“Even countesses have to pay the bills,” I explained.
“Oh,” she said.
It’s amazing how if you assert something with confidence, people just accept it.
Lou climbed far enough to poke her head and flashlight into the attic. The sounds stopped abruptly. She shone her light around and said, “There’s a small family up here.” She climbed down. “The city doesn’t do raccoon removal,” she told us. “You’re supposed to get a pest company. But if you can wait ’til I get off my shift tomorrow, I’ll come and do it for you.”
“What a helpful coincidence,” said Flora.
“More psychics,” said Lou, “should know raccoons. I’d think there’s any number of spirits that turn out to be raccoons.”
The next day I met Lou at the mansion, and she removed a female raccoon and two kits. The mother, understandably, went into snarling hysterics, and the kits stuck together in a ball of cuteness. Each one was about the size of Flora’s purse. Standing outside with Flora next to Lou’s vehicle, I asked Lou what would happen to them, and she said, “You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, no!”
“Look, they’re pests. There’s thousands of raccoons in thousands of attics across this city.”
“Oh, God, Lou.”
“Well, that’s the way it is.”
Lou told Flora she’d found a hole in one of the roof gables and she ought to get it fixed. “That maple should be trimmed back, too, because that’s where they climbed in from. Plus there’s a ton of raccoon poop up there, which oughta be removed by a competent professional.”
“OK,” said Flora.
While we were engaged in all this, the Happy Van pulled up. Apart from me, the Happy Van people were the only ones who seemed to care about Domenica. For a few years now, I’d seen their van, actually a repurposed EMT truck, tooling around north Woodward neighborhoods with the motto health and vigor for all in big letters on the side. Above that was the real name of the company, metro mobile medical services. Everybody just called it the Happy Van, though.
Flora met a cheerful, attractive woman who cantered up the steps carrying a medic-type bag.
“Vivian,” said Flora, “please tell Mom I’ll be up in a minute.”
We said goodbye to Lou and she drove off. I took the opportunity to ask Flora about her mother’s health situation.
“Well,” she said, “Mom’s getting up there, you know, and besides arthritis, her heart’s not so strong, and I think she might be running a little sugar. Vivian’s going to draw her blood and get that checked out.”
“Do you guys have a regular doctor?”
“Oh, sure, we have all the best doctors. But the Happy Van’s just so convenient for us—they’re great with the elderly, they do all the basic medical stuff and physical therapy, everything. Viv is an RN, and her husband’s a doctor. He comes around sometimes.”
“That sounds pretty good.”
“So convenient.”
----
That night I was opening a can of sardines while my potato cooked in the microwave, when my bell rang. No one just dropped by my place, an upper flat I rented from a couple of octogenarians who liked gingerbread and television.
I went down the staircase to find Lou standing there holding a small plastic crate with a towel wadded up in it.
“Can I come up?”
I read the situation instantly. “What’s that?” I asked suspiciously.
“I’ll show you. Let me come up, OK?”
I knew I was in for it, but what could I do? Lou set the box on my living-room rug and squatted next to it.
My friends had been suggesting species for months now, but I’d been steadfast in my refusal.
Lou poked the towel away with her finger. “You were so upset about the baby raccoons that I thought…you know…”
The creature looked anxious and tried to burrow under the crumpled towel. The towel was green. The creature was beige and white, with a tiny black burglar mask.
I said, “This is one of the raccoons from the Pomeroys’?”
“Yeah.”
“Lou, this is a wild animal! You said yourself they’re pests. Our neighbor across the alley when I was a kid used to shoot them when they climbed over the fence. I mean, it’s cute and everything, but I don’t think people are supposed to keep these. Are they?”
Lou sported her off-duty outfit of camo pants and checkered work shirt with rolled-up sleeves, plus her ever-present duty boots. She hiked up her belt and said, “I think there’s too many rules in this world.”
I sighed.
“You don’t have to keep it.” She moved to take the box. “The incinerator’s always running.”
“Oh, God,” I said, and she stopped.
“I’ve told you over and over I don’t want another pet. Everybody’s been trying to give me another pet, especially Billie.” My friend Billie used to rabbit-sit Todd when I needed a safe shelter for him. He fit right in with her apartment-sized, ever-shifting zoological park. She kept trying to interest me in whatever stray du jour she had on hand.
Lou and I stood in silence for a moment. Finally I asked, “What happened to the other one?”
She stared at the toes of her duty boots. “Suffice it to say the mother was not too swift.”
“What happened?”
Still looking down, Lou said, “I decided to release them, solve the problem in a better way, you know? I took all of them up to Lake Orion, but I opened the cage too close to the road. The mother picked up one baby in her mouth and set off across the road. A truck was coming.”
“Oh, no, Lou!”
She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right. “Yeah. This is the survivor.”
“So it’s a traumatized orphan.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” She unslung her shoulder bag and took out four bottles of liquid, plus a syringe-type thing with a tiny nipple on the end. “This is kitten formula. It should work. I can get you more. She’s hungry now, I think.”
“Lou, I don’t know much about raccoons, but people don’t keep them as pets.”
“Right, we’ll have to release it when it gets bigger.”
“But I can’t, like, teach it to hunt or whatever the hell they do to get their food! How’m I gonna—”
“I know a guy. Look, let’s just say I’ve never been one to follow the letter of the law all the way to Z. Just give her some of this formula every couple of hours. Warm it up first.” Lou paused and glanced around my flat, which was pretty much empty but for my books and a few pieces of secondhand furniture. “You need a little pal.”
“Oh, God.”
“By the way, you have to help her pee and poop.”
“What?”
Lou picked up the creature and flipped it belly up. “Take a Q-tip, dip it in warm water, and stimulate her here, for pee, and here, for poop. Like stroking. Their mothers lick them, you know. Don’t stop stimulating until she’s empty.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
She smiled encouragingly. “It’s only until you wean her. Maybe only another week.”
“Lou, this isn’t going to work. It just isn’t.”
Lou picked up the raccoon and placed it in my arms. I knew she would do that. As soon as the animal’s warmth penetrated my sleeve, the connection was made. The raccoon had tiny hands and surprising agility; it squirmed assertively and tried to clamber up my arm.
“Lou, you know you’re setting me up for heartbreak.”
“Oh, there’s plenty more when you need another one.”
“God damn it! This is really not what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Nothing! I had nothing in mind! I don’t want another pet!”
She looked from the raccoon to me. “Her fur is like your hair. It makes you feel good just to look at it.”
“Down, Lou.”
Although she long ago had accepted that we never would be lovers, Lou persisted in admiring
me in a puppy-dog way. She’d get sidetracked by someone else now and then, but things never worked out. We were alike in that department.
It was depressing how Lou’s compliments made me feel even plainer than usual. My looks are ordinary: brown bob, small eyes, beanpole build. What can you do? I once got a makeover at the cosmetics counter in a fancy store, and although my skin felt remarkably smooth, I didn’t recognize myself. The woman in the mirror looked like a Halloween version of Louisa May Alcott.
Lou said, “You have to name her something. How ’bout”—she brightened—“Raquel! Raquel the raccoon! That’s it!”
“I don’t know.”
She shrugged and left.
The baby raccoon seemed to cough. It lifted its tiny eyes to mine and opened its mouth.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered.
I cleaned her box and gave her some of the formula, which after one taste, she drank hungrily. I sort of wanted to bond with Raquel and sort of didn’t.
----
I spent the next morning, Thursday, doing errands and trying to make some plans for the future that were better than taking ongoing advantage of Flora and Domenica Pomeroy. The séance had been over the top, though I was proud of how I’d pulled it off, dressing up Lou, who actually—astonishingly—solved their problem. I had paid myself $500 for cracking the Case of the Missing Woolf, and $600 for the Thudding Spirits Caper, which I split with Lou. It struck me that I had gotten to know the Pomeroys rather well, but they didn’t really know me.
In the midst of all this thinking, Raquel-feeding, and Raquel-groin-stimulating, I got a call from Ricky Rosenthal over at the Journal. I got excited, thinking he had an assignment for me, but he said, “The whole city’s dead. Do you have anything going on?”
“Gosh, uh—”
“I admire your penchant for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, like police business, and I was going through my virtual Rolodex—”
“Hey,” I said, “I could write up something on the raccoon problem.”
“What raccoon problem?”
“Well, there’s thousands of raccoons in thousands of attics all across the city, and like…” I faltered.
“Like what? Are they devouring people’s houses or something?”
“Well, no, but I might be able to make something out of it.”
“Forget it. I need blood.”
“I’m sorry, Ricky. How ’bout the gangbangers? They keep shooting each—”
“We’ve got that so covered, and it never changes. There’s only so many angles you can take on This-City-Is-Eating-Itself-Alive, you know?”
“Well, you could try for some good news.”
“We’ve got interns for that.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Keep in touch.”
A minute after I hung up, my phone rang again. It was Flora.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but can you hurry over here? There’s something on the roof.”
5
When I got to the Pomeroy place, Flora was standing in the side yard gazing up at the roof, hands on her hips. For her outfit today she’d chosen a bright-yellow sundress and the kind of hulking-yet-cool Mexican sandals women wore in the 1970s. With her white-framed sunglasses, she looked ready to jump into a convertible and tear across town to the Roostertail for a martini with Frank Sinatra.
“Do you see that?” she said. “That antenna?”
“Where?”
“Next to the second peak. Look from the left.”
I squinted and just made out a short vertical rod. I couldn’t see where it was attached. “Yeah.”
“That didn’t used to be there. The roof man must have installed it.”
“Well, what could he—”
“Lillian, come on. It might be benign, but there’s a distinct possibility that it’s a listening device, or a transmitter of some sort.”
“For what?”
She took off her sunglasses and gave me a hard stare. “That is the question, isn’t it?”
“Right, well—”
“Look, he left his ladder in place overnight, it’s around back. He’s supposed to come back to finish up this afternoon, after lunchtime. Now’s our chance!”
I peered up at the roof. It was damn high up there, as it was a three-story house and all. “You want me to—”
“I’ll give you hazardous-duty pay, whatever. Write yourself a real paycheck for once. We’ve got to know what’s going on!”
I looked at her, then up at the severely sloping slate roof, with all its angles and protrusions.
She said, “Are you afraid of heights?”
“No, but—”
“Well, then?”
I hurried home and changed from my slick-soled Weejuns into my Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers. I used to wear black ones, but switched when they brought back the off-white “natural” color. I gave Raquel some formula, helped her pee, and made sure she was warm.
When I got back it was noon. If I thought about it about it too hard, I’d chicken out, so I clambered right up.
There’s a tip for you: any frightening, ridiculously dangerous task is best handled right now.
Shrubs and weeds grew thick in the beds behind the Pomeroy house, junipers and bushy cedars mostly. The roofing guy had had to stomp down some juniper branches to angle his ladder properly. He’d extended it and lashed it to the third floor eave somehow. I climbed past the kitchen window, with Flora spotting me from below, then past a blank expanse of sandstone wall on the second story. The aluminum rungs of the ladder felt cool and gritty in my hands.
As I got higher a breeze kicked up, bringing a taste of summer mugginess. I kept going, more carefully the higher I went, gaining the third floor. Most of these windows were the crank-out kind, with leaded panes in diamond shapes. I thought about how beautiful they were. This grand dwelling had been built in a time of optimism, the days of tradesmen who did meticulous work, from pouring concrete to framing walls to polishing mahogany trim. The days of craftsmen who carried their tools in canvas rolls, sharpened them often, and in whose vocabularies the phrase “Screw it—they’ll never notice” did not exist.
Suddenly a face with beady, suspicious eyes appeared in that third-floor window, right in front of me, and for a minute I thought, Hey, maybe this place is haunted after all. But no, it was Domenica’s pale countenance there behind the glass, which could have used a cleaning. She seemed to be saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. I continued up a few more rungs and made it to the roof.
The roof guy had placed nonskid boards along his work route, and though my heart surged into my mouth when I made the transition from ladder to roof, I didn’t slip. I crawled a few feet away from the edge, got my balance, and stood up.
The rooftop spread out around me like a little city, all angles and crannies. The view beyond was a rolling sea of treetops, always a surprise when you get up high in a Midwestern city. So many trees. And in old neighborhoods like this one, you always get the feeling that the trees have their own histories. I don’t know…I feel so much more like a planetary dweller when I leave street level.
The green of these treetops, though fully leafed out, still carried a hint of springtime delicacy, which would darken and toughen over the season. In the far distance I could see downtown.
I waved to Flora, who looked so small down there, and walked slowly toward the spy equipment or whatever the hell it was. Flora followed on the ground. I had to traverse quite a distance, balancing along the safety boards, the roof sloping down to my left, the drop-off maybe twelve feet away.
I came upon some materials the roof man had cached in a flat area: a few pieces of new slate, a small roll of tar paper, some sealant, and a coil of wire. The end of the coil stuck straight up like a cobra. I picked it up and held it for Flora to see. “This is it,” I called. “It’s just a coil of wire.”
“Well, what’s he going to do with it?” she shouted back.
How the he
ll would I know? “Maybe it’s supposed to hold the slate in place.” I inspected the repair work that had been done: new boards screwed down over a raccoon-sized hole in one gable. “It looks fine up here! I’m coming down!”
I took one more look at the view. Such an appealing neighborhood. I checked out the house next door, another grand mansion. Its yard was even deeper than the Pomeroys’, covered by a pretty green lawn, with trees crowding up to the back fence line. The Pomeroys’ yard was so overgrown, you could hardly see the ground from up here.
I was about to turn and make my way to the ladder when my eye caught something on the ground in the neighbor’s yard. It was a person. My pulse jumped. Something was wrong.
It was a woman—fluffy blond hair—and she was wearing gray slacks and a white blouse. She was crumpled over, and although I saw no blood, it was absolutely obvious to me, even at this distance, that she was dead.
6
I scrambled down the ladder and rushed over there, with Flora on my heels. Even though I was sure otherwise, my subconscious was like, Maybe she’s still alive and needs help. If you ever discover a fresh body, you’ll understand the shock and confusion of it.
There was no side fence between the large yards, so it only took seconds.
I knelt next to the woman. She was lying more or less in a fetal position on her right side. I steeled myself for flyblown, staring eyes, but her eyes were closed, or almost closed. Her skin had sunk around them. A purple, depressed gash extended from her hairline to cover most of her left temple. That was the only mark I saw on her.
I felt her wrist, and it was stone cold, an odd thing to say on a warm day, but that’s the way it felt.
“Is she your neighbor?” I asked Flora.
“No, I don’t know her.”
There was no purse or anything with her that I could see, unless she was lying on top of it.
I took my phone from my pocket and called 911, told the dispatcher the situation, then stood up, not knowing what to do next. I felt like I needed to guard this person somehow. The dispatcher had told me not to touch anything. Other than the body, I didn’t see anything to touch. The lawn was just an expanse of grass.
Left Field Page 3
