“The more you thought it,” I finished for her.
She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. “Fifty years,” she whispered. “For fifty years I thought he’d left me, I hoped he’d left me, and at the same time I hoped he was dead, because then he hadn’t left at all.”
Hector peered in again. He seemed overly concerned for a mere friend. I held up a hand, mouthed “It’s okay,” and then nodded toward her. He grimaced at me, but backed away from the window.
Finally, she lifted her head. Still no tears, but she looked ragged. She looked old.
“He wore a ring,” she said, extending her left hand. “It isn’t much, but it was what we could afford back in those days. He never took it off. He always carried a jacket because you never knew when the wind would come off the lake. His was flannel, heavy. And he had a knit cap I made for him.”
“No identification?” I asked.
She let out a small ironic chuckle. “We didn’t have driver’s licenses then. No one thought of carrying something that said where they lived or who they were.”
Minton hadn’t said anything about a ring, but I would ask. “Was the ring engraved?”
She shook her head.
And then, because I couldn’t help it, I looked at hers again. “You never remarried.”
She teared up, and this time the tears threatened to spill over. “I never knew if he was dead or not. I kept thinking maybe he would come home….”
She swallowed hard, then wiped angrily at her face, looking away from me as if the tears embarrassed her. Then she extended her hand.
“It’s not that distinctive,” she said. “But it’s what we got.”
I touched her ring. The metal was thicker than I expected — my adopted parents had rings they got during the Depression, and the gold was so thin it felt like it would snap with the slightest pressure.
Her ring was scratched and worn with time. Would his be? I didn’t know.
“Did he know a family named Baird?” I asked. “Maybe a Gavin Baird?”
She shook her head.
“How about a man named Mortimer Hanley?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure.”
So as far as his wife knew, over a distance of fifty years, Junius Pruitt hadn’t had a run-in with anyone connected to the Queen Anne.
“Did he walk home alone?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He said he didn’t. Said he always had friends from work go with him, but I couldn’t find them either.”
“Couldn’t find the friends or couldn’t find anyone who walked with him?”
“He wouldn’t let me meet the Colosimo’s people. He was happy to have a job doing what he loved — that piano was something, he said — but the people weren’t. He said I didn’t need to know them, and I agreed with him. Foolish of me, I know.”
I shook my head. “It’s not foolish to protect your family.”
She gave me a half-smile. “When the protection backfires, it is.”
I stirred, making it clear we were nearly done. “By chance did he mention anyone named Lawrence?”
She frowned. “I don’t recall the name.”
“How about Zeke?”
“Zeke Ellis.” She said the name like a prayer. “I haven’t thought of him in a hundred years.”
“Where is he now?”
She shook her head. “He run off. He got word that his woman was coming up from Alabama, and he took off out of here like she was the devil herself.”
I frowned, remembering the intact letter that had been found in the wallet. “Was her name Darcy?”
“Oh, yeah. Sweet thing. Cried buckets when she found that he’d left her again.”
“Where’s she?” I asked.
“The Negro section of Oaklawn cemetery.”
Another closed door. “Is there anyone who might remember Zeke? Anyone you can think of?”
“He had a woman here. Her name was — Vivienne? Viola? Vita? — something like that.”
“Do you know where she is?” I asked, doubting that she would when she didn’t even know the woman’s name.
“No, I don’t,” Minnie Pruitt said. “But Felix out front, he would.”
We left the woodshed and went back to the main room. Hector tried to pull Minnie aside, but she wouldn’t let him. Instead, she took me to Felix.
Felix turned out to be a grizzled, bent-over man of about ninety. He had a hearing aid twice the size of one ear on his left side, and an old-fashioned hearing horn that he stuck in his right. He sat on a wide rocking chair in the back of the main room as if he’d been placed there eons ago and abandoned.
Our conversation consisted of my shouted questions and his shouted responses. No one played cards during that, and a number of people helped interpret for me and for him.
Apparently Felix, whose last name was Cayton, wasn’t the marrying kind, and everyone knew it. Still, Vivienne Bontemps had gotten involved with him. She had given him two children before deciding he wouldn’t make an honest woman of her, even though he’d already told her that.
He continued to support the children until they reached fifteen — he was a good man after all, a lot better than they were, the ungrateful bastards, never visiting their old man now that he had only a few good years left.
I could see why they didn’t, and half the people listening rolled their eyes midway through the question-and-answer session. I learned nothing of Zeke, except that he had vanished — and good riddance too! — and that, not Felix, had broken Vivienne’s heart.
Vivienne Bontemps sounded like a stage name to me or a very sad joke. Bontemps, unless I missed my guess, was badly pronounced French for “good time,” and I had a hunch, although I couldn’t ask it at the top of my lungs and I doubted Felix would answer me at the top of his, that he had met her at one of the whorehouses in near the Levee, maybe one of the Bronzeville houses that took colored women.
I thanked Felix for his time, and as I made my way to the door, the man who had greeted me when I came in, the man with the scarred face, pulled me aside.
“Vivienne Bontemps lives on Cottage Grove Avenue,” he said. “She has a nice little house there, and she’s not near so bad as Felix makes her out to be. She knew what she was getting into. So did Felix. He was forty years old when he met her, and took care of her when that Darcy showed up.”
“Darcy, Zeke’s old girlfriend.”
The older man nodded. “Zeke aired right out when he saw she was coming. And I don’t blame him. That was one gator-faced woman.”
“Ugly?” I asked.
“Inside. When she heard he’d beat it, she took to blaming everyone, not the least Vivienne. I don’t think Vivienne knew a thing about it, and the thing was —” he lowered his voice – “that first baby of old Felix’s there, t’weren’t his. ‘Twas Zeke’s and everyone knew it. Even Felix. He just pretended he didn’t. He talks a mean game, but he ain’t a bad man, even if those kids don’t realize it.”
I glanced at Felix, who had set down his ear trumpet and closed his eyes. Apparently I had tired him out.
“Will Vivienne talk to me about this?” I asked.
“I’m sure she will if you don’t treat her like a good-time girl.” He winked at me. I smiled.
“What was her real name?” I asked.
“Ain’t nobody knows, ’cept Vivienne, of course. And she won’t tell you that.” He kept his voice low. “How come all the questions ’bout ancient history?”
“I’m helping out a friend,” I said.
“Mighty old friend,” the man said.
“Not that old. Family things.” I nodded to him and waved at the room. Hector hadn’t come out of the back yet, and Minnie had disappeared into the kitchen as well. I had told her, before I left the back room, to check with Tim Minton at Poehler’s Funeral Home in a few days. I figured we’d have more information for her then.
People watched as I left, almost like I was a vice cop who would ar
rest them for playing cards. I stepped into the chilly afternoon air, which felt chillier after the warmth of the Senior Center, and gathered my coat around me.
Old secrets, old friends, old hurts. I was walking into things I didn’t entirely understand, from a world that was quite alien to mine, even though I’d been born at the tail end of the 1920s.
I felt bad for stirring up Minnie Pruitt’s life. But at the same time, I might have just given her answers to fifty years’ worth of questions.
I only hoped they were answers she wanted.
FORTY
The World Series again interfered with my day, and although I wanted to resent it, I couldn’t. Not entirely. Jimmy was getting such joy from the games that I vowed to get baseball tickets next spring. He needed something to focus on besides his schoolwork, me, the Grimshaw family, and staying out of trouble.
The Mets won again, but this one was a squeaker, and as the game went into extra innings, I found myself forgetting about the Queen Anne. An error in the tenth gave the Mets a 2-1 victory, made Jimmy’s day, and made me smile as well.
We spent the rest of the evening together. I didn’t look at work once, even though I felt guilty about it. After Jimmy went to sleep, I planned the next day. I had some driving to do, and as I went through my notes, I realized that the mailman who had discovered Hanley’s body worked only four blocks away from Vivienne Bontemps.
Maybe, if I timed things right, I could show up at the post office just as he ended his rounds.
The next morning, LeDoux and I both went into the Queen Anne as if we had weeks of work ahead. I had donned my coveralls and carried more paint inside, affecting a world-weary look as I hurried past the neighbors’ windows.
I had asked LeDoux about the ring, and he hadn’t seen it, but that didn’t mean Minton hadn’t found it. And, LeDoux reminded me, given the amount of gold in that attic room upstairs, there was no guarantee it wasn’t up there either.
The very thought of digging through that room still made my skin crawl.
I went back to my worktable past the boiler room. LeDoux hadn’t taken the evidence bag away yet — he’d just plain forgotten during the past two days, as I’d hustled him out of the building so that I could pick up Jim.
I was pleased: there was one piece of evidence I wanted to look at before I visited Vivienne Bontemps. It took a minute of digging, but I found it.
The cocktail napkin with the phone number. And the spidery handwriting:
Sorry.
Love forever
V.
I carefully put the bagged napkin into a folder, then carried it out of the building. On the way, I reminded LeDoux that I would be leaving early again, and he sighed heavily.
“At some point I have to get back to New York, you know,” he said.
“I know.” I managed to sound patient, even though my leaving early had little to do with the amount of time it would take him to finish working this basement.
I got into the van, put the folder in my briefcase, then headed to South Cottage Grove. On the way there, I pulled over and took off the cap and coveralls. No one followed me.
I was beginning to relax my vigilance just a little.
Vivienne Bontemps’ neighborhood in South Cottage Grove was nicer than I expected. The houses were all 1920s bungalows, most of them freshly painted over the summer, and all with well-trimmed lawns. Most of them even had leaf piles near the large trees that arched over the street.
I hadn’t expected an oasis like this. Most of the neighborhoods I went into on the South Side might have looked like this once, but didn’t any longer. Here, it seemed, people still cared about their homes and the way they appeared. Here, people had some pride in the way that they lived.
The address the folks at the Senior Center had given me was right in the middle of the block. This house was painted white. Someone had added a front porch that would have looked better on a Victorian than on the little bungalow.
A white wicker armchair with green cushions sat in front of the picture window. A matching table sat in front of the chair. Beside it a smaller wicker chair, not as expensive, sat as if waiting for a supplicant to talk to the owner of the lawn chair. The smaller chair had no cushion at all.
All around the porch’s floor and on its railings pots stood. Some had dark, trailing leaves, turning brown as the fall hit its full force. Others were simply filled with dirt, probably awaiting their spring blooms now. A few still had green plants, but what they were I couldn’t tell.
Someone had placed a leaf arrangement — a kind of orange-and-brown, fall-themed wreath — on the front door, and in the window hand-drawn jack o’lanterns glared out of white school paper in vivid blacks and oranges.
I had a moment of concern: I hadn’t even thought of Halloween. Last year, Jimmy and I had partnered with the Grimshaws because I hadn’t done Halloween with a child before and, it turned out, Jimmy hadn’t celebrated the holiday either.
He later told me he thought trick or treating was lame. It felt too much like begging, which had, apparently, reminded him of his old life. So I had promised something else this year, although I hadn’t given any thought to what that something else might be.
Time to investigate it, I guessed.
I sighed and walked up the porch steps, briefcase in hand. I felt like an encyclopedia salesman approaching a quiet house in the middle of a workday.
Someone moved behind the picture window — a flash of vivid blues — but I couldn’t catch the face. I was being watched, though, and the movement let me know it.
I didn’t mind. My behavior was probably unusual in such a nice neighborhood on a drizzly fall day.
The door opened almost before I finished my first knock. A woman in a satin, blue day dress stared at me, her straight black hair pulled back in a bun. Her skin was that white-tinged chocolate color that pale blacks sometimes got when they aged, and her eyes were as blue as her dress.
I would have wagered that at times in her past this woman passed between the color lines.
“Help you?” she asked.
“My name is Bill Grimshaw,” I said. “I’m looking for Vivienne Bontemps.”
“You’re looking at her,” she said. “What’d you want?”
I had a feeling she already knew, that someone from the Senior Center had called her and told her a man with a scar was asking about her. I explained my purpose anyway, telling the same story I’d told at the Senior Center, and this time asking about Zeke Ellis.
Her lips thinned, and she looked at me with great disapproval. “I don’t like discussing Zeke.”
“I can understand that,” I said, “but there’s a chance that he might not have skipped town. I have some evidence that indicates he might have died the week he disappeared, right here in Chicago.”
Her mouth opened slightly, as if she’d never considered it, and color rose in her cheeks. Then I saw, through the fine lines that time had left, what her appeal had been.
“You sure about that?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “That’s why I want to talk with you.”
She nodded, bit her lower lip, and considered. She was clearly alone in the house. Then she shrugged. “Ah, what the hell. You only live once. Come on in.”
She stepped away from the door, opening it wide. A blast of perfume hit me, heavy and cloying. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow her, but I smiled at her, nodded, and walked inside.
The room was cluttered with knickknacks and pillows, but it was clean. A white carpet covered the floor, thick and obviously new.
She led me into the dining room, just off the living room. A large, oval-shaped, oak table dominated the space, with fake fruit sitting in a bowl on top of a hand-made doily. She took the captain’s chair at the head of the table. I sat in a more modest chair to the side.
“Okay,” she said. “You tell me what you got that makes you think Zeke didn’t take a flyer.”
Rather than answer her, I opened my briefcase and r
emoved the folder. Then I took the evidence bag out and slid it across the table’s polished surface.
“Please don’t open the bag,” I said. “It’s evidence.”
“Evidence.” She raised her plucked eyebrows, then slid the bag closer to her. She reached into the pocket of her dress and removed a pair of half glasses, which she placed on the end of her nose. Then she peered at the napkin.
And went gray.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered.
“It was folded into the back corner of a wallet,” I said.
She looked up at me over the glasses. “A wallet.”
I nodded.
“Where was that wallet?”
“We found it near three skeletons,” I said as gently as I could.
“Where?”
“In a house on the South Side.”
Her lips thinned.
“You recognize that?” I asked.
She ran her finger over the front of the bag. “Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“The note I left Zeke,” she said. “The morning I told him I didn’t want to see him again.”
Her head was bent, her expression pained.
“When was that?” I asked.
“October 28th 1919,” she said, with such a firmness that I knew she had regretted doing it.
“Why’d you end the relationship?” I asked.
She was still staring at the note. “Because I found a letter from his old girlfriend from Alabama, saying she was moving here.”
“It didn’t say she was going to move here,” I said. “It said she was coming here on the train. All it did was give the date and time.”
She raised her head, and her eyes were filled with such anger I almost leaned back. “Darcy was moving here. That’s what that letter meant.”
Vivienne hadn’t yet realized that I had seen the letter too. It would come to her.
“How do you know that’s what the letter meant?” I asked. “It didn’t say anything like that. Did Zeke tell you?”
“He didn’t have to. It’s not like now, when people just traveled on a whim. If Darcy was taking the train to Chicago, she was going to stay here. And Darcy could barely read and write. She wasn’t going to pour herself onto the page. Me and Zeke, we both knew she was coming up here to live.”
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 25
