“You’re welcome. Do you think they’ll talk to you?”
“The Ingrams? Well, if not to me, then maybe to a subpoena.”
“What does Willie say now about the Hanks case?”
“Willie says she done him wrong.” He laid down the questionnaire, took up his sandwich again. “But he doesn’t have any evidence to prove it. What we need in this case is a big, fat break.”
For some reason, that reminded me of my sister.
“Geof, are you going to be able to go to the party?”
“Party?” The way he said it, as if he were trying to remember the meaning of the word, didn’t reassure me. “Oh, sure. One way or another. I promise.”
“It’s not me you’ll have to answer to, it’s Sherry.”
He grimaced. “In that case, I swear it.”
I didn’t have the courage to ask the same question about our wedding. If he didn’t get a break in the Hanks case soon, he just might say, no, sorry, he’d be working that night.
“Are the Hendersons going to the party?” I asked him.
“Gail and Willie? I don’t know.” He pulled out his wallet, opened it, and shook his head. “Do you have any money, Jenny?”
“Haven’t you and Willie talked about it?”
He looked surprised at the question. “The party? No.”
I tried to imagine two women working together every day and never mentioning the party to which one of them was invited and for which the other was a guest of honor. I shook my head, too. My imagination was active, but not that active.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are we going to have to wash dishes?”
“Men,” I remarked, “are different from women.”
“Yeah, we usually carry more cash on us.”
A black waitress in a pink uniform appeared. “Pie?”
“Is it fresh?” Geof inquired.
She shifted her weight to her other hip. “Do I have the right to remain silent?”
We laughed, and she slapped the check on our table.
“I’ll get it,” I said, and he started to get up from the table. I put out a hand to stop him. “Geof, I know you’re in a hurry, but we really need to talk about the wedding.”
“I’m leaving you with all the work, aren’t I?” He sat down again, looking guilty and apologetic. “What’s left to do?”
What was left to do? Pick up my dress from the seam-stress, buy new shoes, get my hair done, check on the dinner reservations, pick up the airline tickets, take a shower, put on perfume, get him a boutonniere, pick up my own flowers. Most of that he couldn’t do for me, and the rest I could manage on my own if I had to. So why had I even mentioned it? Because I wanted to know if our marriage still lurked somewhere in his mind, squeezed into his mental case files before “mayhem” and “murder.” Or, a sardonic voice in my head suggested, because it lurked in my own head, along with “martyr” and “maybe.”
“Get your suit pressed,” I suggested.
“And show up?”
“That, too.”
Again, he started to rise from the table.
“Geof ...” I shot my next words out quickly, like darts, to pin him to the booth awhile longer. “Have you given any more thought to the idea about a special police training course in handling domestic disputes?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“What, think about it?” He sounded as if he were trying to curb annoyance with patience. “I don’t know, it’s hard to work up interest in something I may not be around to use.”
My heart descended to my stomach, to mix with the greasy tenderloin and fries. “Then you’re still thinking of quitting . . . that is, leaving . . . the force?”
“Well, not tonight, anyway.” He made a visible effort to smile. “On this particular night, at this specific moment, I’m going back to work. See you later.”
“All right.”
He did get up from the table then, shrugged into his topcoat, bent down to kiss the top of my head, and left me to pay the bill. I stared at it for a while, thinking that cheap as it was, the price was still too high for so little sustenance. And what if I convinced him to change his mind about quitting? Then, someday, would I be making the same complaint about being a cop’s spouse—too high a price to pay for too little sustenance? I walked to the counter and paid the cashier grudgingly.
I trudged to my car, feeling heavy and a little depressed, as if an acute case of emotional indigestion was coming on.
On the way home I stopped by Gail Henderson’s house.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” I said, when she answered her doorbell. She was looking at me with a surprised and fixed smile on her thin face. “I tried to call.” Lord, I thought, I sounded like some men I’d known. “Did you find the pizza before the kids stepped on it?”
“Yes.” But her tone was cool, as if she didn’t care much for sausage with extra cheese. Neither did she seem to care to invite me inside, but I was getting used to cool receptions. “Thank you.”
“Well.” I struggled for something to say. “Can you and Willie come to the party?”
“Oh, yes!” At last, there was inflection, even eagerness in her voice, and her face lit up. “Thank you so much for asking us, Jenny! I’m so excited about getting to go out somewhere! I’m practically all ready to go right now.” She laughed, a real laugh this time, not a forced one. “I’ve got the baby-sitter lined up, and I’ve let the hem down on this really pretty dress I wore last year to a christening—I know the invitation said informal, but I hardly ever get a chance to dress up, so I hope nobody will mind if I wear a party dress—and I talked Willie into taking me out to dinner first, before the party! I just can’t wait! It’ll be so nice to meet people. I’m so grateful, it’s just so thoughtful of you to ask us, Jenny!”
She was chattering like a teenager.
“Mom! Mommy, come here!”
She glanced behind her and seemed to find some minor disaster there. “Oh, God, sorry, Jenny.” But this time, her voice was friendly, even though she still didn’t ask me in. “Thanks for coming by. I’ll see you Saturday night, all right?”
“Right, Gail.”
With a quick smile, she closed the door.
I backed off the porch, a little shaken by the extreme fervor of her sociability. It implied the presence of its opposite—equally extreme loneliness.
When I got home, I made a call to try to staunch some of that loneliness that had gushed out of Gail Henderson like a hemorrhage.
“Sabrina?” I said, when she answered. After a few minutes of chitchat about the coalition, I said, “Remember that cop at the meeting? I think his wife, Gail, is pretty lonely, being new in town. I’d like to get the two of you together for lunch sometime.”
There was an unexpectedly long pause before she laughed, and said, “Oh, you liberals. I suppose you think we’d have so much in common because we’re black.”
“Nice.”
“Actually, Jenny . . .”
I waited, wondering at her hesitation.
“She and I do have something else in common.”
“Oh?”
“Willie called me, after the meeting.”
There was another long pause. Mine.
“You don’t approve,” Sabrina said.
“She has enough troubles.”
“I don’t have much choice of men in this town, Jenny.”
“That’s not her fault, is it?”
“Nice.”
“She’s pregnant, Sabrina.”
“That’s not my fault, is it?”
“Come on.”
“No offense, Jenny,” she said sharply and with a touch of self-pity, “but you’re one of the lucky ones—rich, white, and loved. Maybe you’re in no position to judge. Maybe you shouldn’t throw stones at the rest of us who aren’t so lucky.”
“Well, that lets you off the hook.”
But after the flash of anger came a feeling of sadness.
/>
“Please, Sabrina, be careful. It’s dangerous to start attributing your fortunes to luck and your misfortunes to fate. You’re going to get hurt, and you’re going to cause some pain, and bad luck will have nothing to do with it. This is a deliberate choice you’re making.”
“Yes, well, it’s my choice.”
“Sabrina . . .”
“Later.”
She hung up.
The taste of the pork tenderloin—and my conversations that day—lingered in my mouth, making me feel uneasy, queasy. I downed two Alka-Seltzer tablets before I went to bed. They calmed my stomach, if not my mind or my heart.
13
IN SPITE OF MYSELF, I WAS AS EXCITED AS AN EIGHTEEN-year-old when the night of the party finally arrived. As I slipped into sheer hose and a ruby wool dress, and piled my hair on top of my head and clipped on ruby-and-diamond earrings that had belonged to my mother, I felt myself flushing warm with happiness and anticipation. Granted, it was my sister’s party, and the bridegroom was depressed, and Sabrina would be flirting with Willie, and Gail might be hurt, and Henry Ingram would offend somebody, most likely Smithy, still, dammit ... I was thirty-three years old, and I’d never been married before, and I was in love, and I was going to have a perfectly wonderful time.
“Damn right,” I declared to my mirror. “You look terrific.”
“Second that motion.” Geof came up behind me and nuzzled the back of my neck, producing goose bumps that slid down my arms like tiny massaging fingers. Every gland in my body stood at attention. He whispered in my left ear, “I like your red shoes.”
I smiled at his reflection and whispered back, “If I click them twice, I’ll land in Kansas.”
“No.” He turned me around and planted a careful kiss that would not disturb my cherry lipstick. “Please don’t go away from me.”
I leaned toward him. The hell with the lipstick. I was suddenly filled with an electric feyness, a feeling that together we could do anything, surmount any obstacle, follow every rainbow, climb every mountain, ford every stream.
“Please wrinkle my dress,” I murmured, just as his beeper sounded. I felt myself go stiff in his arms, which was odd, since the electricity went out of me at the same time. Geof looked at me with something like desperation in his eyes, and said, “Oh, shit, Jenny.”
I put on my coat and walked him out to his police sedan.
We weren’t saying much. The call was for a reported homicide. There wasn’t much to say. I could hardly whine, “How can you go to a murder when you’ve got a party to attend?”
“Geof, I don’t want to go to the party alone.”
He opened the passenger door for me. “Then come to mine.”
We got in, and he started the ignition. At the first intersection he hit the red light and siren. As we passed the street that would have taken us to Sherry’s, I looked up at the three-quarter moon in the sky. It looked like a dime held between the thumb and forefinger of God. Flip. Heads you win, tails you lose. God had flipped that dime while we weren’t looking, and it had come up tails.
Somebody had lost it all.
It was the stone house with the guttering coming off, where Mrs. Gleason, twenty-five years old, lived with her husband and five children. Still lived? Had lived? Died?
I stayed in the car while Geof raced inside.
Police cars, sirens buzzing, were converging like flies on dead meat. Neighbors were piling out of their houses to stand along the curbs. Any moment, the television cameras would arrive. It was quickly becoming a festival of sorts. Willie Henderson screeched up in his sedan and sprinted toward the house. I thought of Gail, all dressed up and no place to go.
I switched off the dispatcher’s voice, turned on the car radio. There was a talk show playing, with a well-known author explaining how he got his ideas. I laid my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes to the screaming reality around me.
I figured it was Mr. Gleason who was dead. Didn’t know why I felt that so strongly, maybe it was because of the aura of “survivor” about the fat black woman in the yellow tent dress.
Where were the children now, those solemn children?
In my imagination, they peeked out from the windows of the little stone house. Huge, dark, frightened eyes rising like black moons in the windows. The eyes grew larger and larger, asking silently: Is it safe now? Is it safe now? Is it safe to come out now? In the back of my mind, a woman’s voice began to croon in a deep voice of great sorrow and dignity:
Hush little children, don’t you cry.
Mama’s killed daddy, ’bye, ’bye, ’bye.
“ ’Bye,’bye,’bye,” the children sang.
On the radio, the famous writer said, “And sometimes my ideas just seem to spring out of thin air.”
I opened my eyes, sat up.
You and me both, buddy, I thought.
They were bringing Mrs. Gleason out of the little stone house, but it was taking three of them to do it because she was wobbling drunk and singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of her voice.
“He is tramplin’ out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored!”
So much for deep sorrow and dignity. She’d been into the vintage, all right, and it looked as if the grapes had unstored the wrath.
“He has loosed the fatef’l lightnin’ of his ter’ble swift sword!”
“The man’s dead,” she screamed to her neighbors, causing the cops who supported her to lurch and buckle under her weight. Somehow they kept her upright as she flailed her arms and shouted, “That man ain’t never gonna mess with me nor my kids no more!”
“You do it, Lanny?” someone, a man, yelled.
“Must of,” she bellowed back. “Been wishin’ that man dead for years!”
Then she collapsed onto the sidewalk, bringing the cops down with her. Her vast brown arms and legs splayed out over them like logs; her yellow tent dress covered them all like a tarpaulin; her eyes were closed, her head rolled back and forth on the pavement, and she was smiling. Some of the neighbors hooted and whistled. As I watched the cops struggle up from beneath her, I decided to go to the party alone, after all. Marriage was beginning to look like the prize in a pig-calling contest.
14
I HAD HARDLY REMOVED MY FINGER FROM MY SISTER’S doorbell when Sherry flung wide her front door.
“Get in here!” she hissed. “I can’t believe you’re so late! I don’t know what to say to these strange people! They’re your friends! You talk to them!”
She grasped my forearm to drag me into the entryway after her. But then she gasped and splayed her hands on her rib cage under her breasts. She had on an Egyptian sort of dress, white, with lots of pleats and gold trim, and a piece of twisty gold jewelry in her hair. With her face also twisted, but in evident pain, she looked like Cleopatra after the asp.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, “that hurt, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“What’s the matter, Sherry?”
“You’re late!” she said through clenched teeth.
“Fashionably,” I said, with an effort. “No, I mean what’s the matter with you?”
She grimaced. “Cracked ribs, can you believe it?” I could, easily, having lived with little Miss Klutz for the first heavily bandaged fifteen years of her accident-prone life. It wasn’t that she’d been a tomboy, far from it. My theory, often expressed when we were children, was that if she was going to walk around with her nose in the air, she was bound to trip a lot. “It’s unbelievable. I slipped on a spot of grease in the garage and cracked my ribs. On Lars’s tool chest.”
I winced in instinctive sympathy.
But it was beginning to dawn on her that something vital was missing from the scene.
“Where is he?”
She started to screech it, but brought her voice down immediately to an intense whisper. “He’d better be parking the car. If you tell me he’s not coming, I’ll kill him! I’ll kill both of you, I mean it.”
&nbs
p; I wasn’t in the mood for hyperbole about death.
“He’s not coming. I’m sorry. There was a homicide.”
“Honestly,” she said furiously. “Some people!”
That was a fact, I thought, as I followed her into the living room of her house, which had been designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, a claim to fame that I had only just managed to keep her from engraving on a brass plate and sticking by the front door. The disciple’s name must have been Peter, because the house betrayed the master three times before the visitor even reached the kitchen: The ceilings soared too high for human proportion; the building materials could only have been native to a foundry; and there wasn’t any of that built-in furniture that makes a Wright house seem so deceptively plain and simple. As my wedding was supposed to be. Sherry had littered her landscape with gilded white French provincial reproductions that looked as if they ought to be covered in plastic. In her white-and-gold dress, she matched the furniture. I would have liked to think it was only an embarrassing coincidence.
She paused dramatically, almost causing me to run into her back, on the steps leading down into her living room. In the far corner there was a hired bartender. In the opposite corner there was an impressive buffet that looked heavy with lobster and other seafood. There was a man in a tuxedo playing a cello. There was a young woman in a brief maid’s costume circulating about the room with champagne in tall goblets. My friends appeared slightly underdressed.
“The good crystal?” I murmured.
“They break it, you buy it.”
“Jenny!” “Where’ve you been?” “Where’s Geof?”
Cries of welcome and congratulations greeted me.
I looked down at the expectant, smiling, upturned faces. They didn’t know about the murder yet. I was momentarily tempted not to tell them and to let them go ahead and enjoy the evening, but then I realized I would have to explain Geof’s absence.