Vanish in an Instant

12

Highway 12 ran due west from Arbana to Kincaid, just over fifty miles of straight road through flat countryside. Under better circumstances it might have been an hour drive. But heavy trucks and heavy weather had pocked and dented the road, and beyond Jackson the snow began to fall in huge wet flakes that clung to the windshield like glue. Every few minutes Meecham had to slow down to give the windshield wipers more power and speed.

When he reached Kincaid it was five, and the street lights were on. Here and there a few houses were already decorated for Christmas, with strings of colored lights along the porches, clusters of pine branches and cones attached to the doors. The shops and the streets were crowded, and the crowds looked gay as if freshened by the new snow.

He had no trouble finding Oak Street. It crossed the main highway at a traffic signal in the center of town.

Two Hundred Thirty-one was a two-story, white-brick apartment house in a neighborhood that derived its brash but decaying air from nearby slums. Meecham parked his car and crossed the street with the brown package under his arm. The building itself was well kept, and nailed to the front door there was a Christmas wreath, a red cellophane bell surrounded by artificial spruce boughs and red wax berries. The snow made the spruce and the berries look quite real.

Inside the small lobby there was a row of locked mailboxes and on the wall a black arrow pointing to the basement, and a sign, Manager’s Office. The third mailbox belonged to Loftus’ mother: Mrs. C. E. Loftus, Apartment Five.

Meecham walked down the hall. The carpeting was worn but clean, and the air smelled pungently of paint. Someone in the building obviously had a flair for lettering. All over the walls there were elaborately executed instructions: APARTMENTS ONE — FIVE, THIS WAY →→. NO SMOKING IN CORRIDORS. KEEP YOUR RADIO LOW AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK PLEASE. NO SOLICITING. PLEASE USE NIGHT BELL ONLY WHEN NECESSARY. NIGHT BELL ↓↓.

Number Five had a fire extinguisher fastened to the wall just outside the door. Meecham pressed the buzzer, waited half a minute, and pressed it again, twice. There was no response. He went back to the lobby and down the steps to the basement following the Manager’s Office arrow.

A small man past middle age, in a peaked painting cap and splattered overalls, was squatting in a full knee bend outside the door, putting masking tape around the knob. He turned when he heard Meecham’s footsteps, turned without rising and without losing his balance even for a moment. His back was straight as a board.

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you the manager?”

“Yes, sir, I am. Victor Garino.”

“I’m looking for Mrs. Loftus. I’m Eric Meecham, a friend of Earl’s, her son.”

Garino’s eyes behind his rimless spectacles looked misty.

“Oh, you are? Earl’s a fine boy. You tried her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come in, come inside.” He opened the door and Meecham preceded him into a small living room. The room was so crowded with furniture and knickknacks that there was hardly any space to move. In a box beside an electric heater a litter of kittens was mewling, while the mother cat stalked around and around the box with a kind of angry dignity, as if ashamed of the way her children were behaving in front of a stranger.

“You like cats, Mr. Meecham? Yes?”

“Very much.” He had never particularly liked or disliked them but the sight of the tiny furry bodies stirred something inside him.

“Yes, I like all animals, but cats, ah, they’re quiet and quick, and they earn their keep. We never have any complaints about rats,” Garino added proudly. “Never. Sit down, will you? Then I can sit down too. Ah, that’s better. You came from Earl, eh? How is he?”

“The same as usual.”

“Ah, yes. Did you...? You knocked on her door very loud, did you? Sometimes she’s hard of hearing. Also she’s a deep sleeper.”

“Also she gets loaded.”

“Yes,” Garino said in a melancholy voice. “She gets loaded very bad. Often’s the time I let myself in her apartment with my passkey just to see she’s not burning the place down or something. She’s a problem. She’s a nice lady but she’s a problem.”

“I can see that.”

“How we found out, Mama and me, was by the incinerator. Rum bottles. Empty rum bottles kept coming down the chute all the time making a fine mess. Mama said it must be Mrs. Loftus. No, I said, no, how could it be, such a nice dignified lady drinking all that rum. Mama was right, though.” Garino’s eyes were sad as a hound’s. “I went up and asked Mrs. Loftus please not to throw rum bottles down the chute. Right away she denied it, acted real shocked. Why, Victor, she said, why, Victor, you know I never touch the stuff. It must be the young couple upstairs, she said.”

The mother cat had settled down beside Garino on the davenport and was purring in her sleep.

“After that,” Garino said, “there were no more rum bottles in the incinerator. She took them out and threw them somewhere. I often saw her go down the street with a paper bag full of bottles. It looked funny, her such a lady walking down the street to dispose of her garbage. Ah, we feel bad, Mama and me. The bottles didn’t make such a great mess, we would have just let her keep on using the incinerator.”

“Maybe you should.”

“It’s too late now. If I went and told her it was all right to use the incinerator she couldn’t pretend any more, she couldn’t have any pride left. That wouldn’t be good. Anyway” — Garino spread his hands — “she’s not such a terrible bother. Her rent is always paid, Earl sends it to me. And she is quiet. No parties, no company. She keeps to herself. Sometimes when she forgets to eat, Mama takes her up a little plate of something. She’s not a common drunkard, you understand. She’s a lady who’s had one sorrow too many. Some people get strong under sorrows. Other people, they snap like twigs, they break, it’s not their fault.”

“What sorrows?” Meecham said.

“First, they lost their money and then her husband ran away, just left one afternoon while she was at a movie. After that her son went out and got married, left her alone. For nearly a year she was alone and then Earl and his wife came back and they all lived together up in Number Five. That was worse than being alone because there were fights all the time, just words, but loud nasty words, between Earl and his wife, and Earl and his mother, and his mother and his wife. Fighting, fighting, over everything.”

“What was his wife’s name?”

“Birdie, they called her. Such a silly name. She wasn’t anything like a bird. She was a big woman, older than Earl, and quite pleasant unless you crossed her... She had a terrible temper, just terrible. Maybe everything would have worked out, though, if the three of them didn’t have to live together, if there wouldn’t’ve been that jealousy between the two women. As it was, Birdie left town — she’d only been here a month or so — and a little while afterwards Earl got a legal notice that she’d divorced him in some other state, Nevada, I think.”

“When was that?”

“About two years ago. Upped and left just as suddenly as Mr. Loftus had left. After that Earl began to change. No one knew he was sick, he just got quieter and never went out. First we thought it was sadness over Birdie. He was crazy over her, and when she was in a good mood she babied him and fussed over him like a mother. Mrs. Loftus never babied him, being such a baby herself in some ways. Yes, we thought Earl’s trouble was lovesick. But he didn’t get any better. One day he went to Arbana, he wanted to look up some books in the University Library, he was always book crazy. He never came back here. He wrote his mother, he paid her rent, everything was friendly, but he never came back. Maybe it was true what Mrs. Loftus told me — that he had to stay there for hospital treatments. But we have a hospital here. So...” He sighed. “Ah well, I’m getting to be an old gossip. More and more, an old gossip.” He got up from the davenport and then reached down and patted the cat’s head as if apologizing for making too abrupt a move. “I’ll go and ask Mama if she saw Mrs. Loftus go out.”

When he opened the kitchen door, a rich odor of oil and garlic spilled out, submerging the smell of paint. Meecham went over to the box of kittens and knelt down beside it. They were all asleep now, piled haphazardly on top of one another in a corner. He touched one of them very gently with his forefinger, and immediately the mother cat sauntered over to the box with the casual but alert air of a policeman who doesn’t want to start trouble but intends to be around if trouble appears.

Garino returned, followed by a short broad woman in a cotton housedress. She obviously wasn’t Italian like her husband. Her hair was light brown, her eyes green, and she had a certain brusqueness of movement and speech that suggested impatience.

Garino started to speak. “Mama said, yes, Mrs. Loftus went out early this morning. To the grocery store, that’s what Mama thought, only Mama thought maybe she’d come back again and...”

“I can tell it, Victor,” his wife said. “After all, I’ve got a tongue in my head.” She flashed a glance at Meecham. “I guess Victor told you about her?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you have it. When she goes out I never know when she’ll come home or how she’ll come home or if she’ll come home. Nobody knows. She doesn’t know herself.” Mrs. Garino crossed her arms on her chest with slightly exaggerated belligerence. “She’s been gone all day. You know what that means, Victor.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Remember last time.”

“Yes. Yes, Mama.”

“You’d better go and start looking for her.”

Garino glanced at Meecham with an air of apology. “Usually she stays in her apartment and drinks quietly by herself. But sometimes...”

“This is a sometime,” his wife said sharply. “You get your coat on, Victor. You find her. We’ve got other tenants to consider too. Remember last time.”

“What happened last time?” Meecham addressed the question to Garino.

Garino looked down at his hands. “She got in trouble, arrested. After that she was in the hospital for two weeks. She was sick.”

“She had the D. T.’s.” Mrs. Garino’s face had gone a little hard. “You hurry up now, Victor.”

“All right, all right.”

“I’ll go with you,” Meecham said. “I have to find her anyway.”

The woman turned and gave him a long level stare. “Why?”

“I have something for her.”

“Money?”

“Yes.”

Garino had gone into the next room to get his coat. “She’ll blow it all in two days,” his wife said in a low voice. “Victor, in there, he thinks I’m getting sour. Yes, and maybe I am. I’ve got myself to consider too. All this extra work and worry and none of it doing one sliver of good, sure I’m sour. But Victor... Ha, Victor thinks she’s a lady, and ladies don’t get to be common ordinary drunks. Ha. Victor’s been in this country for twenty years and he still thinks like a Wop, still talks about ladies. People are people. Everyone’s people.”

Garino stood in the doorway with his hat and coat on and a woolen muffler crossed at his neck. “You talk too much, Mama.” He added, to Meecham, “Scotch women are jealous.”

Mrs. Garino’s face was white. “Jealous! Me, jealous!”

“Yes, you are.” Garino went over and kissed her affectionately on the forehead. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“As if I cared.”

“You could make some fresh coffee and have it ready.”

“I wouldn’t make you any coffee for all the money in the world.”

“I’m not offering you money.”

“Me, jealous. That’s funny. That’s a scream.”

“Get me a clean handkerchief, will you, Mama?”

She went into the next room, muttering under her breath. When she returned with the handkerchief she didn’t hand it to him; she threw it at him from the doorway. He caught it, one-handed, and then he went out the door, smiling. Meecham followed him up the steps and through the lobby and into the street.

Garino was still smiling. “Ah, now, you mustn’t be embarrassed, Mr. Meecham. That wasn’t a quarrel. Mama and I have been married for twenty-one years. When I get home there will be fresh coffee on the stove and I will tell Mama I love her and she will admit she’s a little jealous.”

“That’s all there is to it, eh?”

“Not at first, no. But after twenty-one years we have worked out some short cuts. We have a system.”

“My car’s across the road,” Meecham said.

“We could walk. I know some of the places where she goes, only two or three blocks away. But then, maybe you don’t like walking?”

“It’s all right for women and children.”

They crossed the street and got into Meecham’s car.