The Good Old Stuff (45 page)

Shay looked over the albums. A lot of Cuban rhythms. The rest was rock with a heavy beat.

“She picked all them out,” Garver said. “She’d—well, she’d dance to ’em when we were alone. She knew I liked it.”

Shay moved over to the dressing table. He stared at the
massive array of bottles, jars, jugs, vials. He picked up a small bottle. “Expensive.”

“Fifty bucks an ounce,” Garver said proudly. “Smells good.”

The big closet covered one whole wall. It had sliding mirror-paneled doors. Once they were open I could catch the woman-scent of her. Shay leafed through the racked clothes like a man reading an out-of-date magazine in a dentist’s office.

“Can you tell which of this stuff she had before you met her, Garver?” he asked.

“She threw most of that out. The blue dress there, the long shiny one, she had.”

Shay took it off the hanger. He glanced at the label and said, “I’m taking this along.”

Garver shrugged. There was a section of built-in drawers. Shay yanked them open, one at a time. Nothing but an array of filmy black panties, yellow ones, pink, powder blue—bras to match. The dressing-table drawers were full of small items. Junk jewelry, a lot of it heavy and barbaric.

“Did she have any good jewels?”

“No. I was going to get her something. She wanted an emerald. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Where did she keep her private papers?”

“She didn’t have any. I helped her pack when she left her place. Just clothes and shoes.”

“What did she take with her?”

“I don’t know. When I left the house in the morning she wasn’t up yet. I made her breakfast and took it to her. I can’t see as there’s anything missing, but I don’t rightly remember all the clothes she had. Or even the suitcases she bought. Lieutenant Ryan asked me all that too.”

“Toothbrush?”

“That’s still hanging right in the bathroom, and her hairbrush and stuff is still in the cabinet. That’s why I don’t think she took anything except the clothes on her back.”

“What did she do all day while you were working?”

“Read and played the radio and her records, or went shopping.”

“Did you two have friends?”

“Well, my friends are pretty old, and she was a stranger
here, and she said it would be nice if we were selfish for the first year or so and stayed by ourselves. That suited me okay.”

We thanked him and left. Shay had the blue dress over his arm. It was a hard, electric blue in heavy satin. I slid behind the wheel and we went down the road.

Shay saw the old woman sitting, rocking, on the farmhouse porch, shelling peas. “Pull up,” he said.

As we walked up to the porch I saw him carefully adjust his clean-cut boyish manner.

“Lovely day, ma’am,” he said shyly.

“Seems to be.” She had the eyes of a chipmunk. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m Shay Pritchard and this is Robert Moran. We don’t want to bother you, Mrs. Carriff.”

“Read the name off the mailbox, eh? What’s on your mind?”

“I know that a good woman like you wouldn’t discuss her neighbors with strangers.”

“Depends on which neighbors, Mr. Pritchard.”

He grinned boyishly. “Let’s say Mrs. James Garver.”

Mrs. Carriff braced her feet and stopped rocking. She looked at Shay and then at me. She started rocking again. “She won’t be back.”

“Why are you so sure of that?”

“Girl like her? Jim Garver was softheaded to marry the likes of that. Her reeking of cheap perfume and wearing no proper undergarments and more coats of paint that Murphy’s barn! Young enough to be his granddaughter. She was after his money, but she found out she’d have to wait too long. Jim’s sturdy. Lucky for him, she wasn’t the kind to help him on his way. It’s happened before. No, she just got right sick of living out here where it’s quiet and went on back to the city.”

“You saw her leaving?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t have to. I know her kind.”

“Did she ever have any callers—that is, while Jim was at work.”

“Men callers? They could have parked up Garrison’s lane and come across lots. Easy enough to stay out of sight that way. She probably had ’em, all right. But the only one I ever saw was that silly Garrison boy. Big, gawky thing. His mother
told me he went off his feed after Jim brought that woman home. He must be nineteen now. Used to hang around out on the road and just stare at the house, hoping to see her through a window. But don’t let on I talked about him if you go see him. His mother’d be mad as hops I told you anything.”

Ted Garrison was working on a yellow tractor. He had the fuel pump dismantled and spread out on newspaper. There was a wide smudge of grease from his cheekbone to his jaw across his wind-burned face. He was tall and wide, and when he moved I saw nothing gawky about him.

“Want something?”

“How well did you know Allie Garver?” Shay asked. His tone was harsh and blunt.

The fuel pump diaphragm slipped out of the boy’s fingers and rolled across the newspaper into the dooryard dust. His face paled under the ruddiness.

“Is—is she dead?”

“Why would you think she was dead?”

“You said how well did I know her. Like she was dead.”

“She’s gone. She could be dead. We don’t know.”

The color seeped slowly back. The boy’s brown eyes hardened. “How well I know her is none of your damn business.”

He had shoulders like a horse, and they were tensed under the blue work shirt. I moved out to one side a bit to flank him, just in case.

Shay sneered. “She’s the kind to use a punk like you for laughs while Jim was working. Where’d you meet her? In the woods?”

The boy rushed with ponderous rage, swinging a right fist like a stone in the end of a sling. Shay moved to one side, evading the blow, and made what seemed to be a pawing, awkward gesture toward the boy’s middle. Ted Garrison whoofed as the wind went out of him. He staggered and went to his knees, fighting for air. He lunged up and went down again, this time onto hands and knees. He shook his head, almost sadly.

“Now, be nice,” Shay said.

Ted pushed himself back onto his haunches. His face was
twisted. “She isn’t that kind. She isn’t! She wouldn’t even look at me. She was too good for that old buzzard Jim Garver. I don’t know how he talked her into marrying him. I wanted to ask her to leave him.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“Once.”

“What about?”

“A letter for her got stuck to one of ours and got into our box. I took it down to her. I said, ‘They left this letter in our box by accident. I’m Ted Garrison.’ She said, ‘Thank you, Ted.’ And then she closed the door.”

“When was that?”

“Last Monday.”

“Did you take a look at the letter?”

“It was from Endor City, and there wasn’t any return address on it. It was typed, and the envelope was the kind you buy in the post office—the long kind with the stamp already on it. It wasn’t addressed to her very good. It just said, ‘Mrs. Garver, Bliss Corners.’ At the post office they’d penciled in ‘Route Two.’ I held it up to the sun, but—” He stopped suddenly.

“But you couldn’t read through the envelope, eh?” Shay said. He laughed.

Ted stood up. “She’s the—the most wonderful person I ever saw. It makes me mad the way the old hens around here talk about her.” He looked hard at Shay. “And if you make another crack about her, I’ll come at you again.”

I wandered
around the house while Shay worked in the studio. The problem of Mrs. Garver seemed to have slipped from his mind.

I was too restless to shut myself in the library and make progress on my book. I swam a bit, even though it was raining. At five he came downstairs, tenderly carrying an object wrapped in burlap sacking.

I followed him into the study and watched him place it on the desk. It was about two and a half feet high. I knew that last night’s clay image of Bets had been coated with a trick rubber solution and that, after the solution had hardened, he
had cut it through to pull the clay figure out. The rubber, when hardened, served as a mold for the white plaster. The last part of the afternoon had been spent buffing the rough edges from the white plaster. Then, as usual, he would wait a month or so. If, at the end of a month, he still liked it, the plaster would be a pattern for the mold to cast it in metal.

“Unveiling of Bets,” he said acidly, unwinding the burlap.

She was taking a half step, and her head was lowered and turned so sharply to one side that the left cheek pressed against the left shoulder. Her arms were rigid at her sides, fingers splayed and pressed hard against her thighs. Viewed from the front the figure expressed shyness and a sense of guilt. I had seen those qualities in Bets, but I hardly considered them dominant.

I frowned. “It doesn’t—”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked mildly. He turned it around gently, so that the back was toward me. I saw the reason for the odd angle of the head. She was looking back over her shoulder. There was slyness and lust on her face, invitation in the cant of her hip and the arch of her back.

“I’m calling it Hypocrisy,” he said. “The two-sided image of shame and desire.”

“It’s—it’s cruel,” I said.

“And very like a woman. She’ll like it.”

“She’ll smash it!”

“Robby,” he said sadly, “I thought you knew Bets better than that. The last pose failed because I got tangled up with conjectures about her soul. Now we are pretty well agreed that Bets’s soul has a twenty-three-inch waist, thirty-two-inch bust, and thirty-one-inch hips.” He looked at his watch. “If you can be ready in fifteen minutes, we ought to be in Endor City by nine o’clock for a late dinner.”

We arrived at Roger’s Place at eleven. A cobblestone alley in the old portion of Endor City, an alley too narrow for a car. Three steps down to a door made of cypress boards, grooved and ancient. At the third step we broke the beam of a photo-electric cell, and the door swung silently open. Nothing could have been more incongruous in that setting.

The ceilings were low and the massive beams were painted Chinese red. The walls were an odd pale aqua, dimly and indirectly lighted. The cypress bar was on the left, a tiny band in the back right corner: marimba, muted trumpet, and bass. The three musicians looked, at first glance, like college boys taking time off. But the crew cuts were dyed, the jackets were sodden in the armpits, and their eyes had been imported from some quiet corner of hell.

Shay took three steps beyond the check girl and planted his feet. He has the knack of imposing himself on the people in a room, of hitting them across the mouth with amused insolence, of showing them, like a black ace flashed quickly, the constant threat of violence.

The thin man who sauntered over wore a Shetland tweed jacket, iron-gray masculine hair. His eyes had the bulging impermanence of droplets of blue spring water spattered on a slick white surface, as though, by shaking his head violently, they would rain to the floor. The eyes flicked across my face, leaving an indescribable sensation of wetness.

“You gentlemen would like to stand at the bar.” He murmured it, and it was a statement rather than a question.

I had moved over to where I could see Shay’s face. It had a heaviness, a glazed, animal look. “Place was recommended to me. You’re Roger.”

Without seeming to, he led us over to the bar. “I’m Rogah.”

“I’m Smith,” Shay said. “John Q. Smith. And my pal—Joseph Q. Brown. Can’t have any fun in the old home town. Too close to the flagpole, as they say. You sell any fun here, Rogah?”

“Life is so full of a number of things, Mr. Smith. Fun is spelled many different ways.”

“We’ll let you write the prescription, Doc Rogah.”

He floated away. My eyes were used to the dimness. Smoke drifted on the sour-sweet air, and some of it had the tang of pot. Several couples moved to the slow beat of the music, glazed and somnambulistic. A girl at a table laughed. A man with a full, silky brown beard made quick Gallic gestures and talked in a low tone to a sleepy boy.

Maybe Rogah, maybe the bartender, pushed a concealed
button. They came through a curtain in the back left corner, two of them. Graded, no doubt, to the cut of our clothes. Tall and long-legged, with that look of breeding that has gone too far, that has decayed, like collies too long in the muzzle, like continental automobiles, like French perfume bottles, like rapiers so frail that they become toys, not weapons.

Rogah joined them and he walked as they did. “Mr. Smith, may I present Miss Smith? And Miss Brown? Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown.” He floated back into the gloom, drifting like something that had become untied under the sea.

Miss Brown’s pupils were so vast that they shrunk the iris to a thin frame of blue. Her honey hair was intricately coiffed. The dress was an off-orange that should have been the wrong color for her but wasn’t. She moved close to the bar between Shay and me, and the other one was on the other side of Shay, his big shoulders turned so that all I could see of her was the crown of her head, the mist-brown hair, ringleted.

“It’s so difficult to meet interesting people,” Miss Brown said. The diction was flat, clipped, precise.

“It seemed easy this time. Boston?”

“Dedham. And please call me Lee.”

“I’m Robby. And your drink is either Scotch or brandy.”

“How perspicacious, Robby. I like men who guess. Earlier in this dull evening it was Scotch, but now it’s five star.”

I ordered. She tilted her head on one side, and I saw that some of the precision of her speech and the carefulness of her movements was due to a case of being taken drunk. Her shoulder, where she leaned lightly against me, was warm.

She said, “Do you work for Mr. Smith?”

“Don’t tell me it’s beginning to show, Lee.”

“Don’t be hurt, Robby. I just felt that relationship in the atmosphere. And I prefer people without that … certain ruthlessness that employers have. You’re a small boy trying to be as tough as the big boys, aren’t you? There—I can see I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“You’re odd, aren’t you?”

“That,” she said briskly, “is a gambit I grow weary of. Dear Lee, you’re so intelligent, so charming, so lovely, so obviously well educated. Then the next step is to ask me why I’m doing
this. I’ll tell you in advance, Robby, before you work your way up to the question. It’s because the world is a very, very dull place.”