John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

But he went anyway, the next morning, a grubby gray Saturday morning. He checked the hotel from Grand Central, but Troy’s room didn’t answer. Bunny had said the Rowley woman was listed in the Manhattan book, so he phoned there. Just as he was about to hang up a fuzzy, sleep-thickened, querulous voice answered.

“I’d like to speak to Troy Jamison,” he said.

“Oh, God! What time is it anyhow?”

“Quarter of ten. Are you Miss Rowley?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m an old friend of Troy’s. Mike Rodenska.”

“Oh, sure. I heard him say that name, I think. Mike, you got a bad habit. Phoning people at dawn. You oughta break that habit.”

“Can I speak to Troy?”

“Lover-boy didn’t come home to Jerranna last night. Jerranna got drunky with friends. I don’t know where the hell he is. Try the Hotel Terr...”

“There’s no answer there.”

“Then check the old manse out Larchmont way. Maybe he crawled back to wifey.”

“He isn’t out there either.”

“Then I can’t help you, old buddy.”

“Could I come and talk to you?”

“About Troy? I don’t think you got the scoop, Mike. I can give you a message. You’d be wasting time.”

“I’ve got a little time to waste.”

“Okay,” she said listlessly, “but don’t show up in no half hour. Make it about eleven-thirty, hey? And look, they drunk me out of goodies, so you be a pal and show up with a jug of Gordon’s and a jug of Early Times, okay? It’ll save me going out on such a stinky-looking day.”

The apartment was a third-floor walk-up a few doors from Second Avenue on East Fifty-first. It was in a defeated building and the enclosed air was both musty and sharply antiseptic. When he rang she buzzed the latch from above and he climbed the stairs to 3G, wondering how many times Troy had climbed those stairs. And why.

When she opened the door, took the brown paper sack from him and thanked him absently, and turned toward the kitchen with long strides, saying, over her shoulder, “Sid-down and make like it was home, Mike,” he had even more cause to wonder why Troy climbed those stairs.

She was younger than she had sounded over the phone. Nineteen or twenty, he guessed. She had a round, rather doughy face, a careless mop of pale brown hair worn long, a rather small head, a very long neck, and narrow shoulders. She was thin, but it wasn’t the kind of leanness that can be called slenderness. This was actually scrawniness, accentuated by knobby joints and a sort of shambling looseness in her gait.

“Want I should fix you something?” she called from the kitchenette.

“Bourbon and water. A weak one, please.”

He sat down in a sagging, overstuffed chair with a torn slipcover and unidentifiable stains. No sun would ever come into this room. Aside from the furniture that had obviously come with the apartment, any additional touches seemed to be added by things won at carnival booths. There was a classic collection of liquor rings and cigarette burns. A broken spring prodded him in the left ham.

He got up and thanked her when she brought his drink.

“Manners, huh?” she said, and grinned at him, and sat in a chair that half-faced his and threw one leg over the arm of the chair. She wore black denim slacks and a burgundy cardigan. The rudimentary breasts under the cardigan, pointed and wide-set, seemed almost anachronistic compared with the rest of her figure.

She had a tall glass of orange juice which he suspected contained plenty of gin. “Here’s lookin’ up your address,” she said and drained a third of it. “I was thinking I could get back to sleep maybe, but you cooked it for me.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Sleeping is the best thing I do. I can damn near fall asleep standing up, like a horse.”

“It can come in handy.”

“I suppose you’re going to sit there lookin’ at me like the cat brought me in, wondering where the hell to start saying what you came to say. So I’ll save you the trouble. He’s got a big career and a fine wife and a fine home and two darling little girls and it’s a damn shame he has to get mixed up with somebody like me, so I should give him up and go away quietly or something. That’s where you have the wrong message, Mike. He can take off anytime. I don’t give a damn. I can get along. I have before and I will again, without him paying the freight. I don’t love him and he don’t love me. Now that’s all over, what’ll we talk about?” She grinned at him.

He stared at her. Her mouth was wide and heavy, her lips habitually parted, her teeth large and strong and yellow-white, ridged. He had seen her before, when the state cops had picked her up off the highway. Seen her in the hospital after a gang rape, still bitter, arrogant, undefeated. What in the name of God could attract Troy to this? A will to destroy himself completely?

“Where did you meet Troy, Jerry?”

She frowned. “Jerranna. I always use the whole thing. It’s my whole name and I don’t like nicknames. I met him at a hockey game at the Garden. The boyfriend I was with, he slipped on those damn steep steps and hit his head, and they took him away, and Troy was with some out-of-town guys, all a little high, and we went here and there and to and fro for kicks, me and those three guys, and Troy was the one lasted the distance and brought me home. That was... oh... months ago. I’m not so good on keeping track of time.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Not right now. I gave it up. It was a cafeteria on Broadway up near Eighty-sixth. But I’m not sweating. I can go get a job anytime. I always have and I always will. Since I was thirteen, picking beans out in the Valley. And I’ll always have boyfriends too. Not so big shot like Jamison maybe, but ready and eager to take care — you know how I mean.”

“I guess so.”

“We’re all of us just here for kicks, I always say, so get all you can.”

He asked her more questions. She answered frankly, acted slightly bored, smiled easily, combed her hair back with long fingers, joggled her foot in time to imaginary music, and made them a pair of fresh drinks. And in some entirely inexplicable way she seemed to change slowly, in front of his eyes, as they talked. He knew it was not the drinks. She had made his weak, as he had requested. In the beginning he had thought her entirely unattractive — so much so that he had thought her boast about boyfriends rather pathetic.

But gradually he was becoming more and more aware of her in a physical-sexual way. The thick contours of her mouth, the girdle line along the top of the careless thigh, a knowing, self-confident look of mockery in her bland gray eyes. Yes, even the careless tangle of the brown hair, the thinness of a slightly soiled ankle, the bawdy and knowing tilt of the sharp, immature breasts.

Awareness increased until he wondered how he could have been so unaware in the beginning. Feature by feature, line by line, she was unattractive — almost, in fact, a grotesque. But there was now evident an unmistakable aura, an amiable pungency, about her that was beginning to make his heart beat more quickly and heavily. He suddenly became aware of a silence that had lasted for some time.

“Say it, old buddy,” she said. “What you’re thinking.”

“Could you... would you want to... send him on his way?”

She shrugged. “Why the hell should I? Anyway, I couldn’t. He’d be coming back.”

“So how does it end?”

“The way it always has. He’ll get on my nerves. You know. Giving orders like he owns me. You can do this and you can’t do that. No other boyfriends. No ramming around town. Stay right here. Hell with that noise. That’s when I quit.”

“How?”

“How big is this town? I move four blocks and he can’t find me. He can walk the streets howling like a dog, but he can’t find me.”