After all, it is the only situation where white male and black female meet in the context of bedroom, and the quarry cannot exactly go running to the management to complain about a guest. Other defensive devices are the switchblade in the apron pocket, the kitchen knife taped to the inside of the chocolate thigh, the icepick inside the fold of the uniform blouse. Some, after getting tricked, trapped, overwhelmed by a few shrewd, knowing, determined white men, become part-time hustlers. Others cannot accept or adjust. Classic tragedy is the inevitable unavoidable tumble from some high place, where the victim has no place to turn, toppled by some instrument of indifferent fate. A high place is a relative thing. Pride of any kind is a high place, and any fall can kill.
"I see you didn't get fired, Cathy," I said as she came out of the bathroom with the towels.
She cast a swift and wary look at Lorette and then said, "No, suh. Thank you kindly."
There was a silence. I saw that they had begun to dust areas already dusted and were making other busy movements without improving anything. Lorette Walker, her back to me, said, "I can take off now, and this here girl can finish up.".
"You look finished. You can both take off."
Lorette straightened and turned to face me, swinging that stupefying bosom around. "You want us both leaving, after I went to all the trouble of telling this here girl she should leastway give you the chance to collect on that favor you did her?"
Cathy stood at semiattention, staring at the wall beyond me, Indian face impassive. She was a big brawny woman, wide through the shoulders and hips, nipped narrow at the waist, with strong dark column of throat, husky shapely legs planted, her body looking deep and powerful through the belly and loins.
"Cathy?" I said.
"Yassa."
"There's no point in Mrs. Walker making us both uncomfortable. So why don't you just take off?"
Cathy looked toward Lorette, eyebrows raised in question. Lorette said something to her in a slurred tone. Cathy scooped up the sheets and towels and with one swift and unreadable glance at me, went out and pulled the door shut. I heard the fading jingle of the service cart as she trundled it away.
Lorette came over and sat on the bottom corner of the bed, facing me, studying me. Small and pretty brown face, coffee with double cream, with no highlights at all on the smooth matte skin, with eyes so dark the pupils and irises merged. She fished cigarettes and matches from her skirt pocket, lit one, crossed slender legs as she exhaled a long plume. There was challenge and appraisal in her stare.
"Black turn you off, man?"
"Not at all. Suspicion does, though. It's an ugly emotion."
"And ugly living with it or having to live with it. Maybe you don't want it from Cathy on account of it would hurt your chance of making it with me, you think."
"How did you ever guess? I forced poor Cathy to drink that doctored gin, and I arranged to have the nurse killed, just so you and I could meet right here and arrange the whole thing. Take a choice of places, honey. Guatemala City? Paris? Montevideo? Where do I send your ticket?"
She was simultaneously angry and amused. Amusement won. Finally she said, "There's just one last thing I got to be sure of. Tell me, are you any kind of law at all? Any kind?"
"Not any kind at all, Lorette."
She shrugged, sighed, and said, "Well, here I go. Out
where the nurse lived there's a white woman in number
sixty, pretty close by. She's got her a Monday-Thursday
cleaning woman, half days. Last Monday the cleaning
woman got there and found a note from the woman she'd
be away a week, don't come Thursday. The woman
works in an office job. The cleaning woman didn't work
Thursday and went there yesterday, Monday, like always.
She can tell the woman that lives there isn't back yet, but
somebody has been in there. Friend, maybe; Somebody
lay on the bed a time. One person. Left a head mark in
the pillow, wrinkled the spread. Something was spilled,
and somebody used her mop, pail, things like that, and
didn't put them back exactly the same. Scrubbed up part
of the kitchen floor, part of the bathroom floor, and
burned up something in the little fireplace those apartments have got, and she said to her it looked like ashes from burning cloth, and she couldn't find some of her cleaning rags anyplace. Don't know what good it is to you. Maybe something or nothing."
"I suppose she cleaned the place as usual and swept out the fireplace?"
"That's what she did. She told me the name of that woman, but I plain dumb forgot it."
"Never mind. I can find out."
"The cleaning woman, she said it's not far from the kitchen door of that place to the kitchen door of the nurse place. Down the walk and around a corner, behind a fence the whole way, a big high pretty fence with little gates in it to little private yards."
"Thanks. Did you get anything else?"
"There's a lot of people in Southtown who plain wouldn't tell anybody anything, black or white. Or they tell a little and hold back some if they think you want to know bad enough to lay a little bread on them. It isn't on account of being mean. Somehow there's never enough money to even get by on. Maybe if..."
I worked my wallet out of my hip pocket and flipped it over onto the bed by her hip. With the half-cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, head aslant to keep the smoke out of her eyes, she opened it and thumbed the corners of the bills. "Take what you think you might need."
"And if I just take it all, man?"
"It would be because you need it."
Bright animosity again. "Never come into your mind I was cheating you?"
"Mrs. Walker, there's seven hundred and something in there. I've got to go along with the value you put on yourself, and you've got to go along with the value I put on myself."
She stared at me, then shook her head. "You some kind of other thing for sure. Look. I got two hundred. Okay? Bring you change, prob'ly."
She started to get up, undoubtedly to bring the wallet back to me, but then out of some prideful and defiant impulse, she settled back and flipped it at me. I picked it out of the air about six inches in front of my nose, and slipped it back into the hip pocket. She folded the bills and undid one button of the high-collared uniform blouse and tucked the money down into the invisible, creamy, compacted cleft between those outsized breasts. She re-buttoned and gave herself a little pat.
She made a rueful mouth. "Talk to you so long out in the back, and now I've been in here with the door shut too long, and I tell you that everybody working here keeps close track."
She got up and took the ashtray she had used into the bathroom and brought it back, shining clean, and put it on the bedside table.
"Going to make me some nice problem," she muttered.
"Problem?"
"Nothing I can't handle. I'm kind of boss girl, right after Miz Imber. Up to me to keep them all working right. Lot of them may be older, but nobody can match me for mean. Can't tell them why I spent all this time in here with you alone. So they're going to slack off on me, thinking that on account of I suddenly start banging white, I lost my place. Oh, they'll try me for sure. But they'll find out they're going to get more mean than they can handle from ol' Fifty Pound."
"Fifty pound?"
Even with that dusky skin her sudden furious blush was apparent. "It's nothing, mister. Anyplace like this, sooner or later somebody'll give the boss gal some kind of special name. The one they give me, it comes from the way I'm built, that's all. Somebody saw me walk by and said, `There she go. Ninety pound of mean. Forty pound of gal and fifty pound of boobs.' So it's Fifty Pound. Used to fuss me, but I don't mind now."
"See what you can find out, Lorette, about a man who works for the sheriff. Dave Broon."
She looked as if she wanted to spit. "Now, that one is all mean. Mr. Holton, he's part-time mean. Mr. Broon,
he wants to know something, maybe a deputy picks up some boy out in Southtown and then Mr. Broon visits with him. When they bring the boy back, he walks old and he talks old, and he keeps his head down. But he doesn't say a thing about Mr. Broon. One thing I know, he's rich. Big rich. It's in other names but he owns maybe forty houses in Southtown. Rains through the roof. Porch steps fall off. Three families drawing water from one spigot, but the rent never goes down. It goes up. Cardboard paper on the busted windows. Tax goes up on other places, never goes up on Mr. Broon's houses."
"You told me that the Holtons couldn't get domestic help because of Holton's attitude toward your people. I know that Mr. Pike and Miss Pearson have been trying to get somebody to look after Mrs. Pike. I noticed they have the yard work done by a white man. Any special reason for that?"
She stood by the door and all expression had left her face. "It's something went on long ago, three years, maybe more, just after that house was built and him new married. Had a live-in couple quartered over the boat-house. Young couple. Good pay. They drank some kind of poison stuff that you spray on the groves. Para... para..."
"Parathion?"
"Sounds right. Both died in the hospital. Mr. Pike paid for a nice funeral."
"Accident?"
"Not with the bag right there on the floor next to the table and the powder still stuck to the spoon. Put it in red wine and drank it. Must have seen it in the movies, because they busted the glasses, threw them at the wall."
"So?"
"So the man had been in Southtown three days before. Quiet boy. Got stinking smashed pig drunk. Cried and cried and cried. So drunk nobody could hardly understand him. Something about signing a paper so they wouldn't have to go to jail. Something about some nasty thing somebody was making his wife do on account of they signed the paper. And about not being able to stand it. Nobody knows the right and wrong of it. Nobody knows what happened."
"But the Pikes can't get any help out there?"
"They maybe could have. People were thinking on it. Then just before they let Mr. Pike get out of the broker business instead of putting the law on him, he was trying to learn to play golf, and he hit a colored caddy with a golf stick. Laid his head open. Mr. Pike give up trying the game after that. Gave Danny a hundred dollars and paid the hospital. Nobody else seen it. Mr. Pike said Danny walked the wrong way at the wrong time."
"Into his backswing?"
"That's what it was, the way they said it. Danny said he had a cold and he sneezed and Mr. Pike missed the ball entire and come at him with his eyes bugged out, making crazy little crying sounds, and Danny turned to run and he knows Mr. Pike couldn't run that fast, so he figures Mr. Pike threw it at him. Then those that had any idea of working out there, they decided against it."
"Why were they going to put the law on him when he was in the brokerage house?"
She looked astonished. "Why, for stealing! How else you going to get in trouble in that kind of job? Mr. McGee, I've got to get back on the job. See you tomorrow I guess. You don't see me, it'll mean I didn't get anything much tonight out home."
I could get in touch with neither Janice Holton nor D. Wintin Hardahee, so I backtracked to pick up a loose end that would probably turn into nothing. I placed a call to Dr. Bill Dyckes, the surgeon who had operated on Helena Pearson Trescott. A girl in his office told me he was operating but would probably phone in when he was through, so I did not leave a message but drove over to the hospital to see if I could make contact with him there.
A very obliging switchboard girl put a call through to the doctors' lounge on the third floor in the surgical wing and caught him there and motioned me to a phone. I said I was an old friend of Helena Trescott and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions about her. He hesitated and then told me to come on up, and gave me directions.
He came out of the lounge and we walked down the corridor to a small waiting room. He wore a green cotton smock and trousers and a green skullcap. There was a spray of drying blood across the belly of the smock, and he smelled of disinfectants. He was squat and broad and younger than I had expected. His hands were thick, with short, strong-looking ringers, curly reddish hair on his wrists, backs of his hands, and down to the first knuckle of the fingers.
He dropped heavily onto a sofa in the waiting room, sighing, stretching, then pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked up at the wall clock. "Next one'll be all prepped by eleven fifteen, and please God it will be nice, straight, clean, and simple because I'm scheduled for a son of a bitch this afternoon. What'd you want to know about Mrs. Trescott, Mr. McGee?"
"Did she ever have any chance at all?"
"Not by the time I went in the first time. Big juicy metastasized carcinoma right on the large bowel with filaments going out in every direction. Got the main mass of it and as much more as I could. Left some radioactive pellets in there to slow it some."
"Did you tell her she wouldn't make it?"
"I tell each one as much as I think they can safely take, when it's bad news. I realized later I could have told her the works. But I didn't know her well enough then to know how gutsy and staunch she was. So I said I thought I'd gotten it all, but I couldn't be sure, so we'd go into some other treatment to make sure. I didn't tell the daughters because I figured she could read them loud and clear. Told Tom Pike so that he could help cushion it for the girls when the time came."
"Then, how was she the second time?"
"Downhill. Had to go in to clear a stoppage. Damned jungle in there by then. Nothing like the anatomy books. Malignant is quite a word. Turned a good experienced operating-room nurse queasy. Then by the last time there wasn't anything about her that wasn't changed by it, in one way or another, except her eyes. Great eyes on that woman. Like the eyes of a young girl."
"Too bad that Maureen is in such condition now."
"I didn't get in on that. It isn't something you go after with a knife. But just about everybody else has had a piece of the action. She's had every test anybody around here has ever heard of, and some I think they made up. It would take two men to lift her lab files."
"Does it boil down to some specific area?"
"If by that you mean her head, yes. If you mean neurology, yes. No physical trauma, no tumor, no inhibition of nourishment. Something is screwing up the little circuits in there, the synapses. Tissue deterioration? Rare virus infection? Some new kind of withdrawal that's psychologically oriented? Some deficiency from birth that didn't show until now? Secretion imbalance? Rare allergy? My personal guess, which nobody will listen to because it's not my field, is that the trouble is in some psychiatric area. That fits the suicide impulse. But the shrinkers have gone through that and out the other side, they say. Series of shock treatments, no dice. Sodium Pentothal, no dice. Conversation on the couch, nothing. I thought you were interested in Mrs. Trescott."
"In the whole family, Doctor Dyckes."
"And I just sit here and open up like the family Bible, eh? And you take it all in, just like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to listen to a doctor violate the ethics of his profession."
"I... I thought you were responding to an expression of friendly interest and concern, Doctor, and--"
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