Read Online When the Thrill Is Gone by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

eyes were no color that I could name.
    Less than a year before I had almost died and she sat by me whenever my family wasn’t there. Twill kept tabs on the visits and called her when the coast was clear. Now and then the fever would abate and I’d slit my eyes to see her waiting for my recovery.
    I blinked and found myself back in the diner with the woman who willed me back to life.
    “You need to pay your rent,” she said.
    “I got an advance yesterday.”
    The moments passed.
    Our breakfasts arrived. I had grits, pork patty sausage laced with sage, and four scrambled eggs. She had grapefruit, Special K, and skim milk.
    “What did you want, Leonid?” she asked after the silence stretched halfway through the meal.
    “I want you back.”
    “How’s Gordo?”
    “Dying. Doin’ pretty well at it, too.”
    “I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
    “Why? I’ll leave Katrina.”
    “I know. And maybe if you’d done it earlier . . . No. It’s not your fault. It’s just that I, I’m afraid of losing you.”
    “You won’t lose anything. I will be there.”
    “When I saw you in that bed I knew that someday you’d die like that,” she said, “bloody and beaten.”
    What could I say? I knew it, too.
    “Yes, but we all die.”
    “Not like that.”
    “No,” I agreed. “Not like that.”
    “I’ll leave the Tesla Building if you want,” she offered.
    “They’ll just hire somebody else to throw me out.”
    “How is everything?” the dancer-waitress asked. She was standing there, smiling hopefully.
    “Fine,” Katrina said.
    “I haven’t seen you guys lately,” the waitress added. “You been away?”
    “Different schedules,” Aura said.
    When the girl was gone I put down a twenty and stood up.
    “Where are you going?” Aura asked.
    “I have to leave. You’ll have the rent by three.”

12
    THE ART DECO wonder of New York, the Tesla Building, was eleven blocks from Winston’s, its elegant foyer replete with Italian marble and frescoes of monumental naked and toga-clad men and women. I had to smile as I walked past the security desk to the elevators.
    It was no surprise to find Mardi sitting at her desk, studying her computer screen. She was the overachieving gal Friday of the movies from back before even I was born. Mardi was so concentrated that she didn’t stand up when I came in.
    “You were right,” she said, not even looking up. “It’s her sister, Shawna Chambers-Campbell, divorced.”
    There was a victory smile on her face when she shifted her gaze to me—but that faded.
    “Ms. Ullman?” she said.
    Mardi had been working for me less than a year and already she had become my closest confidante. The thirty-six years that separated us were nothing. I was a New York sewer rat and she a basket-case savant, raped for years by a man calling himself her father and then set adrift in a world that neither cared about nor comprehended her pain. Our unlikely alliance was, in its own way, perfect.
    “I’m supposed to be the detective here,” I said.
    “But you just look so sad.” Her eyes invaded mine with their compassion; the empathy of a girl made wise by psychic defenses a Soviet spy would have marveled at.
    I pulled up her aqua visitor’s chair and said, “Teach.”
    She gave me a wan smile—the doorway to acres of feeling I could only guess at.
    “Her brother’s name is Theodore but everybody calls him Tally,” Mardi said. “He’s under arrest downtown. Her mother—”
    “For what?” I asked. Shorthand was all we needed to communicate.
    “Possession with the intent to distribute,” she said after hitting a few buttons on the keyboard. “Seven joints and an as yet undefined red capsule. Her mother is named Azure. She has a history of mental illness and is now a resident of the Schmidt Home in Battery Park City . . .”
    You could see New Jersey out of Mardi’s window. From the seventy-second floor it looked like a scale model of Purgatory.
    “What’s her problem?” I