My keys were not in their place at the register counter, which disturbed me, but there was no time to search. I took an extra set from a file drawer, and waited for people to take their seats for Act 2, then excused myself, slipped into the back room, and took Doc and Ruby out the freight door, through the alley, and up to my apartment. I didn't mention my encounter; I didn't know the procedure for discussing guns and death threats in front of children, and I knew there'd be time enough later. I told Doc to lock the door behind me, and not to open it to anyone for any reason.
THOM GUNN NEVER did arrive, nor did Dylan, and the foreigners never returned. Uncle Theo helped me store the chairs in the back room and then he was off to Glendale, catching a ride with a Vietnam vet poet who'd impressed him. “Although,” he said, sotto voce, as he hugged me goodbye, “he's no Thom Gunn.”
Fredreeq approached with a large yawn. “All through intermission Uncle Theo was asking people if they were Dylan Ellison, babbling away about the Dating Project. I shut him down. He doesn't have the common sense of a housefly, does he?” She yawned again. “You need help getting rid of these dates?”
“No, go home, you've got children to see to. And a husband.” I kissed her cheek. Fredreeq's fuchsia lipstick was fading; it must be late indeed. “I really, really appreciate this.”
Sterling shook my hand and thanked me for an interesting evening. He was cool to the point of distaste, I noted, a far cry from the upbeat man who'd walked in earlier.
“I'm sorry, Sterling,” I said, flooded with remorse. “I wasn't very attentive—”
He held up a hand. “Don't bother. It's not going to happen for us. You misrepresented yourself, know what I'm saying?”
Remorse gave way to alarm. “No, what are you saying?”
“You're a smoker. I could smell it on you half the night.” He turned and walked off.
Dealing with Jean-Luc was easier—there was a lot of hand kissing, of course, but his excitement about the poetry overshadowed his interest in me. “Luminous,” he said. “Transcendent. Healing.” Big words for a man who didn't know “flapjacks,” I thought. His English must've improved over intermission.
I ran the vacuum around a few lingering poets, and decided I'd gotten off cheap in the date department, if you didn't count the considerable guilt of misleading two perfectly nice men. God willing, I'd gotten off easy in the industrial spy department too.
As I locked up the shop, I spotted my keys, right on the counter. I pocketed them, along with the spare set, which I'd give to Doc. I thought of him and Ruby up in my apartment, and began to palpitate with excitement. I looked out the picture window to see if any poets remained in the parking lot, but there was only my own happy face, reflected in the glass, staring back at me.
Wild Strawberries. The film title popped into my head. The guys with the gun had been speaking Swedish.
chapter seventeen
Doc was sound asleep in my living room, his body splayed across the striped armchair. He looked as if he'd lived there all his life. His face was lit by a floor lamp, and I stepped in close to study it, something I'd been dying to do since I'd known him. Except for at the Donut Stop, I'd never seen him in good light. Now I memorized details: pointlessly long eyelashes, sunburnt cheekbones. His new short haircut emphasized his bone structure, and while he'd been clean-shaven yesterday, now there was that stubble again, all the way down to the opening of his T-shirt.
Something on the floor beside him caught my eye. A Cheerio. I bent to retrieve it, which brought me to his level. The level of his mouth, six inches away.
I moved in slowly, making believe I was about to kiss him.
His body gave a jerk, his ear brushing my nose. I pulled back, horrified to be caught eavesdropping on his dreams. But he didn't wake, just repositioned himself on the chair and turned his face away.
Across the room, a shape on the daybed stirred. Ruby. The only place left for me to stretch out was under the piano. No matter; a mood like this was wasted on sleep.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER he loomed over me, dark and male in my white kitchen. I looked up at him for a long time.
A siren sounded somewhere on Sunset.
Doc cleared his throat. “What are you doing?”
“Scrubbing the kitchen floor.” I shifted on the black-and-white linoleum, to achieve a more graceful pose. It wasn't easy, given the tightness of Tiffanie's jeans.
“Any particular reason?”
“I was raised to believe that cleanliness is next to godliness,” I said. “Also, it's kind of a Zen thing.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Raised Buddhist, were you?”
I laughed. “No. Catholic. But with a Polish-Jewish influence,” I added, recalling Ruta and her aphorisms. “God in the image and likeness of Mr. Clean.”
He held a plastic bag I'd noticed him carrying earlier, containing, from the looks of it, clothes. He set it down and leaned back, elbows on the counter. “Here's what's going on: We were staying with a cousin, who, it turns out, has a girlfriend, who—okay, it's complicated. Anyhow, Ruby and I are temporarily—”
“Not a problem.” A sign saying Number Six, Not Homeless popped into mental view. I ran over it. “You can stay here. Plenty of room.”
He blinked. “This is a studio apartment, Wollie.”
“Whole families occupy them, in this building. The Farhadiehs downstairs—”
“—don't have a grand piano the size of a yacht in the living room. What are you, a concert pianist, along with everything else?” He rubbed his eyes. “We should go to a hotel, but I don't want to drag Ruby off at this hour. You sure about this?”
“It's not easy for you, is it?” I said. “Being in someone's debt?”
“You have no idea.” He stretched one suntanned arm across the counter and reached into the plastic bag. “Your car keys,” he said, tossing them to me.
“Just so you know, none of this has been a problem,” I said. “I haven't needed the car till now. As long as I get to Rio Pescado tomorrow.”
“Back to the hospital?” Doc gave me a sharp look. “Why?”
I looked down at my linoleum. “You had a daughter there. I have a brother.”
He stopped what he was doing and settled onto the lemon-scented floor. He sat opposite me, his back against the Tupperware cupboard, his feet stretched out in front of him. Our jeans touched. “Tell me about him,” he said.
I did. I talked about adult-onset schizophrenia, how, with the end of my brother's teenage years, came the illness, a preoccupation with the Secret Service, a conviction that musical instruments were conduits for interplanetary surveillance. I explained how P.B. had stopped playing the piano, first because of the extraterrestrials, later because the drugs that kept hallucinations at bay brought side effects, a slowing of muscle memory and motor skills. Playing, P.B. said, no longer felt like play.
Doc didn't ask why I kept the piano, all these years later. He didn't ask about my long-gone father or my eccentric mother, didn't ask why all of P.B.'s concerns fell on me. He listened. He listened so well I just kept talking, going on to describe P.B.'s strange foreknowledge of the murder, and then his apparent witnessing of it. I stopped short of admitting I had even the smallest suspicion he'd done it.
“The problem is,” I said, “I can't get him on the phone, because he hates using technology when he's in crisis mode. I have to see him face to face to find out what happened and how involved he is, and how he's dealing with the police. I've got to—”
“Do you always visit on Wednesdays?”
“No, I go on Thursdays. But Thursday will be too late. You said so yourself.”
He shook his head. “You can't go. Place is crawling with cops, and hospital security is beefed up, including the two guards we ran into. If they spot you, it's over. And everyone's looking for clues: you show up on the wrong day, you become one.”
He pulled off his shirt. His torso was wiry, several shades paler than his face and hands, with all that hair on his chest
I'd noticed before. He stood, went to the kitchen sink, and doused his head with water. His back was nice too. No hair there.
I stood too, and tossed him a clean dish towel. “A lot of people are probably making extra visits,” I said, “worried about the fact that a murder took place there.”
“Wrong. According to the news reports, the murder happened on the outskirts of Pleasant Valley. No one's mentioned Rio Pescado. You, Ms. Shelley, have just set off bells and whistles with that answer.” From his plastic bag he pulled a scrunched-up piece of cloth and shook it into a black cotton T-shirt.
“Well, anyhow,” I said, “it's unlikely that anyone will remember what day I visit, especially up on the rehab ward where nobody really knows me and—”
“You underestimate your effect on people.” He donned the T-shirt. It was not particularly clean. I was torn between pleasure at the compliment he'd just paid me and an urge to do his laundry. “In any case,” he went on, “consider this: if you're being followed, you lead the criminals back to their own crime scene.” He moved to my refrigerator and opened it. “They're gonna wonder what you're doing—”
“I can lose them, I can—”
“I've seen you drive. You couldn't lose a tractor.” He seemed to be checking out my frozen foods. “And if they realize you have a brother there, then he'll be in danger.”
I felt hot inside my pink angora. “Well, what am I supposed to do? Forget about him? How easy was it for you to walk away from your daughter?”
He shut the refrigerator hard, and turned. “I didn't walk away from her.”
I held his look, and he held mine, heat in the space between us.
A sound from outside, a loud crack, broke the tension.
The main room of the apartment was a rectangle, with a window at one end and the daybed at the other. A glance at Ruby showed she'd slept through it, whatever it was. We went to the window.
Intermittent streetlights illuminated parked cars. By craning our necks, we could see a tiny piece of Sunset, better lit, with moving traffic.
“Car backfiring, maybe?” I whispered. Doc was so close, his bare bicep pressed against my angora arm.
“Gunshot, maybe.”
I pulled him back from the window. “Really?”
He looked at my hand on his arm and then up at my face. The phone rang.
I went for it, checking my watch: 11:20 P.M. “Hello,” I said, and when there was no answer, said it again. “Hello?”
“I'm serenading you,” he said.
The words sounded . . . pornographic. “Dave?” I said softly. I don't know why I thought of Dave Fischgarten, Date Nineteen. Something about the voice.
The response was a laugh and a single word. “Whore.” And then a click.
I stood, phone clamped to my ear, listening to a dial tone. Doc was staring. I felt myself turn red. “Okay,” I told the phone. “Thanks. You too.” I put it down, avoiding eye contact. “Nothing,” I said, although Doc hadn't asked. “Never mind.”
“Wollie. Who was it?”
The phone rang again. I got it halfway through the first ring. “What?” I said.
“Second verse, same as the first.” And from outside came another shot.
“Jesus dammit Christ,” I blurted, dropping the phone and covering my head. “Get down! Get away from—” I was stuttering and stumbling and reaching for him.
The next thing I knew, Doc was pulling me roughly to the floor. The shooting stopped and in the silence I had an impulse to burst into tears, which was strange, since I felt more mad than scared. But I must have been scared, too, because when I tried to move I found I was quivering too much. “It's them,” I said, from under his shoulder.
“Who?”
“Whomever,” I said. “The guns, the—guys, the—”
He was across the room in four steps, to Ruby on the daybed. He bent over her, then came back to the window and looked out, staying to one side. “Unbelievable,” he said. “She's still sleeping.” He retrieved the fallen phone and hit three buttons.
“Nine-one-one?” I asked.
“Star sixty-nine.” He put the phone to his ear. “He's blocked it.”
“Mrs. Albertini—neighbor—she'll call the police—”
“Then let's kill the lights.” He went into the kitchen; the kitchen went dark. “No point in giving him a target, or encouraging the cops to visit us.” He moved to the floor lamp and switched it off.
The apartment didn't go completely black, being too close to the street. Light from the window illuminated shapes: table, armchair, man. I found I was clinging to a piano leg like it was a lifeboat, and let go.
Doc knelt and put his arms around me. There was no rocking or back-patting or caressing, just containment. A comprehensive sort of hug. Standing, the top of his head barely reached my nose; on the floor, all that changed.
“Okay?” he said eventually, and when I nodded, he released me. “Who was it on the phone?”
“He said he was serenading us.”
“Us?”
“Well, me.” The word “whore” was, after all, fairly gender-specific.
“Who's Dave?”
“Oh, just someone I—wait,” I said. “It was a New York accent, that's what made me think of Dave. It was more pronounced when he called back.”
“What did he say then?”
“He said, ‘Second verse, same as the first.'”
“What else did he say?”
I looked away. “N-nothing.” Footsteps on the stairwell sounded through the building's thin walls. They reached our floor and continued down the hall, and ended in a faint knocking. Mrs. Albertini's apartment.
“What if they come here?” I asked. “The police.”
“They won't.”
“What if they do?”
“You heard a car backfiring.” He left me and walked back to the window. “You see now why I don't want you visiting your brother tomorrow?”
I said nothing.
“Look, I'll get us through this, I'll go to the cops as soon as I've got something to show them. Now that I have Ruby, I can focus on it. This won't go on forever.”
“Why don't you tell me what ‘this' is? Tell me what you know.”
Doc circled the room, pausing at a framed picture on the wall, standing very close to see it in the darkness. It was my first published greeting card. “I want to keep you out of it,” he said, “at least until I can—”
“Out of it?” My voice rose and I rose with it. “I'm sleeping with furniture in front of my door. I saw a gun tonight, my third—no, fourth in two days. I smoked a cigarette. I'm in this already, as far in as a person can be short of—of—”
“Ssh.” He nodded toward the door. Feet clomped down the stairway. He waited, then came closer to me and whispered, “What gun did you see tonight?”
“The one the Swedish kid was carrying. Wait—” I closed my eyes. “Swedish. Ssss . . . Swedes. Yes. P.B. mentioned Swedes. What was it? Something to do with—”
Something cracked inside me, the wall I'd built against the possibility that my brother was a killer. Relief and shame rushed through. I put my face in my hands. “The Swedes killed that man in the road. That's what he was telling me.”
I was glad for the darkness.
“GUYS IN SUITs, armed and threatening you, and you're just now getting around to mentioning it?” Doc said when I told him about my Wild Strawberries encounter.
“It slipped my mind,” I said, embarrassed that his presence could have that effect on me.
“Describe the gun.”
“I don't know guns,” I said. “I'm more of a people person. And paper person.”
“What do you mean?”
“Greeting cards. Stationery. Linen, rag, recycled, card-stock—”
“Fine. If you encounter another gun, pay attention. Color, size, markings, materials. Take a mental photo; you're an artist, you can do that. It'll give you something to do besides panic.”
“Have I panicke
d?” I said. “I think I've been remarkably calm, considering I have been terrorized by Scandinavians, Hummers, limousines, phone calls, and a man with a very scary suntan.”
He just looked at me. It was too dark to read his face.
Across the room, a small crash startled us both. We went to investigate.
Ruby lay on the daybed, snoring softly. My best blanket covered her. I turned up the lamp's dimmer switch, revealing the source of the noise: the Barbie suitcase lay on the floor, overturned. Margaret scrambled up onto Ruby's chest, a “who, me?” look in her beady, buttonlike eyes. The ferret's body went up and down with the child's ragged breaths, as if white-water rafting. And Ruby slept on.
Doc bent down to pick up the small cache of preadolescent treasures. I wanted to help, but resisted; I could only imagine what indignities, what losses of property and privacy Ruby had suffered in the hospital. In the dim light I studied her.
Her feet stuck out from the other end of the blanket. She wore dirty sneakers, untied. I was glad to see Doc take them off. I wanted her to feel safe here, not poised for flight. She didn't look like someone who felt safe anywhere, though, her pale face tense and troubled, even in sleep. Around her neck she wore a ribbon. The ribbon had a plastic-covered picture on the end of it, the size of a sugar packet. A scapular, it was called, a sacred trinket I hadn't seen since the religion classes of my Catholic childhood. Ruby's hand rested against it, her fingernails ragged and showing the remnants of ruby-colored enamel.
The portrait on the scapular was Saint Anthony. I remembered him well. He was the patron saint of lost things.
chapter eighteen
“What is this, do you think?” I asked Fredreeq, handing her a prescription.
Wednesday morning was as sunny as Tuesday had been, but today, walking to the bank, I was ready for it. I wanted to polka down Sunset.
Fredreeq squinted at the prescription. “Vulcan cylinders,” she guessed. “Alpine cyclist. Who knows? This handwriting is a pharmacist's nightmare. Why don't you fax it to Dr. Cookie?” Dr. Cookie, while not an actual physician, had a degree in pharmacology.
Dating Dead Men Page 13
