Rainy City (9 page)

“Oh,” he grunted. “You?”

“Evening, Burton. I just came back from visiting your daughter. She’s not happy.”

“Angel? You saw Angel?”

“Yeah. And I met your in-laws. It was about as thrilling as watching a cat dig a hole. When are you going to get her back?”

He struggled up, went to the sink, elbowed some dishes aside and splashed cold water across his face several times. It had been a while since I’d watched another man do that. He turned around without toweling the water off and looked at me, droplets running off his cheeks and nose.

“I’m afraid of what Mr. Crowell might do. That’s all. I’m afraid.”

“Do you have a reason to be afraid? Has he threatened you?”

“Christ!” Burton shouted. “What do you want from me? He came here and had some goonybird knock the poop out of me. He took my daughter. What more do you want?”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “He threatened me a few minutes ago. Maybe you’re right. Let me tell you what I’ve found.”

“Melissa?”

“I’m on her trail, but I’m not very warm.” Briefly, I gave him a rundown on Mary Dawn Crowell, how she had sheltered Melissa so many other times, how Melissa had phoned on Tuesday but never arrived.

“Did she sound okay?” Burton asked.

“Her aunt only spoke to her a minute.”

“You mean all those times Melissa disappeared on me, all that worry…She was at her aunt’s all those times?”

“As near as I can tell.”

“God,” said Burton, sponging some of the water off his face using his shirt sleeve. He plunked back down into the rickety kitchen chair, offering me one with torn upholstery. I remained standing.

“What’s in Tacoma?”

“Why?”

“That’s where your wife phoned her aunt from.” “Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Nothing.”

Burton looked up at me, his pale blue eyes blank and unresponsive. “Geez, Mr. Black. I’ve had a rough couple of days here. Would you mind if I crashed now? I’ve gotta get to bed.”

“You don’t want me to find your wife?”

“Yes, find her. But I’m bushed now. I can’t talk anymore:”

“Sure, Burton.” I went out the front door without locking it.

The house of the snoopy neighbor across the street was dark, too, but I was convinced the almost phosphorescent light seeping through a crack in the living room curtains was a television. Somebody was doping on an electronic fix.

When he answered the door, it was plain to see he was potted already, and it was only half past seven. Though he was no older than me, he already had the florid face of a drunk. Wearing threadbare socks, rumpled trousers and a’ dingy tee shirt, he invited me inside. He flopped onto a couch, stretching his legs out onto an ottoman.

Balancing a can of brew on his marshmallowy beer-gut, he addressed me the way an overeager salesman might. “What can I do for you?”

“You know the Nadiskys across the street?”

“By the way,” he said, grinning widely and extending a hand without jiggling the Rainier can on his belly, ‘my name is Iddins. Sid they call me, when they ain’t callin’ me other things.” We shook hands.

“Thomas Black.”

“The blondes across the street? That’s their last name? I never knew it. I seen him. Her too. Even trotted my ass across the street one afternoon and fucked her.” His grin ripped wider with each word. I had to pinch myself to be sure I’d heard correctly.

“Don’t shake your noodle,” he said. “She’s a cute little thang, so I walked over there one afternoon, palavered with her for a few minutes, then took her into the bedroom and raised her skirts. Trouble was, the wife got onto it. She put the nix on my return ticket. But once was fine. She’s a sweet-looking little thang but she ain’t all that warm. Matter of fact, she got downright persnickety afterwards. Tried to pretend she hadn’t cottoned to it.” “Did she?”

“Well … I’ve had more cooperative split tails.” Melissa was a woman who may have had sexual relations a mere handful of times with her own husband. Now this buffoon wanted me to believe he had gone across the street and seduced her in a trice? No matter how promiscuous she had been at other times in her life, I found the tale Sid Iddins told highly improbable.

“Sounds almost like rape,” I said, voicing my thoughts. He laughed quietly and put his eyes on the Monday night football game.

“Rape? Hell, you don’t see no bars around me, do you?”

“Your wife around?”

“Helga’s at work. Downtown at the titty palace. On Second?” Sid stared at me in the dim light, trying to gauge how his words affected me.

“She takes tickets, or what?” I asked, trying to be discreet. I was wasting my time.

“Hell, no. She peels. You know, like a banana. That’s where I met her. Used to spend most of my free time down there. Asked her if I could take her home one night. When we got here, I tried to smooch, but she poked a .357 in my ribs. She’s all woman, that gal. I gotta hand her that. ‘Bout a week later-I took her home again.” His grin grew to mythic proportions. “I ain’t never left since.”

“She’s been dancing a long while, then?”

“Oh, yeah. She likes the atmosphere. ‘Sides, she’s got lots of friends down there.”

“She ever talk to the people across the street?”

“The blondes, you mean? I told you she put the nix on me and blondy. She went over there one day to duke it out with her. Didn’t come back for one hell of a longtime. Hell of a long time. Tell you the truth, I thought she’d killed blondy and was tryin’ to dispose of the body.” He laughed at that, grabbing the teetering beer can on his stomach so it wouldn’t topple off. “Wouldn’t that be funny? Have two women fightin’ over Sidney Iddins?”

“A riot. You know where blondy is?”

He shook his head and sucked on the aluminum can. “Nope. Seen the grampa come Sunday morning and take the little one away, though. Helga talked to the guy about it later. They just sashayed right in and then sashayed right out with the kid. The guy’s a ding-a-ling to let ‘em do it.”

“You think Helga might know where the wife is?”

“Fuck, I don’t know what Helga knows. I don’t keep tabs on her. Why don’t you mosey down there and ask her? Or you’re welcome to sit here and wait. She’ll be back around two-thirty or three. Sit down. Have a brew.”

“Later.”

When I went outside, I could see Burton had lied to me. He hadn’t gone directly to bed. His living room light was on, as if he were expecting someone. I waited outside for an hour and fifteen minutes, but nobody showed. And I hadn’t seen any movement inside. He was probably asleep on the kitchen table again. Or maybe he had left while I was talking to Sidney.

It cost fifteen bucks to walk through the door of the converted theater. The place was murky and smelled of cigarettes and Pine-Sol and booze. I found myself checking to see if anyone I knew had seen me going. in. There was a bar in back and ten or twelve tables under a stage. A reedy-looking girl, naked from the waist up except for some pasties, bobbed to an old Three Dog Night tune. It was pitiful.

Eighteen patrons watched her, displaying varying degrees of interest.

“I gotta talk to Helga,” I said to the bartender. He was half bald and looked too good for the joint, as if he were moonlighting from a job in a brokerage house.

“Helga?”

“Helga Iddins. I don’t know what name she dances under. It’s important.”

He didn’t even reply, just rubbed a beer stein with a grubby towel and shook his head. I took a deep breath and slid a dollar bill across the countertop. He glanced down at it and whined, “Are you kidding me?”

I replaced the one with a five, but that was a joke, too. He shook his head patiently, a tight, grim smirk planted on his kisser. It cost a sawbuck for him to reach under the counter and press a buzzer several times in some sort of code.

When Helga swaggered through a door at the end of the bar, a young buck at one of the tables, a Navy boy from the look of his haircut and ill-fitting civvies, ogled her and said, “Nice hooters, baby.” His three buddies giggled and slopped beer over their wrists and avoided Helga’s hard eyes.

“Drop dead, asshole!”

She wore a velour bathrobe, black net stockings and “heels, and apparently nothing else. Her chest quaked when she walked and she folded her arms across herself to hold it still. The stockbroker tipped his head at me and she stopped and said in a smoky voice, “Well?”

“I spoke to your husband.”

“Not for long, I hope,” said Helga Iddins. “That sort of activity destroys brain cells.”

“I’m looking for Melissa Nadisky.”

“Who?” The woman onstage was grinding toward her finale. Helga watched out of dispassionate professional curiosity. The three buddies of the Navy guy whistled encouragement. The one she’d rebuked glowered at us mutely.

“The blonde woman who lives across the street from you. She’s missing.”

“So?”

“I’m a private detective. I’m looking for her.”

Helga’s entire manner altered. She twisted back toward me and tried to arrange the puffball of hair on her head. It was a soft, pleasant color, like dead grass in the middle of the summer. “You’re a detective?”

I flopped my I.D. out of my wallet, hoping the creep at the table would spot it and think it was a badge.

“Come in the back,” she said, starting toward a door behind the bar. She led me down along a dark L-shaped corridor to a cubicle directly behind the stage. The muffled sounds of Three Dog Night rattled the roomful of mirrors. A washed-out brunette was scrunched in a corner breast-feeding a baby. She read from a psychology textbook. With her free hand she puffed on a cigarette. Cute. Suckle the baby with one hand and suck a Salem with the other.

“Hey, Margaret,” Helga said. “This guy’s a detective.”

Margaret glanced up with bored eyes, covered up her breast With her cigarette hand and yawned. I grimaced and waved. It was nice to be famous.

“I don’t go on for half an hour, so we got some time,” Helga said, sitting before a mirror and brushing her hair slowly. She had never been beautiful, but I could see that up until about five years ago someone might have thought her alluring. Now she was spent, slack fat dragging at her chin. Either Sidney was being pickled in alcohol or he was six or eight years younger than his better half. I preferred the pickle theory. “Now what’s this about the girl across the street?”

A Woman’s Day was folded open in front of her chair. She’d been reading a page of recipes: holiday fruitcakes. “Melissa,” I said. “She’s missing.”

“Missing? She probably ran away from her hubby. Nothing abnormal about that. I’d do it myself, if I had somewhere to go.”

“Somebody posted a two-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to her whereabouts.”

“Two thousand?” She whistled. “Too bad I don’t know where she is.”

“Yeah, too bad. I understand you talked to Melissa?”

“Sidney went over and tried to get what he could. I didn’t know what she was like. From across the street you can’t tell nothin’. So I knew Sid had seen her and I went over with the express intention of breaking her face, know what I mean? Had some trouble with a girl here about six months, ago and I broke her face. I can break a face if I have to.”

“What happened between you and Melissa?”

“I could see right away Sid had taken advantage of her. Right away she starts bawling. Said she didn’t want anything to do with Sid, but he grabbed her and she didn’t know how to get rid of him. It was easy to see she was telling the truth. Boy, talk about a poor self-image. She thought she was the scum of the earth, her with a little girl and a husband who writes poetry. There I was, me, trying to cheer her up! She musta cried an hour. I did my best, but she really needed some sort of professional help. That’s what I told her. I think she got it, too.”

“The Hopewell Clinic?

“How did you know? Yeah, I told her about that place. Margaret,” she said, nodding her head toward the woman breast-feeding in the corner. “Margaret works there parttime for college credits. She’s always tellin’ us about the crazy palookas who come in.”

“What else did Melissa say? She mention Tacoma, by any chance?”

“Naw.” Helga Iddins raised her arms over her head, fiddling with her hair. The movement cracked open the front of her robe, revealing an interesting wrinkled cleft between her sagging breasts. “She did tell me about some guy named Romano who seemed to be giving her a lot of trouble.”

“That his last name or his first?”

“Just Romano. Kind of a Latiny-looking guy. She used to be involved with him and now he won’t let her alone. Like I said, Melissa had a hard time saying no. Christ, she was messed up. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she killed herself.”

“You think that’s a possibility?” I jammed my hands into my pockets and got a fistful of milk-soaked towel.

Staring at her own face in the mirror as if seeing it for the first time, Helga nodded and the whole business I was watching shook.

“You’ve seen this Romano character?”

“Sure. From across the street. He used to show up maybe once a month, once every other month. A real creepy guy. Old enough to be her father. He’d drive over and stay a couple of hours in the afternoon, if the husband wasn’t home. I wisht she’d called me. I would have busted his chops.”

“What’d he drive?”

“Nothin’ much. It was an old pest control van. Acme? Admiral? Something like that. I can’t really remember. I guess nobody ever told poor Melissa she didn’t have to lay down and spread her legs for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wanted to see what it was like. She’s such a smart little girl, too.”

“She say what this Romano guy wanted with her?”

“She didn’t have to. They had an affair once years ago, maybe when she was in college. Now he shows up. What do you think he wants?”

I had to stop and mull it over for a few minutes. Melissa had had sex with her husband only three times in almost four years, yet the neighbor across the street wanders over and jumps on her five minutes after they meet. And then some Latin roach-killer makes regular trips to her place to get his pencil sharpened. I wondered what dear Burton would think of all this if he knew. Burton the cuckold. I wondered if he knew.