Fadeaway Girl (35 page)

I shook my head when he held out the gum, offering a piece. I was running out of reasons. “Well, what would Morris Slade's motive be? Why would a father murder his own
son
?” I said this self-righteously.

“You of
Medea
-fame are asking that? Although I will admit the motive seems a lot more convincing if it's the son shooting the father.” He folded a stick of the gum into his mouth and leaned back against the truck.

At least he was allowing that. I said, “Remember, Ralph came armed.”

He shrugged. “So did his dad . . . if he is the dad.”

I ignored the “if” part. “What Morris Slade's doing is he's protecting the person who must have saved his life. The person who shot Ralph Diggs when he was about to fire.”

Dwayne crossed his arms, chewed his gum, looked at me. “You really think people would go to that length to save someone else?”

“I certainly do. Like Ben Queen taking the blame for Fern. Sure, they go to that length.
You
would.”

Dwayne laughed. “You mean, like for you, maybe?”

“Of course I don't mean me.”

Of course I did.

I walked out.

 

It was a tossed salad I was supposed to be making, so I tossed it, chucking lettuce leaves onto salad plates, plunking cherry tomatoes atop the leaves, boomeranging onion slices.

“What are you doing?” There was Vera, risen like Venus on a clamshell, or whatever that picture was, announcing her displeasure I was still alive.

“Nothing,” I said, in my surly way.

“Be sure you make a cross with the Roquefort cheese dressing.”

So many replies to that rushed into my mind that she was gone before I could choose my favorite. I made crosses with the Roquefort dressing, except on Miss Bertha's. She despised Roquefort, so I slid a teaspoonful into the middle of her salad, hid it with the lettuce on top, and drenched it with French dressing.

While I was busy, Ree-Jane slipped in; that is, she didn't seem to come all at once, but like a vapor trail, which I believe was her “model's walk.” A hilarious smile twitched on her face; apparently the short run to the mental hospital hadn't done much to wipe it off, nor had the shooting of Ralph Diggs had any sustained effect. You'd think she'd never heard of him.

“Guess where I'm going tonight?”

“Hell-and-gone? That dress looks like you're on fire.”

She actually drifted around in a circle to give me the full effect of yet another Heather Gay Struther outfit. “It's new. Red.”

No kidding? Since I hadn't guessed, she said it again: “Guess where I'm going?”

I was silent. Hell hadn't worked.

Now she was whispery: “Pat and I are going to the Double Down. Perry's place.”

“The bar.”

That irritated her. “It's not a
bar
. It's a club!”

I plunked pepper rings on a couple of salads and watched them slide off. “You have to be twenty-one to get in.”

As if she had the perfect answer to that, she said, with a sticky smile, “Not if you're a special friend of Perry's.”

“That's right. Then you have to be
forty
-one.”

“Don't be stupid.” Then thinking over that dumb insult, she added, in a manner she regarded as smooth, “I've always liked older men.” She simpered.

I turned, full face; I was really angry. “No kidding? Is that why you were so moony over Rafe? And ‘prostrate with grief' this morning?” Her face was reddening up. “You know—Rafe Diggs, the dead guy. The murdered guy. Rafe.”

Her mouth worked, but she could think of nothing to say. The color was leaving her face as if the color at least had grace enough to flee.

And so did she, finally.

T
he following morning I was back in La Porte, having walked the two miles myself. I thought about the Sheriff and felt maybe

I should go and see him and, if not exactly apologize, as I didn't think either Maud or I had done anything wrong the day before except be sarcastic . . . well, maybe there was something to apologize for in that.

When he'd told Maud she didn't know “one goddamned thing about it,” maybe he'd been right. We acted too much a lot of the time as if we knew more about the law than he did.

 

“Yeah, I guess I know one kid that's gettin' her comeuppance,” Donny said, swaggering around, hitching his belt up and looking at me with a sharklike grin as if I were a school of minnows swimming by.

“Meaning?” I had no idea at all what he was talking about. But I figured I wouldn't like it, not if it made Donny happy.

The Sheriff had gone out somewhere.

“Well, ain't you got this great story about—?”

Maureen broke in as she yanked a paper from her typewriter. “Donny, you shut up, now. Sam wouldn't want you talking about this.”

He turned slowly to Maureen. “Begging your pardon, ma'am? Hell, Maureen, I didn't know you was deputy.” Maureen had only spurred him on rather than settling him down. He turned back to me. “Yes sir, you're the one that's been defendin' the great Ben Queen, ain't you?”

My stomach went so far down it could have hit the floor. I heard Aurora's voice: “
By the pricking of my thumbs
. . .” I felt it, felt my fingers tingle.

Then Donny said, smiling until the corners of his mouth nearly met his earlobes, “The great Ben Queen. Big hero. Saved your life.”

“I know you're sorry about that.” My thumbs still tingled.

“Maybe he ain't such a hero after all, him and his sainted wife—”

“Donny!” Maureen was picking up the phone. “I'm calling Sam.”

“Oh, for God's sake, woman. He'll be in Cold Flat Junction by now. I'm just doin' a little kiddin' around.”

But I heard whom she asked the operator to put her through to: the Queen residence.

 

What did he mean?

That Donny knew what had happened and even sounded like he knew why—that it was Donny who had this in the palm of his hand—made me feel like all my hard work didn't amount to much. The Sheriff knew it, but that was different; he deserved to know it.

I walked like I had no feet, just blocks of lead, to the taxi office. I looked over at Souder's; the pharmacy was right across from Axel's.
Sainted wife.
I thought Mrs. Souder might know about Rose Queen, that is, something about her that had or could have spoiled her reputation. . . . I had a sudden sense of dread that it might have to do with Mary-Evelyn Devereau, that maybe Rose had done s omething—

No no no. That mystery was solved. I refused to unsolve it. Rose wasn't even there at the Devereaus when Mary-Evelyn drowned.

So I had been right: there
was
another person. Ben Queen. But why would he have shot Ralph Diggs?

 

Dinner was as straightforward as my mother's menus could get: roast beef au jus, oven-browned potatoes, green beans almondine. No involved combinations or fancy sauces. In other words, there was nothing in it to argue about.

Miss Bertha managed to argue: roast beef too rare, potatoes too hard, beans . . . beans . . .

“Too almondine?”

Curtly, she nodded.

“Too bad.” I turned with my tray and left. I did not have time for this.

Vera's table was a party of four people I didn't know, except for the fifth one, Mrs. Davidow, who was loudly making it a party of five. But the only one who minded, really, was Vera, for now she could not pretend to be in charge; Mrs. Davidow was in charge, and sending her out for more rolls, for more au jus
,
for more wine. I could see the steam coming off Vera like off the steam table in the kitchen.

I for one was delighted Mrs. Davidow was in the dining room because that meant she wasn't in the office. My mother was not in the kitchen, though, and that was a surprise. Walter said she'd gone upstairs to change. I told Walter to take in Miss Bertha's bread pudding when they were done.

Then I filled a glass with ice and made for the front of the hotel and the back of the office. I poured an inch of Myers's, another inch of Jack Daniel's, and just a little Gordon's gin over the ice. I added some Orange Crush from Will's stash. Then I poked a little paper umbrella into a maraschino cherry and put that in. I decided to add some of the juice from the little bottle of cherries, which turned the drink a pleasant pinkish brown color, and called it “South Sea Sunset.” I guess I was just good with names.

“What's this?” said Aurora, reaching for it no matter what it was.

“A South Sea Sunset.”

“Well, ain't that pretty!” She drank a good third of it in one go.

“Morris Slade turned out to be Ralph's father.”

Aurora, for once, was stunned. “Now, girl, that about knocks my socks off!” But not the drink out of her hand. “You're telling me that young fellow working here was the kidnapped child? Good God! Sounds like one of your crazy brother's plays.”

“If you mean
Medea,
Will didn't write it. The thing is, there were two guns at the scene—one of them yours, if you recall. And one was a shotgun that I don't think belonged to Morris Slade. And I don't think he shot Ralph. There's suspicion someone else was there.”

She stopped jiggling the ice in her glass. “Who?”

I told her what Donny had said. And the way he'd said it. Dripping sarcasm.

“Ben Queen?”

I nodded.

She looked truly puzzled.

“What did Donny mean?” I must have sounded a little too desperate, for it put her on her guard.

She flapped her hand at me. “You're too young to know all that.”

“If I'm too young to know it, it's got to be sex.”

“ ‘It's gotta be sex.' ” She tossed her palms up and mocked me.

I chewed my lip.

She smiled, showing her uneven teeth: “How about putting on Patience and Prudence before you go.”

I went to the phonograph and rooted “Tonight You Belong to Me” from the stack of records.

She said slyly, holding out her glass, “Get me another and maybe we can talk about s-e-x.”

I took the glass. “I'll get you a drink and maybe you can s-h-u-t u-p.”

But she was already singing along with Patience and Prudence:

I made my way downstairs, wondering, in my own story, who belonged to whom.

I
was lying down on my bed, trying to make sense out of things and knowing I probably never would. I could not understand why all of this was happening. Not just about Morris Slade and Ben Queen and Ralph Diggs, but about everything.

Look at the Big Garage. There's Paul in the rafters and a gun on the pilot's seat of a sawed-in-half airplane, and yet nobody falls to his death or gets shot.

They have all of these colored lights, spotlights, all hooked up on extension cords that stretch nearly to Lake Noir and put so much load on the electricity you'd think the place would explode. But nothing bursts into flame and burns.

They've got knives, saws, hammers, drills that they don't know how to use right, yet no one ever gets an eye poked out or a limb sliced off.

If there's anyplace imagination ever ran riot, ever shot around like the wildfire that leaves them unmolested, then it's up in the Big Garage.

But no harm comes.

And yet out here, in the wide, wide world, spread out all over the place, a few people, without wanting to, come together almost by accident and
boom!
It's all over.

It sounds like the ones who drown and shoot and die, that the Hand of Fate is in that. For these people are drawn like magnets together, drawn into trouble.

But in the Big Garage, they must live a charmed life. No matter how many times they put themselves in the path of a speeding train, the train always switches tracks.

I seem to be saying it's all a game; it's all like a night at the Double Down. Yet surely, it's not luck. I could not say to Ben Queen, Oh, bad luck! Your wife is a victim of a bloody murder? Bad luck. You're the one convicted and hauled into prison? Bad luck. It's your daughter who did it? Bad luck. And then she's murdered? Bad luck, bad luck.

And now there looks to be another piece of bad luck coming your way, another thing forced on you—