77 Shadow Street

25

Topper’s

Mac and Shelly Reeves had a window table in the restaurant, with a view of Shadow Street, where silver rain slashed through headlights and where stoop-shouldered pedestrians in foul-weather gear hurried past under bobbing umbrellas.

A bottle of good Cabernet Sauvignon, candlelight, and the high backs on their booth contributed to a romantic ambiance, and Shelly still daily stirred desire in Mac after twenty-two years of marriage. More important, as the years passed, his feelings for her became ever more tender, the physical aspect of love ever less important than the emotional side of it, though he didn’t anticipate that they would take a vow of celibacy together. And intellectually, they had always been an ideal match.

A booth at Topper’s was also a favorite place for them because it provided privacy, and both the staff and the clientele treated them like anyone else, not like celebrities. For over twenty years, their morning program, Mac and Shelly’s Breakfast Club, enjoyed by far the highest local-radio ratings during the 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. time slot. In a city with a smaller black population than some, their success in a vanilla format like a breakfast club made them even more recognizable.

Having recently been lured to a different station with a promise of tri-state syndication, they were currently in a three-week hiatus before launching their new program, which would be their old program, with the same Mac-and-Shelly shtick that was as much a part of their relationship off the air as on. For all these years, they had gotten up five days a week at 4:00 A.M. and had returned to bed at eight in the evening. During this break, however, they had gone wild—“Almost feral, dangerously close to the point where we might not be able to find our way back to civilization,” Mac had declared—staying up until ten, sometimes even to midnight, sleeping in until six, once even as late as ten past seven.

They were newcomers to the Pendleton, having purchased Apartment 3-G only ten months earlier. This evening, the comparative privacy of a booth at Topper’s was especially welcome because, as it turned out, their conversation drifted early to a discussion of their neighbors in that grand old residence.

The subject came up because, just as the maitre d’ said he would show them to their table, they had glimpsed Silas Kinsley and another man at the farther end of the foyer, donning their coats to brave the storm. Silas’s firm specialized in civil litigation, but until his retirement four years earlier, he had been their personal attorney. They loved Nora and missed her, as everyone did, and it was the occasional dinner at the Kinsley apartment that over the years convinced them to sell their home in the Oak Grove District and move here to Shadow Hill, in the true heart of the city.

Although seeing Silas had prompted them to wax on about some of their neighbors, they spent little time talking about him because he didn’t inspire gossip. Silas’s qualities were all endearing, and his sole eccentricity was an obsession with the history of the Pendleton, which seemed normal and harmless when compared to, say, the interests of their next-door neighbor, Fielding Udell. Just between themselves, Shelly and Mac called Udell Chicken Little or Chick for short.

She said, “I step out the front door this morning to get the paper, and Chick is there in the hall, picking up his usual humongous pile of publications. The delivery guy must love old Chick, a few more years and he’ll have put away a handsome retirement from that one account. So before I can grab our paper and duck back inside, Chick asks do I know what’s happening to the lousewort.”

“Did you fake a hearing-aid problem?”

“I don’t think I’ll try that one again. He knows we’re in radio, we need to have good hearing for that.”

“Sudden debilitating heart arrhythmia.”

“That’s your excuse. He’s not going to believe both of us have heart disease as young as we are.”

“So do you know what’s happening to the lousewort?”

“I said I’ve known a couple of louses but neither of them had warts.”

“You are my favorite wife. Then what did he say?”

“He said all kinds of louseworts are headed for extinction, and the consequences are catastrophic.”

“They always are. What is a lousewort, anyway?”

“Turns out it’s a plant. All kinds of grazing animals like it.”

“Cows?”

“Cows, sheep, goats, Bigfoot for all I know.”

“Is Bigfoot a grazing animal?”

“Well, he’s an omnivore, so he chows down on anything he wants—lousewort, cats, small children.”

“I have a theory about Bigfoot,” Mac said. “I know it’s highly controversial—but my theory is he doesn’t exist.”

“Radical. That’ll get you a full three hours on the weekend edition of Coast to Coast AM with Ian Punnett.”

“So what catastrophe exactly?”

“Seems that certain grasses thrive only in the vigorous presence of lousewort, and other grasses only thrive in an environment that includes pollen from those grasses. I may have that all wrong, since I was preoccupied at the time with thoughts of homicide. But the end-all is some kind of biological chain-reaction that results in the extinction of thousands of varieties of grass.”

“What are we going to use for lawns?”

“We don’t have a lawn in our apartment.”

“Don’t just think of yourself. What about suburbia?”

“If they don’t have to mow the lawn,” Shelly said, “they have more time to listen to radio. See here, I don’t believe you’re extrapolating from the lousewort to the big picture.”

“I assume Chick extrapolated for you.”

“He very kindly did. If we lose the grasses, we lose all the grazing animals. That means we lose our primary sources of meat, milk, cheese, wool, leather, bone meal, and antler racks to hang above hunting-lodge fireplaces. Famine ensues. And bad shoes.”

After a pause for wine, Mac said, “I saw Mickey Dime today in Butterworth’s.”

“That’s never going to sound like a men’s clothing store to me.”

“They were having a necktie sale.”

“Sounds like a waffle syrup.”

“Racks and racks of ties. I saw Dime, but he didn’t see me.”

Shelly said, “Baby, it’s uncanny how still you are when you’re pretending to be a mannequin.”

“He’s interested in the silk ties. But first he takes a moist towelette from a foil packet and washes his hands.”

With the snap of a forefinger, she pinged her wineglass for emphasis: “Just like I saw him do in the fresh-fruit aisle of Whole Foods. Did he also sniff the towelette?”

“Nearly inhaled it. Made me wonder if it was a cocaine-infused moist towelette.”

“The man does love the fragrance of those moist towelettes.”

“Once his hands are clean, he starts fingering the silk ties.”

“Fingering?”

Mac gave her a demonstration with his cloth napkin.

Fanning herself with the wine list as if just watching this performance inflamed her libido, Shelly said, “He’s a spooky dude.”

“He smelled some of them.”

“Smelled the ties? Tell me he didn’t lick them, too.”

“He didn’t. Maybe he wanted to. He was into those silk ties.”

“How long did this go on?”

“I watched maybe five minutes. But then I left. I didn’t want to be there for the climax.”

After the waitress stopped by to tell them the chef’s specials, Shelly said, “With a mother like his, poor Dime didn’t stand a chance of turning out normal.”

“Well, to be fair, we only met her once.” Speaking ill of the dead always made Mac uncomfortable. “She might’ve been having an off day.”

“Renata Dime told me she was immortal.”

“She died just the same.”

“I’ll bet it came as a surprise to her.”

“She meant immortal through her books,” Mac said.

“We both tried to read one, remember?”

He sighed. “It made my eyes bleed.”

Outside, a siren rose, and drivers curbed their vehicles where they could to facilitate the passage of a police patrol with its roof rack of emergency beacons swiveling blue-red-blue-red. As the cop car raced down Shadow Street, Mac Reeves looked past it, to the Pendleton at the summit. Although the police cruiser was neither coming from nor going to that grand old mansion, the place did not look the same to Mac, not as stately as it usually appeared, not as welcoming, and in fact inexplicably ominous. A sense of foreboding overcame him, and he shivered.

As observant as ever, Shelly said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe talking about Renata Dime put me off my mood.”

“Then we won’t talk about her anymore.”