in this cave when you saw all this?”
    “Right.”
    The detective had a concave face. Like a satellite dish. Or a cake that had fallen. He was a smart-ass. He looked sidelong at Lulu. Lulu looked at the snow. The detective turned back to Romulus.
    “Then if you were in this cave, how could you see the fancy white car?”
    “I told you. Try listening for once, OK?”
    “OK. I’ll try anything once.”
    “I’m telling you, I saw the white car on my TV.”
    “Oh. Sure, the TV in your cave. Now you’re talking.”
    “And I can save you some time, I can tell you who the car belongs to. The car belongs to a man by the name of Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant.”
    But the detective’s attention seemed to be wandering. He was watching the ambulance workers load the marble corpse onto a stretcher. They draped a dropcloth over the work and hauled it away. Then a cop came over and handed the detective an eelskin wallet, threadbare.
    “Found it in his coat.”
    The detective looked through it. Not much to look through, though. Supermarket receipts. A driver’s license, which the detective squinted at. Presently he passed the wallet back to the cop, who popped it into a plastic bag and took it away again.
    Then the detective eyed the TV set that sat at the entrance to the cave. Spilling out of the back of the TV was a ponytail of frazzled wires that led nowhere.
    “Hey, tell me something, Caveman. What kind of shows you get on that?”
    “All the shows.”
    “Like what?”
    “Everything. The whole heady broth of American culture, right?”
    “Right. You get cable?”
    “Sure.”
    The detective gave Lulu another look. A little worm of a smile slithering across his lips.
    “Get any broadcasts from Mars?”
    “No.”
    The man kept looking at Lulu. Lulu had inherited the sweet shape her mother used to have, and the amazing ragged-edged irises. And also something else, a sort of anti-aura, something down-to-earth and knotty and impenetrable that fascinated men. And damned if this detective, this squash-faced beet-nose sucker, wasn’t leering at her. The blood began to pulse in Romulus’s temples. Stick to your own kind, fucker. He took a step forward, caught the detective in his shadow.
    “Write it down.”
    “Write what down?”
    “The name of the murderer.”
    “You mean ol’ Uncle North Wind? Hey, what’s the point of getting after
him
? I could book him, you know, but I’d never get an indictment. He’d blow down the frigging courthouse. You ever see the cheeks on that guy?”
    “Write his name. What are you afraid of? Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant. Write it!”
    Drumbeat of skull-blood, and a stirring of tiny wings inside his brain. Quickening toward a rage. But Lulu—only Lulu—kept it from boiling over. With a word.
    “Daddy.”
    Romulus let out a breath. Let his blood settle. He said:
    “Well, tell him to write it, Lulu.”
    “I can’t tell him anything, Daddy. This isn’t even my precinct. I’m just a nobody here, like you.”
    But then the detective raised his clipboard again, and grinned a generous grin.
    “Ah, what the hell, my friend. You got some help for me? Who am I to turn down help? So how do you spell ‘Cornelius’?”

7
    L ater, nearly dark, Romulus was making his rounds, just shuffling along through one of the rich enclaves off Riverside Drive. His low-energy sleepwalk shuffle. Build up some momentum with a gait like this, you could go on forever, like a steamship. But when he came abreast of a familiar and reliable row of garbage cans, he pulled up.
    A doorman across the street gave him a baleful eye.
    Romulus ignored him. Lifted a lid.
    Well OK, here was the afternoon newspaper anyway, not bad. He stuck it under his elbow.
    The