“Fine. I’ll try not to turn into an ogre.”
“As if you could …”
He took a moment then and she thought that he was running those words of hers over in his mind, looking for something that wasn’t there. At least from his expression, it wasn’t there. “Some manage to,” he added at last. “This will all start in about ten days. Too soon for you?”
“Oh, no, not a bit!”
During the rest of the day at the office, and even at home during dinner and in odd moments through the play, she had hugged to herself the memory of those precious minutes. And the memory too of Mr Dunavan, and the way he had looked at her across the desk, something faintly disappointed and yet still friendly, something … the only word she could think of, and yet it wasn’t quite the right word … almost yearning in the depths of his eyes. As if, she thought disgustedly at herself, anyone as young and smart, as obviously on the way up, as good-looking as Mr. Dunavan needed to yearn over anybody.
She wondered briefly in the moment before sleep engulfed her, if Mr. Dunavan could be in love with somebody who was giving him a bad time. He wasn’t married. That was all she knew of the private side of his life.
Sleep swept over like a curtain blowing, and then during the night she dreamed about the two actors standing on either side of the bed, only now they were dressed, fully dressed, and looked quite ordinary. But she couldn’t make head nor tail of anything they said to each other.
Uncle Bax’s second letter had been mailed in Juarez, across the border from El Paso.
Dear Little Niece—
I can’t remember where the Fallon letter was in that stack, whether second or third, but anyway you know by now what I mean. And it’s to be delivered pronto. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding the guy, he’s practically on your doorstep.
Here’s something to spend for a hat to go with that dress I bought you.
Write me in El Paso. I want to be sure that everything is going okeydokey.
Your loving uncle,
Bax
She looked up from the letter at Tom, who was across the room, stretched on the couch with his eyes shut. “He sent some money with this?”
“Uh huh. Two fifties. Let’s see, where’d I put them? In the kitchen, I guess. That’s where I opened the letter.”
“Tom … I don’t want to seem niggelnaggle. But this was addressed to me.” The moment she said it, she could have bitten her tongue in two; it was such a perfect example of everything she had promised herself she would never be: the one who wants to share another’s life completely, but retains certain little private portions of one’s own, the one who takes but grudges giving, the pick and choose artist…. but she saw from Tom’s lazy, unfocused glance that she needn’t have worried.
He said, “Sorry. I didn’t look closely enough at the name on the envelope. By afternoon my eyes are so damned tired, anyway—”
She felt an instant rush of contrition and guilt.
How nasty I am. Could be, if I’d let go. And what’s come over me? She ran to the kitchen, and the two fifty-dollar bills were lying on the sinkboard, crumpled there as if Tom had wadded them getting them out of the letter. She folded them, put them into her wallet, returned the wallet to the battered purse still on her arm, her thoughts busy with the tangle of bills in there and which ones should be paid on first. A little here and a little there. And in passing the sink she looked out into the gray, dingy airwell and for a moment—a very brief moment—she wondered about those people over there, and whether they got sick of the damp and the dark in this place, and whether they too had a scuffy wad of bills that never got smaller.
Still carrying the purse she went back to Tom.
“Tom, this puzzles me. Weren’t the other two names on the letters Coulter and Mrs. Appleton?”
He nodded. “Yeah, that sounds right.”
“And we didn’t see any letter addressed to anyone named Fallon?”
He shifted a little on the softness of the couch. “You’re right. Nobody among Uncle Bax’s correspondents was named Fallon. So he’s dreaming, and we can’t deliver the letter.” Tom yawned and rubbed a slow hand across his thick, tousled hair.
“I’ll bring the box.” She put the purse on the table at the end of the couch.
When she came back Tom was fully stretched out, hands folded on his stomach, fast asleep. So she dumped Uncle Bax’s box out upon the rug.
No letter for Fallon tucked in among the old checkbooks, leafed into the ragged notebook or anywhere else.
Mrs. Kate Appleton, Far Rockaway. Mr. Winton Coulter, in Brooklyn.
The photograph of the Latin General and Bax stared up at her, drawing her eyes back to it. The man in the uniform had a dark, strong, glaciated kind of face, she thought. Merciless eyes, a kind of dynastic purpose under the surface, as if he were about to make sure that his sons and his sons’ sons remained in power. Forever and ever. My strength is gutsier than your strength. My guns are faster than your guns. My soldiers are more afraid of me than your soldiers are afraid of you. My palace is more magnificent than your palace. My country will gobble up your country….
Half-exposed from under the edge was the other picture, the one of Bax posed with the woman, the woman with her incredible beauty and the great pile of hair worn like a crown.
Bax was posed closer to the woman, and he didn’t seem to have the apologetic air that he had in the other picture.
Did the General know the woman? They were alike, somehow.
How had Bax met these people, become friendly enough with them to have photographs made?
A puzzle….
Were the answers in these letters, the eleven opened letters addressed to Bax? Some were pretty old and tattered. She picked them up one at a time and read postmarks: Lima, Bogota, Vera Cruz—One seemed unexpectedly fatter; she turned it in her hands; a shudder of nervous fright stunned her. She had glimpsed that chunk of tape, the crisscross of overlapping tan stickum that sealed the letters of Mr. Shima and Mr. Coulter and Mrs. Appleton, and this was crazy, because this was inside—
Where it had no business to be.
Her fingers shook as she separated the fat sheaf inside the big envelope. What was inside with the pages of faded writing, what had somehow gotten pushed into the old letter to Bax, was a fresh envelope with Bax’s writing on it.
Mr. Theogenio Fallon
The address was right here in Manhattan, on East Seventy Third.
If I’d seen this first, she thought, I would probably have delivered it instead of the one to Mr. Shima.
Worried now, she went carefully through all of Bax’s letters; but there were no others accidentally tucked inside. “Tom,” she said, “I found it. The letter to Mr. Fallon. We can deliver it after all.”
Tom said something on a breathy sigh without waking.
She began to put the stuff back into the box. The apartment was growing dark. It was time to start dinner.
“I wonder, Tom—”
She wished he would wake up and listen to her.
“I wonder, all at once, if we could be doing it all wrong.”
Chapter 5
Somebody’s kid was bawling down the airwell, the teakettle was squealing its spout off and she was trying to peel an onion without blinding herself, when, unexpectedly, there was Tom. He crossed the kitchen, shoeless, to put his arms around her from behind, to breathe down her neck. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Buzzer woke me.”
She turned eyes of disaster on him. “Company? Oh, no, they can’t! There’s just the two chops, and the leftover broccoli, and—”
He pulled her head back and shut her mouth with a kiss, and then said, “Don’t always jump for the worst, baby. Leave a little leeway on your way to the edge. I said buzzer, not people.”
“The buzzer means people.”
“No, or at least not this time. I answered on that thing laughingly known as the intercom, and nobody answered. What’s happened, it’s dark no
w so Keeley locked the lobby doors and somebody went out for a bottle and forgot their key. Or it was a burglar looking for a place where nobody was home. A burglar who wants our beautiful new tape machine. A burglar who wants Uncle Bax’s hundred bucks.
She laughed. “Or a burglar who wants to see into that box?”
Now what had made her say that?
Tom’s eyebrows went up and he looked thoughtfully back at her. “Could be. And it’s getting damned ridiculous, this business with him, his letters, and his oddballs like Mr. Shima.”
She returned to the arm’s-distance battle with the onion. “You saw Mr. Shima in the lobby. Did he seem guarded to you? Like an unnecessarily secretive Charlie Chan?”
“Charlie Chan was big and fat. Mr. Shima is compact square and short. No flab, no wasted motion. Besides, from what I saw he wasn’t Chinese, he wasn’t even definitely Oriental. Just kind of—”
“Vaguely East is East,” she finished for him. “But let’s don’t get impatient with Uncle Bax and his letters He’s saved us from bankruptcy for the time being and there’s hope now—" She almost went on to tell him about the wonderful new job as Mr. Dunavan’s secretary, but then she thought—as she had since Mr. Dunavan had told her—so many things could happen inside ten days. I’ll wait. I’ll wait to tell Tom until I’m sure.
“Always bank on hope, baby. After dinner Sean’s coming over and we’ll go through the play, run it through the tape with comments and new ideas and changes—”
“I’ll read a book in the bedroom and give you two the living room.”
“—hard to explain, but having it down on tape means it won’t be gone when I sit down to work tomorrow morning.”
“I’m glad.”
“Some bright day, Sugar …” He kissed the back of her neck and went back to the living room, and presently she heard the first strings of the Gershwin tape, and something like a wild free desire, a tumultuous beating, something she couldn’t begin to understand, rose to pound like a heartbeat. She closed her eyes to the sight of the airwell and the broken sink and a single bitter, unwilling tear squeezed out beneath her lashes.
What’s the matter with me?
Angry at herself, she dropped the onion and ran to the calendar pinned to the cupboard door; but it couldn’t be the time of the month, either—it was her, and this sick sudden feeling of being trapped, of needing to fight free.
She was free. She and Tom were free and yet they had each other, too. The best of both worlds …
In the lobby the next morning, in the early gray dusty light, Mr. Keeley was pushing his mop. He was sprinkling bleach or something on what seemed to be a darker patch on the marble floor. He was whistling tunelessly between his teeth. He smelled of moldy closets.
“Good morning, Mr. Keeley.”
He straightened, and turned the bleared lenses on her, and she had the funny impression that he had been waiting for her, watching for her to come down, that the little act with the can of bleach had been an excuse to keep him on the path between the elevator and the West End Avenue entrance. “Good morning to you, Mrs. Burch. Uhhh—”
She threw a glance back at him.
“That man, the one who staggered in here off the street with some kind of fit, last week—Made such a disturbance. You folks came home, I noticed, just after the ambulance took him away.”
She threw a glance back at him. She hadn’t noticed Mr. Keeley in the lobby that night, but of course she’d been too tired, really, to notice much of anything. “Yes. Friday night. I remember.”
“He died. It was in the paper.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Keeley. He wasn’t a tenant, was he?”
“No. Didn’t belong here. Didn’t live here and never had to my knowledge. But I’ll tell you how he got in—had no key—it’s the tenants. The tenants in this building won’t cooperate. I always lock up down here soon’s it gets dark, I do that every night without fail, and then somebody goes out for a bite or a drink and they leave the doors not quite shut. You know, they look shut. But the latch ain’t caught, quite—”
At least he wasn’t complaining about Tom and Sean playing the tape machine last night. “We’ll try to be very careful, Mr. Keeley.”
He shook his head with surprising vigor. “No, no, Mrs. Burch. That ain’t what I wanted to tell you. Not about locking the doors. But about this man, the one that ran in here to have his attack, or whatever it was—he’d been around and he’d asked about you.”
Aware of the rushing tick of time, she nevertheless turned fully to face Mr. Keeley. “He asked for me? Asked you?”
“About you. He wanted to know if you had come from the country.”
The phrase nagged at a memory, something buried that she could not quite summon up. “That’s queer. What did you tell him?”
“Why, nothing. Not a thing.” She thought that behind the smeared lenses his eyes were big with innocence, but couldn’t be sure. “The first thing a building superintendent learns, Mrs. Burch, is to keep his mouth off the tenants. See what he will—and believe you me, we see plenty—his job’s not to talk. And I told this Mr…. Mr.—” He paused, thought about it, shook his head. “I told the man I had no idea under the sun where you was from. No idea at all.”
“What kind of man was he?” She moved closer, intent now, in spite of the odor of mildew off his ancient brown jacket.
“Short. A fishy stare. Big forehead.”
“Mr. Shima.”
She thought that behind the lenses Mr. Keeley’s eyes lit up, but had no way of being sure. “Yeah! That’s the name …” He squinted at his memory of Mr. Shima, as if Mr. Shima might be standing beside her. “You know, I figured … what it was, he had a person he had to place, didn’t have the name, knew just one thing about’em. They was from the country. He had to get the name from that—”
“Yes, I guess so. When was this, that he came asking about me?”
“Oh … uh, last week. I kind of thought your husband might of run into him. Mr. Burch was in the lobby around that time.
Mr. Keeley didn’t miss much, after all. “What was the cause of death? Did the paper give it?”
“Oh, yes. Stabbed, he was.”
“Stabbed!” She stood for a breathless, incredulous moment waiting for Mr. Keeley to take it back.
“Of course, everybody thought—I mean, the people here thought he was having a heart attack. No blood that we noticed. He rolled around some, like he was in pain, and he tried to talk. I was here. They called me, the ones that had come in from the deli. Soon’s he fell and started his fit—”
“I can’t believe—”
“Looks as if some hoodlum might of been trying to rob him. You know what these streets are at night.”
“How could … how could he have been stabbed without anyone noticing? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure doesn’t. Must of been stabbed where the clothes absorbed what came out. A little skinny knife, or even an ice pick. They use them, you know.”
She shuddered, felt sick and chilled. “I have to go, Mr. Keeley. But I want to talk to you again. May I come down to see you as soon as I get home?”
“Sure can.”
“Thank you.” She had turned, was on her way to the door again when his hoarse whisper followed. “What do you want me to tell the cops, Mrs. Burch?”
She hesitated, not looking back at him. “I don’t understand—”
“They already called me. Want to come here and see the people who were in the lobby, or anyway the ones he fell down in front of. Do you want me to mention he’d been here previous?”
“I don’t think that it could have had anything to do—”
“Right.” He nodded and whisked the mop here and there. “Couldn’t of had. You’re right.”
“That’s all he wanted to know? Whether I was from the country?”
“Yep.” The mop went slap, slap. Was Mr. Keeley keeping something to himself?
“I’ll see you this evening.”
“On the button.”
She had Mr. Fallon’s letter in her purse. Tom was going to call her at work, after he had made sure that Mr. Fallon still lived on East Seventy Third, and would be at home that afternoon.
On the subway she opened her purse to look at the letter, nestled there among all the bills to be paid, the bills that Uncle Bax’s money would be spread among, a reprieve from disaster.
She had the new money, the two fifty-dollar bills in her wallet. Sheltering the edge of the wallet under her hand, she split the edges to peek at that miraculous windfall. She was at the end of the car, next to the drafty clattering vestibule, no one could look over her shoulder—
She had taken a letter to Mr. Shima. And now Mr. Shima was dead. That was something to think about.
There was something else to think about.
One of the fifty-dollar bills was missing.
She went directly to Miss Vonn’s desk. Miss Vonn was just fixing a sheet with two carbons to go into her machine. Miss Vonn looked up and her eyes narrowed, as if she was thinking, “Not you again!”
To hell with Miss Vonn.
“I want an outside line.”
“Help yourself.”
When Tom answered, she said, “One of the two bills isn’t in my purse.”
She heard a sound like a yawn, a bed-creak, a beard being scratched. “I guess I’m still asleep, baby. A bill is missing? A fifty-dollar bill? You don’t mean one of those—”
“It’s exactly what I mean.”
“You sound sore, for God’s sake. Look around in that bundle of junk you carry and—”
“I have. No fifty. And anyway, I put them both in my wallet. Last night. Before Sean came over. My purse stayed on that table in the living room all night … earlier, too. During dinner.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you think that somebody tippytoed in here and…. Oh, knock it off, baby—”
The Baxter Letters Page 4
