The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  He pulled the Cadillac up across from the house on Charles Street and sat back in the seat with a sigh. He swiped off his glasses and tenderly massaged the indentations they'd made on the bridge of his nose. “Those pictures, Harry,” he said in an achy voice. “Who wants to know about ‘em?”

  “An old man in Clifton,” I said. “He's the girl's father.”

  Bannion nodded and continued to rub his nose. His eyes were shut and, for just a second, I had the eerie feeling he was praying. His teeth raked once across his lower lip, and he opened his eyes and pushed the glasses firmly back on his nose. In that split second, he'd come to some sort of decision about what he wanted to say and concluded that he could live with it, or, maybe, that I could. “I may be able to help you with this,” he said, smiling at me. “Seems to me I done seen that girl's face some place before, though I'll be damned if I kin recollec' where. You wanna give me a look at one of those photos?”

  I took the third print out of my coat and passed it over to Red. He flipped down the sun visor and held the snapshot in front of him. “Sure 'nough I seen this girl,” he said. “In Newport, not too long ago. ‘Course, she was made up different.” He touched the air as if he were touching Cindy Ann's face. “Her hair was—” he swept the air into long tresses. “And her eyes was made up different, too. Shoot, in this picture, she don't look more'n sixteen.”

  “That's how old she is.”

  “Naw,” Red said and flicked the snapshot with his thumbnail. “She gotta be older than that.”

  I looked at him a second and asked: “Why?”

  Red flushed slightly and said, “No reason. No reason a'tall. Might not have been this girl, neither. We can check it out, though. Over at the Deer.”

  “Was she hooking, Red?” I said. “Is that what you're saying?”

  He looked down at the dash. “I don't rightly know, Harry. We can check it out, though. Y'all wanna come back over heah tonight?”

  “I can't tonight,” I said.

  “Well, maybe I kin give you a call tomorrow morning. And let you know if it was her I saw. Kin I keep this?” he said, holding up the photo.

  “Yeah.”

  “You still in Clifton?”

  “Still and always.”

  “All rightie,” he said and opened the car door. We got out, and Red straightened himself and brushed at his coat. “I don't like that kind of thing,” he said and smiled without pleasure. “Me and ol' Willie had us some words about it no more'n a year or so ago. I'd like to lend a hand, if I could. If you don't mind?”

  He looked up at me and smiled like a choir boy. A brawny, yellow-toothed, bullet-headed, sixty-year-old choir boy.

  “I don't mind,” I told him.

  10

  THE SUN was setting behind me as I crossed the Suspension Bridge, but the day's heat was still cooking the air. The nightfall was sticky hot and the evening would remain hot long past midnight. It was those damn hills that did it; they contained the heat like the walls of an oven and, with it, the fumes of the downtown industries and the exhaust of the cars and buses. I hadn't heard the news but I guessed that pollution was near the alert level. A sickly bile-colored haze was floating above the river and laying in fog-like patches along the basin. I felt tired and sweaty-dirty, as if I'd spent the afternoon baling hay instead of talking with three local mobsters.

  Time to go home, Harry, I told myself. Time to take accounts and plan tomorrow's fun. A meeting with the Jellicoes would be in order. But a nice pressureless one. A gab session, with Harry the Venal Detective speaking lightly of old men clients and young missing girls and the very off-chance of some sort of unexpected trouble cropping up. Some photos maybe. Not that it all couldn't be smoothed over with a few dollars and a bit of cooperation. I couldn't risk much more than a veiled threat. After what Coral had said, even that might be too much. But it had to be done sooner or later. I decided that I'd need the photos anyway, even if I didn't flash them at Lance and Laurie. And since I'd exhausted my supply, that meant another stop at the bus depot.

  I turned off the expressway at Front Street and slid down through the concrete ramping onto Columbia Parkway and immediately nosed back up again, like a shallow-diving seal, and broke back into the night at the Vine Street overpass. Behind me, Riverfront Stadium glowed like a squat Japanese lantern. I turned north in front of it and headed up into the dense wall of red brick buildings that is the beginning of the city. Along Fountain Square the street lamps popped on—that dried-out shade of green that's almost white. And the store lights and office lights began to burnish the darkening sky. I turned east at Fifth and drove back down through Government Square to the bus terminal where I had seen Hugo off ages before.

  I was lucky enough to find a parking place on Elm. Lucky because it was a Saturday night in July and most folks preferred to spend it in a bar or a theater rather than at home in front of the T.V. The sidewalks were crowded with ladies in their pastels and their gentlemen in lightweight suits of beige and sky-blue. I felt like a toad, hopping among them in my day-old shirt and slacks and in my twill seersucker sports coat that looked as if it had been scored by a truck tire. But, hell—I was too tired to care. Except, maybe, for the ladies. I liked the ladies. I liked the way they moved under their gauzy dresses. I liked the look of their shoulders in the night. And of their legs as their arms brushed against the flowing skirts. And of their dark eyes shot with white street light or with the warm golden light of the storefronts. God almighty! I said to myself, it has been awhile.

  The bus station was what I really needed. I needed to be jarred by the candle-power of those countless lights, so many and from so many different angles that I don't think a giant could have cast a shadow in the Greyhound Bus Station. And I guess I needed another look at those merry souls waiting on the benches. Needed to hear once again the tap dance of my feet and the rasp of the loudspeaker—if it was a loudspeaker and not just a man who sounded like a loudspeaker. What I needed most of all was the pimply teenage boy who swished by me as I was getting the shoe box out of the locker and, propping one arm coyly against the repository, gazed down at me and pointed his foot like a dancer priming for a grand jeté.

  “Hi,” he said sweetly.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Bruce. You're pitching in the wrong league.”

  “I catch, too,” he said cheerfully and danced away.

  I felt like Hugo Cratz when I got back to my feet. Which reminded me—where the hell was Hugo Cratz? I tucked the shoe box under my arm and went looking for a pay phone. I found one next to a pinball arcade near the Elm Street exit. But it was one of those half-ass, exposed stands, without doors or seat or light. I've always felt that using one of those things was like buying a matching vest without the suit; except for emergencies, they're useless and about as private as a ghetto party-line.

  I skulked back into the night and tried to watch the pavement and not to think about the laughter and the perfume and the bright-eyed ladies who were everywhere around me. Look at it this way, Harry, I told myself, sure they look good to you now. And, maybe, once you get past the gauze, they'd look better still. Brown where the sun has touched them and white and furry where it hasn't. . . . That line of argument was getting me nowhere. I started thinking about Jo Riley, about the way she looked when she dropped one knee on my bed and stretched the other out behind her in a svelte white line. I thought about the way her hair gathered on her shoulders and about the way her breasts swayed slightly as she breathed. Where the sun had tanned them they looked as if they began slightly lower on her chest than they really did, and their pink nipples seemed off-centered, set where the flesh became full and rounded and flowed beneath them in a milk-white curve.

  She would probably be off around twelve. And I hadn't eaten. And, hell, everybody sweats when it's hot.

  When I got to the Pinto, I headed due north, to Ludlow and the gray cube of the Busy Bee.

  ******

  Once I'd gotten the fun part out of my system, I remember
ed the other half of that argument I'd been having with myself down by the bus depot. For there was no mistaking that she was another person, sleeping next to me. Small beneath the sheet, formulating and reformulating the marvelous topography of a woman's body as she turned from her dreams and sighed an easy, peaceful sigh, she was Jo. Jo of the coal-black hair and soft, heart-shaped, Mediterranean face. With all of Jo's wit, and Jo's powerful laugh, and Jo's driving independence. Jo, who could be as sweet as marzipan, and Jo who could be as hard and unyielding as...as Jo. But, by God, it had been worth it. Tickling up the stairs of the old Delores at two in the morning, drunk and acting drunk and festive-sly, like gate-crashers at a fabulous feast. Leaning on each other—the college kids. Pulling away with barks of laughter—the knowing adults. Coming in the door and staring silently, familiarly at the room and at each other. Feeling a bit of fear, then, when it was just Jo and Harry and no one else. And when both Jo and Harry knew full well that what was going to happen was a beginning of something that had to end in a vow or a broken promise. Thank God, the appetites are faster and shrewder than the mind, or else there wouldn't have been Jo and Harry naked and famished for each other. And a great deal of tender and passionate embrace.

  After the lovemaking, I'd sat back against the headboard, arms behind my head, and wondered why on earth I had once thought this would never work. Then, late in the evening, when the air was cooled by a sudden breeze that flushed through the apartment, I remembered why. I remembered that core of reserve, that sudden toughness that would change her into a stranger in a place that I shared no part of. Remembered the admiration I’d felt for that tough-minded independence. And the guilty sense of relief, because that reserve was like an assurance that things could only go so far and no farther, that there would always be that piece of her I couldn't share. A buffer zone. A moat. How good it had made me feel until, one afternoon, I'd discovered that what she kept there, behind the moat, was her heart.

  It was the detective that did me in. Rummaging, exploring, running hands and eyes over a drawerful of her things—jewelry, make-up, a heart-shaped watch on a golden chain, a Japanese fan, some silk underwear, and, in the back, buried beneath the panties, the hard corner of a photograph set in a cardboard frame. I flicked it with my finger, teased it with my eye. And, finally, I pulled it out. It was a wedding picture of a very young Jo and of a tow-headed Marine corporal with his cap buttoned on his shoulder and a loose grin on his face. She caught me with it in my hand.

  She walked over to the dresser and pulled the photograph away and tucked it back in with the underwear.

  “Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her.

  “I suppose because I didn't want you to know.”

  “It doesn't make a difference.”

  “It does to me,” she said, closing the drawer. “We're still married.”

  And then I got what I'd angled for, told patiently, unblushingly, by this strong, black-haired woman with the bridge-club spectacles and the pretty, heart-shaped face. He was an M.I.A., her corporal husband, whom she hadn't seen in five years and whom she still loved enough to cry over with regret.

  When she was done, I wandered off into the living room and fumed at myself and called myself a dictionary full of dirty names. And, in a few minutes, she came in, too, and curled up beside me and said, “Now, you know,” in her husky voice. “Can't love anybody else. Not for awhile. Maybe not ever. Not until I've gotten over him. You're the closest I've come, though. Real close. Only when I think I'm almost there with you, it's not you I'm thinking of. And that scares me.”

  A few weeks later we'd told each other goodbye. Both of us, I think, feeling relieved that we wouldn't have to carry the affair any further, that that moat wouldn't have to be crossed and the keep inside taken by storm. Or not taken.

  But, that hot July night, with Jo sleeping beside me again after three years of absence, I suddenly felt infinitely more valorous. Maybe it was the box of photographs sitting on the living room coffee table. Or the thought of the totally loveless and carnal act they pictured. Or the memory of the Jellicoes. Because those are the folks that never cross moats and carry castles, Harry, I thought. They're the sick by-products of a selfish and unromantic age. And you can either line yourself up on their side and pretend indignance. Or you can try to love the woman lying beside you and take the risk of being hurt.

  But not of being hurt like Cindy Ann was hurt. Not brutalized like a thing. I tried to picture that sixteen-year-old girl-child in a hiked-up skirt with white plastic boots on her legs and a pound of pancake and mascara on her face, hooking the tough bar rail of the Golden Deer. It was just possible. Perhaps the Jellicoes had given up on her. Or, perhaps, she was only acting as bait. Or, maybe, Red Bannion had an old man's eyes and sixty years of guilty conscience and a desperate urge to make a few amends. The morality of an old hoodlum is like a Baptist's notion of charity—a kind of fervent embarrassment.

  I touched Jo on the shoulder and she rolled into my arms. That was best. By far. And I fell asleep, holding her and that thought in my arms.

  ******

  The telephone woke me at eight the next morning—far earlier than I'd wanted to be awakened. I tried to ignore it until Jo mumbled something about not waking her, too. So I stumbled out of bed, stark naked, and padded into the living room. It must have been close to ninety in the goddamn room, and it was too early to start the day, and I heartily wished that whoever was calling me was in hell. I got to the phone on the tenth ring and yelled, “What!” into the receiver.

  “Is this Harold . . . Stoner?” a high-pitched, uncertain voice inquired.

  I sat down on the desk chair, wiped the sweat from my face, and laughed out loud.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes . . . Hugo,” I said. “It's me.”

  “Good,” he said. “ ‘Cause for a minute there I thought I'd dialed the wrong number. I left my specs back at the apartment and the print in these here phonebooks is so damn small—”

  “What time is it, Hugo?”

  “Why, it's eight. Or thereabouts.”

  “Eight in the morning?”

  “Sure.”

  I blew a little steam out of my mouth and said, “How's Dayton?”

  “It stinks,” Hugo said dully. “Just like I thought it would. Them snot-nosed brats of Ralph's was up in my room every damn minute. Couldn't sleep a wink last night. That's why I called you.”

  I guess you pay, one way or another, for what you do. Ralph's kids wake Hugo, Hugo wakes me. At least he was in Dayton and out of harm's way. “You'll manage,” I said to him.

  “Hell, yes, I'll manage. That's easy for you to say. I'm a sick man, Harry. Last night, that youngest one kicked me so hard in the spine, I thought I'd dropped a kidney. I won't last up here,” he said tragically. “No, sir, I'm a dead man. You're talking to a dead man, Harry Stoner. And you're the one that sent him to his grave.”

  “C'mon, Hugo. You'll make it.”

  “I will, will I?” He took a breath and chuckled. “Maybe I will. But there's some others that may not. When you going to let me come back?”

  “A couple of days, maybe,” I said, thinking about what Red Bannion had told me. “It depends on how things go.”

  “You talk to them Jellicoes, yet?”

  “No. I spent yesterday trying to find out what they had Cindy Ann doing.”

  “Did you find out?”

  I hesitated for a minute before telling him and decided that he was tough enough to hear the truth. Without it, he'd be impossible to handle. And he was going to have to hear it, anyway, sooner or later. “They may have her working as a prostitute in Newport.”

  “Oh, God,” he said faintly.

  “Easy, Hugo. If she is working as a hooker, I have friends who can spot her and get her back to us. I'll know tonight for sure.”

  “You'll call me?”

  “Yes.”

  “She ain't . . . they ain't abusing her, are they? I mean like in them pictures?”


  “I don't think so,” I said.

  “ ‘Cause I couldn't stand that, Harry. That would do me for sure.”

  He asked if I'd call him, again, and I told him I would, again. He started to get trembly, and I told him everything was going to be fine. Then he said he was counting on me. And he hung up.

  I was feeling a very different kind of weariness as I trudged back to the bedroom. If Jo hadn't been sleeping so soundly, I would have tried to ease the load by confessing some of it to her. The big difference between detectives in books and detectives in real life is that detectives in books are always rescuing their clients from perilous straits—which is a bunch of hokum and dangerous hokum, at that. That's the way we would have things be, when the bitter truth is that no one can rescue anyone from anything. As exciting and professional as they are, those books about ageless beach bums who salvage their women's psyches along with the family fortunes aren't doing the world much good. All it takes is a little living to know how far from the truth that kind of fantasy can lead you and how irresponsible and finally dehumanizing playing the role of rescuer can be.

  Now, I am and have always been a sentimentalist. I'm a sucker for romance, maybe because I have so much trouble conjuring it up in my own life or maybe because it's more romantic to live it out through other people's lives. But, in my work, there comes a time when I have to abandon the abiding and pleasant notion that Harry can make it all come out right in the end. Harry can't do that. And Harry shouldn't promise desperate old men that he can. And Harry shouldn't take jobs with that in mind. And Harry was feeling sick at what he'd committed himself to. And thinking that the trouble with charity work is not the pay but the working conditions. That they're too damn unreal. And Harry wanted a shoulder of his own to cry on. But the only shoulder available belonged to the slender and beautiful young woman lying next to him, who might or might not be willing to serve as a hankie, but whom Harry was not certain he had the right to infringe on. If, indeed, it was infringement and not just plain old human need, which was also something Harry was unsure of. And he fell asleep feeling unsure about it, while, at the same time, regretting not having told Hugo Cratz what Hugo Cratz already knew—that there was a good chance that, even if she could be pried from the Jellicoes in one piece, Cindy Ann would probably never want to see that sour, old man's apartment again.