Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Want to talk a little?”

“Want to sleep , man.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Mrs. Davis, can you remember exactly what you told George Harper on the Sunday he was here?”

“Long time ago, man.”

“Not so long ago. Try to remember. He asked you where your husband was...”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you told him he was off with the reserve.”

“That’s where he was.”

“What else did you tell him?”

“That’s all.”

“Did you tell him where your husband was?”

“With the reserve.”

“But where with the reserve?”

“Didn’t know where.”

“Where does he usually go?”

“Wherever the unit says.”

“What unit is that? An MP unit?”

“No, no.”

“Then what?”

“Artillery.”

“Which one?”

“Who knows?”

“Did you tell George Harper...?”

“Don’t know what I told him,” she said. “Man, you got to’scuse me, I need some sleep.”

“Mrs. Davis, if you can remember whether you told him...”

“Can’t,” she said, and grasped the arms of the chair with both hands, and shoved herself out of it. She noticed the syringe lying on the floor, knelt down to pick it up, carefully placed it on the end table beside the spoon, and started out of the room. The phone rang again as she was passing the kitchen. She glanced idly through the open door, and then continued down the corridor into what I supposed was her bedroom. The phone kept ringing insistently. I followed her down the hallway and stopped just outside the bedroom door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in the dark, taking off one of her slippers. She dropped it on the floor, and then took off the other one. The phone kept ringing.

“Don’t you want to answer that?” I said.

“Never quits,” she said. “Go home, mister, I got to get some sleep.”

“In just a minute,” I said. “Please try to remember whether—”

“Can’t remember nothin.”

The phone was still ringing.

“Mrs. Davis, did you tell George Harper that your husband was with the Artillery?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you remember if you did for sure ?”

“Go home,” she mumbled.

I did not want her to flake off on me again. I reached for the switch just inside the door, and snapped on the light. The first thing I saw in its harsh glare was a huge painting on the wall over the bed.

The painting was one of Sally Owen’s.

The phone suddenly stopped ringing.

The house was silent again.

Leona Davis was lying full-length on the bed, on her back, blinking up at the overhead light, trying to shield her eyes with her hand. “Turn that off, will you?” she said.

I was staring at the painting.

Like the ones I’d seen hanging in Sally’s bedroom and the one we’d found beneath the tarpaulin in Harper’s garage, this too was an oil done entirely in blacks and whites. But this time around, Sally seemed to have gone straight to the heart of the matter.

According to Freud (as later interpreted by my daughter Joanna) an analysand’s dreams about any given problem will at first be shrouded in symbolism. If the problem persists, however, the dreams will become more and more explicit until at last the true content will be revealed almost documentarily. The subject matter of Sally Owen’s paintings seemed to have progressed from inanimate objects like chess pieces and salt and pepper shakers, to wildlife like penguins and zebras and crows and doves, to domesticated animals like Scotties and Dalmatians, and at last to humans as depicted in the painting we’d found in Harper’s garage. But if it was true that any artistic endeavor was the end result of unconscious stirrings, then Sally Owen — like a dreamer awake — had allowed her unconscious to dictate an artistic expression that had moved inexorably from the symbolic to the absolutely explicit. The painting hanging over Leona Davis’s bed left nothing to the erotic imagination.

The painting depicted a huge black phallus.

The painting further depicted a white woman engorging that phallus.

“Where’d you get that?” I said.

“Turn off the light.”

“It’s one of Sally Owen’s paintings, isn’t it?”

“Man, if you got to talk, turn off the damn light !” She sat up suddenly, and reached over to the bedside lamp. A splash of amber illumination spilled onto the bed. The bedside clock read 5:50. I was going to miss the Eastern flight. I snapped off the overhead light.

“ Is it one of Sally’s?” I said.

“From way back,” she said, and nodded.

“How’d it get here?”

“Gave it to us.”

“A gift?”

She nodded again. “From when we still had The Oreo.”

“The what?”

“Oreo.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” she said.

“Oreo?” I said.

I suddenly remembered Kitty Reynolds cutting herself short each time she mentioned the word oar. Had she been about to say “Oreo”?

I looked at Leona.

“Tell me about The Oreo,” I said.

“Nothin to tell. Ain’t no more Oreo. Don’t exist no more, man.”

“What was it when it existed?”

“Nothin.”

“Is it the name of something?”

“Man, I need to sleep,” she said.

“Something called The Oreo?”

“Ain’t got time for that shit no more,” she said, and fell back wearily onto the pillow. “They’s sweeter stuff, man. Sweeter than you know.” She lifted one arm, gestured limply toward the painting over her head, and said, “That’s Lloyd up there.”

I looked at the painting again.

“And Michelle,” she said, and nodded, and then drifted off again to wherever that sweeter stuff transported her.

AT 9:00 sharp on Thursday morning, from my office in Calusa, I placed a call to the US Army District Recruiting Command on the South Dixie Highway in Miami. I had tried to reach them the night before from the airport, before I caught my Sunwing flight back, but I got only an answering machine telling me the office was open daily from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., except on Saturdays when it closed for the weekend at noon. A woman named Corporal Dickinson answered the phone now. I told her I hoped I was calling the right place, I was trying to get in touch with a recruiting sergeant named Ronnie Palmer, and she asked me to wait, please, sir.

“Sergeant Palmer,” a man’s voice said.

“Sergeant, my name is Matthew Hope, I’m an attorney representing George Harper.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is this the Ronnie Palmer who knew Mr. Harper while he was in the service?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I understand he called you while he was in Miami several weeks back. That would’ve been on Sunday, November the fifteenth, do you remember him calling you?”

“Yes, sir, he called me at home.”

“Do you remember what you talked about?”

“Sir?”

“Do you remember the gist of your conversation?”

“Well, it was just an ordinary conversation, sir. We knew each other in Germany, he wanted to know how I was, what I’d been doing, and so on.”

“Would he have asked you any questions about the Artillery?”

“Well, yes he did. As a matter of fact, I found that puzzling at the time. I was George’s ISR in Germany, you see—”

“His what?”

“In-Service Recruiter. Which is how I happened to be familiar with his particular commitment to the army. Do you know how this works, sir?”

“Not entirely.”

“Well, when a man enlists, he normally commits to the army for six years, four on active duty, two in the reserve. In George’s case — well, this gets a little complicated. To make it simple, when George’s four years of active service were completed, he reenlisted for another three, and I was the one who helped him to pull those in Germany, too, instead of someplace where another shooting war could break out any minute. But, you see, when he came home from Germany, he was finished — that is, he didn’t owe the army any reserve time. Which is what puzzled me.”