Past Due

Chapter 50

“I KNEW A girl once, name of Gwendolyn,” said Skink. “Gwendolyn, not Gwen. She wasn’t one of them thin twigs everyone goes for now. Gwendolyn had breasts like great piles of pudding, they was. I used to love my pudding. Tapioca. With the whip cream. Not no more though, on account of the cholesterol. But Gwendolyn was a lovely girl, nice feet she had, and we had us a lovely time. This was when I was living in Fresno. The girls there they didn’t put on no airs. Of course what kind of airs was you going to put on in Fresno? Still. Gwendolyn.”

Skink and I were in the hospital cafeteria. I had bought a coffee, an egg salad on white, and a bag of potato chips for my dinner. I brought half the limp sandwich up to my mouth and Skink stared at it as if it were some exotic island grub I was sticking into my craw.

“What?” I said.

“Why don’t you just inject a pound of lard into your veins and get it over with?”

I took a bite of the sandwich and, with my mouth still full, I said, “Get on with it, Phil. Why are you telling me about lost loves?”

“Just shut up and listen. So one night I put on the Old Spice, grease back the hair, stuff a handkerchief in the suit pocket, and I’m ready for a night. I picks up my Gwendolyn, takes her to this frilly grease trough, what with candles and a violin. Dinner and a show and the show, it’s going to be back at her place. So I’m laying on the sweet talk, laying it on so thick my tie is curling, when she ups and says, ‘Philip, we need to talk.’ ”

“You don’t have to go any farther.” I opened up the bag of chips, offered it to Skink. “You want?”

“Don’t be daft. So that’s the last of her, I figure. She’s a good-enough sport to give me a final plow for old time’s sake, but that’s the end. No more pudding for Mr. Skink. The last I figure I’d ever see of lovely Gwendolyn. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? The next night, who’s knocking at my door?”

“Gwendolyn?”

“Just wanting to see how I was doing. I’m doing fine, I says. Good, she says. You want to catch a movie? I thought we broke up, I says. We did, she says. So what’s with the movie? I says. We can still be friends, she says. I wasn’t in it for the friendship, I says. Oh, Philip, she says. Go put on a jacket. And damn if I didn’t. You see what I’m getting at here, Victor?”

“Not quite.”

“I began seeing more of Gwendolyn after we split up then I ever did when we was parallel parking. Every night she’s stopping over or calling on the phone to check on me, make sure I was up and chirpy. One night I even found myself out drinking with Gwendolyn and her flock, some girls what made Gwendolyn look like a queen by comparison and a few other Joes what she also was at one time doing the boink but were now strictly friends. A little too pathetic there, don’t you think? That was it for me. Bye-bye Gwendolyn, bye-bye Fresno. She’s married now with a couple boys in the army, but Gwendolyn, she’s still sending me Christmas cards. You see there, Victor, some girls, they ain’t as interested in the bouncing as they are in the collecting.”

“Okay. So?”

“Your Alura Straczynski, she’s like my Gwendolyn, she is. A collector.”

I stopped eating my sandwich, narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

He took out his notebook, licked his thumb. “You’ll be getting a full report, all names and numbers, along with my invoice. But I thought you might be wanting a preliminary idea of what I found. Every night she’s Mrs. Straczynski, out with her husband, doing the rounds, like the perfect little helpmeet. But each morning she’s up and out at the crack. Has got her errands to run, doesn’t she? Busy girl.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a bloke in a nursing home. He ain’t much for conversation, never says a thing, had some sort of attack that left him like an eggplant, but she’s there every day, visiting, reading to him. There’s a panhandler on the street, his spot is Sixteenth and Locust, and she drops him a sandwich every day, and a kind word to boot. There’s a print shop she has some sort of interest in, not a copy machine place, but a real honest-to-god print shop where they got this huge old press and they hand sew the books they prints up. She stops in every now and then, helping out the staff, sometimes coming out with her hands black with ink. And there’s an invalid woman she pays call on every other afternoon or so and stays a bit. I was wondering about that so I knocked on the door, tried to sell the lady some knives.”

“How’d you do?”

“No sale. Even though it is guaranteed to be the best knife you’ve ever used or your money back. Cutco. I keep a sample case in my car for when I need to go knocking on a door. Tools of the trade, so to speak. Sometimes I even get an order. Every dollar helps. But even without the sale it was a profitable visit. Because there she was, your Alura Straczynski, cooking up something in the kitchen.”

“Are you sure? This doesn’t sound like her.”

“You ain’t getting it, are you. It wasn’t no charity work. It’s like she has all these different family members what she collected. See what I mean?”

“Okay,” I said, and then a thought struck about the invalid woman who had refused to buy the knives. She is ill, had said the justice’s file clerk about his wife. You have disturbed her delicate equilibrium. “What was her name, the woman Mrs. Straczynski was caring for.”

“Lobban,” he said. “Matilda Lobban.”

“Surprise, surprise. What else did you find?”

“Something good. Something you’ll love. There was meetings and visitors to that studio place of hers. Usually men, but some women too. You was one of the visitors, drinking with her at that bar she’s always at, she likes a drink she does, and then just the other day you going up to her studio.”

“Business,” I said, picking up the other half of the sandwich, taking a bite.

“Sure it was. I ain’t here to judge.” He gave a judgmental wink. “But there was others too. Somes I didn’t recognize. But one I did, one I couldn’t help but.”

“Who?”

“And it wasn’t just one time neither, him climbing up the stairs to that place of hers in the old factory building.”

“Let’s go, Phil. Just tell me who.”

“But it must not have been going on too long, this one, or I’d a seen it before, wouldn’t I?”

It was in the way he smiled his gap-toothed smile, it was in the way his eyes laughed. I saw his grinning little mug and the idea, crazy as it seemed, started forming. I put down what was left of the sandwich.

“No,” I said.

“Oh yes.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t.”

“And it’s almost sweet in its way, innit it?”

“Stop.”

“Like a little family reunion. The way your Alura Straczynski, she’s been spending quality time with your-”

“Frigging Eddie Dean,” I said.

It didn’t hit me right off, the possibility.

I tried to figure it, how Alura Straczynski and Eddie Dean might have gotten together. Even though I had decided to give up the chase, I couldn’t help but try to figure it, yet nothing made any sense. A chance meeting on the street? At the same table at some fundraiser for that rusting old liner he seemed to care so much about? Mutual friends? Kimberly? And I tried to make sense of the way the justice reacted when I told him all that had happened to me. He was my main suspect, absolutely, but he twisted around in a strange pain as if it were all being done to him as much as to me. Nothing but puzzles.

You work with puzzles long enough, your brain gets fried, and everything that had happened the last couple days had given me a pretty good head start. So after Skink left I went back up to sit a bit with my father and tried to think it through and failed. My mind, overworked and congenitally underpowered, went blank. Went blank. I simply sat there and watched my father and read the ever-changing lines of data on the monitors and listened to the sad iambic song of the respirator, in out, in out.

And then it came, as if sailing in from a place of great distance, it came, the possibility, first a dot and then a fly and then it grew and swelled until suddenly it burst out of the unconscious and shattered the bland quiet of my conscious mind. And with the quiet was shattered my hopeless resignation too.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud.

I used my father’s phone to make the call, and the party I called was Kimberly Blue.

“We’re taking a trip,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. Early. I’ll pick you up outside your apartment, let’s say at seven. No, not Eddie Dean’s house, your apartment. I don’t want your boss to know what we’re doing. Trust me, all right. Just tell him you’ll be busy with a friend or something and then I’ll pick you up. You said you had some questions, right? I think I know where to find the answers, just so long as you let me do the talking. Maybe one night. Just south of Boston. The Shoe City of the World, remember? A little town called Brockton.”