Kiss (17 page)

She had a lean, seamed face with watery almond-shaped eyes. Her gray hair was carefully combed but thinning and without enough body to stay in place. It flew like wisps of cloud in unplanned directions. She looked as if she’d just stepped in out of a high wind. Carver tried to guess her age but couldn’t. Somewhere between sixty and eighty was the best he could do. Narrowed it down to this century.

He stood near her and said, “Damned shame about Kearny.”

She looked up at him with her large, dark eyes, which seemed to peer into his thoughts. He noticed that her dress smelled like mothballs. “He was of an age to go.”

“Guess that’s some solace,” Carver said. “But I think he’d have preferred a few more years, don’t you?”

She didn’t comment. Her eyes stayed fixed on him.

“Like most of us,” he added.

“Where’d you know Kearny from?”

“He and I drove a lumber truck together a long time ago.”

“Out in California?”

“That’s right.” Carver smiled down at the woman. “My name’s Frank Carter. I suppose you and Kearny go back a long while.”

“Quite some years. I’m Wanda Pichet. My mother used to be the Williams’s maid over on Naval Avenue. Knowed Kearny since he was twelve. Used to throw rocks at each other, hide out when it was bedtime. I guess that’s goin’ back a long while, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d say.” Carver stooped down as low as he could with his stiff knee, leaning most of his weight on his cane. “I don’t know any of the family; wanna help me out?”

Wanda Pichet studied him with sad speculation. Then she said, “Them two is Kearny’s son Lawrence an’ his son-in-law Jack Lipp. The other two men’s names I ain’t sure of, but they used to drive with Kearny, too. They’s from the union, I think. That’s Kearny’s daughter Melba. She’s Jack’s wife.” Wanda’s voice had grown strained when she spoke of Melba Lipp.

“Kearny never talked much about his kids,” he said.

Wanda shook her head slowly. “Ain’t much to brag on there,” she said. “Lawrence got hisself messed up with drugs an’ still ain’t straightened out, though he’s workin’ steady now at some sales job. Melba, she’s got even less of a mind than Lawrence; does what that husband of hers wants an’ nothin’ else.”

Carver looked more closely at Melba. She was a mousy brunette with a knife-thin humped nose, an underslung chin, and a superb figure. Hers was a dichotomy of beauty that intrigued some men. “I get the impression you don’t care much for Melba.”

“You think that’s any of your concern?” She asked it gently, as if inquiring whether he thought it was going to rain.

“It might be,” Carver said. “If Kearny was your friend.”

“Hmm.” Wanda shifted her frail body in her chair. She seemed out of place in the palatial mortuary, a beggar in the royal court. “Melba’s got no morals nor willpower whatsoever. That’s all there’s to her, Mr. Carter. Clay to be molded by the devil.”

“And her husband?”

“He owns a jazz club down in the Quarter. Melba’s Place. He’s the one did the latest molding.”

“How long they been married?”

“ ’Bout five years. He got her from a trumpet player she was living with over in Metairie. They passed her down like she was so much baggage—not that she didn’t ask for that kinda treatment.”

“Was she married to the trumpet player?”

Wanda’s face puckered with distaste. “Thought she was married to the whole band, but none of ’em seen a wedding ring nor man of God all the time they was spending her money and taking advantage of her.”

“Didn’t Lawrence try to talk sense to her?”

“Ain’t you been listenin’? Lawrence got no sense hisself.”

“How about the mother? Kearny’s wife?”

“Died givin’ birth to Melba. You oughta know that, ’less you forgot.”

“No, Kearny never mentioned it. Never talked a lot about any of his family. Too much pain, I guess.”

“Whole Williams family knowed pain. They was well-to-do when my mother worked for them in the big house on Naval. Financial affairs went all to seed, though. Somethin’ about the commodity market. I don’t know what an’ I don’t wanna know. It caused Kearny’s father to let his health go downhill so he died a few years later. ’Nother five years, then old Mrs. Williams went. She was a fine woman, way I recall. Kept her good spirits right up till the cancer took her. After that’s when they called in workmen and divided up most of the house, ’cept for the wing where my mother and me lived. Kearny made sure we could stay on long as we wanted, sorta kept an eye on the place for him.”

“You live in the house now?”

“Just me alone in the north wing. My mother passed on twenty years ago. Guess I’ll have to find someplace else now, though. Half a dozen roomers live in the other part of the house, come an’ go as they please.”

“Why don’t any of the Williams children live there?”

“Too run-down for ’em. Too expensive to keep decent. Big place like that’s a cross to bear, Kearny left it to be run by Kemper Management, where I send my rent check to. But they couldn’t spend much on it neither an’ still use the income to help keep Kearny at that old-age home in Florida. That an’ the money he borrowed on the house is all he had, way I hear. He was born too late to enjoy any of the family wealth as a man, was poor Kearny.”

Carver’s good leg was cramped and beginning to tremble. Losing feeling. He had to straighten up or he’d need help in order to stand.

He made it with effort, and felt circulation returning to the leg. Pins and needles.

“Goin’ to the funeral tomorrow?” Wanda asked.

“I don’t think I’ll be able.”

“Me neither. Not that I got other matters at hand. Just don’t like to see the end of things. Me and Kearny, we was best of friends,” She fixed those dark, almond-shaped eyes on Carver. “Best of friends.”

Carver dug the tip of his cane into the plush carpet. “Mind if we talk again sometime? About Kearny?”

She looked away. “I mind. Kearny’s over an’ done with. What’s up there in that coffin ain’t him, and even that’ll soon enough be dust. What’s gone is gone.”

Carver started to say good-bye to her, but she seemed to be in a trance, absorbed by the echoes and visions of long-ago summers. Throwing rocks and running through shadows. She was wrong. What she thought was gone would never be completely over as long as she drew breath.

“It’d really be a big help to me if we talked again,” Carver said. “Be honest, I didn’t really know Kearny all that well.”

Wanda Pichet sniffled. He thought she might begin to cry, but she was an old woman years past tears. She might even have smiled. “Think I don’t know that? Kearny never drove no lumber truck in California nor anyplace else.”

“Then why’d you go along with our conversation?” Carver asked.

She slipped back into her memories. Into a kinder world. She wasn’t going to answer.

He took a last, long look at Kearny Williams’s mourners and limped from the mortuary.

Into heat and life.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Carver phoned from the Belle Grande lobby and had Hertz deliver a rental Ford to him. He assured the woman who brought the car that, despite his bad leg, he could drive a vehicle if it had an automatic transmission. She was dubious, but she filled out the paperwork and he signed for the car. It was a blue, medium-sized Taurus model he’d be able to wriggle in and out of okay with the cane.

He called Kemper Management and got the address of the Williams house on Naval by pretending to be a potential buyer of the property. Kemper Management also sold real estate, Carver was told, and would have the listing on the Williams house when and if the heirs decided to put it on the market.

The agent asked if he could meet Carver at the house, but Carver told him he wanted only to drive past and look the place over from the outside before thinking more about an offer. The agent didn’t ask Carver how he knew the property was managed by Kemper and might soon be for sale; he must have assumed Carver was a speculator with a running knowledge of such things who used the obituary pages as guides to potential cheap property purchases from heirs who usually didn’t mind taking several thousand dollars under market value. The difference in sale and asking price was divided evenly among the heirs and made little difference to them individually, and it eliminated the problem of keeping the property on the market for months while it ate up maintenance and interest money. Edwina had swung some deals like that for sellers in much the same position as the Williams heirs.

The Kemper agent had said the house was half a block off Saint Charles, a wide street upon which a streetcar line ran. Most of the homes in the vicinity of Naval Avenue and Saint Charles looked like plantation manor houses in their reincarnations of sumptuousness. Only a few were what might be described as run-down. After what had apparently been a period of decline, this was again one of the better addresses in New Orleans.

Carver waited for a green-and-red trolley to sway and clank past, then made a left turn onto Naval and drove slowly.

The houses on Naval Avenue were somewhat smaller than on Saint Charles, but still impressive and expensive. Several of them were being refurbished and had skeletal, crude scaffolding erected beside them. Two homes in the middle of the block were in terrible disrepair. The nearest of these was the Williams house.

Carver parked the Ford across the street, left the engine and air conditioner running, and looked closely at the house. It had to contain at least twenty rooms. The vast slate roof was broken by dormers and cupolas, and there was a wide, once elegant gallery porch that wrapped around the front and east side. Many of the spokes in the porch’s railing were missing or broken, and several separate entrances had been placed on the face of the house when it was divided into rental areas, without regard to architectural balance. The clapboard siding had been painted white long ago, but it was a mottled gray now and cracked and peeling.

Most of the windows had yellow shades pulled all the way down against the heat. It gave the impression that there was no one inside, though Carver knew there probably was, Wanda Pichet might be home, in the corner of her past that Kearny had given her and that Kearny’s children would now force her to leave.

The house was set well back from the street, and the grounds were overgrown with weeds. About twenty feet from the porch steps was a huge magnolia tree that shaded the front yard. It had to have been there when Kearny Williams and Wanda Pichet were children. Carver wondered if they’d played in its branches, hidden there together from the world.

He’d seen enough. He put the Ford in gear and drove toward Kemper Management on Maitland Avenue.

Carver explained to the receptionist at Kemper that he might be interested in a preliminary way in the Williams property; he wanted to talk to someone to get more information.

The receptionist was a young man with a toned-down punk hairdo and a gold stud in his ear, wearing a white shirt and tie. He referred Carver to a Mr. Clyde Arlan, who appeared within a few minutes and smiled and shook hands and ushered Carver into a small, square office without a window. Carver again used the name Frank Carter.

There was a brown-enameled steel desk with a glass top in the office, and two padded green chairs. On the wall was a large map of New Orleans with red dots plastered all over it. The dots were plastic or metal and stuck to the map in some way Carver couldn’t fathom; not pinned or taped. Glue, maybe? Magnetism? He assumed each dot represented property managed or listed by Kemper. On the opposite wall was a framed photo of Clyde Arlan posed formally with a pleasant-faced, plump woman and two preschool children who had blond hair and looked like identical twins.

“Nice family,” Carver said, lowering himself into one of the padded chairs.

Arlan grinned. He was in his mid-thirties, skinny, and had thinning sandy hair that had probably started off blond like his kids’. “Thanks. Those husky twins are almost four now.” He sounded especially proud to have fathered twins, as if it made him twice the man. “You the fella I talked to earlier on the phone about the Williams place?” He had a syrupy southern accent and made
place
two syllables.

“Me,” Carver said. “I heard it’ll be on the market soon and wanted some information.”

“Uh-huh. You an agent?”

“Not actually. An agent here would handle the transaction if I decided to buy. Mind you, I’m not anywhere near making a decision. I mean, the property isn’t even on the market.”

“It’ll be soon, though,” Clyde Arlan said. “Owner just died down in Florida and the heirs plan on selling it. It’s one of those rare old fine homes been in the same family for decades.”

Rare old fine homes.
Carver liked that. “You sure about them planning to sell?”

“Uh-huh. One of them told me so just yesterday. We’ve got instructions to contract some work on the place to make it presentable for market, bring it up to code, then list it soon as the will’s probated.”

“How long will that take?”

Arlan shrugged. “Depends on the will.”

“
Is
there a will?”

“Well, nobody seems quite sure. But one way or another, the family’ll inherit and they do intend to sell. We’ve managed the property for the last ten years. Some of the rent money went to support the owner at a retirement home down in Florida. The rest of it went into upkeep.”

“Any liens against the place?”

“There’s a second mortgage of twenty-five thousand, but that’s minuscule compared to how much the property’s worth. Woulda been sold a long time ago, only it had sentimental value for the owner.”

“What’ll the asking price be?”

Arlan flashed a cagey smile. He was trying to grow a mustache, Carver noticed. Just a shadow on his upper lip now. “Price hasn’t been talked about yet. But in that area, half a block off Saint Charles, and with that big lot, it won’t be cheap. It’s prime property. You know that, I’m sure.”

“Last thing I want is to seem nosy,” Carver said, “but which of the heirs will be handling the sale? I mean, which of them contacted you? I’d like to talk to him myself, just to be assured that when the time comes they’ll be open to an offer. Save everybody some wheel spinning.”