by Craig Rice
“I can’t say for sure if I know him or not,” Mother said. “I don’t know who it could be. When Louise told me he had no face I didn’t believe her.”
“Louise?” the sheriff asked.
“That’s my daughter,” Mother said. “Louis is her real name. Gypsy is a stage name, a burlesque stage name.”
The sheriff nodded in sympathy at Mother’s inflection of the word burlesque.
“I cried for days when she first went into that awful theater …” Mother started crying again at the very thought of it. She leaned her head on the sheriff’s chest and let herself go.
Biff looked at me and winked. “While she was crying, though,” he said, “she was eating, which was a damn sight more than when they were doing that broken-down vaudeville act of theirs.”
The sheriff began to pat Mother’s tousled head. Then he caught himself. With a quick glance to see if we had been watching him, he pulled his hand away.
“You’re a brave little woman,” he said to Mother. “Burying that body all by yourself. That took real courage.”
Mother stopped sobbing. She brushed a fat tear from her cheek. “A mother’s love, you know,” she said. She swayed a little at that, and the sheriff put out his arm again. Mother naturally swayed right into it.
The sheriff had a look of deep concern on his face as he looked down at her.
“I’m afraid I’m getting a little faint,” Mother whispered.
Biff looked from Gee Gee to me. We all knew what Mother could go through without getting faint.
“I think you should go back to the trailer,” the sheriff said.
“No,” Mother said with a great effort. “My duty is here, with my child.” She braced herself and threw back her head bravely. With a quick, almost birdlike motion she reached for a square of white linen the sheriff held in his hand.
The sheriff wasn’t birdlike but he was quicker. He put the handkerchief back into his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “We found this in the grave, and it might be a clue. There may be a laundry mark or something on it.”
He handed Mother his own handkerchief, and she dabbed at her dry eyes. Then she looked at him innocently.
“You mean you can tell things by laundry marks?” she asked. Her eyes were too wide and too innocent.
I would have given plenty to get a good look at that handkerchief. When Mother’s eyes get that wide and that innocent, she is up to something. And when Mother is up to something, it’s a cue to watch out.
The sheriff began telling her how important every detail was. “Especially in a murder case,” he added slowly. “I know what you all have been through, and believe me I’d rather cut off my right arm than have to put all these questions to you, but I’m the sheriff and I just have to. This ain’t like our regular murders. We always know right off the bat who kills who, why they do it, when they do it, and how they do it. We almost know before they do it. This is different. These two murdered men are strangers to me. You folks are strangers to me. I have to know everything.”
“Why, of course,” Mother said. “What would you like to know first?”
“I’d like to know who this corpse is.”
We all stared down at the dead man at our feet. Gee Gee turned her head away first. A gurgling noise came from her throat.
“You know him?” the sheriff asked quickly.
Gee Gee shook her head wildly. Her teeth chattered. “No—no,” she said.
Mother moved toward her calmly. “You’ve been drinking too much,” she said in a motherly tone. “That’s what makes you shake so.” She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to Gee Gee.
I found myself staring at the pocket. It was empty. I remembered Mother hiding a small package in her pocket when we left the trailer. The package was gone.
Mother smiled at Gee Gee. Then she turned around and smiled at me. Her eyes were very blue. There wasn’t a trace of worry in them. She glanced at the sheriff’s back through the corner of her eye, then she winked at me.
Her mouth framed the words, “Leave it to me.”
I tried to smile back, but it was too much for me. If I could only have some idea of what Mother planned on doing, I could feel more reassured, but Mother never knew herself until after she had started the ball rolling. By then it was always too late.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mother was the first one to hear the truck.
“Listen!” she said.
We listened. There was a loud knocking. I knew the bearings were burned out before I saw it. And after one quick glance I knew there was more than that wrong with the open-staked-body truck. Ysleta must have prided herself on the museum quality of her vehicles. First the sheriff’s car, now this! It had once been painted green, an uncomfortable green. Lettering on the sides read: COAL—WOOD—ICE. The front door was held shut with a piece of rope. There were patches of adhesive tape running crisscross over the windshield. That, I decided, was to keep the thing from falling in the driver’s lap. Instead of four mudguards, there was one. It was hanging noisily to the truck by the grace of a shred of wire. The collector’s item stopped in a cloud of dust within a few feet of us, and three men jumped down from the front seat.
I thought I recognized one of them until he came closer. Then I knew I had never seen him before, but I could tell by the black bag he carried that he was a doctor. He said hello to the sheriff. Then he walked over to the grave and looked down at the corpse.
“First one this year, eh, Hank?” he said to the sheriff.
He knelt down and opened the dead man’s coat. The ragged tear in the lining caught his attention.
“Stranger,” he said almost to himself.
“How long would you say he’s been dead?” the sheriff asked.
“Hard to tell in this weather,” the doctor replied. “Twenty-four hours maybe. I can tell better when I get him opened up.”
Gee Gee let out a sickish gasp, and the doctor looked at her.
“You find him?” he asked.
“No.” Mother replied placidly. “I found the body. It was in our bathtub.”
“Not this one, Mother. It was the other one that was in our bathtub. Remember?”
The doctor raised one black eyebrow. He glanced at the sheriff questioningly.
“Actors,” the sheriff said, as though that explained everything. “Living in a trailer at Restful Grove. They knew the corpse in the first, In fact, this little woman here buried it.”
Mother smiled as though she were taking bows at the Met. The smiles were wasted on the doctor.
He beckoned the two men who had arrived with him. They brought over a large piece of canvas and rolled the body up in it. They tossed the bundle into the back of the truck and climbed in next to it. The sheriff and the doctor got into the front seat.
“Drop me at the bend,” the sheriff said to the doctor. “I’ll pick up my car there. See you folks later,” he added to Biff and me. With Mother it was a little different. “Get some rest, Mrs. Lee,” he said. “When you feel better, maybe we’ll have a little talk.”
Mother waved sadly as the truck drove away. Then she turned to me.
“Well, that’s over,” she said in a businesslike tone. “I told you I’d fix everything, didn’t I?”
The unbelievable part of it was that Mother really thought she had fixed everything. The bodies were out of our hands, and that is as far as Mother’s mind could travel in one direction.
As we walked towards the trailer I asked Mother about the package.
“What package, Louise?” Mother said.
Biff and Gee Gee were walking ahead of us. I lowered my voice. The package was too small to be another body, but I still didn’t like the way Mother was evading the question.
The package you put into your apron pocket,” I whispered. “Where is it now?”
Mother stopped and stared at me. “Do you feel all right, Louise?” she asked. “I really think sometimes that you
aren’t as bright as you might be. Package? I never had a package.”
In her own way Mother had convinced herself that she had nothing in her pocket when she walked toward the grave. There was nothing I could do about it. Nothing but pray, that is.
I prayed and Mother hummed.
She found seven four-leaf clovers on the way to the trailer. She was in a happy mood because of it. She kept humming too loudly for me to get a word in edgewise.
I wanted to ask her about the handkerchief; why she wanted it. I wondered if the sheriff noticed she had one of her own when she asked him for his. I wondered what was in the package Mother had forgotten about. I wondered if there was a drink left in the bottle. Most of all, I wondered that. I wanted one or two, maybe three or four, and I wanted them right away.
Mamie had set the table, and the teakettle was singing away when we arrived at the trailer. Gee Gee left us at the door. She said she was going to rest for a while. Corny had taken up all the resting room as usual, but Mamie settled the situation nicely.
“Get up, you lazy lummox,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Neither could Biff. Corny not only got up; he left the trailer. With a blanket under his arm he stomped away to a hammock near the shower house.
Mamie was still mumbling when she joined us under the lean-to tent. “I won’t take any of his lip, that I won’t.” She looked at Mother and her mood changed quickly. “You poor dear,” she said sympathetically. “Here, let me fix you a nice cup of tea. It’ll relax you.”
Mother allowed herself to be placed in a camp chair. She smiled wanly at Mamie, who puttered around getting the can of milk and the sugar bowl.
“I couldn’t help but hear Louise on the phone,” Mamie said. “It must have been an awful shock. Just imagine, a dead body in your own trailer. Well, I always say, you never know what’s liable to happen next. The way the world is today …”
Mandy looked up from his Racing Form. “Well, one thing sure. They can’t blame that on Roosevelt.”
“Can’t blame what?” Biff asked sharply.
“Alabaster coming in last,” Mandy replied. “What didja think?”
Biff sighed deeply. So did I, for that matter. Sooner or later everyone would have to know about the corpse, but for the time being I was just as pleased to have it later. It was the sheriff’s job to tell them anyway, I reasoned.
Mandy got up to leave, and Biff gave him six dollars.
“Across the board on Black Night in the sixth at Rockingham,” Biff said.
A trailerite was taking the bets. I think Mandy could have found a bookie on the Sahara desert. He waved to Mamie. “Wish me luck, sweetheart,” he said.
Mamie wore one of Mother’s gingham dresses. As she moved about it flopped around her thin hips. Mother wore low necks becaue her throat was full and lovely. Mamie’s neck needed something to cover it. The white organdy ruffle that looked so crisp and dainty on Mother was grotesque on poor Mrs. Smith.
Biff must have been thinking the same thing.
“When we go into town for groceries, you come with us, Mamie,” he said. “We gotta get you some dresses. Can’t have the ingenue of the layout going around in hand-me-downs.”
Mamie turned her head away. I was sure she was crying.
“You’re all so wonderful to me,” she sobbed. She hurried into the trailer, and Biff drank his tea silently. After a moment he glanced up from the steaming cup.
“Hell’s bells, I didn’t mean to make her cry. I only …”
“I know, honey.”
Mamie opened the screen door and called to Mother. Her voice was light and gay. “Dearie! Make some room on the table. I have a surprise for you.”
Mother moved the tea things listlessly. She seemed to be thinking of something else, something that worried her. Even when Mamie placed the baking dish in front of her, Mother remained pensive. The dish was full of golden-brown biscuits.
Biff gave them a triple take.
“I thought they’d go good with the tea,” Mamie said. “I had an awful time with the oven, though. Kept burning on the bottom.” She lifted a biscuit and felt its weight, first in one hand, then the other. “I do hope they aren’t heavy,” she said.
It was the first time I knew we had an oven. Our meals had been sketchy. Beans, hamburgers, hot dogs, then back to beans again. We hadn’t made a career of the eating business.
From the expression on Biff’s face I decided there was something in that “The-way-to-a-man’s-heart” dialogue. If biscuits would make his eyes sparkle like that, he was going to have biscuits if I had to make them myself.
When he was buttering his sixth, I noticed the line of laundry. On a rope stretched from the tent to a tree, four sheer nighties waved invitingly in the breeze. A pair of lacy panties, men’s socks, my new nylons, and a pair of men’s shorts, lavender ones.
Mamie, watching me, spoke up quickly. “I did the dainty things first. Tomorrow I’m getting at the shirts and the heavy stuff.”
My first reaction was one of resentment. I didn’t like having a stranger doing my laundry. Then I felt ashamed and grateful. I hate doing laundry myself.
Dimples’ voice rose petulantly from the trailer. She couldn’t find her eyebrow tweezers. “They were right here on the stove,” she said.
“You pull out one more hair,” Gee Gee said, “and you’ll be balder’n a bat.”
Mamie rushed into the trailer. She closed the screen door carefully.
“I put all the make-up things in this drawer,” she said. “It’ll take me a little while to learn what belongs to who, but …”
As her voice trailed off I felt Biff looking at me.
“Did I call her an ingenue?” he said softly. “I shoulda called her the leading lady.”
He was right. Instead of worrying how crowded we were, I was thinking how nice that our family was larger by one.
Biff ate the last biscuit carefully.
“This is what I call eating high off the hog,” he said as he swallowed it in two bites.
Mother sipped her tea. She lit a cubeb and blew out the smoke in tight little gasps.
“You know,” she said slowly, “I was just thinking.” She took another puff from her asthma cigarette and let us worry for a moment. Mother’s thinking could be troublesome at times.
“I didn’t want to tell the sheriff until I spoke with you,” she said. “I’m not sure I should even tell you.” The last was directed at Biff: “The way you keep getting things mixed up all the time. I don’t feel that I should, well, trust you.”
I knew then that whatever Mother had been thinking, it wasn’t good. I prepared myself for the worst, but her next words stunned me.
“I think that handkerchief the sheriff had in the hat was Cliff’s.”
Biff gulped.
“I saw the laundry mark,” Mother said. “I remember it from when we sent out that bundle in San Diego. Remember how I happened to send it out marked Lee by mistake?”
Hardly by mistake, I thought. Mother had just been protecting my billing. Even on the laundry lists I had to headline. At the time we thought it was amusing when the dry cleaning and the laundry were all marked Mr. G. R. Lee. When the neighbors began calling Biff Mr. Lee, we stopped laughing.
“There was something else, too,” Mother said.
Biff leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. I tried to brace myself, too, but that old feeling tightened across my chest.
“But,” Mother added mysteriously, “because of your big mouth I’m not going to tell you what it is.” She leaned over her teacup and stared at the matted leaves.”
“Gypsy,” she said.
I knew what was coming. When Mother called me Gypsy she either wanted me to lay out the cards or read the tea leaves. I was in no mood for making like a fortune-teller. I set my jaw firmly. I had every intention of saying no.
Mother poked around in her teacup with a pinky. “I think I see something interesting,” she said.
I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair.
“Of course, I can’t read it,” Mother said, “but it certainly looks like a gun to me.”
In spite of my intentions I was dying to get at the cup. Ever since I had predicted the death of Lolita La Verne at the Old Opera Theater I was convinced I was the white-haired girl of the oracle racket.
“Well, if that isn’t funny!” Mother clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Just as plain as day I see the sheriff’s hat, the way it goes up high in back and comes to a point, and everything. It’s uncanny, that’s what it is, uncanny.”
“Like the hotel without any bathrooms,” Biff mumbled.
I shot him a quick glance, and he went back to his tea.
Mother turned her cup upside down on the saucer. She spun the cup three times to the right, then three times to the left.
“Did you make a wish?” I asked.
Mother nodded. She was very serious as she handed me the cup.
I didn’t see the sheriff’s hat. I did see something that could be interpreted as a gun. That is, if they make a gun without a handle. The only guns I was acquainted with were the kind used in sharpshooter acts. The gun in the cup was quite different.
“I see a journey,” I said. With my fortunetelling I usually start off with a journey. In show business you can’t go wrong seeing a journey.
“There’s a letter or a legal document, a tall man, and a—a marriage.”
I looked up in the cup again. It was the first time I had seen a marriage in the tea leaves. Two straight lines side by side. I turned the cup around and looked again. No matter which way I read it, there was a marriage in my mother’s cup.
“A marriage?” Mother looked more serious than ever. “See if you can find any initials.”
There was one letter near the edge. It was a large D. I didn’t associate it with the marriage. It was too far from the two straight lines. I had an uncomfortable feeling that the letter D meant danger. I handed the cup back to Mother and went into the trailer.
It took me a moment to get used to gloom after the late-afternoon sunlight. The living room was empty. Mamie and Dimples were talking to Gee Gee in the bedroom. She sat on the foot of the bed, a Turkish towel around her shoulders. Her red hair was combed flat against her head.
