Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

She laughed. “Right, you got your period.”

“Must be.”

We put our clothes on. I got three tens from my wallet and put them on the dresser. As usual, she pretended not to notice.

“Want that drink now?”

“Uh-huh, I guess. Bourbon, if you have it.”

She didn’t. She had Scotch, and I settled for that. She poured herself a glass of milk, and we sat on the couch together and listened to the music without saying anything for a while. I felt as relaxed as if we had made love.

“Working these days, Matt?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, everybody has to work.”

“Uh-huh.”

She shook a cigarette out of her pack, and I lit it for her. “You got things on your mind,” she said. “That’s what’s the matter.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I know I’m right. Want to talk about anything?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.”

The telephone rang, and she answered it in the bedroom. When she came back I asked her if she had ever lived with a man.

“You mean like a pimp? Never have and never will.”

“I meant like a boyfriend.”

“Never. It’s a funny thing about boyfriends in this business. They always turn out to be pimps.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve known so many girls. ‘Oh, he’s not a pimp, he’s my boyfriend.’ But it always turns out that he’s between jobs, and that he makes a life’s work out of being between jobs, and she pays for everything. But he’s not a pimp, just a boyfriend. They’re very good at kidding themselves, those girls. I’m lousy at kidding myself. So I don’t even try.”

“Good for you.”

“I can’t afford boyfriends. Busy saving for my old age.”

“Real estate, right?”

“Uh-huh. Apartment houses in Queens. You can keep the stock market. I want something I can reach out and touch.”

“You’re a landlady. That’s funny.”

“Oh, I never see tenants or anything. There’s a company manages it for me.”

I wondered if it was Bowdoin Management but didn’t bother asking. She asked if I wanted to try the bedroom again. I said I didn’t.

“Not to rush you, but I’m expecting a friend in about forty minutes.”

“Sure.”

“Have another drink if you want.”

“No, it’s time I was on my way.” She walked me to the door and held my coat for me. I kissed her goodbye.

“Don’t be so long between visits next time.”

“Take care, Elaine.”

“Oh, I will.”

Friday morning came clear and crisp. I picked up an Olin rental car on Broadway and took the East Side Drive out of town. The car was a Chevrolet Malibu, a skittish little thing that had to be pampered on curves. I suppose it was economical to run.

I caught the New England Expressway up through Pelham and Larchmont and into Mamaroneck. At an Exxon station the kid who topped up the tank didn’t know where Schuyler Boulevard was. He went inside and asked the boss, who came out and gave me directions. The boss also knew the Carioca, and I had the Malibu parked in the restaurant’s lot at twenty-five minutes of twelve. I went into the cocktail lounge and sat on a vinyl stool at the front end of a black Formica bar. I ordered a cup of black coffee with a shot of bourbon in it. The coffee was bitter, left over from the night before.

The cup was still half full when I looked over and saw her standing hesitantly in the archway between the dining room and the cocktail lounge. If I hadn’t known she was Wendy Hanniford’s age, I would have guessed high by three or four years. Dark, shoulder-length hair framed an oval face. She wore dark plaid slacks and a pearl-gray sweater beneath which her large breasts were aggressively prominent. She had a large brown leather handbag over her shoulder and a cigarette in her right hand. She did not look happy to see me.

I let her come to me, and after a moment’s hesitation she did. I turned slowly to her.

“Mr. Scudder?”

“Mrs. Thal? Should we take a table?”

“I suppose so.”

The dining room was uncrowded, and the head waitress showed us to a table in back and out of the way. It was an overdecorated room, a room that tried too hard, done in someone’s idea of a flamenco motif. The color scheme involved a lot of red and black and ice blue. I had left my bitter coffee at the bar and now ordered bourbon with water back. I asked Marcia Thal if she wanted a drink.

“No, thank you. Wait a minute. Yes, I think I will have something. Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason that I know of.”

She looked past me at the waitress and ordered a whiskey sour on the rocks. Her eyes met mine, glanced away, came back again.

“I can’t say I’m happy to be here,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

“It was your idea. And you had me over a barrel, didn’t you? You must get a kick out of making people do what you want them to do.”

“I used to pull wings off flies.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” She tried to glare, and then she lost the handle of it and grinned in spite of herself. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“You’re not going to be dragged into anything, Mrs. Thal.”

“I hope not.”

“You won’t be. I’m interested in learning something about Wendy Hanniford’s life. I’m not interested in turning your life upside down.”

Our drinks arrived. She picked hers up and studied it as if she had never seen anything quite like it before. It seemed an ordinary enough whiskey sour. She took a sip, set it down, fished out the maraschino cherry and ate it. I swallowed a little bourbon and waited for her.

“You can order something to eat if you want. I’m not hungry.”

“Neither am I.”

“I don’t know where to start. I really don’t.”

I wasn’t sure myself. I said, “Wendy doesn’t seem to have had a job. Was she working when you first moved in with her?”

“No. But I didn’t know that.”

“She told you she had a job?”

She nodded. “But she was always very vague about it. I didn’t pay too much attention, to tell you the truth. I was mainly interested in Wendy to the extent that she had an apartment I could share for a hundred dollars a month.”

“That’s all she charged you?”

“Yes. At the time she told me the apartment was two hundred a month and we were splitting it down the middle. I never saw the lease or anything, and I sort of assumed that I was paying a little more than half. That was all right with me. It was her furniture and everything, and it was such a bargain for me. Before that I was at the Evangeline House. Do you know what that is?”

“On West Thirteenth?”

“That’s right. Somebody recommended it to me, it’s a residence for proper young ladies on their own in the big city.” She made a face. “They had curfews and things like that. It was really pretty ridiculous, and I was sharing a small room with a girl, she was some kind of a Southern Baptist and she was praying all the time, and you couldn’t have male visitors, and it was all pretty lame. And it cost me almost as much as it cost to share the apartment with Wendy. So if she was making a little money on me, that was fine. It wasn’t until quite a bit later that I found out the apartment was renting for a lot more than two hundred a month.”

“And she wasn’t working.”

“No.”

“Did you wonder where her money came from?”

“Not for a while. I gradually managed to realize that she never seemed to have to go to the office, and when I said something, she admitted she was between jobs at the moment. She said she had enough money so that she didn’t care if she didn’t find anything for a month or two. What I didn’t realize was that she wasn’t even looking for work. I would come home from my own job, and she would say something about employment agencies and job interviews, and I would have no way of knowing that she hadn’t even been looking.”