Diablerie by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page A

the apartment would be lonely without Mona.
    Lonely without Mona. The words swirled in my head, holding other meanings. I never missed Mona. She could go out every night for weeks, and often did, and I never felt lonely. She was once working in San Francisco for three months, getting a new publication off the ground, and we barely called each other once a week.
    But now, after less than a day, I was missing her.
    I headed south. I had a destination, but not consciously. It wasn't until I got to Thirty-sixth Street that I realized I had been headed for Maria Valeria's apartment building.
    Maria's husband, Isaac, had died when Mona was only eight. He and Maria had come from Jamaica in order to make a new life. They loved their daughter and even now Maria stayed in New York to be near Mona.
    I rang the bell downstairs even though I knew Mona would be angry at my just showing up. But I missed her; I wanted to see her.
    No one answered and I thought that I should leave and call her on her cell phone. But I had the keys to Maria's apartment in my pocket. Mona made me carry them in case she was out of town and there was an emergency.
    I opened the downstairs door thinking that I'd knock, in case the bell was broken.
    No one answered. I stood there a moment, knocked again, looked at my watch—it was 1:21 and I had nowhere to go.
    I opened the door telling myself that Mrs. Valeria was sick with bronchitis, maybe she'd Men or had some kind of asthma attack.
    But the apartment was empty. The kitchen was clean. Maria's bed was made and neat. There were no medicine bottles on the night table or extra blankets at the foot of the bed, no humidifier or oxygen tent, no evidence of respiratory illness at all.
    The guest bedroom also doubled as Maria's office. It was where she knitted and wrote letters on a wobbly cherry table/desk that I had made when I was studying woodworking at the Y.
    Mona's little satchel was at the foot of the bed. It was obvious that she just wanted to get away from me for a while. Maria wasn't sick.
    I knew that I should leave, but Mona's desertion of our home, her lie about her mother's illness, made me suspicious. That's why I emptied her satchel out on the bed.
    A toothbrush, her favorite yellow towel, cartridges for the Mont Blanc Mozart fountain pen, aspirin, Ambien, and a package of six ribbed condoms were arrayed on her neat blankets.
    It was not possible for me to explain away those condoms. We hadn't used them for years. Her tubes were tied after Seela. The pregnancy was so hard on her that we both decided to be happy with one child.
    Mona had a lover somewhere. For how long? Had it started with that trip to San Francisco? Was it only one, or was it many lovers?
    Little hints came back to me as I knelt there next to the bed so as not to muss her tightly tucked covers. For a while she had talked during our nightly dinners about a man named Tom Inch. He was a journalist, and she let it slip one day that they had gone to see a film while in Las Vegas at a convention.
    I was a little bothered by this and said so.
    "It was nothing," she told me. "We were doing a profile on that young actress Jessa Sterling. She had a small role in the film. It was just business."
    I forgot about it before dessert.
    Then there was another guy, I had forgotten his name. He was an artist, I remembered, and used to call the house. They had long talks on her office phone. She laughed loud and hard while talking to him. Once, after a brief talk with the artist, she told me that she was going to her mother's for the evening. I didn't think about it at the time. It seemed . . . ordinary. And I didn't ask a lot of questions.

    The image of my father, a giant, came into my mind. Tall and dark-skinned like me, he went up and down the lane beside our house watering the rosebushes—the huge multicolored orange and yellow and red flowers releasing their heavy, sweet scent all around us.
    "What if the sun came down on that mountain, Daddy?" I