This entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks is dated April 22, 1949:
As I write this, it's two in the morning and I'm back in Portly's Diner where the whole thing started a few days ago, wondering why I'm still awake. The only other soul in the joint is the night man, who has been mopping at the floor with a dry mop for the last hour just so he can look like he's doing something. Meanwhile, I sit in the same corner booth watching the sleepy city through the window, thinking about the man and his wife I helped reunite.
Back in that bawdy house of Max Blank's: they were alone, they stood still for a moment and blinked at each other, to make sure the other person was really there. One year had passed since the last time they were in a room together, and although she was in bed both times, the last time she wasn't alone. I wondered if the Reverend remembered that.
“Two thousand dollars,” Marjorie said, breaking the silence.
He coughed. “Some men speak only one language. Money is his.”
“So much, though. That's all we ever had in savings.”
“It was the price that needed to be paid,” he replied.
They were together for the first time since he sent her away. He was in a room where many men had stumbled and she had been the stumbling block. I was looking through a keyhole with a woman who had caused me no end of grief, and we watched them. The Reverend took his wife's hands and held them, looked into her eyes, and winced, not because he was sorry he paid to get her back, but pained, hurt by the hurt she had suffered. And he said, “You are to live with me all these days. You are not to return here, to this place, to this life. I am your husband, and you are my wife, till death us do part.”
Her body shook. “I'm sorry for all I've done,” she said.
“Then come with me. I forgive you. I love you.”
Gloria pressed into my arm and squeezed the life out of it. I hoped the pretty scene going on in the next room wasn't giving her any ideas.
The Reverend bent down and kissed her with the kind of kiss a man saves up for when he really needs it. When it was over, she stood and took his arm, glanced at our hiding place, and whispered, “Till death us do part.” It made him smile. They left like that, him in his formal collar and her in her sheer nightgown.
And here I am, sitting in the same old place waiting for the kid behind the counter to refill my cup with a bit of burnt coffee. I'll probably slip back into my apartment late enough to catch a few hours of sleep before sun-up and then back into my office, wait for another client to walk through the door, and in the meantime, I'll think about Gloria and how she sat there across from me before I started to write all this down.
“I'll take the bus,” she said, meditatively.
We weren't on the subject of buses and it threw me. “You're going back to New Mexico?”
She nodded and scraped at a piece of pie she ordered. Nothing more was said on the subject. She didn't offer to stay and I didn't offer to drive her home. I watched her as she stood and it didn't even cross my mind that there aren't a lot of female detectives out there, and beautiful ones to boot. I could have asked her to stay and she probably would have, but I had too much stored in my brain, too many times when she thought only of herself. Her empty plate still sits there, and now she's gone.
“You want me to get that?” the kid in the paper hat is saying.
“If you don't mind.”
The Reverend just put everything aside and said he forgave her. She did everything in the book and then some, and he wiped the slate clean. When I think about it, it's crazy, but as I think about it more, I envy him. I'm watching the kid take the plate away and I'm thinking Yeah, I'll probably regret letting her go when I wake up. Maybe that's why I'm still awake.
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