Beauty and the Beast

10

The phone was ringing.

The weather outside was rainy, windy, and cold.

It was nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, December 2, a little less than eight hours since George Harper had knocked me unconscious and fled into the night. I had come to about twenty minutes later. My watch had read 1:46. It’s a digital watch. Nobody says, “It’s a quarter to two,” anymore. It’s always either 1:44 or 1:46. I had debated calling Bloom, and had gone to bed instead. He was on the phone now.

“I didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked.

“No, I was up.”

“Any word from Harper?”

I hesitated. Then I said, “No.”

“Well, sometimes it takes a little while for somebody to make up his mind,” Bloom said. “Maybe he’ll show at the funeral today.”

“What funeral?”

“Sally Owen’s. I have to tell you, Matthew, we’re covering it like it’s a presidential visit, just in case Harper does decide to drop in. Half the cops in the city’ll be there, good day to rob a bank downtown, huh?”

“Good day for a funeral, too.”

“Yes, wonderful,” Bloom said drily. “You going?”

“What for?”

“If Harper shows, he’s going to need his lawyer again.”

“I doubt if he’ll show, Morrie.”

“Oh?” Bloom said, and there was a long pause on the line. “What makes you think that?”

“If you’d killed her, would you go to her funeral?”

“Lots of people who kill people do crazy things later on. I once had a guy on Long Island, he stabbed his wife with a butcher knife, you know? So the very next day, half of Nassau County looking for him, he takes the knife in to have it sharpened, can you imagine? Like locking the barn door after the horse is gone, right? Brings in a knife with blood on the handle, around those little rivets in the handle, you know? So the grinder takes the knife to the back of the store, and he calls us, and when we arrest the guy, all he says is ‘The knife was dull.’ People do crazy things, Matthew.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, anyway, it’s at eleven o’clock, Floral Park Cemetery, if you feel like dropping in.”

“Don’t expect me,” I said.

“You sound grumpy this morning,” he said.

“I’ve got a toothache.”

“Ah, too bad. Do you have a good dentist?”

“Yes, thanks, Morrie.”

“Let me know if you hear from Harper, okay?” he said, and hung up.

I don’t know why I went to the funeral; funerals depress me, even when it isn’t raining. I certainly didn’t expect to see Harper there; you do not sock your own lawyer on the jaw the night before and then walk into the arms of the police the next day. Besides, I really did have a toothache; two toothaches or perhaps teethaches, where Harper had hit me. Moreover, the entire left side of my face was swollen and discolored, and my lower gum had begun bleeding when I’d brushed my teeth that morning. I had not liked getting hit on the jaw. The last time I’d been hit on the jaw (or anyplace else) was when I was fourteen years old and got into a fistfight with an eighteen-year-old football player over a girl on the cheerleading squad. The girl’s name was Bunny, and she had allowed me to fondle her breasts one night, thereby granting me (it seemed in my adolescent fantasy) priority, privilege, and longevity. The football player, whose name was Hank, thought otherwise, perhaps because he’d been laying her steadily (Everybody but me, I thought, I love you, Bunny!) since the start of the season. He told me to keep away from her. I told him he was a moronic turd. He blackened both my eyes, dislocated my jaw, and knocked out one of my molars. I still have in my mouth the restoration Dr. Mordecai Simon put in for me in Chicago. It reminds me never to start up with football players, or with practically anyone else, for that matter. But who expects a client to hit him? From now on, I would expect clients to hit me. I would expect priests to hit me. I would expect little babies in their buggies to slam me with their bottles. Frank’s extension of Murphy’s Law: If you expect the worst, it will nonetheless surprise you when it comes.

The only surprise at Sally Owen’s funeral was the appearance of her former husband, Andrew Owen. He arrived late, holding an umbrella over his head, catching the last of the minister’s words just before the coffin was lowered into the ground. He kept watching the descending coffin. As the mourners began to disperse, he stood looking into the open grave. Bloom was standing some distance off, talking to a uniformed police captain. The cops assigned to the job — I guessed there were three dozen in all — stood like specters in the rain, black rain slickers glistening wet, eyes roaming the rain-soaked perimeter of the cemetery, hands hovering close to the protruding butts of their revolvers. I suddenly wished Harper would not be foolish enough to show up here today. I walked to where Owen was still staring into the open grave, the umbrella over his bent head.

“How are you?” I said.

He looked up, turned to face me. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

“I’m surprised to see you here.”

“We were married once,” he said. “I loved her once,” he said, and shrugged, and then sighed and began walking up toward where the cars were parked in a muddy open space at the top of the grassy rise. The rain kept pouring down. Let it come down, I thought. First Murderer, Macbeth, act III, scene 3. I had played Macduff in our college production during my sophomore year at Northwestern. The critic for the school newspaper wrote of my performance, “Lay off, Macduff! Out, damned Hope!” Our umbrellas, Owen’s and mine, nudged each other like spies exchanging secrets.

“Any idea who might have done it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you think it was George Harper?”

“Not a chance. He may be stupid, but he’s not crazy.”

“Have the police questioned you?”

“Naturally. Ex-husband? Bitter divorce? Sure.”

“And?”

“From what they asked about where I was at what time, I figured they already knew she’d been killed sometime between two and four o’clock in the afternoon. Well, I was at the store all day Monday, from eight in the morning till I closed at seven o’clock. Monday’s my busiest day — well, Mondays and Saturdays, actually. By Monday, all the alkies have guzzled down their weekend stash, they come flocking by the store in droves, man. Cops didn’t get to me till almost midnight. By then, I’d already seen on television that the body was found at seven o’clock, that’s when the lady next door — Jennie Pierce, I know her, nice lady — went over to bring Sally a pie dish or something. I told the cops that at seven o’clock I was just locking up my store, and I had only a million and a half witnesses who’d swear on a case of Chivas Regal that I was in that store all day long, right behind the counter where I was supposed to be. The cops thanked me for my time, this was now one o’clock in the morning, and went on their way. ‘Keep your nose clean,’ they told me. Keep my nose clean. I’ve been an honest businessman in this town for the past ten years, ever since I got back from Nam, never even got a parking ticket in this fucking town, but they tell me to keep my nose clean. All they forgot to add was ‘nigger.’ ”

He had stopped at his car now, a blue Pontiac wagon, and was fishing in his pocket for his keys. Bloom and the police captain, still in deep conversation, were trudging up the slope toward the parking lot.

“I spoke to Kitty Reynolds last night,” I said.

Owen looked up from where he was inserting his key into the door lock. “Oh?” he said.

“Yes.” I paused. Then I said, “Are you still seeing her?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“Things end, man, people drift.”

“When did it end?”

“Almost before it began. Minute Sally sued for divorce, it began to pall. All our old friends, you know, people we used to be with all the time... well, they just stopped seeing us. Gets kind of lonely out there if you don’t have any friends.”

“Harper, too?”

“What?”

“Did he stop seeing you?”

“No, not George. But he didn’t know—”

Owen cut himself short. Maybe it was contagious. Maybe when you spend enough time in bed with another person, you pick up her habits. Kitty Reynolds was an expert at interrupting her own sentences. Owen had just now swallowed the tail end of whatever he’d been about to say, and was busying himself with the door lock again.

“Didn’t know what?” I asked.

“Don’t know what you mean, man.”

“You were about to say...”

“I was about to say good-bye, Mr. Hope.”

“Just one second, okay?”

He had unlocked the door and opened it. He closed it again when he noticed that the front seat was getting rained on.

“What is it?” he said, and sighed.

“The first time we talked, you had trouble remembering Lloyd Davis.”

“So?”

“Kitty Reynolds says she met him at your house.”

“She did, huh?”

“At one of the meetings there.”

“Really? What meetings?”

“She told me a woman out on Fatback Key formed a committee—”

“Oh, yeah, that bullshit committee.”

“To do something about the Jerry Tolliver case.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“And that she’d met you — and Lloyd Davis — at one of those meetings. At your house.”

“Then I guess she must be right, huh?”

“And yet you had trouble remembering him.”

“People came and went all the time at those meetings,” Owen said, and shrugged.

“I was at your house yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Was that front page on your bedroom wall while you were still married to Sally?”

“What front page?”

“On the Tolliver killing.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”

“How about the paintings?”

“Sally’s paintings? Yeah, she used to hang them all over the house.”

“Ever see a painting of a white woman and a black man in embrace?”

“Who remembers? She was painting all the time.”

“Any idea how that particular painting ended up in George Harper’s garage?”

“No idea at all.”

“You don’t remember Sally giving it to him, do you? Or selling it to him?”

“Sally didn’t get along with George, I already told you that.”

“Would she have given the painting to Michelle?”

“She handed them out all over the place.”

“She did? To whom?”

“Anybody who’d take them. You saw the paintings, you know how lousy they were.”

“Who’d she hand them out to?”

“I told you. Anybody. Everybody. I have to go, Mr. Hope. I’ve lost half a day already, I have to go open the store.”

“One last question,” I said.

“Okay, but—”

“What is it that Harper didn’t know? What is it that Harper found out?”

“That’s two questions. And I don’t know the answers to either one of them.”

He furled his umbrella, threw it over the back of the seat, and got in behind the wheel. I watched as he slipped his key into the ignition and started the car, and then I stepped back as he pulled off into the rain. Bloom was just behind me, peering out from under his umbrella as the car negotiated the turn at the top of the hill and drove out of sight around it.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Andrew Owen,” I said.

“Clean as a whistle,” Bloom said. “Alibi a mile long.” He peered at me through the falling rain. “What happened to your face, Matthew?”

“Ran into a door last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, when I got up to pee.”

“You ought to be more careful,” Bloom said.

The last shuttle from Calusa to Miami left at 2:50 P.M. and arrived there at 4:20. It was a little windy on the east coast, but the sun was shining, and the cab driver who drove me to Mrs. Harper’s house kept turning over his shoulder to look at my umbrella as though it were a broadsword clutched in the fist of a medieval knight. Mrs. Harper was bent over a bed of gardenias in her front yard when the taxi pulled up to the curb. She looked up as I got out of the taxi, and continued watching me as I paid the driver and started up the front walk. A tangle of weeds was in her left hand; in her right hand she held a trowel.

“Hello, Mrs. Harper,” I said.

“Mr. Hope,” she said, and nodded curtly.

“I tried reaching you by phone,” I said, “but—”

“Had it disconnected. Too many reporters calling.”

“I hope I can have a minute of your time.”

“All’s anybody wants these days is a minute of my time. Used to was I wouldn’t see nobody for days on end. Now they bangin down my door.”

“It’s about your son,” I said.

“Thass whut all of them’s about.”

“You know he broke out of jail last Thursday, don’t you?”

“So I unnerstan.”

“And you know someone else has been killed, a woman named Sally Owen.”

“Yes, I know that too.”

“When your son came to see you last Thursday—”

“Ony wisht he had,” Mrs. Harper said.

I looked at her.

“Musta figgered this’d be the fust place they’d come lookin for him, though. Fust place they did come, matter of fact. Miami police was here that very night, astin did I know where my boy was. I tole’em my boy was in jail. So they camped on my doorstep waitin for him to show up. I tell you, Mr. Hope, I wisht he hadda. He shunta broke out of jail like he done. Ony makes it look bad for him, ain’t that right?”

“He told me he came here to see you.”

“No, he never did.”

“Said he had some personal business with you.”

“Can’t think of no personal business he mighta had with me. Nor why he’da said he was here when he wasn’t.”

I had flown to Miami hoping she might be able to tell me what she and her son had talked about last week, hoping he might have revealed to her what he’d refused to reveal to me, hoping she might have been the one to whom he’d confided whatever the hell it was he’d learned. It was now 5:12 P.M. by my wonderful Japanese digital watch. It had taken me two and a half hours, door to door, to get here, and it would take me another two and a half hours — if I was lucky — to get back. There was no way I could catch Sunwing’s 5:30 shuttle that would have got me into Calusa at a little before 7:00. Eastern had a flight going out at 6:10, with a change of planes in Tampa, arriving in Calusa at 8:15. I was debating whether to try getting a seat on that one or, instead, to have dinner at the airport here and then catch Sunwing’s last shuttle back at 7:30, when Mrs. Harper — bless her heart — said, “Maybe he went to see Lloyd. Maybe he figgered he could hide out at Lloyd’s.”

The taxi I called from a corner phone booth deposited me in front of Lloyd Davis’s house five minutes later. It was almost 5:30 when I started up the junk-flanked front walk. The sun was almost gone, the shadows were very long. A record player was going inside the house; I could hear the scratchy strains of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” I knocked on the screen door. No answer. I knocked again.

“Yes?”

A woman’s voice.

“Mrs. Davis?” I said.

“Yes?”

“It’s Matthew Hope. May I come in?”

“Sure, come ahead,” she said.

I opened the screen door and stepped into the house.

She was sitting in the living room, the last of the evening’s light coming feebly through a window behind her easy chair, a battered relic that must have been salvaged from her husband’s garage. She was wearing a floral-printed Japanese kimono belted at the waist with a bright red sash. She did not turn to look at me as I came into the room, the screen door clattering shut behind me. She kept staring at the turntable where the Billie Holiday record was spinning, as though trying to absorb sound through her eyes.

On the end table alongside her chair was a torn glassine packet, and beside that a spoon with a blackened bowl. On the floor at her feet was a hypodermic syringe. The record spun to its end. Now there was only the empty click of the needle caught in the retaining grooves. It seemed to alert her to my presence. She turned to look at me.

Her complexion was the color of unrefined sugar, the result of generations of racial admixture, her eyes as brown and as wet as sorghum molasses, sunken in a face with high cheekbones, a patrician nose, and a generous mouth. She must have been a beautiful woman at one time, but the body slumped in the chair seemed frail and brittle and the eyes studying me were dead.

“Well, hello,” she said.

The light was almost gone now; the room was succumbing to the onslaught of dusk. She made no move to turn on the end-table lamp. The needle kept clicking at the record’s end, the only sound in the room.

“I’m looking for your husband,” I said.

“Ain’t here,” she said.

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Nope.”

“Mrs. Davis—”

“Would you turn that off, please?” she said, and raised her hand, and gestured limply toward the record player. I crossed the room and lifted the arm.

“Who’d you say you were?” she asked.

“Matthew Hope.”

“Oh, yes, Hope.”

“I was here last week...”

“Oh, yes, Hope,” she said again.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“When will your husband be home, do you know?”

“Can’t say for sure. Comes an’ goes, you know.”

“When did he leave?”

“Don’t know. Comes an’ goes,” she said.

“Do you know where he went?”

“Army, most likely.”

“Army? What do you mean?”

“Reserve, you know. Always off with the reserve someplace, who cares?” she said, and made a gesture of dismissal, impatiently swinging her arm, and then letting it fall. “Want to do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“That was some pow’ful shit, man.”

“What is it you want?”

“Some pow’ful shit. Cost enough, but, man, it was pow’ful. Want to do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

She nodded, and then — before she could tell me what the favor might be — closed her eyes, and lowered her chin, and drifted off into an atmosphere higher and thinner than any Sunwing had ever flown. I looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow but steady. The room was very dark now, I could scarcely see her in the gloom. I snapped on the end-table lamp, and just then the phone rang.

I turned toward the sound as sharply as if it were a gunshot. The ringing was coming from a room I could see through an open door, obviously a kitchen, the sink and refrigerator vaguely illuminated by the light spilling over from the living room. The phone kept ringing.

“All right,” she mumbled behind me.

The phone shrilled into the silence of the house.

“All right, all right,” she said, and shook herself from her stupor, and started to rise from the chair, and then sank back into it again. “Wow,” she said, “some pow’ful shit.”

The phone rang again, and then stopped.

“Good,” she said, and then looked at me as if discovering me for the first time. Her hands hung limply over the arms of the easy chair; her legs were stretched out in front of her; the kimono flap had fallen open to reveal the marks of her addiction on the insides of both thighs. “Hey, do me a favor, will you?” she said. “Get me a drink of water, I’m dying of thirst here.”

I went out into the kitchen, found a clean glass on the drainboard, filled it with water, and carried it back to where she was sitting. She drank it down in virtually a single swallow, turned to place the glass on the end table, and let go of it before it had found solid purchase. I reached for the glass just as it tumbled to the floor and shattered.

“Ooops,” she said, and grinned at me.

“You okay now?” I said.

“Comin through, man,” she said. “Wow.”

“Want to talk a little?”

“Want to sleep, man.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Mrs. Davis, can you remember exactly what you told George Harper on the Sunday he was here?”

“Long time ago, man.”

“Not so long ago. Try to remember. He asked you where your husband was...”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you told him he was off with the reserve.”

“That’s where he was.”

“What else did you tell him?”

“That’s all.”

“Did you tell him where your husband was?”

“With the reserve.”

“But where with the reserve?”

“Didn’t know where.”

“Where does he usually go?”

“Wherever the unit says.”

“What unit is that? An MP unit?”

“No, no.”

“Then what?”

“Artillery.”

“Which one?”

“Who knows?”

“Did you tell George Harper...?”

“Don’t know what I told him,” she said. “Man, you got to’scuse me, I need some sleep.”

“Mrs. Davis, if you can remember whether you told him...”

“Can’t,” she said, and grasped the arms of the chair with both hands, and shoved herself out of it. She noticed the syringe lying on the floor, knelt down to pick it up, carefully placed it on the end table beside the spoon, and started out of the room. The phone rang again as she was passing the kitchen. She glanced idly through the open door, and then continued down the corridor into what I supposed was her bedroom. The phone kept ringing insistently. I followed her down the hallway and stopped just outside the bedroom door. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in the dark, taking off one of her slippers. She dropped it on the floor, and then took off the other one. The phone kept ringing.

“Don’t you want to answer that?” I said.

“Never quits,” she said. “Go home, mister, I got to get some sleep.”

“In just a minute,” I said. “Please try to remember whether—”

“Can’t remember nothin.”

The phone was still ringing.

“Mrs. Davis, did you tell George Harper that your husband was with the Artillery?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you remember if you did for sure?”

“Go home,” she mumbled.

I did not want her to flake off on me again. I reached for the switch just inside the door, and snapped on the light. The first thing I saw in its harsh glare was a huge painting on the wall over the bed.

The painting was one of Sally Owen’s.

The phone suddenly stopped ringing.

The house was silent again.

Leona Davis was lying full-length on the bed, on her back, blinking up at the overhead light, trying to shield her eyes with her hand. “Turn that off, will you?” she said.

I was staring at the painting.

Like the ones I’d seen hanging in Sally’s bedroom and the one we’d found beneath the tarpaulin in Harper’s garage, this too was an oil done entirely in blacks and whites. But this time around, Sally seemed to have gone straight to the heart of the matter.

According to Freud (as later interpreted by my daughter Joanna) an analysand’s dreams about any given problem will at first be shrouded in symbolism. If the problem persists, however, the dreams will become more and more explicit until at last the true content will be revealed almost documentarily. The subject matter of Sally Owen’s paintings seemed to have progressed from inanimate objects like chess pieces and salt and pepper shakers, to wildlife like penguins and zebras and crows and doves, to domesticated animals like Scotties and Dalmatians, and at last to humans as depicted in the painting we’d found in Harper’s garage. But if it was true that any artistic endeavor was the end result of unconscious stirrings, then Sally Owen — like a dreamer awake — had allowed her unconscious to dictate an artistic expression that had moved inexorably from the symbolic to the absolutely explicit. The painting hanging over Leona Davis’s bed left nothing to the erotic imagination.

The painting depicted a huge black phallus.

The painting further depicted a white woman engorging that phallus.

“Where’d you get that?” I said.

“Turn off the light.”

“It’s one of Sally Owen’s paintings, isn’t it?”

“Man, if you got to talk, turn off the damn light!” She sat up suddenly, and reached over to the bedside lamp. A splash of amber illumination spilled onto the bed. The bedside clock read 5:50. I was going to miss the Eastern flight. I snapped off the overhead light.

“Is it one of Sally’s?” I said.

“From way back,” she said, and nodded.

“How’d it get here?”

“Gave it to us.”

“A gift?”

She nodded again. “From when we still had The Oreo.”

“The what?”

“Oreo.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” she said.

“Oreo?” I said.

I suddenly remembered Kitty Reynolds cutting herself short each time she mentioned the word oar. Had she been about to say “Oreo”?

I looked at Leona.

“Tell me about The Oreo,” I said.

“Nothin to tell. Ain’t no more Oreo. Don’t exist no more, man.”

“What was it when it existed?”

“Nothin.”

“Is it the name of something?”

“Man, I need to sleep,” she said.

“Something called The Oreo?”

“Ain’t got time for that shit no more,” she said, and fell back wearily onto the pillow. “They’s sweeter stuff, man. Sweeter than you know.” She lifted one arm, gestured limply toward the painting over her head, and said, “That’s Lloyd up there.”

I looked at the painting again.

“And Michelle,” she said, and nodded, and then drifted off again to wherever that sweeter stuff transported her.