Life Penalty (18 page)

“Well?” Gail asked, not sure what the question meant.

“Are you going in or what?”

“I’m going in,” Gail told her. “It’s very nice.”

“You can get cheaper down the road,” the woman told her again, “but it wouldn’t be as nice. I try to keep the place as neat as I can. I only ask a few things from you—no loud noise after midnight, no smoking in bed, don’t want to burn the place down, and no drugs or drinking in the halls. I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your room except that this ain’t no brothel. That’s the word, isn’t it? You know, whorehouse. You can have guys and all that. Just don’t make it too obvious.”

“There won’t be any guys.”

The woman regarded her strangely. “No? Well, that’s your business. I just don’t want any hassles from the police, you know what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke, and I don’t take drugs,” Gail started, but the woman was already halfway down the first flight of steps. “Don’t you want to know my name?” Gail called after her.

“What for?” the woman asked without looking back. Gail noticed a trail of ashes along the floor from the woman’s cigarette. She stood for a few seconds in the empty hallway and then went inside her room.

The room was no better than she had expected. The walls were several shades of green or possibly yellow, and the floor was bare wood. At least it was clean, Gail thought with a sense of relief. There was only the most minimal furniture: a double bed in the middle of the room, covered with a cheap, blue-flowered bedspread; a multicolored overstuffed chair whose stuffing had long since vanished; a cheap lamp on a cheaper plastic table; a chest of drawers.

Gail sat down on the middle of the bed and felt with surprise that it was firm. Not that it mattered; she wouldn’t be sleeping on it. She felt a sudden stab of panic, the room closing in around her, and she hurried to the window behind the chair. It was a small window, covered with the flimsiest of blue curtains, and it looked onto a dreary back alley. Gail felt cut off, isolated from the street, from her routine. How could she hope to find anyone behind these unfriendly doors?

She felt queasy and almost fell against the small table trying to find the bathroom. She needed a toilet. Where was the bathroom?

“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked the landlady after she had gone downstairs again.

The landlady peered out from behind her door.

“Oh, didn’t I show you? It’s down at the end of your hall. There’s one on each floor.”

“You mean there isn’t one in the room?”

“Did you see one?”

“I just assumed …”

“You know how much it would cost me to put a toilet in every room? Are you kidding? And the up-keep? Having to worry about someone stuffing something they shouldn’t down the plumbing, which, by the way, you better not do. I don’t get a lot of women to my place, so I forget to mention that sometimes.”

“Who do you get here?” Gail asked.

“What kind of question is that?” The woman tightened her hold on her door, closing it further, so that Gail could see only a quarter of her face. “Are you a cop or something?”

“A cop!” Gail’s laugh was genuine. “No, I’m just … lonely,” she confided, surprised to hear the words come out of her mouth.

The woman behind the door relaxed her shoulders and
pushed open the door with her foot. “You want a drink?” she asked.

“I’d love a cup of tea,” Gail told her before she realized how it would sound.

“Tea’s not exactly what I had in mind,” the woman said, “but I guess I have an old teapot around here someplace. Come on in.”

The room was approximately twice the size of Gail’s, with a small adjoining bedroom. Gail noted that it also sported its own galley kitchen and separate bathroom. The walls were the same yellow-green as the rest of the house, and the furniture strictly Salvation Army. The woman was searching through her cupboards for the teapot.

“‘There it is,” she said triumphantly. “I knew I had one somewhere. I think I remember how to boil water. Sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

“I’m Gail,” Gail told her, deciding at the last minute not to lie.

“I’m Roseanne,” the woman replied, filling the pot with water from the sink and putting it on the stove. “Go on, sit down. Don’t be afraid of the dog. She won’t hurt you unless I tell her to. Rebecca, get down from the couch.”

The dog obeyed instantly, jumping down from its comfortable spot on the faded burgundy velvet sofa and settling on the floor in front of the television. Gail sat down uneasily, her eyes traveling between the small black and white television and the large black and brown dog.

“How did you decide on the name Rebecca?” Gail asked, forcing her lips into a smile in the dog’s direction.

“It was my mother-in-law’s name,” Roseanne told her, coming back into the room and gluing her eyes to the TV. “Rebecca here looks just like her. Gotta have a dog, you know, a woman alone. Especially around here. Men come, they think they can take advantage ’cause you’re a woman living alone. They think again when they see Rebecca.”

“You live alone?” Gail questioned, trying to determine the woman’s age.

“Have for sixteen years,” Roseanne said. “It’s better that way. Husband went out one night for a quart of milk …” She let the sentence linger while she listened for several seconds to what was happening on the television. The program broke for a commercial. “At least he brought back the milk before he split,” she finished, returning to the kitchen to take the teapot off the stove. “Now, let’s see if I have some tea bags.” Gail watched as she hunted through several drawers. “Thought so. They’re a little old. Tea doesn’t go stale, does it?”

“No,” Gail smiled.

“Haven’t had tea in so long,” the woman continued, dropping a tea bag into a mug and filling it with water. “Don’t have any milk or sugar, so you’ll have to drink it plain.”

“That’s fine. What about you?”

“I never eat between meals,” Roseanne said, holding out the mug for Gail to take. “Do you watch this one?” she asked, indicating the television. Gail shook her head. ‘“It’s my favorite. All sorts of things go on you wouldn’t believe. Adultery, murder, Russian spies. Everything, all in the same family! This here’s Lola. She’s the troublemaker. I like her the best, of course. Every time she comes along, you can expect trouble.”

Gail watched the beautiful woman with the long, dark hair wrap her arms around a handsome, middle-aged man wearing a doctor’s uniform and a worried expression.

“That’s Will Tyrell she’s got her arms around. He’s married to Anne Cotton, a lady doctor and a real goody-goody since they got married. She never used to be that way. Will’s her fourth husband in five years. She had a nervous breakdown and murdered the last one, and they gave her all these drugs and she became a drug addict and then
she went through a bout of hysterical blindness before she met and married Will and got so boring. I have a feeling they’ll be bumping her off pretty soon.” Gail was about to laugh when she realized that Roseanne took her soaps very seriously. “But this Lola here, she’s a real character. Nobody knows where she came from and she keeps pretty much to herself. You never see where she lives or anything, but she’s always beautifully dressed, and she does things like wear full-length mink coats with nothing underneath, and she’s always after somebody’s husband. The last husband she stole, the poor girl committed suicide. I wonder if that’s how they’re planning to bump off poor Anne Cotton.”

“I tried to watch a few of these shows for a while … uh, ‘The Guiding Light,’ I think it was called, and ‘A Brighter Tomorrow.’”

“Oh, yeah, I used to watch that one. Is Erica still cheating on her husband, Richard?”

Gail had to think for a minute. “I think her husband’s name was Lance.”

“Lance?! She married Lance? That no-good crook?! Oh, now she’s in for it, throwing away a nice guy like Richard. I mean, playing around on him is one thing, but dumping him to marry Lance, well, she deserves whatever she gets.”

Gail looked restlessly around the room, feeling the walls beginning to close in on her as they had before. “I should be getting home,” she said before she realized what she was saying, and turned anxiously in Roseanne’s direction.

But Roseanne was lost in the problems of Will Tyrell and Anne Cotton and Lola-whoever-she-was, and hadn’t heard Gail’s mistake. Gail wiped the sudden sweat off her upper lip. She’d have to be more careful. A silly slip of the tongue like that one could cost her all her careful planning. She stood up abruptly and the dog jumped to its feet, teeth bared, ready to leap at her throat.

“Down, Rebecca,” Roseanne warned softly, and the dog slowly lowered its narrow, body back to the floor.

“I’m feeling a little dizzy. I think I’ll go out for a walk,” Gail volunteered.

“Don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m not your mother.”

“Thanks for the tea.”

Roseanne waved acknowledgment without taking her eyes from the TV. Gail took a last look around the room before stepping out into the hallway and closing the door behind her. She looked at her watch. It was almost three o’clock and she had better be on her way.

She met with resistance at the front door, realized that someone was pushing in as she was pushing out, and backed away. The young man who stepped inside was barely out of his teens and wore his hair in an unfashionable crew cut. It was so short, it was hard to determine its color. He kept his eyes on his feet as he strode with seeming purpose past Gail and up the stairs. If he had seen her at all, he didn’t acknowledge it in any way. Gail listened to the sound of his boots as he took the first flight of stairs two at a time, and felt the weight of his footsteps as they passed over her head. She pulled the front door open and hurried into the outside air, colder and damper than earlier in the day. She looked back at the house. The boy lived in one of the front rooms, she had quickly determined from his footsteps. Gail glanced up toward the second floor.

He was staring down at her from the window, and as soon as he saw her look up in his direction, he disappeared behind the curtain. Gail stood for a moment on the front walk before deciding to return to her car. As she ambled down the sidewalk, she felt the boy’s eyes following her down the street.

I
t was four days before she saw the young man again.

She had taken to leaving her door open when she was at the rooming house, so she could listen for noises from the other rooms and hear the front door open and close. Usually, the house was eerily quiet. Except for footsteps and doors banging, there were almost no sounds at all. Conversation was virtually nonexistent. Occasionally, there was a sudden burst of verbal abuse from the hallway, an angry torrent of words from the stairwell, but mostly, there was nothing. The sounds of silence, Gail hummed in her mind. In the four days she had been coming here, climbing the stairs to her room at approximately ten o’clock each morning and then alternating between the bed and the chair until it was time to go out for lunch, returning a half hour later to fill in the hours until three o’clock, she hadn’t uttered more than a few sentences to anyone.

She kept track of who the residents were, if not by name, by what room they occupied. There were five rooms on each of the second and third floors. The first floor, where Roseanne’s apartment took up more than the usual amount of space, had only two. Not counting Roseanne, that made for a total of twelve rooms.

Two aging drunks lived in the two rooms on the ground floor. They wore their unwashed hair long, their beards
untrimmed and their scowls fixed. Gail always found them sitting together on the front steps in the morning when she arrived. Surprisingly, each would greet her with a gallant old-world tip of the hat, but when she had tried to speak to them on the third morning, to ask how long they had been living in this place and what they thought of the other residents, they had regarded her as if she were speaking a foreign language and continued in their own erratic attempts at conversation as if she were no longer there.

Most of the five rooms on the second floor had already changed occupants several times since Gail’s arrival, inhabited by a succession of aimless, young-to-middle-aged men and, since yesterday, a strange-looking, mismatched couple of indeterminate age. The young man Gail had seen on her first day still occupied the front room on the second floor. She had seen him on two occasions since, staring down at her from his window when she went out for lunch.

The third floor boasted a redheaded woman of approximately Gail’s age and height, a sinister-looking man a few years older and several inches shorter, a swarthy male, and a still-empty room. The woman was the only one on their floor who had been living here before Gail arrived. Gail had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to her, but each time she had seen her, the woman had been in the company of a different man, and so Gail had said nothing.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Gail heard the woman’s footsteps in the hallway and jumped off her bed and into the hall.

“Something I can do for you?” the woman asked, startled by Gail’s sudden appearance, but unafraid.

Gail hesitated. “I thought maybe we could talk …” she ventured, trying to sound casual, aware she was failing miserably.

“What about?” the woman asked skeptically from the door to her room.

“‘About anything. Just get acquainted, you know.”

“I don’t do women.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not into women. Sorry, honey, I may be a hooker, but I’m straight as an arrow.” She turned the key in her lock.

“I just want to talk,” Gail said quickly as the woman disappeared inside. “That’s all. Really.”

The woman’s head reappeared. “What for?” Gail shrugged. She had no reply.

“You want to talk? Okay, you can come in and talk while I pack.”

“Pack?” Gail asked, following the woman inside. Their rooms were identical in fact if not in feeling. While the bed in Gail’s room had never been slept in, its covers never turned down, Gail doubted that this bed had ever been made. The chair in the comer was covered with discarded clothing and unruly wigs, and someone had knocked the table and lamp carelessly against the wall and not bothered to right them. Bottles of makeup all but hid the top of the dresser.