A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block Page A

and pointed me toward an upholstered chair. He was going to make himself a cup of tea, he said, and would that suit me? Or there was beer, if I’d prefer that. I said tea would be fine.
    There were two posters on the wall, both from shows at the Whitney, both artists even I could recognize—Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. I studied them in turn, and I was still going back and forth between them when he put a cup of tea on the table beside me. He said it was Earl Grey and I said that was fine. The posters, he said, belonged to a woman who’d lived with him for just about two years.
    “Then out of the blue she decided she was a lesbian. I mean, she was no kid. Younger’n me, but well up in her thirties, you know? How can you get to be that old and all along you’re a lesbian and you haven’t got a clue? How does that happen?”
    “I gather it happens a lot.”
    “Does it happen to guys?”
    “I think everything happens to everybody,” I said, “but it seems to happen more often with women.”
    He thought about it, shrugged. “Well, she left the posters here,” he said. “ ‘I’m done with ’em, Mark. You don’t want ’em, toss ’em.’ Why would I do that? They look okay. I’m used to them. That tea okay?”
    “It’s fine.”
    “You ever bust your hand? Just about everything you do becomes complicated. I still can’t tie my shoes. Thank God for loafers, huh?”
    “Where did it happen, Mark?”
    “Right here. He called me on the phone, said he’s got something to tell me, can he come over? I tried to get him to tell me over the phone, because it’s like he’s from a past life, you know? And I don’t remember him or that life with a whole lot of affection, so I’d just as soon hear whatever he’s got to say and be done with him. But no, this has to be face-to-face. I tell him I’m busy and he says okay, pick a time that works, just about any time at all will work for him. And I’m this close to telling him fuck off, leave me alone, whatever it is I don’t want to hear about it. This close.”
    “But you told him to come over.”
    “There was something made me think he’d be harder to shake than a summer cold, and I’m better off seeing him and getting it over and done with. And after I got off the phone with him I’m thinking, Hey, we used to be friends, and just because I’m living a different life these days, and there’s probably no place in it for a guy like High-Low Jack, that doesn’t mean I can’t be civil to him.”
    High-Low Jack.
    “So he comes in, and there’s something different about him, some light in his eyes. Makes me a little uneasy. But it’s been years, you know? Come in, good to see you, take a load off, have a beer. Of course he wouldn’t have a beer. You know about that?”
    “He’d stopped drinking,” I said.
    “Said he was an alcoholic, which I could believe, the way he used to put it away. But then we all did back then, you know? We were kids, we partied hard, we got in trouble. Crazy shit. You grow up and it changes.” He considered. “Or you don’t and it doesn’t. Whatever. So okay, you don’t want a beer, how about a cup of tea? But he doesn’t want anything, he just wants to get down to business. To make things right, except there was another word he kept using.”
    “Amends.”
    “Right, amends. I don’t think I ever heard anybody use that word outside of the context of, you know, an amendment to the Constitution. Amends. You know what he did? You know what this was all about?”
    “Something about a burglary,” I said. “He sold something to you and stole it back again, something along those lines.”
    He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. Then he said, “What I was, I was a receiver. I never went away for it, I never even got arrested for it. You needed to sell something, I’d buy it for cash. You were looking to buy something, if I had it you’d be getting a bargain. But cash, no receipts, and don’t ask where it came