Baby Is Three (46 page)

Muhlenberg hung up, sighed, went into the morgue. He turned off the fan and lights, locked the morgue door, washed up at the laboratory sink, and shut the place up for the night.

It was eleven blocks to his apartment—an awkward distance most of the time, for Muhlenberg was not of the fresh-air and deep-breathing fraternity. Eleven blocks was not far enough to justify a cab and not near enough to make walking a negligible detail. At the seventh block he was aware of an overwhelming thirst and a general sensation that somebody had pulled the plug out of his energy barrel. He was drawn as if by a vacuum into Rudy’s, a Mexican bar with Yma Sumac and Villa-Lobos on the jukebox.

“Olé, amigo,”
said Rudy. “Tonight you don’ smile.”

Muhlenberg crawled wearily onto a stool
“Deme una tequila
sour, and skip the cherry,” he said in his bastard Spanish. “I don’t know what I got to smile about.” He froze, and his eyes bulged. “Come back here, Rudy.”

Rudy put down the lemon he was slicing and came close. “I don’t want to point, but who
is
that?”

Rudy glanced at the girl.
“Ay,”
he said rapturously.
“Que chuchin.”

Muhlenberg remembered vaguely that
chuchin
was untranslatable, but that the closest English could manage with it was “cute.” He shook his head. “That won’t do.” He held up his hand. “Don’t try to find me a Spanish word for it. There isn’t any word for it. Who is she?”

Rudy spread his hands.
“No sé.”

“She by herself?”

“Si.”

Muhlenberg put his chin on his hand. “Make my drink. I want to think.”

Rudy went, his mahogany cheeks drawn in and still in his version of a smile.

Muhlenberg looked at the girl in the booth again just as her gaze swept past his face to the bartender. “Rudy!” she called softly, “are you making a tequila sour?”

“Si, senorita.”

“Make me one too?”

Rudy beamed. He did not turn his head toward Muhlenberg, but his dark eyes slid over toward him, and Muhlenberg knew that he was intensely amused. Muhlenberg’s face grew hot, and he felt like an idiot. He had a wild fantasy that his ears had turned forward and snapped shut, and that the cello-and-velvet sound of her voice, captured, was nestling down inside his head like a warm little animal.

He got off the bar stool, fumbled in his pocket for change and went to the jukebox. She was there before him, slipping a coin in, selecting a strange and wonderful recording called
Vene a Mi Casa
, which was a
borracho
version of “C’mon-a My House.”

“I was just going to play that!” he said. He glanced at the jukebox. “Do you like Yma Sumac?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Do you like
lots
of Yma Sumac?” She smiled and, seeing it, he bit his tongue. He dropped in a quarter and punched out six sides of Sumac. When he looked up Rudy was standing by the booth with a little tray on which were two tequila sours. His face was utterly impassive and his head was tilted at the precise angle of inquiry as to where he should put Muhlenberg’s drink. Muhlenberg met the girl’s eyes, and whether she nodded ever so slightly or whether she did it with a single movement of her eyelids, he did not know, but it meant “yes.” He slid into the booth opposite her.

Music came. Only some of it was from the records. He sat and listened to it all. Rudy came with a second drink before he said anything, and only then did he realize how much time had passed while he rested there, taking in her face as if it were quite a new painting by a favorite artist. She did nothing to draw his attention or to reject it. She did not stare rapturously into his eyes or avoid them. She did not even appear to be waiting, or expecting anything of him. She was neither remote nor intimate. She was close, and it was good.

He thought, in your most secret dreams you cut a niche for yourself, and it is finished early, and then you wait for someone to come along to fill it—but to fill it exactly, every cut, curve, hollow and plane of it. And people do come along, and one covers up the niche, and another rattles around inside it, and another is so surrounded by fog that for the longest time you don’t know if she fits or not; but each of them hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one comes along and slips in so quietly that you don’t know when it happened, and fits so well you almost can’t feel anything at all. And that is it.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

He told her, immediately and fully. She nodded as if he had been talking about cats or cathedrals or cam-shafts, or anything else beautiful and complex. She said, “That’s right. It isn’t all there, of course. It isn’t even enough. But everything else isn’t enough without it.”

“What is ‘everything else’?”

“You know,” she said.

He thought he did. He wasn’t sure. He put it aside for later. “Will you come home with me?”

“Oh, yes.”

They got up. She stood by the door, her eyes full of him, while he went to the bar with his wallet.

“¿Cuánto le debo?”

Rudy’s eyes had a depth he had never noticed before. Perhaps it hadn’t been there before.
“Nada,”
said Rudy.

“On the house?
Muchissimo gracias, amigo.”
He knew, profoundly, that he shouldn’t protest.

They went to his apartment. While he was pouring brandy—brandy because, if it’s good brandy, it marries well with tequila—she asked him if he knew of a place called Shank’s, down in the warehouse district. He thought he did; he knew he could find it. “I want to meet you there tomorrow night at eight,” she said. “I’ll be there,” he smiled. He turned to put the brandy carafe back, full of wordless pleasure in the knowledge that all day tomorrow he could look forward to being with her again.

He played records. He was part sheer technician, part delighted child when he could demonstrate his sound system. He had a copy of the Confucian “Analects” in a sandalwood box. It was printed on rice-paper and hand-illuminated. He had a Finnish dagger with intricate scrollwork which, piece by piece and as a whole, made many pictures. He had a clock made of four glass discs, the inner two each carrying one hand, and each being rim-driven from the base so it seemed to have no works at all.

She loved all these things. She sat in his biggest chair while he stared out at the blue dark hours and she read aloud to him from “The Crock of Gold” and from Thurber and Shakespeare for laughter, and from Shakespeare and William Morris for a good sadness.

She sang, once.

Finally she said, “It’s bedtime. Go and get ready.”

He got up and went into the bedroom and undressed. He showered and rubbed himself pink. Back in the bedroom, he could hear the music she had put on the phonograph. It was the second
movement of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, where the orchestra is asleep and the high strings tiptoe in. It was the third time she had played it. He sat down to wait until the record was over, and when it was, and she didn’t come or speak to him, he went to the living-room door and looked in.

She was gone.

He stood absolutely still and looked around the room. The whole time she had been there she had unostentatiously put everything back after they had looked at it. The amplifier was still on. The phonograph was off, because it shut itself off. The record album of Prokofiev, standing edge-up on the floor by the amplifier, was waiting to receive the record that was still on the turntable.

He stepped into the room and switched off the amplifier. He was suddenly conscious that in doing so he had removed half of what she had left there. He looked down at the record album; then, without touching it, he turned out the lights and went to bed.

You’ll see her tomorrow, he thought.

He thought, you didn’t so much as touch her hand. If it weren’t for your eyes and ears, you’d have no way of knowing her.

A little later something deep within him turned over and sighed luxuriously. Muhlenberg, it said to him, do you realize that not once during that entire evening did you stop and think: this is an Occasion, this is a Great Day? Not once. The whole thing was easy as breathing.

As he fell asleep he remembered he hadn’t even asked her her name.

He awoke profoundly rested, and looked with amazement at his alarm clock. It was only eight, and after what he had been through at the lab last night, plus what he had drunk, plus staying up so late, this feeling was a bonus indeed. He dressed quickly and got down to the lab early. The phone was already ringing. He told the coroner to bring Regalio and to come right down.

It was all very easy to explain in terms of effects; the burned morgue room took care of that. They beat causes around for an hour or so without any conclusion. Since Muhlenberg was so close to the Police Department, though not a member of it, they agreed to kill
the story for the time being. If relatives or a carnival owner or somebody came along, that would be different. Meantime, they’d let it ride. It really wasn’t so bad.

They went away, and Muhlenberg called the paper.

Budgie had not come to work or called. Perhaps she was out on a story, the switchboard suggested.

The day went fast. He got the morgue cleaned up and a lot done on his research project. He didn’t begin to worry until the fourth time he called the paper—that was about five p.m.—and Budgie still hadn’t come or called. He got her home phone number and called it. No; she wasn’t there. She’d gone out early to work. Try her at the paper.

He went home and bathed and changed, looked up the address of Shank’s and took a cab there. He was much too early. It was barely seven-fifteen.

Shank’s was a corner bar of the old-fashioned type with plate-glass windows on its corner fronts and flyblown wainscoting behind them. The booths gave a view of the street corner which did the same for the booths. Except for the corner blaze of light, the rest of the place was in darkness, punctuated here and there by the unreal blues and greens of beer signs in neon script.

Muhlenberg glanced at his watch when he entered, and was appalled. He knew now that he had been artificially busier and busier as the day wore on, and that it was only a weak effort to push aside the thoughts of Budgie and what might have happened to her. His busyness had succeeded in getting him into a spot where he would have nothing to do but sit and wait, and think his worries through.

He chose a booth on the mutual margins of the cave-like darkness and the pallid light, and ordered a beer.

Somebody—let’s be conventional and call him Mr. X—had gone ’way out of his way to destroy two bodies in his morgue. A very thorough operator. Of course, if Mr. X was really interested in suppressing information about the two pathetic halves of the murdered monster in the park, he’d only done part of the job. Regalio, Al, Budgie and Muhlenberg knew about it. Regalio and Al had been all right when he had seen them this morning, and certainly no attempts
had been made on him. On the other hand, he had been in and around the precinct station and its immediate neighborhood all day, and about the same thing applied to the ambulance staff.

But Budgie …

Not only was she vulnerable, she wasn’t even likely to be missed for hours by anyone since she was so frequently out on stories. Stories! Why—as a reporter she presented the greatest menace of all to anyone who wanted to hide information!

With that thought came its corollary: Budgie was missing, and if she had been taken care of he, Muhlenberg, was next on the list. Had to be. He was the only one who had been able to take a good long look at the bodies. He was the one who had given the information to the reporter and the one who still had it to give. In other words, if Budgie had been taken care of, he could expect some sort of attack too, and quickly.

He looked around the place with narrowing eyes. This was a rugged section of town. Why was he here?

He had a lurching sense of shock and pain. The girl he’d met last night—that couldn’t be a part of this thing. It mustn’t be. And yet because of her he found himself here, like a sitting duck.

He suddenly understood his unwillingness to think about the significance of Budgie’s disappearance.

“Oh, no,” he said aloud.

Should he run?

Should he—and perhaps be wrong? He visualized the girl coming there, waiting for him, perhaps getting in some trouble in this dingy place, just because he’d gotten the wind up over his own fantasies.

He couldn’t leave. Not until after eight anyway. What else then? If they got him, who would be next? Regalio, certainly. Then Al. Then the coroner himself.

Warn Regalio. That at least he might do, before it was too late. He jumped up.

There was, of course, someone in the phone booth. A woman. He swore and pulled the door open.

“Budgie!”

He reached in almost hysterically, pulled her out. She spun limply into his arms, and for an awful split second his thoughts were indescribable. Then she moved. She squeezed him, looked up incredulously, squeezed him again. “Muley! Oh, Muley, I’m so glad it’s you!”

“Budgie, you lunkhead—where’ve you been?”

“Oh, I’ve had the most awful—the most wonderful—”

“Hey, yesterday you cried. Isn’t that your quota for the year?”

“Oh, shut up. Muley, Muley, no one could get mixed up more than I’ve been!”

“Oh,” he said reflectively, “I dunno. Come on over here. Sit down. Bartender! Two double whiskey sodas!” Inwardly, he smiled at the difference in a man’s attitude toward the world when he has something to protect. “Tell me.” He cupped her chin. “First of all, where have you been? You had me scared half to death.”

She looked up at him, at each of his eyes in turn. There was a beseeching expression in her whole pose. “You won’t laugh at me, Muley?”

“Some of this business is real un-funny.”

“Can I
really
talk to you? I never tried.” She said, as if there were no change of subject, “You don’t know who I am.”

“Talk then, so I’ll know.”

“Well,” she began, “it was this morning. When I woke up. It was such a beautiful day! I went down to the corner to get the bus. I said to the man at the newsstand,
‘Post?’
and dropped my nickel in his cup, and right in chorus with me was this man …”