In the turnaround, she circled back to the house, then pulled onto the asphalt pad and switched off the ignition, got out and zipped her keys into the waist pouch. Mumbling to himself, Lawton extricated himself from his seat belt and began to hammer on his window until Alexandra came around and unlocked the door and helped him out.
“Ohio’s the ticket,” he said. “It’s too damn hot here. I mean, for Christ sakes, it’s October already, time for autumn.”
Alexandra drifted up the walkway to Jennifer McDougal’s front door. This morning, she’d dressed her father in a light blue jumpsuit and tennis shoes. She’d chosen navy walking shorts and a beige knit top, along with a pair of white Nike running shoes and a woven leather belt. No jewelry, except the wedding ring.
The deep wraparound porch was cluttered with an assortment of secondhand furniture, old couches, a wooden swing, a rattan throne chair. Upside-down milk crates were wedged between the seats, used as side tables, and littering them were empty beer bottles and magazines and a couple of plastic toys, an orange dump truck, and a red-haired rag doll with a moon face and freckles.
Alexandra drew open the screen door and stood for a moment staring out at the street, a light wind stirring the fronds around the telephone poles. Not much air today, humidity crowding in again. Lawton picked up the rag doll and studied its face, saying nothing, lost in his soundless trance.
Alex turned back to the pitted pine of the door, as torn up as an old dartboard. As if perhaps a long string of outraged wives had stood on this porch and tried to claw their way inside.
She knocked three times on the door and the sound seemed to wake her from the electric drone of her anger. She was standing on a stranger’s porch with the scantiest evidence of her husband’s infidelity. She had no phrase on her lips, no image of how she would proceed.
She straightened her shoulders, lifted her fist, and rapped hard on the door again, but something about the hollow echo of her knocks made her certain the house was deserted.
Willing herself back into motion, she closed the screen door, went down the steps, and marched around the west side of the house, peeking in the windows, trying to read the personality of the place from its decor, the furniture, some stray piece of art. Maybe catch a glimpse of some article of Stan’s.
Staring through the window, the image framed itself like a photograph. The rectangular tableau, silent and dead. She held herself very still, snapped it in her mind, freezing that moment that lay before her, distancing herself from it. No corpse this time. Just Jennifer McDougal’s furniture, the kind of mindless foam-filled stuff that was bought and delivered on the same day. Drab green couch, matching chairs, a coffee table swarming with saucers and tipped-over beer bottles. A bullfighting poster hung above the fireplace and below it on the mantel was a collection of wine bottles with wax drippings running down the throats. Near the window, a mobile of clear plastic dolphins stirred in the breeze of an overhead fan. A black cat was coiled tightly on top of the television.
It could be the house of a college student or a nurse or a grocery store clerk or the crash pad of a comic who played local Holiday Inns. There was nothing distinctive about anything she saw, nothing flavored with an identity, certainly nothing that would suggest how the resident of this narrow and shabby place could have won Stan Rafferty’s love.
She moved to the next window, but the venetian blinds were tilted shut. She circled behind the house through a dusty back yard. A redwood hot tub sat starkly in the center of the tiny yard, the plastic pipes running overland, a hasty and improper setup that violated any number of building codes. Just like something Stan would sling together in his usual half-assed hurry.
Alex continued her journey around the house, halting at the first of two windows on the east side. Several thick vines of bougainvillea meandered around the frame of the window—this one with an unobstructed view of the bedroom, an unmade king-sized bed, no headboard, no bedside table. A Spartan love nest for the oblivious sweethearts. As she was pressing her nose flat to the blurry pane, trying to decipher the photograph hanging on the wall to the left of the bed, someone entered the room.
Alex ducked away, a knot tightening in her chest. On Main Highway, a siren passed by, heading north. The down on her arms bristled and she felt a thorn from the bougainvillea stab through the yoke of her blouse, holding her in place.
Out of view of the bedroom, she reached back and freed herself from the vine, then swallowed a long, deliberate breath and inched her head forward till she could peek her left eye around the frame.
On the edge of the unmade bed, Lawton Collins was bouncing hard, as though he was testing the springiness of the mattress. The black cat wound in and out between his legs as Lawton sang, loudly and unconcerned, the words of a song without a name or consequence or history. A tuneless ditty that seemed to be piped up directly from the tattered remains of his reason.
“A termite queen lays thirty thousand eggs a day. She lives for years, and that’s all she does, lay eggs. What kind of life is that, Norman? I ask you.”
The ox just kept staring down Leafy Way at the white house.
“The way I see it, termites and ants and bees, they’re what the bosses want us all to be. Play our roles, do our jobs, round and round we go, shoulder to the wheel. Every day exactly like the day before it and the day coming up. Thirty thousand eggs a day, Norman, think about that. Is that any kind of life? And that’s the fucking queen, the head lady. Think about the workers, the soldiers.
“Man, I’ll take the cockroach any day. A freelancer, independent agent. On its own, surviving any way it can. You know a cockroach can live for a week without its head? Did you know that, Norman? It only dies because, without a mouth, it can’t drink water and withers up from thirst. I know ’cause I snipped off one of their heads as an experiment. That’s when I was younger. I’d never do something like that these days. I respect them too much. They’re my friends. Pets, really. Very affectionate. I know it’s hard to believe, but they are. You just have to know the signs, be able to read the telltale body language to see how affectionate they are. The way they wave their antennae, mainly.”
His face came around, eyes sleepy, looking at her.
“Do you ever stop?”
She smiled.
“What? Do I ever stop talking? Well, no, the answer is no. I talk to relieve the pressure building up inside my head. It’s my way of letting out the gases. And believe me, at this particular moment, I have a lot of pressure building. About as much as I ever remember. You wouldn’t want me to shut up, would you, Norman, have my skull explode all over you?”
He shook his head hopelessly and his eyes wandered back out the windshield.
“I’m a language person,” she said. “That’s because of my mother, how she was. You knew my mother, right?”
“I knew her.” He turned his head slightly to look out his side window.
“You know she wrote poetry?”
He nodded.
“In French, in English, Spanish. The woman was a genius with words. She could’ve been the poet laureate of the Southern fucking Hemisphere if she hadn’t fallen for my old man, got stuck living in the goddamn ghetto.”
“Your mother was nice.”
“Damn right she was. And smart, too, and cultured. That’s where I get my facility with words. That’s why I talk so much. It’s all that genetic shit circulating in my blood. And from all those books she had me reading. Woman thought books were the answer. With Daddy, it was guns; Mother thought it was books. Read enough, get smart enough, you could be anybody you wanted. You could go off, travel through exotic kingdoms, fight wars, dance with princes and dukes, all that romantic fairy-tale horseshit.
“She had me doing it, too, reading books. I was gobbling down five, six, sometimes eight books a week, and it was okay for a while, but then I started to notice that every time I looked up from the page, I was still living in the same fucking ghetto. Same bad shit going on all around me. And it hit
me, if I was going to change my luck, I was going to have to put down the goddamn books and start figuring out how to deal with the real shit.”
Norman turned his eyes back to the white cottage.
“So what do we do, Norm? Go in there, or what? What’s the plan, a full-scale frontal assault perhaps?”
He stared straight ahead down the narrow street and said nothing.
Maybe the big man was stupid. Emma was starting to consider that as a possibility. Or maybe his body’s motor was so taxed from growing massive quantities of hair, he had no horsepower left for thought.
“I say we go in.”
“And do what?”
“Whatever’s necessary.”
“They’re not thieves.”
“Well, this is the house, isn’t it? This is two seven oh nine Leafy Way. Unless your cop friend gave you the wrong address.”
“They’re not the ones.”
“That old man and the woman, they could be part of the gang, the masterminds behind the caper. I say we go in there, throw them up against the wall, shoot them full of lead till they talk.”
“Shoot them, huh?”
Emma had convinced him to use her pool truck as cover. Drive over to the house, do reconnaissance, get the lay of the land before they proceeded further. A good idea, as it was turning out. Two seconds after they’d parked, a white Camry came driving up the street, going slow like a neighborhood crime watch or something; then it turned around at the end of the street and came back and parked in front of 2709.
It was a wonder nobody’d called the cops on them yet. Norman sure as hell didn’t look like he belonged in the front seat of a pool-service truck. Wearing a shiny gray shirt with geometric designs and a long collar spread wide over his canary yellow sports coat, no belt holding up his sky blue pants, and white socks with white loafers. Crash-test dummies had better taste.
“You bring your gun?”
He drew it out, a Glock 9, then slid it back inside his coat.
“I’m carrying, too. They’re under the tarp in back. Two Mac-tens, an Uzi, the Heckler & Koch carbine.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, no. They were my dad’s. My inheritance. You knew my dad, the gun nut, a true-blue paranoid. He was sure our apartment was going to be stormed any second, by the police, by the neighbors, by Martians, who knows? So all that money he got from you for stolen goods over the years, every nickel of it went for guns. Guns and guns and more guns. We couldn’t afford a goddamn TV. We ate off paper plates. Beans and cabbage. But the apartment was jam-packed with guns. Is that ironic or what? He’s got all those guns, and what is he protecting? Just more guns. That dumb shit.”
Emma dug a finger through the frayed hole in the thigh of her cutoffs. White T-shirt today, tennis shoes, hair back in a ponytail, just one curly strand loose and hanging down beside her left eye, giving her that sultry look.
“Money’s the only thing that really protects a person. Not guns, not smarts, not muscle. None of that. Only thing that works is cash. Money, money, money. You get enough dollar bills together in one pile, nobody can touch you. That’s not what they want you to believe, the teachers, preachers, the goddamn politicians. Root of all evil, my ass. The guy that said that never lived in our neighborhood. You want to see the root of all evil, drive down Second Avenue at three in the morning.
“Uh-huh. If money’s the root of all evil, then why’s that collection plate going up and down every pew piled up with cash dollars? Yeah, right. The holier-than-thous are driving around in air-conditioned cars, cold air blowing in their faces all day, and what do I get? I get a broken-down truck with a crank window, sweating all day, nothing I can do about it.”
She leaned back in her seat and looked out at the pretty street. The green trees waving, the sharp, pure sunlight. The day was going on without her. It didn’t matter if she was there or not. That same wind would stir those same trees. The shadows would move along the asphalt. Birds would sing the same tunes with or without Emma. Stepping outside of herself for a few seconds, leaving the husk of Emma Lee Potts on the front seat of her employer’s Nissan pickup. That same feeling had been coming over her a lot lately. Like all at once she was there and not there at the same time.
It wasn’t a bad feeling really, not scary. A kind of pleasant release, like she was practicing being dead.
“While we’re waiting out here, nothing to do, you feel like a hand job, Norman? I mean, just to pass the time.”
“No.”
“Way I look at it, if we’re going to be partners in crime, hanging out together for long hours on stakeouts and shit, we should get to know each other on a more intimate basis, work on a few secret handshakes. Get our chakras humming the same tune, our harmonic clocks synchronized.”
“I said no.”
“What? I don’t turn you on? Not the least little bit? You don’t look at me and get any kind of tingle at all? Little hot gnawing feelings in your belly?”
When he turned his head this time, there was dark fire in his eyes. His mouth moved as if he were chewing on his words before speaking them. He drew the air through his nose and blew it out his mouth.
“Not interested,” he said.
“What’re you, gay, a homosexual or something?”
He turned back to the view out the window.
“Or maybe you’re an out-and-out abstainer. Now there’s a seriously kinky approach to life. There’s a man marching to a totally radical drummer. A monk. A high priest of apathy.” Emma reached out and jingled the keys hanging from the ignition. “Okay, fine, you’ve decided you want to abstain, withdraw from the human race, the animal kingdom in general, hey, fine and dandy. I can handle that. No problem whatsoever.”
She tinkled the car keys, tapped her foot.
“So what makes you tick, Norman? It’s not sex; we’ve established that. So what is it?”
Norman was quiet. A fly buzzed around his face, circled his nose, then landed on his lower lip, took a couple of steps, then flew off again. The whole time, Norman never twitched or tried to wave it away.
“Come on, Norman. Talk to me, big guy. What makes you tick?”
“I don’t tick.”
“Sure you do. Everybody ticks. Something winds your clock and you tick. It’s that simple. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning, get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other. No tick, no life. So what is it, Norman? Down there at the center of your massive physical self, what’s the engine that drives the beast?”
He shook his head.
“Open up, Norman. Let the sun shine in. There’s something there burning inside. I know there is. Some itch you’re trying to scratch. It’s the thing that put your ass in the seat beside me right now. Come on, Norm. I told you mine. I opened up, laid it all on the table. Money’s what I’m after. Pure, sweet, simple money. Now it’s your turn. What makes you tick?”
Norman looked over at her with that drowsy stare, then turned his gaze back to the house.
“Okay, okay. Jesus, you want to be an enigma, fine, you’re a big fucking enigma. Great. A cipher, a conundrum. Terrific.”
Emma looked up as the tall dark-haired woman hurried around the side of the house and climbed up onto the front porch again.
“Something’s going down.”
Emma looked over at the big man. He turned his head slowly and settled his dark eyes on hers.
“So, Mr. Enigma, you think you could focus on this project for a little while? Getting that money, making it ours? You think you could do that?”
She waited for him to reply, but it was useless. He’d said his quota of words for the day.
TWELVE
Alexandra Rafferty pulled out the lock pick that was wedged into the slot of the keyhole; then she nudged the scarred door open and stepped across the threshold into the house.
Her father’s singing guided her through the dreary living area and into a bedroom bathed in sun. He was cradling the cat in his arms,
still bouncing on the edge of the mattress.
“What have you done, Dad?” Her voice was an aching whisper.
He looked over at her, and the cat dropped its head back and stared at her upside down. It was a fluffy, thick-necked creature and seemed quite content with the jostling ride. Lawton’s lullaby dwindled to a discordant hum.
“You wanted to come in here, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to talk to the woman, not break into her house.”
“Well, we’re here now. Might as well look around, check out the competition.”
“Get up, Dad. Right now.”
“Don’t you want to see this place, where Stan and Delvin come after work? Hit buckets of balls.”
“No, I don’t. This is wrong. We have to leave.”
“The front door was ajar; we walked in. No crime in that.”
“You picked the lock, Dad. You broke in.”
She held up the lock pick.
“I did?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, good for me. I haven’t lost my touch.”
“Come on, Dad. Get up. Let’s go. Now.”
“It’s okay. I’m a cop. I can break into people’s houses. I have the full weight of the law behind me. As long as there’s probable cause, and in the present case, I think there certainly is.”
“You’re not a cop anymore, Dad. You retired.”
“Don’t contradict me, Alexandra. I guess I know what profession I’m in. Good grief, I’m not that far gone. Now, you look around, and when you’ve made a thorough examination of the premises, we’ll leave.”
Body Language Page 13