Portland Noir (6 page)
“I’m here about Julia,” I said.
“Julia’s dead,” he replied. He made a noise, half clicking and half sucking, with his cheek.
“I know,” I said. “And I know you were involved.”
He snorted. “Involved all right.”
“What does that mean? What happened?”
He glared at me. “You a reporter? Cop? Lawyer?”
I had been leaning toward him, but now sat back in surprise. “No, of course not. I fix bikes.”
He shook his head, a slight sneer on his lips. “Women shouldn’t do that sort of thing. Can’t fix anything worth a damn.”
I felt the old defensiveness rise in my throat.
Steady, he’s old. Steady
. “How were you involved in her death?”
Was he falling asleep? His eyes were closed, and his head seemed to nod forward.
I raised my voice: “How did she die? What happened?”
His head was still down, and now he seemed to be wheezing.
Unreal
. I wanted to poke him with something, but the room was bare. “Hey, you!” I spoke as loudly as I could, to try to wake him. “What do you mean, involved? What does involved mean?” I was shouting by the end of the sentence, I knew. I could feel my muscles tighten up all over.
His head snapped up. “I killed her, you fool. You stupid woman, I killed her.”
When I tried to speak, my throat was so dry the words got stuck. I tried again. “You did kill her? You did it?”
He nodded. “Yep.”
“But—the note? And the photo, under the wallpaper?” I heard the wail in my own voice. “I found them. The truth, you said. You both knew the truth.”
Henry Lewis chuckled, a wheezy sound, reedy and almost boyish. “That was just my little joke,” he said. “Julia and I were the only ones who knew. Everyone else thought they knew—but they never knew why, or how. And they never knew what I knew: she deserved it. She knew it too, knew I was gonna do it and knew she deserved it.”
He shifted, settled back into his chair.
“I’d been seeing this little yellow-haired gal on the side.
Sally or Sara or something. Anyway, she’d been good to me, real good. Better’n Julia ever was. Me and Julia were high school sweethearts, got married, I went to work. Dumb kids. We didn’t know nothing. After we got married, well, Julia just about froze up. In bed she was nothing, just laid there, and she kept a terrible house. She hated it here, y’see. She hated the rain in the winter, hated the dampness. I told her we’d leave, but after we got married I started working for the railroad, and the money was too good to give up. I told her we were staying put. She didn’t like that, and she just froze up on me then. When she wasn’t froze, she was crying. When she wasn’t crying, she was screaming. Man has a right to his house, to some peace and quiet. And Sally moved in a few doors down, and she was three years younger than Julia, still in high school. Pretty, sweet. Sally liked a man with some spending money. Julia found out. I told her I had a right to a girl who wanted me. She said she’d divorce me, take all my money, get me fired. All this crap.”
He paused. I couldn’t say anything. There was no sound from outside, either.
A cough, and he began again. “One day I came home from work and killed her. Hit her on the head with a frying pan.” That wheezy dry chuckle. “She went down in a heap. I remember the blood came from her head here”—he pointed to a spot above his left ear—“like it was a drinking fountain. I wiped off my fingerprints and dropped the frying pan and ran outta there to pick up Sally for a movie. When I came home, I called the police and said I’d just found her like that, and that I hadn’t been home at all that day cause I’d been out with my girlfriend. Sally backed me up—pretty girl, but dumb as dumb—and they could never prove a thing.”
“So the truth was that …?”
“The truth was that I killed her. She knew I was gonna do it, right up until I did it. And then she was dead and by God she really knew it. She wouldn’t ever cross me no more.” The chuckle again, and now its thinness sounded like wires rubbing against each other, scraping and raw. “Some people thought it was me, sure enough, but couldn’t no one ever prove it. And no one ever knew how much that bitch needed killing.”
I could feel the tears begin in me, the pressure building in my eyes and my sinuses. I swallowed, and my spit seemed to grate along my throat.
“What’s so funny about that?” I asked. “How is that a joke?”
He just wheezed and shook his head some more. I felt the hair on my arms stand up, but I forced my face into impassivity.
“None of my other girlfriends or wives ever tried any of that shit with me again,” he said at last. “Expect they heard about Julia and knew they’d have to shape up. Buried two wives, had girlfriends the whole time. They knew how to keep quiet.”
“You kept cheating?” I asked. I took pride in my voice’s evenness.
“Hell, I’m a man, ain’t I? All men cheat.”
“Mine doesn’t,” I said.
Henry Lewis laughed out loud, a choking sound that brought up something from deep in his lungs. “He cheats,” Henry Lewis said. “You ain’t caught him, but he cheats.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
The wheezing chuckle now, with a shake of the head. “Little girl, you ain’t know shit about men. You and Julia, thinking you can tell a man what to do, how to act. No one can! That’s what makes us men.”
“Why are you telling me this? If they never caught you, why are you telling me this now?”
“Maybe just cause I feel like.” He gave me a hard look.
“You come in here with your little purse and your expensive haircut and the way you pretend you belong here. You ain’t here. None of you are here. It’s like a play for you folks. And maybe I just feel like reminding you it ain’t. Now get out. I’ve got better things to do than teach you how the world is.”
I stood up, smoothing my pants with my left hand. I gave him a hard, long look; he returned part of it, then turned away. Not scared. Bored. He had killed her, and he didn’t even try to deny it. I suppose no one could touch him now, more than fifty years later. Who would believe me, anyway? He started reading a
TV Guide
as I stood there. He was old now, a lifetime older. I was fit, twenty-seven, healthy.
I watched him for a moment.
“You’re Julia now,” I hissed. He looked up, turning a page. I walked over to him, ripped the magazine from his hands, and tore it in half. The paper was all twisted in my hands.
He didn’t move, not even his face. That same bored look. He wheezed when he breathed, and his knuckles seemed too big for his hands. The whites of his eyes looked dull, like overcooked eggs. I was panting, my breath like sandpaper in my throat. He gave me another second of that vacancy, then closed his eyes and folded his hands on his chest, as if he were going to sleep. I dropped the mangled magazine, turned, and walked stiffly out of the house, banging the screen door behind me. I could still hear him wheeze.
Josh was sitting at the dining room table at home, going over swatches of paint. I saw shades of eggplant spread out before him. Very tasteful, all of them. They were for the living room; we were hoping to paint next week. He looked up at me. He was wearing his oldest jeans, the ones all torn up at the hem that my mother thinks make him look like a tightwad. A piece of a leaf perched on top of his brown hair.
“How’d it go?” he asked me, his hands flat on the table now.
“He did it,” I answered. I took the seat opposite Josh. “He admits it, doesn’t even care anymore. We bought a fucking murderer’s house. One who lives all of fourteen blocks away.” I could feel the heat in my eyes, the quiver trying to move my chin.
Josh shrugged. “We bought the house, we bought the house,” he said. “Anyway, Lewis is an old coot now. He can’t do anything to us. And if he tried, I’d fix him.” Josh grinned at me. His teeth were so white, so very white, that I thought I could see my reflection in their gleam. Like a dog’s teeth, constantly wet and shining. He stood up, walked over to me, and gave me a quick one-armed hug.
Then Josh swept out of the dining room; I heard him rooting around the fridge, pulling something out. A pop, a fizz. A can of beer, then. The drink gurgled going down his throat. I heard the backdoor open, then close. Maybe he was sitting on the back porch. Maybe he was just standing in the kitchen.
Henry Lewis was within a few hundred meters of us, somewhere, maybe a kilometer or so at most. He too could be on his porch this night, drinking a beer and thinking of nothing.
The backdoor banged open, then slammed shut. I couldn’t hear Josh anymore. I didn’t know where he was. The dining room was almost all dark now. My hands began to shake. I couldn’t stop them.
T
he kids lined the wall outside the Clinton Street Theater in the sepia-lit mist, waiting to see
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. The girls with their big purple hair and skimpy dresses; the boys in tight black bodices or boxy leather jackets. Cold November night. They clutched their rolled-up newspapers and cups of rice, hid water guns in their pockets. I squinted at them through the drizzle—a time warp to the ’90s, to the ’80s, to the ’70s. Bygone eras. I ducked into the dim red of Dots Café, slipped into a soft gold booth. The waitress had a tattoo of a hamburger on her shoulder. She nodded at me. “The usual?”
I winked up at her. Absolute martini. And spicy fries with tofu sauce.
As she walked away from me, I tried to recall when it was that I’d gone from being a housewife who’d occasionally sneak out for a midnight drink to a regular with a “usual.” I glanced around the joint. Marie Claire, the sexy Midwesterner who ran the Italian restaurant on the corner, sipped a Rumba with one of her young dishwashers. Wilhelm, the frumpy commercial landlord from down on Powell Boulevard, sat alone, adjusted his Coke-bottle glasses as he studied the menu. Nameless hipsters huddled at their smoky tables, too cool with their bleached fashion mullets and pegged pants. I once read in
Nylon
magazine that you can’t get away with retro fashion if you’re old enough to have worn it the first time. Puts me out of the running for skinny jeans and dangling earrings, I guess. I looked down at my boot-cut cords, fingered the oversized holes in my lobes. For all appearances, a washed-up ’90s girl. I’d recently signed up for NiftyWebFlicks, so I averted my eyes when the bearded guy from Clinton Street Video walked in. He sauntered up to the bar to drown his sorrows. A bygone business, video rental.
I got up to use the bathroom. No
Ladies
and
Gents
at Dots Café. Just
It
,
Doesn’t
, and
Matter
. I walked into Matter. The tan and white tiles on the walls gave me a weird sense of vertigo. On my way back to my booth, I passed Wilhelm. He muttered something unintelligible, adjusted those ridiculous glasses.
A couple of drinks and a pile of spicy fries later, I was back outside, feeling too sober for the cold. Some nights after drinks at Dots, I ambled down to my secret spot on the river, sat there watching the flow of things. But that night I headed home. Little fliers picturing some missing woman were stapled to the telephone poles that marked my path.
Catherine Smith,
in bold letters. Grown people were always going missing in this town. A fire glowed from inside an old Victorian, the smell of smoke in the damp night. I zigzagged home through the rain, cut across the rail yard south of Powell, my shoulders hunched. I held my hood tight over my head; a feeble attempt to stay dry. As I rounded the last corner, a shadowy figure flickered into my field of vision. She was so thin, I didn’t recognize her at first, but she said my name in a whisper loud and urgent: “Ruby—”
I was startled, took a minute to take her in. She looked like a wet Chihuahua after a flood, that cute little buzz cut I remembered all grown out now. Still, I’d have known her face anywhere. “Mustang?” I felt my chest tighten. She’d been a lover of mine back before I married Spider, but she ran off to Chicago amid a whirlwind of rumors. “My God, Mustang. What are you doing here?”
How long has it been? Seven years?
I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying or if it was just the rain on her pale face, but her mascara trailed down her cheeks like mud. She’d never worn makeup when we were together. Soft butch. I opened my mouth to speak, but I felt something hot in my throat.
Mustang cocked her head to the side, tried to give me a meaningful look, but it was like she was staring through me, at something on the other side. “I need a place to stay. Just tonight.” Her whisper was gravel and whiskey. She moved closer, gripped my arm. Even through my hoodie, her short fingernails felt like little claws in my skin.
I thought about Spider asleep inside. He was prone to silent jealous rages when it came to ex-lovers—and he didn’t much like unexpected guests. Anyway, I hoped he’d slept through my midnight escape. “Did you already knock on my door?” I asked Mustang.
She shook her head, narrowed her eyes. Her thin lips quivered a little. “C’mon, Ruby. We’re family, aren’t we? Even after all these years?”
I remembered that accusatory pout. I sighed, already defeated, and I wished I’d had another drink back at Dots. “Let me go inside first; give me ten minutes, then knock, all right?”
When I heard her at the door a few minutes later, I pretended to be awakened from deep sleep, I pretended to be groggy, I crawled out of bed real slow, but my charade was all for the night. Spider snored like an emphysemic sailor after a night at port.
As I led Mustang through the dark of the living room, floor boards creaking, she breathed hard. I pointed her down to the guest bed in the half-finished basement. “It’s all yours, babe.”
She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Thank you.” I felt that tightening across my chest again, shook it off.
Spider got up at the crack of dawn, a perverse rod of morning energy even on Sundays. He took his cold shower, headed off to work in his new Prius, none the wiser. Or so I thought.
I lay in bed, just looking at the ceiling. I wondered, fleetingly, if Mustang’s appearance in the night had been a dream.