Goldilocks (23 page)

“It suits me,” Sal said. “Can I get you a beer, maybe something harder?”

“Nothing,” she said, surprisingly fresh after her long drive from Lawrence. She stood long-limbed in a beige suit, the skirt stylishly short. Her dark eyes were clear and alert.

Sal said, “We were worried about you, weren’t we, John?”

John Rozzi was ensconced in a low cushioned chair, the weight of his face sunk between his shoulders, the skin gathered in pleats under his chins. He had a can of Canadian beer in his hand. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“That’s what we did.”

“I did something,” Sal said. “I checked around, see who might’ve put the hit on you, but I drew a blank.”

“I did some checking too,” she said easily. “I didn’t do any better.”

“John and me, we didn’t want you to get any wrong ideas about us.”

Louise’s smile was gracious. “It crossed my mind, Sal, but I dismissed it.”

“That’s a relief. We were concerned, weren’t we, John?”

“I wasn’t concerned,” John said. “You know me good enough, don’t you, Mrs. Baker?”

“I know you both,” she said, stepping away from the deck door and glancing at a framed photograph of three children on the television set. “Your kids, Sal?”

“Belongs to the guy used to own the house.” Sal was watching her closely. “The way I see it, Mrs. Baker, somebody in Lawrence must hate you a lot.”

“That’s more than possible, Sal. The problem is I don’t know who. That’s why I’ve got myself a bodyguard now.”

“You should’ve asked John. He’d have done it for you, wouldn’t you, John?”

John said, “I’d do anything for you, Mrs. Baker.”

“I’m using Chick Ryan,” she said. “You remember him, don’t you, Sal?”

Sal visibly relaxed. “Sure I do. He was a help to you after Scampy kicked.”

“You were a help too.”

Sal grinned. “I knew a winner when I saw one. Your brains, Mrs. Baker, we’ve done well.”

“I needed someone like you.”

“I’m glad I fit the bill.” Sal ran a hand over his pitted jawline. “So where’s Ryan now?”

“I don’t need him everywhere I go,” she said, and smiled down at John. “I’d like to talk to Sal alone for a while, you don’t mind, do you?”

John was on his feet, and Sal said to him, “Go take a walk around the lake. Listen to the birds.” John deposited his beer can on the top shelf of the room divider and left through the kitchen. Sal called after him, “You see Mrs. Reynolds, say hello for me.”

Louise dipped her fingers into the half pockets of her jacket. “Who’s Mrs. Reynolds?”

“Woman lives across the lake. Her husband travels. It’s warm enough, she and I go swimming late at night. She says she never knew a guy like me.”

“Sounds like you have it nice here.”

His eyes embraced her. “I’d give my heart and soul it was you I was going swimming with.”

“I’m a married woman, but thanks just the same.”

He drew near. “That Polack I got rid of for you, I’m ten of him.”

“I don’t doubt it.” The heel of her hand pushed him back. “Let’s talk business.”

“Everything’s on hold.”

“For now, that’s the best place for it. I’ve got word the government’s interested in me. It doesn’t surprise me. One thing follows another.”

“What’s it mean to us?” he asked.

“It means I’m going to fade into the background for a while and you’re going to take a more active role, make a few decisions. Think you’re up to it?”

His eyes glittered, and his color rose. “Sure I can do it. I can do anything you want. Maybe in time I can call you Louise instead of Mrs. Baker.”

“First things first, Sal.” She lowered her head for a moment. “You know I’ve made a lot of money.”

“I got a small idea, Mrs. Baker, but it probably doesn’t come anywhere close. I don’t want to be nosy but if you want to tell me I’ll listen.”

“It’s enough, Sal, so that maybe I might retire, who knows?”

He shook his head. “I never thought I hear you say that.”

“Somebody shoots you, it changes your whole way of looking at life. You understand.”

“Nobody’s ever shot me.”

“You’re lucky.” She stepped back to the sliding door and peered through the glass. “If I look hard, can I see Mrs. Reynolds’s house?”

“Naw, it’s hidden.”

“Maybe I’ll have that beer now.

He grinned and moved past the room divider into the little kitchen, where he pulled two barroom glasses out of a cabinet and yanked open the refrigerator. Bending, he said, “O’Keefe, Stroh’s Light, or Bud? You got your choice.”

“Let me think,” she said slowly. Her expectant eye picked up Chick Ryan slipping into the kitchen on the quietest of feet. Glimpsing her, he signaled with his free hand, a gesture that had the intimacy of a whisper laid against her ear. In a strong voice she said to Sal, “I’ll have what John was drinking.”

Sal reached deep into the refrigerator.

She turned her head. She did not want to see it happen and tried to occupy herself with a broken nail. It was over in one shot from a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, point-blank, base of the skull. Sal went down as if someone had pulled his feet from under him. Louise waited for the coup de grace, but it did not come. Her head still averted, she forced a quaver out of her voice and said, “Make sure.”

Chick, looking down, said, “I don’t have to.”

Staring through the glass, she watched John charge up the rise from the lake as if someone had strong reins on him and were whipping him up a rough road. Minutes later the front door flew open with a bang, and John pushed into the kitchen and pulled up short. For an extended moment the silence was acute and critical. Chick smiled, and Louise, remaining in impeccable profile, said, “What’s it going to be, John?”

“I’m with you, Mrs. Baker,” he said.

Sun poured through the slider and lay in her hair. “You know why this was done, don’t you?

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Chick, in a voice marked with doubt and disappointment, said to her, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Do I, John?”

“Yes, ma’am. You’ll never have to worry about me.”

She opened the slider for air. “Some cleaning up to do here, John. Also a disposal problem. May we leave it in your hands?”

“I’ll take care of everything,” he said flatly.

Chick ejected the clip from the pistol and wiped the weapon with a paper towel. “While you’re at it, John, get rid of this..”

“See you back in Lawrence,” Chick said with a glance at Louise. “Yes, eventually,” she said.

Chick left by the front door, and she departed by way of the deck, beneath which she paused to let a sickness pass.

Ben Baker stood as if catatonic on the edge of an interstate highway, where the traffic could deafen a person, and was nearly swept away by a fifty-thousand-pound rig that roared by at a fantastic speed. Youths in an open car swerved into the breakdown lane and threw empty beer bottles at him. None hit him, but some shattered nearby. A priest in a car bearing New York plates offered him a ride, but something in the clergyman’s manner alerted him.

He began walking again, unsure whether he was going west or east, toward Mallard Junction or away from it. His silk ascot had loosened and fluttered outside his shirt like a little bird under his chin. He was tramping over grass now, ignoring the vibrations from the highway, the chaos in his head, the weariness in his legs. He concentrated only on forging ahead while cursing the greatest injustice in life: loss. When his feet refused another step, he took deep breaths and stared at the river of traffic as if waiting for the strength and the proper moment to plunge into it.

He did not see the red pickup truck gliding toward him, half on the grass, two faces swimming in the sunstruck windshield. Not until the truck pulled alongside him in a small fluster of dust did his eyes fly up. Mrs. Mennick’s face poured out the passenger window.

“Thank God we found you, Mr. Ben.”

The door winged open, and Mrs. Mennick’s reedy legs dangled free, then the rest of her, like a large ball ready to bounce at him. He stood stationary, the greater part of him paralyzed by fatigue. “Lou’s gone,” he said simply.

Mrs. Mennick approached him with arms ready to reach out, as if she thought he might bolt. “No, Mr. Ben. We heard all about it. It was Bonnie Snell got killed. You remember her.”

The name Bonnie Snell no longer meant anything to him. He watched Mrs. Mennick’s brother climb out of the other side of the truck and stand motionless with a face totally bare of expression, which he found vaguely unsettling.

Mrs. Mennick said, “How did you get here, all this way?”

Walked. How else could he have got here? He had walked and walked. When she asked whether he had planned to do anything foolish, he did not reply, as if he were beyond explanation. When she reached for his hand, he recoiled.

“Don’t you want to go home, Mr. Ben?”

“No,” he said.

She looked around. “I need your help, Howard.”

Together they forced him into the cab of the truck, where he sat scrunched between them, his nostrils filled with the fertilizer smell of Howard’s clothes. He took an elbow in the stomach when Howard shoved the gearshift into drive with unnecessary force, and he nearly fell into Mrs. Mennick’s arms when the truck lurched onto the highway. It sped from one lane into another.

“Take it easy,” Mrs. Mennick said, and Howard flipped her a look of disgust.

“You care more about him than you do your own,” he said.

“We both live pretty well off them, remember that,” she countered easily.

He hunched over the wheel. “It’s more than that with you.”

“Think what you like, Howard, but where would your business be without Mrs. Baker?”

Ben, listening, said, “I know what you two are saying.”

“No, you don’t,” Mrs. Mennick said, stroking his head. “That’s the problem, Mr. Ben. You really don’t.”

• • •

Emma Goss walked the length of Mount Vernon Street, something she had not done in years. She avoided the voices of children, but with a boldness that sent a chill into her ankles she nodded to the man watering his patch of lawn and went out of her way to speak to the woman checking her mailbox. The woman, who twice a year knocked on doors for local charities, responded perfunctorily, “And how are you, Mrs. Foss?” Emma did not correct her.

Wind chimes sounded from a front porch, though she was unaware of a breeze. Two boys oblivious of her drifted by on bicycles, their language foul, which did not bother her. She felt there was nothing she could not push out of her mind. The only real bother was her body, for no matter how many times she bathed she did not feel clean.

At the end of Mount Vernon, corner of South Broadway, she entered the drugstore, where early in their marriage Harold had bought condoms, a month’s supply at a time, which would last a year, not because he had lacked ardor, but because he had been a pinchpenny and washed them out after use. When she had learned where he was buying them, she stayed away out of embarrassment, despite her craving for the sweets at the soda fountain. Now, surely, it was safe.

But nothing was the same. She remembered space, and there was none. Instead she found herself poking claustrophobically between tall displays of brightly packaged products that had a tinselly smell.

Gone, or at least hidden from view, was the mammoth penny scale on which she had weighed herself, always with anxiety immediately justified by the reading. She lifted her nose. Gone was the intoxicating scent of chocolate.

“May I help you, ma’am?”

The voice was a boy’s, so handsome he was, with glossy black ringlets fringing his forehead and eyelashes so long she imagined herself brushstroked in his gaze. He stood in a vanilla jacket behind a glass counter, innocence in his early adolescent eyes. Moving toward him, she saw herself in the mirror behind him and wished she had done something with her hair, which was a fright, and had worn a different dress. The one she had on looked as if it had been passed on to her.

“I don’t see the fountain,” she said, and the boy screwed up his Byronic face.

“Ma’am?”

“The soda fountain,” she said, her eyes shooting here and there, but she could not remember where it had been situated. Everything had been rearranged and juggled, and too much was in the way.

The boy said, “No soda fountain here.”

She pointed. “There. I think it was there.”

The proprietor peeked out from the back room. He had cropped silver hair, a crimped forehead, and a warm voice. “Twenty-five years ago at least,” he said, “I had it taken out.”

“It seems only yesterday I — ” she murmured, and stopped.

“That’s the way it goes,” he said, smiling. “When you’re young time floats. Then it flies.” He paused. “Sorry about your husband.”

He recognized her, remembered her after all these years, and she flushed, half with pleasure and half with embarrassment, and remembered she had never been totally indifferent to his smile. Turning quickly to the boy, she said, “I’d like some aspirin, please.”

The proprietor said, “Good to see you again.”

Trees were dropping their shadows when she trekked up Mount Vernon Street with a lighter lift to her step and with her mind reaching far back to better days, though for the first time in her life she questioned whether they had been that good. Had her parents not been so protective, she might have had choices beyond Harold, and had Harold not feared the expense of fatherhood she might have had a daughter to warm these late years. Had things been different she might even have learned to drive an automobile. As she neared the Whipples’ house, she heard the clip of high heels in the driveway and then, plainly Mrs. Whipple’s voice.

“Good to see you out and about, Mrs. Goss.”

She immediately felt shabby and humble against the gloss of Mrs. Whipple, whose gray-blond hair had just been done and whose summery dress was conspicuously expensive. Her sense of uncleanliness intensified from a whiff of Mrs. Whipple’s scent. Silver car keys dangled from Mrs. Whipple’s hand.

“I’m out to do a little shopping. Then I’m meeting my husband for dinner at Bishop’s. Have you eaten there, Mrs. Goss?”