Concrete Angel (2 page)

The room had the dreamlike atmosphere of an old crime movie, the ones we liked to watch on late-night TV. But how could the dead body on the floor be genuine when the rest of the room was still the familiar place where I’d watched
Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show
a few hours earlier? The tableaux seemed to exist on two planes—the everyday and the surreal—as was often the case with my mother.

“Lying there looking so innocent after what he tried to do,” Mother said. “He seemed like such a nice guy this morning. You never can tell, I guess,” she said, sounding surprised by his sudden change—as if he’d pulled something over on her.

At that moment, I’d no idea how or where she’d met him, vaguely imagining he’d appeared at the door posing a threat of some kind, perhaps deserving his fate.

“How many times did you fire the gun?” I asked, looking at the blood. It’d puddled extensively and it was shockingly red. I’d never considered that blood might come in different shades. Our embarrassingly out-of-date black and white TV had shielded me from the true redness of blood. The black blood on TV was somehow less startling—less of a life force, similar to sludge.

Everything in the room seemed heightened in hue. The color palette had transformed itself into something brilliant: a pale green carpet, two aqua chairs, a chartreuse sofa. And the red, red blood.

“Well, how many bullets were in the thing?” Mother asked, avoiding the menacing word
gun
. “Look, I fired until the gun was empty at the shooting range—the one your father took me to,” she explained. “I guess I did the same thing here tonight. I don’t remember much.”

This seemed reasonable to my twelve-year-old ears. She was probably in shock. I’d often heard such reasoning given on
The Rockford Files
or
McMillan and Wife
, my two favorite TV shows.

“I don’t think he mentioned a last name,” she said, as if he might not have one. She was on her knees between rivulets of blood, rifling his wallet, examining his license.

Why didn’t I find it strange she didn’t know the full name of the nearly naked man on our floor? Or that she could talk about it so dispassionately only a few minutes after it happened?

“Santini,” she said triumphantly. “Look, he’s got a Master Charge.” Reluctantly, she slid it back into its slot—wisely forgoing any pleasure stealing it might bring.

Mother continued to forget Jerry Santini’s name each time she was asked it in the weeks ahead—I never once heard her get it right. More often than not, she called him Joey Spatini, confusing his name with a packaged spaghetti sauce popular then.

Sprawled on my mother’s fluffy carpeting, an item she’d made my father buy as part of their divorce settlement, Jerry Santini was certainly dead, putting to rest any notion Mother had exaggerated or misunderstood the final outcome of their tête-à-tête. It was almost impossible to stop her from immediately spraying the area with rug shampoo.

“My God, what sort of blood did he have?” she said, aiming the can she’d retrieved from the kitchen. A line of rust circled the can’s bottom, suggesting its potency was questionable.

“He seemed normal enough this afternoon,” she repeated.

Later, when I studied
Macbeth
in high school, the vision of Mother, poised with her can of stain remover, would run through my head in slow motion, her finger moving inexorably toward the button.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to touch anything,” I said, quickly clapping my hand over the nozzle. My voice and knees were shaking as I began to fully appreciate our situation. “They can find things out from blood samples. Important things.”

This was before the science of blood splatter or the discovery of DNA testing, but there was still information to be culled. Blood type, at least. My years of watching TV detective shows
hadn’t been wasted. It hadn’t occurred to me yet that the things they would find in the police lab might not be ones Mother wanted discovered.

She remained motionless with the can pointed at the rug, her still-rouged lips pursed in thought. I wondered if she’d held the gun so steadily fifteen minutes earlier.

“Blood is blood. What could they possibly learn from his blood?” She turned toward me, the can still hovering over the murder scene. “It was an accident, Christine.” Her voice was whiney, annoyed. “Why must you insist on seeing this… mishap… as a crime? You make it sound like something it’s not. Make sure you use the word
accident
when they come tonight.”

“Come?”

“The police or whoever we eventually call. First impressions last longest, you know.”

This was the sort of adage my grandmother usually came up with but, in this instance, it was probably on the mark.

“And look,” Mother continued, “we have to protect ourselves here. They’ll be trying to pin it on me—on us.”

Mother’s voice trailed off as she stepped back from the body. She’d already linked me with the events although I didn’t notice it then. Or perhaps I saw us as immutably linked long before. It was our apartment, our life. I should have been more vigilant and kept her safe.

“I’m gonna call Cy. He’ll know what to do.”

“Not Daddy?” I whispered, as if this verbal betrayal was being recorded. If she’d kept the door locked, as Daddy suggested after his handiwork a few weeks earlier, we wouldn’t be in this mess. And when had my father been stymied by any situation? He may have been away most of the time, may have been at a loss for words with me when he was home, but you could count on him in a crisis. Military training and running a business had prepared him to react with precision in tight circumstances.

I flashed back to
Rear Window
, to Raymond Burr removing his wife in a suitcase. Would this be how we rid ourselves of this body? Did we have the necessary tools, a large enough suitcase?

Mother made a sound of disgust. “How could we possibly call your father, kiddo? Look what’s lying on our rug. Think Hank would want to see that—want to figure a way out of this one?”

He was naked except for a pair of extremely tight briefs. The bottoms of his feet were pink and plump, like he hadn’t spent much time on them. Good attendance to his feet was fitting given they’d met in a shoe repair shop. I couldn’t see his face, pushed into the rug as it was, but I had the impression he was handsome, misled by the idea Mother was rarely drawn to homely men. He had a nice head of steely black hair and wore it long in the back, which was still the style.

Cy Granholm, the man Mother went to call, had loomed large in our life of late. In the last three months, he’d handled Mother’s divorce and child custody hearing, gone to court with her on a speeding ticket, and twice filed papers demanding an increase in child support. Mother had begun calling him at home with household predicaments too, questions about financial matters, or advice on how to fix the gurgling toilet. She’d never been much good on her own, and I wasn’t old enough to step in. My grandmother often voiced the opinion Mother’s body slanted leftward—as if it were made to lean heavily on someone else, preferably a man.

“Cy!” I heard Mother say a few seconds later, using the phone in her bedroom. There was a trace of gaiety in her tone—probably a quality she’d cultivated long ago and couldn’t discard now—though it was unseemly. The treacherous Ericafone, with its oddly placed dial, still lay overturned on the living room floor. If the incident had happened in the bedroom, the easier-to-use baby blue princess phone might have saved Jerry’s life.

“If it’s not too late, I could use your help, Cy.” Her words were overly precise—like she was reading a script. “No, no, you’ll have to come over here, I’m afraid. Yes, yes, as soon as possible.” She laughed a little, pretending it wasn’t too awful, that nothing was greatly amiss. “I know it’s late but I’d rather not explain over the phone.”

Who could blame her? Although I would’ve liked to have had some warning of what story she’d tell Cy.

It was past midnight and if Cy refused to come, whom could we call next? We’d run out of saviors. One thing was certain from the look on her face when I suggested it, there’d be no calling Daddy. Nor my grandmother. She’d be too full of “I told you so’s,” for Mother to tolerate. She’d be horrified, maybe having a heart attack, adding to our body count. Our list of possibilities was short, so Cy would have to come.

In the recent past, my father would have handled the situation, found a way to wipe things clean, made the problem evaporate even if Mother disappeared with it. But now there was only the two of us to clear things up. And Cy. Only a month or two into our newly divorced state and we were already in a fix as Daddy had predicted.

“Y
ou have no idea what the world’s like,” Daddy flung at Mother in the judge’s quarters some weeks before Jerry Santini reached for the Ericafone. “I’ve taken care of you far too well all these years, ushering you straight from your father’s bed to mine. You’re a child still, Eve. An infant.” Daddy knew this was one charge my mother despised.

“I was about to tell him off right there, but Cy grabbed my hand, nearly crushing it,” Mother said, dabbing her eyes on the night following their divorce. “And this is the worst part.” She blew her nose noisily. “Are you ready for this?” I nodded. “Your father shouted how he could see how things were—suggesting my bed was already waiting for the next guy.” She reached for my hand. “Embarrassing me in front of both the judge and Cy,” she continued shakily. “Have you ever heard of anything so mean? Deserting us without a thought and then blaming me for hiring a decent lawyer to see us through it. Mocking me for accepting help from my own attorney. He’d prefer to see us on the streets begging pennies from strangers.”

I nodded sympathetically.

Mother drew herself up. “Cy’s a married man after all.” She smoothed the wrinkle in her skirt, adding somewhat sadly, “And he’s not my type—not by a long shot.”

Cy was a heavy-set man, the kind of guy who was always hiking up his pants, tucking in his shirt, sweating even in winter. He was also balding and wore thick dark glasses completely obscuring his face. No, he wasn’t Mother’s type. She’d require certain things from Cy, but not others.

I was silent, trying hard to get the childishly mistaken picture of Mother in bed with my grandfather out of my head. The words
from your father’s bed to mine
were difficult to excise from my twelve-year old brain.

It’d already occurred to me that Cy’s addition to our household, if he married my mother, might take some of the pressure off me. I’d had a good taste of what life alone with her was like over the course of my parents’ many separations, and it was wearying. There was always a problem to solve, a slight to be dealt with, Mother’s schemes to be derailed, a place to be found for her newest junk. Junk. We haven’t gotten into her junk yet.

But now I’d found out Cy was married and unlikely to move in and care for us. And he was
not
Mother’s type. His shoes weren’t shined. He was fat. He’d fade from our lives quickly once she no longer needed him.

“I kind of like Cy,” I said faintly. “Maybe he’ll get divorced.” A grandfatherly sort of man might suit us both.

“Fat chance,” she said with a shrug.

Mother went on to let me in on the entire divorce proceedings. The drama of the hearing came across much like one of the boxing matches Daddy liked to watch on Saturday nights.

Pow! “I’m not picking up your wardrobe expenses. You have enough clothing to get you into the nineteen eighties. Scratch that—your eighties.”

Wham! “You can’t see Christine on school nights, and I’m keeping the Thunderbird.”

Zing! “That T-Bird was a birthday gift from my parents. You can take the Dart Swinger.”

“Swell, you want me carting your kid around in that heap. I can dent it with my elbow.”

If there were to be no more boxing matches, perhaps we could watch
Carol Burnett
in peace. But calm, with or without Daddy, didn’t last long.

B
ack to the crime scene: two hours after the soda salesman’s death, I told two police officers I’d found Jerry Santini strangling my mother in the living room and pulled the gun Daddy bought for us from the drawer.