At seventy thirty A.M., a mussed Mee came out in a robe and started making breakfast. She asked Myron if he wanted something. Myron politely declined.
At eight A.M., his phone rang. He checked the number and saw it was from Big Cyndi.
“Good morning, Mr. Bolitar.”
“Good morning, Big Cyndi.”
“Your ponytailed drug dealer was at the club last night. And I tailed him.”
Myron frowned. “In the Batgirl costume?”
“It’s dark. I blend.”
That image came and thankfully fled.
“Did I tell you that Yvonne Craig herself helped me make it?”
“You know Yvonne Craig?”
“Oh, we’re old friends. You see, she told me that the material was one-way stretch. It’s sort of like a girdle fabric, not as thin as Lycra, but not as thick as neoprene. It was very hard to find.”
“I’m sure.”
“Did you know Yvonne starred as the superhot green chick on Star Trek?”
“Marta, the Orion slave girl,” Myron said, because he couldn’t help himself. He tried to get them back on track. “So where is our drug dealer now?”
“Teaching French at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey.”
12
The cemetery overlooked the schoolyard.
Who came up with that—placing a school full of kids, just budding into adolescence, directly across the street from a resting place for the dead? These children walk by this cemetery or look out on it literally every day. Did it bother them? Did it remind them of their own mortality, that in what would amount to infinity’s breath, they’d grow old and end up there too? Or, more likely, was the cemetery an abstract, something that had nothing to do with them, something so commonplace to them that they barely saw it anymore?
School, cemetery. Talk about life’s bookends.
Big Cyndi, still in the Batgirl costume, knelt by a gravestone, head lowered, shoulders hunched, so that from a distance, one might mistake her for a Volkswagen Beetle. When Myron approached, she looked out of the corner of her eye and whispered, “I’m blending,” and then started sobbing again.
“So where exactly is Ponytail?”
“Inside the school, room two-oh-seven.”
Myron looked toward the school. “A drug-dealing middle school French teacher?”
“It seems that way, Mr. Bolitar. Shame, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
“His real name is Joel Fishman. He lives in Prospect Park, not far from here. He’s married and has two kids, a boy and a girl. He has taught French for more than twenty years. No real record. One DUI eight years ago. Ran for town council six years ago.”
“A citizen.”
“A citizen, yes, Mr. Bolitar.”
“How did you get all that information?”
“At first, I considered seducing him so that he’d take me back to his place. You know. Pillow talk. But I knew you’d be against my defiling myself like that.”
“I would never let you use your body for evil, Big Cyndi.”
“Only sin?”
Myron smiled. “Exactly.”
“So I followed him from the club. He took public transportation, the last train out at two seventeen A.M. He walked home to Seventy-four Beechmore Drive. I called the address in to Esperanza.”