Portland Noir

by Kevin Sampsell

  I got up to use the bathroom. No Ladies and Gents at Dots Café. Just It, Doesn’t, and Matter. I walked into Matter. The tan and white tiles on the walls gave me a weird sense of vertigo. On my way back to my booth, I passed Wilhelm. He muttered something unintelligible, adjusted those ridiculous glasses.

  A couple of drinks and a pile of spicy fries later, I was back outside, feeling too sober for the cold. Some nights after drinks at Dots, I ambled down to my secret spot on the river, sat there watching the flow of things. But that night I headed home. Little fliers picturing some missing woman were stapled to the telephone poles that marked my path. Catherine Smith, in bold letters. Grown people were always going missing in this town. A fire glowed from inside an old Victorian, the smell of smoke in the damp night. I zigzagged home through the rain, cut across the rail yard south of Powell, my shoulders hunched. I held my hood tight over my head; a feeble attempt to stay dry. As I rounded the last corner, a shadowy figure flickered into my field of vision. She was so thin, I didn’t recognize her at first, but she said my name in a whisper loud and urgent: “Ruby—”

  I was startled, took a minute to take her in. She looked like a wet Chihuahua after a flood, that cute little buzz cut I remembered all grown out now. Still, I’d have known her face anywhere. “Mustang?” I felt my chest tighten. She’d been a lover of mine back before I married Spider, but she ran off to Chicago amid a whirlwind of rumors. “My God, Mustang. What are you doing here?”

  How long has it been? Seven years? I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying or if it was just the rain on her pale face, but her mascara trailed down her cheeks like mud. She’d never worn makeup when we were together. Soft butch. I opened my mouth to speak, but I felt something hot in my throat.

  Mustang cocked her head to the side, tried to give me a meaningful look, but it was like she was staring through me, at something on the other side. “I need a place to stay. Just tonight.” Her whisper was gravel and whiskey. She moved closer, gripped my arm. Even through my hoodie, her short fingernails felt like little claws in my skin.

  I thought about Spider asleep inside. He was prone to silent jealous rages when it came to ex-lovers—and he didn’t much like unexpected guests. Anyway, I hoped he’d slept through my midnight escape. “Did you already knock on my door?” I asked Mustang.

  She shook her head, narrowed her eyes. Her thin lips quivered a little. “C’mon, Ruby. We’re family, aren’t we? Even after all these years?”

  I remembered that accusatory pout. I sighed, already defeated, and I wished I’d had another drink back at Dots. “Let me go inside first; give me ten minutes, then knock, all right?”

  When I heard her at the door a few minutes later, I pretended to be awakened from deep sleep, I pretended to be groggy, I crawled out of bed real slow, but my charade was all for the night. Spider snored like an emphysemic sailor after a night at port.

  As I led Mustang through the dark of the living room, floor boards creaking, she breathed hard. I pointed her down to the guest bed in the half-finished basement. “It’s all yours, babe.”

  She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Thank you.” I felt that tightening across my chest again, shook it off.

  Spider got up at the crack of dawn, a perverse rod of morning energy even on Sundays. He took his cold shower, headed off to work in his new Prius, none the wiser. Or so I thought.

  I lay in bed, just looking at the ceiling. I wondered, fleetingly, if Mustang’s appearance in the night had been a dream.

  When she staggered upstairs a few hours later, I was making coffee in my pajamas. I offered her a hot cup.

  She still looked bedraggled. “It’s fuckin’ cold in your basement,” she mumbled. “Where’s Spider?”

  “Are you gonna tell me what all the drama’s about?”

  She sipped her Stumptown brew, took a crumpled pack of American Spirit yellows from her hoodie pocket, lit one up. She held the pack in my direction. How long has it been since I’ve had a cigarette? I remembered the hot pulse of the nicotine patches I wore for a year. But what the hell? I reached out.

  Mustang looked down at her scuffed Converse. “I need to talk to Spider,” she said.

  “Spider?” The round of the cigarette felt strangely familiar in my mouth.

  Mustang offered me a flame.

  I leaned in, inhaled.

  Her big brown eyes brimmed with tears again as she dragged on her cigarette. The smoke she exhaled looked musty and brown. “I need a lawyer, Ruby. I might be in pretty big trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Spider was a weed lawyer. And somehow I couldn’t quite picture it—Mustang in trouble for weed? Booze had always been our drug of choice. The smoke from my cigarette burned my throat. I pretended not to feel light-headed. “You been running pot?” I raised an eyebrow. It had been itching since I’d gotten it repierced.

  Mustang gave me that accusatory pout again. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She hunched her shoulders a little. “A lawyer’s a lawyer. You can get Spider to help me. We’re family, Ruby. Aren’t we?”

  It grated on my last nerve that she kept saying that—family. But she didn’t want to talk to Spider. He’s a weed lawyer. And I knew he’d never take her on—not even for weed. My cell phone beeped from the counter. A text message from Spider: get that bitch out of my basement by the time i get home. I flashed Mustang the screen, shrugged. “Sorry, babe, you better go.”

  “Ruby—” she pleaded with me now.

  I kept smoking, silent.

  “I’ll go,” she finally said, shaking her head like she had any right to be disappointed in me. “But meet me later? When does Spider get home, anyway? Why’s he working on a Sunday?”

  He worked every day. “No telling when he’ll be back,” I admitted. “Probably not before 8.”

  “Meet me at that Italian place kitty-corner from Clinton Theater at 6,” Mustang said, straightening her back and running her fingers through her hair, gathering some of her arrogance. “I’ll explain.”

  I frowned, crushed my cigarette on a plate. Maybe I still had a soft spot for her—or maybe I was just bored—but even as I told her I wasn’t sure about my plans for the evening, I knew I’d meet her.

  I headed down to the basement to change the sheets on the guest bed. I vacuumed the carpet remnant that covered the cement floor. I spent the rest of the morning and a tip of the afternoon doing laundry, sweeping the linoleum of the kitchen, mopping it, washing dishes. When the house was clean, I scanned the fridge for dinner prospects. Spider liked to have his food ready when he got home—whether it was 7 or midnight. I usually made a lentil loaf or a tofu-spinach lasagna—something I could reheat. I tossed a salad and left it undressed.

  Early afternoon and I was already tired. I slipped an old movie into the DVD player, eased into the couch. This was how days passed now. Ever since Spider made partner at the weed firm and I decided to quit my job at the New Season’s cheese counter to focus on my artwork, I’d fallen into this dull routine. See, I couldn’t paint until the house was clean. It just didn’t feel right. But once I’d spent the morning cleaning, I hardly had the energy to mix paints or stretch canvases. By the time my movie ended, it was getting dusky outside. I clicked the remote. Sports and travel shows, mostly. Sunday-afternoon network TV.

  No art today? Spider would say when he got home. He always kind of smirked when he said that.

  No. Not today, I’d sigh.

  And then he’d check out his dinner and nod approvingly.

  When we first met, Spider seemed so dark and complicated. I’d been an out lesbian since Hosford Middle School, but Spider wooed me with shots of brandy and a penchant for poker; that long, lanky body that signaled both strength and vulnerability to me. He wore high heels on our second date. I liked the way he wasn’t afraid of his feminine side. But the truth, it turned out, was that Spider just needed someone to control.

  It had even dawned on me recently that maybe Spider didn’t much mind that I wasn’
t doing my art. For all I knew, he’d set this whole scene up on purpose. He had control issues. Ask anyone. Now he had me right where he wanted. Like a fly in a web. I wasn’t making two dimes of my own money—I couldn’t leave if I’d wanted to. I mean, sure, a girl can always leave a place, but it’s different when you’re broke and you’re not twenty anymore. It’s different when you’ve made this big deal to everyone about true love and then about quitting cheese for art. It’s not like he was abusing me.

  “No art today?” Spider had asked me one night when he got home, particularly late.

  I’d been nursing a pricey bottle of vodka. “Fuck you, Spider,” is all I said.

  He just shook his head—that same self-satisfied smirk. “Anger is the enemy of art,” he clucked. And then we just sat down to our lentil loaf and side salad.

  I clicked off the television now, threw on some makeup, grabbed my Queen Bee bag, headed up to Clinton Street.

  Marie Claire poured me a glass of Chianti.

  I looked up into her dark eyes. “What happens under the rose?” I asked her softly.

  She winked. “Stays under the rose,” she promised me.

  “Well, you remember Mustang?”

  But Mustang never showed up.

  I had my Tuscan bean soup, my penne with pesto. I ordered a Northwest by Southeast pizza to go, downed another glass of Chianti, checked the time on my cell phone, paid my bill.

  Outside, it was cold and clear. I wanted a cigarette. I squinted at the flier of the missing girl on the telephone pole on the corner. Catherine Smith. I hadn’t recognized her straight name, but now I saw the face. Birdie. A young artist. Successful in a local kind of a way—First Thursdays and Last Fridays and whatnot. Birdie. It surprised me that anyone paid enough attention to her daily life to make a flier. If you want to know the truth, Mustang cheated on me with Birdie back in the day. But to think of it now didn’t make my chest tighten and ache the way it once did. It was water under the bridge. I nodded slowly at the color Xerox, breathed in her straight name. Catherine Smith. Last seen seven days ago exactly.

  “You know her?” Marie Claire’s voice startled me. She’d stepped out the backdoor of her restaurant into the dark.

  “Acquaintance,” I said. The moon hung in the night sky like a bad piece of art.

  “I hear that investigation’s getting intense.” Marie Claire hugged herself against the cold, her voice low and steady. “The police questioned Wilhelm, the landlord who owns all those buildings down on Powell. People are saying she was last seen at Edelweiss Sausages. Talking to him.”

  Wilhelm. I nodded. Wilhelm had actually been a client of Spider’s once. Tricky case. Mostly because he‘d been so desperate to keep his name out of the press. It was one thing to get busted for running a few pounds of weed up from Hum-bolt, after all, but quite another to have all those businesses on Powell Boulevard implicated in the whole fiasco.

  “Well,” I shrugged, “I hope she’s all right.”

  Marie Claire just squinted at me, didn’t say a word before she slipped back into her restaurant.

  I eased across the street and into Dots Café.

  The waitress with the hamburger tattoo sat at a corner table, smoking American Spirit blues.

  “Hey,” I approached her real slow. “Can I borrow a cigarette?”

  She exhaled a plume into the dark, handed me one.

  I tried to sound casual: “You don’t happen to remember a girl named Mustang who usta live around here?”

  The waitress nodded. “Sure. She was just in here—I don’t know—maybe three hours ago? Looked like hell. She had these dark bruises on her upper arms. I asked if she was all right, but she seemed pretty spooked. Ran outta here.”

  I nodded my thanks, ordered an Absolute martini at the bar, threw my debit card down. The owner shook her head at me. After all these years, I still forget. Only cash or checks at Dots. I got a twenty out of the ATM. Bastards at the bank get me with their little fee every time. I headed home with my pizza. I knew Spider wouldn’t be thrilled to see takeout, but what was he gonna say?

  How about: “Why’d you let that bitch into my basement?”

  That’s what he said when he finally walked in, loosening his batik neck tie. I’d always hated that tie.

  “Jesus, Spider. She’s not a bitch. She’s an old friend. She just needed a place to crash.”

  “Well,” he shrugged, softening a little. He grabbed his glass pipe from the mantle, took a hit, and closed his eyes. “I just don’t like the way she treated you—that’s all. Anyway,” he sighed, “did you borrow my car the other day?”

  I didn’t see Mustang again that night. Or the next. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, best I could. I had a lot going on, personally. A lot of changes I could feel bubbling up inside of me. A lot that I felt on the brink of. I snuck out to Dots at midnight, sometimes made my way down to the river. Then Thursday around noon I was clicking the remote. Brenda Braxton on KGW news: a body had surfaced in the Willamette. Just downstream from Ross Island. Catherine Smith. They showed her face, that same picture from the flier. The police believed she was strangled, but they were waiting for autopsy results. They talked about her art. She’d always thought she was so special with her swift birds paintings and her ravens—like an artist named Birdie painting birds was avant-garde rather than straight-up cheesy. And now here she had to be dead to even get on the local news. Brenda Braxton said she’d gone to Evergreen.

  Brenda Braxton looked a little sad.

  I watched the story, surprised by my own lack of emotion. Lack of connection, really.

  And then just this morning I get the news about Mustang. From the cops. A detective shows up at my door, plain-clothed and questioning. “Did Mustang have something to do with that Catherine Smith thing?” I ask, feigning cluelessness. The officer shakes his head. “Her body was found this morning.”

  “Mustang’s?”

  He nods real slow.

  I invite the detective in, but he declines my invitation. He wants to stand on my doorstep. The incessant drip-drips from my eaves land right in the middle of his bald spot, but he doesn’t move. I lean into my doorframe as I tell him my story—everything I’ve just told you. Well, almost everything.

  He takes his notes, sniffles, finally slaps his little book shut, caps his pen, thanks me. As he turns, I think I hear him sigh—like he already feels defeated.

  I slink back inside, clean the house. When it starts to get dark outside, I turn the news on again. The second body in the Willamette in as many days. Just downstream from Ross Island.

  Spider comes in real late. We eat zucchini casserole by candlelight.

  “No art today?” Spider asks.

  And I shake my head. “Not today.”

  “Did you borrow the Prius yesterday?”

  “When would I borrow the Prius?” He always had that damn car with him at work. I don’t tell him about the detective or about Mustang. I just eat with him, silent. I wash the dishes while he showers. I climb into bed next to him and wait.

  As soon as he starts snoring, I’m out. I pull on my cords and my black hoodie, tiptoe across the living room and out the front door. I cut through the rail yard, cross Powell. Birdie’s picture still clings to the telephone poles that mark my path.

  As I step inside Dots, I take a look around the joint. The dark red feels like home. All the regulars sipping their usuals. I head to the bathroom, go into Matter. The tan and white check of the tiles doesn’t make me feel so unsteady tonight. I apply some lipstick in the mirror. Back out at the bar, all the hipsters and the business owners are huddled closer together than most nights—abuzz with the news. One of the kids with a bleached mullet thinks it’s a serial killer targeting lesbians. He seems impressed with his own theory, ashes his cigarette in a glass tray.

  Marie Claire shakes her head, sips her Rumba. “The two women used to be an item,” she says gravely. “It’s not random lesbians. It was either murder-suicide or a Rome
o and Juliet kind of a thing.”

  The bleach boy snickers. “You mean Juliet and Juliet?”

  No one acknowledges him.

  His hipster girlfriend breathes in my ear all sultry, “I heard they both recently joined NiftyWebFlicks.” She glares at the guy from Clinton Street Video.

  The waitress with the hamburger tattoo nods. “He’s a loose cannon, that one.”

  I can’t tell if she’s talking about the guy from Clinton Street Video or about Wilhelm, who plays pool by himself, refusing to make contact with anyone.

  The waitress shrugs, looks down at me. “Absolute martini?” She asks it like it’s a rhetorical question, but I’m ready not to have a usual anymore. “Bombay,” I tell her. “Bombay martini.”

  I tap the table as I wait, consider the theories.

  As soon as the gin hits my throat, I feel strangely distracted, inspired. My mind bends and wanders.

  Pretty soon, the regulars have changed the subject. They’re on to a new mystery: someone has stolen the little picture of Marie Claire from the bathroom in her restaurant. That picture was so cute—Marie Claire at age six or seven, her geeky cat eye glasses, her hair askew, hardly a hint of the beauty she would become. I down my last drink. Was that three? Four? I don’t even feel the cold outside as I float home, cut across the rail yard, slither in the front door and across the living room, floor boards creaking.

  In the light from the neighbor’s back porch through our bedroom window, I watch Spider as he sleeps. I don’t know if you’ll understand me when I tell you this, but there are people in this world who’ll do you wrong. No matter what Oprah says, there are people in this world you can’t forgive. There are people who, just the sight of them makes your chest go tight, your throat hot. Even when they’re sleeping, the rise and fall of their chests just fills you with this sudden panic and you think: No one will ever love me. And you think: You tricked me. And you’re right. And then that panic morphs into a quiet kind of a rage that radiates from the center of you and tingles down your arms and into your fingers. It used to frighten me, that feeling. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to make it go away.