Blanche Cleans Up: A Blanche White Mystery (Blanche White Mystery Series Book 3)

by Barbara Neely

  Blanche crossed her fingers. “Miz Inez thought maybe Ray-Ray might have given Miz Barker a box to hold for him. A kind of souvenir box. His first pair of baby shoes are in there, and his high school diploma. Now he’s gone, Miz Inez’d really like to have them.”

  “But why would he give it to Gran?”

  “Well, Miz Inez didn’t exactly say. But she did seem to know a lot about what was in Ray-Ray’s private box. Maybe that’s why he wanted it out of the house.”

  “Could be,” Pam said, “but I never saw it.”

  “Well, is there someplace special Miz Barker might have put it, if he did give it to her?”

  “I already started going through her things,” Pam said. “And I haven’t seen any box like that.” She paused for a minute. “There’s the attic. Gran probably hadn’t been up there in years. I sure haven’t.”

  “Could we look?”

  When Pam agreed, Blanche made a date to come by later that morning. She hung up and tried to convince herself her lies were justified. When this mess was all straightened out, she’d tell Pam the truth.

  She took the piece of envelope with Donnie’s number on it from her bag and called him. This time she wouldn’t have to lie; she just didn’t intend to tell the whole truth. There was no sense adding to Donnie’s grief by telling him somebody had killed Ray-Ray—and that she thought she knew who’d done it.

  “International Autos, Sales Department,” a crisp-voiced woman told her. Blanche asked for Donnie and waited.

  “Donald McFadden, how can I help you today?” His voice was louder, deeper, and more pushy than she’d heard it before.

  “Donnie? It’s Blanche White. You got a minute? It’s about Ray-Ray.”

  “Hi, Blanche. Did you find my letters and the picture?”

  “They’re not at his mom’s place,” she told him.

  “Maybe he has some stuff in storage, or a friend I don’t know might have them. You could ask his mother, maybe she—”

  “Listen, Donnie,” Blanche interrupted. “You remember I asked if he ever mentioned the Brindles, the people Miz Inez works for? Well, he may not have mentioned them, but they, at least one of them, have been doing a whole lotta talking about Ray-Ray. Allister Brindle—”

  “Don’t tell me! I don’t know anything about Ray-Ray and those people, and I don’t want to know, especially anything that…I told you! We wanted to start fresh. We didn’t talk about old…” Donnie’s voice quivered.

  “Donnie, I’m sorry. I know you’re having a hard time right now, but somebody tried to break into my house yesterday. I think they were looking for—”

  “Don’t. I told you, I don’t…Look, I gotta go.”

  The phone was dead before Blanche could open her mouth. “Chickenshit!” she said to the dead line. He’d have likely pooped in his drawers if she’d told him the whole story.

  “Hello, darlin’. ” Wanda eyed the teapot.

  “I’ll make a fresh pot of tea if you’ve got a minute. There’s some biscuits and ham.”

  Wanda unwound her layers and sat down. She looked around the room, then turned to Blanche.

  “Somethin’different about this place. Feels like sad times coming.”

  “You feel it, too.” Blanche poured tea.

  “What’s been goin’ on?”

  What hasn’t? Blanche thought.

  “Course, it’s what’s comin’ that’s the thing. I had an old auntie who could tell you at what o’ clock death would be knocking at a neighbor’s door. I can’t tell the comin’ of death from the comin’ of a broken arm. All I know’s when something bad’s headin’ this way.” She stopped to bite into her ham biscuit. “Christ! You can cook, darlin’! I never quite got the knack of it meself.”

  Blanche was glad Wanda had drifted away from talk of the Brindle house. She liked what she’d seen of Wanda. Blanche smiled to herself when the phrase “even though she’s a white woman” tried to work its way into her thinking. Wanda was definitely not who she meant by “a white woman.” But liking Wanda was not the same as confiding in her. That kind of trust took longer than the two weeks they’d have together. They sipped their tea and ate their biscuits in companionable silence.

  Wanda went off to her work. Blanche checked the time and gathered her bag and jacket so she’d be ready.

  As soon as Felicia left for the hairdresser’s, Blanche assured Carrie that she’d be back long before Felicia was finished trying to turn back time. She called a cab and went upstairs to tell Wanda she had to leave for a while.

  “Mind how you go, darlin’. I’ll be rootin’ for ya,” Wanda said, as if she knew something Blanche hadn’t told her.

  Blanche climbed the slim, fold-down ladder to Miz Barker’s crawl space and gritted her teeth against the mental exertion of forcing herself to thrust her head into the small opening above her. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped up another two rungs so that her head and shoulders were in the crawl space. It smelled of dust and mildew and looked like a rest home for cardboard boxes and dilapidated valises, their leather peeling away like shedding skin. Pam was already on the other side of the space. A layer of fine undisturbed grit covered the floor, except where Pam had walked. The dust that covered everything else in the room like an afghan was also undisturbed. Pam was right. No one had been up here for years. Blanche was delighted to back down the ladder and out of the tiny place before it got too hard for her to breathe. She checked her watch—still fine on time.

  They left Miz Barker’s house and went to the store, where Blanche was almost bowled over by the spirit of the old woman. She stood in the middle of the floor, feeling Miz Barker moving slowly round her. The echo of the old woman’s voice mingled with her sharp liniment smell. If she tried, Blanche was sure she could reach out and touch Miz Barker’s arm. The look on Pam’s face as she stared at Miz Barker’s stool made Blanche think Pam knew the old lady was still there, too. Pam drew a ragged breath.

  “This is the first time I been in here since…” Pam’s voice was thin and sad.

  Blanche looked up at the dusty shelves and at the ancient cash register and wondered again about the woman whose life was in this store. Had the store given Miz Barker pleasure? Or had she run it for so long she couldn’t do without it? Had she reached a point where, like Blanche, she felt she had worked too hard and too long for too little? And would she do it all the same if she could live again? Or would she, too, want to take a flying leap out of here to parts unknown?

  Blanche leaned over and pulled out the drawer under the cash register: receipts, paper clips, small pads of paper, pencil stubs. She lifted a lid from a box on a shelf behind the cash register, and it crumbled in her hand. Most of the other boxes they opened were empty. What little stock there was had mostly been nibbled by mice.

  “I don’t think what you’re looking for’s in here,” Pam said, wiping dust from her hands onto her jeans. She looked around her. “It’s like the store died, too,” she said.

  Blanche didn’t think the tape was there either, and it was time to get back to the Brindle house.

  “We could look down in the bomb shelter,” Pam said.

  “In the what?”

  “Underneath Gran’s house. It runs the length of the whole block. These houses were built back in the fifties when everybody was paranoid about the Russians, but now it’s just storage space. I doubt most people leave anything much down there.”

  Blanche was interested. “I gotta get back to work,” she told Pam reluctantly. “Maybe we can do it later this evening?” She remembered the date she’d made with Lacey yesterday. “No, I can’t this evening, what about…”

  “I’ll just give you the keys and you can go when you get a chance,” Pam said. She took Blanche to Miz Barker’s house and showed her the outside door to the shelter.

  “Don’t forget to bring a flashlight whe
n you come back,” Pam said as they stood looking down a short flight of cracked, litter-strewn steps at the shelter door. “It’s got electricity, but I don’t know if the bulbs are any good.”

  Blanche began crushing ice for the Brindles’ cocktails when she felt the car coming up the drive. She knew it was them the same way she always knew when an employer was approaching.

  Both of ’em look like they need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Blanche thought. Allister reminded her of one of those never-quite-finished sweaters Taifa used to knit: limp and lumpy and coming loose around the edges.

  “Ah, drinks! Just what I need,” Allister spoke like a man being rescued. Felicia looked as though a volcano were about to explode from her belly.

  Blanche held the drinks tray out to her.

  “Leave it, please,” Felicia, said, instead of taking her martini from the tray. And quickly, her tone seemed to add.

  Blanche did as she was bid, but of course this didn’t stop her from lingering outside the door.

  “Allister, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Not Marc again, I hope.”

  “No, it’s not Marc. At least not in the way you—”

  “I don’t suppose it could wait? I’ve had—”

  “Until when? After the campaign? Felicia’s volcano was beginning to rumble. “Never mind. I don’t know what could have gotten into me.” Felicia took a sip from her glass.

  “Felicia, I’m tired. I only meant—”

  “You only meant, ‘Shut up, Felicia, and stop expecting to be treated like anything other than a large purse.’ I bet you’d have enough energy for a conversation about your missing tape! Oh yes,” she added. “I know about it. And I hope whatever is on it is enough to destroy you!”

  Felicia’s volcano had erupted, but it didn’t wilt Allister.

  “I doubt you’d really enjoy seeing me destroyed, my dear.” Allister’s voice was full of what Blanche could only identify as privilege: the sound of ownership—not just money but ownership of government, museums, and colleges, of the right to run the world. “You see, I remember how eager you were to join my penniless little world, how delighted your vulgar, wig-manufacturing, nouveau riche, social-climbing parents were when…”

  “You bastard!”

  Something shattered in the room. There was rustling, movement. Blanche tiptoed down the hall toward the kitchen.

  She didn’t know when they went upstairs to dress. Felicia clicked into the kitchen on high, high heels to tell Blanche they were leaving. Blanche had been too interested in their conversation during drinks to focus on Felicia. Now she looked at this woman, the second woman she’d met, she realized, who had killed someone. The first one had been mad as a monkey on LSD. Was this one? If anything, Felicia looked more like herself, as though killing her lover had simmered her like stock, until there was only the thickest, richest part of her left.

  “Is everything all right?” she said under Blanche’s long gaze.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m fine.” Blanche put more emphasis on the “I’m” than she’d intended. Felicia didn’t miss it.

  “So am I,” she said, her voice just a tad too high. “How do I look?” She posed in her form-fitting ankle-length off-the-shoulder number in deep red and hard orange.

  “Like fire,” Blanche said. “Just like fire.” She wondered whether Felicia was about to burn something up or go up in flames herself.

  They were hardly out of the house before Blanche called Lacey to come pick her up. The phone rang as she put it down.

  “Blanche? It’s Donnie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I’m sorry about the way I, about hanging up earlier. I was just so…And then somebody came in and I couldn’t really talk.”

  “Well, I appreciate your calling back, Donnie. When I called you, I was hoping maybe Ray-Ray had told you…”

  “Listen, Blanche, I loved Ray-Ray but I can’t get mixed up in anything he might have…”

  “Anything like what?”

  Donnie hesitated, then: “Look, I shoulda told you when you called. But I was so…Two guys came by my place asking questions about Ray-Ray, who he used to hang with and where, stuff like that.”

  Blanche immediately saw Samuelson’s goons towering over Donnie. “Did they say what it was about?”

  “No. But they got a real attitude when I told them I didn’t know anything about Ray-Ray’s business. I’m not sure they believed me.”

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

  “No, but…” Donnie took a deep breath.

  “What is it?”

  “They scared the hell out of me, Blanche.”

  Blanche could feel his fear seeping like cold air through the phone.

  “So, what are you going to do about it? You—”

  “No! Nothing! I’m not doing a damned thing about it! I don’t know what Ray-Ray did, but if it got him…if he was in trouble with those guys who came by my place, they could have…what if they’re still watching me? Maybe the way he died wasn’t…”

  “We could work together,” Blanche said, “try to find out…”

  “Ray-Ray’s dead,” Donnie said. “Nothing can change that.”

  “I know that,” Blanche said. “But it ain’t that simple. I got kids, I can’t have…” She let the sentence trail off. Not only did Donnie not want to know anything about Ray-Ray’s business, she realized she didn’t really want to tell him what she’d learned, either. As scared as he sounded, if Samuelson’s Muscle Brothers paid Donnie another visit, he’d likely tell them every word she said faster than a lizard could catch a fly.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she told him, although she had no idea if it was true. “If those men thought you were lying, they wouldn’t have left without trying to make you tell what you know.”

  “You think so?” He sounded like a child wanting to believe the bogeyman was out of town.

  “Sure, I’m sure.”

  “Look, Blanche, I’m sorry to sound so…”

  Weak and wussy? Blanche thought. “Take care of yourself, Donnie.” “Gutless wonder!” she muttered when she hung up. She was on her own, as usual. What a joke that Ray-Ray should fall for such a little weakling.

  She was locking the back door when Lacey arrived.

  They drove down Tremont Street, passed Connolly’s, turned right on Massachusetts Avenue and then onto Washington Street. Lacey made a couple turns down narrow streets whose street signs Blanche didn’t see.

  “Where are we?”

  “In the South End,” Lacey parked on a side street, near a row of apartments with torn window blinds and dirty stoops—not an Allister Brindle kind of neighborhood. A bar and grill sign glowed neon red in a small front window across the street. The place was just as dreary on the inside; they didn’t stay long. Lacey motioned Blanche to follow her down a dim corridor. Hair rose on the back of Blanche’s neck when a man stepped out of a doorway near the far end of the corridor.

  “Hey, Lacey,” he said. He gave Blanche a brief once-over, and handed Lacey two black half masks. When Blanche and Lacey put them on, the man turned and knocked on the door behind him.

  The room they entered was huge. The walls were painted a dark, vivid blue lit by track lights. Black leather banquettes surrounded onyx tables that also glowed blue, lit from inside. The banquettes rose in three tiers above a dance space with mirrored floors. Two large, empty cages hung from the ceiling on either side of the room.

  “My favorite seat,” Lacey said as she slid onto one of the banquettes in the third tier.

  Blanche could see why. From here you could see most of the club—and there was plenty to see. Had that man worn those bottomless leather pants and short jacket on the bus? She folded her arms across her own breasts as if the large gold ring in a passing woman’s nipple might
attack her. A man in handcuffs and a T-shirt that said i’m yours threw himself on the floor in front of a woman carrying a whip. She lifted her foot, and he began passionately licking the bottom of her shoe. Blanche turned to find Lacey watching her with amused eyes.

  “What can I bring you, ladies?”

  Blanche couldn’t stop herself from staring at the waiter’s see-through plastic shorts and his pink penis with its cock ring clearly visible. Lacey could hardly order for laughing. Blanche didn’t mind. She had no doubt that if her mask wasn’t covering it, the expression on her face would warrant a chuckle or two.

  She looked around the quickly filling room as rolling ladders were moved beneath the two cages. There was light applause. A couple climbed into each cage. All four people were dressed in form-fitting black leather. The woman in the cage on the right also wore a half mask. The man with her wore a tight leather hood with openings only for his mouth and nose. The woman carried a whip. In the other cage, the head and face gear were reversed and the man carried the whip. The room grew quiet. The background music died down, and something with a more driving beat began at a higher volume.

  Blanche felt her mouth hanging open; she didn’t even notice the waiter when he brought their drinks. She flinched as the whip cracked against the back of the woman on her knees in the cage to her left. She turned to her right. The man in that cage was on all fours, his head buried in his arms and his behind in the air. The woman had one stiletto heel planted on the small of his back. She was leaning over, teasing his bare butt with the whip handle—more than teasing, Blanche realized when she saw the tip disappear between his buttocks.

  She turned from the cages and looked around. There was a woman on all fours being used as a footstool by two men in suits; two other men with leashes attached to collars around their necks were being led around the room by a woman in a skintight pink jumpsuit. Was this supposed to have something to do with sex? She thought about the kind of pain and shame black folks suffer in America, and wondered how many were into pain for pleasure. She didn’t have a problem with people who needed handcuffs and a good spanking to get their rocks off, but for her, being bound and hit and shamed were too much like slavery to be a good time. Still, people sat at the bar the same way they sat at any bar, couples cuddled in corners, and a few folks were grinding their hips on the dance floor. As the room filled, there were more worsted pin-striped suits than black leather.