Free Live Free

The Neighborhood

When Candy had gone out of the Quaint, the witch said, “And now what of us, Mr. Stubb? Have you an investigation for yourself too? And one for me?”

Stubb nodded. “Soon as I finish my coffee.”

“Then I must tell you I cannot oblige you. I have matters of my own to which I must attend.”

“All right, but you’ll have to loan me the key to your room.”

“I cannot do that either.”

Stubb raised his voice. “Waitress! Hey! What time you got?”

The waitress glanced at him, then at her wrist. “Eight thirty-seven, sir. We’re on Eastern Standard Time here.”

“Thanks, doll.”

The witch said, “And what was that about?”

“A maid came to the door of our room, remember? It couldn’t have been eight o‘clock yet, and there she was. You really think the maids in this place come around and pound on doors at eight o’clock?”

The witch stared at him. At last she said, “It did not seem to me that she intended harm. I sense these things.”

“So do I, but I don’t make a big deal of it. She looked happy.”

“I sensed it before the door was opened. But yes, I concur. So?”

“Let me guess, all right? The maids here probably come to work around six thirty and start off by cleaning up the meeting rooms—any place that’s been used the night before but isn’t being used then. After that, they probably get a list of rooms where people have already checked out. There’s always a few guys with real early flights. Then maybe they do the corridors.”

“What is it you are circling toward, Mr. Stubb?”

“Suppose somebody stopped one on her way to work. Suppose this person said, ‘Look, honey, here’s fifty bucks and a ashtray.’ Or maybe it was one of the Gideon Bibles. Whatever. ‘You put this in room seven seventy-seven when you fix it up, and if you’ll meet me down in the lobby afterward and let me know you did it, I’ll slip you another fifty.’”

“I see. She would wish to get the money at once. Perhaps she would be afraid he would leave if she took too long. You are correct, there is an assignment for us both. We must go to my room and search.”

Before he knocked at Mrs. Baker’s door, Stubb stood on the sidewalk for a moment to study the wreck of Free’s house. As far as he could tell, it was just as he and the others had left it the night before; in fact, he could see their tracks in the snow going up and down the short walk, their footprints on the steps.

In the brilliant winter sunshine, its ruin was more apparent. Most of the front wall had been dashed to rubble. Most of what remained looked as though it might fall at any second. Stubb found himself wondering why the people who did not have houses, himself included, did not riot when houses like this, solid brick houses that might stand for five hundred years if only the governments and the banks would let them alone, were destroyed.

He looked around for the destroyers. The long-necked yellow machine waited quietly at the curb, its deadly black ball lying before its treads like a discarded toy before the paws of some great, sleepy beast. Both the machine and the ball were dusted with sparkling snow. There were no workers in sight. The houses to the left of Free’s had CONDEMNED signs in red on their windows, and some of the windows had been smashed.

He walked on, then up the step and onto the porch of Mrs. Baker’s house. Wires emerged from long-splintered wood where the doorbell should have been. He knocked hard, a habit acquired from bill collecting.

There was no sound inside.

After waiting a moment, he knocked again; this time he heard footsteps, slow and hesitant. A new Yale lock had been set into the door, but the old-fashioned keyhole remained. Stooping, he put his mouth to it and called, “It’s just me, Mrs. Baker. Jim Stubb, remember? From the hotel last night? I have to talk to you.”

The door opened. Mrs. Baker wore a gray housecoat and slippers. Her sparse hair was in curlers.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” Stubb said.

“Time for me to get up anyway. ‘Early to bed and early to rise, and get the jump on the other guys,’ that’s what the late Mr. Baker used to say. It’s from Shakespeare.”

“I’ve always felt the same way myself,” Stubb told the old woman.

“Anyway, come in. Would you like some cooco? Or maybe tea? ‘Cooco’s a cad and a cow.’ Better than milk, it means. Isn’t that what they say?”

“‘Tea is like the East he grows in,’” Stubb quoted from memory. “‘A great yellow mandarin, with urbanity of manner and unconsciousness of sin.’”

“You’re right, that’s like the people here for sure. Even if I don’t think folks in California’s any better. Where’d you learn all that? Would you rather have tea than cooco?”

“Cocoa will be fine,” Stubb told her as he stepped inside. “I went to a parochial school when I was a kid, and there were poems we had to learn. That wasn’t one of them, but it was in the same book, and it was the only one I really liked.”

“No amounting for tastes,” Mrs. Baker’s gray back announced vaguely.

The house was cleaner than Free’s had been, but mustier too, as though its windows never opened and somewhere (upstairs, perhaps, in an unused bedroom) there was a vast accumulation of rags, dusty rags filling the room and spilling, so Stubb imagined them, from an open door into the hall.

They went through the parlor where Proudy had played with Puff, now silent and dark. The dining room was crowded with dark, heavy, oak furniture, the kitchen brighter than the other rooms but empty-seeming: a sink with a few dishes, a white-enameled refrigerator, a white-enameled gas stove, a table, and two chairs. Mrs. Baker filled a teakettle and put it over stiff blue flames.

“I don’t generally eat much breakfast,” she said. “Just cold cereal and milk. What the French call the breakfast of mushrooms, I’m told, though I’m sure I don’t know what that means.”

“I had breakfast quite a while back,” Stubb said, seating himself at the table. “That cocoa will be all I need. Mrs. Baker, I came to ask you about the two women you told us about last night.”

The kitten came out of the dining room, walked halfway across the kitchen floor before deciding Stubb was perilous, and scampered under the stove.

“You said these women didn’t give you their names, remember? That you didn’t even know if they were married or not, because they wore gloves. You thought they might be from the Federal Government, but you weren’t sure.”

“And you said not to tell them a thing till I talked to you,” Mrs. Baker continued for him. “Mom’s the word, that’s what my own mother used to say.”

“That’s right. And I wanted to talk to you some more, but not then, because the Duck girl was there.”

Mrs. Baker produced two china cups of the decorated sort sold in five-and-ten-cent stores when there were five-and-ten-cent stores. “We can talk while we have our cooco, Mr. Barnes. I’ll eat my cornflakes too, if you don’t observe.” She spooned cocoa powder into the cups. “The valiant flee to eat their breakfasts on the lip of the line, as the Bible teaches us. That means that if you’re brave you ought to run fast to get your breakfast, if there’s just a little while to eat it in.”

“I’m Stubb, Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker, do you ever watch crime shows on TV?”

“Once and awhile,” the old woman said, puzzled. “Not very much. As soon as you turn them on they’re all over but the shooting, as the saying goes. But the shooting is what troubles me.” She set a cup in front of Stubb.

“The reason I asked is that a lot of people seem to have gotten their ideas of detective work from them, and you’ll notice, if you watch them at all, that even when the detectives on those shows find someone very important, they just ask two or three questions and go away. Real detective work isn’t like that, Mrs. Baker—people who know something important are too hard to find. I’d like to ask you a lot of questions about those women who talked to you. It isn’t going to be very exciting, but I’d like to do it anyway because if I do I may find out something important to old Mr. Free as well as to me. Do you understand?”

The old woman nodded. “Every stone takes its turn.”

“Yes. That’s very well put, Mrs. Baker. Now, when these two women came to see you, did they telephone first, or let you know in any way that they were coming?”

“No. Just come knocking at the door like Bare-Knuckle Bill.”

“About what time?”

“You remember when they tore down Mr. Free’s front? A little after that. After work but not quiet dinner time, not but that all my times aren’t quiet now that I don’t work no longer and Mr. Baker’s gone.”

“You didn’t look at a clock?”

The old woman shook her head.

“Between five and six—would that be about right, Mrs. Baker?”

“If I’d have known it was so important, I’d have looked. A dilly of a five o’clock scholar, that’s what I am.”

“Not later than six?”

She put her bowl of cornflakes on the table, flanked it with a formerly silver-plated spoon, then paused in the act of sitting down. “Could have been as late as six thirty.”

Stubb rubbed his chin.

The old woman lowered herself into her chair. “No, I recompense. At five o’clock I always have the news. That nice man with the white hair.”

“Bryan O’Flynn? WROM?”

“That’s him. And the big story was about the president going somewhere. I used to vote, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s coffee that makes politicians wise—that’s what the Pope said—only they don’t drink enough.” She took a sip of cocoa. “Hot. Cave cane ’em, Mr. Barnes.”

“I’ve been stirring it,” Stubb told her.

“Anyway, there was a lot about him. And then the strike. I think whenever they strike they should cut their pay. That would put the kibitz to strikes pretty soon. Then the weather—more snow is what they said. Then the basketball. Did you ever play, Mr. Barnes?”

“No,” Stubb said. “I didn’t.”

“Me either. Just a lot of jumping around, if you ask me. Then about poor Mr. Free. I told you about that last night up at your hotel.”

Stubb nodded.

“And that was the end of the news—practically the end, anyway. Now curfew nods to tell of parting day; that’s what my father always used to say about that time of night, when the churchbells rang. We went to bed with the chickens a whole lot earlier then.”

“And then the two women came?”

“Well, not right away.”

“How long after?”

“I left the TV on just like I usually do, but I don’t remember now just what the show was. And I went to fix my dinner. I had real Irish stew, the frozen kind. I lit the gas and put it in the oven and set the table and so on—poured my milk—and just when I was finishing they come a-tap, tap, tapping like the poor raving.”

“Finishing setting the table or finishing eating, Mrs. Baker?”

“Finishing eating, but Lord, that didn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Then I got up and went to the door and they came in and I turned the TV off and gave them some tea.”

“How long would you say the frozen stew took to cook?”

“Wait just a shack.” The old woman got up and hobbled across her kitchen to the outside door. “This is the one those nice policemen broke,” she said. “I have to get it fixed.”

She stepped out onto the snowy porch, and returned a moment later holding a shiny little carton. “I always keep my garbage back there until collation day. They used to come oop the alley, but now they won’t, and I don’t see why. Anyhow here’s the stew box, Mr. Barnes. I was wrong about the Irish—Hungarian galosh, they call it. I haven’t got my glasses, so you’ll have to read the back yourself. I only wear them when I want to see something. How long does it say?”

Preheat oven to 350 F, Stubb read. Ready in 20 min. “Twenty minutes,” he told the old woman.

“Then it must have been about six when they came.” She filled her mouth with cornflakes and milk.

“Yeah. And that’s about half an hour after Free’s face was on the news. But they wouldn’t have come here—next door—first. First they would have gone to Free’s and poked around a little to see if he was still there, or had maybe left a note for the milkman or something. Say ten minutes for that. They got here in about twenty minutes from wherever they were. Did they have a car?”

Mrs. Baker nodded and swallowed.

“Did they say they had one, or did you actually see they did?”

“There was a car in front of the house when I got the door, and when they left I heard a startup. I saw the lights in my curtain too, now that I come to think. What lights through yonder window breaks, as they say, though naturally they didn’t really break it.”

“When you came to the Consort, how’d you get there, Mrs. Baker?”

“Cab.” Her mouth was full of cornflakes. “Drink your cooco. It’ll be as cold as a cumberbund.”

Stubb took a sip. “You phoned for one and it came? Or did you go to a busy street and flag one down?”

“Phoned.”

“When it came for you, did the driver stop in front of your house, where the two women’s car had been?”

“I believe so, but I can’t imagine where it makes no never blind.”

“It means it’s probably no use for me to look for tracks from the women’s car in the snow. What sort of car was it?”

“Like General Matters, you mean? I didn’t see.”

“Standard? Subcompact?”

“Kind of bewitched and between.”

“That’s a compact. Old or new?”

“New, I think. It looked kind of shinish. But listen here, Mr. Barnes.” The old woman scooped up more cereal. “Suppose I knew just exactly how it was—I don’t, but preposing I did—what good would it do for poor Mr. Free?”

“I don’t know,” Stubb admitted. “Maybe none. But maybe I’d come across that car someplace else and be able to link the two up.”

“If they come again, I’ll look better.”

“Thanks. Write down the license number if you can. Getting back to this time, you said it looked shiny. What color was it?”

“Black, I think, or midlight blue.”

“Could it have been gray?”

She shrugged. “You know what they say—at night all cars is gray. Is that important too?”

“It’s the usual color for cars in the General Services Motor Pool, that’s all. Two doors or four?”

“Four, I believe. Two on the side I saw.”

“You didn’t see the women get out of the car? Or get back into it?”

She shook her head.

“When you saw the car, could you tell if there was anybody else still inside?”

“Not for curtain sure, but I don’t think so.”

“Was it the women who told you where we had gone?”

She shook her head again. “You wasn’t even there already, when they come.”

“Then how did you know? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours between the time Madame Serpentina checked in and the time you knocked on the door.”

Mrs. Baker sat silent, refusing to meet his eyes.

“If I guess, will you tell me if I’m right? You were sitting in your parlor watching TV, and you happened to overhear—”

“Well, you’re a cushion! That’s what my mother used to say. You make the hard things easy.”

“You did overhear us, then.”

“Not really overhere, Mr. Barnes.” She swallowed, although all her cornflakes were gone. “Mr. Barnes, I guess you’re too much of a gentleman to scald a old lady.”

“I never scold people. That’s not my job.”

“Like you said about overhereing—I would have, you know, just sat here out there and overhered if could have. But only I couldn’t, so I opened the window a little teenie and scrootched down on the floor and dropped just like Eve in the Garden of Edam. I’d been watching, you know, and I saw Ms. Snake come in, and I was overworried about poor Mr. Free.”

“I’m glad you did what you did, Mrs. Baker, and if you were trying to help Mr. Free, nobody can blame you for that.”

“And then later I heard Ms. Girth ask about a hotel, and somebody said the Consort. But I didn’t know you were there until I tapped one of those hoppers.”

Stubb nodded to himself.

“Are you about finished, Mr. Barnes?”

He took a final sip of cocoa. “No, I haven’t really started yet, Mrs. Baker. I want you to tell me everything about those two women. We might begin with the way they were dressed.”

“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch.” Mrs. Baker shook her head in wonderment. “And the Dutch meet the Devil.”