Steel Guitar (16 page)

“Ten minutes, right?” They always say that.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Put the gun down.”

“You do me one too.”

“Yeah?”

“Call me Carlotta.”

“You got the gun, I call you whatever you want.”

I lowered it to my side, feeling angry and foolish. “Damn,” I said. “Dammit to hell.”

T.C. burst out of the linen closet and scooted to my side. He didn't even yowl and scratch when I picked him up.

“Come downstairs,” Cal said. “I'll buy you a drink.”

Twenty-Four

The cops took twenty minutes to arrive. There were two of them, what they call a salt-and-pepper team, one black, one white. They could have called this team a Laurel-and-Hardy. The white man was so fat, I didn't see how he'd passed the physical, unless they'd weighed him with his skinny partner and divided by two. They made Cal and me wait outside in the rain while they did the same room-by-room search I'd done, guns drawn. They came downstairs chuckling like it was the most fun they'd had all night.

Then, their muddy footprints all over the place, they invited us back into my living room. The fat one pulled out a form and handed it to the skinny one, who started filling it out.

I hadn't expected anything else. It was late. Routine housebreak was what these guys expected to see. My neighborhood is popular with burglars.

“Aren't you gonna dust for fingerprints?” Cal demanded. “Take photographs? You see that mirror in the bathroom? She's been threatened, for chrissake!”

“Witnesses?” the fat cop said evenly, looking straight at Cal.

“The cat,” I said. “Hid in a closet.” The wallop of a hurriedly downed Scotch was starting to catch up with the earlier double bourbon and the long-ago beer.

“Boyfriend? Husband?” the thin black cop said, nodding at Cal.

“Yeah,” Cal said defensively. “Ex.”

“You have anything to do with this?” the fat cop asked.

“No, as a matter of fact, I didn't.”

“Some guys do, have it arranged. Prove to the little woman she can't hack it living alone.”

“That the kind of help you give, nickel psychology?” Cal asked.

“You piss anybody off lately?” the black cop asked me. “Fire anybody? Give somebody the finger?”

“Me?” I said innocently. “The little woman?”

“It was kids,” the fat cop said, smoothing it over. “Do it all the time. Probably saw the lipstick-writing thing on TV. Miracle they spelled two words right. Peanut butter and jelly on the rug. Shit, too, unless that's from the cat. Kids got no respect for property.”

“Broken glass,” the black cop observed, shaking his head, and scuffing around the living room. “Probably sent a brick through your window and climbed in. Good locks. Couldn't force 'em. Oughta get these windows boarded up tonight. Know an all-night place?”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering if either of the cops would notice anything odd about the pattern of breakage.

“Your insurance probably covers glass,” the white guy said. “Take photos.”

“I will,” I said. Suddenly I just wanted them out of my house. I needed time to think. “Good night. Thanks for coming so quickly,” I said.

Cal stared at me like I needed a quick brain scan.

“Sorry this had to happen,” the black cop said. “You write out a list of stolen items and get it into the station. Xerox a copy for your insurance company.”

I made some remark about the lousy weather, and all the creeps coming out on a night like this.

Long as it killed the heat, they said, they didn't mind. Then they sped on their way.

“What's going on, Carly?” Cal said, trying to stare me down.

“Carlotta,” I reminded him absently. “Look, why don't you go home? We can talk tomorrow.”

“I'm too wired to go home. I'll help pick up the glass.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The glass.”

“What's that mean?”

“You see much glass in this room?”

“No.”

“That's because the windows were broken from the inside.”

“The inside?” Cal repeated.

“Yeah,” I said. “‘But then how did the little pranksters get in?' asked the cops.”

“They didn't ask.”

“Yeah, but if they had, I could have told them.”

“Tell me.”

“They used my keys.”

“Maybe you should call the cops back,” Cal said after a long pause.

“Maybe you should go home,” I said.

“Maybe you should call that all-night glass-repair place.”

I'd lied to the cops. I don't know an all-night window-boarder. I do know Gloria, the dispatcher at G&W. And Gloria has three brothers, the smallest of whom got booted out of the NFL for playing too rough. They do odd jobs at odd hours. I never inquire too deeply into their current employment.

One SOS to Gloria, and they were available. They boarded the front windows with half-inch plywood, cursed the filthy weather, and told me somebody would be by with glass in the morning.

I treated them to the remainder of Roz's bottle of Scotch. I figured she owed it to me for not getting the locks changed fast enough. While the brothers hammered, Cal helped me take inventory and clean. Not that there was much we could do. The rug needed professional care. We figured we'd do more harm than good, tackling it with home remedies, so we rolled it up, filth and all, and stood it on end in the hallway.

I fed the cat. His cans of FancyFeast had been left untouched, and it made me feel better to see him hunker down, a calm oasis, in his special corner.

A five-pound sack of flour had been dumped in the middle of the kitchen floor. The assailant—I thought of him that way, as the assailant—had then emptied two cans of pie cherries and a big plastic bottle of maple syrup over the pile. Then he'd swept a broom through it, making sure the goo spread before hardening.

In the living room, Cal's denim jacket hung from the coat tree, his wet socks from the cold radiator. He'd put his shoes back on because of the broken glass. He'd righted the couch. He wore the turquoise towel draped around his shoulders like a fighter; his hair was wet and spiky from rain or sweat. He held my silver-framed photo of Paolina in his big hands, picking shards of glass away from the print, and turned to me with a question in his eyes.

“My little sister,” I said.

“I thought she might be your kid.”

“From the Big Sisters Organization.”

He set the photo down, ran a careful hand over the wooden mantel. “You're not married?” he asked.

“No. You?” I returned.

“No.”

He started filling another trash bag with debris. I remembered him after performances—on a natural high, adrenaline-pumped. That's why he drank, he'd tell me. That's why he doped. He had to come down, had to come down from the performing high. He was too wired to sleep, but so tired, so tired.

“This happen to you often?” he asked.

“No.”

“And I thought I had a crummy job,” he said.

“Sit down,” I said.

“No. No, this works. Maybe I should get a job cleaning buildings nights, after playing with that crummy band. Group's been together barely a month, and already it feels wrong. Roger, the lead guitar, he couldn't front a washboard trio.”

I was reluctant to sit while he paced, so I picked up the remains of a kitchen mug and tossed it into a doubled Hefty Bag. At least nobody had slit the upholstery. But then, why should they? Nobody was trying to find anything here. They were just trying to warn me off.

Warn me off what?

“You had a good solo in the third set,” I said to Cal, grateful for his help and his company. Roz hadn't returned from her pub crawl yet. Maybe she wouldn't. Not till long past daybreak. “Second from the last song.”

“Yeah,” he said. “One decent break, the whole night.”

“You could find a better band,” I said.

“Oh, sure. People waiting in line for ex-addict bass players,” he said. “Standing in line. You play much?”

“Just practice,” I said.

“You still got your National?”

“Under my bed,” I said. I wished I hadn't mentioned the word “bed.” It sounded louder in my ears than it should have.

“I'll play you a song,” he said, too casually.

“This is business, Cal. This whole mess, this break-in, has something to do with a case I'm working on.”

“Does that mean it might have something to do with me?”

“You might be able to help me.”

“Why would I?”

“For auld acquaintance,” I said.

He squatted, dumped pieces of broken china into a bag. “You remember sneaking around in here while your aunt was alive? Before we got married? She knew what we were up to, old Bea. She wasn't so dumb.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I knew she knew, and she knew I knew she knew, but we needed to keep up the front, you know? Some kind of generational thing.”

He stood up. “You got any older generations in the house?”

“No.”

“So, you wanna dance?” He turned to me abruptly, threw out the words like a challenge.

They were the first words he ever said to me, the day after my nineteenth birthday. We were at a concert. Nobody was dancing. There wasn't even a dance floor.

In our lovers' language, “Wanna dance” became shorthand for something far more intimate.

“In the middle of this?”

“Nobody got hurt, not even the cat. We should celebrate.”

“I imagine you've done a lot of dancing since me,” I said.

“I imagine you have too. I'm healthy,” he said. “Checked and inspected.”

“Me too,” I said. “Healthy.”

“I use condoms, if requested.”

“Is there somebody at home waiting for you, Cal?”

“Just the rats and the roaches.”

“No woman who's gonna hate us both in the morning?”

“Nope.”

“Promise?”

He touched my cheek with callused fingertips and the shock wave traveled to the nape of my neck and exploded.

“I need to find Davey Dunrobie,” I said.

“Tonight?” he asked softly, his mouth a quarter of an inch from mine. “Right now?”

“No.”

Twenty-Five

I woke slowly, wondering why I felt so hot. On a steamy August night I wouldn't wear so much as a T-shirt to bed, much less drape myself with my quilt. Half asleep, I tried to shove the heavy weight aside.

Ah. I stopped mid-push. Not a quilt. A man …

Last night's liquor furred my tongue. Hot summer nights, Sam and I sleep in his Charles River Park apartment in air-conditioned bliss.

Not Sam. Cal, my ex-husband.

Cal, my ex-husband, stirred and moaned, rolled over onto the pillow beside me. I stretched cautiously. Aside from my tongue, I discovered that the rest of me felt great.

“Never sleep with your ex-husband.”

I comforted myself with the thought that my grandmother would never have dreamed of such a situation, and therefore couldn't possibly have passed on a relevant Yiddish saying to my mom.

My vest dangled from the back of a chair. My panties were snagged on the handle of the bedside table drawer. The rest of our clothes littered the floor. I couldn't see my shoes.

The rain. Wet shoes in the hall. No. We'd put our shoes back on because of the glass.

The glass! I sat up quickly. What the hell time was it? Would a truckload of glaziers be arriving momentarily?

Cal groaned softly and yanked at the sheet. I touched his arm. His narrow-shouldered body had aged well; he was leaner, harder. Last night my exploring hand had touched a scar near his flat stomach.

Appendectomy or barroom brawl. I'd have to ask.

I eased out of bed naked, crossed to the phone, dialed hurriedly. I spoke softly, but I was pretty sure I didn't have to bother with the precaution. The Cal of old could sleep through a thunderstorm.

“Mooney?” I was in luck; he answered on the second ring.

“Yeah?”

“Don't you ever go home?”

“Why this sudden interest in my personal life?”

I shifted gears fast. “Anything on the bass player's autopsy?” If the cops were satisfied with suicide, I figured there was no need to stir things up, busted windows or no.

“Doesn't look great for your friend.”

“What does that mean?”

I could hear him shuffling papers. “Let me translate from the patholog-ese,” he muttered. “Here it is. Looks like our female Caucasian—Hunter, Brenda Alice, Miss—got a three-way hit: booze, pills, and just to make sure, an injection. Speedball-type thing, cocaine and heroin. And the kicker is that we found no works—no needle, no syringe. So what we got is this: We got her in Dee Willis's bed, dead meat. And we got Dee Willis, first on the scene, and a bunch of hangers-on lying to keep her from incriminating herself. It may have been an accident, but, hell, she probably killed the girl. What did they give the girl who shot up John Belushi? Second degree?”

“That woman had the works on her and a drug rap-sheet as long as my arm, Mooney. She admitted the whole deal. You find a needle in Dee's guitar case?”

“She had plenty of time to ditch it.”

I sat on the dresser, resting my toes on the wooden floor. “Mooney, listen. Somebody broke into my house last night.”

I moved the phone away from my ear, preparing myself for the explosion. Mooney doesn't think women should live alone. When his dad died, Mom promptly sold the family digs in Southie, and moved in with her darling boy. Mooney rumbled, spluttered, and finally decided not to voice his opinion, bless him. He said “You okay?” in such a mild tone I almost missed it. I was staring at my bed, at Cal's bony foot sticking out from under the sheet.

“I'm fine.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and tried to keep a smile out of my voice. “The only reason I'm telling you is, it wasn't any casual kick-in-the-door job. My bag was lifted at the Berklee. Somebody used my keys to get in and trash the place.”