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straight and you can make us each a gin and tonic.”
    Until they moved into the building I hadn’t seen Tim in five or six years. He’d once been a big, loosely put-together man with freckles and reddish hair. With illness he’d collapsed inward as such men do, as if the plug had been pulled and his gusto had all run out. The red hair was a yellowed white and sparse on a long oval face with cheeks sinking against the hollows of his elongated skull and the freckles had coagulated into brown disks which rested like coins on the parchment face. Red veins had exploded outward from his bony hawk’s nose. He looked as if he’d been hurled forward from within his body and shattered the windshield of his face. He was wearing a cowboy shirt with one of those awful string ties held in place by something that looked like a turquoise napkin ring. Baggy old corduroys and furry slippers of indeterminate age completed the ensemble and his hand, weakly shaking mine, felt dusty.
    “There.” He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen counter, where the Tanqueray and Schweppes stood like soldiers beside the limes, the ice trays, the old paring knife. “Make ’em. I gotta sit down.”
    I built them quick, listening to the sound of the television in the other room. Hogan was suggesting to Captain Klink for the two millionth time that he just might be ticketed for the Eastern Front if word got back to Berlin. It was a funny show. I could hear the laughter but Pa Dierker was sitting in the dark corner of the room, scowling, wheezing. Expensive, very bad paintings hung in odd, conflicting areas of wall and made the room look empty. He sat in a Naugahyde tilt lounger, a rich old man who wasn’t enjoying the sunset years. Somehow he made his corner of the room look like a documentary film about abuses in the nursing-home industry. “Siddown, Paul, and give me the drink. Did you put gin in mine?”
    I nodded.
    “I forgot to tell you I’m not supposed to drink. Ah, well, I’ll tough it out.” He took a deep swallow. He’d been a hard drinker once and at least you never lost the knack.
    “Forget what Ma told you.” He clicked a handset and the sound of Hogan’s Heroes died. No more applause.
    “How do you know what she told me?”
    “I know. Poor Larry. Pa looked on him like the son we never had, that witch of a wife drove him to kill himself, their marriage broke Pa’s health …” He made a sour face. “Direct hit?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, she runs off at the mouth and I learn it by heart. God hasn’t blessed me with deafness, the one affliction I could make use of. But no, she talks and I listen and I know she’ll just keep saying the same thing until there’s nobody … left to hear it.” He took another deep drink and coughed wetly, turning gray beneath the exploded blood vessels. “It’s all bullshit.”
    “You mean she made it up?”
    “I didn’t say that, Paul. But she gets it all out of focus. The facts are … old. They deserve to die. Larry killed himself; he’s dead.” He stared at the silent television picture. “Who cares why anymore?”
    “Do you know why?”
    “Me? How should I know, Paul?” He was grinning, overtly wily, possibly gaga, for all I knew. He looked suddenly as if he were playing a game I hadn’t been told about.
    “She said Larry’d stopped in to see you a few times. What did he want? Did he act like a man who was going to kill himself?”
    “How should I know? What do I know about suicides?”
    “Did he talk about his wife?”
    “Yes.” He grinned. “He rambled on about his wife. Shit!” he snorted. “Why can’t we just leave women out of it? He was through with Kim; that was all over.” The craftiness of the rodent gleamed behind his dull eyes. “Why would he care about Kim anymore? Women! Ma and her goddamned imagination …”
    “Your wife doesn’t agree with you, Tim. She was upset about this whole thing. She said you were disturbed when Blankenship came to see you.