An old woman answered Donaldson’s knock. She was fat and lumpy in a yellow housedress. Her legs were bare and mottled, her feet thrust into scuffed men’s loafers. Her gray hair was short and straight around her head, the ends uneven, cut at home probably, with dull scissors. Her face was nearly without features, fat puffing around her eyes, making them seem small and squinty.
“Morning, Mrs. Burlington,” Donaldson said. “Got a man here from Boston wants to talk with you about Donna.”
She looked at me. “You seen Donna?” she said.
“May we come in?” I said.
She stood aside. “I guess so,” she said. Her voice wasn’t very old, but it was without variation, a tired monotone, as if there were nothing worth saying.
Donaldson took off his hat and went in. I followed. The room smelled of kerosene and dogs and things I didn’t recognize. The clutter was dense. Donaldson and I found room on an old daybed and sat. Mrs. Burlington shuffled off down a corridor and returned in a moment with her husband. He was pallid and bald, a tall old man in a sleeveless undershirt and black worsted trousers with the fly open. His face had gray stubble on it, and some egg was dried in the corner of his mouth. The skin was loose on his thin white arms and wrinkled in the fold at the armpit. He poured a handful of Bond Street pipe tobacco from a can into the palm of his hand and slurped it into his mouth.
He nodded at Donaldson, who said, “Morning, Mr. Burlington.” Mrs. Burlington stood, and they both looked at Donaldson and me without moving or speaking. American Gothic.
I said, “I’m a detective. I can’t tell you where your daughter is, except that she’s well and happy. But I need to learn a little about her background. I mean her no harm, and I’m trying to help her, but the whole situation is very confidential.”
“What do you want to know?” Mrs. Burlington said.
“When is the last time you heard from her?”
Mrs. Burlington said, “We ain’t. Not since she run off.”
“No letter, no call, nothing. Not a word?”
Mrs. Burlington shook her head. The old man made no move, changed his expression not at all.
“Do you know where she went when she left here?”
“Left us a note saying she was going to New York with a fellow we never met, never heard nothing more.”
“Didn’t you look for her?”
Mrs. Burlington nodded at Donaldson, “Told T.P. here. He looked. Couldn’t find her.” A bony mongrel dog with short yellow fur and mismatched ears appeared behind Mr. Burlington. He growled at us, and Burlington turned and kicked him hard in the ribs. The dog yelped and disappeared.
“You ever hear from Tony Reece?” It was like talking to a postoperative lobotomy case. And compared to the old man, she was animated.
She shook her head. “Never seen him,” she said. The old man squirted a long stream of tobacco juice at a cardboard box of sand behind the door. He missed.
And that was it. They didn’t know anything about anything, and they didn’t care. The old man never spoke while I was there and just nodded when Donaldson said good-bye.
In the car Donaldson said, “Where to now?”
“Let’s just sit here a minute until I catch my breath.”
“They been poor all their life,” Donaldson said. “It tends to wear you out.” I nodded.
“Okay, how about Tony Reece? He got any family here?”
“Nope. Folks are both dead.” Donaldson started the engine and turned the car back toward the town hall. When we got there, he offered me his hand. “If I was you, Spenser, I’d try New York next.”
“Fun City,” I said.
11
It was sunset when the plane swung in over the water and landed at La Guardia Airport. I took the bus into the East Side terminal at Thirty-eighth Street and a cab from there to the Holiday Inn at West Fifty-seventh Street. The Wiener schnitzel had been so good in Red-ford, I thought I might as well stay with a winner.
The West Side hadn’t gotten any more fashionable since I had been there last and the hotel looked as if it belonged where it was. The lobby was so discouraging that I didn’t bother to check the dining room for Wiener schnitzel. Instead, I walked over to a Scandinavian restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street and ravaged its smorgasbord.
The next morning I made some phone calls to the New York Department of Social Services while I drank coffee in my room. When I finished I walked along Fifty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue and headed downtown. I always walk in New York. In the window of F.A.O. Schwarz was an enormous stuffed giraffe, and Brentano’s had a display of ethnic cookbooks in the window. I thought about going in and asking them if they were a branch of the Boston store but decided not to. They probably lacked my zesty sense of humor.
It was about nine forty-five when I reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned left. Four blocks east, between Third and Second avenues, was a three-story beige brick building that looked like a modified fire station. The brown metal entrance doors, up four stairs, were flanked with flagpoles at right angles to the building. A plaque under the right-hand flagpole said CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, YORKVILLE INCOME MAINTENANCE CENTER. I went in.
It was a big open room, the color a predictable green; molded plastic chairs in red, green, and blue stood three rows deep to the right of the entrance. To the left a low counter. Behind the counter a big black woman with blue-framed glasses on a chain around her neck was telling an old woman in an ankle-length dress that her check would come next week and would not come sooner. The woman protested in broken English, and the woman behind the desk said it again, louder. At the end of the counter, sitting in a folding chair, was a New York City cop, a slim black woman with badge, gun, short hair, and enormous high platform shoes. Beyond the counter the room L’d to the left, and I could see office space partitioned off. There was no one else on the floor.
Behind me, to the right of the entry, a stair led up. A handprinted sign said FACE TO FACE UPSTAIRS with an arrow. I went up. The second floor had been warrened off into cubicles where face to face could go on in privacy. The first cubicle was busy; the second was not. I knocked on the frame of the open door and went in. It was little bigger than a confessional, just a desk, a file cabinet, and a chair for the face to face. The woman at the desk was lean and young, not long out of Vassar or Bennington. She had a tanned outdoor face, with small lines around the eyes that she wasn’t supposed to get yet. She had on a white sleeveless blouse open at the neck. Her brown hair was cut short and she wore no makeup. Her face presented an expression of no-nonsense compassion that I suspected she was still working on. The sign on her desk said MS. HARRIS.
“Come in,” she said, her hands resting on the neat desk in front of her. A pencil in the right one. I was dressed for New York in my wheat-colored summer suit, dark blue shirt, and a white tie with blue and gold stripes. Would she invite me to her apartment? Maybe she thought I was another welfare case. If so, I’d have to speak with my tailor. I gave her a card; she frowned down at it for about thirty seconds and then looked up and said, “Yes?”
“Do you think I ought to have a motto on it?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A motto,” I said. “On the card. You know, like ‘We never sleep’ or maybe ‘Trouble is my business.’ Something like that.”
“Mr.”—she checked the card—“Spenser, I assume you’re joking and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I have a good deal to do and I wonder if you might tell me what you want directly?”
“Yes, ma’am. May I sit?”
“Please do.”
“Okay, I’m looking for a young woman who might have showed up here and gone on welfare about eight years ago.”
“Why do you want to find her?”
I shook my head. “It’s a reasonable question, but I can’t tell you.”
She frowned at me the way she had frowned at my card. “Why do you think we’d have information about something that far back?”
>
“Because you are a government agency. Government agencies never throw anything away because someone someday might need something to cover himself in case a question of responsibility was raised. You got welfare records for Peter Stuyvesant.”
The frown got more severe, making a groove between her eyebrows. “Why do you think this young woman was on welfare?”
“You shouldn’t frown like that,” I said. “You’ll get little premature wrinkles in the corners of your eyes.”
“I would prefer it, Mr. Spenser, if you did not attempt to personalize this contact. The condition of my eyes is not relevant to this discussion.”
“Ah, but how they sparkle when you’re angry,” I said.
She almost smiled, caught herself, and got the frown back in place. “Answer my question, please.”
“She was about eighteen; she ran away from a small midwestern town with the local bad kid, who probably ditched her after they got here. She’s a good bet to have ended up on welfare or prostitution or both. I figured that you’d have better records than Diamond Nell’s Parlor of Delight.”
The pencil in her right hand went tap-tap-tap on the desk. Maybe six taps before she heard it and stopped. “The fact of someone’s presence on welfare rolls has sometimes been used against them. Cruel as that may seem, it is a fact of life, and I hope you can understand my reticence in this matter.”
“I’m on the girl’s side,” I said.
“But I have no way to know that.”
“Just my word,” I said.
“But I don’t know if your word is good.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You don’t.”
The pencil went tap-tap-tap again. She looked at the phone. Pass the buck? She looked away. Good for her. “What is the girl’s name?”
“Donna Burlington.” I could hear a typewriter in one of the other cubicles and footsteps down another corridor. “Go ahead,” I said. “Do it. It will get done by someone. It’s only a matter of who. Me? Cops? Courts? Your boss? His boss? Why not you? Less fuss.”
She nodded her head. “Yes. You are probably right. Very well.” She got up and left the room. She had very nice legs.
It took a while. I stood in the window of the cubicle and looked down on Thirty-fourth Street and watched the people coming and going from the welfare office. It wasn’t as busy as I’d thought it would be. Nor were the people as shabby. Down the corridor a man swore rapidly in Spanish. The typewriter had stopped. The rest was silence.
Ms. Harris returned with a file folder. She sat, opened it on the desk, and read the papers in it. “Donna Burlington was on income maintenance at this office from August to November nineteen sixty-six. At the time her address was One Sixteen East Thirteenth Street. Her relationship with this office ended on November thirteenth, nineteen sixty-six, and I have no further knowledge of her.” She closed the folder and folded her hands on top of it.
I said, “Thank you very much.”
She said, “You’re welcome.”
I looked at my watch: 10:50. “Would you like to join me for an early lunch?” I said.
“No, thank you,” she said. So much for the operator down from Boston.
“Would you like to see me do a one-hand push-up?” I said.
“Certainly not,” she said. “If you have nothing more, Mr. Spenser, I have a good deal of work to do.”
“Oh, sure, okay. Thanks very much for your trouble.” She stood as I left the room. From the corridor I stuck my head back into the office and said, “Not everyone can do a one-hand push-up, you know?”
She seemed unimpressed and I left.
12
Thirteenth Street was a twenty-five-minute walk downtown and 116 was in the East Village between Second and Third. There was a group of men outside 116, leaning against the parked cars with their shirts unbuttoned, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from quart bottles. They were speaking Spanish. One Sixteen was a four-story brick house, which had long ago been painted yellow and from which the paint peeled in myriad patches. Next to it was a six-story four-unit apartment building newly done in light gray paint with the door and window frames and the fire escapes and the railing along the front steps a bright red. The beer drinkers had a portable radio that played Spanish music very loudly.
I went up the four steps to number 116 and rang the bell marked CUSTODIAN. Nothing happened, and I rang it again.
One of the beer drinkers said, “Don’t work, man. Who you want?”
“I want the manager.”
“Inside, knock on the first door.”
“Thanks.”
In the entry was an empty bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine and a sneaker without laces. Stairs led up against the left wall ahead of me, and a brief corridor went back into the building to the right of the stairs. I knocked on the first door and a woman answered the first knock.
She was tall and strongly built, olive skin and short black hair. A gray streak ran through her hair from the forehead back. She had on a man’s white shirt and cutoff jeans. Her feet were bare, and her toenails were painted a dark plum color. She looked about forty-five.
I said, “My name is Spenser. I’m a private detective from Boston, and I’m looking for a girl who lived here once about eight years ago.”
She smiled and her teeth were very white and even. “Come in,” she said. The room was large and square, and a lot of light came in through the high windows that faced out onto the street. The walls and ceiling were white, and there were red drapes at the windows and a red rug on the floor. In the middle of the room stood a big, square, thick-legged wooden table with a red linoleum top, a large bowl of fruit in the center and a high-backed wooden chair at either end. She gestured toward one of the chairs. “Coffee?” she said.
“Yes, thank you.”
I sat at the table and looked about the room while she disappeared through a bead-curtained archway to make the coffee. There was a red plush round-back Victorian sofa with mahogany arms in front of the windows and an assortment of Velázquez prints on the wall. She came back in with a carafe of coffee and two white china mugs on a round red tray.
“Cream or sugar?”
I shook my head. She poured the coffee into the cups, gave me one, and sat down at the other end of the table.
“The coffee is wonderful,” I said.
“I grind it myself,” she said. “My name is Rose Estrada. How can I help you?” There was a very small trace of another language in her speech.
I took out the picture of Linda Rabb that I’d taken at her apartment. “This is a recent picture of a girl named Donna Burlington. In nineteen sixty-six, from August to November, she lived at this address. Can you tell me anything about her?”
She thought aloud as she looked at the picture. “Nineteen sixty-six, my youngest would have been ten.… Yes, I remember her, Donna Burlington. She came from somewhere in the Midwest. She seemed very young to be alone in New York, far from home. She was with a boy for a little while, but he didn’t stay.”
“What happened to her when she left you, do you know?”
“No.”
“No forwarding address?”
“None. I remember she had no money and was behind in her rent, and I sent her down to the welfare people on Thirty-fourth Street. And then one day she gave me all the back room rent in cash and moved out.”
“Any idea where she got the money?”
“I think she was hustling.”
“Prostitute?”
She nodded. “I can’t be sure, but I know she was out often and she brought men home often and she used to spend time with a pimp named Violet.”
“Is he still around?”
“Oh sure. People like Violet are around forever.”
“Where do I find him?”
“He’s usually on Third Avenue, in front of the Casa Grande near Fifteenth.”
“What’s his full name?”
She shrugged. “Just Violet,” she said. “More coffee?”
“Thank you.” I held my cup out, and she poured from the carafe. Her hands were strong and clean, the fingernails the same plum color as her toenails. No rings. Outside I could hear the portable radio playing and occasionally the voices of the men drinking beer.
“She was a very small, thin, little girl,” Rose Estrada said. “Very scared. She didn’t want to be here, but she didn’t want to go home. She didn’t know anything about makeup or clothes. She didn’t know what to say to people. If she was turning tricks, it must have been very hard on her.”
I finished my coffee and stood. “Thank you for the coffee and for the information,” I said.
“Is she in trouble?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Nothing I can’t get her out of.”
We shook hands and I left. The street seemed hot and noisy after Rose Estrada’s apartment. I walked the half block to Third Ave and turned uptown. At the corner of Fourteenth Street a man in a covert cloth overcoat was urinating against the brick wall of a variety store. He was having trouble standing and lurched against the wall, holding his coat around him with one hand. Modesty, I thought, if you’re going to whiz on a wall, do it with modesty. A few feet downstream another man was lying on the sidewalk, knees bent, eyes closed. Drinking buddies. I looked at my watch, it was two thirty in the afternoon.
At the corner of Fifteenth Street was a bar with a fake fieldstone front below a plate glass window. The entry to the left of the window was imitation oak. A small neon sign said CASA GRANDE, BEER ON DRAFT. At the curb in front of the Casa Grande were a white Continental and a maroon Coupe de Ville with a white vinyl roof. Leaning against the Coupe de Ville was a man who’d seen too many Superfly movies. He was a black man probably six-three in his socks and about six-seven in the open-toed red platform shoes he was wearing. He was also wearing red-and-black argyle socks, black knickers, and a chain mail vest. A black Three Musketeers’ hat with an enormous red plume was tipped forward over his eyes. Subtle. All he lacked was a sign saying THE PIMP IS IN.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m looking for Violet.”
Five Classic Spenser Mysteries Page 79
