“Ten-thirty? What do you think this is, the Ritz? I close up shop—” Again she cut herself off. “Oh, what difference does it make? I usually stay up until one in the morning looking at the damned tube, anyway. Come on by.”
When I got back to my table, Lisa brought me fresh coffee. It pays to be a regular.
Chapter 28 - Creeping Up on a Plant
I walked up the dark, narrow staircase behind Mrs. Polter, my feet tripping on the torn linoleum. In deference to the remembered smell I’d brought my own sheets as well as towels, but memory couldn’t compete with the reality of grease and stale sweat. A cheap motel would have been ten times cleaner and more private.
Mrs. Polter’s arms brushed the walls of the stairwell. She stopped frequently to catch her breath. After bumping into her bulk on her first rest I kept a good three steps between us.
“Okay, honey, this is it. Like I said, no cooking in the rooms; the wiring won’t stand it. No smoking in the rooms either. No loud radios or TVs. None of that kind of stuff. You can help yourself to breakfast any time between seven a.m. and noon. You’ll find the kitchen easy enough—it’s at the end of the hall downstairs. Try not to hog the bathroom in the morning—guys gotta shave before they go to work. Here’s a key to the front door-—you go and lose it, you pay to put in a new lock.”
I nodded solemnly and made an ostentatious show of tying it to one of my belt loops. She had put up quite a fight about letting me have a key. When I told her the choice was between that and my rousing her in the middle of the night, she started to demand that I stay elsewhere. In mid-fight she’d broken off and glared at me, then abruptly agreed to the key. It was the third time she’d voluntarily overridden a major objection to my presence. I was here against both our better judgments—that certainly gave us a common ground for conversation.
She turned on the naked forty-watt bulb with obvious reluctance. To save money on electricity she moved as much as possible in the dark. She hovered in the doorway, eyeing my suitcase, which had a number lock.
“You want me to tell you the combination?” I asked brightly. “Or would you like to figure it out for yourself?”
At that she muttered darkly and heaved her bulk out of the entrance. When I heard her slow tread back down the stairs, I undid the lock and surveyed the contents. Except for refill cartridges for my gun there was nothing in there she couldn’t see, nothing that revealed my address or my income. My change of underwear was sober white cotton, not my prized silks. I’d also brought a can of bathroom cleanser and a rag so I could scrub down the sink enough to stand to brush my teeth in it. Let her make of that what she would.
I scooped up the cartridges and stuffed them in my jacket pockets. They could stay in the Impala’s glove compartment for the time being. Whipping the rank sheets from the thin mattress, I stuffed them under the bed and put my own on in their place. It seemed faintly amusing to me that someone of my slovenly habits should have invested so much energy lately in cleaning other women’s houses.
The room sported an ancient plywood bureau lined with papers that dated to 1966. Fascinated, I read part of an article on Martin Luther King’s speech at Soldier Field. I remembered that speech: I’d been one of the one hundred thousand people who came to hear him.
Tonight wasn’t the right time for nostalgia. I pulled my eyes from the grimy page and slid a hand around the drawers to see if Mitch might have left some revealing document behind. All I came away with was a black smudge from the accumulated grit. I decided to leave my clothes—really just a clean T-shirt to go with the underwear—in the suitcase.
I scrutinized the room for possible hiding places, pulling back pieces of loose linoleum, peering in the hems of the frail window shades. None of them seemed suitable for concealing anything bigger than a Kleenex. The small stack of papers Mitch had considered important enough to take around with him must have been the limit of his sacred possessions. And those were gone. To his son, or a facsimile thereof.
When I finished my survey I left the suitcase unlocked. I knew Mrs. Polter would be up here pawing through it as soon as I was gone; I didn’t want her to spring the lock to get at the inside. The can of Comet and the rag I left on the floor.
There were four guest rooms on the floor. Pale light poked feebly underneath one door and a radio, tuned to a Spanish station, played softly. Someone was snoring loudly behind the door of a second, but the third seemed empty. Maybe it was just desperation for cash that prompted Mrs. Polter to let me stay—she’d demanded another twenty on top of what I’d paid her for Mitch as soon as I came up the front steps.
My landlady was watching television in the living room when I came down the stairs. The big color console was tuned to pro wrestling. The light coming from the screen far outdid the miserable efforts of the only lamp in the room.
Mrs. Polter sensed my approach over the screaming fans on the screen and turned to look at me. “You taking off, honey?” She didn’t bother to lower the volume.