Read No Time to Die for Free Online

until a thin layer of foam blanketed the rim, then placed a small bowl of peanuts in front of us.
    “Freshen your drink?” she asked.
    “Not right now,” I said, tapping my half-filled glass. I intended to sip slow while I drew the story out. Marie waited until the barmaid moved away before she spoke.
    “So you tryin’ to find out about James.” She picked at the few peanuts, popped them delicately in her mouth, then took a sip of beer. “First off, lemme say this. When I hooked up with him, he was already separated from Claudine. I didn’t break up nobody’s happy home. I want that understood, okay?”
    “Okay,” I said, wondering what game he had dropped on this one between his
GQ
styling and bald-faced lying.
    James was two years older than Claudine and raised in the 115th Street projects by an aunt who substituted for a permanently absent father and a frequently absent mother. Before alcohol had cut the inroads into his face, he had been a good-looking man. A weak man but good-looking enough to pull a woman in hip-deep before she caught him in his lies, which he explained away with more lies. As he had done with Claudine. And when the lies about his college background and his plans for a law degree eventually cornered him, he’d used his fists to make his way out.
    Claudine had come to my door one night with her face swollen so large she couldn’t speak. Dad had collared Ruffin and grabbed a baseball bat and gone out looking for him but he’d disappeared. Hit and run …
    “James, you know, got a way of talkin’ his way into things,” Marie said. “He gas a woman up, tell her how fine she look, how she so rare. You know, all the stuff a woman want to hear, though deep down, you know the brother’s lyin’, comin’ on wrong, scammin’. All James got is a degree in B.S. and it wasn’t long before I found out he didn’t have too much of nuthin’ else.”
    She said this as if she’d read my mind. James probably knew his game was weak and his strategy was to move in on a woman fast, dazzle her, and hope she’d remain dazzled. When the glow faded and the questions began, then the violence started.
    I nodded and raised my glass, waiting for her to continue.
    “So he tried comin’ on Rambo a few times. He got real strong arms and he like to come up on you, sneakylike. Come from behind with somethin’ in his hand swingin—a stick, a bottle, a belt. Two times he tried that shit with me. You know that ’cause you answered one of the nine-elevens …”
    I nodded again, remembering running with three other officers down a dim hall in a five-story walkup where a hefty young woman had opened her door and pointed to the apartment near the end of the corridor.
    “They at it again,” she had said. “That door right there.” Her voice had been strong with anger and flowed over the blare of her television set.
    “I don’t know how that girl stand it. I dimed him out and you can tell him I did. If he base up at me, I’ll beat his buns into the carpet. Tell him I said that too!”
    The light streaming from behind her had accented the sweat on her narrow nose. She was really not that big a woman but her hands on her hips were balled into fists the size of large, unripe avocados and she was prepared to back up her conversation.
    I imagined a set of hundred-pound barbells propped in front of her living room television and a library of workout tapes.
    “We’ll handle it, miss,” I said, thankful we hadn’t been called to
her
apartment. “Thanks for calling.”
    Marie sipped her beer now, remembering also. “He tried that shit twice, and after that, I said three strikes, motherfucker’s out. So one night, I’m standin’ at the stove and he come up talkin’ some stuff about how the fish ain’t fried crisp enough. Here I am tryin’ to get things together fast, done worked a double while he home all day chillin’ with Montel and Rolling Rock …”
    “He wasn’t working?”
    “He was supposed