by Noreen Ayres
I’ll give him this: He was direct. He said, “I hear you’re a cop.”
The busboy came with water, and as I sat waiting for the arms to get out of my face, I caught Roland’s other look, the one behind the innocent statement.
“I work in the evidence lab, is all.”
“I thought about being a officer of the law once myself.”
“No kidding.”
Patricia said, “Will wonders never cease?”
“It was that or the navy, long as it’s blue. But Okie boys don’t always make the best choices for theirselves.” And then he drilled a long look at my friend and added, “’Cept starting right now. Ain’t that right, Snookums?”
“Give me a break.” she said, but she liked it. “You call me that one more time, and I’ll give you a break.”
He asked me, “Y’all were down at the station, when me and my brother were conductin’ business there, huh? That’s what Snookums tells me.” Patricia’s leg jumped and Roland’s moved and bumped into mine and held there four seconds until I moved mine. “She’s got a nasty boot,” he said.
“It’s a small world, I guess.”
“I think she’s got a boyfriend locked down she don’t want to tell me about.” He reached his right hand over and swept his forefinger across the back of her hand like a windshield wiper. Then he slowly cranked his head to me, and winked.
I said, “I thought I saw you in the parking lot.”
“Now, if I’da seen two pretty little dollies like you, I’d sure remember it. No, Phil and me picked up our fishin’ license and then we did split.”
“Fishing license?” Patricia said.
“You don’t get them there,” I told her. I smiled at Roland then. We’re all just good buddies here.
He nodded to me and half-winked. “You could put one over on her, couldn’t ya?” Drawing Patricia’s hand to his lips and kissing her knuckles, he said, “I saw this one climbing in that orange Frog car, and I just said to myself, Now, that’s a pretty good-lookin’ long tall drink o’ water.”
A waiter with dark hair dangling in his face came and took drink orders. I said I wouldn’t be eating. Patricia gave me a look without expression, but I knew she was critical. I’d hear about it.
I said, “What kind of work do you do, Roland?”
“Whatever pays best.”
“He’s going to start studying computers.” Patricia smiled.
Roland clinked the tines of his fork on the empty wineglass, to the tap of “Shave-and-a-Haircut, Four-Bits.” He said, “I’ve been doing some ocean work, underwater repair, like on them offshore oil rigs?”
I nodded. Tell it all, Dork Man.
“My job’s going to finish up here next week. I might go to Hawaii. Anybody want to come along?” He smiled at Patricia and pulled her fingertips to meet his so that the two of them sat there making spiders, and then gave me a look that said we could make it a threesome if I want.
The drinks came. I swallowed an old-fashioned in three mouthfuls and chawed the fruit while Patricia talked about making money in real estate and Roland’s eyes turned greener. His knee wandered into mine.
I said I had to go. Roland said, “Hey, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers’ll getcha. You chucked that shooter right down.”
“Mind your own business, Roland,” said Patricia. “Smokey can take care of herself.”
“I’ll bet she can. But you know what? I get the feeling Smokey—say, that’s a great name, you know it?”
“See you. Take it easy.” I stood up and put a fiver on the table.
Roland dragged on, his voice, I’ll admit, grabbing me by the throat because I like them that way. He said, “I get the feeling Smokey here don’t like me a bit. Now, how can that be, a nice guy like me?”
Patricia’s face cleared and then charged with alertness, as if I might say something wrong.
I said, still standing, “I might as well come out with it, Roland. I don’t particularly like the fact that you just happened to show up in her apartment complex after seeing us that night. That clear enough for you?”
“Oh-h, now I see it. You tell her about me, Patricia, my little brushes with the law a long time ago?” He asked her, but he was looking at me. “I thought a person got a second chance in this country. What’d I go to Nam for if that ain’t so?”
I shook my head and laughed and said, “Don’t give me that Nam bullshit, Roland, and just watch your step, okay?, with my friend.”
Patricia directed the remark to me: “Stop it—” and I halfassed saluted and said, “Talk to you later.”
Roland said, “See ya around, Sunshine.”
A few days passed, and I hadn’t heard from Patricia. Nothing new turned up on the Dwyer case, and Christmas was closing in and I hadn’t bought a thing. I stopped by Patricia’s apartment once to see if she wanted to go shopping, but she was not at home; called once, but hung up before the answering machine would click on. The idea of Patricia with Roland distressed me, but I know one thing: You can’t make a person see the truth unless they’re ready. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”—I memorized that once when I was a kid.
And then one day I got a call on my answering machine from Patricia’s apartment manager. Patricia was ten days overdue on the rent, she said, and Patricia had put my name down on her rental application as a reference.
CHAPTER
19
Hawaii must’ve sounded pretty good to Patricia. I called back the Fairdale Apartments and asked if Patricia hadn’t given some relatives for references. The landlady said, “I been calling for three days, and zilch. She gives an aunt here too, in Moline, Illinois. I call, she hasn’t been at that number for over a year.”
“What about Patricia’s employer?”
“I go to them first off,” she said. “She’s on vacation. I say, ‘When’s she coming back?’ He says, ‘One week Tuesday,’ but my creditors don’t wait one week Tuesday.”
Five needles attacked the lower right side of the back of my head. I hunched up my shoulder. Jesus, what was this now? A psychosomatic something. I was falling apart. The problem was, if Patricia went to Hawaii, would she have been mad enough at me not to tell me? She told me everything.
I told the landlady I’d bring the money over for the rent. She said, “You better do it before seven o’clock tomorrow morning, or I’m hauling her stuff down to storage.”
“Don’t do that,” I said, “please.”
“I don’t want to pack it up neither. That’s no fun and I got plenty to do here. Can you be here by seven A.M.?”
“Yes. I’ll be there.”
“Then everything’ll be all right.”
I thanked her. She said, “Sometimes these young ones go off. They’re havin’ a good time, they forget. I know how it is, I was young once. But you got to pay the piper.”
“Patricia wouldn’t have gone off without paying her rent, ordinarily. I know her. There must’ve been an emergency.” Of course I didn’t know her, as the last few weeks’ events had revealed.
I thought I heard a sigh at the other end. “Could you bring cash?” the landlady said. I said, Yes, and thanks again, and started to hang up. “Better bring maybe three dollars more to pay for Moline.”
I sat near a window in the law library where I could look out on the concrete courtyard and see all the people threading their way between a hot dog vendor and the Federal Building, and looked up Mr. and Mrs. Harris’s neighbors in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a reverse directory. When I got names of people residing on either side of the Harrises’, I went back to my office and called an A. B. Winters first.
A soft Southern voice came on the line: “Hello?” I could hear kids in the background, and shrieks and water splashing. “Oh,” the voice said, “just a moment, please.” The receiver was being laid down, ka-clunk.
“Children,” the voice called, “quieten down now, all right? Mam-maw’s talkin’ on the phone. Yes, William, I see, that�
�s good. You all quieten down for just a minute, hm?” It seemed a long time until she came back. I imagined her heavy side-to-side gait across a braided carpet on a hardwood floor. I imagined a pie in the oven, and Mrs. Winters brushing back a strand of flyaway gray hair as she retrieved the phone. “Now, what can I do for you?”
As if on cue, Joe L. Sanders appeared at my door. He looked a little put out because I was on the phone. He walked in and took a pen and a piece of note paper off my desk and began to write something.
“Ms. Winters? I’m calling from California—”
Joe looked up, raising an eyebrow. No doubt he’d ask me what the long-distance call was for later, as if it were out of his own budget. Stu Hollings was a bean counter too, but not as bad as Joe.
“You don’t know me, but . . .” I said, and asked her if she was a neighbor of Patricia Harris’s parents, only I didn’t say Patricia Harris’s parents with Joe standing there; I said Mr. and Mrs. Herman J. Harris.
He slid the paper toward me, glanced at me, and left. The note said, “See me before you go home. Please.” I wanted to say yes to him or nod or something, but he never looked back.
As I spoke to the Harrises’ neighbor, I tried not to alarm her, and I think I was successful in that. She said the Harrises had been on a cruise to Spain and the Greek islands for two weeks. They had one more to go. The first they’d ever been on, and they were very excited.
“Was their daughter Patricia with them?”
“No, I don’t believe I heard them mention that. Can I do anything to help?” I told her no, I’d call back. She said, “I think they said the Greek islands,” then paused. “Are there Greek islands?” And then answered herself: “Yes, I think so.” She laughed and said, “I’ve never been.”
At the front driveway to the Fairdale Apartments, a freestanding directory holding the names of the residents was enclosed in a wood-framed glass box. I looked through the strips of blue-and-black labeling tape for “Dugdale.” Found it. Whoever punched the label hit the ampersand instead of the pound sign: &210. The manager’s was #100.
Driving through passageways narrow as alleys, I intended to spot number 210 first, lock its location in my mind, and come back to it later, after handing over seven hundred of my hard-earned dollars.
The apartments were grouped in circular segments and painted deep gray with white trim. Clouds of lavender impatiens and pink vinca poofed out along patches of too-green lawn by each apartment, the sod newly installed in visible blocks. Palms, their fronds still tied up at the top to prevent transplant shock, lined the roadways. Rustlers can get five thousand dollars for the tall ones, complete with nesting rats, but these palms were only about ten feet high and probably worth no more than five hundred, so they just might survive awhile. Nailed high into the stucco of some of the end apartments was an occasional brass unit letter out of sequence. This is a test: You can’t live here unless you can figure out the system.
Halfway down one of the asphalt passageways I saw a Bronco parked under an open carport with maybe thirty empty spaces around it; black, looking like one of our police vehicles without the six-pointed star on the side. Ours are full of wooden drawers holding flares, lanterns, first-aid stuff, yellow tarps. But this one, if it was a Dugdale’s, full of what? Diving gear? B-and-E goodies? I stopped behind it. The license plate bore an unremarkable seven-character tag, but it was the plate frame that interested me, and I memorized the license plate anyway: two-Mike-Hotel-Xray-six-fourteen. The frame was from a dealership in Victorville, a high-desert town a solid hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles, full of coarse sand, strong wind, and spiky Joshua trees. The city used to be little more than a highway gas stop; a drunken man could walk home hoisting his brown sack in happiness and baying at the moon until about ten years ago. Nearby, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and their stuffed horse, Trigger, could listen to the wind whooing out over the far hills that cradle dude ranches and spas deep in their shadows. Now there were Kmarts and apartment houses within rock-throwing distance of the freeway. But restaurants still served country breakfasts with white gravy, and women with rolls of flesh around their middles laughed hard, talked with cigarettes in their mouths, and didn’t give a damn. The thing was, it was still a desert town, with a desert mentality, and somebody like Roland Dugdale would be from Victorville—or Texas or Oklahoma—the point being, someplace with large landscapes just a little left-side of the law. I almost pulled into the spot next to the Bronco. But I went on. Find the lady. Pay the lady. Come back. Go knock on Roland’s door and ask what the fuck he thought he was doing.
I found her, I paid her. She gave me a receipt I was prepared to ask for, then said, “I guess you know if she doesn’t show up, I’m entitled to store her stuff and let the apartment out to somebody else.” She was wearing an all-over bright-pink polyester pant outfit, and her hair was orange and thin on top so you could see the very pale scalp. She said this to her desk while she was putting away my cash, and when I didn’t respond, she looked up at me.
Fastening the latch on my purse, I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” I smiled and said, “But I’ll sure look up the code,” and left out the screen door.
I must have driven at least twice past the spot where I thought the Bronco was because of the damned layout—and because I couldn’t believe it was gone. Not that soon. But it was.
I wheeled into a slot and got out, seeking number 210. When I found it, my heart was beating hard enough for me to hear it in my ears. I took a breath and knocked. Waited. Saw a bell nearly obscured by bushes, and rang.
No answer. As I started off to walk the opposite direction around the hexagonal path, I slowed and looked in a window of apartment 210. A red sweater was draped across the back of a couch near the window. On the floor at the other end was a mound of clothes near an empty laundry basket, and across from the couch a guitar case leaned upright on a cantaloupe-colored loveseat. The furniture was whitewashed pine and the colors were fashionably soft—so far, not a place, it seemed, that a country boy or a deep-sea diver would rent. Doubt swept over me. Did I even have the apartment number right from the registry? I was confused and felt foolish lingering at someone’s picture window like a snoop. I stepped away but glanced back and could see the corner of the dining-room table. Outlined there were two wine bottles and several beer cans. Now, if I could just see a diver’s suit, a helmet with brails. How about a gun, a pistol, say, with big focking rounds lined up ready to be loaded. How about something concrete, I told myself. And walked away, disappointed, disgruntled, and disgusted.
CHAPTER
20
All week it wore on me, where Patricia could be, and how this thing happened with Dugdale. Saturday I worked, and Sunday I did the usual maintenance stuff: grocery-getting, laundry, gasoline. Then, back from my last foray out, my key still in the front door and the door open a crack, I heard a familiar engine, and looked down. From the second-story walkway that leads to my unit, I saw Patricia’s Peugeot pulling around the circular red-brick courtyard, seeking one of the few parking places available to visitors. There’s a stone fountain in the center of the courtyard, with small yellow and blue flowers popcorning around it, and the sun turned the cascading water into a cellophane umbrella.
Both front doors opened. As Patricia folded out of her side, Roland Dugdale ducked out of his, wearing a lime-green shirt, an open brown leather jacket over that, sand-colored shorts, and beach thongs. Then the rear door opened, and the top of someone’s head, a woman’s, emerged, the hair shiny and dark, chin-length. Patricia said something to the woman, and then they were all of them coming toward the stairs below where I stood on the balcony, Patricia looking up, spotting me. She called out, “Smokey, here! We’ve come to say hello.”
I just stared and let them come up, pulling my door shut, and moved to the top of the stairs—Roland Dugdale wasn’t coming into my apartment.
A long box of sun lit up the pebble-surfaced stairway and fired Patricia’s hair as she ascended.<
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Roland looked up once, his green eyes splintering into mine. Between Patricia and Roland, the other one, the girl, about my height but more delicate, and pale. As she squinted into the glare of sun, I saw that she was young, younger than Patricia and I.
“Smokey . . . what’s the matter?” Patricia said, coming toward me. “Listen, you shouldn’t have. You didn’t need to do that. I mean, thank you and all, but really, you didn’t need to pay my rent.” She laughed her nervous laugh, with only one of the two dimples forming. “I brought money to pay you back.” She began ferreting in the black patterned purse that hung from her shoulder and across the Australian outfit I knew she got from Olivia Newton-John’s billabong shop or whatever she calls it, at Mainplace. “Here, meet my friend,” she said, extracting a wad of bills from her purse and waving it toward the pale girl. I saw the perennial sweetness of Patricia’s face, and in her eyes the readiness to accept all things, and thought for a moment, She’s better than I, kinder, more tolerant, open. Innocent; and that man too, and this new girl, this Southern California Saks Fifth Avenue–decorated girl standing behind Roland; in this country, innocent until established guilty by means I was privileged to have at my disposal, not by bias, not by reaction, not by emotion. Innocent. Look Roland in the face and acknowledge innocence. Look.