Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde (19 page)

I watched the fire lighting her twisting white back until it disappeared in the trees. I fished her shoe out of the trunk and threw it after her. I was very tired. Letting her go had been another dumb play. If I could scare her silent, someone else could scare her noisy. If the pimp
had earned his bullet, so had she. I pulled out a corner of my shirt and began wiping down his gun, feeling the heat of the fire on my back. I kept staring into the black orchard. Estrella might do all right on a farm someplace. It was probably where she’d come from. I can usually tell another kid from the country. I wasn’t a farmer’s son, but I grew up in a farm town and I’ve pulled rye and cut wheat. I thought for a moment of Estrella in a plain decent dress, on her own place somewhere, with a lot of black-haired kids that hopefully didn’t look too much like me, and her plump little body next to mine at night. I wouldn’t have been the first old slob out there with a young wife who didn’t speak much English. Yeah, well. My cousin farm. For all I knew, Soledad would put the girls straight into another house. I hadn’t reached Halliday, either. All I’d done was make bad smells and loud noises, and all I had to show was eighteen dollars and a dead pimp. No, I’d left ten bucks in the tray. One of the girls had it now. Eight dollars and a dead pimp. The fire reached the gas line in the kitchen then and made me jump. I tossed the pimp’s gun in the ditch and drove back to town. Halfway there I remembered there wasn’t anything at home, not even coffee, so I stopped at an all-night diner and bought myself a couple plates of chicken hash with Delores’s money.

I expected to feel pretty bad the next day, but as it happened I didn’t feel much of anything. When I thought it through again, I still couldn’t see a way to turn the girls
loose without killing the pimp. Not without getting cooled myself, then or later. I don’t pretend I know what people deserve, but the girls couldn’t stay there and I figured I had at least as much right to be perpendicular as the pimp. Actually, I did feel bad, like hell in fact, but about Metz’s tongue. It was Metz I still couldn’t stop thinking about. That didn’t make sense to me, but there’s no law that things have to make sense to me, and eventually I said the hell with it and went out to buy groceries.

I was planning to get juice, bread, bacon, eggs, potatoes, and a pound of coffee. While I was there I figured I’d better get some spaghetti and maybe some ground beef, and then I thought I ought to have some vegetables, growing boy like me, and some fixings if I wanted to make stew or a casserole, and by the time I was done I’d spent just about all I had on groceries. I didn’t really regret it. There’s worse things to blow your money on. It’s good having a house full of food. When I pulled back into the lot at home, I noticed a gleaming gull-wing Mercedes parked in one of the slots. It was empty. No one with any business at the Harmon Court would be driving a car like that. I got out carrying one of the bags and put a hand to the hood. Warm. I set my groceries down on the sidewalk, got my gun from the glove compartment, and walked around the corner of the manager’s office, holding it down by my leg.

The pool was deserted, as usual, except for the drifting clots of brown algae that weren’t supposed to hurt you. It was a bright morning and the sun was in my eyes. That wasn’t so good, and I considered swinging around and coming in the other way, but if they were watching from my window I didn’t want them to notice I’d noticed anything. The gun was down behind my right leg where they probably couldn’t see it. Then the shadow of the Sun-Glo Girl’s elbow fell across my face and I blinked in the dimness.
My front door was half open. I strolled up at a little angle so whoever was inside wouldn’t have a clean shot, and when I was almost to the door, I kicked it open and spun back against the wall. Nothing. I barged into the room, gun first.

Scarpa had pulled my desk chair to the middle of the rug, and was sitting there reading
The Red Badge of Courage
, one leg crossed neatly over the other. He looked up and said, “You gave me a start, with that bang. This is a pretty good book.”

“It’s one of my favorites,” I said, my gun trained on his pocket handkerchief.

“This is an old book? Famous?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a pretty good book. You mind I borrow it?”

“Go ahead.”

I lowered the gun.

Scarpa lay the book face down on his knee, open to keep his place, and looked around the room. “You live like a pig,” he said.

“I thought I kept it pretty neat.”

“That’s what I mean. Imagine having to keep a place like this neat.”

“You’re a hard man to please.”

“It’s not true,” he said. “I’m easy to please. All I want is people acting sensible, doing what they say, and I’m pleased. Of course, they got to do what I say, too.”

I stuck the gun in my pocket. My hand was sweaty, and I wiped it on my leg.

“I had a little trouble last night,” he said. “Somebody came to one of my businesses. Not a big business, just a little business of mine. But they chased everybody away, and shot a guy works for me. And then they burned the place down.”

“What, the whorehouse?”

“Oh, you know all about it?”

“It’s in the papers. That was your whorehouse? I wouldn’t brag about being in that line of work.”

“Just a little business,” he said, “and it’s not enough they got to kill everybody. They got to
burn
it. Right down to the ground. And I’m thinking, who do I know like that? Who do I know’s a goddamn Mau-Mau that doesn’t know when to stop? I thought I taught you something. I thought you knew how to screw the lid on.”

“It’s a big town, Lenny. Every now and then something happens I don’t do.”

“You didn’t burn down my whorehouse?”

“I didn’t burn down your whorehouse. Why would I?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“I’ve got no reason to do it. Where’s the percentage?”

“No percentage.”

“Well then,” I said and lifted my palms.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It’s the God’s truth. As long as I been doing this, I have never gunned anybody without a reason. It’s sloppy. You start gunning people just cause you got guns and everything goes to hell.”

“Good. Don’t gun me.”

“I got a feeling about you, Corson. But a feeling’s not a reason.”

“No.”

“But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “In twenty-four hours, no, let’s be nice. In seventy-two hours. I want you living someplace else. Some other city. Where I never see you or hear about you again. All right? Someplace far away. I’m not gonna come here again. I’ll send people. And Wednesday afternoon, if you’re still here? I’ll have my reason. Cause you didn’t do what I say.”

He closed the book and stood. “This was a nice short conversation,” he said, and walked to the door.

When he was halfway along the pool, he called back, “Thanks for the book.”

In a minute I heard the Mercedes start up, and then it ground off into the distance.

I put my desk chair back where it goes and opened up my trunk to see if he’d mussed my books. Then I opened the closet and sniffed. You could still smell the smoke on my jacket. It was nice Scarpa hadn’t thought of that, but I didn’t think he’d make enough mistakes to save me.

Aside from the chair, he hadn’t disturbed anything, but I walked around fiddling and putting things to rights anyway. My books, my bed, my clothes, my desk. It had been a pretty good room. I’d liked being here. There were plaid curtains, and I’d gotten used to seeing them when I woke up in the morning. They let me know that I wasn’t back on the road again. It was the first place I’d ever had a bathroom to myself, and I always kept it so it shone, so no one would ever be able to go in there and say, This is some bum’s bathroom. When you’ve been on the road, you hate to leave a room. You know they might not let you have another.

My bag of groceries was still on the front walk, and I fetched it back and got the rest from the car, and then put them all away in the kitchen. I’d planned a big breakfast and that’s what I had: four eggs up, a couple stacks of flapjacks, about half the bacon, a few pieces of buttery rye toast, and coffee. Then I cleared the dishes and washed the pans and drank another cup, slowly, while I read the paper with my feet up on the guest chair. And then I went for a ride, because the car was all mine now, bought and paid for.

I had it in mind to take a spin along the coast, with the waves rolling and racing as if they were skipping along with the car, and the sun warming my face and the clean wind in my hair, but I don’t drive a convertible and I
wound up in a second-run movie theater on Pascal. It was some kind of science fiction deal. I’d come in in the middle. These octopus-things that lived in craters were dragging the spacemen underground. It was a planet of women, and you could tell their queen was evil because her eyebrows were pointy, and you could tell she was the queen because her collar stuck up in back higher than her head. When she was upset, she did these interpretive dance moves. There was a lot of running through tunnels, and finally the walls were toppling in, the queen dancing around clutching her temples, and then you saw the palace burning, the little minarets toppling off, and a big
THE END
in the sky. I sat there for a few minutes watching cartoon squirrels whack each other with mallets, and then it started up again. The rocket came down on a column of fire. The men set out across a kind of meadow. Way off on the horizon, the palace appeared, shining and perfect. I got up out of my seat and went to see Rebecca.

The stairs still weren’t anything that would interest Busby Berkeley. At the top of them, I heard voices. They got louder as I neared Number 6. It sounded like I wasn’t the only one having a bad morning. I paused in front of the door, listening. Down the hall, the manager’s door was shut. Inside I heard Shade and Rebecca going at it pretty strong. I was coming at a bad time. Okay by me. The worse, the better. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I opened it.

Rebecca wore a pair of beige slacks and a brassiere. Her hair was uncombed and her feet were bare. Shade was dressed just as he’d been the previous Friday, except I couldn’t see his hat anywhere. His face was dark and ugly, and his enormous neck seemed to be swelling as I watched. When I came in, he slowly pivoted his entire body to look at me. It was like watching a gun turret
turning. “Why, it’s Misser Carson,” he said.

“Ray,” Rebecca said, not looking at me. “Get out of here.”

I said, “Hello, Shade. Rebecca.”

“Why it’s Mister Carson. H’lo, Misser Carson. Nother one a Beggy’s frien’s. Nice t’know Beggy’s so many frien’s.”

“That’s enough now, Lorrie,” Rebecca said.

“Real good frien’s. Y’wamme t’run along now like a li’l bitty angel and run long now so you c’n talk a Mister Carson?”

“Good idea,” I said.

“Shut up, Ray. Lorrie, I want you to calm down now.”

“Beggy’s poplar gal. Yessir. Nother frien’. Nother frien’. Wamme run long? Be n’angel? No? No? Maybe’ll stay then. Stay’n wash. Learn some’n. Yessir, Beggy knows a few th—”

Shade wasn’t the only one who could move fast. I saw a white streak, and suddenly Shade’s face had snapped to the side and there were three red welts down his cheek.

“Shut up,” she whispered. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

He looked at her in horror — I was probably looking at her the same way — and his eyes slowly filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Becky. I didn’t mean it.”

“Get out of here. Go away.”

“I didn’t mean it, Becky,” he said, beginning to sob. “I didn’t mean nothing, Becky.”

“You miserable fat-faced lump of hillbilly cowboy feeble-minded — you’ll never mean anything. You’ll never mean anything. Go
away
.”

She began to swear at him then, one hard spurt after another of vile language. She didn’t use any words I didn’t know, and I guess I wasn’t surprised she knew them herself, but it was shocking to hear them in those
clear, familiar, almost prissy tones — her diction hadn’t coarsened at all — and pouring out through a red distorted face I wouldn’t have recognized.

“Don’t, Becky,” Shade kept saying. “Becky, don’t.”

He pronounced it
dawn
.

Swearing furiously, she wrangled him through the door and slammed it.

“I’ll go crazy,” she said to no one special. “I’ll go right straight out of my goddamned mind. This is hell. This is
hell
.” She looked at me with hatred. “What do you want here with your big fat face?”

Then she went still. Her eyes, which she’d twisted small, grew huge, terrifyingly large, and she spun and yanked the door open again.

Shade was still standing there, weeping. “Becky,” he said.

The noise that came from her now wasn’t speech at all, just a sound like heavy chain being dragged over rock. She lunged forward at Shade and began driving him down the hall with her fists. I heard them shuffling slowly along the carpet, and her voice echoing. She was expressing herself, all right. He was getting it with the bark still on.

The moment they were out of sight, I went to the little desk. Nothing there or in the closet. The top drawer of the bureau was socks and undies. In the second drawer I found the powder-blue appointment book. I flipped through it. Mostly blank. The first three months were gone. In the back there was a string of phone numbers next to single initials, and I tried to commit the first two to memory. I looked in the pocket in the back cover, from which she’d taken the snapshot of Halliday. Inside was a letter on plain white stationery, with no envelope. It had been folded and refolded so often it was fragile along the creases. I read:

Dear Becky,

Well Kid it looks like the Movie Star idea is a bust as we thought it might be but I’m not down hearted and I don’t want you to be either. I got a number of other things working just at the moment and I think I’m doing O.K. or anyhow I could be if a few things would work out like I’m planning but my spirits are good and this is not as bad a Town as I was thinking. But I wish I had my girl with me. Because then I know everything would really go then. Honey there are more girls here then you could think of a million girls but there aren’t any of them like you, like a queen, and I think you should come out here because when they see you here they’ll know they really got something. I’m serious when I say that you could go big around here. Baby they think they’ve seen something but they haven’t seen athing till they’ve seen you. I’d like to see you up there getting treated like you deserve and I wouldn’t be a bit suprised to find you got that little something they seem to think I lack, and also I never think so clearly as when your here with me. If we were working this town together nothing could stop us. And even if they did I wouldn’t care anyway if you were here. I’m taking a little liberty and enclosing as you can see a ticket on the Western Zephiyr. I wish I was sending you an airplane ticket instead but that’ll come in time. Baby just come for a visit to lift my spirits and if you don’t like it I’ll get you home again someway but I know the way I really know things that this is your kind of Town.