Kiss

24

Linda Redmond was in the phone directory, along with the address Desoto had given Carver. Carver phoned her from the Indianapolis airport. She was home. In a weary, cynical voice, she tried to brush him off, treated him like a siding salesman-until he mentioned Beatrice Reeves. Then she agreed to talk with him. He told her he didn’t have a lot of time, and she said there was none like the present.

Since Carver wasn’t going to be in town more than a few hours, instead of renting a car he took a cab to Linda Redmond’s address.

She lived in an old brick apartment building on Meridian, in a neighborhood that lay in hot and despairing limbo while it waited for demolition.

Carver limped into the graffiti-marked vestibule. There was a three-speed Schwinn bicycle leaning against the wall, near a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes beneath round black holes where doorbell buttons used to be. The bike’s front wheel had been removed and the frame was chained to a floor-to-ceiling steam pipe. A large padlock dangled from the chain, and the pipe had nicks and dents in it where the chain looped around it, as if the bike had been secured there countless times. The floor was littered with trash, some of which had probably been there so long it would take an archaeologist to fix the dates. In a far corner, near steep wooden steps, sat a rusty baby stroller with three wheels. Nobody figured to steal that. The vestibule smelled like humidity-dampened varnish and stale urine, and rage and nausea welled up in Carver for a moment as he flashed back to the Belle Grande and Raffy Ortiz. Then he whacked aside a crumpled McDonald’s bag with the tip of his cane, found Linda Redmond’s apartment number on the mailboxes, and began climbing the stairs.

She’d heard the clatter of his cane on the wooden steps. When he reached the third floor she had her door open and was standing waiting for him.

Linda Redmond was in her late thirties. She’d been pretty once, possibly beautiful. Time had taken care of that, worked on her lean face and frame as it worked on ancient artifacts; it hadn’t left a major mark, but in a myriad of minor ways it had exacted its toll. Her straight blond hair was thinned and lank, her blue eyes faded, her pale cheeks too sunken even for the gauntest of fashion models. Carver wondered if she’d lost most of her molars to disease or violence. She was wearing an untucked white blouse above raggedy cutoff jeans that reminded him of Dr. Pauly’s. But her legs were thinner and better-looking than Pauly’s, even though there were scars around her knobby knees, as if she’d done a lot of kneeling on rough surfaces.

Slightly unnerved by his appraising stare, she said, “Mr. Carver?”

He said he was. She smiled. It was a placid, attractive smile. All her teeth were there, but they were badly yellowed. A fine network of lines, like those seen on old folding money, spread around her eyes and the corners of her lips. Carver immediately liked her, felt almost as if he knew her, but he wasn’t sure why.

She stepped aside to let him pass and then closed the door behind him. She was out in front of him again, moving with loping strides that suggested surprising strength. She had on rubber thongs that flopped softly, loose at the heels but held tight on her feet by toes like talons. “Sit down, please. Get you some tea or coffee?”

Carver declined the offer of something to drink as he lowered himself into a round, wicker basket chair; he hadn’t seen one of those in years. Now that he’d heard the word coffee he noticed the scent of it, pungent, as if it had been freshly brewed. He crossed his good leg over his bad and laid his cane sideways in his lap, looked around.

The apartment had bare hardwood floors and was cheaply and sparsely furnished. The windows had Venetian blinds with missing slats and no curtains. There was a bookcase stuffed with paperbacks on one wall. Updike, Bellow, James Baldwin, a Flannery O’Connor short-story collection. One of the windows held a gray box fan that was ticking away and creating a cool breeze through the warm apartment. Stapled to the wall near the window was an unframed museum print of pastel water lilies on a foggy pond, an idealistic rendering of reality. Near the door to the kitchen a bicycle’s front wheel leaned against the wall; the bike chained in the vestibule was Linda Redmond’s.

She crossed thin arms and stood with her weight on one leg. One of her rubber thongs had slipped half off her foot. “You mentioned Beatrice Reeves on the phone.”

“Birdie Reeves, actually. That’s what she calls herself now.”

Linda lowered her chin and fixed a frank and studious blue gaze on Carver. “What’s your interest in Beatrice?”

“I’m not searching for her,” Carver said truthfully.

“You said on the phone you were a private investigator. You working for the welfare authorities?”

“No. Birdie-or Beatrice-is only incidentally involved in what I’m working on.”

“Then why should I talk to you, Mr. Carver? Why should you want to talk to me?”

“I know where Birdie is.”

Linda’s arms came uncrossed and dangled at her sides. Then she sat down on a low, green sofa and absently caressed one bony hand with the other. She knew she had little choice about talking to Carver, if she didn’t want Birdie’s whereabouts revealed. She leaned forward and said, “She all right?”

“Yeah, I suppose you could say she is. But there might be trouble at the place where she works.”

“Trouble’s in everybody’s life. Think she’ll come out of it okay?”

“Possibly unemployed. And the law might delve into her past and find out who she really is.”

“She’s never had any trouble with the police. That what she’s got now?”

“No, not the kind you mean. You still a social worker?”

Linda laughed and tilted her head in a practiced way. Probably a sexy little move long ago. Sunlight glinting off golden locks. Now her lank blond hair swayed without the body or bounce so often mentioned in shampoo commercials. “I haven’t had anything but temporary office work for six months. Laid off because of government funding cutbacks. Instead of me, the taxpayers get another guided missile.”

“You must have handled a lot of cases, though. Got to know plenty of hard-luck kids. How come you seem to regard Birdie as special?”

Linda clasped her hands over one of her knees and rocked back. “There is something special about Beatrice, a kind of spirit I didn’t often see in the sad cases I handled. Despite the fact that fate kept shitting on her, she kept fighting. She has intelligence and courage, but at the same time a kind of innocence and vulnerability it seems a sacrilege to have violated. Things were bad for her, and they kept getting worse. Finally she broke and ran, but I can’t blame her.”

Carver shifted his weight. Wicker creaked. “What about her family?”

“Her father, Clement Reeves, is dead-which strikes me as justice. He should burn in hell for two eternities for what he did to her. The mother’s a sometime waitress, sometime prostitute out in Waverly. She’s a fulltime boozer.”

“How about the foster father who molested Birdie?”

“That bastard? He’d have been tried and convicted if she’d stayed around to testify against him. He and his wife moved out of town not long after Beatrice disappeared. They went to Cincinnati, I think. The prosecuting attorney, with his usual perseverance in such cases, was content to let him leave.”

“Hard to get a guilty verdict without a victim,” Carver said.

“People know that and take advantage of it with children. See to it that they’re afraid to testify, or too confused to be believed.” There was a rush of feeling behind the words. It was obvious that Linda loved underdogs and identified with victims.

Carver said, “Who’d want Birdie back here in Indianapolis?”

“The state. She’s officially a ward of Indiana and a runaway child. Until she’s eighteen.”

“That’s a few years away,” Carver said. “What if she turned up at your door?”

“Well, what if she did?”

“Ever think about that happening? What you might do?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought. Look around this place. Look at me. Figure out how much I could help her.” The tendons in Linda’s lean neck worked like cables as she swallowed.

“And you’d be sheltering a fugitive,” Carver pointed out.

“I know the law.”

“Would you break the law for Birdie?”

“If I thought it’d help her. But it wouldn’t. Don’t you understand, Carver? The other side’s got me. I’m one of the hard-luck cases I used to be able to help.”

Carver knew she was right. Linda Redmond had enough problems, and little to offer Birdie other than moral support. And there was always the possibility that the authorities would find out she was illegally sheltering Birdie.

“Where is Beatrice, Mr. Carver?”

“I’ll tell her you asked, give her your phone number.”

“Fair enough.”

Carver stood up out of the basket chair. Creeeak!

“Everything wrong that can happen to a child,” Linda said, “happened to Beatrice. A man can’t possibly understand what it means when a girl’s father molests her over a period of years. Then, she was supposed to have been granted sanctuary, another molestation. That bastard poured gasoline over her legs and threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t do exactly what he wanted.”

“I didn’t know that,” Carver said.

Linda tucked her chin into her scrawny neck again and shook her head, as if shaking off a mood. “She’s had a crappy life. She deserves a break or two.”

Carver started toward the door, but Linda got up and stood next to him, her fingertips lightly touching his shoulder, “Why’d you come here to talk to me about Beatrice?” she asked. “I mean, really.”

“I see the storm coming. It bothers me what I should do about her.”

“She has layers and strengths not many people know about. What she’s gone through’s given her that, along with the nightmares.”

He looked into Linda’s weary, faded eyes. They had no depth, as if they were mere reflections of the crushing world about them.

“I want to do what’ll turn out all right for her,” he said. “She might be cut from her moorings again, partly because of me. Nowhere’s going to be easy for her. At least in Indianapolis she knows people, you among them. Has some support. I don’t know, should I let her be sent back here?”

“No, Mr. Carver. Anyplace but here.”

She turned away from him.

Carver left her that way, standing and staring out her window at the drab buildings across the street. The woman who’d been traded for a guided missile.