I had heard the news before I left the Johnson house. President Thomas Byrnes had died early that morning.
CHAPTER
103
I WAS HOLDING and gently petting Rosie the cat. I had the kitchen door open and peered outside, squinted at Sampson.
He stood in a freezing-cold rain. He looked like a big, dark boulder in the teeming rainstorm, or maybe it was hail that he was weathering so stoically.
“The nightmare continues,” he said to me. A simple declarative sentence. Devastating.
&n
bsp; “Yeah, doesn’t it, though? But maybe I don’t care about it anymore.”
“Uh-huh. And maybe this is the year the Bullets win the NBA championship, the Orioles win the World Series, and the raggedyass Redskins go to the Super Bowl. You just never know.”
A day has passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving. President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before. It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.
I had on dungarees and a white T-shirt. Bare feet on a cold linoleum floor. Steaming coffee mug in hand. I was convalescing nicely. I hadn’t washed off my whiskers, as Jannie calls the act of shaving. I was almost feeling human again.
I hadn’t asked Sampson in yet, either.
“Morning, Sugar,” Sampson persisted. Then he rolled back his upper lip and showed off some teeth. His smile was brutally joyful. I finally had to smile back at my friend and nemesis.
It was a little past nine o’clock and I had just gotten up. This was late for me. It was shameful behavior by Nana’s standards. I was still sleep-deprived, trauma shocked, in danger of losing the rest of my mind, throwing up, something shitty and unexpected. But I was also much better. I looked good; I looked fine.
“Aren’t you even going to say good morning?” Sampson asked, pretending to be hurt.
“Morning, John. I don’t even want to know about it,” I said to him. “Whatever it is that brings you here this cold and bleak morning.”
“First intelligent thing I’ve heard out of your mouth in years,” Sampson said, “but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. You want to know everything. You need to know everything, Alex. That’s why you read four newspapers every damn morning.”
“I don’t want to know, either,” Nana contributed from behind me in the kitchen. She had been up for hours, of course. “I don’t need to know. Shoo, fly. Go fry some ice. Take a long walk off a short dock, Johnnyboy.”
“We got time for breakfast?” I finally asked him.
“Not really,” he said, careful to keep his smile turned on, “but let’s eat, anyway. Who could resist?”
“He invited you, not me,” Nana warned from over by her hot stove.
She was kidding Sampson. She loves him as if he were her own son, as if he were my physically bigger brother. She made the two of us scrambled eggs, homemade sausage, home fries, toast. She knows how to cook and could easily feed the entire Washington Redskins team at training camp. That would be no problem for Nana.
Sampson waited until we had finished eating before he got back into it, whatever it was, whatever had happened now. His dark little secret. It may seem odd—but when your life is filled with homicides and other tragedies, you have to learn to take time for yourself. The homicides will still be there. The homicides are always there.
“Your Mister Grayer called me a little while ago,” Sampson said as he poured his third cup of coffee. “He said to let you have a couple of days off, that they could handle this. Them, like the great old horror flick that used to scare the hell out of us.”
“That, what you just said, makes me suspicious and fearful right away. Handle what?” I asked.
I was finishing the last of half a loaf of cinnamon toast made from thick homemade bread. It was, honestly, quite seriously, a taste of heaven. Nana claims that she’s been there, stolen several recipes. I tend to believe her. I’ve seen and tasted the proof of her tale.
Sampson glanced at his wristwatch, an ancient Bulova given to him by his father when he was fourteen.
“They’re looking over Jill’s office in the White House right about now. Then they’re going to her apartment on Twenty-fourth Street. You want to go? As my guest? Got you a guest pass, just in case.”
Of course I wanted to be there. I had to go. I needed to know everything about Jill, just as Sampson had said I did.
“You are the devil,” Nana hissed at Sampson.