I could feel the tears coming down my cheeks again.
“No,” I said, rocking back and forth. “No…no…no.”
Thomas.
Cantor said, “Had he ever used heroin?”
“Right before he went to rehab,” I said. “But he snorted it, the way he used to snort everything else. I always thought it was the heroin that finally got him to go.”
I turned to look at Cantor. “He said he was killing himself one party at a time,” I said.
“There were no signs that he might go back to using,” Cantor said.
“No,” I said. “He washappy. He was working here. We were working together.” I was once again trying to get my breathing under control. I drank more whiskey.
“No,” I said again.
“Tell me again what he said when you talked to him.”
“He said he’d found out something,” I said. “That he needed to talk to somebody before he came over here.”
“But not who?”
I shook my head. “Just that he might know why they were coming at us so hard and what was really going on. Something like that.”
“But not who ‘they’ might be.”
I shook my head again.
“I checked his phone,” Cantor said. “It was in his pocket. The last call he made was to you.”
I stood up.
“Give me a minute to clean myself up. Then let’s go.”
It was like I was the one in some kind of drug-induced state, trying to do what Thomas said he did when he was out of rehab. Put one foot in front of the other. Not a day at a time. One minute at a time.
“What happens to his share of the team now that he’s gone, if you don’t mind my asking?” Cantor said. “No chance he would have left it to either of your older brothers, right?”
“Not in ten thousand years.”
“I have to ask,” Cantor said.
“It goes to me,” I said. “If Thomas had outlived me, I was going to do the same for him.”
I felt so tired all of a sudden.
“Is it out yet?”
“You know what the goddamn world is like,” Cantor said. “Before long everybody will know.”
Cantor put a flasher on the dashboard of his car and we drove, fast, through the streets of San Francisco in the night, blowing through one light after another. I was afraid to close my eyes because every time I did there was the image of my brother’s body where Cantor said they’d found him. I remembered all the times when he stood in the front row of his suite and talked about how much he loved the view.
From way up here, he’d always say.
We drove through the Port of San Francisco, still going fast. My father had been trying for as long as I could remember, without success, to get a new stadium for the Wolves built in South Bay.
“Tell me what he said again,” Cantor said.