Hotel Paradise (29 page)

Shirl just went on arguing with herself as people came with their bills and toothpicks in their mouths and she punched the cash-register keys like a crazed typist.

I knew the Rainbow Café people would be talking about the dead woman, so it wasn’t as if I’d chosen it as a place to hide from the news. The wire basket that held the Rainbow’s supply of the
Conservative
was empty, and papers were spread on the counter or crinkling and rattling in people’s hands. I felt it was pretty daring of me even to walk in here (although not as daring as it would have been a few hours ago). If the counter stools had not been full of broad rear ends, I’d have taken one, though I prefer a booth. There were two empty booths, but, of course, Shirl was there overseeing things. Still, I noticed Miss Isabelle Barnett was permitted to take up a booth on her own. This didn’t mean that I could. So I stood there scratching my arm and being embarrassed I was alone and without a place to sit. Dodge Haines turned and gave me a sort of evil grin and Miss Isabelle offered me a little wave, fingers closing and opening on her palm.

Thank heavens Maud was there and saw me and motioned for me to stay put. Charlene was behind the counter, standing with her plump arms folded over her big bosom and laughing; pretty clearly, the customers had been served. Chicken-fried steak was the special, and the truck driver and Dodge Haines were eating it with sides of green beans and mashed potatoes.

Maud called down to Shirl that she was taking a break. In another minute she held up a tall glass of Coke and smiled and signed that I was to follow her. What she was doing was inviting me back to the Reserved booth to sit with her on her break. In fact, I guessed she was taking a break just for my sake. Shirl did not like this, but after all, if Charlene or Shirl herself wanted to share the Reserved booth with their friends, they were free to do it, and so was Maud. Shirl just didn’t like the idea that some kid was allowed to sit there.

As we passed Miss Isabelle, she looked up and gave us both a glimmering smile and I noticed her earrings—cheap, bright blue, like chips of porcelain overlaid with a sprinkling of silver, something like the silver dust on some of Miss Flyte’s fancy candlesticks. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out where the earrings had come from.

Maud and I sat down and I saw the
Conservative
lying on the table. Maud set her coffee cup on a corner of the front page, but she didn’t seem aware of the newspaper. She didn’t bring up Suzy Whitelaw’s account, either. After setting down her cup, she lit up a Camel and waved the match into the aluminum ashtray. I started in on my cherry Coke and she turned to peer around the corner of the booth and then turned back again. She asked, “You seen Sam today?”

I sucked Coke through my straw and shook my head.

She sighed and looked back towards the door again. “Usually he comes in after lunch, at least.”

Maud looked peculiar—that is, sad. Because she’d been so nice about taking her break now, I felt compelled to say something that might cheer her up. Without realizing what I was doing, I said, “Probably he’s busy over at White’s Bridge.” Quickly, I dropped my head and sucked up Coke, afraid I’d really started something.

But I hadn’t. She merely said, “I guess,” in a vague sort of way, and went on smoking.

Maud was never a gossip, never one to make a juicy meal out of some tidbit that came her way. Still, this dead and maybe murdered woman was more than a “tidbit.” After turning the matchbook in her fingers awhile and continuing to look sad, she picked up the paper. It was bound to happen at some point, what with everybody in here probably talking about it. She appeared to be reading the article—I supposed that was what her eyes, traveling over newsprint, were taking in. Finally, she set the paper aside. She looked unhappy, but I don’t think this was because of the stranger lying in Mirror Pond. Maud tended to be moody—not mean, just moody. The Sheriff had pointed this out to me several times. She didn’t talk about what was in the paper, probably because I’d given the impression I’d already read it and knew all the details. Maybe I did; maybe there weren’t many.

As much to break into her blue-devil mood as to hear myself talk, recklessly I said, “People are saying they know who she was.”

Dismissively, she flicked her hand. “People are stupid, too.”

“Well, in Britten’s store someone said it was this Louella Smitt.”

Her eyebrows crowded together over her nose. “Who’s Louella Smitt?”

“This man said she’s from Hebrides.” I didn’t go into what Jude had said about her being “Ben Queen’s girl,” I guess because I wanted to check that out somehow first.

“Police don’t know
who
she is or
where
she’s from. So whoever said that’s just showing off. Unless, of course, Sheriff Dee-
Geen
has been running at the mouth.”

When Maud was mad at the Sheriff, she started calling him by his last name, as if putting distance between them. It made me want to laugh, almost. But I said, “He never does. Maybe Donny does, though.” But she just started flicking through the paper again, uninterested in Donny. She was mad because the Sheriff hadn’t been in to the Rainbow to talk about what had happened.

“She’s certainly not from Hebrides,” Maud went on, squinting down at the paper. “Somebody would have identified her by now.” She bent her head even closer. “And no one could tell
anything
from this picture—”

Picture!
My heart stepped up its beating to a wild kind of whirr.

“—which the paper never should have printed anyway. You can’t even tell what color her hair is, it’s so wet and muddy. That Whitelaw woman never did have good taste.” She shook her head. “All they really have to describe her is her dress. It says, ‘a light cotton dress, with a flo—’ ”

Quickly, I cut her off: “Mrs Davidow says there wasn’t any identification, nothing to tell who she was, not even in her handbag.” I blurted this out fast to get her off the subject of the cotton dress, possibly “flowered.”

“Hmm. I don’t remember—oh, here it is. That’s right, it says, ‘No clues as to identification were offered by the white vinyl handbag—’ ”

I breathed more easily. The Girl would never have been carrying a white vinyl handbag.

“ ‘—found some distance from the body. Sheriff DeGheyn—’ What’s he know?” Maud made a face—“ ‘speculated that it might not even have belonged to the dead woman.’ ”

What?
The purse not belong to the victim? The presence of that handbag was the only thing that had made me certain it
wasn’t
the Girl, for she hadn’t been carrying anything like a white handbag. I became so agitated, I grabbed the newspaper and started reading. That was what he had said about the white handbag, true. Then I started at the beginning—even taking in the blurred picture of a facedown figure who no one could possibly have recognized from the photo—and read it straight through.

And learned nothing at all new, except that “inquiries” had been
made of “all of the residents in the immediate area, without result.” This had been done in case the person had been looking for someone who lived there. The dress itself was described as a “flower-print dress.” But after I thought about it, I realized that covered the clothes of every woman in La Porte who wasn’t wearing a solid color, like Helene Baum, who always wore yellow. All of the other details were exactly what I’d picked up by listening to people. And there really
weren’t
any details to speak of.

I sat back feeling betrayed. It was possible to read this three-column account and come away from it knowing no more than if it had never been written. Here I had been playing cat-and-mouse with the newspaper, padding quietly around it, careful not to show too much interest or look it directly in the face. I had spent hours trying to avoid it.

I had gone to all of this trouble to keep from knowing and then found out there was nothing to be known. I should have been disappointed. Instead, I was strangely relieved, for I felt a weight lifting. People babble; they babble just to hear themselves, as if it proved they were really there. They even go along with other people’s babble.

Maud had risen to go to the counter when someone there called her, and I sat staring out of the window for a moment, watching the trees on the other side of the street perform their magic trick of separating from the building they shielded. Then, suddenly I realized it was five-fifteen and I’d better get a move on or the salads wouldn’t be ready.

Ree-Jane was in the kitchen, pinch-hitting for Vera, who was sick. That made me laugh, the notion that Ree-Jane could take over for the be-all and end-all of waitresses. No one ever insisted Ree-Jane wear a waitress uniform like the rest of us; she was permitted to wear her own clothes, just as long as she wore one of the small organdy aprons. I hated those uniforms; they were starched white with short sleeves and flat mother-of-pearl buttons. We all looked like nurses with aprons. Vera, naturally, wore long-sleeved black, for she was the head waitress and had to be different. Ree-Jane let it be known that, as she was substituting for the head waitress, that meant
she
was in charge of who each of us would wait on. Since each of us had our regulars, and Vera had most of them, that meant Ree-Jane was going to be doing a lot of work, which was fine by me.

Whenever Ree-Jane works in the dining room, she’s always dressed up and made up, since she considers these stints to be public appearances. She doesn’t exactly carry the food in; she
models
it in and through the dining room. The path between the tables becomes her runway. She puts on that model walk of hers, the toe going down just a fraction before the heel, which results in an affected gliding motion. She will set down a salad or the little condiment tray with one hand on her hip and then do a quarter-turn with some shoulder action, as if she were showing the diners the back of her designer dress. All of this sort of kills two birds with one stone, given Ree-Jane’s list of will-be-famous-fors, since she plans on being both a model and a dress designer. Put that together with the photojournalism and the stint in Hollywood,
and you can see Ree-Jane’s going to have a busy life. All of these careers would, of course, come before she married either the English count or the Russian prince (or, I suggested to her, Mr. Nasalwhite, and then she could be Queen of Bohemia). But dining-room modeling was going to get her into a New York City stable of models, and from there it was but a hop, skip, and jump to the silver screen.

As there was only one source I knew of for information about Ben Queen, I had to work out how to tackle Aurora Paradise that evening. I didn’t want to wait another whole day for the mid-afternoon doldrums. In between designing salads (
my
claim to fame) and slapping napkins in hot roll baskets, I managed to get a tall glass and pack it with ice that I chipped off the huge block in one side of the icebox. I filled this a quarter-way up with orange juice, dropped in a teaspoon of sugar, and buried a couple of maraschino cherries in it. Naturally, in the course of this operation someone asked me what I was fixing, and I just mumbled something unintelligible. I had learned long ago that people ask questions or make comments and don’t care if the other person really answers as long as the other person makes an answering noise. So, if anyone saw this glass next to the block of ice, I’d mumble something else about it, such as wanting it for my dinner.

I would have to wait for a lull when my customers would all be chomping away and not in need of more water or butter, and this would have to coincide with Lola Davidow’s filet mignon dinner, which I hoped she’d eat in the dining room instead of the office. I had seen her rooting through the freezer for her personal food stock—grapefruit and filet mignon, which she salts away like diamonds in a safe.

I could see her over in the office now, as I was loading salads on my tray. The window in the side of the office faces the kitchen’s screen door, so that people can, if necessary, call back and forth, though it’s quite a distance. From over in the kitchen, I could see she was trying to call to us, first waving, and then cupping her hands around her mouth. I went to investigate. What came across the blowing, uncut grass was the shouted message that
the dumbwaiter was broken!

A stroke of luck!

At least it started out to be. The dumbwaiter occasionally breaks down, and no wonder, what with all the passing up and down of bottles of gin and pitchers of old fashioneds and cocktail nuts, and of shirred eggs and chicken dinners and dirty laundry. When this happens, it’s Vera who has the honor of carrying dinner up to Aurora Paradise,
Vera being the only one pleased enough with herself that if Aurora decides to lob some insults her way, well, Vera doesn’t even notice. I remember hearing her say that Great-Aunt Paradise was “such a kidder.” I could just imagine. My mother can’t leave the kitchen at dinnertime to take up her tray, and Lola Davidow isn’t about to walk up three flights of stairs, and certainly not after her pitcher of martinis.

Anyway, there being no Vera present, I quickly offered my services. My mother was busily fluting some whipped cream around the edge of an Angel Pie and said all right, but I should be sure to see that everything was on the tray.

And
then
Ree-Jane stuck her nose in.
She
was, after all, taking Vera’s place, and she assumed that she should be the one to perform this task. I knew she didn’t really want to; it was enough for her that I
did
want to—that would make her jump right in and offer to do it herself. My mother looked up and quickly let her eyes slide between me and Ree-Jane and then, with a tiny, tight smile, told Ree-Jane she could do it. Over my protests, my strong protests. But my mother refused to argue about such trivial things and told me to see to “Jane’s” guests in case they needed anything while she was gone.

I fumed inwardly. Outwardly, I yawned and shrugged and picked up a Parker House roll.

Aurora’s dinner tray was ready. Ree-Jane raised it up like a flag of victory with its load of fried (white meat of) chicken, shining mashed potatoes, peas as green as the Emerald City, a steaming carafe of coffee, and a slice of Angel Pie. Pleased with winning, she sailed off.