The 56th Man (12 page)

In the time it took him to reach the
overhang, a pair of girls had slipped out of the shop door and were
scratching cigarettes out of a battered soft pack. Ari thought they
had been severely beaten, until a closer look revealed the bruises
to be black lipstick and mascara. One of them was evenly plump all
over, the other plump in the abdomen. They drew back as he stomped
his feet on the pavement and shook his arms, as if he was trying to
fling the bad weather in their faces. He nodded at them, smiling.
Assuming that he was headed for Big Lots, they made way for him to
pass. They were nonplussed when he took out his pack of Winstons,
found one that had not gotten soaked, and asked for a light. With
what might have been a surly pout, which under all that makeup
might have been a bright smile, one of the girls handed him a tiny
red lighter.

"Is the shop open?" he asked after starting
his cigarette and handing the lighter back. The storm reflected off
the plate glass storefront. The interior of Moria's Notions looked
dark.

"You have to go in over there," the
evenly-plump girl said, folding one arm across and resting her
other elbow on top of it, as though her cigarette was so heavy that
additional support was necessary.

"You have to enter the sewing shop through
Big Lots?"

"Oh...you want to come in here?" the
evenly-plump girl said in bored astonishment, nodding at the door
by which they were standing.

"Some people come in the wrong door, the
middle-plump girl said quickly. She too had levered her forearm
under her elbow. As Ari began to enter, she turned the end of her
cigarette toward him, as though warding him off with its glowing
tip. "You can't smoke in there."

"Ah," Ari nodded understandingly. "They're
afraid the cloth will catch fire."

"You can't smoke in any stores," the
evenly-plump girl said, looking at him with thickly applied
suspicion. "We can't smoke inside either." As evidence, she nodded
at the cigarette butts strewn thickly on the walkway.

"You work here?" Ari asked.

"Well yeah," both girls snorted defensively,
as though he had questioned their ability to earn a living.

"You sell costumes, then?"

"Costumes?" The girls checked each
other out, making sure their black rags were properly out of
alignment. "These are our
clothes
."

"I beg your pardon. I'm new to this
country."

"Well..." the evenly-plump girl tapped her
foot with contingent forgiveness. "Your English is good."

"I'm a translator at the UN."

"That's in New York," the middle-plump girl
snapped, less forgiving, then cocked her head along with her
cigarette. "What country?"

"Why France, of course." Ari assumed a prim
stance.

The girls gave him a collective moony
look.

"Je suis arrivé au summum de la Folie des
'Freedom Fries'. J'ai reçu des regards très particuliers, je dois
le dire. En fait, certains de ces regards étaient identiques à
celui que vous me jetez maintenant."

"Anyone can learn a language," the
middle-plump girl said with all the disdain of someone who had
never troubled to learn a second tongue.

"I'm visiting relatives during the U.N. Rosh
Hashanah break," Ari continued. "My sister needs
some...notions."

"Why didn't she come herself?" the
evenly-plump girl asked.

"She broke her leg while skiing."

"At Wintergreen?"

"I'm not familiar with that resort. No, she
was at Chamonix. Poor thing had to fly back to the States in a
cast. Can you imagine being crammed, in a full leg cast, in a 767
with over three hundred passengers? She's still distraught."

"But she can still sit at a sewing machine?"
the middle-plump girl shot.

Ari had overplayed his improvised persona. He
took a shallow draw from his Winston, wanting to stretch out the
smoking break, and repaired his bona fides. He gave a shrug that he
hoped was Gallic enough without slipping into cliché.

"Not very well," Ari admitted. "But I wanted
to help her out while I was in town. She needs something called a
bobbin."

"We've got plenty of those," the middle-plump
girl rolled her eyes. The evenly-plump girl shrank with practical
wariness. Was he going to insist on her helping him, forcing her to
stub out her half-smoked cigarette?

"There's no rush," he assured them.

They could not relax entirely. His presence
alone, interfering as it did with gossip and complaint, was enough
to put them on guard. But they seemed to resign themselves to the
intrusion.

"One of you wouldn't happen to be Tina, would
you?"

"She's the owner," said the evenly-plump
girl. The inference from her tone was that he should know better,
that owners did not dress like this. Which seemed to Ari to
conflict with their implication that they were dressed perfectly
normally.

"You should turn on more lights," he
suggested. "From the parking lot your store looks abandoned."

"Like that would help."

"Business isn't booming?"

"Business is busting," the middle-plump girl
answered sourly. "See that across the road? That mall over
there?"

"I'm afraid..."

"If it wasn't raining so hard, you'd see
Hancock's Fabrics. People only come over here when Hancock's
doesn't have something they want. And since Hancock has
everything..."

"Has Tina ever thought of expanding?" Ari
inquired, glancing over at the lawyer's office, as though that
would be the perfect place to start. "Or of moving to another
location?"

The middle-plump girl took out a dainty
handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. "Don't even try to mention it
to her. We tried, and she almost took our heads off."

"Not that, surely," said Ari.

"She thinks this is the best location in the
county."

"Yeah," the middle-plump girl joined in.
"That's why Hancock's is here."

"You know--" The evenly-plump girl
stopped.

Both girls fell into a prudent silence that
was unnecessary, unless they had toed a dangerous line.

The middle-plump girl honked into a
handkerchief identical to the one held by her coworker.

"If I had a cold I would cut back on my
smoking."

Ari's helpful suggestion was greeted with a
howl of silence.

"Do you think Tina would mind talking to me?"
Ari asked.

The girls registered mild alarm.

"About that?" the middle-plump girl said.

"My sister moved into the house of the
previous owner."

"Moria's house?" The girls froze for a
moment, then drew towards him. He was suddenly a very interesting
fellow.

"They were partners," said the evenly-plump
girl. "They only named it Moria's Notions because--"

The middle-plump girl shot her a warning
look.

"Well," she continued, "It sounded better
than Tina's Tinkles."

Both girls laughed. For a moment, their
inherent meanness dropped away.

"They were drunk when they came up with that
one," the middle-plump girl explained.

"If you bring up the Rigginses with Tina..."
the other one began.

"She took their deaths hard?"

"More than you can know."

The middle-plump girl tossed a dismissive
hand in front of Ari. "And she doesn't like Frogs. I heard her say
that once."

'Frogs'. Right to his face. Ari took
offence--and he wasn't even a Frog. He smiled.

"So Moria Riggins drank a lot?"

"No more than anyone else," the evenly-plump
girl shrugged.

Ari refrained from pointing out that there
were hundreds of millions of people in the world who didn't drink
at all. They would no doubt interpret the observation as a
criticism. America, Land of the Lushes.

"Moria and Tina used to go bar-hopping during
happy hour. Sometimes they took us along after we closed up
shop."

"Yes?"

"Well, you know. 'Happy hour'. They got
happy."

The evenly-plump girl made it sound as if the
rest of the day was reserved for sheer misery.

"They did this often?" Ari asked.

"Not really. A couple times a week."

"Moria's children were being watched by a
nanny?"

The girls found this word amusing. The
proposition itself was subjected to a barrage of ridicule.

"That was Jerry's job. His studio was at
home, so he became babysitter."

"While the mother was out..." Ari found the
idea ludicrous and repulsive. "And this continued up to the time of
Moria's death?"

The girls had gone into gossip mode and did
not question Ari's inquisitiveness. There was a less-than-endearing
lack of respect for their employers' privacy--and for the dead.

"Like clockwork."

"There were specific days when Moria and Tina
went out together?"

"Tuesdays and Fridays."

The evenly-plump girl finished her cigarette
and crushed it under her toe. She glanced toward the window, as
though concerned that Tina might see them talking to Ari.

"Were there any specific bars that they went
to?"

"No place special. Andy's, The
Shamrock...they pretty much stuck to them."

She stopped at a nudge from the evenly-plump
girl, who had apparently decided Ari was a bit too nosy for
anyone's good.

Feigning indifference, Ari smiled, shrugged,
and leaned towards the window. "You really must turn on more
lights. I was ready to pass by without stopping." He cupped his
hands against window, blocking out the reflected parking lot. "Ah,
but I see that you really are open..."

A tall, narrow woman was standing near the
front counter. Her head was nodding forward as she spoke into a
cell phone. When she saw him, she stood straight, said a few more
words into the phone, then snapped it shut. She stormed to the
front.

"Hey!" the evenly-plump girl protested as
Tina violently threw open the door and fetched her in the
shoulder.

"You'll get a lot worse if you don't get back
to work," Tina said with the harshness of a mother and the
authority corporate magnate. She nodded at the middle-plump girl.
"You, too."

"You can't talk to us like that!"

"What? I can't talk to you like your
boss?"

"Like we're nothing."

"You want your pay, don't you?"

The girls both opened their mouths--and
gulped down their comebacks. They were filing into the store, Tina
holding the door open for them, but stopped when they heard her
next words, directed at Ari:

"There's nothing I can help you with. If you
don't like being stuck in the Riggins house, you can go back where
you belong. I'm right, aren't I? You're the Cinnamon guy?"

Ari offered a confessional grimace.

"
You
moved into--" the evenly-plump girl gawked. “Not your
sister?”

"I knew it." The middle-plump girl's scowl
was made positively menacing by her eye-shadow. "I bet you're not
French, either."

"French!" The sound Tina made came out like
jagged glass. "He told you that? He's totally Italian!"

This was just as problematically Eurocentric,
as far as the girls were concerned. They were balefully
reconfiguring his identity when Tina pointed inside. As they
slumped away, Ari smiled at the middle-plump girl.

"My apologies, and my congratulations."

As the middle-plump girl turned, Tina let go
of the door, letting it close.

"She's not pregnant, Mr. Cinnamon," Tina said
sharply.

"Ciminon," Ari absently corrected her.
Unaccustomed to embarrassment, he shrugged contritely at the bared
teeth bordered by black lips on the other side of the glass.

"What kind of nonsense have you been telling
them?" Tina demanded.

She was a half inch shorter than Ari. Her
cropped red hair seemed to flame out behind her head, giving her
the appearance of a trapeze artist who had just finished her act.
She was dressed in a blouse and slacks.

"Forgive me. You can imagine that I would be
curious about the Riggins family."

"Then why didn't you just come in and
ask?"

"A cultural fault, I'm afraid. In Sicily we
never approach a sensitive subject directly. It could get us
killed. I'm sorry I misled your employees."

He was banking on American misconceptions and
ignorance. And American cinema. Tina produced a slight but
satisfactory flutter of uncertainty as she was racked by episodes
of the Sopranos.

Ari was in a rush. He did not want to meet
Carrington under these circumstances, and everything Tina had said
indicated the detective was the one she'd been talking to on the
phone. Chances were he was roaring up Broad at that very moment.
With plenty to mull over for the next few days, there was no need
to accept unfavorable terrain. He doffed a non-existent fedora.

"
Je vous
demande pardon, Madame. J'ai un engagement antérieur, je dois y
assister.
"

He did not relish the startled expression
Tina wore as he forged once again into the deluge. He had probably
made trouble for himself in that direction, and had little doubt it
would not be long in coming. But he hadn't foreseen that Moria's
Notions would be such a sore point with Carrington, with such
abundant cause. If he had had any preconceptions, they had to do
with the Riggins' standing in the community. He had already learned
that Jerry and Moria were not only upstanding citizens, but
outstanding upstanding citizens. They had won accolades for their
work with the disadvantaged, the disabled and the disinherited. Not
very long ago, there had been some protests lodged in the local
paper's Letters to the Editor when Moria did not win Mother of the
Year.

That she had
not
won was no surprise to Ari, now that he knew
about her after-hours activities
vis
the bar scene. To his way of thinking, she was totally unfit.
Being a mother, she should not even have held a job, let alone run
a business.