“Where are you staying in town? You never said.”
“At the Palace. That’s where the party Kitty came up for is being held. I was invited, too, but I wasn’t coming—till Harry turned into a son of a bitch.”
“Are you talking about Jinx Watson’s party?”
“Why, Olive! Do you know Jinx?”
“Her mother is my friend Loydell I was telling you about. And I’m going to that party, too. I was just discussing with Pearl here what I ought to wear. We agreed on my blue.”
Sam grinned. “Well, I’m wearing my red. But not this.” She pointed at her sweat suit. “A little red dress with gobs of pearls. You think that’ll do?”
“Honey, if you know Jinx, you know it doesn’t matter what you wear.”
Sam nodded. Oh, yes, ma’am, she sure did know Jinx.
“Then you know she’s going to turn up looking like Elizabeth Taylor—or Cher—whoever’s the latest version of dressed-to-the-tits. Nobody’s going to give you a second look.”
Sam laughed. “She and Kitty and I were all together in school at Stanford. Back when Jinx was a beauty queen.”
“First runner-up to Miss Arkansas. We thought for a while there Jinx was going to kill that girl what won.”
And if she had, and if they’d hanged Jinx, Sam would have thrown a party to celebrate. But that was one thing about giving up the booze. You had to learn to give up hating people’s guts. Alcoholics couldn’t afford resentment. It was surely one hard lesson to learn. But that didn’t mean she had to like her old rival. The one who’d been so pretty it’d make you puke. The one who’d horned in on her friendship with Kitty. The one who’d ripped off her best beau.
“I wouldn’t exactly say Jinx and I are close,” she said to Olive.
Olive hooted. “That’s precisely what her momma says. My friend Loydell? The woman doesn’t give two hoots for her one and only flesh and blood, but she makes the best of it. I reckon you’ll make the best of it, too. In any case, it ought to be some party. They say a whole planeload of folks flew in from San Antonio, where Jinx’d been living before she came over for the races and met that man she’s marrying. And them Texans know how to party. I myself have been looking forward to this shindig. A fat old lady like me don’t get asked much to such fancy goings on. The last doodah I went to was over in Little Rock the night Bill was elected President. Me and Loydell got all dressed up and drove over and stood out in the yard of the Old Statehouse, yelled Woo Pig Soooooeee till we couldn’t anymore. It was one of those times just like today, I was saying about it being so beautiful and all, I thought, Lord, I ain’t ever going to be happier than I am right now. Take me if you want. But He didn’t, so here I am, about to iron my blue dress.”
“And I’m glad.” Sam reached over and gave the fat old lady a big hug. “I’m glad you stuck around to be with me today.”
“Me, too. I swear I don’t know what you’d have done without me. Drove off in a ditch and starved to death, I reckon.”
“Probably. Now, I’ve really got to scoot.” Sam checked her watch. “Kitty’s expecting me, and she’s going to be screaming bloody murder if I don’t get there in time to have a visit before the party.” She hugged Olive again. “I’m so happy you’re going to be there too. You save me a dance, okay?”
Olive cocked a finger at her. “Now that’s an offer I’m holding you to.”
2
TEN MINUTES LATER Olive had turned on her talk show again. Sitting up there now were these 18-year-old girl Siamese twins who wanted to marry each other. Olive said, “I can’t see as how it’d make any difference, can you, Pearl?” Then the bell sounded, and a four-door silver Mercedes about 10 years old pulled up. A slender redhead stepped out and reached for the do-it-yourself unleaded supreme at the very same pump Sam had used.
“Would you look at that, Pearl? Are we having a run of pretty ladies today, or what?” Olive raised up off her stool to get a better look, pulling down her muumuu in the back where it had bunched up. “You see that yellow suit, that’s genuine linen. That pretty white blouse is silk, and those pumps—that’s real alligator, Pearl. Which reminds me of that Japanese tourist at the alligator farm in town who was carrying an alligator bag from one of them designers, leaned over too far, a big old ’gator snagged her bag like it was his Uncle Elmer he’d always had it in for, chomped it and her wallet, a thousand dollars in cash and a whole bunch of credit cards.” Pearl barked. “I already told you that one? Well, you look out at that woman there, she’ll keep you amused. Ain’t she purty? And rich, got to be rich, driving that big car, you see those diamond studs in her ears, see ’em sparkling way over here? That’s class and money, Pearl. Bet she comes in here and flips out a gold card. Or a platinum.” Pearl barked again. “That’s right. That’s all the metal you see these days, none of them silver dollars I used to collect. We’d drop ’em in the big slots in Bubbles. Did you know that’s what the Yankee gangsters used to call Hot Springs, Pearl? Idn’t that cute? Watch out, now, here she comes. Wonder what her name is? Rita? Lucy? Something to match that red hair, I bet.”
“Well, hello there,” said the woman, breezing in with the same smile you’d swear she used when she had tea with the Queen of England. Olive took a look at the turned-up nose, small white teeth, milky skin, the faintest little laugh lines at the corners of the mouth and eyes—and put her at 28. Probably be good to 50. “Beautiful afternoon, isn’t it? Oh, my goodness, what a gorgeous dog. Is she a hunter?” asked the redhead, wrinkling up her nose. She had an overripe accent, like maybe she was from Charleston, Savannah, one of those. But she had a West Coast kind of body, slim, strong like a young boy’s. She looked like she jogged five miles a day or rode a bike.
“Coon dog,” said Olive. “Redbone hound’s the best coon dog money can buy. Pearl here belongs to my grandbaby, Bobby.” At that Pearl flopped right over, belly up, tongue out, drooling like a perfect fool. The redhead leaned over and goosed her for a minute with long thin fingers, which were pretty, but looked like they knew a few tricks. On her right hand sparkled an emerald-cut diamond that had to be at least four carats, maybe six. She said, “Dogs are so much better than people, don’t you think? I used to keep English spaniels. But I can’t now, I travel so much.” The smile on her beautiful face was a heartbreaker. If it were a record, thought Olive, she’d play it over and over again on rainy afternoons. Then the redhead straightened in one long motion and pulled a bill for the gas from the alligator bag, and handed it to Olive. “Do you mind if I use your ladies’ room?” The pretty lady glanced at her gold-and-stainless-steel watch, the kind you see in fancy ads in magazines. “In fifteen minutes I’m due at a meeting in Hot Springs, at the Arlington, and I need to freshen up.”
“Why, not at all. Please help yourself.” Olive heard herself flossing up her inflection as if she were a grand lady with appointments to keep instead of a former hooker/waitress now convenience store proprietor/gas jockey. Though she did have Jinx’s party this evening. “You go outside, turn right, around to the side, you can’t miss it. But don’t you want your change?” Then Olive looked down at the bill she was holding. A 50. You hardly ever saw one of those.
The woman’s smile tucked in at the corners as she nodded at the bill. “I hope that’s not inconvenient.” She stared back down in her bag, then lifted eyes of emerald—just like the cut of that perfect diamond on her perfect finger. “I’m afraid it’s the smallest thing I have.” Then she did the tiniest little shrug, followed by something with her fanny you’d say was cousin to the hootchy-kootch if she wasn’t such a lady and you didn’t know that she really had to go to the bathroom.
Which set Olive to worrying about the shape the Ladies was in. Oh, she’d emptied the trash like she did every morning, made sure there was plenty of toilet paper and paper towels and pink liquid soap. But she hadn’t mopped it. She wished she’d swabbed it down with Lysol and hung some of those little huck towels with the day of the week done in cross-stitch and laid in some of
that pink carnation soap her grandbaby, Bobby, gave her for Christmas four years ago, still in the box, Olive was saving it for something special. But Olive handed over the $32.45 in change and hoped for the best, bathroom-wise. “Thank you so much,” said the redhead stepping outside.
Olive shook her head. “There’s them that has, and them that don’t, Pearl. You know that? That’s the way God made the world. ’Course there’s them that say there’s only so much people stuff in the universe and it keeps getting recycled, so there’s always another chance, depending on what you did the time before, you could come back a millionaire. I know what I want to be next time around.”
Pearl sat up and said, “Rowooo, rowooo,” like she had a big old coon up a tree and could see the shine of his eyes, her idea of nirvana.
Olive said, “Nope. Don’t wanta be like that redhead, either, driving that big silver car. I already was a pretty woman, and look how that turned out.”
Pearl muttered something deep in her broad chest.
“That’s right,” said Olive. “You. I’m coming back as a coon dog with a momma who owns a store full of snacks and nothing better to do than sit around and spoil me all day. Though, I wouldn’t mind having that one’s figure again. I used to have me one like that—and a pretty pale yellow suit. Wouldn’t that look swell at Jinx’s party? I think it’d be perfect, early evening do.…”
Just about then, the lady whose suit Olive was coveting was striding back to her car, turning and waving with that stiff little motion like you see beauty queens do, when suddenly she yelled bloody murder. It was the kind of scream that you used to hear from the blonde in monster movies. The kind of scream that let you know the screamer wasn’t fooling around. There really was something out there in the dark that was going to scare the bejesus out of you. More likely it’d eat you alive. Olive thought maybe the redhead’d stepped on a snake, so she grabbed her .44 Bulldog from behind the counter, and hit the door running, making sure Pearl didn’t escape. “You stay!”
The lady was still screaming. Then she saw Olive with the revolver and threw her arms up in the air. “Oh, my God! Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot me!”
“Lady, are you crazy?” Olive was looking all around for the snake. Where’d it go?
The lady was jumping up and down hollering. “I’ve lost my ring! My diamond ring!”
Her ring? That’s what all this fuss was about? Then once again Olive saw that emerald-cut sparkler catching the fluorescent lights, and she commenced to joining in the screaming. “Where? How? Tell me exactly what you did.”
Now the lady was jumping up and down, shaking her wrists. Then stopping to stare at the right hand like if she looked at it long enough, her ring would reappear. “I took it off in the ladies’ room to wash my hands, and then, well”—she started to wail—“I don’t remember!”
“Yes, you do. Just calm down. If you get ahold of yourself, you’ll see what you did.” Olive knew how that was. How you did things automatically. Driving, even. Like when you were thinking about something real hard, you’d start off in your car in Hot Springs, next thing you knew you’d be in Pine Bluff, 40 miles away, not remember a dad-blamed thing.
“I was thinking about Dean, Dean’s my boyfriend who gave me the ring.” The lady broke into some serious tears.
Olive wouldn’t have figured her for a crybaby, but you never knew. She could hear Pearl yodeling away inside. Pearl was dying to poke her nose in their business, see if it was something she could chase through the brambles, torture across a bog.
“Listen, lady,” Olive said.
“Madeline.”
“That’s a right pretty name. So listen, Madeline, let’s just collect ourselves here. I know we’ll find that ring.”
Madeline was wiping her eyes, making black smudges on her knuckles. That and the runny nose, she looked like a kid.
“Come on, now. You only went from here to the Ladies. We’ll retrace your steps, find it for sure.”
So that’s what Olive and Madeline did. Olive slipped the revolver in the pocket of her muumuu, and together they examined every square inch of the oil-spotted concrete. They poked at old chewing gum, at gravel, at weeds growing up through a crack. They inspected every last centimeter of the Ladies itself, though Madeline swore that she knew she hadn’t dropped it in there. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered shaking her fingers one last time in the sunshine to make sure they were dry before she put on her ring because she was prone to dermatitis, she had sensitive skin. The ring had simply disappeared into thin air.
Well, it couldn’t have done that, said Olive. Things just didn’t dematerialize. They weren’t snatched up by haints. Olive was a practical woman who’d always lived in the here and now, and by God, that diamond was here, and it was here now, and they would find it if they just persevered. So they did the search all over again. Frontwards. Backwards. Sideways. Widening the area each time, but with no luck. Madeline was crying all the while, blubbering like a baby, talking about how much that diamond was worth. A quarter of a million dollars, she said. Insured, of course. But she couldn’t report it missing. Not after that robbery that she and Dean had had at his beach house last summer, when the thieves broke in and knocked them around and tied them up and took every last piece of jewelry she had. My stars, said Olive. Dean had given her this ring as a sort of consolation prize while they were looking around to replace things with the insurance money. Not that you could ever replace those pieces with sentimental value. Of course not, said Olive, shaking her head, remembering that pink-gold locket with the little engraved roses, pictures of her first dog, Pokey, inside, that a john had ripped right off her neck 40 years ago. Thinking about it still made her mad. But because of that robbery, said Madeline, her insurance premiums were already so high, if she reported this… Besides, she wanted the ring that Dean had given her, the very one, not some replacement. Then she broke into sobs so heartrending, Olive almost joined her.
After a while Madeline got control of herself, blew her nose in a white linen handkerchief trimmed with both cutwork and lace, rocked back on those alligator heels, and moaned, “On top of that, now I’m late for my meeting. And it’s an important meeting.”
Olive was sure it was. What other kind of meeting would a woman wrapped in linen and silk and alligator and diamonds and gold and stainless steel and a silver Mercedes be going to?
Madeline reached in her alligator bag and pulled out a little notepad and a gold pen. She scribbled her name, Madeline Brooks, and the words Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs. “That’s where I’m staying.”
Olive nodded. Anybody who knew anything about Hot Springs knew the Arlington. It and the Palace were the two grand hotels left from the good old days when Hot Springs was something. Al Capone had kept a suite there.
“I hate to leave.” Madeline turned her head and closed her eyes and threw her naked right hand over her pretty white-silk-and-yellow-linen-covered breast. “But I must. With the hope, of course, that I’ll hear from you soon. That you’ll call and say that you’ve found my ring and you’re waiting for me to come and claim it and give you your thousand-dollar reward.”
Olive gasped. A thousand dollars! Now wouldn’t that come in handy? That trip she and Loydell were planning to Morocco.
“Cash,” said Madeline. “To anyone who finds Dean’s token of affection. Oh, Olive, please, please, find my ring.” Tears danced in her emerald green eyes.
Olive had never seen anyone with eyes that color. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. Unless the angels have swooped down and carried it off for the Good Lord to wear on His pinky, you’re gonna hear from me soon. I promise you that.” With any luck, she’d find it right after Madeline left, bring it into town with her on her way to Jinx’s party, stop into the Arlington, call Madeline up on the house phone.…
“Oh, Olive!” Madeline clasped her to her bosom and gave her a big hug. “I know you’ll be my salvation.” Reluctantly she stepped into the Merc
edes and pulled the door to with that solid kerchunk like a bank vault closing, and waving a sad little Miss America wave, drove off.
3
THERE WERE TWO messages waiting for Sam at the hotel desk. The first one said, Call Harry. That was a laugh. What did he want, to fill her in on a forgotten detail of his trysts with Barbie? And how’d he know where she was, anyway? She handed the yellow slip of paper back to the desk clerk and said, “Could you burn this, please?”
The second message was from Kitty telling her to get herself down to the baths. Now! So she dumped her bags in her room, stripped, grabbed up the monogrammed terry cloth robe and paper slippers the hotel had so graciously provided, and rang for the cute little gilded elevator, which took her to the spa on the Palace’s second floor.
The reception area was a Moorish temple done in tiles of turquoise and maroon. Behind the desk the receptionist wore a platinum beehive and rhinestone cat eye glasses and called her Honey. She took Sam’s room number and pointed her through the pink curtains, straight back to the twenties. The waiting room sported wooden ceiling fans, walls of spanky clean white tile and gray marble, and mazelike floors of pink and white octagons.
Kitty threw herself at Sam from a scalloped green metal lawn chair. “Oooooooh, I am so glad to see you!”
The two old friends kissed cheeks and hugged. The top of the five-foot-two Kitty’s strawberry blond head tucked neatly under Sam’s chin. She said, “I know. I almost died without your smart mouth running in my ear the past twenty-four hours.” And that was true. The visit with Olive had been great, but nothing beat old friends.
“Speaking of dying. I don’t know why you didn’t fly. Did it rain all the way? I was just sure you were roadkill by now. You all agitated, driving eighty miles an hour.”
“I never topped seventy-five,” Sam lied. She was famous for her speeding tickets, and her impatience. “The driving was good, I needed to work off some nervous energy.”
He Was Her Man Page 2
