Nancy looked at me. She chewed on her lip. I wished I could, too. “Have you found anything?”
I looked away again. “I know who did it, and how and why. I can’t prove any of it. So I tried to force something. The guy is very well connected, and he was too much for me. I wound up in the drunk tank. Now he’s got cops following me, taking me off to jail every two hours. No matter what I say or do now, it’s going to look like I’m a crank. The kind who’s always finding conspiracies under the bed. So I guess I’ve crapped out.
“I tried to tell the whole thing to a high-price lawyer the City keeps on retainer. I crapped out there, too. I’ve pretty much crapped out everywhere, all along the line, and I don’t have any idea what I can do now.”
“So you’re going to quit?”
“Nancy, it isn’t that simple.”
“Neither is life. But you already quit on that, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. She got quiet. “Until I met you.”
Now she looked away.
“But I’ve run out of ideas there, too.”
She didn’t look back at me. Her head was turned to one side. I watched her neck muscles. The red color slowly left her cheeks. I heard a clock tick.
“What is it you want from me, Billy?” She said it so softly I could barely hear her. “I’m not here to be your savior.”
“I know that.”
“You can’t just come barrelling into my life and take it over, that’s—I have a lot of other things going on.”
“I know that, too.”
“Because it was—at first I thought we had something really happening, you know, and then when I thought you were squirreling out on me, I did some thinking.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t know if I am ready for the kind of relationship you represent, Billy.”
“Okay.”
“God-damn it, Billy!”
Our eyes met.
“Don’t just sit there and agree with everything I say. Talk to me.”
“Nancy—I was starting to care for you, a lot. And that scared me. And made me feel guilty. And I am caught up in something very tough and it’s taking the heart out of me. I am at a dead end with both things. I don’t have any answers anymore. I don’t know if I’m capable of having answers.”
There was a long quiet stretched between us. I could see the last of the day’s sun slowly pulling its feelers back out the window. The traffic below was muffled but sounded lethal even four floors up.
I couldn’t take the quiet anymore. “Anyway, that’s what I wanted to tell you. I owed you an explanation. And an apology.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“I mean it. There might be things I’ve never talked about before. Maybe I took it for granted that you don’t have to talk about them even if you’re married to someone, and with you—I’m new at all this, Nancy. I don’t always know what I’m doing with you.”
“At the moment, we haven’t decided if you’re doing anything.”
“There is that.” I saw the beer sitting in front of me, still unopened. Mostly to have something to do, I opened it. I started to take a sip. Miller. Because her brother liked it.
I put the beer down.
“What’s the matter?” Nancy asked.