One day in early October, about a week before the legal papers were to be signed to dissolve the marriage, my mother went to the restaurant where Tilton was working for a modest salary plus five percent per year of the business, which eventually he would own. She had no phone number for him, communicated only through his attorney, who was handling the divorce, and wanted to talk face-to-face one more time about the wisdom of what they were doing.
She discovered that he had been fired from that job seven months earlier, long before he had walked out on us. He had never been more than a salaried employee. Worse, his salary had been substantially higher than what he pretended when he lived with us and relied on my mother to pay the rent.
The weak spot she had for him in her heart finally healed that day, much to my relief.
As for Eve Adams, aka Fiona Cassidy, she never bothered either me or Mr. Yoshioka again that summer and early autumn. Periodically, disturbing chemical smells came from 6-C, though never for more than an hour at a time, and my friend the tailor reported them to no one but me. Not long after my mother discovered the truth about Tilton, Eve Adams moved out of 6-C.
We only learned she had gone when, a week later, a crew of workmen set about stripping off the wallpaper, taking up the rotten linoleum, and painting that apartment. In the months she had lived there, she had addressed none of the tasks that she supposedly had been brought in to complete.
When I discovered this, I tracked down Mr. Smaller, who was working again in the spider-infested basement, and I asked about the pretty lady with the purple-blue eyes. I played the crush-stricken boy, bereft that he might never again see that goddess.
Mr. Smaller wasn’t dealing with boiler sludge this time. He was filling a glass jug with some kind of smelly lubricant that poured from a tap in one of the unlabeled barrels.
He sported the usual elastic-waist khakis with racehorse-tack suspenders, but not the tank-top undershirt that completed his summer uniform. Instead, in recognition of the cooler weather, he wore a gray sweatshirt with black letters, GET OFF MY CLOUD, which had been the title of a number-one hit by the Rolling Stones almost a year earlier. The faces of the Stones were arrayed across the sweatshirt. This seemed a most unlikely garment for Mr. Smaller. He must have been fifty, not of the demographic that wore garb purchased at rock concerts. Because he never seemed to be concerned whatsoever about his appearance, I supposed that he wore whatever second-hand clothes he found at thrift shops. That GET OFF MY CLOUD sweatshirt had perhaps been thrown out by someone who no longer got a thrill from being a fan of Mick Jagger and the boys, and Mr. Smaller had bought it most likely not because he was an admirer of the Stones, but because the size and the price were right.
“She never done nothin’ in Six-C, and I never checked on her to see was she doin’ what she was gettin’ free rent for. Them pennypinchin’ suits downtown send some hippie skank up here so she’ll do a cheap job and make their sacred bottom line look good, then they got no right expectin’ me to supervise her on top of all my other damn work. I’m happy she stiffed ’em, they ain’t deserved nothin’ better, but I’m even more happy she’s outta here. She’s a weirdo, got a screw loose. We’ll see that freak on the news one day, and it ain’t gonna be ’cause she won herself some Nobel Prize. Son, I done warned you not to go moonin’ around her. You’re lucky she ain’t cut out your heart, dried it, and smoked it to get high.”
This was a Friday, after school, when ordinarily I would be in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, being encouraged by Mrs. Mary O’Toole to move from American standards and current pop to classical music, not as an ultimate destination, just to see if Mozart stirred me as much as did Duke Ellington and Claude Thornhill and Fats Domino. Before I got home from Saint Scholastica’s, Mom had left for a meeting with a talent manager, after which she would catch a cab to Slinky’s. I had come home to freshen up before going to the community center, but when I’d found the work crew from 6-C taking a cigarette break on the front stoop, my plans had changed.
After racing up to the sixth floor to verify that Eve Adams was gone, and after plunging down to the basement to see Mr. Smaller and confirm that the woman was never coming back, I went next to our apartment. Inside, I engaged both deadbolts behind me but neglected to fix the security chain to the doorplate.