Our building management doesn’t believe in such unnecessary expenses as hallway lights. Only the emergency bulbs at either end of the corridors provide a faint illumination, enough to fumble your keys into your lock. As I got off the elevator I could see a dim shape outlined against the wall across from my office. I don’t get much walk-in business—most of my corporate clients prefer that I come to them. It’s one of the reasons I can run my business from such dismal surroundings.
If someone wanted to shoot me, this was the perfect opportunity. I thought about racing for the stairwell and fetching help, but Tom Czarnik, the building super, was waiting for a chance to prove me an unfit tenant. And getting the cops would take so much time that my visitor would probably be long gone before they got there.
And the real truth, V.I., is that you can’t stand asking people for help. This cold thought came to me even as I was trotting down the hall, moving from side to side and hunching my shoulders to minimize my size. When I came up to the shadow figure I gave a little gasp of laughter, release from my fears—Zerlina Ramsay was waiting for me.
“I didn’t know if you was ever coming in here, girl. I’ve been here since eight this morning.” It was a comment more than a complaint.
“I’ve been under the weather,” I said, wrestling clumsily with the keys in my gloves hands. When I finally turned the right one in the lock the door opened slowly—a week’s accumulation of mail was blocking it. I scooped it up and held the door open for Mrs. Ramsay.
“You could have called me at home if you needed me— I’d have been happy to go see you.”
Under my office lights her skin color looked healthier than when she’d been in the hospital. Her dour hostess apparently was looking after her well.
“Didn’t want to do that. I didn’t know who you lived with, whether they’d let you talk to me.” She lowered herself carefully into my utilitarian guest chair. “Anyway, I didn’t want Maisie to hear me on the phone to you.”
I dumped the mail on my desk and swiveled in the desk chair to face her. My desk faces the window with the guest chairs behind it so that a steel barrier won’t intimidate visitors.
“I heard on the news you’d been hurt in that fire last week. Across from the Indiana Arms, wasn’t it?” She nodded to herself and I waited patiently for her to continue. “Maisie says leave you to yourself—you got Cerise in trouble, leastways your aunt did, let you get yourself out by yourself.”
I didn’t feel responsible for Cerise’s death, but I also didn’t see what purpose arguing about it with her would serve. Anyway, she could well be right about Elena, at least partially right.
“it seemed to me the two of them had some scheme going,” I ventured. “I thought maybe they wanted to pretend Katterina had died so they could collect a big award from the insurance company.”
“You could be right.” She sighed unhappily. “You could be right. Blaming you doesn’t take away the pain of having a child like that, one that uses heroin and crack and God knows what-all else, and steals and lies. It’s just easier to blame you than lie in bed asking myself what I should of done different.”
“Elena’s no prize, either,” I offered. “But my dad was her brother and they didn’t make ′em any better than him.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t bring her up. If I hadn’t a had to work so hard, be gone all the time—” She broke herself off. “No use talking about it now. It’s not why I came up here. Took me three buses too.”
After a brooding silence in which her full lips disappeared into a narrow slit in her face, she said, “It’s no news to you that that aunt of yours, that Elena, likes to tell a story or two.”
She waited for my agreement before continuing. “So she claims she saw someone talking to Jim Tancredi a few weeks before the fire, and then she came over to my room the night the place burned down telling me he’d been there again.”
She smiled in embarrassment. “You gotta understand, the kind of life we lead, any new face is excitement. Maybe you wouldn’t of been interested, but I was. And that was when she saw I had my little granddaughter with me, Cerise and Otis dropped her off, you know, and she gets real righteous about how no children can be in the building and she’ll talk to Tancredi about it, so I give her the price of a bottle and she goes off, but I figure I’d better get our little princess over to Maisie. With an alkie like Elena you can’t trust her to keep her mouth shut just because she says she will.”
When she looked at me defensively I grunted agreement—knew that chapter and verse on Elena too well to argue the point. “What did she say about the man she’d seen? Black, white, young, old?”
She shook her head regretfully. “He was white, I’m pretty sure of that, even though she didn’t say it in so many words. But she said he had the most gorgeous eyes, that was her expression, and I can’t see her using it about a black man.”