The Do-Right (6 page)

V
V

SHE GOT OFF the bus too soon, down at the wrong end of Ashley Avenue. Walked past an array of two-story mansions. Stared through the wrought iron fences at red brick and white brick, white pillars and black shutters, gracious wide doors, a crystal chandelier lit behind a picture window. Yards like the green felt of pool tables, shiny cars parked side-by-side in the driveways.

Addresses on the black mailboxes told her how many blocks she had to go. After four or five, the mansions began to drop off in quality and size, the yards in neatness. She came finally to a high hedge, past which she could see no more houses at all, just land and a tangle of trees, and—a block farther on—cars driving by. Miss Blanchard's aunt might live on an avenue with many mansions, but she owned the puttered-out end of the street.

A driveway disappeared like a footpath into the wild hedge. Delpha could see no house at all. But it was a driveway because she walked on it through the hedge, and an unwashed Cadillac was parked in it.

Lions in the wilderness
.

That's what the place looked like. The grounds a thicket of bushes, sticks and rotting leaves, canopied trees, straggling flowers. She climbed concrete steps that lofted up to a pair of guard lions, the one on the right missing the claw part of
his foot. Delpha used her key. The door swung open. Marble foyer, no chandelier though there was plenty height for one, grand staircase laid with a carpet runner held in place by tarnished brass rods.

Delpha walked down a passageway, snapped on the light.
Look at this
. Her Rosemont room would fit three times into this kitchen with the black and white checkerboard floor. Ten foot ceilings. White enamel wood-burner converted to gas, glass-front white cabinets holding shelves of silver-ringed china.

She went closer to the cabinets. Plastic water glasses, paper plates, twenty cans of Campbell's soup. Some shelves empty. Drawer of dimestore forks and spoons.

She took down a Cream of Mushroom out of a row of them, found a saucepan, mixed the jellied soup with some water, and lit the gas with a wooden match.

Mr. Phelan's job. This job. She had work.

That meant a door to close and a lock on that door, a shower with hot water twelve steps down the hall. Meant Miss Blanchard's fine biscuits and gravy and Oscar's pie, it meant all right. That burst on her, and Delpha held in her mind one of the three picture shows she'd ever seen on the outside,
Cinderella
. She'd been eleven years old, bug-eyed as singing birds and rats with clothes on sewed that girl a pink and white dress and tied bows all over it. That girl had danced. Delpha did a thing she used to do in the dark of her cell: she petted her own head, petted it and crooned some nice words that never really came out of her mouth.

“Who are
you
?”

Delpha's head snapped up. She backed to the sink, hands down and visible. The cocker spaniel woman, a pair of white patent leather boots dangling from one hand, moved a
highball glass from her forehead, so she could squint through damp blond bangs.

“Calinda Blanchard hired me to stay with your mother evenings, give her some supper and all.”

“My
mother
ran off with a morphine addict when I was four years old. Jessie is my
grandmother
. Jesus, how old do you think I am?”

The blue-jean miniskirt said twenty, but a sag at the knees admitted to forty. This was Ida Rae the cousin, second cousin, whichever. Delpha nodded to her. “Grandmother, sorry. 'Bout my age, I guess.”

“And how old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

The woman skated over on stocking feet, boots flapping, and attempted to hug Delpha, tipped some gin onto her blouse. “Oops! Thank you, sweetie pie. You and me'll be friends. Will you be my friend, please?” The cousin's head tilted to the side as she smiled, in a pose that must have been adorable thirty-five years ago. The gin protruded like a blade from her face.

Delpha leaned back.

“Warning you, you're gonna get tired of her fast.” Ida pinched her nostrils together and rolled her eyes, gave a little trill. “But you—” She touched her head, slopping her drink from the glass. “Who rubs their own head? That was so
cuuute
. I'm Ida Rae. Tell me your name. Oh, wait, you know…doesn't really matter. Watch out for Moselle, the day nurse. No matter how nice to her I am, she never likes me.”

Blandly, drunkenly pleasant, Ida's face crumpled for a second, as though crushed by a huge hand, and then expanded back into blandness. She didn't seem aware of the change.

Delpha continued to stand stiffly as the woman veered close and breathed into her face. “And don't—do
not
, you
hear?—be poking around my house. Bye, sweetie.” Ida Rae skated from the kitchen and collapsed into a bowlegged chair in the hall. After tugging the boots on, she clopped toward the marble foyer.

The heavy front door shut. Delpha carried a tray up the broad stairs. She looked in the first bedroom, spied a spurt of white hair above a gullied forehead, cheeks grooved vertically, fretful little eyes and plucking hands. The sewer smell greeted her as soon as she entered. Delpha toted the soup back downstairs and returned with a rag soaked in warm water. She opened the large oak cabinet that served as a night table, found a set of sheets from one side, and a fresh diaper from the other, put these on the marble top of the cabinet, and closed up its two doors. She searched out a nightgown in a bureau drawer.

“Roll on your side, Mrs. Speir.” Delpha helped her. “Hold up your arms now. Hold 'em up.”

She peeled off the soiled nightgown, gathering it in her fingers so she didn't spread the shit.

“Stay rolled now, Mrs. Speir.”

Slid the diaper from between her legs. Look like a girl front side, hairless, white, sealed as an angel. The other side, no butt at all. Yoke of bone, puddle of skin from it.

Jesus God, let me not live one hundred years
.

Took forty minutes moving slow to fix her up again, positioning, swabbing, drying, maneuvering on the diaper and the sheet under her. The nightgown. Then clean in a clean bed.

Delpha bundled the dirty clothes and stuffed them in the washer downstairs, hit the button, and scoured her hands and on up her arms. She sniffed herself. Nope. Washed and sniffed again, still smelled shit. Washed each fingernail separate, knuckles, palms, inhaled up to the elbow, ah there was a
smear on her rolled sleeve. Took off the blouse and scrubbed out the spot, buttoned it up, folded the sleeve higher, washed her hands. Done. She reheated the soup, carried it up on the tray, and set it on the broad old night table.

The outer corners of Jessie Spier's eyes, calm now, were wreathed in powdery, finely-crisscrossed skin. Thin lips, harshly downturned on one side, parted, and she let out garbled phrases.

“My name's Delpha. Brought you mushroom flavor but if you like some other kind, you just say.”

The forehead wrinkles deepened. Delpha repeated herself, but her patient scowled at her until she finally hollered, “Is mushroom soup the kind you like?”

It was or it wasn't. Mrs. Speir delivered her opinion in such shrewd, definite syllables that Delpha believed she could understand if only she strained sufficiently. Couldn't. Offered spoonfuls of soup, which were accepted until a hand began to spider toward the nightstand. She set down the bowl, picked up a pair of cat-eye glasses lying there, stroked back the white topknot, and fit them on the old woman's head.

Said, “Hello there.”

Ten thirty on a hot May night. Block east of the New Rosemont, Delpha got off the bus to the distorted chords of pedal steel. She sat down on the bench, slid around to face Crockett Street's yellow party-glow. Surge of guitar, thump of drum, again the twang of pedal steel. Not a tune she recognized, but then she didn't know many of them now. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, she'd missed all that. The last honkytonk song she'd heard blaring across a dance floor might have been Elvis' “Hard-Headed Woman” or Johnny Cash's “I Walk the Line.”

A distant crowd clapped and whistled. Delpha stood up from the bus bench and walked on to the New Rosemont's steps, picked up an empty of Night Train and, swinging it by the neck, carried it in to throw away.

VI
VI

HANK AARON WALLOPED his 685
^th
homerun—just thirty more to beat The Babe's record—and next week was here.

Phelan strolled out onto Leon's pine floor at quarter till ten, taking inventory. Two young pool players were having their fencing match refereed by a red-faced man in a bar apron. Three guys sat at the bar, across from the neon Jax sign, heads angled to view baseball on the corner-mounted TV. A twined couple whispering in a booth. Pack of women past forty who seemed to be laughing with genuine pleasure. Few tables of Monday night spouse-avoiders with half an eye on the Astros game and a jukebox urging them to “go home to the armadillo.”

“Tommy Phelan!” A pointy-chin waitress might have flung herself on him if she hadn't been toting a tray of longnecks and a dish of peanuts.

Behind the Max Factor and the red lipstick overlaid with Vaseline for shine, Phelan picked out the freckled face of his junior prom date. The one he didn't know he was supposed to get a corsage for until his grandmother Lila had sent him off to buy a white carnation dripping with ribbons.

“Patty Peavey. How you been?”

“It's Johnson now. I got two kids, a divorce, and this new job. Just a minute.”

Patty dealt the round of beers to a table of raucous guys,
slipped out from under one of them's grabbing arm and returned to Phelan.

“Tommy,” she said seriously as she took in his suit, “who died?”

Phelan fingered a lapel. “Just business.”

“Heard the army made you a medic in Vietnam. Then you went off to the rigs and hadn't heard nothing since.”

“Came back. There a lady in here by herself?”

Patty glanced around. “No, all the crazy people are where you can see them.”

“If one comes in, I'll be in that back booth. Send her over. I'll take a Salty Dog, and…you liking this job, Patty?”

“Tell me what likin' has to do with workin', baby.”

Phelan smiled, passed the line of unoccupied bar stools, saluted the three occupied ones, and paused to take in the score: Astros tied in the bottom of the ninth. He slid into the back booth. Smell of frying hamburger, maybe a little catfish wafted from behind the swinging doors to the kitchen.

He unfolded the sheet of paper Miss Wade had given him: available info on Mrs. Lloyd Elliott.

“You want me to research the client?” Miss Wade had asked.

“Cover all the bases,” Phelan'd said. Why not? Might be something useful there. Besides, Mr. Phelan and Miss Wade had
beaucoup
time on their hands.

“Isn't much there,” she'd told him as she set the handwritten sheet down on the desk beside the Selectric. “Pictures, but you'll have to go see those.” She typed up her findings, Phelan noting that the sound of the typewriter going made him feel like his business was going.

He swallowed some Salty Dog and read it all again. Mrs. Lloyd Elliott had been Neva McCracken, daughter of R.J. and
Tillie of Dallas, Texas, president of McCracken Investment Management and homemaker, respectively. Neva had married young attorney Lloyd Elliott in 1952 after graduation from Texas State Women's College in Denton. Attended by eight bridesmaids in her chosen colors, rose and pink. Phelan didn't get that part. Rose, pink, what's the difference. Miss Wade had sketched a picture of the full-skirted bridal gown—a yellow, stripey one, since she was using pencil on a legal pad.

The next paragraph detailed a society dinner and a gala attended by Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Elliott. Phelan skimmed it and went on to the last paragraph, which summarized mentions of his client during the late ‘50s and early 1960. Mrs. Lloyd Elliott had given generously to the Neches River Festival and opened her lovely home for a fund-raiser for Senator Richard M. Nixon.

Putting the paper away, he wondered how she felt about her boy Nixon now that he'd acquired his own special prosecutor. Phelan had had one of those in third grade, until he cracked the fifth-grader's head with a Davy Crockett lunch box. Maybe Nixon'd try that.

Last ten years, no more pictures of Neva McCracken Elliott. No dinners. No galas. Galas—everything Tom Phelan knew about that subject, he could record on a grain of Uncle Ben's rice. Boards, she sat on boards for this bank and that foundation and Lamar College's Building Fund.

The heads at the bar turned as a dark woman in three-inch black heels entered Leon's. Two turned back to the game. Patty balanced a tray of highballs while she bent her head to listen to the tourist. Then she brought up her right hand and shot Phelan with her index finger.

Mrs. Lloyd Elliott wore a suit no gala had ever seen. Charcoal gray and boxy, covered buttons, skirt past her
knees. Didn't go with the high heels and the fashionable tips of glossy brunette hair lofted and feathered around her face. Hair and shoes were here in 1973, but the suit was strictly Mamie Eisenhower. Given the paint-black sunglasses and Leon's romantic lighting, Phelan wasn't surprised when her toe snagged the leg of a barstool. He was on his feet at once, caught her before she stumbled.

The black lenses fixed on him. “Thank you.”

Patty, bearing a clean ashtray complete with matchbook, came to take her order. Mrs. Elliott stationed her index and thumb four inches apart and said, “The least disgusting scotch.”

Patty's gaze floated past Phelan's without landing on him.

Once the waitress was out of range, Phelan's client cut short his attempt at a friendly introduction by removing the sunglasses. Her eyes were reddened and glassy with tears, and the pupils were unusual, an unattractive, boggy brown, focused on him like an X-ray machine.

“How old are you, Mr. Phelan?”

Phelan offered his hand. “Glad to meet you, Mrs. Elliott. I'm twenty-nine. I hope you're well this evening.”

“That ad announcing your business and now, seeing you—you're new to the profession.” She switched her car keys to her left hand, wrung his hand and dropped it.

“Why don't we sit down? Yes, I am establishing my business. Is that a problem?”

The stare had not left him. “Not necessarily. But you have no experience at all?”

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence, Mrs. Elliott.”

It was curious to watch. The X-ray machine shut off slowly, from the inside. The ugly brown eyes did not become friendly, but they lost their penetration.

“Of all things. Quoting Calvin Coolidge. Is that normal for a detective?”

Phelan smiled. “Just something my grandmother says. A less educated lady than yourself might not have recognized old Cal, and that might have made me look good.”

She laid her car keys on the table and sat down. Finally.

“I happen to like Calvin Coolidge and especially that speech of his. You couldn't have known that, Mr. Phelan, so that makes you lucky. And luck can be better than experience.”

Patty returned with Mrs. Elliott's scotch and a new Salty Dog for Phelan. Mrs. Elliott stared at the drink.

“I can get you something else,” he offered.

She put the glass to her lips, tipped her head back, and half the scotch was gone, languidly. She was here at Leon's and sort of not here, as close as he could figure it. The woman had sounded so contained on the phone that this change in composure now interested him. He put it down to her being already blasted. That could be 90% of it. But there was something else, he felt it.

She slipped the glasses back on and became very here. “All right, what I want is quite simple. Photographs of my husband with his girlfriend. His car is a black Cadillac Seville, license J5489. I know they went to the Holiday Inn once. I'm not certain they go there every time. You'll have to find them. Take some pictures of them and give me a call on a Tuesday or a Friday at eight in the morning before I leave for work. Your secretary has the number. I'll meet you somewhere to pick them up and settle your fee. This is a retainer.”

During this rapid speech, the Texas in her voice dried up. She pushed an envelope toward him. “Is there anything else I need to tell you?” She edged a knuckle beneath a black lens. It came away wet.

He took out his small notebook, jotted the license number
and make of car. “This is fine. I'm sorry, Mrs. Elliott. Anyone in your place would be upset. I take it that the photos will be used in a divorce proceeding.”

Her top lip curled. “I think that's likely.” She picked the matchbook from the ashtray and idly struck a match. Her head tilted as she studied the fizz of ignition. “Don't you think that's likely?”

Phelan lifted a hand. “Excuse me. Whatever you want the pictures for is your business.”

“A divorce is painful. You'd agree that a divorce could be extremely painful.” The blackened match dropped and a second one flared. “It would hurt.”

“I'd be unhappy.”

“Unhappy.” Her voice was distantly puzzled. “You'd be unhappy.”

“Sure. Anybody would.”

“The loss of your wife, your mate, that would be ungood, it would be unpleasant. Un-nice.”

“Mrs. Elliott—”

“It wouldn't be…” She lit another match. Behind the yellow flame, the woman's lips parted and her brow squeezed. The muddy eyes must be squeezing too beneath the black lenses. There was some panting noise caught between her throat and her teeth that did not release, that held itself at bay like a bleeding animal in the dark of a cave.

Phelan sat up straight and got his feet under him.

The noise stayed back. Her voice switched on. “That loss wouldn't be…wouldn't be, oh, say…eviscerating for you? You wouldn't feel lacerated into parts that can't recall how they were ever joined?”

The black matchstick fell into the ashtray. It had burned her skin. He smelled it.

“I don't know,” he said. Hairs on his arms shifted.

“My blessing on you, Mr. Phelan, twenty-nine years old—may you never know.” She vanished the other half of the scotch.

“Can I get you another drink?” Phelan asked.

Mrs. Elliott flicked away water on her cheekbone. “No, thank you. And don't get up. Call me when you've got the pictures, please. And only then. My time is dear.” She slid from the booth and walked off, trailing a hand against the backs of the empty bar stools as she passed them.

Phelan sipped his grapefruit. This woman considered divorce eviscerating, yet she was engineering one. Must be the betrayal she was talking about. Easier now to understand why her social life had dwindled in the past ten years. Imagine tipping a glass of pink champagne with Neva Elliott. Like trading banter with a bandsaw. Phelan couldn't figure if his estimate of Lloyd went up or down.

All in all
, he thought,
up
.

He laid down a couple bucks for the drinks. He folded a ten, just about enough for a sack of groceries, by the far side of his glass. Maybe he'd piss off the freckled girl who'd worn that white carnation corsage. Maybe not.

The three guys at the bar were leaving. Astros must have wrapped it up. The lunkhead pool players and the middle-aged ladies had already taken off. The bartender reached up and dialed the channel to an
I Love Lucy
rerun. Except for the table of beer-drinking grabbers, Leon's was deserted.

Patty cruised by. “That suit's doing strange things to you, Tommy. Your type has changed considerably.”

“Professional meeting, darlin'.”

“Well, as I recall, you used to beat 'em off, not drive 'em off. You make that poor woman cry?”

“Not on my account. You gonna keep this job?”

She whispered in his ear. “Just till I find a suitcase of money.”

Phelan kissed Patty's Revlon-coated cheek. She grinned, licked her thumb, touched it to one hip, and hissed, “Sssssst. Still got it.”