"Uh-huh." She scanned the dialogue quickly, trying to get a sense of who these people were from what they were saying. The cab-driver was easy; she quickly formed a mental picture of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners reruns they showed on Channel 18 in the afternoons. Parry was a little harder-generic hero, she supposed, comes in a white can. Oh, well; it was no big deal either way. She cleared her throat and began, quickly forgetting that she was standing on a busy streetcorner with a wrapped painting under her arm, unaware of the curious glances she and Lefferts were drawing.
""Well, it's funny," the driver said.
"From faces I can tell what people think. I can tell what they do. Sometimes I can even tell who they are... you, for instance."
""All right, me. What about me?"
"'You're a guy with troubles."
"I don't have a trouble in the world," Parry said.
""Don't tell me, brother," the driver said.
"I know. I know people. I'll tell you something else. Your trouble is women."
""Strike one. I'm happily married."" Suddenly, just like that, she had a voice for Parry: he was James Woods, nervous and high-strung, but with a brittle sense of humor. This delighted her and she went on, warming to the story now, seeing a scene from a movie that had never been made inside her head-Jackie Gleason and James Woods sparring in a cab that was racing through the streets of some anonymous city after dark.
""Call it a two-base hit. You're not married. But you used to be, and it wasn't happy."
""Oh, I get it. You were there. You were hiding in the closet all the time."
"The driver said, "I'll tell you about her. She wasn't easy to get along with. She wanted things. The more she got, the more she wanted. And she always got what she wanted. That's the picture."" Rosie had reached the bottom of the page. Feeling a strange chill up her back, she silently handed the book back to Lefferts, who now looked happy enough to hug himself.
"Your voice is absolutely wonderful!" he told her.
"Low but not drony, melodious and very clear, with no definable accent-I knew all that at once, but voice alone means very little. You can read, though! You can actually read!"
"Of course I can read," Rosie said. She didn't know whether to be amused or exasperated. "do I look like I was raised by wolves?"
"No, of course not, but often even very good readers aren't able to read aloud-even if they don't actually stumble over the words, they have very little in the way of expression. And dialogue is much tougher than narration... the acid test, one might say. But I heard two different people. I actually heard them!"
"Yes, so did I. Mr Lefferts, I really have to go now. I-"
He reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder as she started to turn away. A woman with a bit more experience of the world would have known an audition, even one on a streetcorner, for what it was and consequently would not have been entirely surprised by what Lefferts said next. Rosie, however, was stunned to temporary silence when he cleared his throat and offered her a job.
6
At the moment Rob Lefferts was listening to his fugitive wife read on a streetcorner, Norman Daniels was sitting in his small office cubicle on the fourth floor of police headquarters with his feet up on his desk and his hands laced behind his head. It was the first time in years that it had been possible for him to put his feet up; under ordinary circumstances, his desk was heaped high with forms, fast-food wrappers, half-written reports, departmental circulars, memos, and other assorted trash. Norman was not the sort of man who picks up after himself without thinking about it (in just five weeks the house which Rosie kept pin-neat across all the years had come to look quite a bit like Miami after Hurricane Andrew), and usually his office reflected this, but now it looked positively austere. He had spent most of the day cleaning it out, taking three large plastic garbage bags full of swill down to the waste-disposal site in the basement, not wanting to leave the job to the nigger women who came in to clean between midnight and six on weekday mornings. What was left to niggers didn't get done-this was a lesson Norman's father had taught him, and it was a true lesson. There was one basic fact which the politicians and the do-gooders either could not or would not understand: niggers didn't understand work. It was their African temperament. Norman ran his gaze slowly across the top of his desk, upon which nothing now rested but his feet and his phone, then shifted his eyes to the wall on his right. For years this had been papered with want-sheets, hot-sheets, lab results, and takeout menus-not to mention his calendar with pending court-dates noted in red-but now it was completely bare. He finished his visual tour by noting the stack of cardboard liquor cartons by the door. As he did so, he reflected how unpredictable life was. He had a temper, and he would have been the first to admit it. That his temper had a way of getting him in trouble and keeping him in trouble was also something he would have freely admitted. And if, a year ago, he had been granted a vision of his office as it was today, he would have drawn a simple conclusion from it: his temper had finally gotten him into a jam he couldn't wiggle out of, and he had been canned. Either he had finally piled up enough reprimands in his jacket to warrant dismissal under departmental rules, or he had been caught really hurting someone, as he supposed he had really hurt the little spick, Ramon Sanders. The idea that it mattered if a queerboy like Ramon got hurt a little was ridiculous, of course-Saint Anthony he was not-but you had to abide by the rules of the game... or at least not be caught breaking them. It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn't understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it. But he was not being canned. He was moving, that was all. Moving from this shitty little cubicle which had been home since the first year of the Bush Presidency. Moving into a real office, where the walls went all the way up to the ceiling and came all the way down to the floor. Not canned; promoted. It made him think of a Chuck Berry song, one that went C'est la vie, it goes to show you never can tell. The bust had happened, the big one, and things couldn't have gone better for him if he'd written the script himself. An almost unbelievable transmutation had taken place: his ass had turned to gold, at least around here. It had been a city-wide crack ring, the sort of combine you never get whole and complete... except this time he had. Everything had fallen into place; it had been like rolling a dozen straight sevens at a crap-table in Atlantic City and doubling your money every time. His team had ended up arresting over twenty people, half a dozen of them really big bugs, and the busts were righteous-not so much as a whiff of entrapment. The D.A. was probably reaching heights of orgasm unmatched since cornholing his cocker spaniel back in junior high school. Norman, who had once believed he might end up being prosecuted by that geeky little f**k if he couldn't manage to put a checkrein on his temper, had become the D.A.'s fair-haired boy. Chuck Berry had been right: you never could tell.
"The Coolerator was jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale," Norman sang, and smiled. It was a cheerful smile, one that made most people want to smile back at him, but it would have chilled Rosie's skin and made her frantically wish to be invisible. She thought of it as Norman's biting smile. A very good spring on top, a very good spring indeed, but underneath it had been a very bad spring. A totally shitty spring, to be exact, and Rose was the reason why. He had expected to settle her hash long before now, but he hadn't. Somehow Rose was still out there. Still out there somewhere. He had gone to Portside on the very same day he had interrogated his good friend Ramon in the park across from the station. He had gone with a picture of Rose, but it hadn't been much help. When he mentioned the sunglasses and the bright red scarf (valuable details he had found in the transcript of Ramon Sanders's original interrogation), one of Continental's two daytime ticket-sellers had hollered Bingo. The only problem was that the ticket-seller couldn't remember what her destination had been, and there was no way to check the records, because there were no records. She had paid cash for her ticket and checked no baggage. Continental's schedule had offered three possibilities, but Norman thought the third-a bus which had departed on the southern route at 1:45p.m.-was unlikely. She wouldn't have wanted to hang around that long. That left two other choices: a city two hundred and fifty miles away and another, larger city in the heart of the midwest. He had then made what he was slowly coming to believe had been a mistake, one which had cost him at least two weeks; he had assumed that she wouldn't want to go too far from home, from the area where she'd grown up-not a scared little mouse like her. But now- Norman's palms were covered with a faint lacework of semicircular white scars. They had been made by his fingernails, but their real source was deep inside his head, an oven which had been running at broil for most of his life.
"You better be scared," he murmured.
"And if you're not now, I guarantee you will be soon." Yes. He had to have her. Without Rose, everything that had happened this spring-the glamor bust, the good press, the reporters who had stunned him by asking respectful questions for a change, even the promotion-meant nothing. The women he had slept with since Rose had left meant nothing, either. What mattered was she had left him. What mattered more was he hadn't had the slightest clue she meant to do it. And what mattered most was she had taken his bank card. She had only used it once, and for a paltry three hundred and fifty dollars, but that wasn't the point. The point was that she had taken what was his, she had forgotten who was the meanest motherfucker in the jungle, and for that she would have to pay. The price would be high, too. High. He'd strangled one of the women he'd been with since Rose had left. Choked her, then dumped her behind a grain-storage tower on the west side of the lake. Was he supposed to blame that one on his temper, too? He didn't know, how was that for nuts? For right out to lunch? All he knew was he had picked the woman out of the strolling meat-market down on Fremont Street, a little brunette honey in fawn-colored hotpants with these big Daisy Mae tits poking out the front of her halter. He didn't really see how much she looked like Rose (or so he told himself now, and so he perhaps really believed) until he was shagging her in the back of his current duty-car, an anonymous four-year-old Chevy. What had happened was she turned her head and the lights around the top of the nearest grain storage tower had shone on her face for a moment, shone on it in a certain way, and in that moment the whore was Rose, the bitch who had walked out on him without even leaving a note, without leaving so much as one f**king word, and before he knew what he was doing he had the halter wrapped around the whore's neck and the whore's tongue was sticking out of her mouth and the whore's eyes were bulging out of their sockets like glass marbles. And the worst thing about it was that once she was dead, the whore hadn't looked like Rose at all. Well, he hadn't panicked... but then, why would he? It hadn't been the first time, after all. Had Rose known that? Sensed that? Was that why she had run? Because she was afraid he might- "don't be an ass**le," he muttered, and closed his eyes. A bad idea. What he saw was what he all too often saw in his dreams lately: the green ATM card from Merchant's Bank, grown to an enormous size and floating in the blackness like a currency-colored dirigible. He opened his eyes again in a hurry. His hands hurt. He unrolled his fingers and observed the welling cuts in his palms with no surprise. He was accustomed to the stigmata of his temper, and he knew how to deal with it: by reestablishing control. That meant thinking and planning, and those things began with review. He had called the police in the closer of the two cities, had identified himself, and then had identified Rose as the prime suspect in a big-money bank-card scam (the card was the worst thing of all, and it never really left his mind anymore. He gave her name as Rose McClendon, feeling sure she would have gone back to her maiden name. If it turned out she hadn't, he would simply pass off as coincidence the fact that the suspect and the investigating officer shared the same name. It had been known to happen. And it was Daniels they were talking about, not Trzewski or Beauschatz. He had also faxed the cops side-by-side pictures of Rose. One was a photo of her sitting on the back steps, taken by Roy Foster, a cop friend of his, last August. It wasn't very good-it showed how much lard she'd put on since hitting the big three-oh, for one thing-but it was black and white and showed her facial features with reasonable clarity. The other was a police artist's conception (Al Kelly, one talented sonofabitch, had done it on his own time, at Norman's request) of the same woman, only with a scarf over her head. The cops in that other city, the closer city, had asked all the right questions and gone to all the right places-the homeless shelters, the transient hotels, the halfway houses where you could sometimes get a look at the current guest-list, if you knew who and how to ask-with no result. Norman himself had made as many calls as he'd had time for, hunting with ever-increasing frustration for some sort of paper trail. He even paid for a faxed list of the city's newest driver's license applicants, with no result. The idea that she might escape him entirely, escape her just punishment for what she had done (especially for daring to take the bank card), still hadn't crossed his mind, but he now reluctantly came to the conclusion that she could have gone to that other city after all, that she could have been so afraid of him that two hundred and fifty miles just wasn't far enough. Not that eight hundred miles would be, a fact she would soon learn. In the meantime, he had been sitting here long enough. It was time to find a dolly or a janitor's cart and start moving his crap into his new office two floors up. He swung his feet off the desk, and as he did, the telephone rang. He picked it up.
"Is this Inspector Daniels?" the voice on the other end asked.
"Yes it is," he replied, thinking (with no great pleasure) Detective Inspector First Grade Daniels, as a matter of fact.
"Oliver Robbins here." Robbins. Robbins. The name was familiar, but-"From Continental Express? I sold a bus ticket to a woman you're looking for." Daniels sat up straighter in his seat.
"Yes, Mr Robbins, I remember you very well."
"I saw you on television," Robbins said.
"It's wonderful that you caught those people. That crack is awful stuff. We see people using it in the bus station all the time, you know."
"Yes," Daniels said, allowing no trace of impatience to show in his voice.
"I'm sure you do."
"Will those people actually go to jail?"
"I think most of them will. How can I help you today?"
"Actually I'm hoping that I can help you," Robbins said. "do you remember telling me to call you if I remembered anything else? About the woman in the dark glasses and red scarf, I mean."
"Yes," Norman said. His voice was still calm and friendly, but the hand not holding the phone had rolled into a tight fist again, and the nails were digging, digging.
"Well, I didn't think I would, but something came to me this morning while I was in the shower. I've been thinking about it all day, and I'm sure I'm right. She really did say it that way." "say what what way?" he asked. His voice was still reasonable, calm-pleasant, even-but now blood was brightly visible in the creases of his closed fist. Norman opened one of the drawers of his empty desk and hung the fist over it. A little baptism on behalf of the next man to use this shitty little closet.
"You see, she didn't tell me where she wanted to go; I told her. That's probably why I couldn't remember when you asked me, Inspector Daniels, although my head for that sort of thing is usually quite good."
"I'm not getting you."
"People buying tickets usually give you their destination," Robbins said.
"Give me a round trip to Nashville," or
"One way to Lansing, please." Follow me?"
"Yes."
"This woman didn't do it that way. She didn't say the name of the place; she said the time she wanted to go. That's what I remembered this morning in the shower. She said, "I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?" As if the place she was going didn't matter, as if it only mattered that-"
"-that she go as quick as she could and get as far away as she could!" Norman exclaimed.
"Yes! Yes, of course! Thanks, Mr Robbins!"
"I'm glad I could help." Robbins sounded a bit taken aback by the burst of emotion from the other end of the line.
"This woman, you guys must really want her."
"We do," Norman said. He was once more smiling the smile which had always chilled Rosie's skin and made her want to back up against a wall to protect her kidneys.
"You bet we do. That eleven-oh-five bus, Mr Robbins-where does it go?" Robbins told him, then asked:
"Was she part of the crack-ring? The woman you're looking for?"
"No, it's a credit-card scam," Norman said, and Robbins started to reply to that-he was apparently ready to settle into a comfy little chat-but Norman dropped the phone back into the cradle, cutting him off in mid-rap. He put his feet up on the desk again. Finding a dolly and moving his crap could wait. He leaned back in the desk chair and looked at the ceiling.
"A credit-card scam, you bet," he said.
"But you know what they say about the long arm of the law." He reached out with his left hand and opened his fist, exposing the blood-smeared palm. He flexed the fingers, which were also bloody.
"Long arm of the law, bitch," he said, and suddenly began to laugh.
"Long f**king arm of the law, coming for you. You best believe it." He kept flexing his fingers, watching small drops of blood patter down to the surface of his desk, not caring, laughing, feeling fine. Things were back on track again.
7
When she got back to D amp; S, Rosie found Pam sitting in a folding chair in the basement rec room. She had a paperback in her lap, but she was watching Gert Kinshaw and a skinny little thing who had come in about ten days before-Cynthia something. Cynthia had a gaudy punk hairdo-half green, half orange-and looked as if she might weigh all of ninety pounds. There was a bulky bandage over her left ear, which her boyfriend had tried, with a fair amount of success, to tear off. She was wearing a tank-top with Peter Tosh at the center of a swirling blue-green psychedelic sunburst. NOT GONNA GIVE IT UP! the shirt proclaimed. Every time she moved, the oversized armholes of the shirt disclosed her teacup-sized br**sts and small strawberry-colored ni**les. She was panting and her face streamed with sweat, but she looked almost daffily pleased to be where she was and who she was. Gert Kinshaw was as different from Cynthia as dark from day. Rosie had never gotten it completely clear in her mind if Gert was a counsellor, a long-time resident of D amp; S, or just a friend of the court, so to speak. She showed up, stayed a few days, and then disappeared again. She often sat in the circle during therapy sessions (these ran twice a day at D amp; S, with attendance at four a week a mandatory condition for residents), but Rosie had never heard her say anything. She was tall, six feet one at least, and big-her shoulders were wide and soft and dark brown, her br**sts the size of melons, and her belly a large, pendulous pod that pooched out her size XXXL tee-shirts and hung over the sweatpants she always wore. Her hair was a jumble of frizzy braids (it was very kinky). She looked so much like one of those women you saw sitting in the laundromat, eating Twinkies and reading the latest issue of the National Enquirer, that it was easy to miss the hard flex of her biceps, the toned look of her thighs under the old gray sweatpants, and the way her big ass did not jiggle when she walked. The only time Rosie ever heard her talk much was during these rec-room seminars. Gert taught the fine art of self-defense to any and all D amp; S residents who wanted to learn. Rosie had taken a few lessons herself, and still tried to practice what Gert called Six Great Ways to Fuck Up an Asshole at least once a day. She wasn't very good at them, and couldn't imagine actually trying them on a real man-the guy with the David Crosby moustache leaning in the doorway of The Wee Nip, for instance-but she liked Gert. She particularly liked the way Gert's broad dark face changed when she was teaching, breaking out of its customary claylike immobility and taking on animation and intelligence. Becoming pretty, in fact. Rosie had once asked her what, exactly, she was teaching-was it tae kwon do, or jujitsu, or karate? Some other discipline, perhaps? Gert had just shrugged.
"A little of this and a little of that," she had said.
"Leftovers." Now the Ping-Pong table had been moved aside and the middle of the rec-room floor had been covered with gray mats. Eight or nine folding chairs had been set up along one pine-panelled wall, between the ancient stereo and the prehistoric color TV, where everything looked either pale green or pale pink. The only chair currently occupied was the one Pam was sitting on. With her book in her lap, her hair tied back with a piece of blue yarn, and her knees primly together, she looked like a wallflower at a high-school dance. Rosie sat down next to her, propping her wrapped picture against her shins. Gert, easily two hundred and seventy pounds, and Cynthia, who probably could have tipped the scales over a hundred only by wearing Georgia Giants and a fully loaded backpack, circled each other. Cynthia was panting and smiling hugely. Gert was calm and silent, slightly bent at her nonwaist, her arms held out in front of her. Rosie looked at them, both amused and uneasy. It was like watching a squirrel, or maybe a chipmunk, stalk a bear.
"I was getting worried about you," Pam said.
"The thought of a search-party had crossed my mind, actually."
"I had the most amazing afternoon. How "bout you, though? How you feeling?"
"Better. In my opinion, Midol is the answer to all the world's problems. Never mind that, what happened to you? You're glowing!" "really?" "really. So give. How come?"
"Well, let's see," Rosie said. She began to tick things off on her fingers.
"I found out my engagement ring was a fake, I swapped it for a picture-I'm going to hang it in my new place when I get it-I got offered a job..."
She paused-a calculating pause-and then added, "... And I met someone interesting." Pam looked at her with round eyes.
"You're making it up!"
"Nope. Swear to God. Don't get your water hot, though, he's sixty-five if he's a day." She was speaking of Robbie Lefferts, but the image her mind briefly presented to her was Bill Steiner, he of the blue silk vest and interesting eyes. But that was ridiculous. At this point in her life she needed love-interest like she needed lip-cancer. And besides, hadn't she decided that Steiner had to be at least seven years younger than she? Just a baby, really.
"He's the one who offered me the job. His name is Robbie Lefferts. But never mind him right now-want to see my new picture?"
"Aw, come on an do it!" Gert said from the middle of the room. She sounded both amiable and irritated.
"This ain't the school dance, sugar." The last word came out sugah. Cynthia rushed her, the tail of her oversized tank-top flapping. Gert turned sideways, took the slender girl with the tu-tone hair by the forearms, and flipped her. Cynthia went over with her heels in the air and landed on her back.
"Wheeee!" she said, and bounced back to her feet like a rubber ball.
"No, I don't want to see your picture," Pam said.
"Not unless it's of the guy. Is he really sixty-five? I doubt it!"
"Maybe older," Rosie said.
"There was another one, though. He was the one who told me that the diamond in my engagement ring was only a zirconia. Then he traded me for the picture." She paused.
"He wasn't sixty-five."
"What did he look like?"
"Hazel eyes," Rosie said, and bent over her picture.
"No more until you tell me what you think of this."
"Rosie, don't be a booger!" Rosie grinned-she had almost forgotten the pleasures of a little harmless teasing-and continued to strip off the wrapping paper with which Bill Steiner had carefully covered the first meaningful purchase of her new life.
"Okay," Gert told Cynthia, who was once more circling her. Gert bounced slowly up and down on her large brown feet. Her br**sts rose and subsided like ocean waves beneath the white tee-shirt she was wearing.
"You see how it's done, now do it. Remember, you can't flip me-a pipsqueak like you'd wind up in traction, trying to flip a truck like me-but you can help me to flip myself. You ready?" "ready-ready-Teddy," Cynthia said. Her grin widened, revealing tiny wicked white teeth. To Rosie they looked like the teeth of some small but dangerous animal: a mongoose, perhaps.
"Gertrude Kinshaw, come on down!" Gert rushed. Cynthia seized her meaty forearms, turned a flat, boyish hip into the swell of Gert's flank with a confidence Rosie knew she herself would never be able to match... and suddenly Gert was airborne, flipping over in midair, a hallucination in a white shirt and gray sweatpants. The shirt slid up to reveal the largest bra Rosie had ever seen; the beige Lycra cups looked like World War I artillery shells. When Gert hit the mats, the room shuddered.
"Yesss!" Cynthia screamed, dancing nimbly around and shaking her clasped hands over her head.
"Big mama goes down! Yessss! YESSSS! Down for the count! Down for the f**king cou-"
Smiling-a rare expression that turned her face into something rather gruesome-Gert picked Cynthia up, held her over her head for a moment with her treelike legs spread, and then began to spin her like an airplane propeller.
"Ouggghhh, I'm gonna puke!" Cynthia screamed, but she was laughing, too. She went around in a speedy blur of green-orange hair and psychedelic tank-top.
"Ouggghhh, I'm gonna EEEEJECT!"