“What did your father do?”
“My daddy played the trumpet. He was always walking out on us. But then he would come back. And it was the most wonderful thing. Just when we thought that we would never ever see him again, the door would kick open and there he would be, in all his glory. He would have these presents from faraway places. Like, once he got me this hairbrush from Kansas. I was so in love with that brush. I took it with me everywhere that I went. I sang into it for hours.”
“How marvelous.”
“It was! It didn’t matter that we had to live in this tiny apartment with bugs creeping around under the wallpaper, or that we were hungry all the time, or that my mother made us scrub floors. That’s all you get in life—a childhood. And you get a mommy, and if you’re real lucky, you get to have a daddy. And that time is filled with all these feelings of love, even if you get the worst parents in the world. And then as an adult you always have to go around trying to find fake ways to get that feeling. You have to do the dirtiest, most lowlife things to find that feeling. That feeling is always in the strangest of places.”
Who was this philosopher? Pierrot wondered.
“You hungry? Want to come back to my apartment? I’m going to make stew.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s a recipe my grandma taught me.”
“All right. I’m actually hungry.”
“My name’s Coco, by the way. You can trust me.”
? ? ?
THEY STOPPED AT A STORE so that Coco could get the ingredients for stew. She came out with a paper bag with some onions and a turnip it in.
“Is that all you need?” Pierrot asked.
Pierrot had never had anyone make him their grandma’s special homemade stew, but he knew it had to have more ingredients than what Coco had haphazardly stuffed into the bag.
“I don’t know. The owner gets on my nerves. He’s so in love with me. Everyone’s in love with me around here. But you can trust me. Right?”
“Right?” Pierrot answered hesitantly.
Pierrot felt very wary of anyone who insisted that they were trustworthy. People who really were trustworthy believed the attribute to be implicit and the assumed, normal way to be. Why was she feeling guilty?
“Would you like to maybe go to a movie with me?”
“Not right now. Let’s get up to my place and start on this stew. It’s really the most important thing.”
Yes, thought Pierrot. She possesses all the traits of a lovely spy sent by McMahon. But so what if she had been sent to ruin his life? So be it, he thought. He wanted his life to be ruined.
They stopped at the window in the lobby. An old lady with blue hair and dressed in a man’s coat handed Coco a key with a pink ribbon on it. There were a lot of stairs up to Coco’s room in the skinny Desire Hotel. It surprised Pierrot. The building hadn’t seemed so tall to him from the outside. Every time they got to a landing, he was sure they must have reached the top floor, but then there was yet another level.
An artist must live in one of the apartments, he concluded, because the walls of the stairwell were covered in oil paintings. They were all of different sunsets and were quite arresting. There was one that was just of a group of cumulus clouds. The others were of the sky being shocked by pink and yellow and orange streaks.
“There are a lot of stairs in this building,” Pierrot commented.
“If you’re an old person, you just stop going out. You just stay up on the higher floor for eternity.”
? ? ?
THEY FINALLY ARRIVED at the top floor. Coco opened the door to her room and Pierrot followed her in. There was nothing on the walls and, in the center of the room, a large bed whose mattress caved in the middle. Coco put the paper bag down on the counter in the small kitchenette, then rolled over the bed as a shortcut to the window. She swung open the blinds.
? ? ?
THE DETECTIVE SAT in an apartment in the building across the alley. He pulled a yellow armchair with a pattern of pink roses up to the window. He took his camera out of a medical bag with a broken clasp that had belonged to his father. He put a book, a copy of David Copperfield, on the radiator, placed the camera on it and parted the green curtains.
? ? ?
PIERROT WAS STANDING at the end of the bed, and Coco came up to him. They were practically nose to nose. She turned around and leaned her forehead over in a slight bow, as an indication that she wanted him to help remove her clothes. As Pierrot unzipped Coco’s dress at the back, the zipper got stuck on her lace undershirt. This took a lot of time to untangle, and Coco kept yelling at him to watch out because he was going to tear the best dress she had.
“Man oh man, would you watch it, buster,” she yelled.
However, in the photo the private investigator took, she appeared to be moaning in ecstasy.