King Maybe by Timothy Hallinan Page A

used to them, they stay in the same location, and we have memories set in them.”
    Stinky prodded his plate. “Gluten,” he said, in the tone I’d been saving to say “knot of writhing centipedes,” and then touched the tip of his fat little index finger to his tongue. “Sugar.”
    â€œIt’s pie,” Ronnie said, poking a hole in the top crust of a piece of apple and then licking the back of the fork. One of the things that recommends Ronnie to me is that she loves to eat. She may have lied to me about literally everything else in her life, but her love of food is genuine. I don’t trust people who don’t like to eat, which is not exactly the same thing as saying I trusted Ronnie. She said, “What do you eat anyway?”
    â€œLean protein in small quantities,” Stinky said. “Cruciferous vegetables. Seeds and nuts.”
    I said, “You’re still going to die.”
    Stinky said, “Do you know how this stuff accumulates in the gut, how it turns to putrefactive acids, how long it takes you to excrete it?”
    â€œNot my topic.” My pie was peach and had more sugar in it than Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I figure I can either die having eaten pie or die without having eaten pie, and as existential choices go, that one’s a snap. It requires even less energy than figuring out who to vote against.”
    â€œYou have memories about this place?” Ronnie asked with her mouth full.
    â€œThis was where I received the Gospel According to Herbie,” I said. “He brought me here the night we met, and we came back regularly, whenever he had the urge to pass along a lifetime of learning. Du-par’s was the soda fountain of knowledge, so to speak.”
    â€œHerbie Mott,” Stinky said, having sniffed his water and put it down. “Great burglar.”
    â€œThere should be a Burglary Hall of Fame,” I said. “Posthumous, of course, no need to make it any easier for the cops than it already is.” I nodded in the direction of the four uniformed officers in the booth, busily turning my tax dollars into burgers and fries. One of them, who had been staring at Ronnie, held my gaze in the biologically approved male-primate fashion. I smiled to indicate submission. “Herbie would be the first inductee.”
    â€œThe pathological need of Americans to give each other awards,” Stinky said. “It’s pathetic. It infantilizes us in the eyes of the world.”
    â€œWe’ve been infantilized in the eyes of the world for a long time,” I said. “Back in the 1920s, after we came out of World War I in a single piece, the painter John Sloan— Do you know that Herbie left me a Sloan painting?”
    Stinky put his elbow on his pie, glanced down at it, and left it there. He rubbed his nose with his free hand, the sure sign that his heartbeat had just increased—I’ll kill the person who tells him about it—and said, “You have a Sloan?”
    â€œI do.”
    He rubbed his nose again. “Have you thought about selling it?”
    â€œOf course not. Anyway, after the war ended, with us largely protected by oceans, Sloan referred to America as ‘the great unspanked baby of the world.’”
    â€œVery apt, I’m sure,” Stinky said. “You have a Sloan?”
    â€œWho retained you to get the stamp?” I said.
    â€œSurely you jest,” Stinky said. Ronnie batted his arm away from his pie, pulled the plate over to her, and began to eat around the elbow dent. “You have the stamp, and you think I’ll tell you who the buyer is?”
    â€œLookie here.” I took the stamp out of my pocket and brought it within half an inch of the coffee in my cup. I wiggled it back and forth, feeling the heat of the coffee on my fingers. “What do you think?”
    â€œYou wouldn’t,” Stinky said, his eyes on the stamp. “You have an aesthetic