Flip this burger, Adam. Don’t burn another one.
Now he can’t imagine going anywhere without her. Still, he has an itchy foot and she’s sitting on the bed, circling real estate ads.
“How are you going to afford to buy a house?” he asked her last night. “You don’t get the insurance on the building.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but it becomes a question, a plea for assurance. Please tell me that you don’t have insurance. On the apartment. On your belongings. On Cath. If what Irving said was true—but maybe nothing Irving said was true.
“I’m going to come into some money soon,” she says.
“From what?”
“It’s just a feeling I have. Don’t you ever have those? Like, a sixth sense about something that’s going to happen. It’s in my palm.”
Her landlord is paying for her to stay at the motel, but Adam never visits her room. She comes to him now. How he misses that apartment. Maybe more than she does, he thinks. Did she know all along that it wasn’t going to be her home? All summer, she had said she had to be moving on. But she loved those things, he knows it.
She also loves her freedom. She would not have risked that cavalierly.
* * *
About midnight she taps on his door. Their lovemaking has become more savage as of late, which surprises him. When a secret romance goes public, things usually get tamer. Even as she circles ads for homes, plots domestic life, she retains this innate wildness in bed. What is their future? He would be crazy to marry her, have children with her.
He will be crazy without her.
Finished, he stares at the ceiling, wills himself not to speak, waits for her to fall asleep.
Then, very nonchalantly: “Was it midnight when you came by?”
“Tonight?”
“Then.”
“Oh. I think so. Thereabouts. You know I don’t have a watch anymore. And it was humid before the rain started, so I was walking pretty slowly.”
Thunderclap, the rain coming down in sheets. He feels as if he heard the thunder first, then saw the lightning, but that’s not how it works. Could it have been the explosion that he heard? All he has to do is call the weather service, find out what time the storm started and he’ll know what time she was on his doorstep.
What does it matter? As she says, she no longer has a watch. In that conflagration, it melted as surely as that watch in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting.
23
Polly loves Thursdays, the day that the area weekly paper is published. She gets up at six and walks to the Royal Farms to buy a copy, then curls up on one of the benches near the window that gets strong morning light. She could take the paper back to her room, but she thinks of the Royal Farms as her “office,” a place to tend to business until she has her own place. Once a week, she buys cards, sends them to Jani and Joy, obviously no longer afraid for Gregg to know where she is.
* * *
She reads the real estate ads as if they were love poems.
Cozy cottage with fruit trees
3 beds, 2 baths, your dream house awaits
Two beds, one bath, needs TLC
She’s not naive. She can translate the optimistic real estate speak: Cramped shack with bug-infested trees; a waking nightmare yearns to scare you; house reviled for good reason. But she prefers a fixer-upper. She wants her next house to be hers, truly hers, tailored to her particular needs and specifications. Her dream house awaits.
When Gregg bought the house on Kentucky Avenue, she tried to believe it could be her dream house. It had small touches of what felt like grandeur to her—a built-in breakfront, a heavy swinging door between dining room and kitchen, a glass transom over the front door, the house number etched in gold. But it was just an ordinary 1940s house. The neighborhood, even in its glory days, had never been better than middle class. People had expected more, once upon a time. You didn’t have to be rich to have a breakfront.
Now, everywhere you look, it’s about size. Polly doesn’t want a big house, no more than three bedrooms, preferably a rancher. In the decor magazines, she has begun to study photos of places that were considered modern forty years ago. She is fond of uncluttered rooms, as few objects as possible. Smooth wood floors. Bedrooms with nothing but beds, nightstands, a single dresser. She will never buy another iron bed or metal-top table. She wouldn’t mind doing the whole house in IKEA furniture, although she would have to rent a big U-Haul to get it all over here from Baltimore.
She’s not in a hurry to realize this dream. Good thing, because she’s no longer sure how quickly the divorce will come through now that she’s decided not to go to Reno. But how much longer could it take, with things so cut and dried between Gregg and her? She’ll give him everything he wants. Which, she assumes, is everything. So, six months? Maybe a year? A year’s a long time, but she’s endured longer stretches of waiting, in and out of prison. Still, it’s worrisome. She had planned to be free of Gregg no later than November.
Maybe she and Adam should both leave Belleville and head to Nevada. No one’s forcing them to stay here. Cath Whitmire’s death has been ruled an accident. They found enough of her skull to rule the cause of death blunt force trauma, consistent with a gas explosion. The case is closed.
Only it’s not. Cath’s sister and brother-in-law keep agitating. They know people, what with him working for the state police and her a court stenographer. They have complained that the investigation was botched, that Polly should have been treated as a suspect, not a lucky witness who escaped death by paying an impromptu booty call. They pointed out that the volunteer fire department made myriad mistakes at the scene. That was Jim’s quote in the Wilmington News-Journal—“myriad mistakes at the scene.” If Polly leaves town now, with or without Adam, everyone will think she’s guilty. That shouldn’t bother her, but it does.
Polly wonders if Cath’s people have come to regret making a stink. Because while the News-Journal has dutifully reported Polly’s “life story”—apartment’s tenant was a Baltimore woman who had killed her husband after years of alleged abuse, then been granted a controversial pardon—it also dug up Cath’s past, which is almost as interesting. As a seventeen-year-old high school senior, she had jumped another girl who was taunting her. The two had been on the elevated ramp at an old driving range, a place where high school students went to smoke dope and drink beer. The railing gave way and the other girl had fallen, breaking her neck. Cath went to a juvenile facility; the other girl was in a wheelchair for life. So, yes, there was a record of rage and anger, consistent with lying in wait for a woman she was trying to blackmail. If Polly had known before about Cath’s temper—no, she thinks it’s better she didn’t know.
But the brother-in-law can’t let go. When Polly arrives for work on this particular Thursday, he’s sitting in the High-Ho parking lot in his state trooper car. His tanned, brawny forearm on the window ledge makes Polly think of a thick snake basking in the middle of the road, one you’d almost go out of your way to slice with your tires. She wonders if it’s allowed, using his official car on this not-quite-official business.
“I want to talk to you,” he says, without preamble.
She doesn’t have to cooperate with him, of course. She could get a restraining order, complain to his bosses. She has been cleared. It’s—unseemly, the way he uses his job to badger her.
But Polly knows a thing or two about cops. She knows how they close ranks, even behind the worst of the worst. Her husband was a dirty cop and his colleagues had to have suspected as much. There was a pattern, if anyone cared to find it. Beyond his own criminal activities, he was just a lousy guy. He hit her, threatened horrible things. His coworkers had to have known that was true as well. But he was one of theirs and she had killed him, and that wasn’t allowed. Killing was a perk that cops kept for themselves. Themselves and maybe little old ladies, shooting blindly toward an intruder in the middle of the night.
“What do you want to talk about?” She stops, but doesn’t get in the c
ar, which is clearly his intent. She doesn’t want to be in a confined space with him. Then again, she’s not going to let him follow her inside, where Adam is already at work, prepping for lunch.
“What really happened that night.”
“Only she knows for sure. I wasn’t there.”
“Why wasn’t your door locked?”
“I never locked the door. No one locks their doors here. It’s Belleville.”
“We could bring a lawsuit against you, you know.”
That gets her attention. “For what?”
“Liability. You knew that stove wasn’t safe.”
“That’s on the landlord.”
“He says you didn’t report it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure that trespassers have any right to be assured that the appliances they use are in perfect condition.” She goes inside the High-Ho, not in the least bit of a hurry or a fluster.
Still, he has needled her, and she mulls what he has said as she moves on autopilot through the steps of readying for the lunch service. Could Cath’s family really sue her? Can she be held accountable? She has heard about cases where people claim civil damages even when criminal liability is unproven. She should ask a lawyer, but no one knows better than she does that you can’t even say how-are-you to a lawyer without starting the clock.
There’s a famous old saying, He who steals my purse steals trash, he who steals my good name, etc., etc. People can do whatever they want to her name, but Polly likes her purse, thank you very much.
“What did he want?” Adam asks. So he, too, saw the car, saw Cath’s brother-in-law.
“He’s just being a jerk probably to appease that crazy wife of his. Tried to scare me by saying they could sue because I knew that old stove was dangerous. Can someone really sue me? For that?”
“People can sue for anything,” Adam says.
She had expected a more comforting reply from him. She stews about Jim’s threat the rest of the day, is snappish with Max and Ernest when they come in, not that they notice or care. No matter how she treats them, each man leaves a lone dollar at the end, usually a soft limp one that looks as if it’s been dug out of a back pocket. Never more, never less, as if her actions don’t matter. Polly is so tired of men deciding how much money she deserves—Ditmars, who kept her on a strict allowance. Gregg, ditto. Even her landlord, who seemed like such a sweetheart, stated flatly how long he was willing to stake her to a motel room while she tried to find a new place. Maybe she should sue him. No, better to let that go if she’s going to stay in Belleville. The town has been remarkably forgiving of the newcomer whose faulty stove killed one of their own. This is the time to live and let live. For the landlord, if not for poor Cath.
If she and Adam stay together, will he police her money? Will she be asked to show her receipts, to account for every cent? Show me a man’s wallet and I’ll show you his soul, she thinks as she pockets Max and Ernest’s sad little dollars. Was that a famous saying? It should be.
24
Irving Lowenstein has no voice mail. If someone wants to leave a message for him, Susie takes it down, writes it on one of those pink while you were out slips. This morning there are three, all from the same number, which he recognizes immediately. A tenant. That means money going out instead of in.
Irving owns only a few properties now, mainly on the northwest side. He once had more than forty, thirty-six apartments and ten houses, some commercial in the mix. But it was too much work, and all he ever got for his trouble was labels. Slumlord, as if he were the one who made the places slums. They started out nice, his units. Now he’s down to one commercial property and three residential ones. He’d like to get rid of those, but he has a soft spot for the tenants, elderly women, good people, if prone to neediness.
Today, it’s Mrs. Macalester on Oakley Road, says the hot-water heater is acting up. It’s a pretty new heater, so he’s not sure what could be wrong. Turns out the pilot blew out, something he can fix, although anything with gas makes him a little nervous. He’s in and out in less than fifteen minutes and the day is so nice, the first real fallish day of September, even if the calendar says there are ten more days to autumn. He decides to eat an early lunch in a diner on Garrison Boulevard.
But when he comes out at noon, it’s hot again, the day’s promises broken. Noon on the dot, he notices on the dashboard clock.
High noon. Yes, it’s coming on high noon in more ways than one.
They think he’s stupid, those two. Why not? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice—but she hasn’t fooled him twice. He has been onto her for a very long time. Maybe she’s like one of those diseases you get as a kid. Once you’ve had it, you’re immune. He had a little case of the Pauline Ditmars blues, but once she cheated him, he was over it. There are a lot of women in the world, only so many dollars. Irving likes having money, although he permits himself few indulgences. The nice things, such as the house, were for his wife, and Birdy’s gone. Irving likes having his money in the bank, in brokerage accounts, in retirement funds. His account balances are proof that everyone was wrong about him—his parents, who wouldn’t support him past the age of sixteen, forcing him to drop out of high school. The teachers who gave him Cs and Ds, when he knew he was the sharpest in the class. The insurance agents with whom he works, who put so much stock into appearances, with their expensive cars and suits and haircuts.
“I don’t waste money on luxuries,” Irving tells new clients when they visit his office. “You see a fancy office, you’re looking at waste. I don’t have a big nut, so I have no incentive into getting you to bite off more than you can chew. And I’m a broker—I find the best policy for you. I work for you.”
Ninety percent of the time, every word was true. Ninety, ninety-five percent of his customers paid their premiums, and the policies were there when they needed them. People in insurance sell something that everyone resents paying for—until they need it, and then it’s never as good as they think it should be. Doesn’t make for popularity. Yet he’s the one who’s there for them, time and time again. Irving has helped families bury people, send children to college, survive natural disasters. He has consoled survivors and widows.
Helped to create a few widows, too. But that wasn’t his fault, not really.
It started in the early 1980s, when he still had properties in the county. He had a tenant in Dundalk, just over the city line. She was okay, but her kids were trouble. Moved in, basically turned the house into a shooting gallery. Place was trashed. But—she paid the rent. Somehow, every month, the rent was paid. He couldn’t evict them without cause and he couldn’t prove they were selling drugs out of the house. Maybe he should have let it go—they were paying on time—but once they vacated, it was going to cost him a year’s rent to get the place back into shape. They let metal men scavenge the appliances, then claimed they had been burglarized. Their hot-water heater was stolen, or so they said. He needed them gone.
He started to spy on them, thinking he would see something that would allow him to kick them out. But tenants have too many rights in Maryland and he never caught them in an open act of thievery. One night, he was wandering down the alley, smoking a cigar, trying not to look too conspicuous—it was a mixed neighborhood, still more white than black, yet Irving felt he stood out here—and it occurred to him that people couldn’t live in a house with a little fire damage. He tossed his cigar in the overflowing trash container behind the house. Such pigs they were. And it was a slow-starting fire, the smoke was only beginning to rise in the sky as he pulled away in his Buick. They would have had plenty of time to get out if their senses hadn’t been dulled by drugs. Or if the smoke alarms had worked.
Three people died.
That’s when Ditmars came into Irving’s life.
Later, too late, Irving would come to understand that the guy was always dirty. Ditmars was born dirty, couldn’t play it straight even when straight was the better play. He needed to be getting away with something, anything.
Salesmen say, always be closing. Ditmars just wanted always to be putting something over on someone, anyone.
But the first time Irving met Ditmars, all he knew was that an arson investigator had him in his sights.
“Shame about that fire at your Dundalk property,” Ditmars said, dropping heavily into the chair opposite Irving’s desk.
“Yeah,” Irving said. “A very sad situation.”
“No, I mean it’s a shame it doesn’t happen more often. Druggies. Scum. The kind of people you never used to see in the county, but I guess that’s changing.”
Irving thought himself a cynical man, but Arson Investigator Burton Ditmars was a new kind of hard.
“Do they know what started the fire?”
“Trash can fire. The front of the house is brick, but the addition on the back was wood. Guess I don’t have to tell you the nature of the structure. Something as small as a burning cigarette butt could have done it.”
He almost yearned to correct this arrogant man, offer up cigar. Instead: “They had smoke alarms. My places are always up to code. But it’s not on the landlord to check the batteries.”
Ditmars put his feet up on Irving’s desk, knees bent so Irving could see the tops of the shoes, which had a formidable shine. Irving could almost see his reflection in the toes.
“I got somebody you should meet,” Ditmars said. “Somebody I think you should be in business with.”
“I’m not sure—”
“That your blue Buick out front?”
His Buick. There’s no reason for Ditmars to ask about his car—unless someone saw him driving away.
Irving watched as his twin reflections nodded hesitantly, trapped in the bulbous ends of those shoes.
* * *
A week later, Ditmars returned, this time with a quiet African American man in khakis and a Banlon shirt. Rail-thin and sinewy, with close-cropped hair that was beginning to gray. He looked like a walking piece of jerky.
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