sense of reality. It wasn’t an easy thing to do at all, keeping my head on straight when next to a gal like that.
Trying not to let my surprise overrule me, I asked, “How do you figure that?”
“Take me home with you,” she said again with a nod. “I will tell you more.”
I noticed that she barely parted her lips when she spoke, actually speaking through clenched teeth. Was her jaw wired shut? Had some worthless bully of a so-called man knocked her around enough to bust her up like that? Or was it just part of the way that she was used to speaking in … well, whatever country it was that she came from?
“Why not tell me right now?”
She hesitated, moving away from me slightly before saying, “I will tell you more … later.” The reluctance I felt must have shown clearly on my face. “Please … Mister Verconi.”
I thought about it another second, looked at her, and knew that there was just no use in fighting it. I didn’t want a fling, and I didn’t want to get this poor girl hurt any more than I already had … but, dammit, the curiosity was going to eat me alive from the inside out, if I didn’t figure out what she was all about. They say that curiosity killed the cat, but I think curiosity’s list of victims goes on for a few miles beyond a nosey feline.
“Call me Paul … or Paulie, if you want. Everyone else does,” I said with a smirk. She nodded. “You got a name? Or do I have to wait for that, too?”
“Erzsebet,” she replied.
“Elizabeth?”
“Erzsebet Kasimira Vladislav,” she said with a more deliberate, ethnic enunciation. I thought that I saw something unusual as I caught my first flash of those pearly white teeth of hers when she repeated her name, but it was so quick and the lighting so poor at that moment, I dismissed it.
“How about if I just call you Bettie?”
She considered that for a moment, then nodded with a close-lipped smile. And so I drove along through the rainy night toward downtown Kansas City with Bettie snuggled close at my side, wondering just what in the hell I had already gotten myself into, and what kind of a mess I would have to sort through over the course of the next few days … and nights.
The only people out that late at night, even downtown in the city, generally were crooks, bums, or cops. I wasn’t a cop, for sure, so I wasn’t sure which of the other two categories I fit into; Bettie, on the other hand, was still such a complete mystery to me that she still could have just as well been any of the three. She clammed up on me just as quickly as she’d started talking, going back to being the quiet and sweet pretty thing she’d been all night long – the innocent part, however, was long gone. I wasn’t sure whether or not to call her on the blood-licking thing just yet. I still wasn’t quite even sure that she was consciously aware of what she’d been doing, really.
My left hand was throbbing with pain by the time I was within a couple of blocks of my destination. It wasn’t bleeding much now, but there was a definite sting at the surface, and the pain got worse whenever I tried to move the fingers of that hand to clench the steering wheel – pinched muscles, I guessed. The sooner I could clean and dress it, the better I’d feel about my chances for my hand getting infected to a point that a doc would have to lop it off. I’d had worse, much worse, but those were usually clean cuts and the like; the chump that had tried to saw off my head had been using a rusty guitar string instead of good ol’ piano wire. I would have almost preferred if someone had sent a higher-class hit man to do the job, because taking a bullet to the head or heart would have been easier than slowly dying off from complications of an infected wound.
I parked the battered old black sedan in the lot behind my apartment building, donned my fedora, and helped out Bettie. Still giving me the silent, mysterious treatment, I escorted Little Miss Mute into the rear foyer of the building with my muddied trench coat held over her head. She was still pretty well soaked from the mess back at the speakeasy, but I was a sucker for pointless gestures of chivalry. She didn’t let it go unappreciated, either, as she gave me a gracious and eager full-on kiss when we were under a dry roof.
Without even thinking, I started to lead Bettie up the stairs. I always took the stairs, not so much because I liked to keep my legs strong, but because I just didn’t trust elevators … or at least not the one in that building. That elevator was out of service more often than not, and I didn’t want to be in it the one day that a cable decided to snap and drop my sorry self fifteen stories down. I figured most gals to hate taking the stairs, but Bettie didn’t even seem to be short of breath in the least by the time we were five stories up. I, on the other hand, had to stop for a breather at that point, telling myself for the hundredth time that I needed to kick the habit, even as I lit up another smoke.
Bettie snuggled herself against me with her arms tightly around my waist as we stood there for a few minutes. More than really needing to catch my breath or pollute my lungs, I needed a moment to think things over. First of all, what was I doing, taking this dame back to my place? It was something I almost never did, not just on principle so much as a matter of practicality. My place was nothing to look at, for one, and my bed was only built for one. More than that, especially considering the way it seemed those two clowns up north had really been looking to do in Bettie more than me, I wasn’t so sure I wanted her to know exactly where I lived. Sure, I might never see her again after that night, but I didn’t need a couple of thugs to come beating down my door later on, looking for her – not a fear, just another headache that I didn’t need.
Not so much a priority issue, but something that weighed no lighter on my conscience, I was really starting to question the wisdom of bedding this skirt. Saying that she was a weird one was like calling the rain wet; she dressed different, spoke different, acted different … and, hell, she preferred licking up blood instead of wiping it away. Of course, any macho tough guy would have dove into a challenge like that, but I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. There was something unmistakably dangerous about this dame, and even though I still couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I didn’t want to be the last to find out if and when things came to a point that they would cost me big.
Looking into those perfect emerald green eyes of hers, her spooky-dark mascara and lipstick smeared but still somehow beautiful on her, those strands of black hair curling and kinking up ever so slightly as she still struggled to dry out from her earlier drenching, I knew there was no point in lying about it. I wanted her … and entirely for all of what should have been the wrong reasons. What every guy needs is a gal that’s stable, predictable, communicative, and down to earth; Bettie was none of that at all, as she was strange, mysterious, damn near mute, spooky … and just plain weird, really. Besides, common sense and prior experience should have told me by now that I didn’t need a woman in my life at all, not with the kind of life that I led. How many more times did I need to have that concept pistol-whipped into my empty head before I got it?
If this was a planned scheme of hers, she was an artist; if her appearance and demeanor was all just an act, then I would make it a quest from the next day on to seek out and marry the real woman that had inspired her. Maybe it was the whole Little Miss Mute routine, the careful manner by which she fed me just a tiny clue here and there as to what she was all about, or maybe I really was just as shallow as any other Joe Schmuck and I was done in by her looks. Maybe it was the simple fact that she obviously wasn’t from around these parts that just set her hundreds of miles apart from any other run-of-the-mill dame in the Midwest – city flapper or country girl, alike.
Whatever it was, whether it was a single fact or the whole deal, I was sold. I just had to keep the blood from draining from my brain to think straight about how I was going to play this out. For one, I was intrigued enough by just the first taste of her that I wanted to read every page of her life’s story. I wasn’t going to let this be some one-night stand. Stupid, I know, and totally against what I’d just finished telling myself not to do, seconds ago. I still was
n’t sure if that was what she had in mind, herself, but at the very least, she sure wasn’t making any secret of the fact that the attraction was mutual.
I wasted half of a good cigarette as I dropped it into a nearby ashtray and led her up the last few flights of stairs. No building has a real thirteenth floor, but anyone that could count knew that’s where I lived. Then again, it wasn’t so much a floor as a glorified attic, and not even a real apartment as it was an overgrown janitor’s closet. Basically, I lived on the roof. I never had quite understood the point of the construction of my place, other than the fact that it had seemed like a total afterthought from the building’s original construction. I think they had meant it to be the live-in quarters for some of the building’s staff, since the place had originally been more of a ritzy hotel than a housing slum. But the owner had outfitted it just enough to make it legal to fit in a few more folks that he could squeeze for some rent every month.
Sure, the walls and roof were solid and secure enough, bricks and shingles and all, but the walk from the stairwell to my front door was bare, naked sky overhead and asphalt-tarred rooftop underfoot. It was the damnedest thing I’d
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