* * *
“Got a nickel, dearie? Just one nickel for an old lady.”
Jane turned from the display window of Dayton’s department store. Beyond the chill glass, frozen-faced mannequins posed, draped with an assortment of furs.
“What?” Jane stared down at the squat, bulky figure beside her. It was wrapped in layers of unmatched clothing. A seamed, squirrelish face peered up at Jane from under a tower of overlapping hats. Between them, a mittened palm was poised as if to receive a tray.
“Money, honey. A few coins for an old lady. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“Neither have I,” Jane said, “and I don’t have any money.”
The old woman reared back. She reminded Jane of Neumeier in some unlikely way, just as shrewd and just as careful.
Her quick eyes took stock of Jane. “No purse,” she noted.
Jane spread her empty gloved hands. “No purse.”
The old woman’s eyes flicked to Jane’s pristinely ordinary clothing. “You got money. How’re you gonna eat without money?”
“I don’t know,”
“Oh… you are in trouble, dearie. Forget the nickel.”
She waddled off down the street, shaking her snarled head, dragging an overstaffed shopping bag after her like a dog.
Jane shrugged and turned back to the store window. She couldn’t think of anyplace else to go, except the hospital. Kevin wouldn’t like that, she guessed. Besides, she didn’t want to go there.
A burst of excited exclamations down the street made passersby pause and look back. Jane finally did, too. The old woman was returning, her lips pinned back over pointed teeth into a grin.
“Look here, girlie! A fin.” She waved a green bill under Jane’s chin. “Come on, I’ll treat you to lunch on me. You better get street-smart if you’re gonna walk around here with no money.”
The call of Zyunsinth drew Jane’s eyes to the window again. The old woman tugged on Jane’s sleeve.
“You shouldn’t go around in this cold with nothin’ on your head. You could catch pneumonia. Here.” She doffed the highest of her hats and stretched to install it on Jane’s head.
Jane twisted to see her reflection in the window. An impressive spiral of maroon felt with a winking rhinestone butterfly poised atop her hair.
“It all goes out the top of your head, dearie—the heat. Just blows it off like a tea kettle if you don’t wear a hat. Now, come on. My name’s Panama Hattie. There’ll be a lunch line already, but maybe we can stop off first for a spot of…” Panama Hattie smoothed the tattered five-dollar bill in her ragged mittens. “—tea, sweetie, we’ll have a small spot of tea.”
* * *
“You didn’t order tea,” Jane complained, staring into a murky mahogany liquid in her glass.
“Tea I call it, tea it is, though men be thick about it sometimes and you have to call it blackberry wine to their faces.”
Panama Hattie glared at the bartender before leaning back into the booth. Jane heard the woman’s heels drum the bench bottom beneath the table. She was so small her feet didn’t reach the floor. She raised the wineglass to her Lips, sipped, then smacked appreciatively. “Aaaah.”
Jane eyed the place, certain that Kevin would not approve. The sign outside had said “The Brass Rail,” but there was no rich glint of brass within, only the glimmer of glasses and eye whites in the semidark.
Air crowded close, weaving a tangle of smells—tobacco, vomit, beer, whisky, sweat and mold, and mostly… men. The unshaven, red-faced men along the bar stared at Jane. She stared back.
If the street was cold, the Brass Rail was hot in an unhealthy way that made sweat trickle down Jane’s overbundled body.
“Drink up! That’s a treat there—Jane, you say it is. A rare treat. I don’t come by fivers that often. You’re my lucky charm. I meet you and, presto!—five in the palm of my hand, and I don’t mean fingers. I don’t often drink tea in a place like this. We coulda had a whole bottle to ourselves from Skelly’s, for the price of these two bitty glasses. But when I’m out with a lady friend, I like to put on the dog.”
Hattie stuck her red, runny nose in the air and tilted back the glass. Jane swallowed from her own glass. Sweet, thin fiery liquid surged down her throat. Hattie’s fingernails were dirty, she noticed, her hands twisted and homy. Jane suddenly wished she had used the shower at Kevin’s place.
“All right, my lady. It’s off to lunch. If you’re not going to finish that—” Hattie’s disreputable hand whipped across the scratched tabletop for Jane’s glass. More “tea” gurgled down her wattled throat.
Jane watched, not wanting to contradict the first person to have taken her in hand the way Kevin had. It was nice to be told what to do again, To not have to decide anything. When Panama Hattie wriggled down the bench and dropped to the floor, Jane rose and followed her. Like Kevin, Panama Hattie seemed to know where she was going.
Chapter Nineteen
* * *
Kevin must have driven by the Hennepin County Court House a thousand times. Everybody in Minneapolis knew it—a massive, turreted gray granite building that looked like the Bastille.
This time they drove him right up to it, right up to the main Fourth Street door. He couldn’t figure out why they had bothered to drive; the trip was only two short city blocks and the cops seemed to take deliberate pleasure in parading him in handcuffs.
Squad cars were double-parked along the whole south side of Fourth Street, empty or idling, all ready to roll. Kevin’s cops pulled him roughly from the car. People on the sidewalk stopped to stare.
The cops propelled him in front of his audience to the main doors and through an unheated entry.
Inside, the gray court house stones echoed like a cathedral’s, and its vaulted rotunda ceiling glowed reverently with stained glass. A mammoth time-grayed marble statue of a naked, bearded man—Neptune, it looked like, but Kevin knew that it represented the Mississippi River— reclined before a grandiose stairway.
The cops spared Kevin an ascent up the opera house stairs. Instead, they bustled him around the side to a row of up-to-date elevators.
A waifish woman poured into a cheap leather miniskirt—a spindly, feral Lolita in her late thirties, probably a hooker—sprinted down the echoing corridor in high-heeled boots. She obviously knew her way around these intimidating halls. On the street, Kevin wouldn’t have glanced at her; here and now, he envied the woman her edge.
They took him to a fourth-floor waiting room painted deep orange. The lettering on the wall read “Adult Detention Center.” That didn’t sound so bad, Kevin reflected, until you remembered it still meant “jail.”
People sat at the rim of the circular space—the passive, disinterested kind of people you find waiting for buses in a seedy part of town.
Beyond a glass partition, beige-uniformed Sheriffs Department personnel hovered over hot computers in a command center.
They allowed Kevin through a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” The two city cops peeled off and Kevin was suddenly being herded through a drab, efficient entrail of official processing by Sheriffs Department officers.
At every painted metal door, he was jerked to a stop until a buzzer sounded. Then the cop opened the door and pushed him through. Behind them, the door ground shut with a clank of internal locks.
Hand-lettered signs littered the pale yellow walls like Sunday school graffiti. “Jail Intake” in red, with an arrow. “Authorized Personnel Only.” Beyond glass barriers, the authorized personnel watched. Kevin glimpsed himself in the glass in passing—a shadow man in a shadow mirror, wavy and distorted.
In one cul-de-sac between two locked doors, Kevin had to spread his hands against the wall and submit to another search. The cop in charge donned see-through plastic gloves before touching him, and ran his fingers through Kevin’s hair before checking his torso and limbs—twice and thoroughly, The hand-sweep along his crotch was impersonal but probing. It took all of Kevin’s self- discipl
ine to keep from bucking his body away.
“Clean,” the examiner noted. “No cuts, no wounds. Guess we can keep him,” he added sardonically.
Kevin’s escort nodded. “We better. Come on.”
Kevin was jerked to the closed door opposite the one they’d entered, then jerked to a stop while the uniformed woman behind the glass hit the lock release. Kevin glanced at her curiously. Her beige sheriffs outfit made her look grandmother-petite, but the black leather holster on her narrow hip looked more than standard size—huge.
Down more fingerprinted halls they went, these lined with castoff church pews—or courtroom benches, Kevin supposed. They passed a neglected water fountain, the stainless steel caked with white mineral deposits. A dry spasm in Kevin’s throat resurrected memory of his recent drugging.
“Water?” he asked.
“Later,” the cop answered, his eyes indifferent.
In the intake area they finally unlocked the cuffs. Kevin’s shoulders sagged into normal alignment, aching in protest, his wrists throbbing.
They made him take off his shoes and wristwatch, and empty his pockets again. The gold watch met the same impassive disinterest. Kevin was beginning to hate the way he had to surrender it—first to Turner, now here.
They showed him around a corner, and in a cinder-block cubicle he peeled off his clothes, as told. A new cop stepped in and conducted a strip search with cold, plastic-gloved hands. By then Kevin had steeled himself for the inevitable, the rough, quick fingers in the open mouth, even the scrupulous passes across his groin and buttocks. Like going to the doctor, he told himself, lying through gritted teeth.
But lower body cavities were excluded from indignity. Kevin gratefully pulled on the shapeless pants and shirt they handed him. The damned things were cut and colored like surgeon’s greens. Slipperlike laceless tennis shoes on his feet made him feel an invalid, eased him into a familiar hospital mode, soothed his wildly fluctuating anxiety.
Outside the cubicle, he signed a receipt and watched his clothes dumped into a wire basket atop stained items that smelled of a county hospital detoxification ward.
Kevin last glimpsed his gold watch as a clerk shut it into a manila envelope with his cash and keys.
He began to feel like a kid enrolling for school for the first time. They stood him against a wall and shot his photo with a big Polaroid. They weighed and measured him. They booked him in a glass booth. He filled out a long medical screening admission form, with questions ranging from “Have you ever been in jail before?” to “Do you feel suicidal now?” One no, one maybe.
He wrote his name—last, first and middle—and stared perplexed at the next blank, “DOB,” until he translated it. Date of birth. Under the “charges” section, Kevin checked off PC—probable cause. The others were MIS— misdemeanor?—and DOM— domestic? Where it said “Alias” he almost wrote “Judas Goat,” but figured that, like the IRS and Mother Nature, official copdom was nothing to fool with.
Some might take heart that the authorities cared enough to inquire into his physical and mental state. Kevin knew better; the form legally absolved them of responsibility if he happened to hang himself with a spaghetti noodle by morning.
Next they slapped his finger and palm prints on the back of the booking sheet, using printer’s ink chat spurted a strong, chemical odor into his nostrils like smelling salts. They wiped his messy hands afterward with ink remover and handed him a bar of green Lava soap to use in the sink.
Encouraged by these domestic touches, Kevin sized up the cop who still escorted him. “Say, can I use the bathroom?” He couldn’t remember his last leak. The drugs had overridden natural functions, but now his bladder was burning from an uncustomary combination of nerves and neglect.
“Later.”
“I ready gotta go—”
“Later!”
The cop commandeered Kevin’s arm, steering him down another dingy hall where two wall phones—one black and one fingerprint-smudged beige—were bolted side by side.
“My… call?” Kevin asked.
“Your call,” the cop said magnanimously.
Kevin stared at the phones, not knowing who the hell to dial. A sign listed the jail address: “Room 36, Old Courthouse, 300 South 4th St.” for those confused enough not to know where they were. “Located in the Old Clock Tower Building,” the lettering added—a Chamber of Commerce touch Kevin figured must be lost on the mislaid souls confronting these phones.
“Just one call?” he wondered.
“One call.”
“I don’t have a lawyer—”
“Look, call or forget it. I don’t care who you call—your mother, the mayor…”
“What… charges am I being held under anyway? You haven’t even read me my rights.”
“No charges, fellah. We have thirty-six hours to hold you before filing formal charges. We got you on probable cause, murder. That’s all, right now. And that’s enough.”
“When… can I get out?”
“When we let you out.”
“Come on, there’s bail. And thirty-six hours… Today’s Friday, so—”
“Your arithmetic won’t cut it in here.” The cop kept a poker face. “Today’s Friday. The thirteenth.”
Kevin blinked at the impersonal triumph in the man’s voice. Maybe he was really a nice guy off duty; maybe it was just his job to make everybody feel scared and guilty and like scum. It worked.
“Day of arrest doesn’t count,” the cop added.
“So… midnight Friday to Saturday. I should be out noon Sunday.”
“’Cept Saturday don’t count.”
Kevin was beginning to get the message carved in the stone face before him. “And Sunday?—”
“Don’t count.”
“My thirty-six hours don’t begin until midnight Sunday.”
“Not exactly.” The cop smiled this time. A little. “You had the bad luck to get picked up on a holiday weekend—”
Kevin saw it coming and resented it. “Holiday! What the hell—this is January! There’s no national holiday in January!”
The cop shook his head. “How soon they forget.” He was enjoying this. “Martin. Luther. King’s. Birthday. January fifteenth. This is Friday, January thirteenth. The holiday falls on a Sunday and gets moved to a Monday—” He shrugged.
“So the soonest I can get out—?”
“Noon Wednesday… maybe. If you make bail. If I was you, I’d make some kind of call, buddy. Come on, I can’t wait all day. You’re not askin’ for a date.”
Kevin picked up the phone.
* * *
“Hiya, Boomer.”
Panama Hattie beamed into a wrinkled old face blessed with a white stubble of beard and a nose as bulbous and empurpled as a turnip.
“Yer late. They’re gonna run out.”
“Nah.” Hattie cast an expert glance at the line fringing the side of the blond brick building. Jane had read a large sign up front that said “House of Charity.”
“They always save some for me.”
Boomer’s rheumy eyes slid to Jane. “Who’s the social worker?”
“Hell, this ain’t no social worker. This here’s Jane. She’s a street baby. Orphan-like. I took her under my wing.” Boomer eyed the hat atop Jane’s head, and nodded. “I hear the Salvation Army’s full up nights now.”
“Where you been crashin’, then?” Hattie asked anxiously.
Boomer jerked a shoulder behind him. “By the tracks.”
“Don’t the cops come by and roust you?”
“Sometimes, but it’s so cold nights nowadays, they don’t bother us much. I got together a real nice place there. Can’t you go to the women’s shelter tonight?”
“They’re full, too. And this one makes it two… “Hattie, you know you kin always hang your hats at my place. Not a iotta room for an extra, though—”
Hattie’s torn mitten rested on Jane’s shoulder. “She’s a nice girl, real quiet. She don’t belong on the streets. S
omebody gotta look out for her.”
“Somebody oughta look out for you—nearly lost a few toes last winter, sleepin’ out. My place is better, though.”
“Thanks, Boomer.”
The line shuffled forward. Jane looked around. It wasn’t much different from the bank—people mindlessly waiting for some mysterious transaction to occur somewhere at the front of the line far away.
This line waited in the raw wind and endless cold, though. Jane stamped her boots, feeling numbness stealing over her toes again.
“Keep hoppin’, dearie. It’s the only way. We’ll be inside and nice and warm soon enough.”
Hattie’s prediction was nine-tenths optimism and one- tenth truth. Jane’s infallible internal clock told her it took exactly forty-eight minutes and sixteen seconds and twelve milliseconds before the glass door finally swung open to admit her and Hattie and the old man known as Boomer.
Inside, the room was crowded and the line remained, eeling its way to a far steam table. The congestion stewed the rich human scents that the outside cold had masked into a heady brew of sweat, dirt, urine and old vomit. The smell had sent more than one do-gooder directly out the door of the House of Charity.
Not Jane. The overwhelming closeness touched deep memories of huddling together with a circle of hairy humanoid bodies, with smell so thick it had a heft to it, with warmth and… safety. Safety from the dark and cold of night and the distant icy silver sun that she had last felt among the creatures she remembered—just barely—as Zyunsinth.
Memory flashed cue cards in front of her eyes—shards of scenes Kevin would have given his last hundred-dollar bill to have tapped. The drift of simmering stew merged in Jane’s flaring nostrils with a familiar, untended animal smell. For the first time since she had awakened without a memory and with only Kevin to guide her, Jane felt at home.
Shuffling past the steam table, Jane accepted the brown mess ladled into her bowl and shoved her tray on down the stainless steel track, Hattie behind her clucking encouragement.
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