Yellow-Dog Contract

Chapter Eight

The next morning at nine I was back in Georgetown knocking on my sister’s door. She wasn’t naked this time when she opened it. She was wearing white pants, a blue silk blouse, and a scarf on her head. She was also carrying a broom in one hand.

“Jesus,” I said, “you look the way TV commercials think a housewife should look.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

I went in and my niece and nephew bounded into the room with my nephew yelling, “Harvey, Harvey, Mama says we’re gonna go out and see you and Ruth Saturday and you got a new swing and everything.” Maybe it wasn’t a yell, but it was loud.

Before I could reply, Audrey said, “En Français, goddamn it! En Français.”

My nephew, whose name was Nelson, age six, frowned, thought about it, and said, “French is too damned hard.”

My niece, Elizabeth, age five and a vixen, smiled smugly and said in rapid, perfect French, “Good day, uncle, I hope you are well and that Aunt Ruth is well and that the dogs and the cats and the ducks and the goats are also well.” Then she stuck her tongue out at her brother.

I picked Elizabeth up before her brother smacked her one and said in French, “The goats asked only yesterday if you were coming Saturday.”

“Goats can’t talk,” her brother said. But he also said it in French. “Goats can only say baaaaaa.” That was in French, too, perhaps even the baaaaaa.

“Did you ever speak French to a goat?” I asked him, still in French.

He looked at me suspiciously, but finally gave in with a wary, “No.”

“Well, goats speak only perfect French,” I said. “So until you’re perfect, they won’t talk to you.”

He still wasn’t convinced, but when I put his sister down, he took her hand and said in French, “Let’s go outside and play.”

My niece turned to me, smiled silkily, and showed off her perfect accent again. “Farewell, uncle, I will enjoy seeing you and Aunt Ruth and the dogs and the cats and the ducks and the goats on Saturday.”

“You forgot the peacocks,” I said and repeated “peacocks” in English.

That was a new word for her so she pronounced it carefully a couple of times and then said, “And, of course, the peacocks.”

Her brother gave her hand a yank and they raced out of the room toward the rear of the house and the garden.

“You’re right,” I said to Audrey. “They’re six and five.”

She shook her head. “I think I started them on the French too late. I should have started them at two or three instead of four.”

“They’re doing fine,” I said.

She nodded toward the rear of the house. “Let’s go back in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ve got to sweep up the cornflakes. The maid couldn’t make it this morning.”

“Where’s Sally?” I said.

“She’s not here either,” Audrey said.

Back in the kitchen she poured me a cup of coffee which I drank while I sat at the table and watched her sweep up some spilled cornflakes. I thought she was a little out of practice, but I didn’t say anything. When she was done she joined me at the table with a cup of tea.

“Well, you’re certainly doing the elder brother role this week,” she said. “Two days in a row.”

“I was sort of in the neighborhood.”

“You were. Sort of.”

“You’ve decided to come out Saturday then?” I said. “Ruth was tickled when I told her you might.”

“Harvey.”

“What?”

“What the fuck’s on your mind?”

I sighed and took the spoon out of my pocket and put it on the table. Audrey looked at it, picked it up, then stared at me, and said, “Where’d you get this?”

“You recognize it?”

“Christ, yes, I recognize it. It’s Mother’s.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. Good God, you must know what it is. It’s what we used on Sunday and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter. It’s a spoon from the good silver. Mother’s good silver. It’s even got the L on it. See.”

I had already seen the L for Longmire, but I looked anyway.

“You took the silver, didn’t you, I mean after Mother died?”

“Sure I took it,” she said. “You don’t throw silver away. You didn’t want it, did you?”

“No, I didn’t want it. You still have it, don’t you?”

“Of course I still have it.”

“Where?”

Audrey thought for a moment. Then she got up and started opening some of the lower drawers in the kitchen cabinets. “Here,” she said with a small note of triumph. “I remember that I asked Sally to ask the maid to polish it a couple of months ago. What do you want me to do, count the spoons?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I want you to count the spoons.”

She counted them. “There’re supposed to be twelve, but there’re only ten.”

“What about the forks?” I said. “Not the salad forks, just the regular ones.”

After she counted them, she said, “Two missing.”

“Maybe you’d better count the knives, too.”

She looked up at me after she was done. “Two missing. Anything else?”

“No,” I said. “They probably wouldn’t need anything else.”

“Who?”

I took out my tin box and started to roll a cigarette. “Oh, for God’s sake!” Audrey said, reached in a drawer, and tossed me a pack of Luckies. “I bought these yesterday after you left. I swore I wasn’t going to watch you go through that macho cigarette-rolling act of yours again even if I had to buy you a year’s supply.”

“I didn’t know I was being macho,” I said.

“What else would you call it?”

“Economical.”

“Cheap, too.”

I put my tin box back, opened the Luckies, and lit one. Audrey was angry, or at least pretending to be. She flounced down into the chair opposite me, providing that one can flounce in pants and a shirt. I decided that she could.

“Okay, Harvey, who’s been dipping into the family spoons?”

“What do you think about Max Quane?” I said. Even though she was my sister I watched her closely for a reaction. I also think I hated myself a little.

She had no reaction. She said, “What should I think about him?”

“Didn’t you know he was dead?”

“How should I know he was dead?”

“It was in the paper. On TV.”

“Harvey.”

“What?”

“I haven’t read a newspaper in two years. Not the front page anyhow. Sometimes I look at the Style section in the Post, but lately I haven’t even been doing that. I haven’t looked at a TV set in six months — unless you count Captain Kangaroo or whatever the hell it’s called that the kids sometimes look at.”

“You didn’t know Max?”

“No, I didn’t know Max, if that’s what you call him. I know that there was a Max Quane who called up here yesterday for you. He said it was important and he sounded kind of twitchy so I gave him Slick’s number. Did he reach you there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what’s all this got to do with Mother’s silver?”

I picked up the spoon and looked at it. It was as familiar as an old photograph. “I found this spoon in Max Quane’s apartment yesterday after I found him with his throat cut.”

“Jesus!”

“You didn’t know him?”

“I already told you I didn’t know him.”

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t know Max. Not that way.”

“You mean I wouldn’t be interested in playing house with him and even bringing along my own spoons.”

“It’s not your style,” I said, rose, went over to the coffee pot, and poured myself another cup. “Where’s the sugar?”

“In the sugar bowl.”

I found it, put a spoonful in my coffee, stirred it, and said, “Sally still lives here, doesn’t she?”

“Sally’s family,” my sister said. “She still has her own place on the third floor, the one we fixed up like a little apartment.”

“But she’s not here today?”

“No.”

“Why?”

My sister sighed. “Sally and Quane, huh?”

I nodded. “It looks that way.”

“She got a phone call about eight last night. It made her upset and she told me that she had to go out. I didn’t ask why.”

“Are you and she still as close as ever?”

Audrey nodded. “Maybe even more so. I think she saved my life after Jack died.” Jack Dunlap, Audrey’s late husband, had been one of those financial geniuses that Texas sometimes produces. By the time he was thirty he was already a millionaire. At thirty-five, which was when he had married Audrey, he was a millionaire many times over as well as part owner of a professional football team, a power in the Democratic party, a member of the boards of at least a dozen major corporations, and a nut about sports and hunting. In 1972 he had been hunting splittail grouse in North Dakota. He had climbed over a barbed-wire fence, his shotgun had gone off, and that had been the end of Jack Dunlap. I thought my nephew looked exactly like him. My niece was the image of her mother, which was just as well because Jack had been kind of ugly.

“She’s been with you how long?” I said.

“Six years, ever since Nelson was born. I hired her as a social secretary because Jack insisted that I needed one. When I asked him what a social secretary did, he said he didn’t know but he had read about them in books. So I hired Sally. She was just out of Smith where she’d gone on a full scholarship and graduated with top honors, which isn’t bad for a kid from this town who was born near Ninth and U.”

“No,” I said, “not bad at all.”

Audrey was silent for a moment, as though thinking. “Four weeks ago,” she said. “It must have started about four weeks ago.”

“Sally and Quane?”

Audrey nodded. “It was a couple of weeks after I’d broken up with Arch — or he had broken off with me, which is actually how it happened. I was pretty upset and Sally came to the rescue again. She urged me to talk about it. And I did.”

“How’d you know about her and Quane?”

“I didn’t know it was Quane, I just knew it was somebody. She’d leave at odd times. Matinees, I reckon. I asked her about it once or twice, but all she’d say was that he was white and married and that she knew she was a goddamned fool, but that she’d rather talk about my being a goddamned fool than about her being one. So we talked about Arch Mix and me.”

I had been up since six and had eaten breakfast at six-thirty and I was hungry again. I got up and started opening cabinet doors. “Where’s the bread?” I said.

“In the bread box,” Audrey said.

I found it and dropped two slices into the toaster. “You want some toast?”

“No.”

I waited for the toast to pop up, found the butter and some strawberry jam in the refrigerator, put some on the toast, and sat back down at the table. “Did you and Arch ever talk about the union?” I said and took a bite of the toast.

“Sure. We talked about everything. I told you that.”

“Just before you split up, was there anything about the union that was bothering him? I mean anything out of the ordinary?”

Audrey looked at me strangely. “He talked about you a lot. It wasn’t about you exactly, but it was about you and the union back in sixty-four.”

“What did he say?”

She shook her head. “I listened, Harvey, but I didn’t keep notes. Maybe I should have because recently Sally’s been getting me to talk about the same thing.”

“How recently?” I said.

She thought about it. “A month or so. Ever since Arch disappeared.”

“What’d she get you to talk about?”

“Well, I wanted to talk about what a rotten, no-good son of a bitch he is but Sally steered it around so that I found myself talking about what he’d told me. Sally’s no dummy and I thought she was trying to help me get him out of my system.” Audrey looked at me and smiled, but the smile was half sardonic, half rueful. “She was pumping me, wasn’t she, for this guy Quane?”

I nodded. “Don’t blame her too much. Max was awfully good at manipulating people. It was a specialty of his. One of several.”

Audrey looked out the window to where her children were playing in the garden. They were playing tag although Nelson seemed to be bopping his sister a little harder than was really necessary. “I wonder if I told her what your friend Quane wanted to know?”

“You probably told her exactly what he wanted to know.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Max called me yesterday. He was as you said, twitchy, which wasn’t at all like Max Quane. He said he had to see me. When I asked him why he said it was because he thought he knew what had happened to Arch Mix.”

Audrey rose, went over to a cabinet, took down a cannister labeled “pepper,” took out a cigarette, and lit it. It wasn’t a real cigarette though; it was dope. She drew the smoke down into her lungs, held it, and then let it out slowly.

“Shit,” she said. “Does that mean that what I told Sally got Quane killed?”

“Quane got himself killed,” I said. “If he’d really figured out what happened to Mix, he must have tried to get cute with it. He got cute with the wrong people.”

“I wonder what I told her?”

“Was there any single thing that Sally kept coming back to, pressing you on?”

Audrey took another drag on her marijuana, picked up the pepper cannister, and sat back down at the table. She offered me the cannister but I shook my head.

“Sally’s too smooth for that,” Audrey said. “I mean she would never make it obvious.”

“There must have been something,” I said.

Audrey thought about it. “In bed,” she said.

“She was interested in you and Mix in bed?”

“Not really. But I once told her that after Arch and I had had a really good fuck he liked to just lie there and think out loud. I didn’t mind because I was feeling good and remembering how fine it had been. But it was then that he was relaxed and confident and felt that he could talk about whatever was on his mind.”

“So what did he talk about?” I said.

“That’s what Sally asked — and kept asking, although I didn’t notice it at the time.”

“She must have been more specific than that.”

“Uh-huh, she was, now that I think about it. She was especially interested in what Arch talked about just before we broke up. She kept coming back to that with the excuse that maybe there was something in what he’d said that would give me some clue about why it really happened. I mean our bust-up. So I told her what he’d said as best as I could remember.”

“But then she would come back for something even more specific?” I said.

“How do you know?”

“That’s how I would have done it,” I said.

“You are a shit.”

“Come on, Audrey. What the hell did you tell her?”

“She kept coming back to a couple of nights right toward the last when Arch was talking about you and the union. He wasn’t bad-mouthing you. It was just that he’d found out something that made him think of you and the union back in sixty-four.”

“What?”

“I told you I didn’t take notes. Anyway, I was half asleep.”

“Just tell me what you told Sally.”

“I told her that Arch had told me that they were going to try to use the union just the way they had used it back in 1964 but that he, by God, was going to put a quick stop to it. Or something like that.”

I slumped back in my chair. “When did you tell her this?”

“A few days ago. Maybe a week. It was all very casual. Just talk. Or at least that’s the way it seemed then. Does it mean anything?”

“It sure as hell meant something to Max Quane.”

“Does it mean anything to you?”

I thought about Max lying on the cheap green rug with his throat cut. “I hope not,” I said.