WIDOW (15 page)

Charlene heard a light tapping—tap tap tap—at the window covered by the drapes and she started from the bed in wordless fright, the folds of her skirt clutched in both fists. She stood all atremble, listening for it again. When it did not come, after a full fifteen minutes of stiff waiting, she was able to let go of her skirt.

She had to stop thinking she was being hounded day and night. Oh, he was out there, he followed her and threatened her, that was the truth, no matter what the therapists said about persecution complexes and hallucinations and paranoid delusions, but not all the time. Not every minute.

He probably wasn't there now. The fog cover had made her nervous and hysterical. He wasn't there any more than the boys who laughed and played at the poolside were there. Products of her sensitive and exaggerated imagination, that's all they were.

“I'll make strawberry shortcake,” she said aloud. Talking made her feel safer. It was a real voice and centered her in her head where she could tell the sounds came from her thoughts.

She went to the kitchen and turned on all the lights: the one over the sink, the fluorescent rectangle overhead, the light in the walk-in pantry. She closed the blinds at the window over the sink. That did away with the slinking figure she kept spying outside the house. She lined up her ingredients on the long counter. There was the packet of soft spongy shortcakes she had asked Shadow to buy, the green plastic basket of ripe strawberries, the tub of whipped cream. She cleaned the strawberries, lopping off the green leaves, washing the ripe fruit, slicing them one by one into a bowl. She added a half cup of sugar and stirred and stirred. She let it sit a while to soak in the sweetness while she prepared the round cakes on individual saucers.

Shadow wouldn't eat more than one. She had to watch her figure, after all. But Charlene could eat all the rest, the remaining five. All at once or over a period of a couple of days, anything she liked, because she was free . . . “White and twenty-one,” she finished aloud, laughing at herself. Happy now. Doing something. Making things right and real.

Look at the strawberries, she told herself, in the dissolved sugar, how red the juice! Feel the way the cake snaps back if I make an indentation with my finger. Taste how the whipped cream melts on the tongue, sweet and light as a summer cloud. She nearly danced in delight at how sensuous the food made her feel.

Life was glorious with Shadow. It was the way life should be, a friend on your side, a person to care for and watch after, to clean for, to cook for, to be proud of when she brought you money to spend on yourself for anything.

“Buy some clothes,” Shadow told her. “Buy a hamster or some guppies or a dog. Dye your hair, Charlene, or get a bicycle. Anything you want, you buy. This money's yours.” And she did. At the dime store in LaPorte she bought Magic Rocks and put them in a jar of water to watch them grow. She bought a fistful of pale pink roses made from sea shells. She bought a cup and saucer that said, “Texas Is the Place You Want To Be.”

Her room filled with things she had never been able to buy before, things she'd lusted after and hadn't the nerve to steal when Marion State let her out on her sojourns. Shadow never once said she was wasting money or that she should have bought something else. Shadow laughed happily on seeing the purchases, and sometimes drank her coffee from the Texas cup.

While swooping heaping spoonfuls of sweetened strawberries into the cake cups, Charlene halted with the spoon in the air, and thought a black thought that came like the fog from out at sea, quickly, covering everything and blotting out the world. Shadow was crying in the night.

Was that last night, after they had gone to bed? Yes. Wakened from a sound sleep, Charlene heard her weeping, inconsolably, the cries muffled. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't her imagination because it had made her come awake, disturbed her sleep. She had tiptoed to the bedroom door and opened it. The crying was louder. She crept down the hall to Shadow's room and stood outside the door to make sure. It was weeping, all right, real and heartbroken.

Now what should she do about that? She dumped the strawberries onto the cake and began filling another one. What could she do about it? Shouldn't people be allowed to cry when they needed to? Didn't it help them to cry, to wash away the pain inside?

But she had never seen or heard Shadow cry before. Not in the hospital. Not in this house. And now that she had found her in that condition she realized Shadow might not be as strong and dependable as she had thought in the beginning. She might still be sick, the same as Charlene was sick. Sickness might never leave people, she decided, topping the strawberry shortcakes with lumps of cream and placing half a strawberry right in the center for decoration. Mind sickness might go underground and hide, but maybe it was always there, waiting to come out, like a virus that bided its time, that lingered without symptoms until one day it took over the system and killed you. It was that way with her. It was always there.

What would she do if Shadow got sick enough to go back to the hospital? She couldn't stay in this monstrous place alone. Dear God, no!

Well, she'd return to the hospital with her and she'd care for her there as she had done before. She'd talk her out of it. She'd be at her side until she recovered.

So what if Shadow didn't recover?

Shaking her head, shaking away the very possibility, Charlene took the shortcakes to the refrigerator and aligned them side by side—pretty yellow, red, and white desserts she couldn't wait to devour one after the other.

Now it was time to clean the kitchen and mop the floor. Next, she would scrub down the bathroom on the second floor, the one they used most often. It was as large as a normal-sized bedroom, so many tiles to wipe, walls, floor, tub, sink. There was dusting to be done. The banister to polish. The mirrors to clean and make shine. Shadow's bed to make. The halls to sweep. And one night soon she must clean the ballroom, however long it took her, or however much effort it entailed.

Humming to herself, Charlene started in, all the while the thought of the strawberry dessert in the back of her mind, making her mouth water.

She did not again see the skulking figure at one of the windows.

Chiefly because she forgot to look for him.

 

Thirteen

 

Shadow saw the man come in. He was there to catch her act once . . . sometimes twice a week. He sat alone, nursing a drink, his face inscrutable. For some reason she knew he was after her. She wondered if all women knew it when men wanted them, wanted some kind of relationship, lusted for them. It didn't have to be something in the eyes. The stare could fool you. Nearly all the men who came to a titty bar stared and lusted. Not all of them would really act, given a chance. But this particular man would, she knew that by picking up the invisible signals coming from him. It was the way he moved across the packed room, trying to keep her in view if he happened to come in when she was already on stage. And in the way his hands clasped around the cup on the table before him, the fingers laced together as if he didn't trust himself to raise the drink to his lips without a firm grasp. The way he was honed in on her, like a radar beam, tracking even the subtle moves of her flesh that some of the others missed because they were glued on her breasts or the G-string snaking between her buttocks.

This man. He worried her. Something about him didn't match the regular clientele. The way his sports jacket hung, maybe, or the cut of his hair, or the depth in his eyes, as if he were thinking something unfathomable and not easily put into words.

She finished a dance and walked off the stage to the curtains. Two dancers stood there sharing a joint. One of them was a lush, too, and Shadow thought she was a sloppy, careless dancer, a real slut. The other one—Mad, she called herself—was young, with a pimply ass, and cool gray eyes the color of wet stone.

Shadow said. “Who's that guy out there, the one in the brown tweed jacket? He comes in a lot.”

Mad made a slit in the curtain with long, curved red nails. “That's a cop. Samson. Not Vice, though. Homicide, I think.”

“Cop!”

“Oh, sugar, he don't mess with us,” the lush said, letting out a rush of thick heavy smoke and handing the roach to Mad. “He's got this thing for the girls. He seems to like watching. There's lotsa guys like that, all walks of life, even cops. They're human too, ain't they?” Then she laughed and choked and reached for the joint. It was Mad's song coming on. She had to hit the stage anyway.

Shadow shrugged, not interested in more conversation with the older woman. She noticed as she moved past her to the dressing room that one of the hag's nipples was puckered, the brown tip bending oddly to the left, like a bent wire. Ought to see about that, she thought. Might be a tumor working. But she would never say that to the old dame. Her nipples were her business.

The girls all dressed in the same long narrow room where a row of scarred wooden benches ran along a counter set into the wall below mirrors that stretched to the low ceiling. Shadow was finished for the night. She jerked out the bills in her purple G-string, counted them. Ninety-six dollars. She turned the tumblers on the combination lock that secured her locker, pulled out a small black purse, and added the bills to the wad inside. She had made three hundred or so tonight, a good take, very good.

The cop in the tweed jacket never tipped her, never came near the stage. Sometimes the bartender handed the girls tips that men left with him, shy men afraid to reach out to dancers on stage, so maybe the cop paid them that way, but she wouldn't bet on it. There was something about him—nothing to do with him being a cop—that made her leery of his attention.

She stepped out of the G-string. Damn thing set her back sixty-five bucks. They sold dancer strings and bras and see-through jackets at a booth just outside the dressing room, but the stuff was cheap, gaudy, and too expensive. This purple thing was one of her first purchases, before she knew where to buy what she needed at a little shop down the street from the club. The G-string was already fraying around the elastic at the waist where the purple sequins were attached.

Shadow laughed and threw it into the gym bag she took home with her. How was she going to become a class act in bits of sequin and elastic that wouldn't last through a week?

Dressed in black slacks, a black silk pullover, and black jacket, she shouldered the bag, her purse, slammed shut the locker door, and twisted the combination. Dancers were notorious thieves. They'd stolen two outfits, a hundred and fifty dollars, her lipstick, and an expensive, waterproof mascara, before she remembered to lock everything up tight the minute she hit the dressing room.

In the hall she pushed past Dawn—an eighteen-year-old whose hair was bleached white as snow —and rounded the corner for the back exit. Outside in the alley, she looked around for lurkers and perverts, saw the cop coming from the front street entrance, and felt her heart catch.

Goddamnit, what did he think he was doing? She talked to no one. Dated no one. Slept with no one. This was business, her dancing, not a leg up to prostitution, the way it was for other girls, and she'd be damned if she'd let some cop come messing around.

She turned sharply and hurried to the back parking lane behind the building, unlocked the door of the Toyota and jumped behind the wheel. As she turned the key in the ignition and fired the engine, she glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw him rounding the corner, making for her. She slipped the transmission into drive and left just as he raised his hand to flag her down.

Jesus God. What did he want with her? But she knew, deep in her woman's heart she knew. It had nothing to do with police work. It had to do with want and need and the illusion, all the things she was not willing to deal with again, maybe never again in all the rest of her life.

~*~

Mitchell stood with his hand raised in the air, feeling foolish. “You damn fool,” he said, then grunted in disgust at himself.

He watched the brake lights of her car blink as she turned into the street, vanishing beyond the many-storied buildings on the block. An errant breeze slipped around the corner and licked at his cheeks. It smelled of Chinese food and hamburgers on a grill and burnt coffee. It smelled like the city on a lazy, lonely, late-spring night.

Whatever had possessed him? He didn't talk to the girls. He had never before followed one outside to the parking behind the club, hoping to flag her down.

And if he'd succeeded, what would he have said? “I'm crazy for you. There's something about you that pulls me like a magnet. I can't get through a week without seeing you. Why are you dancing naked this way, demeaning yourself to those scumbags? You've got to stop it!”

He rubbed his chin, feeling the stubble growing there since he'd shaved early in the morning. This was all wrong. He was dropping like a wet sack of cement into a morass. This obsession that made no sense in his life. He should have been doing something worthwhile, not hanging out waiting for Shadow to get off work. He had cases—a case load to kill a workhorse!—that he could have been working. He had people to see, places to go. Didn't he always?

Yet he was acting like some lovesick son of a bitch, some wacko like those stalkers who fixated on girls, complete strangers, hoping to find a way to make a connection. He needed a shrink.

He didn't need a shrink.

He needed . . .

He wanted . . .

To hell with this shit, it was making him crazy. He had a murder to investigate—a gay bashing that had gone the dreadful limit, poor guy found in a trash bin with his skull crushed to pulp. Someone on the street would know something, might have seen something. They hadn't found the weapon, but the ME said it was probably a tire iron or length of pipe or wood they took along in the trunk of the car and disposed of later. He didn't have the tissue samples analyzed yet. He'd know soon if it was metal or wood.