Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (8 page)

It took me thirty minutes to get the same answer at the other houses on the street. By that time all the neighbors had an eye on me as I walked along the street. To give them time to forget it and to make sure I didn’t miss any bets, I went to the used-furniture store.

A little bell above the door went off when I shoved it open. It was hot inside. The air smelled as if no one had been breathing it lately. There was a small path across the scuffed floor to a pair of curtains with a two-inch space between them. The rest of the floor was crowded with indifferent furniture.

“You wanted to buy something?” a tough female voice said from beyond the curtains.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to talk to someone.”

“Come on back,” the voice invited.

It was even hotter at the back of the store. Part of the floor was concrete and there was a small brick oven against one wall. Tall thin windows filtered light through the dirty crusty glass. There were shelves everywhere, stacked with hundreds of little clay figures of soldiers, children dressed in costumes from a dozen countries, animals, characters from fairy tales. On a large table about three and a half feet high were boxes of modeling clay, cans of paint and glazing compound, stacks of books and magazines, tools to aid in shaping the figures. Two long-necked lamps at each end of the table provided most of the light.

A large fat woman with olive skin and bluish gray hair neatly waved on her round skull worked at the table, her
fingers squeezing and kneading clay. She wore a black dress buttoned close to her chin and spreading amply over her length of fat, ending a few inches above her ankles. She had sharp eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, and jabbed them at me when I came through the curtains. I saw that she had been watching the store through the curtains with the aid of a small mirror on the table. A huge fan on the floor a dozen feet behind her didn’t disturb the steamy air much. I was sweating before I’d taken half a dozen steps. Apparently she was firing some of the figures in the oven.

“What could I do for you?” she said, her fingers never stopping their work.

The heat made me feel weak in the stomach. “I’ve been looking for a man named Victor Clare. He used to live down the street, at Sixty-nine-o-six, but nobody there has heard of him.”

“What do you want with him?”

I named a fictitious lawyer that I was representing. “He’s come into a little money. We’d like to find him and make the disposition.”

“He died,” she said. “Heart attack. About Thirty-three, it was.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. I hesitated. “There was a little girl who lived with him. Carla Kennedy. He took care of her after her parents were killed in a fire.”

Her fingers continued to work at the clay until a figure began to emerge. I was beginning to think she hadn’t understood me.

“I remember the child,” she said then. “I remember when she came to live with him. He was her uncle, I believe.”

“What did the girl look like?”

She took off her glasses, wiped them on a handkerchief. “What insurance company did you say you were with?”

“Lawyer,” I corrected. She wasn’t believing a word of it.

“She was a very pretty child,” the woman said. “I remember that.”

“Do you remember what color hair she had?”

“I never knew. Most of it was burned off. Sort of brownish, I think. She didn’t live in the neighborhood long, after her uncle died.”

Her busy fingers finished the rough outline of her current figurine. She held it up for me. “There. How’s that?”

“Fine. What happened to the girl after that?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t say.” She put down the clay, scraped bits of it from her hands with a thin, filelike blade. She stood up, holding on to the table for support. She wasn’t much taller standing up. She went to a shelf nearby and took down one of the figures.

“I have one here I think you’d like,” she said, bringing it with her and lifting it toward me. It was a little Southern girl in a bell-shaped hoop skirt. I turned the glazed statuette in my hands, looking at it from all angles. “What’s the price?”

“Twenty dollars.” Her sharp eyes were almost ashamed.

I looked around the dreary little store. “That’s pretty steep. What goes with the figure for the twenty dollars?”

“I think I can find out where Carla Kennedy is for you.” Her eyes prodded me. “I don’t get around so good any more. It’ll take a little time.”

“How much time?”

She dug around in a pocket of the shapeless black dress, and her fingers came out holding a scrap of paper. She had to sit down from the effort of her search. She held out the paper to me. There was a phone number written on it.

“Call me tomorrow night about seven. If the girl’s still in town I’ll get in touch with her.”

“Twenty dollars,” I said sorrowfully.

“Well,” she said defensively, looking at the statuette, “I’m probably saving you a lot of time.”

I nodded and reached into my hip pocket for my wallet.

I memorized the phone number, Seminole 4-3278, as I walked slowly back to where I had parked the Buick earlier that morning. It was close to noon. I sidestepped a small boy wheeling a tricycle around the sidewalk, opened the door and slid into the car. The boy stopped pedaling and watched me from the sidewalk with round serious eyes.

I wadded up the slip of paper and put it in the ashtray, got out the key and stuck it in the ignition.

“Did he fix yoah cah?” the boy said suddenly in a shrill voice. It startled me.

“What?”

He stared at me, mouth open. His face needed washing. “Da man fix yoah cah,” he said clearly.

“This car?”

He nodded, rode the tricycle in a furious circle, stopped, stared at me again.

“When?”

He pointed up the street. “Jus’ left.”

I looked at the key in the ignition, frowned at it. I withdrew it carefully and put it in my pocket, then got out of the Buick, walked around it and lifted the hood. In a minute or so I found the gimmick, unwired it from the starter and pulled it tenderly away from the motor. Three sticks of dynamite wired together composed the guts of the homemade starter bomb. If I had turned the key in
the ignition, the Buick would have looked as though it had been dropped into the middle of the street from an airplane. What I would have looked like was too sickening to think about.

I put the thing in the trunk, wrapping it in an old inner tube and sticking it into a corner where it wouldn’t bounce around. The little boy was still close by. He had saved his own life as well as mine by speaking out. He had a pleased smile on his face.

“He fix yoah cah.”

“He sure did,” I said. I had to sit down. I opened the door of the Buick next to the sidewalk and sat inside, my feet on the pavement.

“Come here a minute, son,” I said.

He backpedaled cautiously. “Ma said not to.”

“Okay, then. Stay there. Did you watch this man fix my car?” He nodded.

“What did he look like? Was he as big as I am?” He nodded again.

“Bigger?” He looked uncertain.

“Came in a car?” Nod.

“Was it a big car, like this one?” Not sure.

“What color?” Blue.

“What was he wearing? Like I’ve got on, a suit?”

He studied this. “Ov’alls,” he said.

Overalls. I tried to think what else I could ask him that he might have paid attention to. License number? Ha-ha. I was too upset to think it through. I wanted to get in the car and drive it right back to Orange Bay. A sudden thought came to me.

“Did he have on a hat? A blue hat?” The head went from side to side, slowly. Well, that was crazy, anyway.

Down the street a woman yelled hoarsely, “Ronniieeee!” We both jumped. He looked around, aimed the tricycle in that direction and pedaled off.

That left me alone on the lazy noon street. A breath of air touched my hot forehead. I wondered if any of the neighbors had noticed the phony mechanic doctoring the Buick, decided it wasn’t worth asking. I got under the wheel, put the key in the ignition gingerly and winced when I turned it, forgetting to step on the gas.

“Oh, Elaine,” I said under my breath. “Elaine, Elaine, Elaine.” I drove away from there. Ten minutes later I felt the first satisfying edge of anger and my stomach had stopped jumping. I parked in front of a drugstore. I had a very vague idea and nothing else to do but track it down.

I found the number I wanted and a fresh young voice answered right away. “Stan’s Restaurant.” I asked her where Stan was. She didn’t know. He usually came in for lunch but today he must have gone home to eat. I asked where home was. “I can’t give out that information,” she said coldly. I hung up.

Just for the hell of it I looked through the phone book and there it was. Maxine, Stanley, 1901 Jacaranda. I went outside to the Buick, dug out the city map again and found Jacaranda. It was in the Lake Alena section, a block from the golf course that rimmed the west side of the lake.

In fifteen minutes I was there. It was a nice two-story house of peach-colored stucco, with a little Mexican balcony above the front entrance, and a big side porch.

There was no car parked in front and I didn’t see a drive, so I decided the garage could be reached only from the rear. I rang the doorbell.

“You want something?” a soft voice said behind me.

I turned and looked at a big Negro with elegantly graying hair and magnificent shoulders. He was wearing levis, a T shirt and a bandana around his throat. He carried a pair of hedge clippers.

“I was looking for Stan,” I said pleasantly.

The hedge clippers went
chop-chop.
“He’s not here,” he said in an unfriendly tone.

“When would he be likely to get here?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” the man said. “I just work here.”

The front door opened. I looked at a girl in red toreador pants and a bare-midriff blouse. She had lots of soft dark-red hair with streaks in it like hot flame, high cheekbones, cozy blue eyes. She had a near-perfect figure and the clothing she liked made you instantly familiar with every good line of it. Her breasts were almost outsized. She stood with one hand on a stuck-out hip, the other on the doorframe.

“Hello,” she said. She looked past me at the gardener. “Who’s this, Bradley?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said in his dignified voice. “He was looking for Mr. Maxine.”

She looked at me. “Stan’s not here. He was, but he left just a few minutes ago.” She smiled. “Could I help?”

“I don’t—”

“Come on in anyway,” she invited, turning to let me see the profile. She stood straight, belly flattened a little too much, as if she were holding it in. I could see the rounded edge of her rib cage.

I went past her into the house. It was very cool inside. The living room was wide and deep and shady, decorated and planned by an expert to seem as casual as a chew of
tobacco. There was a patio beyond wide French doors, with gaudy lawn furniture.

“I’m Gerry,” she said, sitting on the edge of the sofa. She was barefoot. “Are you a friend of Stan’s?”

“Yes. Are you?”

That got her. She laughed charmingly, a laugh that put dimples at the corners of her mouth. “I sure am,” she said.

A sudden gash of sound startled me. It was a booming bass voice rolling out a piece of something from an opera. The singing was excellent, though loud enough to wrinkle glass. It ended as abruptly as it had begun. I looked around in bewilderment.

“What was that?”

Gerry shrugged. “Bradley. You saw him outside. He’s going to be an opera singer.”

“What does he do around here?”

“Oh, he works for Stan. He’s sort of a gardener and chauffeur, and he keeps an eye on the place. Spends most of his spare time taking singing lessons. He breaks out like that all the time. I’ve got used to it. The neighbors complain, though. The people next door moved away because their cocker spaniel went around shaking all the time and wouldn’t eat.”

“Could you tell me where I might find Stan?” I asked her.

She tossed her head, putting fingers to her hair. She slid a look at me I wasn’t supposed to see. It totaled me up like an adding machine.

“I suppose he went back to the office. He’s president of Marlin Linen Supply Company. You didn’t tell me your name.”

“His name’s Pete Mallory,” Stan Maxine said.

Neither of us started guiltily. Maxine was standing in the doorway to the dining room looking at us. Gerry glanced at him casually.

“I thought you were gone, Stan.”

Stan mopped his misting dark face with a pink handkerchief. He wore a cream-colored suit, dull orange dress shirt with a black tie, and black suede shoes. His hair was tumbling on his forehead and he waved it back into place with fingers that trembled slightly.

“I, ah, I forgot my stomach medicine, sweetie,” he said. His moist, moody eyes kept swinging back to me. There were acne scars on either cheek, and the knife scar at one corner of his mouth held his lips slightly apart and got in the way of his speech when he talked rapidly, which was most of the time. There was a congested look on his face as he suppressed a stomach rumble.

“It’s probably upstairs,” Gerry offered, swinging one small foot briskly as she sat on the arm of the sofa.

“Yeah,” Stan said. “Probably. Listen, honey, would you mind going into the kitchen and maybe stick the dishes in the washer while Mallory and I talk private?”

Gerry grimaced unhappily.

“Just for a minute or two, honey,” Stan coaxed. She picked up a pair of slip-on shoes and walked slowly toward the dining room. When she was close to Maxine she looked back at me and a smile touched one corner of her mouth. Maxine’s finger flexed, but he continued to look at her fondly. When she had shut the door to the dining room he took three big strides toward the sofa, his face pinched with fury, snatched up a big square pillow, turned and flung it at the closed door.

“I’m gonna catch you one of these days, you little tramp!” he said fiercely under his breath. I didn’t quite smile at him. Stan always made the slightest movement seem incredibly difficult to achieve, throwing his whole body into a wink, a word, a gesture. I’ve never seen him still for longer than half a minute.