This Dame for Hire (16 page)

“Yeah.” I picked up the L & T bag from my lap.

“Not yours,” she said.

“How very psychic of you.”

“Toss it.”

I did, and she caught it one-handed.

I watched while she reached in and pulled out the pink sweater.

“You know for certain that this was Claudette’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you say what it was for?”

“I did . . . without usin your name . . . and it was touch-and-go for a while with Daddy, but I finally got him to agree.”

“Did he choose this?” She held the sweater in both hands as if it were a baby.

“No, the mother.”

“I wanted to make sure because some people like to see if they can fool me.”

“She wouldn’t. He might.”

Anne took a sip of her tea, something I’d yet to do. This didn’t escape her, so I lifted my mug and knocked back a little.

“It doesn’t matter if you hate it, Faye. It’s good for you. You need it for energy. And you’ll need plenty of that tonight.”

“Okay, what does that mean?”

“Your dinner date with that guy and his mother.”

“I didn’t know I told ya . . .” And of course I
hadn’t
told her. “I’m really havin dinner with them, huh?”

“About seven-thirty.”

“Seven,” I said.

“You won’t get there until seven-thirty.”

“Why not?”

“How should I know? Drink your tea.”

I took another swig and tried to look happy about it. “Mmmm . . . yummy for the tummy,” I said.

She ignored me, and I couldn’t blame her. She put down her mug and ran her hands over the sweater, which lay across her lap. I knew that soon she’d close her eyes and feel the sweater like she was kneading dough.

But the God-Love-You lady started before that happened. The back of Anne’s building, along with three others, created a well. In one of those buildings the God-Love-You lady had an apartment.

“Oh, no,” Anne said. “I was hoping we’d be spared.”

“It’s sort of early for her to start, isn’t it?” I’d never heard her in the daytime.

“God love you,” the woman yelled.

It was a terrible sound, like a talking crow with a small vocabulary.

“What’ll we do?” I asked.

“Wait her out, I guess. What else can we do?”

No one we knew of had ever seen the God-Love-You lady. Everyone living in the apartments had heard her. Even when somebody called the cops they hadn’t found her.

“God love you.”

Anne said, “I think that’s the last one.”

I started to ask her how she knew but caught myself. Still, I did have a nagging question.

“Anne, how come
you
can’t figure out where she lives?”

“Too frivolous,” she said.

“The woman drives everybody crazy. This was small potatoes today, but I’ve been here when it goes on for hours.”

“Faye, it’s not my job to find out where she lives. Anyway, she has a right to yell anything she wants.”

“She does?”

“She never does it after eleven at night. People have rights.”

I guessed she had a point, but I didn’t think I could’ve lived there with that going on two or three times a week.

“Since when has she been givin matinees?”

“Oh, for a few months now. But it doesn’t happen often, and it doesn’t last too long. She’s done now.”

Anne went back to the sweater, and within moments she closed her eyes. I waited. It felt like hours were slipping by.

Finally, Anne said, “A man has touched this sweater. Did the father touch it when it was given to you?”

“No.”

“Rough.”

I waited.

Her face got all screwed up like she was in pain. It was tough to keep my trap shut, but I knew the drill.

“Oh, God. No. Very rough.”

She was swinging her head back and forth.

“Stop it, stop it,” she said.

Anne was moving around on the sofa and then she jumped up. With one hand she swung at the air. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Oh, no. Oh, God.” She crumpled to the floor, and her eyes opened.

I stayed still, asking only if she was okay.

She nodded and stood up very slowly, the sweater still in her hands as she went back to the sofa. She put it next to her on a cushion and took a long swig of the tea.

My patience, not my long suit, caved in. “What happened, Anne?”

She put up a hand, palm out, signaling me to wait. Her eyes looked funny, as flat as slate. After a sec, when some light came back into them, she focused on me and I knew she was okay.

“Was she wearing this sweater the night she was killed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t believe they’d keep those clothes.”

“We need to be sure.”

“Okay, let me make a call.”

She nodded.

I crossed my fingers that Myrna would be home. She was, and I asked her. She told me that Claudette hadn’t been wearing her pink sweater the night I stumbled over her. Myrna hadn’t even wanted those clothes back from the police. I thanked her and hung up.

“There was a man,” Anne said. “He was trying to hurt me. But I don’t think he wanted to kill me.”

“What did the man look like?”

“I don’t know. His face was blurry.”

“Could ya see anything? Like the color of his hair maybe?”

“No. He was in the shadows.”

“How’d ya know it was a man?”

“His hands. I could see them because they were pulling at me, then grabbing me hard. He hurt my arms. This man was strong.” She shuddered. “And then it turned into what it always does lately.”

“What?”

“There’s a battlefield.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“No matter what images I start with they devolve into a battlefield or a foxhole or something to do with war.”

“Don’t ya think that’s because ya hear so much about it on the radio and read it in the papers?”

“I don’t have a radio, Faye, and I never read the papers. You know that.”

“I forgot.” This was hard for me to keep in mind cause I couldn’t live without my papers and radio. But I understood that Anne didn’t want the interference. She’d explained it all to me once, but I kept forgetting.

“So what do ya make of it?”

“I don’t know. Not everything needs clarification.”

We sure differed there. For me, not only did everything
need
reasons, everything
had
reasons. But Anne and I lived in different worlds, even though we sometimes found common ground.

“Okay, ya don’t have an answer . . . but ya must have an idea about the battlefield, what it is, where it comes from. Like that Dr. Freud said, ya get stuff from dreams.”

“I don’t agree with Dr. Freud. I believe dreams tell us the future, and he believes it tells us the past or present.”

“Okay, forget Freud. Do ya have any idea what these visions of war mean?”

“That would be a clarification, Faye.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Tell me the difference.”

“A clarification is tellin the facts, an explanation. Ideas are more like opinions.”

“So you’re asking for my opinion of these war visions?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“It’s not going to be very edifying, but if that’s what you want I’ll tell you. I
do
know there is a war going on, and along the road of my life I’ve seen images of war in books, images I’d rather not have seen. And for some reason I’m incorporating them into my visions.”

“That makes sense. Does it happen every time ya try to do somethin like ya did today?”

“No. Not all the time.”

“What about when it does happen? Anythin in common? Are there certain visions that connect to war themes?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that and you’re trying to get me to clarify this.” She smiled.

“Yeah. Guess I am. Okay, so what do ya make out of the stuff ya saw before the war scenes?”

“That’s pretty clear. Someone, some man, was trying to hurt Claudette. Or make her do something she didn’t want to do.”

It could be her killer or it could be Leon or Richard or Brian Wayne. Or some guy I didn’t even know about yet. Maybe the one she said she was in love with.

“Ya got any idea what he was tryin to make her do?”

“Something she definitely didn’t want to do. Or have any part of.”

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

“I know why I think that,” Anne said. “But why do you?”

“No. Why do
you
?”

“A sense. A feeling. Different feelings go with different images. Even though he hurt me . . . her . . . it wasn’t pain he wanted to inflict. He wanted his will to overcome hers. That has a different feel to it. And then, of course, colors.”

She’d told me before that different feelings had different colors that went with them.

“What color did ya see?”

“Red. A very deep red.”

“And that means?”

“Domination. So why do
you
think it was some kind of power struggle?”

“I think this case has to be about sex and money, and they usually add up to a power struggle. Claudette was pregnant, and she had tons of money. Or at least her family did. Sex and money. Murder’s almost always about one or the other or both. Everythin is. Everythin except the God-Love-You lady.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“What are you talkin about?”

“Just a theory of mine. Nothing I’ve experienced.”

“Spill.”

“She’s obviously deranged, and her disturbance seems to be located in the religious area . . . or it’s manifested itself in religious terms.”

“Agreed.”

“How does something like that happen? Many ways. But I think the God-Love-You lady had some bad sexual experiences when she was a child and she hid out in religion. That just made her crazier though because she went into it very deeply, and a certain kind of piety can turn highly toxic.”

“It made her go round the bend?”

“Why not?”

“What religion?”

“Who knows? And it wasn’t the religion’s fault. It’s what she did with it.”

“Because of some bad sexual stuff in her past?”

“It’s just a theory, Faye. Not much different from your theory about Claudette West.”

“Which you corroborated.”

“I simply didn’t say you were wrong. More tea?”

EIGHTEEN

As I knocked on Jim Duryea’s door I gave my watch a look-see. It was seven-thirty on the dot. I smiled, thinking of Anne’s prediction. Porter West had kept me on the phone longer than I’d expected. He wanted to hear about every moment of Anne’s experience with Claudette’s sweater. I told him what had happened and asked if it meant anything to him. It didn’t. But he raved on about Richard Cotten again, saying he must have roughed up Claudette without their knowing. I told him it was possible and that I’d check Cotten again.

The door opened, and there was Jim in a red smoking jacket with lapels, cuffs, and belt of black velvet. His trousers were gray gabardine.

“Welcome, Faye.”

I’d brought a bottle of Chianti, and I held it out in front of me, speechless.

He took the bottle. “Thank you. Come in, come in.”

When I stepped across the threshold, I felt like I was gonna suffocate. Every square inch, as far as I could see, was taken up, filled, decorated, covered. It was like being in a museum, except museums left space between items. There were figurines, tiny boxes, glass objects, pottery, china cups, and geegaws on every available surface.

The walls got the same treatment with mirrors, paintings, drawings, and other hanging objects I didn’t wanna even guess at.

“You look lovely,” he said.

I’d worn a dress I’d had for several years, but it was in good shape.

“Thanks.”

“Come, meet Mother.”

Mother, I could see, was seated in a thronelike chair near one of the large windows (in my apartment that was where the piano was gonna go).

“Mother, this is Faye Quick. Faye, my mother.”

“Howdayado, Mrs. Duryea.” I held out my hand.

She took it and squeezed hard. Mrs. Duryea was a large woman with a big head, and she wore a black hat with a wide brim over curls of gray hair peeking from beneath.

“Pleasure,” she said. But her brown eyes said otherwise.

It was hard not to stare at the perfectly round circles of rouge on each heavily powdered cheek, like the red rings ya might see on a wooden soldier. Her mouth was lipsticked scarlet, and she coulda used a palette knife to put it on.

She was wearing a navy dress that must’ve come from the Thirties. It buttoned at the neck, had long sleeves and no particular style that I could put the squint on. Her shoes were black with matching laces tied in neat bows. I noticed she wore silk stockings and wondered where she’d got em, before deciding they were something she hoarded. Could even be her original pair. Nothing to it to imagine that.

“Look, Mother, Faye brought us wine.”

She flashed a fake smile.

I rattled my noggin for an excuse to get outta there, but nothing came to me.

“Sit down, Faye.” He pointed to a red velvet sofa. “Would you like a sherry?”

Mother, I saw, had her glass on a table next to her chair.

“Sure,” I said.

Jim went into the little kitchen while Mother and I laid our glims on each other. I broke first. To one side of the room Jim had set up a table and chairs. I could see that each place had swanky silver and what looked like linen napkins.

“Jimmy’s father went to the corner store for milk and never came back,” she said.

What do you say to that? I nodded and smiled.

“You think it’s funny? Nothing funny about it.”

“No, I don’t think it’s funny. It’s sad.”

“That’s right. Jimmy tells me you’re a private investigator. Think you can find him?”

“Your husband?”

“Well, who else are we talking about?” She reached for her glass and drained it. “Jimmy, I need to be filled up again.”

“Coming, Mother.”

I felt like I was in the middle of a bizarre version of the Henry Aldrich show.

Mother held out her glass. Jim took it from her without a word and went back into the kitchen.

“So,” she said. “You think you can find Mr. Duryea?”

“When did he disappear?”

“I know exactly. That’s not something you forget.”