Free Shoedog by George P. Pelecanos Page B

the day before last, when Weiner had finally asked her out for coffee. She had said it as she looked down into the black of the coffee.
    Weiner put the ring back down on the felt, deciding now that Nita would have her diamond.
    “I’ll take it,” Weiner said.
    “It’s lovely.”
    “Wrap it for me, will you?”
    “Of course.”
    The clerk took the ring and glanced once at Weiner before she disappeared into the back room. Weiner took the roll from his trousers and unwound the rubber band, counting out the bills. He took what he needed for the ring and put it in his right pocket and rebanded what remained and put that in his left pocket. He looked into the mirror behind the counter.
    He wasn’t so old. At least he didn’t look his age, not fifty-five. No way did he look fifty-five. He had put on a few pounds, but on him it looked good, and the goatee he had worn for thirty years had come back in style. He had seen it on the young people, first the African-Americans and later the whites, over the last few years. He looked good anyway, and now the goatee, it made him look younger. He figured he looked good because he had never married, since married cats always looked older, on account of all that stress. Some people said it was clean living, but clean living, in his case, had nothing to do with it. Anyway, he didn’t know what kept him young, but he knew he wasn’t too old for Nita.
    That day in the coffee shop he had asked her to go to the Sonny Rollins show at One Step Down, the jazz joint in the West End. He had met her buying music at Olsson’s at Dupont Circle, where she worked as a clerk when she wasn’t studying for her undergrad degree at GW. He had been looking to pick up an old disc, “Mulligan Meets Monk,” that had been reissued on CD. Olsson’s didn’t stock the CD, but she knew of it, and he had been impressed. Her looks—dark hair, black clothes, heavy on the eyeliner, heavy in the hips—had impressed him as well. She reminded him of the zaftig beat chicks he had known in the old days, at Coffee and Confusion. The memory saddened him, but at the same time it made Weiner realize that all he wanted was to get next to it—to touch it—just once.
    But Nita had hedged on the date, telling him to swing by Friday afternoon, her next shift, where they’d discuss it. He figured she needed to think it over—the age difference, and like that—and that was natural. But the ring might help things along. The ring might close the deal.
    Three C notes seemed steep and a bit of a gamble, but that day Weiner felt lucky. He had cased both liquor stores in the morning, diagraming them and taking notes just after his visits. As usual, his memory had been dead on, his stay brief and uneventful. Afterward he had driven out to Laurel for the one o’clock post, settled in his spot in the grandstand, and quickly surveyed the form. For the first race he laid a win bet at the five-dollar window on the four horse, Arturo. Arturo was to be ridden by Prado, the hot and hotheaded Peruvian. Weiner gave equal weight to the jockeys as he did to the horses, and Prado had been his man since Desormeaux had hightailed it for Del Mar. Arturo went off at eight to two and won the six-furlong contest; Prado had pushed him to a roll at the rail.
    In the second race Weiner played the seven-two combination and hit the exacta for six hundred twenty-six dollars and twenty cents, his biggest payday in months. He would have stuck around for another race—his friend Kligman pleaded with Weiner to “parlay it,” the favorite strategy of track losers—but he had to make the two-thirty meeting. He felt relieved, really, driving to the jewelry store at Laurel Mall, that the money he had won still rested, for a change, in his pocket. He’d pick up the ring, drive out to Grimes’s house, and lay out the whole deal.
    As for the twenty grand that Grimes would give him to strategize the job, that would pay off old debts. And of course there was