“He didn't,” Doc said. “Unless—he's not French, is he?”
“French? He's my brother. Do I look French?”
His eyes dropped briefly down my dress. “To be honest, I never know how to describe the way you look.”
“What are you, a fashion consultant?” I heard the defensive note in my voice.
“No, a high school teacher. Physics and economics. You got six calls on your machine, as of ten-fifteen. Your brother wasn't one of them. Save the quarter.”
A schoolteacher. I could see it. Probably taught at a military academy. What had become of the old Doc? Where was the good humor tonight, the insouciance?
He checked us in as the “Clark” family. I liked being his wife, if only in the glazed eyes of the Budgeteer night clerk, even with the foul mood Doc was in. It was a dangerous feeling to indulge in, but what the heck. Plus, he paid. Sixty-five dollars bought us a broom closet with a double bed and the promise of a rollaway, on plaid carpet so appalling I considered keeping my shoes on all night. Decades of cigarette smoke lingered in the air, despite a cardboard fragrance tree dangling from the bedside lamp. Ruby loved the room, jumping on the bed and freeing Margaret from her crate. After her stints in Social Services facilities and mental wards, this was probably her idea of the Four Seasons. At the window, Doc looked out on the courtyard.
“You don't think the Weasel could have followed us here?” I asked, joining him.
“In a Hummer? I think we would have noticed. But he's got a cousin working with him. Carmine, the guy who came into your shop the other day.”
“No need to worry about Carmine. He and I had a nice long chat this morning.”
Doc stared at me, then picked up a remote from the bedside table and turned on the TV. Tossing the remote to Ruby, he said, “One night only, you get to watch whatever you want. Keep it clean.” He pulled me into a corner of the room. “Now, let's you and me have a nice long chat.”
Hard to say which part of the story he liked least, the part where I made him the fence of stolen goods, or the part where I agreed to steal one of them back. Hard to say, because he listened in silence, arms crossed, sitting on the windowsill. Over on the bed, Ruby clicked through channels. “So it took some doing,” I said, finishing, “but now we know what it is everyone's after. A diamond,” I added, in case he wasn't clear on that point. I waited. Under his implacable stare, I began to twitch. “You know what?” I said, finally. “These John Wayne silences are getting on my nerves.”
“In twenty-four hours,” Doc said quietly, “Carmine is going to come after you, wondering why you stood him up, figuring you double-crossed him. Looking for a reason not to start cutting off your fingers to make you talk. I'm trying to come up with one.”
“Carmine doesn't strike me as the knife type,” I whispered, “and—”
“Don't be so goddamn naïve.”
A knock on the door saved me from a reply. Our glassy-eyed desk clerk delivered the rollaway, and with help from Doc and much grunting and squeaking of old parts, managed to get it into the room. By the time he was gone, Ruby was gone too.
Alarmed, I ran outside, with Doc on my heels.
The motel rooms were built around a courtyard, eerily lit, with a cracked, kidney-shaped pool in the center. Ruby was circling the pool's perimeter, zigzagging erratically around bushes until Doc caught her and stopped her. “What's going on? What are you doing—hey!” He reached for her a second time as she pulled free and nearly fell over. “Damn it, Ruby, talk to me, can't you? Can't you?”
Nose to nose under the yellow floodlight, their profiles mirrored each other, his dark, hers pale and freckled. Abruptly, he broke eye contact, and pulled her into his arms. “Sorry,” he said, and kissed the top of her head. “I'm sorry. For everything. All of it. Talk when you're ready.” Ruby, her cheek pressed against his stomach, scanned the ground.
It was an intense moment to witness and I was struck by how much power the little girl had, how much strength there is in silence. Tyranny, even. Something occurred to me. I cleared my throat. “It's Margaret, isn't it? Is she lost, Ruby?”
Ruby looked up, her face clearing.
Doc said, “Is that it? You let her off the leash? Okay, go inside, I'll look for her. Go with Wollie; I don't want you wandering around out here.”
Ruby went as far as the doorway and plopped herself on the concrete just outside the room, staring at her father as if watching a movie. I wedged the door open with my shoe, and stood behind her, looking down at her slumped and rounded back in a brand-new pink sweatshirt. Her brown hair managed to be both frizzy and oily. And only eleven, I thought. You still have adolescence to get through. Her hands were clasped as if she was praying, but then I saw a small photo clutched in her thumbs. I leaned down. It was a professional wallet-size photo, the kind they do at Sears. A much younger Ruby leaned against a seated woman, in front of a pastel cloud background. The woman was gorgeous.
I turned away. Naturally, she missed her mother. She probably wondered what I was doing here, usurping the mother's place in this moth-eaten hotel room. I wrestled with the rollaway, kicking the stubborn metal frame until, with one loud creak, it sprang open. Inside was a lumpy striped mattress.
Upon the mattress sat Margaret.
I drew in a breath, surprised to find her still three-dimensional. She blinked up at me, unperturbed, and gave a delicate yawn. “Ruby,” I said.
Ruby turned, stood, and at the sight of Margaret, broke into a blinding smile. It was easily the best thing to happen to me all day.
I STOOD IN the doorway an hour later, breathing in takeout Indian food from an adjoining room. I'd wrapped the bedspread around me for warmth, a peach satin quilted number that had seen better days and worse nights. Doc lay just outside the room, in a rickety reclining lawn chair stolen from poolside, staring at Orion. I wondered if he'd always had a craving for night air, or if it was acquired during his half year in prison. Inside, Ruby and Margaret were riveted to Jerry Springer grilling guests on TV.
“Doc?” I said. “If these guys are cousins, if they're on the same team, why is the Weasel after me? Carmine thinks we have a deal, he thinks I'm showing up tomorrow with the diamond, so why didn't they both take the night off?”
He shrugged. “Failure to communicate.”
“And the Swedes, Olof and Tor: aren't they with a different family altogether?”
“I'll know more about them tomorrow. A friend of a friend at the DMV is running a check on the Alfa Romeo license plate, and then I plan to—”
“Is that legal?”
He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Strange question, coming from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forget it.” He sat up and stretched. He didn't seem cold, even in a short-sleeved T-shirt. He looked awfully good—his marital status didn't change that, nor did his glacial attitude. This bothered me. What would it take to turn me off?
“Why don't you go to bed?” he said. “It's late.”
“Okay. Think they'll give me a wake-up call? I need to be at the shop by—”
“Forget it.”
I blinked. “Why?”
“What do you think ‘on the lam' means? You're not going to work tomorrow. Or the next day, either; not till this is over.”
“That's impossible.” I felt a rising panic. “This is a critical week—”
“Too bad.”
“—with so much at stake you have no idea. Four years of work have led to this, not to mention my night job, which you don't even know about, which is driving me—”
“I know about it.”
I stopped. “You know? About the Dating Project? Who told you, Fredreeq?”
“Fredreeq's in on it?” he said sharply.
“In on it? She practically runs it. What?” I said, at his look of disgust. “You have a problem with this? You, of all people?”
“Why wouldn't I have a problem with it?” he said. “Because I'm an ex-con?”
“Because you're married! Yet you go around winking at people and kissing them and letting them think—look,” I said, forcing my voice back down. “It's unorthodox, but it's a job; I'm not doing it for fun, or even for science, not altogether. I need money.”
“Science?” He laughed. “Jesus. There are other ways to make money, Wollie.”
“Like what, a paper route?” I snapped. “I already put in twelve-hour days at the shop, seven days a week.”
Quite deliberately, he turned his back and resettled himself into the lawn chair, stretching out in the moonlight. “Well, congratulations, then. You're on vacation.”
I LAY ON the rollaway, listening to sleep sounds emanating from Ruby in the double bed. Doc was next to her, lying on top of the covers, his jeans just visible as my eyes adjusted. What time had he come in? Out the window, the sky seemed lighter, and I judged it to be a little before six, my usual wake-up time. I'd thought I'd be too mad to sleep, but apparently not. I threw Doc a malevolent glance. I hoped I'd snored.
Reaching for the bedside phone, I called home to pick up my messages. There were six, according to the little computer voice. No new ones. None from P.B.
The first message was from Jean-Luc, a simple “Allô, I send you beeg kiss.”
The second was Robert. “I'd like to pick up where we left off. Without your cousin. Maybe Saturday?”
The third was Rex. “Hey, Doris Day. Wish you were here. I'll try you again.”
The fourth was Joey. “Hi, you got one, maybe two guys tomorrow and a box of clothes from UPS. I'll be around to do the Polaroids—the evil sister-in-law is back in town, so I'm spending the night. I'm going out now to get something to eat, but call if you get in and want to talk.” I sat up. Joey had spent the night in the back room? Dear God. Was she safe? I got out of bed and began to search for my shoes.
The next message was almost as bad, in a very different way.
“Wollie?” said Dr. Cookie in her trademark radio voice. “Hope you're having fun with Man du Soir. Well, you must be, since you're not there. Now, this fax you sent me: looks like valacyclovir, which is a herpes remedy. Which I hope to God is not for you. Or, bless your heart, any of the eighteen or nineteen men you've been with the last month or two. Your moonlighting is going well, so don't screw it up with a sexual disease. Call me.”
I could feel myself blushing in the dark, as if Doc, four feet away, could hear it all too. He hadn't learned about the Dating Project from Fredreeq; he'd listened to my messages last night and drawn his own conclusions.
He thought I was a hooker.
Anger returned, overriding embarrassment. I wanted to wake him up so I could knock him unconscious, but there was one more message coming through.
I listened just long enough to note the voice, playful and nasty, and then replaced the receiver. I was pretty sure I couldn't hear the Weasel's message right now and still do what I had to do.
chapter twenty-three
Hobbling homeward was no picnic. The perfect night had mutated into a dismal dawn, and while it was easy, even satisfying, to walk out on Doc, I hated doing it to Ruby, who'd seen enough disappearing acts lately. I wish I'd left a note. But my big concern was Joey.
I moved as fast as I could, which wasn't all that fast, given my heels, and within blocks I was frozen, which numbed my feet, which made me feel I was running on a pair of chopsticks. My braless breasts bounced violently and every thirty seconds or so I looked back to see if I was being followed. Sticking to side streets, my ten-minute trek turned into a half-hour marathon, the last of it in pouring rain.
Joey's Saab was in the parking lot, and she herself in the back room, stretched out on the red velvet sofa bed. I rushed over to make sure she was breathing, and her eyes popped open. Weak with relief, I threw my arms around her thin shoulders. “Thank God,” I said. “You're okay, you're alone, he's not here?”
“Who?” She wiped water from her forehead. “You're wet. Is it raining?”
I stood, wringing out my hair. “Yes, I'm wet, I'm cold, I slept in these clothes. No, not with the mogul. Do you mind coming out front with me?”
I led her to the register desk, dialed my home machine, and put the phone on speaker. My messages started replaying. “I don't know how to fast-forward them,” I said. “This'll take a minute.”
Joey was pulling on a pair of skinny jeans. She'd slept in just a T-shirt and a pair of socks. The T-shirt was familiar—one of Doc's.
Joey saw me staring. “I found it on top of the dryer. I love this shirt. I used to go out with a guy who had this shirt. Where'd you get it?”
“Why? What is it?”
“It's MIT Press. The college newspaper. See?” She pushed aside her Lady Godiva hair and pointed to the logo, seven vertical white lines, with the fifth and sixth elongated. It looked like a bar code. “What's cool about this is that you have to know what it is, or you'd never know what it is.” She traced over it with her finger to show how the lines represented the letters M-I-T-P.
Doc had gone to Massachusetts Institute of Technology? So had the dead man, if his sweatshirt was any indication. Doc had said he didn't know the man, but what were the chances of two unrelated former MIT students meeting on that road? Was there some abnormally large alumni population roaming Ventura County?
My phone machine reached the sixth message. I braced myself and pulled Joey closer.
“You there?” The voice was a whisper, low, gritty as sand. “All right. Anyway. I've been meaning to get together for a little gift exchange, so I'm coming over. Is tonight good? I'll leave my gun at home. I prefer a knife anyway. It's quiet. Ever think about that? I could go up into you, deep inside, scrape you out clean as a turkey and nobody would hear a thing except the sounds you make. It's messy, but I wear gloves. As for your gift to me, I think you know what I'd like. No need to wrap it. Just leave it in plain sight in case you're not going to be there.”
Joey turned to me, her face doing what mine was doing. Like we'd just found ourselves with a mouthful of lemons. “Tell me that's not one of your dates,” she said.
My voice shook. “We gotta get outta here.”
“But he called you at home. Hours ago. This is your shop.”
“It doesn't matter, he knows where I live, he's gotta know where I work, he follows me, he's the one in the Hummer, the pet store, the—bad, he's a bad man, come on.” I threw her her shoes and pulled her outside, into the rain. With still-frozen fingers I searched my evening bag. “Do you have your key, I can't seem to—”
“Yes. Calm down.” Joey pulled me back under the awning and locked up. “Think a minute. The guy on the phone: Why was he calling? What was his objective?”
“To scare me to death.”
“Yes. To what end?”
I tried to concentrate. “I don't know. There's something he thinks I have or can get for him.”
“Strange tactics, don't you think? To threaten you with—disembowelment.”
“You're saying, in case I was home, he wanted me to panic and run?” I asked. “Okay, so what? Look, if I could call the cops I would, but I can't, so—”
“We don't need cops,” Joey said, in a tone of voice I knew well. “Come on.” She headed for her car. I followed.
She opened her trunk and handed me an umbrella, orange with a duck's head for a handle. She searched some more and pulled out something wrapped in a sock. “Does this guy know you can't go to the cops?” she asked, leading me toward the alley.
“I don't know.”
“Okay, my guess is, he's not going to hang around if he thinks they'll show up. Assuming he was at your place, he's long gone now. If I'm wrong, we have an umbrella and”—she reached into the sock—“a Glock.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Does everyone but me own a gun?”
“Elliot bought it for me when he left for Europe. I just hope I remember how to use it—not that it will come to that,” she added, seeing my face.
“You know how to use this—this
Clock?” I followed her into the alley.
“Glock. Yeah. It's what Gun Girl carried.”
In her acting days, Joey had starred in a TV series, Gun Girl. Seeing her eagerness to storm my apartment, I wondered if it had skewed her perspective, made her oblivious to real danger. Maybe she subconsciously assumed there was a camera crew in the shrubbery, filming our approach, ready to stop the scene if things got ugly.
Inside the building, that changed. I felt Joey's hesitation along with my own, a response to the dark. My landlord being too cheap to spring for anything stronger than Christmas tree lights, the entire Minardi crime family could be stuffed under the stairwell, unseen. Normally the darkness didn't bother me, not in the daytime, but nothing about this day was normal. For one thing, it was too quiet. There was rain pelting the roof and the beating of my heart, but where were the neighbor noises, the morning sounds, the Spanish radio, the colicky baby? Had the Weasel murdered my fellow tenants? I took Joey's hand and she gave mine a squeeze.
At the top of the stairs, a door opened.
The wizened face of Mrs. Albertini peered out at us. Her wizened terrier yapped. Mrs. Albertini's eyes went to our joined hands, to my umbrella, to Joey's gun, then back up to our faces. She slammed her door. We continued on our way, up the concrete steps to my apartment.
The door was open.
“Don't go in,” I whispered.
“Why not?” Joey whispered back.
“They tell you not to go in if you come home to an unlocked door. I'm sure I've heard that.”
“They tell you that because it's a sign there may be a burglar inside. In our case, we expect there was a burglar, and that he's gone. Going in is what we're here for.” Joey pushed the door open with her foot.
It looked like I'd been evicted. My worldly possessions, plus a few of Doc's and Ruby's, covered every surface. Books were stacked next to bookshelves, pots and pans in front of cupboards. My wardrobe took up most of the living room floor, displayed as if at a yard sale. I felt laid bare. Only the knowledge that most of my photos and artwork and business records were stored in the back room of the shop kept me from coming unglued. I whispered, “It's all so neat.”
Dating Dead Men Page 17
