Women of the Mean Streets

by J. M. Redmann

  The sky was beginning to pinken beyond her kitchen window and Muriel rose to turn off the glaring kitchen light. She drank the last of her tea and rinsed the cup in the sink. Scott and Gina were apprehended two days after Irene Corrigan McManus was murdered, after Gina called the police from a convenience store outside Topeka because Scott had hit her, hard, and split her lip open for, Gina thought, no good reason. In the photograph in the Kansas papers, Gina was wearing the necklace belonging to Muriel’s grandmother. Blood was splattered down the front of her low-cut white sweater and there were flecks of it across her cleavage, like dark red freckles. Muriel had been struck by how pretty Gina was, how very young she looked. It was difficult to imagine this pretty girl holding her cigarette to the sole of Muriel’s mother’s foot and watching while her boyfriend muffled her mother’s screams. It was easier to believe such inexplicable violence of the sexy but mean-looking boy who glowered out from the page and who the papers noted had a predilection for violence, while the girl had never been in real trouble, just had never finished school past the ninth grade and had been involved in petty crimes before with boys not quite as sociopathic as this boy was. Muriel’s aunt Jane had wanted the death penalty, but the youth of the two had been discussed during plea agreements. There had been no trial. Scott and Gina had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder which, given the plea, but with the aggravating circumstance of the torture, would offer them parole within the next two decades. Depending on how they spent their years in prison. Muriel was certain Powell would die there—either by the hand of another inmate not as fragile as her mother, or because he would kill again, even behind bars. She couldn’t guess about the girl. The girl would befriend another female inmate as bad as the boys she’d been with up till now—Muriel knew this instinctively. Gina Tucci wasn’t a girl who knew how to take care of herself. She needed another person to get through her days and nights. Some things are immutable. Her mother was dead, these two had killed her, and there was no payment, really. There were pleas and bargains; she imagined her mother had pleaded and bargained before her awful death. But there had been no mercy. And there would be none now.

  Muriel hadn’t wanted to think of them ever getting out, ever visiting someone else at Christmastime.

  Muriel had flown to Kansas just as she had planned and had stood in her mother’s living room looking at the Christmas tree, holding her breath until she had to gasp for air. She thought about the time it took for her mother to perish in the dark, cold ground. She thought about what it must have been like to be in one’s grave and know it.

  Charlie had sent Sharleen and the children back to Austin, and so Irene’s son and daughter had spent a mostly silent night in their childhood home, neither even contemplating sleep, both sitting at the kitchen table taking turns holding their breath. At five in the morning, in silence, they had walked to Menninger Park and stood above the big hole, now surrounded by yellow crime tape, and looked down into the place they imagined their mother had viewed with abject terror before she was buried alive. Muriel had crouched down and touched the earth at the edge of the makeshift grave. It was hard and icy cold. She clawed a little at the earth with her bare fingers, clawed until the earth came loose in her hand, put the reddish dirt in her pocket, turned to see her brother, eyes glinting with unshed tears, looking at her with a fleeting look of horror. She looked down at her fingers; they were streaked with blood.

  *

  Muriel waits at the airport gate at Gatwick, close as she can get in these days of heightened security, for Liz to come in from customs. She runs a hand through her russet hair so like her mother’s had been and pulls her leather jacket tight around her, shifts back and forth on her feet. It is chill in the airport. It doesn’t feel like spring, even for England. A rush of people—all carrying bags and bundles and the ubiquitous striped plastic valises—pours out from behind the customs barrier. In the melee, Muriel sees Liz, small and wiry, her black hair pulled tight off her face, big silver earrings slapping against her cheeks, a small tapestry bag in her right hand.

  Liz sees Muriel and smiles, pushing a little harder through the crowd. Muriel walks right up to the gate, reaching out her arms for Liz.

  “Poor darling,” Liz murmurs into Muriel’s hair as she envelops her in her strong arms, kissing first one cheek and then the other.

  “Let’s get you home.” Liz locks her arm in Muriel’s and leads them both toward the exit.

  Through the airport windows Muriel looks out onto the suburban English landscape, out at the little tile-roofed houses linked together so much more tightly than those in Kansas. Muriel takes a deep breath and begins to count.

  *

  Later, much later, Muriel lies in the dark, Liz’s breathing soft and measured beside her. Muriel rises, walks to the window, looks out into the garden. In the dull and faded moonlight, she sees a dark hole off to the side, near a rhododendron. She squints her eyes, peers closer, her face fairly pressed against the window. In the half-light she spies a strip of gray blowing from below the shrubbery, from out of the hole she knows is there. Clouds pass over the moon and the garden is lit with silver. The shard blows again and Muriel can see pieces of flesh, red and white shreds, stuck to the tape. She opens her mouth to scream, then shuts it. Muriel presses her face hard against the glass, holds her breath until her heart slows and the window, blurred with grayish light, swims before her. She never feels the floor as she passes out, a little hiss of breath escaping her lips as she once again begins to breathe.

  Lost

  J.M. Redmann

  If I’d looked at the phone maybe I would have seen that it was a rattlesnake about to strike, but I didn’t look, didn’t even glance up from the computer screen, reached out and fumbled for the handset that even after five months, I still wasn’t accustomed to.

  I answered as I usually do when I didn’t recognize the number, “M. Knight Agency.”

  “Michele?” But I knew the voice, dry as pious parchment.

  “Aunt Greta?” I had—because I somehow imagined that my father would have wanted it—called her after Katrina. Her house hadn’t flooded; she was fine save for the inconvenience of having to be away to avoid the mail disruption, long lines in groceries and the “new element” that had come to town—men of a different skin color helping to rebuild. She didn’t ask how I’d done. I didn’t want to tell her—we could barely discuss the weather politely—how could I convey losing the shipyard and house out in the bayous where I’d grown up? It was a brief conversation. I assumed that I would only talk to her again at some required family occasion, a wedding or funeral.

  But it was her voice on the other end.

  She didn’t bother with pleasantries—perhaps thought I didn’t deserve them. Or was aware enough that her asking how I was would be hypocrisy and she wasn’t willing to inflict that on me.

  “I need a favor,” she said.

  I’d never imagined hearing those words from her, so I could think of no reply.

  She continued, “Bayard is lost. I need you to find him.” There was a tremor in her voice, the only sign of emotion, of what she was feeling. Bayard was her oldest son. From my outside perspective, they were damaged people who used each other and called it love and affection. I called it need and greed.

  I didn’t say all the things I wanted to say, from the cliché of “good riddance to bad rubbish” to my true feelings of “may he rot in hell” to the sarcastic “I’m not the lost and found. Perhaps you should check ladies’ lingerie.”

  It was six months after Katrina had washed away New Orleans; we were all rebuilding our lives, being kind because we needed kindness to survive.

  I merely asked, “Lost? How?”

  It was a sign of how lonely she was, the words poured out. Perhaps she thought she was talking to the phone in her hand, not to me. He had come with her after the storm had passed and people were allowed back in to check on the house he had grown up in and where she lived. Bayard had insisted that although it
was all right, she couldn’t stay there, not until things were better. Aunt Greta lived in the suburbs, where it hadn’t flooded, but there was damage, loss of power. She didn’t want to be a strong woman who made her own decisions, was happy to let her son dictate what she was to do. He found her a little place around Shreveport. He stayed with her, between jobs, and came down to fix up the house. He had been gone two weeks, told her he’d be back a week ago, had called to say that he was on his way. And that was the last she had heard from him.

  She wanted me to find him, repeating the word “favor” to make it clear that this was not a paying job.

  I agreed. It got her off the phone more quickly than arguing, although one of the last things I would have ever wanted to do was to look for my disgusting, arrogant cousin. But there had been a quiver in Aunt Greta’s voice that I’d never heard before. She was alone in the world, having raised three children as self-absorbed as she was. Gus, her youngest, had moved out to Arizona years ago. Mary, her daughter, lived in Covington, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and never had time to drive over the twenty-four-mile Causeway unless she was shopping with her girlfriends or her husband was taking her out to a nice dinner in the French Quarter. Only Bayard had time to come around, mostly for a free meal, to have his laundry done, to crash when his latest girlfriend had thrown him out.

  I do a lot of missing persons cases, especially now that so many people were missing from New Orleans. Aunt Greta hadn’t asked and I hadn’t told. She was clearly hoping that he’d somehow show up and everything would be as it was before. I knew that one of two things had happened to him: He was dead or he’d skipped town. Dead was clearly an answer she didn’t want to hear, but if he’d left on his own—and cut himself off from her—that also wasn’t going to be a happy end.

  I looked at my desk. I was just finishing up the paperwork on several cases that I had closed, several others I was waiting on replies to inquiries, nothing was in the “need to do right now” category.

  Aunt Greta would call again in a day or two, expecting miracles. There were none to be had, but at least I could have some answers. I sighed, put on my jacket, and headed for the house in Metairie.

  I had lived there from the time I was ten, after my father was killed in a car wreck, until I’d left, when the clock struck midnight and I turned eighteen. Aunt Greta was cold and dutiful, Uncle Claude a blob in front of the TV, having lost too many arguments with his wife to try again, Bayard, Mary Grace, and to a lesser extent Gus, the real children, had been insistent on letting their interloper cousin know it. Bayard was the worst. The others were content to ignore me; he was five years older than I was and had uses for his young girl cousin.

  It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Instead I focused on what was outside the car’s windows, searching for signs of reconstruction or dark water marks on untouched buildings and homes. I hadn’t come this way in a while, probably several months. I’d returned in the fall, the October after the storm. Now it was spring, the trees attesting to the cycle of life, a delicate green erupting from their barren limbs. And like the trees, there was a slow rebirth of life—a water line power-washed away, trash stacked in piles by the curb, furniture being unloaded into a newly painted house.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to find at the house. Maybe Bayard wanted to take a break from his clinging mother and had shacked up there with his latest floozy. He liked them young and stacked no matter how old and stooped he was. Intellectually I knew it was possible that he had been hurt or killed, but it didn’t feel likely; he’d always been one of life’s cockroaches, able to wriggle his way to survival. Finding him holed up there, one last blast of freedom, was where I’d put my money.

  I hadn’t been here since long before Katrina. Even this un-flooded block was different, trees torn down, roofs scalped by the wind. But also familiar, the houses the same pale yellow brick, one-story ranch, far enough away from each other so secrets and anguish didn’t cross the hedges between properties.

  The house didn’t look lived in, lights off, although the power had long ago been restored here. The yard was unkempt, grass ragged, too high, weeds peeking through the azalea bushes that ringed the house. I had hoped that this would be no more than a quick drive out, a brief—very brief—exchange of me telling him to call his mother, and then it would be over. But Bayard wasn’t the frugal type; he didn’t turn off lights just because he wasn’t home.

  Even cockroaches eventually die, I told myself as I got out of my car. He was old enough and had both the genes and the lifestyle that a heart attack wasn’t out of the question. He could be decomposing on the toilet, the girlie magazine on the floor, one hand rigor mortised around his now very limp member.

  Trying to shake that image out of my head, I walked up the flagstone path.

  It couldn’t be that, I told myself; the lights would still be on, his car parked out front, if something like that had happened. It seemed that if he had been here, he had deliberately left.

  I knocked on the door. No answer and more telling, no soft sounds of anyone in the house that I could discern. People may not open the door, but they usually either try to see who it is or move away so that they can’t be seen by anyone peeking in, as I was now.

  No lights, no movement, dust visible on the side table by the couch. I started to go around to the side window to get a different view, but a police car was slowly coming down the block.

  Well, that didn’t take long, I thought, digging in my pocket for my P.I. license. Even though it was broad daylight, I must have looked like a prowler—a middle-aged woman burglar—to someone on this block.

  But the cop car cruised by me without a glance and pulled in front of a house three doors down.

  I went around to the side windows, the ones that looked into the bedrooms. If this house had a tale to tell, it would be here. But it was the same old story. Mary Grace’s old bedroom was held ready for her kids in case they came to visit, but there was dust on the toys, ones for a childhood a generation ago. Gus’s had been converted to storage, as if he would never come back, and Bayard’s was a mess, still his room, but nothing in it seemed recent, no dirty socks waiting for Aunt Greta to put in the laundry, no empty drink can waiting for her to take it to the trash, just the usual piles of junk. Her bedroom, at the back, was its usual neat and prim, not a wrinkle in the bedspread.

  I heard a loud voice from down the block, where the police car had stopped.

  “No, I’m not an idiot, I didn’t forget and leave it open.”

  I hopped over the fence into the backyard, but the windows there revealed the same scene, a house that people lived in, but no one was home and no one appeared to have been here recently.

  Only the garage had a different tale to tell.

  Aunt Greta’s car was parked there. She had mentioned that Bayard was using her car, since it was newer and in better condition than his and he was driving back and forth between Shreveport and New Orleans, about a five- or six-hour journey.

  Bayard wasn’t here, but the car he was driving was.

  The house key was still in the same hiding place it had been for the last thirty years, a fake rock that was showing signs of aging that real rocks don’t. I used it to let myself into the back door and from there went to the garage.

  The backseat of the car held the usual jumble of fast food bags that I expected from Bayard. But the front seat was relatively clean, as if he had taken everything that was of use out of the car. The front garage door was down, not something that Bayard would bother with if he was coming in and out.

  It was almost as if he didn’t need the car anymore, but didn’t want anyone to notice that it was still here.

  I relocked the back door, hopped the fence again, and headed back to my car.

  Down the block a man was in his front yard explaining something to the officer.

  “I just bought it two months ago—”

  The cop cut in, “Yes, sir, we’ll be on the lookout, but honestly, it
’s probably in a chop shop by now.” With that, he closed his notebook and headed back to his patrol car.

  The man in the yard watched him drive away, so he didn’t see me approach until I was about five feet away.

  That P.I. license came in handy after all. I held it up as I said, “Excuse me, what happened here?”

  He barely glanced at my badge, was happy enough to have someone listen to his tale of woe.

  “My car was stolen. Out of my locked garage. Cop says I probably forgot to lock it, but no way. That baby was only two months old, I was still coddling her. Washed her every Saturday. Even in football season, she got her wash.”

  “When was your car stolen?”

  “A week ago. Cops only now getting out here to take a report. Slow bastards.” He added, “Pardon my French,” as he remembered he was talking to a woman.

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “A 2006 red Porsche Boxster. Yeah, I know, go ahead and say it. Mid-life crisis. But I got the insurance money from a place we owned on the north shore. Wind. Probably a tornado. Not going to rebuild. So I got the sports car I’ve always been dreaming of. My wife even helped me pick it out—said if I’m going to be stepping out on her, might as well do it with something that won’t give me the clap or ask for a fur coat.” He shook his head ruefully.