Yellow-Dog Contract

Chapter Fourteen

Max quane’s house out in the Bannockburn section of Bethesda, Maryland, was a block and a half off Wilson Boulevard. It was a medium-sized, wide-eaved, one-story house built of dark red used brick with a shake shingle roof. Its front lawn was green and neatly mowed and there were four or five tall elms that helped give the place a permanent, steady look — as if it were occupied by a family whose breadwinner was predestined to get his GS 14 by Christmas.

The overhead door of the two-car garage was up and the garage itself was partly filled by a large Ford station wagon that was two or three years old. The rest of the space was taken up with the junk that people put in garages because they can’t think of anywhere else to put it.

Max Quane’s car, a green Datsun 280-Z with a D.C. license plate that read LEASED, was parked in the driveway. Max had always liked to compose his own license plates and usually he came up with ones that were rather witty — or cynical — like Max himself.

I parked the pickup in the street and walked up to the front door, making my way around two boy’s bicycles. One of the bikes was supported by its kick stand. The other was lying on its side in the middle of the walk so that you’d be sure to trip over it. I picked it up and put it on its stand. Then I went up to the door and rang the bell.

Dorothy Quane opened the door. She had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and circles under her eyes. She looked at me for a moment and then said, “Well, it’s you. His other friend. You were his friend, weren’t you, Harvey?”

“Sure,” I said. “I was his friend.”

“So he had two after all,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“You want me to come in or leave?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m thinking about it. I guess I want you to come in.”

I went in and followed her into the living room. She turned and gestured with the cigarette for me to sit anywhere. I chose the couch. She stood for a moment, looking at me. She wore blue jeans and one of Max’s white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the tails out. I could tell it was Max’s shirt because of the tab collar.

“You want a drink?” she said.

“If it’s no trouble.”

“It’s not if you get it. It’s in the kitchen. It’s bourbon. Wild Turkey. Ten dollars a fifth. Max had expensive tastes.”

“I know,” I said and went back to the kitchen, found a glass and fixed a drink. There were no dirty dishes in the kitchen. No smeared glasses or plastic sacks of unemptied garbage. Everything was as neat and as tidy as it was in the living room. I remembered that Dorothy had always insisted on having things neat. It was one of her minor obsessions.

I went back into the living room and sat down on the couch again. “Where’re the boys?” I said.

She gestured vaguely with her glass. “Out,” she said. Then she looked at her watch. “It’s nearly six so they should be home soon. They’re out somewhere, with their friends, I guess. Kids always have friends, don’t they?”

“Almost always,” I said. “What happened to yours? You used to have a lot of friends, Dorothy.”

She sat down in a green wing-backed chair that was one of a matched set that flanked the fireplace. She looked at me, almost staring. At thirty-five Dorothy Quane was still a striking woman with one of those finely boned faces that help keep the years away. She wore no lipstick, not even a touch, but then she had never worn any. Her dark grey eyes were clear and I wouldn’t have known that she had been crying if it hadn’t been for her nose. It was red and shiny at the tip and I remembered that it always got like that when she cried, which I also remembered was often on Sunday afternoons. Especially on wet, rainy Sunday afternoons.

The circles under her eyes didn’t tell me anything because Dorothy Quane had always had circles under her eyes. They were one of the things that made her appear so striking. The circles almost looked as if they had been artfully painted there for effect and the effect that they had, at first glance, was hauntingly memorable.

Finally she quit staring at me, took a swallow of her drink, a drag on her cigarette, and blew the smoke out as she said, “You’re right, I did have some friends once, didn’t I?”

“A lot of them.”

“They couldn’t take Max. I had the kind of friends who couldn’t take Max so they sort of drifted away. You and Murfin are about the only people who could take Max, but then you and Murfin aren’t like my other friends, are you?”

“I try not to be,” I said. Those friends of Dorothy’s that I remembered had been rather high-minded people who seldom approved of Max or wanted anything to do with him. I think they thought he was wicked.

She took another swallow of her drink, another drag on her cigarette, and looked into the fireplace. “I’m going to kill myself, you know.”

“Oh,” I said. “When?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Sure I do. I was just curious about your timing.”

“I’m not sure yet. I guess after the funeral. It’s not going to be much of a funeral. Murfin can’t find any pallbearers. That’s pretty fucking funny, isn’t it? A thirty-eight-year-old man dies and he hasn’t got six friends or even acquaintances who’ll be his pallbearers. I think that’s pretty fucking funny.”

“After the funeral,” I said, “and before you kill yourself, why don’t you come out to the farm and bring the boys and stay a while. Ruth’ll be glad to see you. You always liked Ruth.”

She looked at me curiously. “You’re serious, aren’t your?”

“Sure.”

“Did Ruth put you up to this?”

“No.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “How long could we stay?”

“As long as you like,” I said, hoping that it would be three days, a week at the most. “I put up a new swing that goes out over the pond. The boys will get a kick out of it.”

Dorothy Quane ground her cigarette out in an ashtray. She kept on grinding it and smashing it even after it was out. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me think about it.”

“You don’t have to think about it. Just come on out Saturday after the funeral.”

“Could I kill myself out there?” She made herself smile. It was a very tiny one.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

She rose and came over and picked up my glass. “I’ll get you a fresh drink,” she said. “Water, isn’t it?”

“Water.”

When she returned with the drinks, she handed me mine, and sat back down in the green wing-backed chair. Again she turned her head to look into the cold, empty fireplace that looked as if it had been freshly scrubbed. It probably had. “Did you know her?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play fucking dumb, Harvey. You know who I mean. The girl that Max was fucking. The nigger.”

“She was a nice, bright girl, if that’s any help, which it probably isn’t.”

She caught the tense that I had used and turned her head to stare at me. “Was,” she said. “You said was.”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She was shot to death this afternoon. Murfin and I were there. We saw it happen.”

Dorothy Quane didn’t say anything for quite some time. Then she said, “I’m sorry. I was trying to sort out how I feel about it and I think I’m really very sorry. I called her nigger, too, didn’t I? That’s not like me, is it? Not like little Dorothy Quane, the raving radical of Bannockburn who marched with Martin at Selma.”

“Forget it.”

“Did her getting shot have something to do with Max and what he was messed up in?”

“I think so.”

“You know how much money Max left?”

“No.”

“He left six hundred and fifty-three dollars and thirty-two cents. That’s what was in the bank. He had ninety-six dollars on him when he was killed. And some change. The police said they’re going to turn that over to me eventually. I told them I could use it now. When he died I had eighty-six dollars in cash and that went for groceries. Murfin said that there’s a check due from the Vullo Foundation. Max’s last paycheck. That’ll be about twelve-hundred after deductions. Maybe a little more. Max was making thirty-six thousand a year plus a car and an expense account. It was a good job, the best he ever had. But he spent it all. Or we spent it all. He didn’t have any insurance. I thought he had insurance, but when I checked, he didn’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I guess I’ll kill myself.”

There are those who claim that there really isn’t any such thing as déjà vu, but suddenly I was back in the coach house on Massachusetts Avenue and it was Sunday afternoon and raining. I think I shuddered a little. Dorothy Quane went on with her monologue, if that’s what it was.

“I don’t know what happened to Max. When I met him he was a sweet, big-eyed kid who was going to help change the whole world. You introduced us. We even talked about joining the Peace Corps together. What a fucking laugh. The only thing that Max ever changed was himself. He quit being a sweet, big-eyed kid and made himself hard and cynical and tough-minded. That was one of his favorite words. Tough-minded. He found out he liked to manipulate people. He was good at it. He manipulated me. I didn’t mind. I knew what he was doing. But other people didn’t like it and after a while they didn’t like Max. I think they were afraid of him. He didn’t seem to care. Politics suited him. It gave him a chance to manipulate people. After a while, that was about all he cared about. He didn’t even care who he worked for. He even talked about working for Wallace once, but then Wallace got shot, and that fell through. He thought working for Wallace would be a joke. When I asked him who the joke would be on he said it would be on him. Max, I mean. Then he started going into these funny deals. I don’t know what they were. He never told me. But one time he brought home ten thousand dollars in a paper sack and dumped it in my lap. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it. He said it was just a deal he’d pulled off. He was always going to pull off a big deal. He was talking about it just before he got killed. It was going to be the biggest deal of all. He was going to retire at thirty-eight and we were going to take the kids and go to Europe. He seemed excited about it. We even went to bed together, which we hadn’t done in God knows when. It was going to be a big, big deal. He was going to make two hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. Then he got killed and there wasn’t any big deal. There was just Max dead and six hundred and fifty-three dollars and thirty-two cents in the bank. I’m going to kill myself, Harvey, I really am.”

She started to cry, but she did it silently and I remembered that she had never made any noise when she cried. I got up and went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered a little. It was what she did instead of sobbing. “Come out to the farm Saturday,” I said. “Bring the boys and come out to the farm and we’ll talk about how you’re going to kill yourself. Maybe we can come up with something fairly pleasant.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I believe you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Here,” I said and handed her my handkerchief. She dried her eyes and looked up at me. “When did you grow that?” she said.

I gave my moustache a quick brush. “A couple of years ago.”

“You know who it makes you look a little like?”

I sighed. “Who?”

“Don Ameche. You remember Don Ameche?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don Ameche and Alice Faye.”

“It makes you look a little like him except for those clothes of yours. What’re you supposed to be?”

I glanced down at my clothes. I was wearing old faded jeans, which I thought were rather stylish, and a faded chambray work shirt that I’d bought from Sears before I quit buying things from Sears. “I’m not supposed to be anything,” I said.

“You used to wear suits,” she said. “I remember when you didn’t wear anything but suits and vests. You even had them made in London. They were Savile Row, weren’t they?”

“No, there was a place in Dover Street that made them.”

“Max tried to dress like you used to, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“He’s got thirty or forty suits and jackets in there. You and he were almost exactly the same size. If you want some of them, you can have them.”

I thought about it. “I’ll tell you what, Dorothy. I’ll buy a couple of them.”

“You can have them free.”

“I’d rather buy them.”

“Sort of a contribution to the Widow Quane, right?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I can sure as hell use the money. Come on.”

She rose, carrying her drink, and started back toward the bedroom. She had stopped crying. I followed her. The bedroom was as neat and immaculate as the rest of the house. Dorothy opened a large closet with sliding doors that took up most of one wall. She gestured with her drink. “Take your pick,” she said.

There were about twenty-five or thirty suits and about fifteen jackets. They were all hung very carefully facing the same way on shaped wooden hangers. Most of the suits were hard-finished woolen worsteds, either blue or grey, although there were several nice tweeds and a couple of light summer-weight gabardines. Max apparently hadn’t gone in for synthetic fibers. The jackets were mostly quiet tweeds or softly woven herringbone. There were also a couple of muted plaids. I decided on a light summer-weight grey worsted suit and a sporty-looking brown-tweed one that looked as if it had never been worn. I thought the tweed suit would go well in the country. It was rough and hairy and all I needed to go with it was a blackthorne walking stick. I also picked out a couple of jackets, a summer-weight one and a nice dark grey cashmere number. Max certainly hadn’t stinted himself on clothes.

When I was through making my selection Dorothy Quane said, “You want to try them on?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“While we’re in here, you wouldn’t want to go to bed, would you — just for old time’s sake?” It was a casual, offhand, deadly serious invitation. Or proposition, I suppose.

“I’d like to, Dorothy, but I think we’d better not.”

“Why?”

That was a good question and the only answer that I could give her that wouldn’t make her threaten suicide or start crying again was a feeble one. “Maybe the boys might come home. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t.”

“Maybe another time,” I said brightly.

“Sure, Harvey. Another time.”

Back in the living room she insisted that two hundred dollars would be a fair price for the suits and jackets, which new had probably cost at least eight hundred. Max had never bought anything but the very best, or the next thing to it.

I wrote out the check and handed it to Dorothy. “If you should need some more, let me know,” I said.

She looked at me curiously. “You really liked Max, didn’t you, even though nobody else did, except maybe Murfin?”

“He was a friend of mine.”

“Do you still like me?”

I fought back a sigh. “I’m very fond of you, Dorothy. So is Ruth. We’ll be expecting you out at the farm on Saturday. You and the boys.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“We’d really like you to come.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, “if I don’t kill myself first.”