“Here are some more friends for you, Gladys,” the neighbor said, getting up. “I’m going to go home for a while, but I’ll bring some supper over to you later.”
“You don’t have to do that, Judy,” Mrs. Mohr said in the thread of a voice. “Cindy here can take care of me.”
Cindy, Kerry, Kim—all those cute, girlish names parents love to bestow on their daughters, which don’t suit us when we’re middle-aged and grief-stricken. I thanked my mother’s memory for her fierce correction of anyone who called me Vicky.
When Judy left I moved over to Mrs. Mohr’s side. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, Mrs. Mohr, and this is Mr. Contreras, who used to work with your husband. I’m so sorry about his death. And sorry we have to bother you.”
Mrs. Mohr looked at me apathetically. “That’s all right. It doesn’t matter, really. I just wanted to know what the two of them talked about this morning. It seemed like afterwards he was angry and upset, and I hate to have to remember him like that.”
“It looks as though you have a lot to remember him by,” I said, indicating the room and the pool beyond with a sweep of my hand. “He seems to have been a wonderful provider.”
“It was when he retired,” Mrs. Mohr explained. “He worked hard all his life and earned himself a good pension. Young people complain nowadays. Like all those niggers, they just want something for nothing. They don’t understand you have to work hard, the way Eddie and I did, to earn the nice things in life.”
“Yes, indeed,” I said enthusiastically. “I know Mr. Contreras here, who worked with Eddie for—was it thirty years?—would love to put a pool in our backyard, but our co-op board won’t let him.”
“Come on, doll,” Mr. Contreras said indignantly. “You know I don’t want to do anything like that. And even if I did, I don’t have the money for it.”
“You don’t?” I said, reproachful. “I thought you worked hard all your life, just like Eddie Mohr. I know you said you could afford a car if you wanted one, although not necessarily a Buick Riviera along with an Oldsmobile.”
A shade of alarm crossed Mrs. Mohr’s face. “Eddie was the president of the local for a long time. He did a lot for them at Diamond Head, and he got a special—special agreement when he retired. We didn’t want to say anything to any of the other men on the floor, because we knew it might not seem fair. We only could afford all this when he retired. They just finished work on the room here and the kitchen two months ago. But there was never anything dishonest about it. Eddie was a very honest man. He was with the Knights of Columbus and he was on the parish council. You can ask anyone.”
“Of course.” I sat in the chair Judy had vacated and patted Mrs. Mohr’s hand in a soothing way, wondering if I was being as big a scab as I felt. “What kinds of special things did he do for them at Diamond Head?”
She shook her head. “Eddie was a decent man. He left his work at work and never bothered me with it. When we were starting out, when it was the two of us with Cindy and her brothers, I had to work too. I baked cakes at Davison’s. It’s too bad we couldn’t have had some of düs money back then.”
“It’s only because the neighborhood went down so much that Dad could afford to do this,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Lots of houses standing empty. He could have moved away. He should have moved away. But he wanted to stay here because he grew up here, so he bought the lot behind us and added the pool. He was only helping the neighborhood and then they had to go and shoot him.”
In the distance we heard the doorbell ring. Cindy Johnson moved off to answer it, patting her matted hair without seeming to feel it.
Tears welled in Mrs. Mohr’s large eyes. She looked past me to Mr. Contreras. “What did he say to you? Or you to him? After he hung up he went back to his den—we turned the old kitchen into a den for him when we put the new one on last winter—and called some people. He wouldn’t tell me what the problem was, just went out and left me and I never saw him again. What did you say to him?”
Despite the air-conditioning, Mr. Contreras was wiping sweat from his neck, but he answered manfully. “Him and me—we were never very close when we was working. He hung with a different crowd, you know how that goes. But I heard from one of the boys that he was giving a lot of money to a charity. I never heard of the outfit, but Vic here has some friends who played the piano or violin or something at one of their benefits. I told him we wanted to come talk to him about it. I don’t know why it got him so upset, and that’s a fact.”
“What did he say to you?” Mrs. Mohr asked painfully.
“He thanked me. Thanked me for calling him in advance, I guess was how he put it. If I’d known… I sure wish I hadn’t made that call.”
“You think he went out to meet someone?” I asked Mrs. Mohr.