Martha Grimes - The Blue Last

The dog Stone preceded Carole-anne Palutski into Jury’s room and lay down in front of Jury’s easy chair and fell asleep. Dogs amazed Jury.

Not as much as Carole-anne Palutski amazed him, though. She stood in the doorway, dressed in a short dress of burning blue. Standing in her vibrant rays, Jury thought he ought to be wearing sunscreen. Wordlessly, he held the door wider. She entered.

He did not know why she had hesitated on his doorsill, since she immediately plopped herself down on his sofa. Invisible strings seemed to pull and tug Carole-anne from place to place, as if even space wanted a taste of her.

“It’s Saturday night and I don’t expect you’d like to go down to the Nine-One-Nine?”

This was Stan Keeler’s regular gig when he was home. The flat directly overhead was home. “Don’t be so defeatist. When did Stan come back?”

“Last night. You weren’t here,” she added, accusingly.

The second-floor flat had been empty for years as a result of Carole-anne’s managerial skills. She had convinced the landlord that he should put its letting in her hands in order to keep out the riffraff, the riffraff being females, married couples and all men who failed to meet her standards. So there was silence overhead until Stan Keeler had come along with his guitar and his dog Stone, a caramel-colored Labrador now draped across Jury’s feet, dreaming of empty fields-

Which brought Jury back to the present, or, rather, to the past. Carole-anne reminded him a little of the redheaded girl, though Carole-anne’s hair had more gold mixed in with the red. And she hadn’t a mean bone in her gorgeous body.

She put her feet up on the paper- and magazine-strewn coffee table. Picking up a copy of Time Out, she started flicking through it and yawned as she said, “Am I to take ‘I-shouldn’t-be-defeatist’ as a yes?”

He loved her feigned indifference. “Yes.”

“Good. Elevenish?” The Nine-One-Nine never really got going until just before midnight. Then she was frowning over Time Out. “I don’t see why you buy this, seeing you never go anywhere.”

“But I do. I go many wheres. You just don’t happen to be with me when I go.” Resting his head against the back of his chair, he was aware of her narrow scrutiny. A secret life? she’d be thinking. That’s what worried her.

“Like where?”

“To the City, for example, which is where I was today. To visit an old friend, hit the pubs, the coffee shops. All over. Found a nice waitress, really pretty.” She was looking at him avidly. Jury smiled. Carole-anne sometimes seemed unsure but what Jury might just vanish before her turquoise eyes. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I get up to. Even though you see no life beyond these four walls for me”-Carole-anne had a job at the Starrdust in Covent Garden, telling fortunes. Costumes like a chorus girl-“I do have quite an eventful life.” He went on to tell her some wild tale about a case he’d just wrapped up, exaggerating his own Scarlet Pimpernel role in the proceedings. From the wide-eyed way she was looking at him, he wouldn’t be surprised if he was becoming to her more myth than man.

“What waitress?” she said.

Sunday and Jury could not shake off the depression over Mickey Haggerty’s fate. Fate, doom. Terminal disease. Interminable sorrow. He tried to put himself in Mickey’s shoes, but he couldn’t. He lacked the imagination.

At the moment it was his own shoe, dangling from his hand, that he was now putting on as he sat on the edge of his sofa, its worn material resplendent in the slant of sunlight coming through his window.

Above him, Stone barked once. Stone was not profligate with his barks. That meant Stan was up and in a few minutes the guitar would start warming up. This was not an unpleasant prospect for Stan was careful to tailor his tunes to the time of day. Nothing raucous on a late Sunday morning.

Music. Carole-anne was sure to follow.

There came a rat-a-tat-tat on his door. He opened it. Carole-anne said good morning and entered, wearing a blindingly bright coral-colored dress that, together with the sunlight, set her red hair and the room afire. She plunked herself down on the sofa from which he had just risen and removed one of her sandals.

Jury was holding his other shoe and wondered if in this symmetry there was some oblique, symbolic message. No. Carole-anne had a pedicure in mind. She was unscrewing a bottle of hot-pink nail polish.

“You look like the coral reef off Key West, an endangered species.”

“Is that a compliment, then? Or are you saying I look like crumbled rocks?”

Jury had seated himself in his easy chair and said, “I don’t think any of our conservationists would call a coral reef or you crumbled rocks.”

Her toes planted against the edge of his coffee table, she applied the nail polish in little dabs to her toes, observed Jury’s shoe lacing up and asked, “You going out? It’s Sunday.”

“Sunday is a going-out day. Maybe the most of the entire week. People veritably live in pubs from noon to night.”

Her chin on her upraised knee, she asked, “You going to the Angel, then?”

“Nope.”

“Then where?”

Jury stopped his lacing to take in the mellow music coming through the ceiling. He sighed. “He’s great.”

“Stan? We’re going to the Angel.” She had taken down one foot and put up the other. “Where’re you going?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well, you were looking pretty hangdog yesterday when you came home.”

“No kidding?” Jury wondered if there was any breakfast stuff in his frig and wished for the zillionth time he had a cigarette.

“So where were you? I mean besides where the waitress was?”

He smiled. “Around.”

She paused in her polish application and looked at him. “Then you need a little hair of the dog like.”

He gave a short laugh. “I’m not hung over, though I admit I tried hard enough to wind up with one last night.”

“I don’t mean booze.” Her head bent again, she worked on her little toenail. “I mean you should go back around.”

“Back around?”

“Back around the City, back where you were yesterday.” She examined her bare foot, the freshly painted nails. “Except,” she added, “that coffee place. Too much caffeine is bad for a person.”

Plus other things, Jury thought, with a smile.

Perhaps she was right, even though it was strange advice coming from Carole-anne, who usually saved her prognostications, anything that hinted of Jury’s future, for the Starrdust, where she told fortunes by way of a crystal ball. Or rather by way of her blue-green eyes. Andrew Starr loved it; it was unusual to have men patronize the Starrdust, given its main purpose was the casting of astrological charts, and men didn’t want to be seen as believing in astrology. But now there were men aplenty.

Sunday was a good day for an undisturbed walk about the City. He wondered if Mickey was in his office, if he spent weekends there instead of at home where his mortality would be constantly mirrored in the faces of his family. Even if Mickey could forget for five minutes, they couldn’t, at least not for the same five minutes.

Jury supposed it was another price, ironic in being exacted, that the seriously ill had to pay: people didn’t really want to be around them and for precisely the same reason they should. They were afraid of their own dying; they didn’t want to be reminded. Beneath that obvious cowardice, though, were other, more complicated reasons. He would probably see enough of Mickey, anyway; there would be questions, problems, things to report.