Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Hello, Mrs. Harper,” I said.

“Mr. Hope,” she said, and nodded curtly.

“I tried reaching you by phone,” I said, “but—”

“Had it disconnected. Too many reporters calling.”

“I hope I can have a minute of your time.”

“All’s anybody wants these days is a minute of my time. Used to was I wouldn’t see nobody for days on end. Now they bangin down my door.”

“It’s about your son,” I said.

“Thass whut all of them’s about.”

“You know he broke out of jail last Thursday, don’t you?”

“So I unnerstan.”

“And you know someone else has been killed, a woman named Sally Owen.”

“Yes, I know that too.”

“When your son came to see you last Thursday—”

“Ony wisht he had,” Mrs. Harper said.

I looked at her.

“Musta figgered this’d be the fust place they’d come lookin for him, though. Fust place they did come, matter of fact. Miami police was here that very night, astin did I know where my boy was. I tole’em my boy was in jail. So they camped on my doorstep waitin for him to show up. I tell you, Mr. Hope, I wisht he hadda. He shunta broke out of jail like he done. Ony makes it look bad for him, ain’t that right?”

“He told me he came here to see you.”

“No, he never did.”

“Said he had some personal business with you.”

“Can’t think of no personal business he mighta had with me. Nor why he’da said he was here when he wasn’t.”

I had flown to Miami hoping she might be able to tell me what she and her son had talked about last week, hoping he might have revealed to her what he’d refused to reveal to me, hoping she might have been the one to whom he’d confided whatever the hell it was he’d learned. It was now 5:12 P.M. by my wonderful Japanese digital watch. It had taken me two and a half hours, door to door, to get here, and it would take me another two and a half hours — if I was lucky — to get back. There was no way I could catch Sunwing’s 5:30 shuttle that would have got me into Calusa at a little before 7:00. Eastern had a flight going out at 6:10, with a change of planes in Tampa, arriving in Calusa at 8:15. I was debating whether to try getting a seat on that one or, instead, to have dinner at the airport here and then catch Sunwing’s last shuttle back at 7:30, when Mrs. Harper — bless her heart — said, “Maybe he went to see Lloyd. Maybe he figgered he could hide out at Lloyd’s.”

The taxi I called from a corner phone booth deposited me in front of Lloyd Davis’s house five minutes later. It was almost 5:30 when I started up the junk-flanked front walk. The sun was almost gone, the shadows were very long. A record player was going inside the house; I could hear the scratchy strains of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” I knocked on the screen door. No answer. I knocked again.

“Yes?”

A woman’s voice.

“Mrs. Davis?” I said.

“Yes?”

“It’s Matthew Hope. May I come in?”

“Sure, come ahead,” she said.

I opened the screen door and stepped into the house.

She was sitting in the living room, the last of the evening’s light coming feebly through a window behind her easy chair, a battered relic that must have been salvaged from her husband’s garage. She was wearing a floral-printed Japanese kimono belted at the waist with a bright red sash. She did not turn to look at me as I came into the room, the screen door clattering shut behind me. She kept staring at the turntable where the Billie Holiday record was spinning, as though trying to absorb sound through her eyes.

On the end table alongside her chair was a torn glassine packet, and beside that a spoon with a blackened bowl. On the floor at her feet was a hypodermic syringe. The record spun to its end. Now there was only the empty click of the needle caught in the retaining grooves. It seemed to alert her to my presence. She turned to look at me.

Her complexion was the color of unrefined sugar, the result of generations of racial admixture, her eyes as brown and as wet as sorghum molasses, sunken in a face with high cheekbones, a patrician nose, and a generous mouth. She must have been a beautiful woman at one time, but the body slumped in the chair seemed frail and brittle and the eyes studying me were dead.

“Well, hello,” she said.

The light was almost gone now; the room was succumbing to the onslaught of dusk. She made no move to turn on the end-table lamp. The needle kept clicking at the record’s end, the only sound in the room.

“I’m looking for your husband,” I said.

“Ain’t here,” she said.

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Nope.”

“Mrs. Davis—”

“Would you turn that off, please?” she said, and raised her hand, and gestured limply toward the record player. I crossed the room and lifted the arm.

“ Who’d you say you were?” she asked.

“Matthew Hope.”

“Oh, yes, Hope.”

“I was here last week...”

“Oh, yes, Hope,” she said again.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“When will your husband be home, do you know?”

“Can’t say for sure. Comes an’ goes, you know.”

“When did he leave?”

“Don’t know. Comes an’ goes,” she said.

“Do you know where he went?”

“Army, most likely.”

“Army? What do you mean?”

“Reserve, you know. Always off with the reserve someplace, who cares ?” she said, and made a gesture of dismissal, impatiently swinging her arm, and then letting it fall. “Want to do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“That was some pow’ful shit, man.”

“What is it you want?”

“ Some pow’ful shit. Cost enough, but, man, it was pow’ful . Want to do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

She nodded, and then — before she could tell me what the favor might be — closed her eyes, and lowered her chin, and drifted off into an atmosphere higher and thinner than any Sunwing had ever flown. I looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow but steady. The room was very dark now, I could scarcely see her in the gloom. I snapped on the end-table lamp, and just then the phone rang.

I turned toward the sound as sharply as if it were a gunshot. The ringing was coming from a room I could see through an open door, obviously a kitchen, the sink and refrigerator vaguely illuminated by the light spilling over from the living room. The phone kept ringing.

“All right,” she mumbled behind me.

The phone shrilled into the silence of the house.

“All right, all right ,” she said, and shook herself from her stupor, and started to rise from the chair, and then sank back into it again. “Wow,” she said, “some pow’ful shit.”

The phone rang again, and then stopped.

“Good,” she said, and then looked at me as if discovering me for the first time. Her hands hung limply over the arms of the easy chair; her legs were stretched out in front of her; the kimono flap had fallen open to reveal the marks of her addiction on the insides of both thighs. “Hey, do me a favor, will you?” she said. “Get me a drink of water, I’m dying of thirst here.”

I went out into the kitchen, found a clean glass on the drainboard, filled it with water, and carried it back to where she was sitting. She drank it down in virtually a single swallow, turned to place the glass on the end table, and let go of it before it had found solid purchase. I reached for the glass just as it tumbled to the floor and shattered.

“Ooops,” she said, and grinned at me.

“You okay now?” I said.

“Comin through, man,” she said. “Wow.”