5 Highball Exit

by Phyllis Smallman

Aunt Kay said, “It will be easier when Holly’s father is here to share the burden with you.”

  “He can’t come down.” Aunt Kay and I exchanged looks. “He said he can’t get away.” Glancing in the rearview I saw her tears start.

  “And he said it wouldn’t do any good anyway. He’s going to send me half of the cost of the funeral.”

  The closer to Sarasota we got, the more she seemed to fold into herself, appearing smaller and smaller each time I checked in the mirror.

  This time the super opened the door for us. Up close she had olive skin and a faint mustache but she seemed friendlier than she had before. I’d worried all the way to Sarasota how awkward it might be if she mentioned that we were there before, but Bella only said, “Sorry for your loss,” and led the way to the elevator, pushing a luggage cart.

  Truthfully, Mrs. Mitchell wouldn’t have noticed if Bella had said a hundred people had come by asking about Holly.

  Bella opened the door to the apartment and stepped aside. “I’ll wait here, give you some privacy.”

  “Thank you.” Pushing the luggage trolley, I led the way with it into the apartment.

  Aunt Kay practically had to drag Mrs. Mitchell inside. She hovered near the door, looking like she might bolt at any second. Her eyes grew wide with surprise and darted around the room. “I don’t understand.”

  Aunt Kay wrapped her arms around Mrs. Mitchell’s shoulders and began making soothing noises.

  Starkly modern, the apartment was done in tones of white, cream and beige, with glass and steel furniture sitting on plush carpeting and ebony hardwood. Dan had said that everything was packed and the apartment was neat. He hadn’t exaggerated. Against the wall by the entrance was a small pile of things. Other than that, the room was bare of any sign of human life, not a potted plant nor a discarded magazine in sight.

  I went to check out the rest of the rooms.

  In the bedroom there was a wall of mirrored closets where not even dust had been left behind. Across from the closets the sheer curtains were open on the million-dollar view over Sarasota Bay.

  I turned away and opened the bedside table. Not even lint. Who leaves a place this clean?

  In the bathroom fresh towels awaited new arrivals, just like in a hotel.

  My search didn’t take long. The person who packed up hadn’t left any traces of the woman named Holly Mitchell except for the small pile of belongings near the front door.

  On the way back to the living room, I went into the galley kitchen. It was so clean it looked like not even water had been boiled in there and it smelled of antiseptic cleaner. The first thing I did was open the doors of the refrigerator, maybe because that’s what I always do when I enter my own kitchen. The fridge was empty, not even half a jar of mayo left behind. Okay, say that Holly was obsessive about neatness and cleanliness; even so, does anyone move out and leave a place this bare?

  At the edge of the door, between the wall and the fridge, I saw a sharp corner of a piece of paper, just a tiny triangle no more than a quarter of an inch. I closed the fridge and could no longer see it. I opened the door again and tried to reach the paper with my fingers, but they wouldn’t fit. I took two steak knives from a wooden block on the counter and, using them like tweezers, I locked onto a curled corner and pulled the sheet forward to where I could reach it with the door closed. The paper was dry and crumpled from life behind the fridge.

  I studied the grainy image, printed by an ordinary desk-jet printer, of a woman holding a baby. Then I carefully folded the sheet and stuck it in my purse.

  In the living room Mrs. Mitchell had refused to budge from her position by the entrance. “I can’t,” she said when Aunt Kay asked her once again if she didn’t want to look in the other rooms. She’d already seen too much. Her cocoon of ignorance had been destroyed and her memories tainted.

  “There’s nothing left in there anyway,” I told them. “I looked everywhere, checked all the drawers and cupboards.”

  Mrs. Mitchell’s soft response was, “It doesn’t matter.” Her voice was full of defeat. Nothing was going to matter to her for a long time.

  I pushed the luggage cart closer to the pile of boxes and started loading. There were two large wheeled suitcases, a cardboard box full of beauty products and two lidded plastic bins full of photo albums. There were also three more plastic bins full of shoes and purses. Still, it wasn’t a lot for twenty-one years of life.

  Bella waited in the hall to lock the door. “Did you clean the apartment?” I asked.

  She looked like I was accusing her of a crime. “The property manager called and told me to go through it after the police left. Everything personal I found I added to those bins, only a few things, and then I gave it a good cleaning just like I was told.”

  “Bella, who owns the apartment?”

  Her eyes slid sideways to Mrs. Mitchell. “You’ll have to ask the property manager about that.” She took hold of the luggage cart and pushed it towards the elevator.

  CHAPTER 35

  After leaving the Jade Towers apartments I dropped Aunt Kay and Mrs. Mitchell off at the first family restaurant we saw. Mrs. Mitchell looked like she didn’t care if she ever ate again, but she didn’t protest when Aunt Kay led her away.

  Around the corner from the restaurant I pulled in behind an office building and climbed into the truck bed, trying to decide where to start. The bins were easiest so I began checking in every purse for stray papers, old tissues, receipts or notes. That was the strangest thing. Every purse was perfectly empty. Not even some leftover coins. This wasn’t Bella’s work. Was it Holly who’d emptied them all out? The featherhead Holly I knew wasn’t that obsessive. Maybe someone just opened every purse and dumped the contents into a garbage bag.

  The tubs full of photos took the most time because I got caught up in watching Holly morph through years and through styles. The camera adored Holly and gave her a unique allure that the living, breathing Holly didn’t have. The studio shots Ryan Vachess took were the very best of the whole collection, more art than reality, showing a vulnerable woman with a haunting fragility, the bubbling, enthusiastic Holly gone astray. And something more, a transitory loveliness, like a flower that only blooms for a day. There were no photos like the ones on the Angel Escort website, just page after page of her beauty.

  Why hadn’t she made it in the world of modeling? With her willingness to please and the way the camera captured her beauty, she should have made it to the top. Maybe Holly was right and she just never got the right break.

  In the last container of publicity stills and promotional shots I found a silver picture frame. When I turned it over I was staring at myself and Holly posing on a beach. I was captured in the act of drying off my left leg, half bent over and looking up at the person taking the picture and with all my charms about to tumble out of my bikini top.

  I would have sworn I’d never been on a beach with Holly but the table in the background brought back the memory of mimosas and French pastries. The sister of one of the bartenders at the Sunset had organized a birthday brunch on the beach one Sunday morning in early summer. We’d only been there for about two hours. By noon, walking on the sand was like walking on fire.

  Holly hadn’t framed and kept the picture because of me but because she’d been unable to cut me out and still keep the terrific photograph of her. It was from her blonde bombshell phase. In the photo she was standing on her toes, wearing a bikini and holding a towel, leaning forward from the waist and doing sort of a Madonna imitation. It was a sizzling print. It really, really worked and explained why Ryan thought he knew me. For a minute I thought of keeping it for myself. What would it hurt?

  I turned it upside down and set it back in the box and took out a small plastic album, cheap but new-looking, the kind you can buy in any drugstore. My fingers stuck to the plastic with sweat as I tur
ned the pages of baby pictures of a child in the first weeks of life. Holly wasn’t in any of the pictures. Maybe she was behind the camera. I took out each one of them and checked the back but they told me nothing more.

  I stared at the pictures, trying to see Holly or Dan or signs of anyone else. Was this the child Shelly had handed to me, was this Hannah? I couldn’t tell. For me it was just a formless little being. There were no secrets there for me to discover.

  Mrs. Mitchell wouldn’t understand why Holly had the pictures of a baby. Should I keep the album out or put it back, leave them there to raise questions, or take them out and deprive her of the only contact she’d have with her granddaughter? In the end I put the tiny book back in the bin.

  The oversized, wheeled suitcases contained expensive clothes in pristine condition. There was nothing that you’d do housework in or wear to paint a bathroom. There wasn’t even a pair of shabby pajamas for when she got sick. It was like every inch of her life was glamorous.

  I sat back on my heels and considered the pile. Holly’s past was missing. There was no life before she went to live in that white apartment and nothing to give us a clue to Holly’s friends. Where were all her other belongings? It was unlikely that Holly had left them behind with Mrs. Mitchell. Maybe Holly’s past went into a garbage bag as well.

  There was no phone and no computer in the bins, but the police might have those. I did find a small pink-leather address book with phone numbers and addresses of modeling agencies and other professional contacts. I looked under T, but my name wasn’t there. Neither was Aunt Kay’s. Neither was the phone number of the Sunset. I flipped through the book to see if any name jumped out at me or if a name looked like it didn’t fit. Nothing.

  In a zippered plastic pouch I found her bank statements and a checkbook that showed she had two hundred dollars in the bank. There were no keys, wallet, social security card, none of that. In the end, my search raised more questions than it answered.

  CHAPTER 36

  I unloaded the last bin into Marnie Mitchell’s living room where Holly’s possessions took up most of the empty floor space. The temperature inside the tiny west-facing box was barely cooler than outside, probably well into the nineties, but Mrs. Mitchell was unaware of the heat. She sat on a straight-back chair, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest, and rocked back and forth, staring at the leftovers of her daughter’s life that I had stacked in front of her. Finally, when the last bin had been added to the pile, she said, “The police told me who paid for that apartment.”

  Aunt Kay pulled up a chair and sat beside her. “Why don’t you tell me? You’ll feel better sharing.”

  Mrs. Mitchell shook her head. “Nothing will make me feel better.” She looked from the pile of her daughter’s belongings to Aunt Kay.

  “When I heard his name I was proud at first, but only at first . . . until I realized . . .” She lowered her gaze to her lap and said, “. . . what it meant.”

  Mrs. Mitchell went back to staring at the heap of containers. “You know him, you must know him. We all did.” The name was barely whispered. “Dusty Harrison.”

  Aunt Kay showed surprise. She looked to me but I just shrugged my shoulders. The name meant nothing.

  “You mean the singer?” Aunt Kay asked.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Mitchell started to hum and I recognized a silly Christmas song that you hear in every mall all December long. Mrs. Mitchell said, “He wrote that, you know.”

  “I didn’t realize,” Aunt Kay said.

  “Oh, yes. He wrote all his own material. I used to have some of his albums, loved his voice.” Mrs. Mitchell hummed another song.

  I knew this sappy love song. “You mean the singer my mother used to listen to and go weak at the knees over, that’s Dusty Harrison?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “That’s him, a real talent.” Aunt Kay, with her hands planted on her widespread knees, swiveled her body to look at me. “He was a big star thirty years ago. He still sings at every charity event in Southwest Florida.”

  Mrs. Mitchell nodded. “A living legend, that’s what they call him.”

  “And the apartment?” Aunt Kay asked. “Was he paying for the apartment?”

  “The police said he owned it.”

  “And he let Holly live there?”

  Mrs. Mitchell pinched her lips together in a thin line like she was trying to stop words from bursting out.

  Aunt Kay reached out and took her hand. “Did the police talk to him?”

  “I don’t know; don’t know anything more about it.”

  I closed the door as gently as possible behind us. “Is she going to be all right?”

  Aunt Kay gave a small lift of her shoulders. “How do you survive the death of a child, never mind that she’s only coming to realize some unpleasant things about her daughter? It will take a while for her to smooth over events and create a story she can live with.”

  I took Aunt Kay’s elbow as she stepped stiffly down the steps and onto the path.

  When she had both feet firmly on the ground she pulled her arm away from me. “Are you some kind of nurse now?”

  “Seems like it.”

  My tee was sticking to me. “I bet we broke another record for heat today.” I pulled the cloth away from my body and fanned it gently. “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve had a shower and something to eat.”

  “You really are getting to be a princess.” The humidity had her own hair curling up into a tangled halo around her very pale face. This heat wasn’t good for her but she wasn’t giving in.

  “What did you find?” she said when we were back in the truck and she’d stopped panting like a dog.

  I pulled the paper out of my purse and had a good look at the baby. “I don’t know if this is a picture of Hannah.” I handed it to Aunt Kay. “Does it look like the baby Holly brought to show you? Is it Angel?”

  “I’m not sure.” Aunt Kay pointed to the woman holding the baby. “Who is this woman?”

  “I can’t tell . . . can’t see the face because of the hair.”

  “Well, I’m sure it isn’t Holly.” She pulled the photo closer to her face. “The baby is Angel. I’m sure of it.” She lowered the printout. “Were there more pictures of Angel?”

  “There was a small baby album but nothing to say who the photos were of or where they were taken. It looked like Angel’s first month of life, but no pictures of Holly in any of them. I left the album there.”

  “I’m surprised there weren’t later pictures of Angel.”

  “Maybe there were more pictures on Holly’s phone.”

  “And where is that?”

  “I don’t know. Dan said he checked her messages, so it was there when her body was discovered. Maybe he took the phone because his number was on it.”

  “Will you call him and find out?”

  “I’m not really happy doing that.”

  “Well, I’m not paying you to be happy, am I?” Aunt Kay went back to studying the printout as though she could discover some hidden truth. She kept at it all the way back to her house.

  CHAPTER 37

  When I came out of her bathroom, Aunt Kay greeted me with, “Cal Vachess is outside.”

  Her news made my stomach turn over. “How do you know?” I moved to stand beside her at the window.

  “Please, a black Cadillac Escalade on this street stands out like a biker in Sunday School.”

  She held out a pair of old-fashioned field glasses. “Besides, I got out my binoculars and had a closer look.”

  “Why would he be watching your house?” I took the glasses from her hand and stared at the SUV parked on the opposite side of the street. “It’s him all right.”

  “I bet he knows you’re here. Your truck in the drive is a dead giveaway.”

 
“How did he find out where you live?”

  “I left my phone number when I called him. Could he find out from that?”

  I lowered the glasses. “What the hell does he want with me?” She took back the glasses. “What do you want to do?”

  Across the street a man mowed his lawn. Next door, two kids ran through a sprinkler while their mother watched from the front step. Whatever was on Cal’s mind he wasn’t going to act on it in broad daylight with all these people as witnesses. “I’m going to get in my truck and go to the Sunset.”

  “Are you sure?” Aunt Kay’s voice was full of doubt. “I’m sure. It’s me he wants, not you. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not concerned about me. What if he follows you?”

  “He knows where I work so he doesn’t need to follow me. He can pick me up anytime.” I had a horrible thought. “If he’s looking for the baby and he thinks you might know something, he might come in here and threaten you.”

  “I won’t answer the door.”

  “That might not be enough.”

  “Hear those kids screaming next door?” She pointed at the kids in the sprinkler. “Their dad is a policeman and he’ll be home anytime now. I’ll call him if Cal gets out of his vehicle. Just you be careful and phone me when you get to the Sunset.”

  I made two calls and then I left, not even looking over to where Cal waited, but I watched as he followed me over the bridge across the inland waters and out the beach to the Sunset.

  At the Sunset Cal pulled into the lot and then swung around to face the street. I couldn’t figure out why he was stopping out there.

  I parked by the alley that ran behind the building. Miguel stood at the bottom of the stairs to the kitchen door. He was carrying a meat cleaver, what Miguel likes to call his attitude adjuster, Mexicanstyle. A few guys had quickly changed their attitude when Miguel came out of the kitchen with his chopper. Except for the cleaver hanging from his hand, Miguel looked like he’d just stepped out to enjoy a cigarette before the evening rush started.