“Be sure to give the cops the Corvette’s plates when you call, will you?” I told him. “The fellow who drives it is a detective with the Central District’s Violent Crimes Unit. The beat guys’ll enjoy razzing him about getting accused of being a pimp. If you didn’t catch the plate, it’s ‘fureous’—that’s F-U-R-E-O-U-S.” Some days I’m just more conciliatory than others.
He scowled at me with dark angry eyes, trying to decide whether I was bluffing. Hearing the license plate spelled out apparently made him decide I wasn’t. He stalked back into his apartment and slammed the door. From the south unit I could hear Peppy’s insistent whimpering as she begged to join in the fray. I ran up the stairs two at a time to avoid Mr. Contreras’s predictable harangue.
I ushered Elena and Cerise into my apartment. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Soda?”
“I’ll take a beer,” Cerise said.
“Sorry, I don’t have beer. Coffee, milk, or juice. Or I have seltzer and some Coke.”
Cerise settled on a Coke while Elena asked for some of that wonderful coffee like my ma used to make. I served up the remains of the pasta salad I’d taken to yesterday’s picnic and heated a couple of rolls. Neither woman seemed to have eaten much recently. Beyond Cerise’s asking what the queer white things in the salad were, and accepting “calamari” with a wise nod, they both ate rapidly without speaking.
“So what’s the problem that needs a detective?” I asked when they’d finished.
Cerise looked at Elena, asking her to speak for her.
“It’s her baby,” my aunt said.
In the bright light of my living room I could see Cerise wasn’t as old as her sophisticated clothes had made her look downstairs. She might have been twenty, but any legitimate bar would card her.
“Yes,” I said as encouragingly as possible.
“We think she died in the fire,” Elena said.
“Died in the fire?” I repeated stupidly.
“At the Indiana Arms,” my aunt said sharply. “Don’t gape there like a carp, Vicki. You must remember it.”
“Yes, but-you think? Don’t you know?”
I’d spoken to Cerise. She shook her head and again turned to Elena. My aunt spoke briskly, using wild hand motions and pursing her lips periodically to underscore a dramatic point.
“The whole point of an SRO, Vicki, is that it’s single resident occupancy. Single means no one else in the room with you, not even a cockroach, if you get my drift. And certainly no babies. And here’s Cerise, trying to get her life together, and she has the sweetest little baby you ever saw, fourteen months old and just starting to toddle, and what’s she supposed to do with it while she’s out hunting for work?”
Elena paused, as if waiting for an answer, but I didn’t try to interrupt the flow.
“So she leaves it with her ma, same as you would if it was you. If Gabriella was still alive, I mean, being as how she always wanted the best for you. And Cerise’s ma is just the same. Nothing too good for Cerise and she’ll risk getting thrown right out on her rear end”—-Elena smacked her own behind to emphasize the point—“if it’d help Cerise here make a decent life for the baby.”
When I didn’t say anything she repeated her last point sharply.
“Great,” I managed.
Elena beamed. “So her ma is kind of a pal of mine. We’ve knocked back a few beers together, not that I drink, you understand, nor does she, just a few beers now and then in a sociable kind of way.” She stared at me defiantly, but I didn’t challenge the statement.
“So Zerlina—that’s Cerise’s ma—is watching the baby while Cerise is out of town Wednesday night when we have the fire. Now Zerlina’s vanished—poof—and poor Cerise can’t find out if her dear little baby made it out of the building alive.”
She slapped her hands together for effect and watched me expectantly. All I could think was that it was Sunday night, almost four days since the fire—-why was Cerise surfacing only now?
“So I told her you’d help,” Elena prompted me impatiently.
“Help do what?”
“Well, Vicki—Victoria—she needs to find the poor little thing. She’s afraid it’ll get her ma in trouble if she goes to the police. You know, for keeping a baby in the room. Maybe she’d never be able to find another place. I said you were just the person for her.”
“Why has it taken this long for Cerise to miss the baby?” I demanded.
“I been out of town.” It was Cerise’s first contribution to the conversation since she’d asked about the calamari. “Otis, he the baby’s father, he took me up to the Dells. We trying to work things out, you know, I want him to marry me and make a home for me and Katterina and he don’t want to do it. So he promised me a vacation.”