Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

A wide doorway between the juke joint and pawn shop provided entrance to the apartment building.

Cameron stood for a short while when he got out of the Caddy. Then he crossed the street quickly and ducked inside the building.

I sat in the borrowed car and timed him. He was gone about five minutes. He went through a second hesitation as he came out of the building. There were few people outside. The only sign of life the block showed was the crowded gin mill.

His rapid steps returned Cameron to the Caddy. He sat there another ten minutes. Then, as if the strain were telling, he started the car and drove off with a roar of sudden power.

I got out of the car, knowing he hadn’t found what he had come here to find. But he’d known where it was, and this was the place.

A fifteen-watt night light burned in the foyer of the building. A wide stairway, its treads scooped out by millions of shuffling footsteps, led upward. Beside the stairs, a narrow hall ran to the rear of the building. The building had the faint smell of sweat and of chitterlings cooked long ago.

At its birth, half a century or so ago, the building had possessed a certain elegance. There was a balustrade of heavy hardwood, scratched and scarred. The wainscoting was of marble. Stained and cracked, it had pieces missing, revealing the crumbling mortar cement underneath.

At the left was a row of mailboxes. Twelve apartments in the building, if the boxes were to be believed, four to each of the three upper floors.

One of the boxes was particularly dusty. She never got mail here, but the janitor, owner, or whoever looked after the building had dutifully scrawled her name on a slip of paper and stuck it to the box to match all the other boxes.

One greasy little slip of paper in all Tampa that stated simply: L. Shaw, 212.

Somewhere in the upper reaches of the building a couple started fighting. A door slammed. The staccato of an angry man’s footsteps came down the flights of stairs, a woman’s bitter voice hurling invectives after him from the top floor.

I faded into the shadows beside the stairs. The man reached the foyer, thin as a blade in garish sport shirt and pegged pants. He dabbed at a scratch on his forehead below the line of black, curly hair. Cursing under his breath in Spanish, he vented his rage on the front door by kicking it open and disappearing outside.

Upstairs, the coarse voice of a male tenant told the raging dame to shut up. She told him where he could go. It seemed for a moment a cuss fight was starting, but the woman huffed into her apartment. The building quietened, letting the muffled beat of the juke box next door return to the walls like the pulse of a tired heart.

I slid from the shadows and padded up the stairs to the second floor. Number 212 fronted the street. The door was locked, and I took out my key ring. The old lock was not hard to pick.

I eased inside the apartment, closed and relocked the door. The air was stale and hot, a mingle of odors — the sweetish smell of powder and perfume overlaying the faint stench of old food and soured beer.

The old-fashioned roller blinds were half drawn, but enough light was admitted from the street for me to make out the shadows of furniture. With the pencil flash, I made a quick tour of the apartment.

It had been a dump to start with. She’d improved it none whatever. The lumpy living-room couch and chairs were littered with a few old newspapers and magazines. An ash tray had been spilled on the cracked linoleum, which was worn to the black asphalt base in spots. The kitchen was a mess, remains of old food on the table, dirty dishes piled in the sink, paper sacks holding empty beer cans and seeping garbage providing a popular rendezvous for the Florida variety of huge black roaches and swarming gnats.

There was a bed, dresser, and chest of drawers in the bedroom. The bed linens were soiled, mussed as if she had never made the bed. The dresser was dusty with spilled face powder, jumbled with an array of cosmetics. I glanced at the labels. She’d bought expensive beauty aids.

The closet was stuffed with clothing. All was in vulgar taste. The back corner of the closet was piled with soiled clothing.

I clicked off the flash, went to the kitchen, cracked a window.

I settled down inside for a wait, long or short.

About ten minutes later, a bell tinkled softly. Her telephone, which she’d had muffled. Twenty minutes after that, the discreet demand for her attention sounded again in the living room. I wondered if the caller were Cameron. He’d expected to find her here tonight. I had the feeling she’d come.

The juke box in the gin mill kept up its whispered invasion of the walls. It became a normal part of the night, an unnoticed thing.

It was the sibilant background for the grating of a key in a lock.

I was on my feet, beside the door opening from the kitchen to the bedroom.

I heard her close the door. She stumbled against a piece of furniture and said, “Oh, damn!”

There were no wall switches here. She found the naked bulb hanging from its overhead wire. Light from the living room splashed into the bedroom. The silhouette of her came into the bedroom. She stretched, reaching for the socket holding the fly-specked bulb.

In the bedroom light, she sat down at the dresser and looked at herself a moment. The real she and the one in the mirror exchanged a soft, secretive little laugh.

She patted a yawn, lighted a cigarette, and reached for something on the floor at the end of the dresser.

She lifted into view an oval-shaped, deep hatbox that my rapid search with the pencil flash had missed.

She set the box on the dresser, but she didn’t open it right away. She began working on her face, painting her lips as bright as fresh blood, touching the corners of her eyes with pencil, the lids with shadow. She made slight changes in the face, but the sum total of the change was great. The big change came from inside, as if the surface changes had wiped out the remaining curbs on her inner self.

The transformation from Rachie Cameron to Luisa Shaw was almost complete.

She opened the hatbox, lifted out the wooden form holding the blonde headpiece. It was perfectly made and must have cost her quite a penny.

Pushing back her short-cut dark hair, she slipped the blonde headpiece on, working it carefully into place. It was the final detail needed to achieve the effect she was after.

She tilted her head, turned it from side to side, satisfying herself.

My throat clotted with something deeper than anger as I thought of the perverse pleasure and amusement she must have received the night we’d made the rounds together searching for a blonde woman in Ichiro Yamashita’s life.

She let her fingertips caress the blonde hair, the headpiece that had shed a hair on the arm of Ichiro shortly before he died.

Dead and beautiful hair, like everything else about her.

I stepped inside the bedroom. Her upraised hand chilled in that position.

She was chilled all over for a moment. Then she turned to me slowly and said, “Hello, ugly man.”

She rose gracefully, with that strength that comes from pliant, streamlined muscles.

“Have you waited long, ugly man?”

“Not enough to try my patience.”

“I liked you,” she said, coming toward me. “I thought about bringing you here.”

“But you changed your mind.”

“You were mean to me.”

“That’s too bad.”

She slid her arms to my shoulders. “You went to a lot of trouble to find me.”

“Considerable,” I admitted. “It should have been easier. A long-dead blonde hair was found on Ichiro’s arm. It must have been shed on him shortly before he died, or it would have got brushed off or fallen off. The lack of a dead person to provide the hair indicated a wig. A wig indicated a masquerade, and a process of elimination indicated you as the person who’d delight in such a game. It wasn’t clear at first. There were too many other details obscuring the picture.”