Lady Yesterday (20 page)

“Mozo?”

“The little spick wasn’t any better at it than he was the first time.”

“He hurt you?”

“He didn’t have to. When a man’s got you he’s got you. It isn’t like I had anything to fight for.”

She sounded tired. I crossed the tracks behind the streetcar. “Mary Ann Thaler wins the pool,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Mozo made a clean sweep of the police department, that’s all.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Not at you. Never at you.”

The salt they had spread on St. Antoine had done its work. Melted ice stood in brown puddles, axle-high in spots. I made sure Iris wouldn’t be stepping into one when I parked, and got out to open the door for her. She was already on the sidewalk when I made it around the car.

Sara answered the door, wearing a fuzzy pink angora sweater and blue jeans. I wondered if she ever wore shoes. When she saw me she smiled. “Hi.” Then she saw Iris. “Hey, you okay? We thought—”

“Where’s Mary?” I asked.

“She’s in the basement. What happened to your head?”

“Years of disappointment. Can we talk to her?”

“Sure. I’ll show you the stairs.”

The basement was well-lit, paneled, and freshly concreted. It contained a Nautilus machine and an exercise bench and assorted weights. Mary M, in sweatsuit and sneakers, lowered the dumbbell she was curling when we entered. Her face was shiny.

“Iris! Did they—”

“I’m in one piece,” she said. “Was anybody hurt?”

“Jonesy was taken to the hospital. How did you get loose?”

I said, “She got loose. That’s the main thing, right?”

“Right.” She set the dumbbell down on the exercise bench. Then she opened her arms and took a step toward Iris.

“Stay back!” I blocked the way.

Mary stopped. The skin of her face tightened, obliterating the lines.

“Amos?” asked Iris.

I took my hand out of my coat pocket with the Smith & Wesson in it. “Imitate a statue,” I told Mary. “I’m not Jonesy. I know what you are.”

“I don’t—” said Mary.

“Sure you do. Flynn said it. You wouldn’t know him; you were only an accomplice before the fact in his murder. He said Jonesy wasn’t one to let somebody he’d never seen walk up to him and kick him in the head, much less a Korean who’d just finished breaking in the front door. At the very least he wouldn’t be taken with his gun still holstered under his arm. It would be someone he might expect to have standing in front of him sometime or other. Someone like the owner, or who he thought was the owner. A woman who just happened to be proficient in karate.

“She’d be talking to him, maybe telling him for the umpteenth time he wasn’t welcome here—by then he probably wouldn’t even hear it anymore—and then she’d move and he’d be on the floor bleeding. Maybe she’d have put something in one of his ham sandwiches just in case he was quicker than he looked, which he was if he was anything like Flynn. There’d be plenty of stuff in a house full of reformed prostitutes, some of them junkies. Then while he was out cold she’d open the door for Mozo and whoever was with him, Felipe or Ang or both, to come in and carry Iris off. They must have caught her sleeping, or she’d have put up a better fight.”

“They did,” said Iris. “I dozed off in the chair. I woke up with chloroform in my face.”

“You’d have been wide awake if anyone had broken through the front door. I checked the lock on my way out. It was a dead bolt and it was intact.”

“You’re the one who got hit too hard in the head.” Iris was becoming shrill. She was still reacting from the morning. “Mary’s my friend. This house and her guests mean more to her than anyone or anything. Why would she help Mozo?”

“Because this house and her guests mean more to her than anyone or anything. Right, Mary?”

“You did your homework.” Her wiry little body was coiled and there was a trapped brightness in her eyes. She had never looked more like a rodent.

“I found out this morning. Mozo’s corporation, SouthAmCo, bought up your lease the day Iris arrived. It was cheaper to acquire the place and mix it in with the company’s other holdings than it would have been to mount an offensive and risk bringing in the cops, Iris has been a tagged animal ever since she came back to town. At the garage, in the motel—who recommended the motel?” I asked Iris.

“The attendant.” She sounded subdued. “He said I’d get a discounted rate if I told the clerk I’d garaged my car at the Park-a-Lot. He said it was a nice place. I could use the savings.”

“Raleigh looked like a charmer. My guess is he told you all that when he came down with the car. After he’d talked to Mozo in the office and shown him your signature.”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

“Probably. Point is wherever you went he had a leash on you. No wonder he was in no hurry to kill you.”

“Mary stole my pin?”

“It was a small thing against losing her lease and turning her broken doves out into the cold. But once you’ve clone it, going up to assault and complicity in kidnapping isn’t such a big leap.”

Mary looked less hunted. “Please believe me. Iris, it wasn’t anything against you. He said he’d throw everybody out and doze the place and build a parking garage. There are more parking garages in this town than cars. You know how many places there are like this? Not one. Where would they all go?”

“A man died,” Iris said.

“Men are what filled this house to begin with. Anyway, I had nothing to do with that.”

I said, “The law might not agree, after they’ve read my statement and confirmed the ownership of this house.”

She flipped the exercise bench up easily. With the dumbbell at my end there was no trick to it. I stepped back quickly and got an arm up to deflect it and she yelled and spun and kicked the gun out of my hand. Then she lost her balance and fell. Iris had caught the dumbbell with a foot as it rolled and given it a shove, striking the ankle Mary M had been supporting herself on. She twisted in midair and landed in an animal crouch. I scooped the gun up off the floor and rolled back the hammer. She relaxed.

“Call the cops,” I told Iris.

“No. Let’s just leave.”

“She’ll run.”

“Where’ll she go?”

I looked at Mary M. She was sobbing now, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her face in her hands, her shoulders working. “What’s going to happen to them?” she said. “What’s going to happen to them?” I elevated the barrel and let the hammer down.

“What about your clothes?”

“I’ll buy new ones. Please, Amos, let’s just go.”

We went. I could hear the sobbing from upstairs.

The snow heaped in front of my driveway had set in rusty clods. I guided the Chevy through the ruts and parked it in the garage. We sat there for a long time after I killed the engine.

“Mary was as tough as anyone,” she said.

“That’s the scary part.”

“I trusted her ahead of everybody. Including you.”

“She used to be a prostitute. That doesn’t mean anything except maybe she confused selling her body with selling herself and then it didn’t seem so hard.”

“I was one, don’t forget.”

“Only by profession.” I got out. This time she let me open her door.

We went in through the kitchen. Being with her I was aware of the lifeless smell of the air in a house in winter where only one person lives. In the living room she looked around.

“Place needs plants.”

“Just keeping myself alive is work enough,” I said. “Can I get you something? I think there’s a tea bag somewhere.”

“Right now really cheap whiskey sounds great.”

“You should listen to my liquor cabinet. The bathroom’s in there.” I went into the kitchen.

The shower was running when I came out carrying two full glasses on a tray and set them down on the coffee table. I carried mine into the bedroom and peeled everything off down to the skin. I put on black woolen slacks and moccasins and a sweater and finished my drink and bought a refill in the kitchen. The bathroom door opened and closed. In the living room she had on two towels and her glass in her hand.

I’d forgotten the smooth brown of her shoulders and legs and the perfection of her feet. The towel on her head emphasized the Nile look, and with the rest of the makeup scrubbed off she seemed younger, almost adolescent. Not quite, though.

She saw me looking. “I had to get out of those clothes. There’s a robe in there but I could turn around inside it. I could put it on anyway.”

“Not if you’re comfortable.”

“All I took out of Mary M’s was my pin. I was damned if I was going to let her keep that.”

“I’ll get you something to wear and then you can go shopping.”

“Charles will wire me money. I hate asking him.”

“I’ll make you a loan.”

“I’d hate that more.”

I grinned at that. There wasn’t any reason to. She smiled back, and there wasn’t any reason for that either. We were leering at each other like two kids who had run away from home and found ourselves alone in a motel room and now we didn’t know what we were supposed to do.

She drank. “My father?”

I stopped grinning. “I found George Favor.”

“Where?” She almost spilled her whiskey. She set the glass down on the scratched coffee table. “Is he alive?”

“He’s alive. Where doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter? I’ve been looking—”

“Get some rest. I’ll take you to your father later. You’ll want to be fresh when you talk to him. Also clothed.”

“I don’t know if I could sleep knowing—my God.” She put a palm to her cheek and smiled again and looked away. “I’m starting to feel like a little girl whose daddy’s been gone a long time. What did you bring me, Daddy? God, what’ll I say to him? How does he look?”

“Don’t work yourself up to something that won’t happen. It isn’t like he dandled you on his knee and warned you to steer clear of boys who use Vaseline on their hair. A long time ago he met a woman; you were the result. That’s all. It will be clumsy. There won’t be any violins.”

“I know that.”

“You say it, and maybe you think you do. Everyone’s looking for where he came from and some of us find it. Then what? It never changes anything. You buried your parents. Everything else is just a biological accident.”

“Why are you angry?”

“I’m not. Hell, yes, I am. The harder you look for a thing the more disappointed you’re going to be when you find it. It’s never as big or as bright or as sweet as what you’ve got pictured. Half the time it’s so small and dull and bland you trip over it looking for it before you realize you’ve found it. Why shouldn’t I be angry?”

We were standing close. She put her arms around me and squeezed tight, holding on for a long time. She smelled of soap and Iris. Then she leaned back against my supporting arm and looked up at me. Her eyes were dry.

“Explorer Scout,” she said. “Knowing the things I’ve done for money and the things I did with the money, and still trying to keep me from getting hurt. You’re sweet and stupid.”

She closed her eyes and I kissed her. After another long time I swatted her on the rump.

“Sleep. If the telephone rings, let it. It’ll probably be the cops wondering why I’m not downtown dictating my statement.”

“Amos—”

“Don’t finish it,” I said. “You might want to take it back later.”

T
HE SNOWMAN IN
W
ESTLAND
looked lonely. The kids who had built it were in school and the sun had melted it and the cold had refrozen it, giving it a glaze like the seat of a worn pair of pants. It had a drunken list and its charcoal-briquette eyes were shedding black tears.

Nothing about the house next door had changed. The brick was still yellow, the wood around the windows lead-colored where the paint had curled away, the windows curtained and dark. My footprints from the day before yesterday were still there without company, swollen and crusty, with some later snow hammocked inside them. I followed them around to the trailer in back.

No more snow had been removed from the walk since my first visit. The shovel stood where Sweet Joe Wooding had left it. You could stand in that one spot and believe the earth never turned. It was a definite temptation.

I mounted the wooden steps, knocked, waited, and went inside. I was alone with the furniture and the smell of old marijuana. I walked over to the heavy curtain and pulled it aside. It masked a single unmade bed with a dented pillow and white sheets gone dirty ivory. A white clay ashtray on the cracked bedstand contained a roach in a clip. I touched a finger to the burnt end. Cold. I tapped on a folding louvered screen in the corner, then craned my neck around the end. The tub and toilet were unoccupied.

Back outside I smoked a cigarette and looked at the house. There were no tracks leading to it, but a crust had formed on top of the snow and a slight person could walk on top of it without leaving any. Not being slight I made some footprints of my own and tried the back door. It was unlocked.

It led into a mudroom without plaster or insulation. The black rubber mat was wet, but condensation could have been responsible for that. I opened an inner door and rancid air hit me in the face.

This room had a window, but the curtains were drawn. I found the light switch and used it. No lights came on. I pushed aside one of the curtains with a rattling of plastic rings and sunlight fell on a white stove and refrigerator and sink and a sheet-metal table with a moldy plate on it and mouse droppings in the plate.

The living room was just as dark until I drew aside a curtain there and looked at some uncovered furniture with a skin of dust on it and framed posters on the wall. I lifted a corner of the sheet on the only covered object in the room. It was a gray leather trombone case with brass hinges. I replaced the sheet.

Some of the posters were all text, advertising performances in circus lettering. The latest date was October 3, 1963. Others had pictures. These were photographs and paintings of a good-looking young black man with a neon grin and straightened black hair worn in a high pompadour, who looked a lot like Nat King Cole. In several of them he sat straddling a bass viol with his fingers poised on the frets. One was a black-and-white snapshot mounted at an angle on a blue held with red lettering: