Rose Madder (21 page)

I'm not her, I
am
afraid—so afraid I'm almost wetting my pants—but I'm not going to let you just take me, Norman. I swear to God I won't do that.

For a moment or two she tried to remember the throw Gert Kinshaw had shown her, the one where you seized the forearms of your onrushing opponent and then turned sideways. It was no good—when she tried to visualize the crucial move, all she could see was Norman coming at her, his lips drawn back to show his teeth (drawn back in what she thought of as his biting smile), wanting to talk to her up close.

Right up close.

Her grocery bag was still standing on the kitchen counter with the yellow picnic-announcement fliers beside it. She'd taken out the perishables and stuck them in the refrigerator, but the few canned goods she'd picked up were still in the bag. She walked across to the counter on legs which seemed as devoid of feeling as wooden planks, and reached in.

Three more quick knocks:
rapraprap.

“Coming,” Rosie said. Her voice sounded amazingly calm to her own ears. She pulled out the biggest thing left in the bag, a two-pound can of fruit cocktail. She closed her hand around it as best she could and started toward the door on her numb woodplank legs. “I'm coming, just a second, be right there.”

W
hile Rosie was marketing, Norman Daniels was lying on a Whitestone Hotel bed in his underwear, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the ceiling.

He had picked up the smoking habit as many boys do, hooking cigarettes from his dad's pack of Pall Malls, resigning himself to a beating if he got caught, thinking that possibility a fair trade for the status you gained by being seen downtown on the corner of State and Route 49, leaning against a phone pole outside the Aubreyville Drugstore and Post Office, perfectly at home with the collar of your jacket
turned up and that cigarette dripping down from your lower lip: crazy, baby, I'm just a real cool breeze. When your friends passed in their old cars, how could they know you'd hawked the butt from the pack on your old man's dresser, or that the one time you'd gotten up courage enough to try and buy a pack of your own in the drug, old man Gregory had snorted and told you to come back when you could grow a moustache?

Smoking had been a big deal at fifteen, a
very
big deal, something that had made up for all the stuff he hadn't been able to have (a car, for instance, even an old jalop' like the ones his friends drove—cars with primer on the rocker panels and white “plastic steel” around the headlights and bumpers held on with twists of haywire), and by the time he was sixteen he was hooked—two packs a day and a
bona fide
smoker's hack in the morning.

Three years after he married Rose, her entire family—father, mother, sixteen-year-old brother—had been killed on that same Route 49. They had been coming back from an afternoon of swimming at Philo's Quarry when a gravel truck veered across the road and wiped them out like flies on a windowpane. Old man McClendon's severed head had been found in a ditch thirty yards from the crash, with the mouth open and a generous splash of crowshit in one eye (by then Daniels was a cop, and cops heard such things). These facts hadn't disturbed Daniels in the least; he had, in fact, been delighted by the accident. As far as he was concerned, the nosy old bastard had gotten exactly what he had coming to him. McClendon had been prone to asking his daughter questions he had no business asking. Rose wasn't McClendon's daughter anymore, after all—not in the eyes of the law, at least. In the eyes of the law she had become Norman Daniels's wife.

He dragged deep on his cigarette, blew three smoke rings, and watched them float slowly toward the ceiling in a stack. Outside, traffic beeped and honked. He had only been here half a day, and already he hated this city. It was too big. It had too many hiding places. Not that it mattered. Because things were right on track, and soon a very hard and very heavy brick wall was going to drop onto Craig McClendon's wayward little daughter, Rosie.

At the McClendon funeral—a tripleheader with just about everyone in Aubreyville in attendance—Daniels had started coughing and had been unable to stop. People were turning
around to look at him, and he hated that kind of staring worse than practically anything. Red-faced, furious with embarrassment (but still unable to stop coughing), Daniels pushed past his sobbing young wife and hurried out of the church with one hand pressed uselessly over his mouth.

He stood outside, coughing so hard at first he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees to keep from actually passing out, looking through his watery eyes at several others who had stepped out for cigarettes, three men and two women who weren't able to go cold turkey even for a lousy half-hour funeral service, and suddenly he decided he was done smoking. Just like that. He knew that the coughing-fit might have been brought on by his usual summer allergies, but that didn't matter. It was a dumb fucking habit, maybe the dumbest fucking habit on the planet, and he was damned if some County Coroner was going to write
Pall Malls
on the cause-of-death line of his death certificate.

On the day he had come home and found Rosie gone—that night, actually, after he discovered the ATM card was missing and could no longer put off facing what had to be faced—he had gone down to the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill and bought his first pack of cigarettes in eleven years. He had gone back to his old brand like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime.
In hoc signo vinces
was what it said on each blood-red pack, in this sign shalt thou conquer, according to his old man, who had conquered Daniels's mother in a lot of kitchen brawls but not much else, so far as Norman had ever seen.

The initial drag had made him feel dizzy, and by the time he'd finished the cigarette, smoking it all the way down to a roach, he'd been sure he was going to puke, faint, or have a heart attack. Maybe all three at once. But now here he was, back up to two packs a day and hacking out that same old way-down-in-the-bottom-of-your-lungs cough when he rolled out of bed in the morning. It was like he 'd never been away.

That was all right, though; he was going through a stressful life experience, as the psychology pukes liked to say, and when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits. Habits—especially bad ones like smoking and drinking—were crutches, people said. So what? If you had a limp, what was wrong with using a crutch? Once he'd taken care of Rosie (made sure that if
there was going to be an informal divorce, it would be on his terms, you might say), he would throw all his crutches away.

This time for good.

Norman turned his head and looked out the window. Not dark yet, but getting there. Close enough to get going, anyway. He didn't want to be late for his appointment. He mashed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the nighttable beside the telephone, swung his feet off the bed, and began to dress.

There was no hurry, that was the nicest thing; he'd had all those accumulated off-days coming, and Captain Hardaway hadn't been the slightest bit chintzy about giving them to him when he asked. There were two reasons for that, Norman reckoned. First, the newspapers and TV stations had made him the flavor of the month; second, Captain Hardaway didn't like him, had twice sicced the IA shooflies on him because of excessive-force allegations, and had undoubtedly been glad to get rid of him for awhile.

“Tonight, bitch,” Norman murmured as he rode down in the elevator, alone except for his reflection in the tired old mirror at the back of the car. “Tonight, if I get lucky. And I
feel
lucky.”

There was a line of cabs drawn up at the curb, but Daniels bypassed them. Cab-drivers kept records, and sometimes they remembered faces. No, he would ride the bus again. A city bus, this time. He walked briskly toward the bus stop on the corner, wondering if he had been kidding himself about feeling lucky and deciding he had not been. He was close, he knew it. He knew it because he had found his way back into her head.

The bus—one that ran the Green Line route—came around the corner and rolled up to where Norman was standing. He got on, paid his four bits, sat in back—he didn't have to be Rose tonight, what a relief—and looked out the window as the streets rolled by. Bar signs. Restaurant Signs.
DELI. BEER. PIZZA BY THE SLICE. SEXEE TOPLESS GIRLZ.

You don't belong here, Rose,
he thought as the bus went past the window of a restaurant named Pop's Kitchen—“Strictly Kansas City Beef” said the blood-red neon sign in the window.
You don't belong here, but that's all right, because I'm here now. I've come to take you home. To take you
somewhere,
anyway.

The tangles of neon and the darkening velvet sky made him think of the good old days when life hadn't seemed so weird and somehow claustrophobic, like the walls of a room that keeps getting smaller, slowly closing in on you. When the neon came on the fun started—that was how it had been, anyway, back then in the relatively uncomplicated years of his twenties. You found a place where the neon was bright and you slipped in. Those days were gone, but most cops—most
good
cops—remembered how to slip around after dark. How to slip around
behind
the neon, and how to ride the streetgrease. A cop who couldn't do those things didn't last very long.

He had been watching the signs march past and judged that he should be approaching Carolina Street now. He got to his feet, walked to the front of the bus, and stood there holding the pole. When the bus pulled up at the corner and the doors flapped open, he walked down the steps and slipped into the darkness without saying a word.

He'd bought a city street-map in the hotel newsstand, six dollars and fifty cents, outrageous, but the cost of asking directions could be even higher. People had a way of remembering the people who asked them directions; sometimes they remembered even five years later, amazing but true. So it was better not to ask. In case something happened. Something bad. Probably nothing would, but TCB and CYA were always the best rules to live by.

According to his map, Carolina Street connected with Beaudry Place about four blocks west of the bus stop. A nice little walk on a warm evening. Beaudry Place was where the Travelers Aid Jewboy lived.

Daniels walked slowly, really just sauntering, with his hands in his pockets. His expression was bemused and slightly dopey, giving no clue that all his senses were on yellow alert. He catalogued each passing car, each passing pedestrian, looking especially for anyone who appeared to be looking especially at him. To be
seeing
him. There was no one, and that was good.

When he reached Thumper's house—and that's what it was, a house, not an apartment, another break—he walked past it twice, observing the car in the driveway and the light in the lower front window. Living-room window. The drapes were open but the sheers were drawn. Through them he could see a soft colored blur that had to be the television.
Thumper was up. Thumper was home, Thumper was watching a little tube and maybe munching a carrot or two before heading down to the bus station, where he would try to help more women too stupid to deserve help. Or too bad.

Thumper hadn't been wearing a wedding ring and had the look of a closet queer to Norman anyway, but better safe than sorry. He drifted up the driveway and peeked into Thumper's four- or five-year-old Ford, looking for anything that would suggest the man didn't live alone. He saw nothing that set off any warning bells.

Satisfied, he looked up and down the residential street again and saw no one.

You don't have a mask,
he thought.
You don't even have a nylon stocking you can pull over your face, Normie, do you?

No, he didn't.

You forgot, didn't you?

Well . . . actually, no. He hadn't. He had an idea that when the sun came up tomorrow, there was going to be one less urban Jewboy in the world. Because sometimes bad stuff happened even in nice residential neighborhoods like this. Sometimes people broke in—jigs and junkies for the most part, of course—and there went the old ballgame. Tough but true. Shit happens, as the teeshirts and bumperstickers said. And sometimes, hard as it was to believe, shit happened to the right people instead of the wrong ones.
Pravda-
reading Jewboys who helped wives get away from husbands, for instance. You couldn't just put up with stuff like that; it was no way to run a society. If everyone acted like that, there wouldn't even be a society.

It was pretty much rampant behavior, though because most of the bleeding hearts got away with it. Most of the bleeding hearts hadn't made the mistake of helping his wife, however . . . and this man
had.
Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. This man
had
helped her.

He mounted the steps, took one more quick look around, and rang the doorbell. He waited, then rang again. Now his ears, already attuned to catch the slightest noise, picked up the sound of approaching feet, not
clack-clack-clack
but
hish-hish-hish,
Thumper in his stocking feet, how cozy.

“Coming, coming,” Thumper called.

The door opened. Thumper looked out at him, big eyes swimming behind his hornrimmed glasses. “Can I help
you?” he asked. His outer shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, hanging over a strap-style teeshirt, the same style of teeshirt Norman himself wore, and suddenly it was too much, suddenly it was the last straw, the one that fractured the old dromedary's spinal column, and he was insane with rage. That a man like this should wear an undershirt like his! A
white man's
undershirt!