Burn- pigeon 16 (11 page)

"Anna," Anna said, taking the proffered hand. It crossed her mind to give a fake name in case Betty spoke of her to Jordan, but she didn't. If she did blow her cover, it wouldn't be a disaster. Indeed, it might be good for Jordan to know there were other eyes than those of the snake loa watching him.

Betty crunched Anna's knuckles in a steely grip. "I give," Anna said easily. "You're the strongest."

Betty looked nonplussed for a moment, then laughed, a happy cackle. "Believe it or not, that wasn't intentional. I work over at the docks. It's my job to crate and uncrate perishables depending on if they're coming or going. Bad news, good news: I got arthritis starting up in my knuckles, but there isn't a pickle jar in America I can't open."

The dancer left the stage, moving remarkably gracefully on the six-inch heels, and hip-chucked her way from table to table. The college boys laughed and flirted, and she laughed and flirted back until they had tucked a handful of bills in the string of her thong; then she undulated to the bald bourbon drinker's table and gyrated while he, looking even more miserable than he had earlier, tucked a twenty into her G-string, the backs of his fingers lingering against the skin of her belly till she wormed away.

"That's Tanya," Betty told Anna, gesturing at the dancer with the neck of her Budweiser. "She is too good for this dump. Way too good. You'd think Larry's or Rick's would snatch her up."

"Maybe she's the wrong color," Anna ventured just to see what happened.

"Could be. She's my girlfriend."

"Congratulations," Anna said. "I'd like to meet her."

"Oh, she doesn't know she's my girlfriend. Not yet," Betty said. "Right now she just thinks I'm a fan, but I'm growing on her. Like Paul Newman in that old movie? I grow on people."

She was growing on Anna. There was something so straightforward and good-humored about her that Betty felt like the only piece of genuine earth in the assorted filths of the club. Tanya wriggled her way past the long arms of the college tables toward where Anna and Betty sat.

"Shoot," Anna said. "All I've got is a twenty."

"Give it to her. You look like you've got dough," Betty said.

"Easy for you to say," Anna grumbled. "You get union wages."

As she dug out her money clip again, she felt Betty's hand trace lightly over her right buttock.

"Hah!" the dock worker crowed. "Calvin Kleins. Fork it over. My girl works hard for her money."

"And here I thought you just liked me," Anna said and peeled off yet another twenty.

"Nope. I'm a one-woman woman," Betty said. She snatched up Anna's twenty, added one of her own, and tucked it into Tanya's G-string. "You doing okay, baby. Any of these goons bothering you?"

"They wouldn't dare," Tanya said.

Betty laughed. "That's my girl!" The dancer gave her a bump on the shoulder with her hip and left to work the far side of the room. "Tanya tells customers she's paying her way through college on the pole, but she isn't. Tanya's got a son in college, Tulane. She strips because she digs it."

"Cool," Anna said, to prove she was listening. "What do you know about the bartender?"

Betty slammed her beer down on the black cube that served as their table and stared balefully at Anna. "Okay. You can tell me you're straight. I can live with that. But you tell me you're straight
and
interested in that little peckerwood and I'll go sit with bald boy over there."

"My interest is purely malicious," Anna assured her.

"That's all right, then," Betty said.

"Why do you call him a peckerwood?" Anna asked curiously.

"If I tell you, will you take off that ridiculous mask?"

"What the hell," Anna said. The thing kept slipping down her nose and blocking her vision anyway. She pulled it back, threaded her braid out through the elastic band, and laid the mask on the cube.

Betty looked at her, squinting a little in the odd dim yet glaring lighting design of house and stage. "Nothing to be ashamed of," she pronounced at last. "For an old broad, you're a stunner."

"Thank you," Anna said dryly and took a swallow of her Pepsi. "Peckerwood?" she nudged. The bench rider was back. She wore the same schoolgirl mini but had added a man's tie for some reason. As she worked the pole, Anna's attention was caught by the girl's middle and her breasts.

When Betty raised her eyebrows at Anna's sudden interest in the stripper, Anna said, "I'd bet a month's salary that child is pregnant."

"Good eye," Betty said. "Four months gone."

"It doesn't get much worse, does it?"

"You're not from around here, are you? That's Candy. I don't know her last name. I've had her do a couple lap dances for me, you know, in private." Anna didn't know, but she could imagine. "Candy has the IQ of about an eight-year-old, maybe ten. I told the owner he was a piece of shit, but he keeps her on. She probably works for beer and TV privileges," Betty said. "I never even tried for a feel, just tipped her good and hoped some bastard let her keep some of it. I may be an old dyke, but I'm not a sick old dyke." She took a deep swig of the beer.

"And I respect you for it," Anna said honestly. "Is she tied in with the bartender?"

"Not that I know of," Betty said. "He's not the owner. He's a peckerwood all by his little lonesome." For a long moment, Anna and Betty watched Jordan. Betty took another swig of her beer and held it up, the universal signal for "Bring me another." Jordan responded with a fractional nod and ducked under the counter. Again the light hit his face. A small icebox under the counter, Anna guessed. He straightened up with a beer in his hand and came around the end of the bar.

"What do you know against him?" Anna asked.

"Nothing specific. He ignores Tanya and he's not gay. That is weird in and of itself."

"How do you--"

"Gaydar," Betty said. "He's not gay. He's just a freak of some kind."

Jordan wove through the cubes and chairs and put the fresh beer on a clean napkin in front of Betty. "Are you ready for your second?" he asked Anna.

The mask was off. Anna looked him square in the face for a second, waiting for him to recognize her. At first he seemed so lost in his haunted inner landscape he didn't. Then his eyes cleared, widened, narrowed, and, without waiting for her to reply, he turned and left, going not to the bar but to the dark recesses on the far side of the stage.

"What's it with you and the peckerwood?" Betty demanded.

"Malice," Anna repeated.

Betty sighed. "I'm here for love, not war. Go to the ladies' room."

"I don't have to," Anna said.

"Go anyway. Ah, beauty rises from the ashes!" Tanya was back, climbing the stairs to the poles, a silver cape and taxi cap over very little else.

Anna left Betty to her worship, elbowed her way through a gout of confused, overheated middle-aged men who'd just come in, and headed toward the back of the hourglass where the restrooms had to be. Jordan passed her in the bottleneck between stage and bar. He didn't make eye contact, but she could see his bones stiffening what little flesh remained uneaten by demons.

Dead center of the back wall, between more cube tables and plastic chairs filled with men and cheap drinks, was a hallway as black and featureless as the rest of the club. There being no other place to go, Anna walked into it, feeling much as she imagined a cow might feel walking into a chute at the slaughterhouse. Three doors opened off the end of the truncated hallway, one to either side, one marked with a crude drawing of breasts, the other with that of a penis, larger than life and erect, naturally. The third was at the end of the hall, leading either upstairs or out to an alley. A faint reek of urine emanated from the men's room; a stronger but not as repugnant reek of marijuana smoke emanated from the ladies'.

Putting her hand between the cartoon boobs, Anna gently eased open the door and slid into the fog.

FIFTEEN

The happy lapping up of brains convulsed Clare's stomach one more time before she found the wherewithal to grab the little dog. Always willing to reassure his people, Mackie turned in her arms to lick her face. Blood discolored the white mustache and chin whiskers. Clare retched again but rose regardless, the dog clamped under one arm, and headed toward the small door that had to be either closet or lavatory. It was the lavatory. For this lack of delay in washing the vomit from her chin--and the blood from that of her dog--she actually felt lucky. After a night of ongoing misery, and a day promising more of the same, even this tiny easement was noted.

Mackie was dumped unceremoniously into the tub and the sink tap turned on as high as it would go. Water exploded out in a brown rush, splattering the front of her coat and the floor. The dog made a dash for the door and the irresistible delights that lay beyond.

"No!" Clare cried as she kicked the flimsy wooden panel, slamming the door almost on Mack's nose. The thought of him doing what he'd been doing even when she was not looking was intolerable.

The bathroom of the apartment was sufficiently cramped that one tub, one stool, one sink, a woman, and a small dog filled it to capacity. Mack sat between her feet as she washed her face. She could feel the cold trail of his bloodied whiskers on the insides of her calves as he licked her with a tongue that might still have the children's babysitter's brains on it. For a moment Clare thought she was crying--or perhaps vomiting again--but she was laughing. The confluence of events had come together with such stunning wretchedness that she couldn't contain the horror. It was cartoonlike, surreal, funny.

Damn funny. Too funny.

She was becoming hysterical or going insane. Neither was acceptable. Mackie began to whine. Clare raised her head and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. The glass was old, the silver backing gone along the bottom edge, and the light over the bowl wasn't very bright. Even with this help, she looked a fright, frightening. Like a woman who could murder her own children. Abruptly she stopped laughing.

She had seen the small bodies. Against that, all she had was the knowledge--unratified by any living creature, including the dog--that Vee and Dana were not in the house when she came home. That, and the disparate facts of two dogs, one stuffed, one live, that were outside the house when by rights, if the children were within, the dogs should have been as well.

Staring at the face in the glass, the face of a woman much older than Clare's forty-two years, she said, "If they were dead, I would know it, I would feel it." Against the recommendations of those still in love with the Method, Clare had practiced the lines to more than a hundred plays watching herself in the mirror. This line sounded trite. Maybe she'd said it before onstage, read it in a book, heard another actor trying to make it fresh on a
Lifetime Movie of the Week.
Proof that simply because something was believed, or was true, that didn't make it good theater.

"I
would
feel it," she said again, putting the emphasis on the auxiliary verb. It had to be right. A mother was a
mother
, for God's sake. She would feel it if her children were dead.

When a child was taken, snatched from the sidewalk or school or the playground and spirited away, was this how the mothers felt? Like a great gaping maw of pain with only a microscopic flicker of hope to light their way back to life as it had once been? Did they, long after their daughters and sons were rotting in a shallow grave in some freak's backyard, still feel the life of that child like the whisper of a half-heard secret borne on the wind?

Sorrow so deep the only sensations were those of cold and dizziness enveloped her, and she grabbed the edge of the sink to keep from falling. Clearly her mind was not a place she could afford to go alone anymore. Moving to keep moving, she bent and snatched up the dog. Mackie, sensing he had transgressed grievously without knowing how, didn't fight her as she sluiced off his jaws.

She was sitting on the toilet seat toweling him off with an unadorned white Turkish towel when she heard the apartment door open. Or thought she did. In apartment buildings it was easy to believe homey sounds coming through the thin walls were actually occurring in one's own abode. "Shhh," she said, though the dog on her lap wasn't making a sound.

Jalila. No. Jalila was dead. Whoever had made Jalila dead? David?
Her short list of suspects--one of whom had the perfect alibi and the other probably the same--exhausted, Clare began to feel afraid.

It wasn't lost on her that, not too many hours past, she'd wanted nothing more than to kill herself. Now she was afraid for her life. A common enemy seemed to be a cohesive force even when one battled only with one's self. "Shh," she whispered again. This time Mackie needed the reminder. His hearing more acute than hers, he'd begun to growl, a thread of sound deep in his chest. Not the sort of noise that would strike terror into people's souls or make them hesitate to kick down the bathroom door.

Door.

Clare reached over and turned the old-fashioned bolt. The metal was sturdy, but the wood of the door wouldn't withstand a strong breeze, let alone a determined foot. She unlocked it, turned the knob, and opened it a foot or so. From a dramatist's point of view, an unlocked door was less interesting than a locked door, a closed door more interesting than one left slightly ajar. Secrets built tension. The unseen was more powerful than the seen.

Hoping she hadn't waited too long, she switched off the light. The bathroom was small enough that she didn't even have to disturb the dog. Bending over Mackie in her lap, Clare closed her eyes as if that would hide her or make her hearing more acute.

The front room's door banged back. Whoever opened it was not pleased or didn't know his own strength. Carpet swallowed the sounds of feet entering.

"Right where I left it." The voice was young, cheery, and, in some indefinable way, uneducated. There was a trace of an accent. Southern, but Clare couldn't tell from where. There were as many drawls as there were counties in the South, each a little different, depending on local culture and caste.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?"

Clare recognized this voice: the dark man on the cell phone who'd had the little girl by the hand. The man who'd said odd words: "Bourbon Street nursery," "magician," and something else she couldn't recall. There on the commode, his accent came to Clare. Cajun, the man was Cajun. There wasn't much call for that in the theater, but zydeco had been used as curtain music for
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Deemed too old for either Blanche or Stella, Clare'd had to sit that one out, but she remembered the accent from several of the cuts on the CD they'd used.

"I'm just gonna look."

"You think she put her head back together and moved? Come on. Get away from there."

"I gotta take a leak." The young voice, the lighter of the two, had come closer. Clare guessed he was in the bedroom where Jalila lay--or at least standing in the doorway. She didn't dare look.

A long silence wound out. Clare felt her nerves winding out with it. A scream sang along the distance, and she feared it would come out of her mouth if something didn't break soon. These were the men who had murdered Jalila. Probably the men who set fire to the house. These men knew what had happened to her children.

She didn't know if the scream was because she might be found, and her corpse and that of her dog added to the carnage, or because she knew she could not step from the bathroom and pull the information she craved out of these men along with their fingernails, entrails, and any other part of their anatomies that might cause extreme pain.

Silence dragged on.

Clare wondered whether the younger man was using the carpet beside Jalila's body as a urinal or waiting for the Cajun to give him permission to go to the bathroom.

With a jolt her tired, shocky brain realized she was in the bathroom, she and Mackie, in a space too small to hide even a rubber ducky, much less a woman and a dog. Years of ballet classes and fencing lessons allowed her to stand, dog in arms, and step over the edge of the claw-foot tub without making a sound. The shower curtain, white Egyptian cotton, hung from a metal ring suspended from the ceiling. The showerhead was an add-on, a long silver snake of pipe with a sprinkler set into a hook on the wall. The curtain was partially drawn. Clare eased back behind it.

David was a stickler for cleanliness and natural fibers. Much of the clothing he put together in the factory was made of polyester, rayon, and acrylic--the sort of thing one would expect to find in Target or Walmart for the most part. He himself would let nothing that had not once been living touch his skin. Till this night she'd thought it was because it was "natural"--whatever that meant anymore. Now, as she eased the 100 percent white cotton curtain along the track as quietly as she could with one hand, she wondered if it wasn't that he just enjoyed the sensation of something once living dead against his skin.

As with the bathroom door, she left the curtain open slightly. It would seem emptier that way.

"Let's get out of here," the Cajun hollered. He, at least, was still in the front room. Clare turned her back on the commode and closed her eyes. She knew there was little to the idea that people could feel eyes on them, feel themselves being watched. Over the years she'd watched hundreds of people, studying them for mannerisms, tics, postures, and walks she wanted to emulate for one role or another, listening in on conversations at neighboring tables, in the row behind her at the movies, on buses and planes and trains. People didn't feel her eyes upon them. Ninety-nine percent of the human race seemed to move through life in capsules, neither seeing nor hearing nor noticing other capsules unless they inadvertently crashed into them. Still, she turned away.

Mackie, already restless with fatigue and the anxiety boiling off of his mistress, began to squirm. Clare tried holding him more tightly, but that brought the beginnings of a whine, and she had to settle for juggling a writhing dog. Having raised two daughters, she had experience in the exercise.

"I gotta go. Pleeeeeease." The man sounded younger even than before, like a kid no more than nine or ten. In her mind Clare saw him standing in the doorway near the murdered girl, his legs crossed, and his hand in the air with one finger extended. This time the layering of the absurd and the macabre didn't make her want to laugh.

"Make it fast." This from the Cajun.

She heard the bedroom door close and waited for the sound of the man's steps to leave the carpet and move onto the tile of her small prison.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

"Hey, Dougie, you fall in?" The Cajun again, shouting from the living room.

From nearer Clare heard a low-voiced mantra. "Unh, unh, uh." Bile rose in her throat. The man wasn't taking a leak; he was beating off over Jalila. Maybe he was beating off. Maybe he was a necrophiliac. She bit down on her lower lip and buried her face in Mackie's fur so she would not see with her mind's eye.

A crash jerked her like a fish on a line. She may even have squeaked, but the racket from the other room drowned it out.

Something hard hitting flesh. "You sick fuck!" A thud as if a body hit the wall. "You sick son of a bitch." Another thump and a high injured cry. "Serves you right. God damn, you're a piece of work."

"Blackie, I didn't--" Slam.

A moment of quiet followed. Clare hoped the Cajun, whom she was warming up to simply because he exhibited a shred of human decency, had killed the other man.

There was a long silence. Then, "Somebody's been here." It was the Cajun again, but all anger had gone from his voice. It was as hard and packed as January snow.

Clare no longer trusted in his human decency.