Rose Madder (14 page)

“ ‘Well, it's funny,' the driver said. ‘From, faces I can tell what people think. I can tell what they do. Sometimes I can even tell who they are . . . you, for instance.'

“ ‘All right, me. What about me?'

“ ‘You're a guy with troubles.'

“
I don't have a trouble in the world,' Parry said.

“ ‘Don't tell me, brother,' the driver said. ‘I know. I know people. I'll tell you something else. Your trouble is women.'

“ ‘Strike one. I'm happily married.'

Suddenly, just like that, she had a voice for Parry: he was James Woods, nervous and high-strung, but with a brittle sense of humor. This delighted her and she went on, warming to the story now, seeing a scene from a movie that had never been made inside her head—Jackie Gleason and James Woods sparring in a cab that was racing through the streets of some anonymous city after dark.

“ ‘Call it a two-base hit. You're not married. But you used to be, and it wasn't happy.'

“ ‘Oh, I get it. You were there. You were hiding in the closet all the time.'

“The driver said, ‘I'll tell you about her. She wasn't easy to get along with. She wanted things. The more she got, the more she wanted. And she always got what she wanted. That's the picture.' ”

Rosie had reached the bottom of the page. Feeling a strange chill up her back, she silently handed the book back to Lefferts, who now looked happy enough to hug himself.

“Your voice is absolutely wonderful!” he told her. “Low but not drony, melodious and very clear, with no definable accent—I knew all that at once, but voice alone means very little. You can read, though! You can actually
read!
”

“Of
course
I can read,” Rosie said. She didn't know whether to be amused or exasperated. “Do I look like I was raised by wolves?”

“No, of course not, but often even very good readers aren't able to read aloud—even if they don't actually stumble over the words, they have very little in the way of expression. And dialogue is
much
tougher than narration . . . the acid test, one might say. But I heard two different people. I actually
heard
them!”

“Yes, so did I Mr. Lefferts, I really have to go now. I—”

He reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder as she started to turn away. A woman with a bit more experience of the world would have known an audition, even one on a streetcorner, for what it was and consequently would not have been entirely surprised by what Lefferts said next. Rosie, however, was stunned to temporary silence when he cleared his throat and offered her a job.

A
t the moment Rob Lefferts was listening to his fugitive wife read on a streetcorner, Norman Daniels was sitting in his small office cubicle on the fourth floor of police headquarters with his feet up on his desk and his hands laced behind his head. It was the first time in years that it had been possible for him to put his feet up; under ordinary circumstances, his desk was heaped high with forms, fast-food wrappers, half-written reports, departmental circulars, memos, and other assorted trash. Norman was not the sort of man who picks up after himself without thinking about it (in just five weeks the house which Rosie kept pin-neat across all the years had come to look quite a bit like Miami after Hurricane Andrew), and usually his office reflected this, but now it looked positively austere. He had spent most of the day cleaning it out, taking three large plastic garbage bags full of swill down to the waste-disposal site in the basement, not wanting to leave the job to the nigger women who came in to clean between midnight and six on weekday mornings. What was left to niggers didn't get done—this was a lesson Norman's father had taught him, and it was a true lesson. There was one basic fact which the politicians and the do-gooders either could not or would not understand: niggers didn't understand work. It was their African temperament.

Norman ran his gaze slowly across the top of his desk, upon which nothing now rested but his feet and his phone, then shifted his eyes to the wall on his right. For years this had been papered with want-sheets, hot-sheets, lab results, and takeout menus—not to mention his calendar with pending court-dates noted in red—but now it was completely bare. He finished his visual tour by noting the stack of cardboard liquor cartons by the door. As he did so, he reflected how unpredictable life was. He had a temper, and he would have been the first to admit it. That his temper had a way of getting him in trouble and
keeping
him in trouble was also something he would have freely admitted. And if, a year ago, he had been granted a vision of his office as it was today, he would have drawn a simple conclusion from it: his temper
had finally gotten him into a jam he couldn't wiggle out of, and he had been canned. Either he had finally piled up enough reprimands in his jacket to warrant dismissal under departmental rules, or he had been caught really hurting someone, as he supposed he had really hurt the little spick, Ramon Sanders. The idea that it mattered if a queerboy like Ramon got hurt a little was ridiculous, of course—Saint Anthony he was not—but you had to abide by the rules of the game . . . or at least not be caught breaking them. It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn't understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it.

But he was
not
being canned. He was moving, that was all. Moving from this shitty little cubicle which had been home since the first year of the Bush Presidency. Moving into a real office, where the walls went all the way up to the ceiling and came all the way down to the floor. Not canned;
promoted.
It made him think of a Chuck Berry song, one that went
C'est la vie,
it goes to show you never can tell.

The bust had happened, the big one, and things couldn't have gone better for him if he'd written the script himself. An almost unbelievable transmutation had taken place: his ass had turned to gold, at least around here.

It had been a city-wide crack ring, the sort of combine you never get whole and complete . . . except this time he had. Everything had fallen into place; it had been like rolling a dozen straight sevens at a crap-table in Atlantic City and doubling your money every time. His team had ended up arresting over twenty people, half a dozen of them really big bugs, and the busts were righteous—not so much as a whiff of entrapment. The D.A. was probably reaching heights of orgasm unmatched since cornholing his cocker spaniel back in junior high school. Norman, who had once believed he might end up being prosecuted by that geeky little fuck if he couldn't manage to put a checkrein on his temper, had become the D.A.'s fair-haired boy. Chuck Berry had been right: you never could tell.

“The Coolerator was jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale,” Norman sang, and smiled. It was a cheerful smile, one that made most people want to smile back at him, but it would have chilled Rosie's skin and made her frantically wish to be invisible. She thought of it as Norman's biting smile.

A very good spring on top, a very good spring indeed, but underneath it had been a very bad spring. A totally
shitty
spring, to be exact, and Rose was the reason why. He had expected to settle her hash long before now, but he hadn't. Somehow Rose was still out there. Still out there somewhere.

He had gone to Portside on the very same day he had interrogated his good friend Ramon in the park across from the station. He had gone with a picture of Rose, but it hadn't been much help. When he mentioned the sunglasses and the bright red scarf (valuable details he had found in the transcripts of Ramon Sanders's original interrogation), one of Continental's two daytime ticket-sellers had hollered Bingo. The only problem was that the ticket-seller couldn't remember what her destination had been, and there was no way to check the records, because there were no records. She had paid cash for her ticket and checked no baggage.

Continental's schedule had offered three possibilities, but Norman thought the third—a bus which had departed on the southern route at 1:45 p.m.—was unlikely. She wouldn't have wanted to hang around that long. That left two other choices: a city two hundred and fifty miles away and another, larger city in the heart of the midwest.

He had then made what he was slowly coming to believe had been a mistake, one which had cost him at least two weeks: he had assumed that she wouldn't want to go too far from home, from the area where she'd grown up—not a scared little mouse like her. But now—

Norman's palms were covered with a faint lacework of semicircular white scars. They had been made by his fingernails, but their real source was deep inside his head, an oven which had been running at broil for most of his life.

“You
better
be scared,” he murmured. “And if you're not now, I guarantee you will be soon.”

Yes. He had to have her. Without Rose, everything that had happened this spring—the glamour bust, the good press, the reporters who had stunned him by asking respectful questions for a change, even the promotion—meant nothing. The women he had slept with since Rose had left meant nothing, either. What mattered was
she had left him.
What mattered more was
he hadn't had the slightest clue she meant to do it.
And what mattered most was
she had taken his bank card.
She had only used it once, and for a paltry three hundred and fifty dollars, but that wasn't the point.
The point was that she had taken what was his, she had forgotten who was the meanest motherfucker in the jungle, and for that she would have to pay. The price would be high, too.

High.

He'd strangled one of the women he'd been with since Rose left. Choked her, then dumped her behind a grain-storage tower on the west side of the lake. Was he supposed to blame that one on his temper, too? He didn't know, how was that for nuts? For right out to lunch? All he knew was he had picked the woman out of the strolling meat-market down on Fremont Street, a little brunette honey in fawn-colored hotpants with these big Daisy Mae tits poking out the front of her halter. He didn't really see how much she looked like Rose (or so he told himself now, and so he perhaps really believed) until he was shagging her in the back of his current duty-car, an anonymous four-year-old Chevy. What had happened was she turned her head and the lights around the top of the nearest grain-storage tower had shone on her face for a moment, shone on it in a certain way, and in that moment the whore
was
Rose, the bitch who had walked out on him without even leaving a note, without leaving so much as one
fucking word,
and before he knew what he was doing he had the halter wrapped around the whore's neck and the whore's tongue was sticking out of her mouth and the whore's eyes were bulging out of their sockets like glass marbles. And the worst thing about it was that once she was dead, the whore hadn't looked like Rose at all.

Well, he hadn't panicked . . . but then, why would he? It hadn't been the first time, after all.

Had Rose known that? Sensed that?

Was that why she had run? Because she was afraid he might—

“Don't be an asshole,” he muttered, and closed his eyes.

A bad idea. What he saw was what he all too often saw in his dreams lately: the green ATM card from Merchant's Bank, grown to an enormous size and floating in the blackness like a currency-colored dirigible. He opened his eyes again in a hurry. His hands hurt. He unrolled his fingers and observed the welling cuts in his palms with no surprise. He was accustomed to the stigmata of his temper, and he knew how to deal with it: by reestablishing control. That meant thinking and planning, and those things began with review.

He had called the police in the closer of the two cities, had identified himself, and then had identified Rose as the prime suspect in a big-money bank-card scam (the card was the worst thing of all, and it never really left his mind anymore). He gave her name as Rose McClendon, feeling sure she would have gone back to her maiden name. If it turned out she hadn't, he would simply pass off as coincidence the fact that the suspect and the investigating officer shared the same name. It had been known to happen. And it was Daniels they were talking about, not Trzewski or Beauschatz.

He had also faxed the cops side-by-side pictures of Rose. One was a photo of her sitting on the back steps, taken by Roy Foster, a cop friend of his, last August. It wasn't very good—it showed how much lard she'd put on since hitting the big three-oh, for one thing—but it was black and white and showed her facial features with reasonable clarity. The other was a police artist's conception (Al Kelly, one talented sonofabitch, had done it on his own time, at Norman's request) of the same woman, only with a scarf over her head.

The cops in that other city, the closer city, had asked all the right questions and gone to all the right places—the homeless shelters, the transient hotels, the halfway houses where you could sometimes get a look at the current guest-list, if you knew who and how to ask—with no result. Norman himself had made as many calls as he'd had time for, hunting with ever-increasing frustration for some sort of paper trail. He even paid for a faxed list of the city's newest driver's license applicants, with no result.

The idea that she might escape him entirely, escape her just punishment for what she had done (especially for daring to take the bank card), still hadn't crossed his mind, but he now reluctantly came to the conclusion that she could have gone to that other city after all, that she could have been so afraid of him that two hundred and fifty miles just wasn't far enough.