Rose Madder (25 page)

(Caroline)

the baby, Norman had nearly lost his job (had come close to being arrested, she had an idea), she had gone to the hospital with a broken rib that had lacerated and almost punctured her lung, and, as a small extra added attraction, she had been cornholed with the handle of a tennis racket. That was also the year her mind, remarkably stable until then, began to slip a little, but in the midst of all those other festivities, she barely noticed that half an hour in Pooh's Chair sometimes felt like five minutes, and that there were days when she took eight or nine showers between the time Norman left for work and the time he came back home.

She must have caught pregnant in January, because that was when she started to be sick in the mornings, and she missed her first period in February. The case which prompted Norman's “official reprimand”—one that would be carried in his jacket until the day he retired—had come in March.

What was his name?
she asked herself, still drifting in her bed, somewhere between sleep and waking, but for the time
being still closer to the latter.
The man who started all the trouble, what was his name?

For a moment it wouldn't come, only the memory that he had been a black man . . . a jiggedy-jig, in Normanspeak. Then she got it.

“Bender,” she murmured in the dark, listening to the low creak of the crickets. “Richie Bender. That was his name.”

1985, a hell of a year. A hell of a
life.
And now there was this life. This room. This bed. And the sound of crickets.

Rosie closed her eyes and drifted.

L
ess than three miles from his wife now, Norman lay in his own bed, slipping toward sleep, slipping into darkness and listening to the steady rumble of traffic on Lakefront Avenue, nine floors below him. His teeth and jaws still ached, but the pain was distant now, unimportant, hidden behind a mixture of aspirin and Scotch.

As he drifted, he also found himself thinking about Richie Bender; it was as if, unknown to either of them, Norman and Rosie had shared a brief telepathic kiss.

“Richie,” he murmured into the shadows of his hotel room, and then put his forearm over his closed eyes. “Richie Bender, you puke. you fucking puke.”

A Saturday, it had been—the first Saturday in March of 1985. Nine years ago, give or take. Around eleven a.m. on that day, a jiggedy-jig had walked into the Payless store on the corner of 60th and Saranac, put two bullets in the clerk's head, looted the register, and walked out again. While Norman and his partner were questioning the clerk in the bottle-redemption center next door, they were approached by another jig, this one wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey.

“I know that nigger,” he said.

“What nigger is that, bro?” Norman asked.

“Nigger rob that Payless,” the jig had replied. “I was standin right over there by that mailbox when he come out. Name Richie Bender. He a bad nigger. Sell crack out of his motel room down there.” He had pointed vaguely east, toward the train station.

“What motel might that be?” Harley Bissington asked.
Harley had been partnered with Norman on that unfortunate day.

“Ray'road Motel,” the black man said.

“I don't suppose you happen to know which room?” Harley had asked. “Does your knowledge of the purported miscreant stretch that far, my brown-skinned friend?”

Harley had almost always talked that way. Sometimes it cracked Norman up. More often it'd made him want to grab the man by one of his narrow little knit ties and choke the Kokomo out of him.

Their brown-skinned friend knew, all right, of course he did. He was undoubtedly in there himself two or three times a week—maybe five or six, if his current cash-flow situation was good—buying rock from that bad nigger Richie Bender. Their brown-skinned friend and all his brown-skinned jiggedy-jig pals. Probably this fellow currently had some sort of down on Richie Bender, but that was nothing to Norman and Harley; all Norman and Harley wanted was to know where the shooter was so they could bust his ass right over to County and clear this case before cocktail hour.

The jig in the Bills jersey hadn't been able to recall the number of Bender's room, but he'd been able to tell them where it was, just the same: first floor, main wing, right in between the Coke machine and the newspaper boxes.

Norman and Harley had bopped on down to the Railroad Motel, clearly one of the city's finer dives, and knocked on the door between the Coke machine and the newspaper dispensers. The door had been opened by a slutty high-yellow gal in a filmy red dress that let you get a good look at her bra and panties, and she was obviously one stoned American, and the two cops could see what looked like three empty crack vials standing on the top of the motel television, and when Norman asked her where Richie Bender was, she made the mistake of laughing at him. “I don't own no Waring Blender,” she said. “You go on now, boys, n get your honky asses out of here.”

All of that was pretty straightforward, but then the various accounts had gotten a little confusing. Norman and Harley said that Ms. Wendy Yarrow (known more familiarly in the Daniels kitchen that spring and summer as “the slutty high-yellow gal”) had taken a nailfile from her purse and slashed Norman Daniels with it twice. Certainly he had long, shallow cuts across his forehead and the back of his right hand,
but Ms. Yarrow claimed that Norman had made the cut across his hand himself and his partner had done the one over his eyebrows for him. They had done this, she said, after pushing her back into Unit 12 of the Railroad Motel, breaking her nose and four of her fingers, fracturing nine bones in her left foot by stamping on it repeatedly (they took turns, she said), pulling out wads of her hair, and punching her repeatedly in the abdomen. The short one then raped her, she told the IA shooflies. The broad-shouldered one had tried to rape her, but hadn't been able to get it up at first. He bit her several times on the breasts and face, and then he was able to get an erection, she told them, “but he squirted all over my leg before he could get it in. Then he hit me some more. He tole me he want to talk to me up close, but he did mos of his talkin with his fists.”

Now, lying in bed at the Whitestone, lying on sheets his wife had had in her hands, Norman rolled onto his side and tried to push 1985 away. It didn't want to go. No surprise there; once it came, it never did. 1985 was a hanger-arounder, like some blabby asshole gasbag neighbor you just can't get rid of.

We made a mistake,
Norman thought.
We believed that goddam jig in the football jersey.

Yes, that had been a mistake, all right, a rather big one. And they had believed that a woman who looked so much as if she belonged with a Richie Bender must be in Richie Bender's room, and that was either a second mistake or an extension of the first one, and it didn't really matter which, because the results were the same. Ms. Wendy Yarrow was a part-time waitress, a part-time hooker, and a full-time drug addict, but she had not been in Richie Bender's room, did not in fact know there was such a creature as Richie Bender on the planet. Richie Bender
had
turned out to be the man who had robbed the Payless and wasted the clerk, but his room wasn't between the soda machine and the newspaper boxes; that was Wendy Yarrow's room and Wendy Yarrow had been all by herself, at least on that particular day.

Richie Bender's room had been on the
other side
of the Coke machine. That mistake had almost cost Norman Daniels and Harley Bissington their jobs, but in the end the IA people had believed the nailfile story and there had been no sperm to support Ms. Yarrow's claims of rape. Her assertion that the older of the two—the one who had actually gotten
it into her—had used a condom and then flushed it down the toilet was not provable.

There had been other problems, though. Even their greatest partisans in the department had to admit that Inspectors Daniels and Bissington might have gone a little overboard in their efforts to subdue this one-hundred-and-ten-pound wildcat with the nailfile; she
did
have quite a few broken fingers, for instance. Hence the official reprimand. Nor had that been the end of it. The uppity bitch had found that kike . . . that little baldheaded kike . . .

But the world was full of uppity, troublemaking bitches. His wife, for instance. But she was one uppity bitch he could do something about . . . always supposing, that was, he could get a little sleep.

Norman rolled over onto his other side, and 1985 at last began to fade away. “When you least expect it, Rose,” he murmured. “That's when I'll come for you.”

Five minutes later he was asleep.

T
hat slutty gal, he called her,
Rosie thought in her own bed. She was close to sleep herself now, but not there quite yet; she could still hear the crickets in the park.
That slutty high-yellow gal. How he hated her!

Yes, of course he had. There had been a mess with the Internal Affairs investigators, for one thing. Norman and Harley Bissington had escaped from that with their skins intact—barely—only to discover that the slutty high-yellow gal had found herself a lawyer (a baldheaded kike ambulance-chaser, in Normanspeak) who had filed a huge civil suit on her behalf. It named Norman, Harley, the entire police department. Then, not long before Rosie's miscarriage, Wendy Yarrow had been murdered. She was found behind one of the grain elevators on the west side of the lake. She had been stabbed over a hundred times, and her breasts had been hacked off.

Some sicko,
Norman had told Rosie, and although he had not been smiling after he put the telephone down—someone at the cop-shop must have been really excited, to have called him at home—there had been undeniable satisfaction in his voice.
She sat in at the game once too often and a wildcard
came out of the deck. Hazard of the job.
He had touched her hair then, very gently, stroking it, and had smiled at her. Not his biting smile, the one that made her feel like screaming, but she'd felt like screaming anyway, because she had known, just like that, what had happened to Wendy Yarrow, the slutty high-yellow gal.

See how lucky you are?
he'd asked her, now stroking the back of her neck with his big hard hands, now her shoulders, now the swells of her breasts.
See how lucky you are not to be out on the street, Rose?

Then—maybe it had been a month later, maybe six weeks—he had come in from the garage, found Rosie reading a romance novel, and decided he needed to talk to her about her entertainment tastes. Needed to talk to her about them right up close, in fact.

1985, a hell of a year.

Rosie lay in bed with her hands under her pillow, slipping toward sleep and listening to the sound of the crickets coming in through the window, so close they sounded as if her room had been magically transported onto the bandstand in the park, and she thought of a woman who had sat in the corner with her hair plastered against her sweaty cheeks and her belly as hard as a stone and her eyes rolling in their shock-darkened sockets as the sinister kisses began to tickle at her thighs, that woman who was still years from seeing the drop of blood on the sheet, that woman who had not known places like Daughters and Sisters or men like Bill Steiner existed, that woman who had crossed her arms and gripped the points of her shoulders and prayed to a God she no longer believed in that it not be a miscarriage, that it not be the end of her small sweet dream, and then thinking, as she felt it happening, that maybe it was better. She knew how Norman fulfilled his responsibilities as a husband; how might he fulfill them as a father?

The soft hum of crickets, lulling her to sleep. And she could even smell grass—a husky-sweet aroma that seemed out of place in May. This was a smell she associated with August hayfields.

I never smelled grass from the park before,
she thought sleepily.
Is this what love—infatuation, at least—does to you? Does it sharpen your senses at the same time it's making you crazy?

Very distantly, she heard a rumble that could have been
thunder. That was strange, too, because the sky had been clear when Bill brought her home—she had looked up and marvelled at how many stars she could see, even with all the orange hi-intensity streetlights.

She drifted, sliding away, sliding into the last dreamless sleep she would have for some time, and her final thought before the darkness claimed her was
How can I hear crickets or smell grass? The window's
not
open; I closed it before I got into bed. Closed it and locked it.

L
ate that Wednesday afternoon, Rosie almost floated into the Hot Pot. She ordered a cup of tea and a pastry and sat by the window, slowly eating and drinking as she watched the endless river of pedestrians outside—most of them office-workers at this hour, headed home for the day. The Hot Pot was actually out of her way now that she was no longer working at the Whitestone, but she'd come here unhesitatingly just the same, perhaps because she had had so many pleasant after-work cups of tea here with Pam, perhaps because she wasn't much of an explorer—not yet, at least—and this was a place she knew and trusted.

She had finished reading
The Manta Ray
around two o'clock, and had been reaching under the table for her purse when Rhoda Simons had clicked through on the speaker. “Do you want a little break before we start the next one, Rosie?” she had asked, and there it was, as simple as that. She had hoped she would get the other three Bell/Racine novels, had
believed
she would, but the relief of actually
knowing
could not be matched.