Steel Guitar
Page 12
“Carly?”
Nobody calls me Carly. Nobody ever did except Cal.
“Hi,” I said, expelling a deep breath.
There was a pause. He hadn’t read Miss Manners on chatting with ex-spouses either.
“So how are you?” he said finally, taking twice as long as necessary to unhook his bass strap. It was intricately tooled leather. I’d given him that strap.
“Okay.” I walked up the two steps to the stage, taking extra care not to trip over a cable. “You?”
“Okay.”
Another pause. Cal tucked his bass into a hardshell case.
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.
“No.”
“Just no?” I asked.
“Not here,” he said. “They lock up so fast, sometimes I get my foot caught in the door.” Then he lowered his voice so the curious keyboard player couldn’t overhear. “Not anyplace.”
Stung, I said, “Last time I saw you, you wouldn’t turn down a drink.”
“Yeah, well, I’m clean and sober now,” he said. “Stone-cold. Two years, two months.”
“Good for you,” I said, meaning it. “Look, I don’t care about the drink. I want to talk.”
“Not here. And not at my place.”
I wondered if he was living with somebody, married even.
“You have an unlisted number.”
“I don’t have a phone,” he said.
“I wish I’d known you were in town. Would have made my life easier,” I said.
“Yeah, but that’s not my job, is it?”
Two waiters piled chairs on top of tables. The waitress swept underneath as fast as they stacked them. The barkeep checked the clock.
There aren’t too many joints to hit in Boston at two in the morning. It’s not New Orleans.
“Maybe we could take a walk,” I said.
“Okay.”
I’m a late-night walker. Rain doesn’t deter me. A downpour does. The wind scooped water off the sidewalk and dumped it into my shoes, turned my umbrella into a useless sail. Cal, with no umbrella or raincoat, zipped up his denim jacket and stuck the hand that wasn’t holding the bass into his pocket.
“Do you know any place that’s open?” I hollered into the gale. “A doughnut shop? A diner? All the after-hours places I know are cop hangouts.”
“It’s your call,” Cal said impassively, rain dripping off his chin.
I always try to flag a Green & White out of company loyalty, but this time I grabbed the first available cab, a Yellow, piloted by a Haitian who crept along at half speed.
Cal, sharing the backseat, his knees straddling his bass, seemed like a stranger; everything I remembered about our marriage seemed like something I’d read in a book, like it had happened to somebody else.
I gave the cabbie my address.
“How’d you get clean?” I asked.
“AA.”
“I thought you had to believe in God for AA.”
“A Higher Power. Bothered me some at the beginning, but it turned into an easy choice: believe in something, or wind up dead in some stinking hole with a needle in your arm. AIDS scared the hell out of me. I always thought I’d die young, but that’s sure not the way I want to go.”
“Motorcycle crash,” I suggested with a lifted eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he said. “Blast of glory. James Dean. Dick Farina. Instead I go to AA.”
“Good for you,” I repeated.
“And I play bass with whoever pays,” he said.
We didn’t talk during the rest of the ride. The windshield wipers slapped out a squishy rhythm. I paid the fare.
I’d stuck my duplicate keys into my back pocket. My hair was drenched by the time I got all the locks open.
“Yeah,” Cal said, dripping on the foyer rug. “I remember this. Nice place. Big.”
I stuck my umbrella in the stand, stepped out of my soaked shoes.
“Okay if I take my shoes off?” Cal asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can I leave the bass here? Case is wet.”
“Just leave it,” I said. “I’ll get towels. Be right back.”
“Your aunt would have yelled a blue streak, water all over her floor.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not her.”
I raced upstairs to the linen closet, yanked out two turquoise towels. I bent at the waist to secure one of them around my head, turban style, and headed toward the bathroom.
It was the first thing I saw when I stepped through the door. Across the mirror, someone had printed the words crookedly: “Back off” in blood red. Lipstick, I realized. The floor was littered with broken medicine bottles, assorted tablets. Cough medicine trickled across the tile.
I ran downstairs.
“You always looked good in towels, Carly,” Cal said.
I pushed past him into the living room. The sofa was upended; its weak leg finally split. Cal must have followed. I heard him gasp.
“Call 911,” I said.
“Somebody might still be here.”
“Call 911,” I repeated.
“What the hell are you gonna do with that thing?”
While he was dialing, I’d opened the lower-left-hand drawer of my desk, quickly unwrapping my .38 from its undershirt shroud.
“I had to make sure it wasn’t stolen,” I snapped.
“Is anything gone?” he asked.
I turned in a slow circle, the .38 pointing at the floor. Aunt Bea’s mahogany end tables had been smashed. The Oriental rug looked like it had sprouted a new pattern. From the emptied food jars nearby—peanut butter, mustard, ketchup—I could guess the artist’s medium. The room smelled; he’d used worse. Urine. Feces, maybe.
“T.C.!” I called, while Cal was giving my address to the Cambridge police.
I took off upstairs, gripping the gun. There aren’t a lot of things I care about in that house. T.C., my cat, is one of them. It’s odd that I thought about him before Roz. Maybe not. Roz, with her karate training, can look after herself. And Roz was the one who was supposed to have had the damned locks changed.
I did a room-by-room search, aware that it ought to be left to the cops, aware that I was taking reckless chances. I felt like taking reckless chances. I felt like catching whoever had smashed Aunt Bea’s carefully polished end tables into splinters, turned her prized rug into a spoiled canvas—catching him and hurting him.
Not killing him. Hurting him. Badly.
I heard a noise on the staircase, pivoted. “Carly, they’re on their way.”
“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.
“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 breakin, 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?