Charlaine Harris - The Julius House

“He got hurt,” she said. “A bad man kicked our little doggy two days ago, didn’t he, Kickapoo?”

“Oh, that’s terrible!”

“Kickapoo couldn’t hurt anyone, you can see that,” said the woman, dreadful indignation printed deep in folds of fat. “I don’t know what was the matter with him.” I assumed she was referring to the kicker. “He was in a bad mood that day, but he never has done nothing like that.”

“Not your husband?” I inquired incredulously.

“Oh, no! Carl loves our little doggy,” she said, “doesn’t he, Kickapoo?”

The dog didn’t nod.

“No, this was a friend of Alicia’s, the man she has collect the rent and tend to things for her. ‘Course, we mow the lawn and take care of the little repairs, but if something big goes wrong, we call…” and she stopped dead.

“Yes?” I said encouragingly. I was totally bored with the conversation until the woman so obviously remembered she wasn’t supposed to be having it.

“Nothing. Here I am, going on and on. I haven’t even found out what you need.”

Angel and I were both well-dressed that day, since I thought that’d be reassuring to an old lady like Alicia Manigault. I was wearing a little suit with a white jacket and a navy skirt, and Angel had on tailored black slacks and a sapphire blue blouse with a gold chain and earrings. So it wasn’t out of the question for Angel to claim we were from the Metairie Senior Citizens’ Association, which she promptly did.

“Oh,” the woman said. “I never heard of that. But that’s nice.”

“And you’re Mrs.-?” Angel said pointedly.

The woman reached for an eyedropper by a bottle of medicine on a table jammed into one end of the living room. She squeezed what was in it into the little dog’s mouth. It swallowed obediently.

“Coleman,” she said, looking down at the animal. “Lanelda Coleman.”

“So Mrs. Manigault doesn’t need transportation services to and from the center?” Angel asked.

“No, she’s just here a few weeks a year,” Lanelda Cole-man told us.

I was totally at sea.

I opened my mouth to ask where she was the rest of the year, but my cohort kicked me in the ankle.

“Then we’ll just go, I can tell you’ve got your hands full,” Angel said sympathetically.

“Oh,” Lanelda said, “I do. We’re just terrified Kickapoo is hurt bad. We’ve about decided to take him to the vet. It’s so expensive!”

I moved restlessly. They adored the dog but hadn’t taken him to the vet?

“It sure is,” Angel agreed.

“Carl and I just were up all night with this little thing,” Lanelda said abstractedly, her attention on the dog.

“The man who kicked him should pay for the vet visit,” Angel said.

I turned to stare at her.

Lanelda’s face looked suddenly determined. “You know, lady, you’re right,” she said. “I’m gonna call him the minute Carl gets home.”

“Good luck,” I said, and we left.

We conferred by the car.

“We need to ask some questions,” I said.

“But not of her. She’s been told not to talk about the arrangements for that house by someone, someone she’s scared of. We don’t want her calling whoever it is and telling them we’ve been asking questions.”

“So what do we do?”

“We move the car,” Angel said slowly. “Then we go from house to house. Her curtains are closed, and she’s busy with the dog. She may not notice. Our cover story is that we’re canvassing old people in the neighborhood about the need for a community center with hot meals and transportation to and from this center every day. I just hope Metairie doesn’t have one already. Ask questions about the old ladies who own Number Twenty-one.” I looked up at Angel admiringly. “Good idea.”

I wasn’t so enthusiastic an hour later. I’d never knocked on strangers’ doors before. We’d waited until after five o’clock so people would be home; most of the mothers here would be working mothers.

This was an experience that I later wanted to forget. I was never intended to be a private detective; I was too thin-skinned. The old people were suspicious, the younger people were too busy at this time of day to give much thought to my questions, or could think of no good reason why they should spend time talking to a stranger. I actually had a door or two shut in my face.

One woman in her sixties, Betty Lynn Sistrump, did remember the sisters when they were in residence, and had known them superficially.

“I was amazed when Alicia told me Melba had moved out,” Mrs. Sistrump said. She was wearing a bathrobe and a lot of makeup for a woman her age-or any age. “They were like Siamese twins or somethin‘. Always together, though they sure fought sometimes.”

“So you don’t think Mrs. Totino lives anywhere in Metairie?” I asked, to keep up the fiction. “We need to contact her about the center, if she does.”

“Alicia said she was going back up to someplace up north-Georgia, I think-to live with her daughter.”

“Do you remember about when that was?” I managed to say. I’d been struck almost speechless at the thought of Georgia being far north to this woman. Georgia, north! If my hair had been shorter, it would’ve bristled.

When Mrs. Sistrump opined it’d been about five years, more or less, since she’d talked to Alicia-though she’d caught glimpses of her since then going into and out of the house-she admitted it had caused her no grief, not seeing the sisters. And that was the impression I’d gotten from all the people on the street who would actually talk to me.

Flattened by the whole experience, I returned to the rental car to find Angel leaning against it staring off into space. Angel had a great quality of repose.

“Carl’s home,” she said. “It must be him. He went in without knocking.”

It took me a few seconds to track that down mentally.

“Okay,” I said cautiously.

“Lanelda said,” Angel reminded me, “that when Carl came home, she would talk to him about calling the man who’d kicked their dog. And that’s the man who must know where Alicia Manigault is.”

“So what do we do?” I asked uncertainly.

“I can try to creep in there under the windows and listen,” Angel said dubiously. “Or we can just wait to see if the man comes. He’d have to to give them the money for the vet visit, wouldn’t he?”

“Sounds pretty iffy. What if the dog died this afternoon? What if the man says he won’t give a dime?”

“Got a better idea?”

Well, we could go back to our luxurious hotel and order a great meal. But that wasn’t why we were here, I told myself.

It was still light, but fading fast. While we waited for it to get darker, so Angel could gauge if she could risk her creep, we drove to the nearest fast-food place. While we dealt with French fries and chicken sandwiches in the rental car, we exchanged stories about our block canvass.

Of the people Angel had talked to, only two householders remembered the sisters. The other people had moved in since Alicia had rented the house. The two accounts Angel had pieced together basically matched Betty Lynn Sistrump’s. About six years before, Alicia had told people who cared enough to inquire that her sister had gone to live with her daughter. Soon after that, Alicia had rented the house and had only appeared from time to time since then. One alert woman, confined to a wheelchair and dependent on neighborhood happenings for her entertainment, remembered a police car visiting the house about then-an occurrence so unusual that she’d asked Alicia about it, the next time she’d seen her.

“And got my head bit off for asking,” she’d told Angel. “I guess I was just being nosy, but wouldn’t you be? I mean, what if she’d had a robbery or a prowler? Those are things other people in the same neighborhood need to know about, aren’t they?”