Blanche Cleans Up

by Barbara Neely

  They left Miz Barker’s house and went to the store, where Blanche was almost bowled over by the spirit of the old woman. She stood in the middle of the floor, feeling Miz Barker moving slowly round her. The echo of the old woman’s voice mingled with her sharp liniment smell. If she tried, Blanche was sure she could reach out and touch Miz Barker’s arm. The look on Pam’s face as she stared at Miz Barker’s stool made Blanche think Pam knew the old lady was still there, too. Pam drew a ragged breath.

  “This is the first time I been in here since…” Pam’s voice was thin and sad.

  Blanche looked up at the dusty shelves and at the ancient cash register and wondered again about the woman whose life was in this store. Had the store given Miz Barker pleasure? Or had she run it for so long she couldn’t do without it? Had she reached a point where, like Blanche, she felt she had worked too hard and too long for too little? And would she do it all the same if she could live again? Or would she, too, want to take a flying leap out of here to parts unknown?

  Blanche leaned over and pulled out the drawer under the cash register: receipts, paper clips, small pads of paper, pencil stubs. She lifted a lid from a box on a shelf behind the cash register, and it crumbled in her hand. Most of the other boxes they opened were empty. What little stock there was had mostly been nibbled by mice.

  “I don’t think what you’re looking for’s in here,” Pam said, wiping dust from her hands onto her jeans. She looked around her. “It’s like the store died, too,” she said.

  Blanche didn’t think the tape was there either, and it was time to get back to the Brindle house.

  “We could look down in the bomb shelter,” Pam said.

  “In the what?”

  “Underneath Gran’s house. It runs the length of the whole block. These houses were built back in the fifties when everybody was paranoid about the Russians, but now it’s just storage space. I doubt most people leave anything much down there.”

  Blanche was interested. “I gotta get back to work,” she told Pam reluctantly. “Maybe we can do it later this evening?” She remembered the date she’d made with Lacey yesterday. “No, I can’t this evening, what about…”

  “I’ll just give you the keys and you can go when you get a chance,” Pam said. She took Blanche to Miz Barker’s house and showed her the outside door to the shelter.

  “Don’t forget to bring a flashlight when you come back,” Pam said as they stood looking down a short flight of cracked, litter-strewn steps at the shelter door. “It’s got electricity, but I don’t know if the bulbs are any good.”

  Blanche began crushing ice for the Brindles’ cocktails when she felt the car coming up the drive. She knew it was them the same way she always knew when an employer was approaching.

  Both of ’em look like they need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Blanche thought. Allister reminded her of one of those never-quite-finished sweaters Taifa used to knit: limp and lumpy and coming loose around the edges.

  “Ah, drinks! Just what I need,” Allister spoke like a man being rescued. Felicia looked as though a volcano were about to explode from her belly.

  Blanche held the drinks tray out to her.

  “Leave it, please,” Felicia, said, instead of taking her martini from the tray. And quickly, her tone seemed to add.

  Blanche did as she was bid, but of course this didn’t stop her from lingering outside the door.

  “Allister, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Not Marc again, I hope.”

  “No, it’s not Marc. At least not in the way you—”

  “I don’t suppose it could wait? I’ve had—”

  “Until when? After the campaign? Felicia’s volcano was beginning to rumble. “Never mind. I don’t know what could have gotten into me.” Felicia took a sip from her glass.

  “Felicia, I’m tired. I only meant—”

  “You only meant, ‘Shut up, Felicia, and stop expecting to be treated like anything other than a large purse.’ I bet you’d have enough energy for a conversation about your missing tape! Oh yes,” she added. “I know about it. And I hope whatever is on it is enough to destroy you!”

  Felicia’s volcano had erupted, but it didn’t wilt Allister.

  “I doubt you’d really enjoy seeing me destroyed, my dear.” Allister’s voice was full of what Blanche could only identify as privilege: the sound of ownership—not just money but ownership of government, museums, and colleges, of the right to run the world. “You see, I remember how eager you were to join my penniless little world, how delighted your vulgar, wig-manufacturing, nouveau riche, social-climbing parents were when…”

  “You bastard!”

  Something shattered in the room. There was rustling, movement. Blanche tiptoed down the hall toward the kitchen.

  She didn’t know when they went upstairs to dress. Felicia clicked into the kitchen on high, high heels to tell Blanche they were leaving. Blanche had been too interested in their conversation during drinks to focus on Felicia. Now she looked at this woman, the second woman she’d met, she realized, who had killed someone. The first one had been mad as a monkey on LSD. Was this one? If anything, Felicia looked more like herself, as though killing her lover had simmered her like stock, until there was only the thickest, richest part of her left.

  “Is everything all right?” she said under Blanche’s long gaze.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m fine.” Blanche put more emphasis on the “I’m” than she’d intended. Felicia didn’t miss it.

  “So am I,” she said, her voice just a tad too high. “How do I look?” She posed in her form-fitting ankle-length off-the-shoulder number in deep red and hard orange.

  “Like fire,” Blanche said. “Just like fire.” She wondered whether Felicia was about to burn something up or go up in flames herself.

  They were hardly out of the house before Blanche called Lacey to come pick her up. The phone rang as she put it down.

  “Blanche? It’s Donnie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I’m sorry about the way I, about hanging up earlier. I was just so…And then somebody came in and I couldn’t really talk.”

  “Well, I appreciate your calling back, Donnie. When I called you, I was hoping maybe Ray-Ray had told you…”

  “Listen, Blanche, I loved Ray-Ray but I can’t get mixed up in anything he might have…”

  “Anything like what?”

  Donnie hesitated, then: “Look, I shoulda told you when you called. But I was so…Two guys came by my place asking questions about Ray-Ray, who he used to hang with and where, stuff like that.”

  Blanche immediately saw Samuelson’s goons towering over Donnie. “Did they say what it was about?”

  “No. But they got a real attitude when I told them I didn’t know anything about Ray-Ray’s business. I’m not sure they believed me.”

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

  “No, but…” Donnie took a deep breath.

  “What is it?”

  “They scared the hell out of me, Blanche.”

  Blanche could feel his fear seeping like cold air through the phone.

  “So, what are you going to do about it? You—”

  “No! Nothing! I’m not doing a damned thing about it! I don’t know what Ray-Ray did, but if it got him…if he was in trouble with those guys who came by my place, they could have…what if they’re still watching me? Maybe the way he died wasn’t…”

  “We could work together,” Blanche said, “try to find out…”

  “Ray-Ray’s dead,” Donnie said. “Nothing can change that.”

  “I know that,” Blanche said. “But it ain’t that simple. I got kids, I can’t have…” She let the sentence trail off. Not only did Donnie not want to know anything about Ray-Ray’s business, she realized she didn’t really want to tell him what she’d learned, either. As scared as he sounded, if Samuelson’s Muscle Brothers paid Donnie another visit, he’d likely tell them every word she said faster
than a lizard could catch a fly.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she told him, although she had no idea if it was true. “If those men thought you were lying, they wouldn’t have left without trying to make you tell what you know.”

  “You think so?” He sounded like a child wanting to believe the bogeyman was out of town.

  “Sure, I’m sure.”

  “Look, Blanche, I’m sorry to sound so…”

  Weak and wussy? Blanche thought. “Take care of yourself, Donnie.” “Gutless wonder!” she muttered when she hung up. She was on her own, as usual. What a joke that Ray-Ray should fall for such a little weakling.

  She was locking the back door when Lacey arrived.

  They drove down Tremont Street, passed Connolly’s, turned right on Massachusetts Avenue and then onto Washington Street. Lacey made a couple turns down narrow streets whose street signs Blanche didn’t see.

  “Where are we?”

  “In the South End,” Lacey parked on a side street, near a row of apartments with torn window blinds and dirty stoops—not an Allister Brindle kind of neighborhood. A bar and grill sign glowed neon red in a small front window across the street. The place was just as dreary on the inside; they didn’t stay long. Lacey motioned Blanche to follow her down a dim corridor. Hair rose on the back of Blanche’s neck when a man stepped out of a doorway near the far end of the corridor.

  “Hey, Lacey,” he said. He gave Blanche a brief once-over, and handed Lacey two black half masks. When Blanche and Lacey put them on, the man turned and knocked on the door behind him.

  The room they entered was huge. The walls were painted a dark, vivid blue lit by track lights. Black leather banquettes surrounded onyx tables that also glowed blue, lit from inside. The banquettes rose in three tiers above a dance space with mirrored floors. Two large, empty cages hung from the ceiling on either side of the room.

  “My favorite seat,” Lacey said as she slid onto one of the banquettes in the third tier.

  Blanche could see why. From here you could see most of the club—and there was plenty to see. Had that man worn those bottomless leather pants and short jacket on the bus? She folded her arms across her own breasts as if the large gold ring in a passing woman’s nipple might attack her. A man in handcuffs and a T-shirt that said i’m yours threw himself on the floor in front of a woman carrying a whip. She lifted her foot, and he began passionately licking the bottom of her shoe. Blanche turned to find Lacey watching her with amused eyes.

  “What can I bring you, ladies?”

  Blanche couldn’t stop herself from staring at the waiter’s see-through plastic shorts and his pink penis with its cock ring clearly visible. Lacey could hardly order for laughing. Blanche didn’t mind. She had no doubt that if her mask wasn’t covering it, the expression on her face would warrant a chuckle or two.

  She looked around the quickly filling room as rolling ladders were moved beneath the two cages. There was light applause. A couple climbed into each cage. All four people were dressed in form-fitting black leather. The woman in the cage on the right also wore a half mask. The man with her wore a tight leather hood with openings only for his mouth and nose. The woman carried a whip. In the other cage, the head and face gear were reversed and the man carried the whip. The room grew quiet. The background music died down, and something with a more driving beat began at a higher volume.

  Blanche felt her mouth hanging open; she didn’t even notice the waiter when he brought their drinks. She flinched as the whip cracked against the back of the woman on her knees in the cage to her left. She turned to her right. The man in that cage was on all fours, his head buried in his arms and his behind in the air. The woman had one stiletto heel planted on the small of his back. She was leaning over, teasing his bare butt with the whip handle—more than teasing, Blanche realized when she saw the tip disappear between his buttocks.

  She turned from the cages and looked around. There was a woman on all fours being used as a footstool by two men in suits; two other men with leashes attached to collars around their necks were being led around the room by a woman in a skintight pink jumpsuit. Was this supposed to have something to do with sex? She thought about the kind of pain and shame black folks suffer in America, and wondered how many were into pain for pleasure. She didn’t have a problem with people who needed handcuffs and a good spanking to get their rocks off, but for her, being bound and hit and shamed were too much like slavery to be a good time. Still, people sat at the bar the same way they sat at any bar, couples cuddled in corners, and a few folks were grinding their hips on the dance floor. As the room filled, there were more worsted pin-striped suits than black leather.

  It was just after six in the evening. Blanche wondered what this place was like about midnight, when folks were really loosened up. She felt Lacey watching her, and turned toward her.

  “I don’t meet a lot of women in your line of work,” Lacey said.

  “Likewise,” Blanche said. “But I meet a lot of women who were in my line of work, at one time or another, or one way or another. I imagine the same is true for you.”

  Lacey laughed and clapped her hands. “Brava, Blanche! Most women like to pretend that being in the life is something only sluts and junkies do. I’m glad you know better.”

  Blanche decided not to mention the big difference between women who traded sex for a new house, a better car, and so on from the men in their lives and pulling down your panties for men you didn’t know, and who would never acknowledge you if you met them in church. Instead, she took off in a direction she hoped would lead to where she wanted to go.

  “And what about men? The backbone of the industry?”

  “Ah, yes, God love ’em; what would we do without their appetites! You’d be amazed at what some of the big-money boys want from a woman. Course, they have to pay big for the pleasure.” She rolled her eyes in emphasis. “But you don’t want to talk about my business. It’s Allister Brindle you want to know about, isn’t it?”

  Blanche couldn’t hide her surprise. “Why do you say that?”

  Lacey gave her a sly smile. “You told me. That’s another thing we working girls do well: listen.”

  “When did I tell you?”

  “You told me that you’d found two packs of matches from Le Club, and you found one of them in a place that surprised you. You didn’t say where you found the matches, but I called you at the Brindles’ place. So it stands to reason that you found at least one of the packs there. Am I right?”

  Blanche grinned at her. “You sound like a detective.”

  “I’d be good at that, too.”

  “So,” Blanche said. “What about Allister Brindle?”

  Lacey picked up her drink and jiggled it. “He’s not a Family Values client.”

  It took Blanche a couple seconds to remember that Family Values was the name of Lacey’s call-girl business. “Shit!” she said, not bothering to hide her disappointment.

  Lacey smiled at her. “You don’t get it. If Brindle were one of ours, I couldn’t tell you anything. Client confidentiality, you know. But since Brindle isn’t one of ours…” Lacey shrugged and grinned.

  Blanche leaned across the table, almost knocking over her drink. “Tell me!”

  Lacey laughed her hearty laugh. “I wish Marcella were here. She’s the one to tell the story about your employer! But she’s left town. It must have been right here, at her going-away party, when she told us about him.” She tilted her head in a remembering way. “It was me, Ray-Ray Brown, God rest his soul, and one of his dates—I don’t remember his name—and Marcella and her sister, Joyce. Girl, Marcella had us dying! Drunk and maudlin as she could be. Sniveling about how moved she’d been that afternoon when Brindle insisted on making a tape of—”

  “Did you say a tape? Like a videotape?”

  “That’s right—Allister Brindle dressed up like a little girl, and Marcella giving him a good spanking with the hairbrush. Marcella told us: ‘Movies always make me look
fat, but he looked so cute in that frilly little dress, how could I say no?’ ” Lacey howled with laughter. “He told her he wanted it to remember her by, since he was bankrolling her move to LA.”

  Blanche had to turn her head to hide the tears of disappointment that sprang to her eyes. She’d been hoping Allister’s tape would at least have some kind of illegal payoff on it, or a deal with the mob—something important—not some silly shit, like Allister skipping around in a pinafore. While she could understand why Allister wasn’t eager to have the voters see him in girl-wear, she’d been expecting something more important than bottomless britches. Like something that would land him in jail. She’d also been hoping whatever was on the tape would jam Samuelson up, too. Shoulda known life wasn’t about to get that simple, she thought.

  “Did you say Ray-Ray was with somebody? Was it a guy called Donnie?” Blanche couldn’t remember Donnie’s last name no matter how she tried. “He’s kinda slim, light brown–skinned, well-dressed, dreamy brown eyes, with real short hair?”

  Lacey shook her head. “Unh-unh. This was a white guy. Dark hair, nice-looking. Kinda quiet, or shy.”

  Blanche sat up straighter in her seat. “Marc? Was his name Marc?”

  Lacey thought for a second or two. “Could have been. Yes, maybe so. You know him?”

  If only, Blanche thought, and shook her head.

  Lacey went on: “I don’t care what people do, as…”

  But Blanche’s attention was elsewhere. If Marc and Ray-Ray were together when they found out about the tape, Marc was also probably the answer to the question of how Ray-Ray had gotten into Brindle’s personal safe. She’d bet serious money that Marc supplied the combination.