by Ed McBain
“Well, it wouldn’t just be watching someone get married, Joanna. I’m sure you’re invited to the reception as well—”
“Sure, lots of grown-ups getting drunk,” Joanna said.
“I’m sure there’ll be some people your own age, too. People you and Daisy know.”
“You trying to get rid of me or something?” Joanna asked, and I could visualize her grinning on the other end of the line.
“I’m trying to be fair, honey. If you really want to go...”
Veronica came out of the bathroom, naked and drying herself with a huge blue bath towel.
“Is it Bloom?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Is Dale there with you?” Joanna asked.
I felt suddenly embarrassed, as though Joanna and I were hooked up on one of those science-fiction television-phones where we could see each other while we talked, and where she could also see Veronica standing just outside the bathroom door, drying herself.
“No, she isn’t,” I said.
“Then who was that?”
“One of the cleaning women.”
“I thought they came on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Joanna said, puzzled. “Isn’t this Wednesday? I keep losing track of what day it is, all those damn papers Mrs. Carpenter keeps assigning. Dad, don’t sweat the wedding, okay? I’d rather be with you, really. Anyway, Daisy Robinson’s a pain. She used to tell me I cheated at jacks, remember?”
“I remember. So what’s your decision, honey? Do you want to go or not?”
“Of course not. What time will you pick me up Friday?”
“Five-thirty?”
“Terrif. I gotta go, Roadrunner’s honking the horn. See you Friday, I love you, Dad.”
“Love you too, honey,” I said, but she was already gone.
I put the receiver back on the cradle. Veronica was watching me from the bathroom door.
“Your daughter?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is this her weekend with you?”
“This one, and the next one too.”
She nodded and went back into the bathroom to hang up the towel. She came out again a moment later, went to the chair where she’d thrown her clothes last night, picked up a pair of white nylon panties, and stepped into them.
“Will I be meeting her?” she asked.
I went back to the mirror and started knotting my tie all over again.
“Matthew?”
“I’m thinking,” I said.
“Is there that much to think about?”
“I haven’t yet told her about Dale.”
“Your former lady friend,” Veronica said, and picked up the white shorts. “Who left you for...what’d you say his name was? Jim?” Jim.
“Hardly ever brings me pretty flowers. Do you know that song? Or was it before your time?” She stepped into the shorts. She zipped them up the back. “That’s right, you grew up with the Beatles, didn’t you?” she said.
“I was already in law school when the Beatles came along.”
“Who, then? Elvis?”
“And the Everly Brothers, and Danny and the Juniors, and...”
“Never heard of them,” she said, and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “I keep giving away my age, don’t I? Are you finished with that mirror? Never mind, I’ll use the one in the bathroom.” She picked up her handbag and carried it into the bathroom with her. I could see her at the mirror over the sink, brushing her lids with a blue that was a shade darker than her eyes.
“Why’d you tell her I was the cleaning lady?” she asked.
I had not enjoyed lying to Joanna. I liked to believe that our father-daughter relationship was built on mutual trust. But I hadn’t seen any way of telling her, at eight o’clock in the morning, that the female voice she’d heard in the background belonged to a woman she didn’t know, a woman she’d immediately realize I’d spent the night with. On Joanna’s block, in Joanna’s entire adolescent neighborhood, Dale was the woman I was supposed to be spending my nights with.
“She caught me by surprise,” I said.
“So naturally you said I was the cleaning lady. It’s a shame I don’t do windows or floors.”
“Well, I just didn’t know what to tell her.”
“Maybe you should have tried the truth.”
“Not on the phone.”
“Of course not.”
“She’s very fond of Dale.”
“Of course she is. How old is Dale, anyway, did you tell me? At my age, it’s so difficult to remember things.”
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two, how nice,” she said, an edge of saccharine bitchiness to her voice. “They must have been like sisters to each other.”
I watched her as she applied lipstick to her mouth. She was the only woman I’d ever met who could look so radiantly beautiful in the morning. She didn’t need eye shadow, she didn’t need liner, she didn’t need lipstick or blush. All she needed was that gloriously naked face with its spatter of freckles across the bridge of the nose. She saw me watching her in the mirror. She winked broadly, and then came out of the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror over the dresser, where the light was better. She tucked a stray wisp of blonde hair behind her ear. She dabbed with a tissue at a tiny smear of lipstick near the corner of her mouth.
“You could have told her I was me,” she said softly, still studying herself in the mirror. “I am me, you know.”
“Yes, I know that,” I said, and smiled.
“I thought maybe you thought I was the cleaning lady,” she said, and smiled back at me in the mirror. She turned and leaned against the dresser. “Will I be seeing you this weekend?” she asked.
“After I break the news to her.”
“The news,” she repeated.
“About Dale.”
“Oh, the breakup.”
“Yes.”
“For a moment I thought you meant the news about me.”
“I’ll do that in person. When you meet her.”
“Will I be meeting her, Matthew?”
“Of course you will.”
“Of course I will. When?”
“I’ll have to call you,” I said. “Let me see how it goes with Joanna.”
“After you tell her about Dale, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Could be traumatic, I suppose.”
“Well, she’s very fond of her.”
“I’m sure. When do you think that might be, Matthew?”
“I’m not following you.”
“Sorry. You said you’d have to call me. You said you wanted to see how it went with—”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know, actually. We’ll have to play it by ear. I’ll call you as soon—”
“I have a better idea,” she said. “Call me a taxi instead. Now, okay?”
I looked at her.
“Blue Cab or Yellow,” she said, “either one’ll take me out to the ranch.”
“I was planning to drive you out,” I said.
“I wouldn’t dream of troubling you,” she said. “I’m sure you have a lot of work to do this morning. You’ll probably want to prepare a brief on how best to break the news to your—”
“What is this, Veronica?”
“You tell me.”
“What are you so angry about all of a sudden?”
“What makes you think I’m angry? And who says it’s all of a sudden? You tell your daughter I’m your cleaning lady, you tell me you’re not sure you can see me this weekend—”
“This is only Wednesday, why are you worrying about the weekend? We’ve got tonight, we’ve got—”
“That’s what you think.”
“Well, haven’t we?”
She put her hands on her hips. She looked me dead in the eye. Her own eyes looked virtually colorless in the wash of light that streamed through the window. When she spoke, her voice was very low.
“The weekend depends on how Joanna reacts to this devastating news, doesn�
��t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“This awesome news. This shattering—”
“Veronica, you can’t expect me to tell her it’s over with Dale and then just spring—”
“Just spring Grandma on her, right?”
“I think we can drop the ‘Grandma’ routine, don’t you? I don’t find it funny anymore.”
“Neither does Grandma. If this precious love affair of yours—”
“Veronica, you’re totally misconstruing—”
“—was so memorable, so goddamn unique that announcing its demise will cause earthquakes in Southern California...”
“For Christ’s sake, we sound married! All I said—”
“All you said, Matthew, was that you want to put me on hold. Well, I’m afraid that isn’t good enough. I spent too many years married to a man who kept me waiting on the other end of the line while he was off frolicking in Denver or Dallas or—look, the hell with it, let’s just forget it, okay? You spend the weekend worrying about your daughter, and I’ll spend the weekend worrying about mine. Roses are red, and violets are blue, so fuck it.”
She picked up her sandals.
“Don’t bother about a taxi,” she said, “I’ll walk home.”
Barefooted, the sandals dangling from her hand by their straps, she walked nonetheless with great dignity out of my bedroom and out of my house.
Like a damn fool, I let her go.
Harry Loomis called me at two o’clock that afternoon. I did not feel like talking to Harry Loomis. I did not feel like talking to anybody. All morning long, listening to the various clients with whom I’d had appointments, I kept losing track of the conversations. One woman—who was there to see me about petitioning for a variance that would allow her to build an eight-foot-high wall around her property—actually said, “Mr. Hope, only my psychiatrist doesn’t listen the way you don’t listen,” and stomped out of my office. Another client, who knew me somewhat better, said, “Matthew? Big night last night?” When I blinked at him, he said, “Maybe we ought to save this for another time, huh?” We’d been discussing an outlay of $1,600,000 for prime shorefront property; I could understand his ardent desire for me to get all the details straight. I tried to snap back. I tried to listen. I made notes. When he left the office, I realized that without the notes I wouldn’t have been able to remember a word of our conversation. I took at least a dozen calls, doodling while I listened—women in profile, women with short pale hair, always the good profile, the left one. At lunch with a pair of attorneys to whom we’d farmed out a malpractice suit, I listened halfheartedly while one of them told a gynecologist joke. They were specialists in malpractice suits, these two. All their jokes had to do with the medical profession.
A woman goes to see a gynecologist.
The gynecologist says, “What seems to be the trouble?”
The woman says, “My husband keeps complaining I have a very large vagina.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” the gynecologist says.
He puts her up on the table. He puts her feet in the stirrups. He takes a look.
“My God, what a huge vagina!” he says. “My God, what a huge vagina!”
“Well, you didn’t have to say it twice,” she says.
“I didn’t!” he says.
The malpractice attorney telling the joke laughed out loud when he delivered the punch line. His partner, who had heard the joke before, laughed so hard I thought he would choke on his sea bass, the catch of the day. I smiled.
I did not feel like talking to Harry Loomis that afternoon. But Cynthia buzzed me at two o’clock to say he was waiting on six, and I sighed heavily and picked up the receiver, and then moved my doodling pad into place.
“Well,” he said, “I finally got her on the telephone. Reason it’s off the hook most of the day is she sleeps all day long.”
I assumed he was talking about Burrill’s daughter in New Orleans.
“Doesn’t get to bed till the crack of dawn. What she is, Mr. Hope, she’s a workin’ girl is what she told me she is. What I mean is she doesn’t get to sleep till dawn, she gets to bed a lot earlier’n that, and a lot more frequently. What she is, Mr. Hope, is a prostitute down there in N’Orleans, is what she is. Hester Burrill. Talked to her early this morning, I think she had a sailor in bed with her, way she kept callin’ him ‘Ensign,’ though that mighta been the man’s name, they got funny names in N’Orleans, comes from the French influence, I suspeck. Point is, Mr. Hope, I’m a God-fearin’ Baptist who don’t want no more truck with prostitutes than’s necessary. She’s flyin’ down here tonight, wants to look over the land tomorrow; you’d think she was inheritin’ the Taj Mahal, way she sounded on the phone. The sailor kept tellin’ her to stop jumpin’ up and down on the bed, and she kept yellin’, I’m an heiress, Ensign, I’m a fuckin’ heiress!’—’scuse the language, but that’s what she said. You listenin’ to all this, Mr. Hope?”
“I’m listening,” I said. I was also doodling another left profile.
“What I plan to do, I plan to draw a termination agreement ready for her signature on Friday. I don’t want to spend any more time on this than I have to. What I’ll recommend is she settle for the four thousand in escrow and the Ford Mustang, and be happy the farm’s still hers, that’s what I’ll recommend. We’ll forget all about his sneakers and dirty socks, how’s that? Papers’ll be all ready for her signature, if she knows how to write. I’d appreciate it if you came by Friday morning, picked them up, got your client to execute them, and that’ll be that. I don’t like dealin’ with prostitutes, Mr. Hope. You can get yourself a terrible disease just shakin’ hands with ’em. Can you stop by here Friday morning?”
“Why don’t you just put them in the mail?” I said.
“No sir, I want to expedite this entire matter. You come look them over, make sure they’re okay for her signature, and then take ’em with you. I’ll have her here in the office at eleven o’clock, that too early for you?”
“Eleven’ll be fine,” I said.
“Maybe you can drop them off at the ranch there on your way back to Calusa, get Mrs. McKinney to execute ’em, finish the whole thing off in one day.”
“Well...maybe,” I said.
“Anyway, I’ll see you here on Friday,” he said, and hung up.
7
* * *
IT WAS raining when I started for Ananburg on Friday morning. It wasn’t supposed to be raining in the morning. In August it was supposed to rain in the afternoon. Maybe the hurricane season was gathering full force. Maybe all of Calusa would get blown out to sea before September, when we normally started worrying about getting blown out to sea. I kept kicking myself for not having told the mechanic to fix the windshield wipers. I kept telling myself that a fifty-seven-year-old woman should have known better than to place a thirty-eight-year-old man in conflict with his fourteen-year-old daughter. I kept thinking maybe Frank was right; I didn’t know how to treat women. I kept thinking I should go over his rules more carefully, study them, learn them by heart. I kept thinking I was about to meet a bona fide hooker, and I wondered if I should treat her like a lady.
Hester Burrill did not look like what I supposed a hooker should look like. I expected her to be wearing a slinky red dress cut low over creamy white cleavage, and slit high on a shapely thigh. I expected her to be wearing bangles and bright shiny beads. I expected her to be swinging a red leather handbag. I expected her hair to be bleached blonde, maybe done in the frizzies, or else worn straight and long and hanging over one eye, the way Veronica Lake used to wear hers. I expected eyes made up to resemble Cleopatra’s, heavy rouge on the cheeks, a scarlet lipstick slash on her mouth, and a scarlet letter on her breast.
Hester Burrill looked like a female accountant.
She was wearing a blue linen suit, with a simple white blouse under the jacket. She was wearing matching blue shoes with low heels. A blue leather shoulder bag sat on the floor near her chair. The only piece of jewelry she
wore was a high school graduation ring on the middle finger of her right hand. Her hair was black and styled in a straight simple cut, cropped to just below her jawline. She had green eyes that did not seem to harbor all the obscene sexual secrets of the universe, and the only makeup she wore was a muted lipstick on her generous mouth. I guessed she was in her late twenties. The single clue to her occupation was her very pale complexion; I did not suppose Hester Burrill spent much time in the sun.
“Well, I’d like to get this over with soon’s we can,” Loomis said, searching on his cluttered desktop for the release he’d prepared. He was not chewing tobacco today, I noticed, and he was treating Hester with gentlemanly courtesy and respect; maybe he had read Frank’s ten rules. “Miss Burrill took a look at the farm yesterday, and she tells me—”
“Some farm,” Hester said, and rolled her eyes.
Loomis smiled. “Little run-down, from what she tells me,” he said. “She plans on puttin’ it on the market again, soon’s she’s in actual possession. Meanwhile, she’s read these papers”—he had them in his hand now—“and she’s willin’ to sign ’em soon’s you look ’em over and say they’re all right.”
He handed one set of papers to me, and another to Hester. She put her copy back on the desk again, without looking at it.
“What they are,” Loomis said, “is a simple agreement by both sides to cancel the contract. The estate turns over the four thousand dollars in escrow and the car used t’belong to McKinney, and in return Miss Burrill here agrees not to press further for satisfaction of the contract between her late father and McKinney.”
“This is all assuming, of course—”
“Assumin’ she’s the only heir at law, correct,” Loomis said. “I’ve put that in the first paragraph, and cited Avery’s will, as well, a copy of which is attached to the papers. I don’t think there’ll be any problem with probate, but if for some reason the estate don’t go to her, you’re covered.”
“We would not, of course, turn over any property until—”
“Until we clear probate, that’s in there too. We don’t expeck the escrow check or the car till it’s determined Miss Burrill is the sole heir. If you look at the will, though, you’ll see there’s no problem.”