by John Farris
“Did you ever know Stan?”
“I knew him. A long time ago.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t get along,” she said.
“How did you get along with him?”
She finished the cigarette and tucked it into the dashboard ashtray. “I liked him,” she said simply. “I still like him.”
Castile’s southernmost suburbs began to cluster beside the wide highway and traffic slowed. At Balmar I cut across town to the Mulloy Freeway and went into the city by way of the airport. Diane gave me the address of a clinic on Shrader Boulevard. I left her and Aimee there, and drove downtown to the Sun-Express building.
Chapter Ten
In the file room of the Sun-Express I found follow-up stories on the fire. One of them told me the lone survivor was a six-year-old named Carla Kennedy. She was the oldest of the three children. No mention was made of how she escaped the fire. The little girl had been badly burned and was recovering in Good Shepherd Hospital. None of the stories mentioned any relatives of the Kennedys.
The four clippings about the fire that Macy had received had been taken from the noon edition of the Castile Sun, dated May 19, 1932. The issues of the newspaper were preserved on microfilm.
At Good Shepherd Hospital I spent three quarters of an hour looking through boxes of old ledgers and records before I found out that Carla Kennedy had been discharged from the hospital thirty-one days after the fire in the care of an uncle, Victor Clare. There was an address, so faded it couldn’t be read. The child’s medical record was stored somewhere else, so I didn’t bother looking for it. Next stop: Southern Bell.
There were three Clares in the ’32 telephone directory. V. E. Clare lived at 6906 Monessen. I looked up the street on a city map.
On my way to Victor Clare’s address I went by the block where the tailor Kennedy had been burned out. Most of an old neighborhood shopping center had been razed in favor of modern apartments. There was a drive-in near the former location of the shop, half a block of asphalt chopped up into rectangles by yellow guide lines for parking, with a circular barbecue shack in the center. On a hot night you could probably smell the place half a mile downwind. Girl carhops in sandals, chartreuse Bermudas and perky little overseas caps leaned into the shade afforded by a tired awning and lifted one foot and then the other away from the slow sizzle of the asphalt. So that was progress. I drove on.
The Monessen address was a narrow pink stucco apartment house with two stories of screened porches across the front supported by flaked white columns. The place looked like last year’s birthday cake. I parked in front and went up to the door. There was a small bicycle parked in the middle of the yellow lawn and a ’49 Ford halfway down the drive that ended in a sagging garage at the rear of the place. I went inside. There was a door to the left in the small foyer and a flight of stairs with worn rubber matting that led steeply to the second floor. Two mailboxes gave me the names Matlock and Torrance. No Clare.
I looked up the steps and sighed. Halfway up there was a shallow depression in the plaster, as if the upstairs tenant paused in his journey up the steps each evening to beat his head against the wall. I reached out and touched the doorbell button of the downstairs apartment.
The door was opened presently by a girl about five feet tall wearing pale blue jeans and a man’s handkerchief tied around her forehead. She held an infant in one small arm. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
She smiled up at me. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Matlock?”
“Ye-es.” She sort of blushed at the thought that she was Mrs. Matlock.
“I’m trying to find out about a man who used to live here. A Mr. Clare. It was about twenty-five years ago.”
Mrs. Matlock frowned slightly. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. I wasn’t even born then.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Oh, no. About a year.”
“Do you remember who had the apartment before you?”
“Some people named Gruen. Like the watch. They lived here since before the Second World War.”
“I see. Uh — the people upstairs. Torrance? Do you know how long they’ve—”
The baby gurgled comfortably. Mrs. Matlock stood patiently, holding the weight of him on one hip. “They’ve only lived here about four months. Before then Frank’s — Mr. Matlock’s — grandmother lived alone upstairs. She lived here for a long time.”
“Do you know where I might get in touch with Mrs. Matlock?”
“Oh, you couldn’t. I mean, she died. About six months ago. Ye gads, the phone. I’ll get rid of whoever it is.” She thrust the baby at me. “Here, you hold — do you know how to hold?”
I took the baby and showed her I knew how to hold. She scampered off to the phone. She was back in a minute. “Thanks, I’ll take him. C’mon, Stevie.” She heaved him gently to her shoulder. “Woof, he’s getting heavy,” she said. “You see, Frank and I own the apartment. His grandmother gave it to us when we got married. Said we’d need a place, we were just starting out, and she just wanted a roof over her head. A place to sit until she died, she used to say. She was kind of funny. Then she did die. After that we let the Torrances move in. They’re about our age. We play bridge every Wednesday.” She looked at me expectantly.
“I — thank you for giving me so much of your time, Mrs. Matlock.”
“That’s all right. You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Mallory. Pete Mallory.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Mr. Mallory.”
I said goodbye and helped her shut the door. Outside I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. The rest of the block consisted of small houses, except for a used-furniture store toward the Kelvin Boulevard intersection and a drugstore across the street from that.
I tried the house next door on the right. On the porch two small boys were drawing on the floor with chalk. A dog bared his teeth at me and backed under a chair at the same time. A plump white-haired woman was using a vacuum cleaner in the living room. Without turning off the vacuum or stopping work, she put across to me that she had never heard of Victor Clare.
Across the street a thin tired-looking man sat on the porch, his long brown hair waving in the stream of air from a fan about a foot from his face. He was reading a racing sheet and making marks in some kind of personal code on a pad of scratch paper. He gave me the time it took him to light a fresh cigarette. He managed to light it and keep a hand over the scratch pad at the same time. It was quite a feat.
He didn’t know Victor Clare. His wife didn’t know Victor Clare. They had lived in the house about ten years. He didn’t remember the name of the man they had bought the house from. I wouldn’t want him to look it up, would I? I told him not to bother.
It took me thirty minutes to get the same answer at the other houses on the street. By that time all the neighbors had an eye on me as I walked along the street. To give them time to forget it and to make sure I didn’t miss any bets, I went to the used-furniture store.
A little bell above the door went off when I shoved it open. It was hot inside. The air smelled as if no one had been breathing it lately. There was a small path across the scuffed floor to a pair of curtains with a two-inch space between them. The rest of the floor was crowded with indifferent furniture.
“You wanted to buy something?” a tough female voice said from beyond the curtains.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to talk to someone.”
“Come on back,” the voice invited.
It was even hotter at the back of the store. Part of the floor was concrete and there was a small brick oven against one wall. Tall thin windows filtered light through the dirty crusty glass. There were shelves everywhere, stacked with hundreds of little clay figures of soldiers, children dressed in costumes from a dozen countries, animals, characters from fairy tales. On a large table about three and a half feet high were boxes of modeling clay, cans of paint and glazing compound, stacks of books and
magazines, tools to aid in shaping the figures. Two long-necked lamps at each end of the table provided most of the light.
A large fat woman with olive skin and bluish gray hair neatly waved on her round skull worked at the table, her fingers squeezing and kneading clay. She wore a black dress buttoned close to her chin and spreading amply over her length of fat, ending a few inches above her ankles. She had sharp eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, and jabbed them at me when I came through the curtains. I saw that she had been watching the store through the curtains with the aid of a small mirror on the table. A huge fan on the floor a dozen feet behind her didn’t disturb the steamy air much. I was sweating before I’d taken half a dozen steps. Apparently she was firing some of the figures in the oven.
“What could I do for you?” she said, her fingers never stopping their work.
The heat made me feel weak in the stomach. “I’ve been looking for a man named Victor Clare. He used to live down the street, at Sixty-nine-o-six, but nobody there has heard of him.”
“What do you want with him?”
I named a fictitious lawyer that I was representing. “He’s come into a little money. We’d like to find him and make the disposition.”
“He died,” she said. “Heart attack. About Thirty-three, it was.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. I hesitated. “There was a little girl who lived with him. Carla Kennedy. He took care of her after her parents were killed in a fire.”
Her fingers continued to work at the clay until a figure began to emerge. I was beginning to think she hadn’t understood me.
“I remember the child,” she said then. “I remember when she came to live with him. He was her uncle, I believe.”
“What did the girl look like?”
She took off her glasses, wiped them on a handkerchief. “What insurance company did you say you were with?”
“Lawyer,” I corrected. She wasn’t believing a word of it.
“She was a very pretty child,” the woman said. “I remember that.”
“Do you remember what color hair she had?”
“I never knew. Most of it was burned off. Sort of brownish, I think. She didn’t live in the neighborhood long, after her uncle died.”
Her busy fingers finished the rough outline of her current figurine. She held it up for me. “There. How’s that?”
“Fine. What happened to the girl after that?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t say.” She put down the clay, scraped bits of it from her hands with a thin, filelike blade. She stood up, holding on to the table for support. She wasn’t much taller standing up. She went to a shelf nearby and took down one of the figures.
“I have one here I think you’d like,” she said, bringing it with her and lifting it toward me. It was a little Southern girl in a bell-shaped hoop skirt. I turned the glazed statuette in my hands, looking at it from all angles. “What’s the price?”
“Twenty dollars.” Her sharp eyes were almost ashamed.
I looked around the dreary little store. “That’s pretty steep. What goes with the figure for the twenty dollars?”
“I think I can find out where Carla Kennedy is for you.” Her eyes prodded me. “I don’t get around so good any more. It’ll take a little time.”
“How much time?”
She dug around in a pocket of the shapeless black dress, and her fingers came out holding a scrap of paper. She had to sit down from the effort of her search. She held out the paper to me. There was a phone number written on it.
“Call me tomorrow night about seven. If the girl’s still in town I’ll get in touch with her.”
“Twenty dollars,” I said sorrowfully.
“Well,” she said defensively, looking at the statuette, “I’m probably saving you a lot of time.”
I nodded and reached into my hip pocket for my wallet.
Chapter Eleven
I memorized the phone number, Seminole 4-3278, as I walked slowly back to where I had parked the Buick earlier that morning. It was close to noon. I sidestepped a small boy wheeling a tricycle around the sidewalk, opened the door and slid into the car. The boy stopped pedaling and watched me from the sidewalk with round serious eyes.
I wadded up the slip of paper and put it in the ashtray, got out the key and stuck it in the ignition.
“Did he fix yoah cah?” the boy said suddenly in a shrill voice. It startled me.
“What?”
He stared at me, mouth open. His face needed washing. “Da man fix yoah cah,” he said clearly.
“This car?”
He nodded, rode the tricycle in a furious circle, stopped, stared at me again.
“When?”
He pointed up the street. “Jus’ left.”
I looked at the key in the ignition, frowned at it. I withdrew it carefully and put it in my pocket, then got out of the Buick, walked around it and lifted the hood. In a minute or so I found the gimmick, unwired it from the starter and pulled it tenderly away from the motor. Three sticks of dynamite wired together composed the guts of the homemade starter bomb. If I had turned the key in the ignition, the Buick would have looked as though it had been dropped into the middle of the street from an airplane. What I would have looked like was too sickening to think about.
I put the thing in the trunk, wrapping it in an old inner tube and sticking it into a corner where it wouldn’t bounce around. The little boy was still close by. He had saved his own life as well as mine by speaking out. He had a pleased smile on his face.
“He fix yoah cah.”
“He sure did,” I said. I had to sit down. I opened the door of the Buick next to the sidewalk and sat inside, my feet on the pavement.
“Come here a minute, son,” I said.
He backpedaled cautiously. “Ma said not to.”
“Okay, then. Stay there. Did you watch this man fix my car?” He nodded.
“What did he look like? Was he as big as I am?” He nodded again.
“Bigger?” He looked uncertain.
“Came in a car?” Nod.
“Was it a big car, like this one?” Not sure.
“What color?” Blue.
“What was he wearing? Like I’ve got on, a suit?”
He studied this. “Ov’alls,” he said.
Overalls. I tried to think what else I could ask him that he might have paid attention to. License number? Ha-ha. I was too upset to think it through. I wanted to get in the car and drive it right back to Orange Bay. A sudden thought came to me.
“Did he have on a hat? A blue hat?” The head went from side to side, slowly. Well, that was crazy, anyway.
Down the street a woman yelled hoarsely, “Ronniieeee!” We both jumped. He looked around, aimed the tricycle in that direction and pedaled off.
That left me alone on the lazy noon street. A breath of air touched my hot forehead. I wondered if any of the neighbors had noticed the phony mechanic doctoring the Buick, decided it wasn’t worth asking. I got under the wheel, put the key in the ignition gingerly and winced when I turned it, forgetting to step on the gas.
“Oh, Elaine,” I said under my breath. “Elaine, Elaine, Elaine.” I drove away from there. Ten minutes later I felt the first satisfying edge of anger and my stomach had stopped jumping. I parked in front of a drugstore. I had a very vague idea and nothing else to do but track it down.
I found the number I wanted and a fresh young voice answered right away. “Stan’s Restaurant.” I asked her where Stan was. She didn’t know. He usually came in for lunch but today he must have gone home to eat. I asked where home was. “I can’t give out that information,” she said coldly. I hung up.
Just for the hell of it I looked through the phone book and there it was. Maxine, Stanley, 1901 Jacaranda. I went outside to the Buick, dug out the city map again and found Jacaranda. It was in the Lake Alena section, a block from the golf course that rimmed the west side of the lake.
In fifteen minutes I was there. It was a nice two-s
tory house of peach-colored stucco, with a little Mexican balcony above the front entrance, and a big side porch.
There was no car parked in front and I didn’t see a drive, so I decided the garage could be reached only from the rear. I rang the doorbell.
“You want something?” a soft voice said behind me.
I turned and looked at a big Negro with elegantly graying hair and magnificent shoulders. He was wearing levis, a T shirt and a bandana around his throat. He carried a pair of hedge clippers.
“I was looking for Stan,” I said pleasantly.
The hedge clippers went chop-chop. “He’s not here,” he said in an unfriendly tone.
“When would he be likely to get here?”
“I wouldn’t know that,” the man said. “I just work here.”
The front door opened. I looked at a girl in red toreador pants and a bare-midriff blouse. She had lots of soft dark-red hair with streaks in it like hot flame, high cheekbones, cozy blue eyes. She had a near-perfect figure and the clothing she liked made you instantly familiar with every good line of it. Her breasts were almost outsized. She stood with one hand on a stuck-out hip, the other on the doorframe.
“Hello,” she said. She looked past me at the gardener. “Who’s this, Bradley?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said in his dignified voice. “He was looking for Mr. Maxine.”
She looked at me. “Stan’s not here. He was, but he left just a few minutes ago.” She smiled. “Could I help?”
“I don’t—”
“Come on in anyway,” she invited, turning to let me see the profile. She stood straight, belly flattened a little too much, as if she were holding it in. I could see the rounded edge of her rib cage.
I went past her into the house. It was very cool inside. The living room was wide and deep and shady, decorated and planned by an expert to seem as casual as a chew of tobacco. There was a patio beyond wide French doors, with gaudy lawn furniture.
“I’m Gerry,” she said, sitting on the edge of the sofa. She was barefoot. “Are you a friend of Stan’s?”
