Tippy took the chair he offered. “She knows what I’ll have,” Tippy said. “What I do is dance. Period.”
Fred nodded. “I’m sorry about Mr. Z.”
She’d washed her face and applied makeup. But this hint of courteous sympathy from a stranger threatened the new construction. Fred went on, “It could be a coincidence. I don’t know you, and I don’t know your relationship with Mr. Z. The least I can do is show some respect. I was with him yesterday. If you were close, I’m sorry.”
Fred’s waitress appeared with a tall glass in which ice chattered. The color was ginger ale. A cherry bobbed halfway down, suppressed by ice. “Thanks, Linda,” Tippy said. She looked at Fred for a half minute before she said, “Talk for a while. How do you know my name? Start there. It is going to be a goddamn mess. In fact it’s started. It already is.”
Fred said, “That’s too bad.”
“I have to move out.”
“That’s rough,” Fred said.
“She’s coming back. She’s bound to.”
“It’s rough,” Fred said.
A silence fell between them. Tippy looked absently at her moving colleague. “Rough, the man says. You can say it’s rough. So, Fred? What’s your story?”
“Time like this, my story’s got to be a distraction,” Fred said. “It’s a small thing when you compare…backing up. My story. I ran into some folks from your high school, Nashua Central. Maybe even your class. Eva is one. Ruthie Hardin…”
“You know Ruthie Hardin?”
“Arthur Schrecking,” Fred said.
Tippy was nodding. “You’re from down south,” she said. “When Arthur took off that’s where he went. South. He got out of here. Out of Nashua. A lot of people, they never do. A state of mind. Like me. So far anyway. I never…”
“Arthur did your ink,” Fred said.
Tippy smiled for the first time since Fred had first laid eyes on her. “You like it?”
“It’s brilliant,” Fred said. “I hope I didn’t seem to be staring at it while you were dancing. I don’t want to be rude.”
Tippy gawped at him over her drink, letting her mouth hang open as if he might be the first man she had met in the world, in all her life, who did not want to be rude. Who did not, in fact, take being rude for granted as a natural right. She was suddenly hopelessly lost in a foreign land.
“Glinda doesn’t know what she’s doing,” she said, gesturing toward the stage. “Calls herself Glinda. I call myself Scheherazade but it never took. Everyone knows me. I could of got away with Sherry. No. They want you to be exotic, so Gail took Glinda. She’s not from around here, who knew? Everyone calls her Glinda. The Good. Out of the movie. She’s good for ten more minutes, then she gives out and I’m on again.”
Fred said, “If you have to get ready…”
“How long can it take to pull off the dress? He’s in Boston, yes?”
“Near enough.” Cambridge was Greater Boston.
“That’s what he said he would do. Boston. Get some money together. Then maybe out West. San Diego. Arthur. He’s good, but he’s not aggressive. Needs an agent. Like everyone else. It’s the agent gets the money, but who can find one? Arthur, like I say, has trouble with the commercial end. I told him…” Whatever she had told him didn’t surface.
Fred said, “That design Arthur did for you, the jar…”
“With the weird bugs. I love them,” Tippy said. “I look at them every day. Best I can, where they are. I have names for them. If I could feed them…”
“They come from that painting,” Fred said.
“Sure. No, look, she’s giving out. Didn’t eat yet. No stamina. Glinda falls down, she gets herself canned. Listen, I have to take over.” She stood, taking a long drink from her glass. The girl on the stage looked pleadingly toward her.
“Can we pick up on this at the next break?” Fred said.
“Swing by at midnight,” Tippy said. “We’ll take it from there. The door around back. So I don’t have to say hi to my fans.”
Three minutes later, Tippy walked onto the stage again. The audience had grown slightly larger. It managed indifferent applause as she joined Glinda and the two moved together for a full minute, massaging the pole until it might disregard its affiliation with the mineral group. Then Glinda retired in haste, wobbling, almost collapsing when she bent for her cape.
A square woman approached the table. Late middle age, large black and white clothing, thin rusty hair in a complex lacquered sweep. Eyes that peered as if they were too proud for spectacles. Until she sat in the chair Tippy had vacated, Fred stood.
“A gentleman,” the woman scolded. Mid-European accent. “I like that. Also I am not fool. Not fooled.”
Fred sat and watched the woman lift Tippy’s drink and take some into a narrow mouth whose lips barely owned enough bulge to support the weight of brilliant red paste they carried. “You ask for Christina,” she said. She was not thirsty or careless. Whatever Fred was being billed for, she’d been testing to make sure Tippy had not been given alcohol.
“I talked here yesterday afternoon with Zag,” Fred said.
Tina’s impassive gaze took in the stage, the room, the invisible kitchen, the universe, and her unexpected companion, each item with the same amount of disinterest. She brought the focus of her eyes toward Fred. “You are a friend of Zagoriski?”
“No.”
“He owes you money, then.”
“No.” Fred shook his head.
Tippy danced. Tina, catching the direction of Fred’s sidling eyes, said, “It is not easy.”
“Running a place like this?” Fred helped. “In Nashua, New Hampshire?”
“Everything. Me, Zagoriski owes money.”
“May I offer you a drink?” Fred gestured.
“Lots money,” Tina said, shaking her head impatiently. “You, Fred. Who gonna pay?”
Chapter Thirty-three
“Not exactly a lawyer,” Fred said. Tina’s expression was the moral equivalent of spitting on the floor next to his feet. “You have to collect from his estate.”
Tina’s expression was the moral equivalent of offering to rub his face in it. “You think Zagoriski leaves me a contract signed and with a pink bow tied around her like a virgin bride?”
Fred said, “I’m not sure I can help. Z and I were not close.”
“Your business with Zagoriski?”
“I never got to my business. I met Zagoriski yesterday afternoon for the first time, had a drink with him. Came back to Nashua this afternoon, pick up where I left off, found out about the accident. Fellow human. Thought I’d learn what happened. Came back here.”
Tina heaved herself up from the table until she was standing. “Lots money,” she said. “He told me last evening he was about to get. Look what he gets instead.”
Beware of the enemy who does not make threats.
Her hands, pressing against the tabletop as she rose, obliterated something metaphorical in a grisly and excruciating way. “Lots money,” she repeated.
***
Fred had more than an hour to kill. He checked the incomplete scraps of fact that had appeared in the article in the Nashua Sentinel and drove into town, nosing through the streets until he came to the area of old mill buildings near the canal. The snarl of yellow crime scene tape must mark where the body had been discovered. It was a part of town that any man who had ever seen a movie would have known better than to visit late at night, unless he was either pure of heart, bewildered by a gorgeous redhead, or at least half in the bag.
Or blinded by the expectation of “lots money.”
Almost the last thing Z had said, on the phone, first thing at the Moonglow, before he and Fred got chummy—“and have it with you.” What was that about?
Grand old red brick
mill buildings on either side, and between them a clear run for the vehicle that had knocked Zagoriski down, backed over him, and—after a pause long enough for the driver to climb out? Take a good look? Open the passenger door to admit a gorgeous redhead?—drive over the body one more time, to make certain of the job. What I tell you three times is true.
In other situations and other contexts, and supposing it were Fred’s business, he might make note of the coincidence: Z’s death, and the fact that Z owed Tina “lots money.” Had Tina despaired of collecting and decided to cut her losses by making Z, at least, an advertisement that might at minimum encourage others? Was Tina’s diplomatic visit to Fred’s table meant to signal “Don’t mess with me”?
Lord knows, she had access to all the gorgeous redheads she might need to bait a pie-eyed Zagoriski into the path of a moving truck.
“Table it,” Fred said. “You’re only interested in following one trail. The rest of it? Take it all under advisement. But watch your back.”
***
Tippy came out of the Moonglow’s kitchen door after midnight. She stood in the heat reflected from the mall’s blacktop, wearing jeans and a thin short-sleeved shirt of vertical blue and white stripes. She carried a paper grocery bag from Food Dreams. A tiny purse hung from her shoulder.
Fred swung the car around and leaned across to open the passenger door.
“Sorry about the smell,” he said as Tippy climbed in. “My guess is, the previous owner kept a dog in the car. I open the windows when I can.”
“Go that way,” Tippy pointed. “You save me finding a ride home, then being expected to pay and getting into all that, or waiting an hour for Glinda to get off. Turn here. No, right.”
Fred followed her directions past malls, subdivisions and abandoned farms waiting to be obliterated, until they arrived at an older development of identical houses with identical lots whose owners had tried to make them appear unique by variations in paint color or planting.
“Right here. Now left. Around the circle and stick it in this driveway,” Tippy instructed. “That’s my car. Behind my car. Mr. Z’s was impounded. Mine needs a new battery. Forty dollars. Listen.” Fred had stopped his car behind the one Tippy described as hers. She swung around in the seat, the grocery bag in her lap, and looked him in the eye. “We talk in your car, or we go inside if I can trust you. Keep looking at me and tell me I can trust you.”
“You can trust me,” Fred said.
“That’s all?” Tippy demanded. “You’re not going to prove it? No argument?”
Fred shook his head.
“OK, we’ll go in. I’m dying to get rid of the butt floss. Sequins. Can you imagine?”
“Now you mention it, I’m trying not to.”
“I use the back door,” Tippy said. “We go in, finish our talk, then I pack.” The lot’s little back yard was derelict, down to the cracked ceramic birdbath. A light had been left on over the back door. “Cops, earlier,” Tippy said. “They almost made me move out last night, looking at everything, but it was me let them in, and I live here.”
“Zagoriski’s house?” Fred guessed.
“I thought you knew,” Tippy said, turning as she keyed the door open. “Mr. Z lets me use the room upstairs. Used to. Wait down here. Don’t poke around. There, in the living room, he calls it.”
The house was stale and hot. The former presence of Zagoriski’s absent wife—“Mary,” hadn’t he used that name?—could be inferred, but no longer felt. The house felt like a violated grave. Tippy led Fred through the kitchen and along a small hallway to a room in which every surface was crowded with objects that illustrated the concepts “unnecessary” and “decorative.” What it felt like: the wife had left, and Z, the husband, had roamed the house gathering objects together that he could either throw or sell, piling them up like the damaged groceries that go cheap. Odd things, like gilt wedding presents, jostled with cruets and figurines, waiting for the last raffle that signals the end of days. The room, the whole house, smelled of the aggressive neglect imposed by a weak man upon the memory of his wronged wife.
“Him being dead, I don’t dare open the windows or turn on the air,” Tippy said.
“Take a seat. I’ll be right back. It’s how I eat. Extra shit from the restaurant they can’t unload.” She carried the grocery bag in the direction of the kitchen they’d come through, leaving Fred in the Zagoriski living room.
Fred tried an armchair and exchanged it for the couch facing a TV so large and so incongruous that its purchase must have been an act of revenge against the absent wife. There were no books to look through. On the walls nothing but framed needlepoint. Scratch that. Reproductions of needlepoint. In cheapo gilded frames. God Bless Our Home. Samplers. One of those mournful memorial things with maidens, under a willow tree, flanking an urn. It was a collection. Souvenirs of the failed marriage. If Z used the room, it was like a ghost who refrains from rearranging furniture. His interest in art didn’t show here. Unless the few rectangles on the wall stained by absence spoke of nice things gone. People live together, their tastes might jostle. Here, other than the samplers and the outsized TV, the room wasn’t a compromise any more. It was a defeat. Mary Zagoriski had been stricken from the record.
Tippy came in again. She’d exchanged the jeans for a cooler pair of Bermuda shorts. “When you say she’s coming back, and you’ll have to move out,” Fred said, “you mean Mrs. Z.”
Tippy nodded. “There’s Cokes in the kitchen, the fridge. They’re mine. I’m not gonna offer anything belongs to the house. Mr. Z. Whatever. Ice is OK, I can make more. I’m having a Coke. You want one?”
“That would be great.” Fred moved to follow her to the kitchen but she gestured him to stay where he was.
She returned with two red-and-white cans and one glass of ice that she handed Fred. “I like mine neat.”
“She’s been gone for a while?” Fred said.
“Like a year.” Tippy sat on the chair Fred had rejected, made a face of disgust and rose again. “Hot as it is, everything in this room sticks to your skin,” she said. She sat on the floor’s beige carpet, crossing her legs to minimize contact. “Before I moved in obviously. And listen, it doesn’t make any difference what you believe, so I won’t push it. Only, so you’re straight, I and Mr. Z, it wasn’t like that. What it looks like. Me living here. The spare room.
“Sure, everyone knew what he liked. Mentoring a girl, he calls it, and sure, if she lets him, he’ll feel her up. Like accidentally. So he doesn’t notice what he’s doing. If it’s late and he’s been drinking. Anyone can get lonely. There was no harm to him, more like a hobby. Creepy, but there’s worse things, and he could be nice. He’s dead and I miss him, bumping around down here. He’d get her the job like at Wendy’s maybe, or like me, you have the talent, the Moonglow. Me, he wanted, said he could get me into a junior college, in another state, maybe even the city; he believed in me. To one day be in real estate. Or dental hygiene. And he did. But I didn’t.
“Dirty old man, what else is new? A girl didn’t haveta and, you come right down to it, maybe he couldn’t.
“Who gives a shit about art? Every year you go back, there’d be, maybe one, maybe two, girls from his class where he’d take a special interest, and by the time, after graduation, a person needs help getting started, Mr. Z was ready. To help.
“Especially like, what was my case, if there had been, and it was their fault, trouble with the parents, problems at home, they’re not in town any longer anyway, Dad lost his…”
Fred said, “Mrs. Z moved out. New York, Z said. She told him, ‘I’ll send for my stuff.’”
“Search me. Mr. Z. I’m not going to say he was a gentleman. But he was. And he left me alone. Or I wouldn’t be here. Most of the time. He might, we’re at the Moonglow at the same time, people are watching, put his arm around me like I’m his, you know,
people get the idea he’s…”
Fred said, “I’d love to see that painting. With the bugs.”
“Mr. Z gave me it,” Tippy said.
Chapter Thirty-four
“It’s here?”
“It was in my room? I said I liked it. Against the wall with some posters and they thought they were going to have a kid but didn’t, so the parts of the crib, it’s really an attic but there’s room for a bed, and thank God there’s windows on either side, trunks and stuff, boxes, or I’d die up there, this heat.
“The honest truth, Arthur saw it and fell for it, him and I had a thing going. I wasn’t supposed to, in my room here, but we didn’t want anyone to know. Besides, Mr. Z teaching at Central, so the honest truth, Arthur didn’t have a place, next chance I got, I told Mr. Z, I love that old painting, and Mr. Z says, Take it. Arthur had the idea…
“So I take it.”
Tippy sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I miss Mr. Z. You get used to a person. Being around. At first he was gonna charge me rent. Which how was I gonna pay? It’s not my fault, Mrs. Z. Mr. Z was—we’d been seen around together, and it wasn’t the first time. Other girls, the years before, everybody knew. It was how he was. A mentor. His nature. Mr. Z got me the job, the Moonglow, after he knew I wasn’t going to work up the ambition to leave town. Or the money. Everything takes money.
“So I’m working there, Mr. Z one night comes in, he’s almost upside down he’s so upset. She’d walked out. Left a note. She calls me a stripper in the note. He showed me, he found when he got home that evening. I was working, he comes back? He says—I’m on break—‘She walked out. Took off. No warning. Note: Send me my stuff,’ but he wouldn’t. What he said…”
“I know what he said,” Fred said. “In fact, I know his exact words. ‘Whoever walks out, all bets are off.’”
“So I move in. And I have to find a new place,” Tippy said. “Now Mrs. Z has the house again. Obviously it’s her house. Me, she thinks I’m the reason…Glinda says crash with me for a few days, she’ll pick me and my shit up tomorrow, but her boyfriend…”
A Paradise for Fools Page 16