Merlot dropped the luggage and sat on the bed and pulled out one of the joints and fired it up. The bed had five or six thick pillows piled against the headboard and he leaned against them. Penelope closed the door. Then she locked it. She was looking around, touching a leather couch, taking off her blouse, smiling, shaking her head over a footstool made from an elephant’s foot. The ceiling was high and carved with wood intricacies by some long-dead carpenter and the windows were draped with sheer white material over the blinds.
“Pretty nice, huh?” Merlot said, and passed her the joint. She snuggled down beside him and took a few tugs on it.
“Wow,” she said. “Did you see that straight-up piano downstairs? That thing’s got to be two hundred years old.”
She took one more toke and then handed the joint back to Merlot. He took a few more hits and then moved some little tied-up lace bags of colored rice from a brass tortoise shell and mashed it out. He handed her a glass and got the corkscrew and opened the wine and poured them half a glass apiece. They sipped and lay back on the bed. Merlot smiled at her.
“And did you hear the old lady cackling with happiness? Hell yes she takes American Express! I thought she was gonna carry our luggage up.”
Penelope giggled in her deep and lovely voice.
“She’s a sweet old thing, ain’t she? Reminds me of my mamaw. I bet this house has been in her family since the Civil War. I bet we’ll sleep good in here.”
“Yeah, if we get to sleep any,” he told her, and bent her back on the bed, since her snow-white bra was showing about a foot of deep brown cleavage. There was a tiny silver star pinned high on the left cup that he knew she wore just for fun. But her gun was in her bag. Loaded probably. It had made him a little nervous to have it in the Four-Runner the whole way down here and it was still making him nervous to have it in here in the bedroom with them but he didn’t say anything. Not then.
Later: Dinner that night was candlelit in the deserted dining room, muted but certainly not sad, fine dark wood on the walls where hung pictures of stiff old white people long turned to dust beneath engraved slabs of stone, fine linen on the table, crystal glasses, a whole browned duckling with an orange glaze, truffles in sauce, more good wine, and the creamiest mashed potatoes Merlot had ever tasted. The maid came in from time to time to bring more homemade rolls or butter. After they’d finished, the old lady came out with her book from her room where she’d been reading, and asked them if they’d like to share a brandy and a coffee with her, to which they said they’d be delighted. She said she’d be back in a few minutes.
Penelope was radiant in a clingy dark-blue knit dress with a neckline that would stop a man in his tracks, her hair pinned up in a tight, shiny bun, and Merlot couldn’t get enough of just looking at her. Even though he was pretty full, he was already smiling at the thought of being naked with her on that big soft bed with the canopy, holding her good brown body in his hands, and then going to sleep beside her, safe and warm in Columbus.
“You turn me on,” he said, and she squeezed his hand across the table. He could already imagine the food they were going to cook together. She knew all those Creole recipes for jambalaya and all that good New Orleans food. He could show her how to make bread. He could show her how to make biscuit pudding like his mother’s. They could call his mother up, maybe drive down to Gulf Shores and see her sometime.
She picked up her wine and sipped at it. She’d been a little quieter the last few minutes and he wondered if something was bothering her. But he held off asking her. It might not be any of his business. And he hadn’t known her that long. She kept sitting there and sipping lightly on her wine.
“What’s wrong?” he finally said.
She smiled too quickly.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t bullshit, baby.”
Then she looked away and rested her chin on her hand for a moment.
“I shouldn’t be here, Merlot.”
He leaned back in his chair and picked at a scrap of truffle with his fork. It seemed almost cruel to train pigs to hunt them but not give them any when they found a nice juicy patch. They probably fed them the rotten ones.
“Why not?”
She took her hand down and put both of them in her lap.
“I ought to be back there helping them look for Perk.”
“The cop who’s missing?”
She was slow to raise her eyes and look at him. Finally she did.
“Yeah. I knew him pretty well. Or at least I used to.”
It wasn’t so much what she said. It was the way she was looking. So. Okay. There it was. She’d been lovers with this missing constable maybe. But did he expect her to be a chaste virgin? Hell no. She was thirty-three. Would it have been unusual for a female police officer to be at some point in her life sexually involved with a male police officer? Shit no. Not unless it would be unusual for a female dill-pickle slicer to be involved with a male dill-pickle slicer. And the same thing could be said for dogcatchers and librarians, or those who climbed tall poles with spikes on their boots and tools swinging from their belts. Maybe they’d shot their guns together on the weekends.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not here to ask you a bunch of personal stuff about your private life before I met you ’cause I just met you.”
She toyed with her napkin. She seemed suddenly at a loss for the proper words.
“I know you did. And you’re a sweet man.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. You’re off duty.”
She nodded and looked down at the floor.
“That’s right.”
“You’re actually suspended from active duty for two whole weeks. With pay.”
“That’s true.”
“So they probably wouldn’t let you help look for him even if you were still back there. Would they?”
“I don’t guess they would,” she said. “They’re pretty strict about stuff like that.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes were almost wet. Her nostrils flared.
“I just thought maybe I should tell you about him. I don’t want any secrets between us about…stuff like that.”
Merlot held her eyes with his. The question kept running through his mind, face-to-face with her like this. Was now the time to level with her about Candy? She was damn sure leveling with him about this damn constable.
“Baby. I’m not asking any questions.”
“I think I’m going to call sometime and see if they’ve found out anything.”
He tapped his fork gently on the edge of his plate and then laid it down. He wasn’t sure what to say about all that. He lifted his wineglass and sipped from it briefly.
“Do you think he’s dead?”
She didn’t answer at first. Merlot set his glass down and ran his hand over the tablecloth. It was littered with a few bread crumbs that he swept together with the edge of his hand and then put them on his plate. He dusted off his hands. He looked up at her.
“I don’t know. Rico would have made the guy tell him where Perk was if the guy hadn’t escaped from the hospital. If the guy knew. If he’s got anything to do with it. And he probably does. He carjacked you pretty close to a place where Perk parks sometimes.”
“Where Perk parks? Who’s Rico?”
“Elwood’s brother. Perk’s brother. He’s a detective. We left before he got to the jail, but I know he was on his way over there. And he would have made him tell.”
“How would he be able to do that?”
She sighed and took a sip of her wine.
“He would have probably held a knife to his balls. He did that to a guy who robbed a bank with some friends in Coffeeville and Rico wanted to know where the rest of them were. He found out, too. That’s how he got promoted to detective.”
“Holy shit,” Merlot said slowly. “You were dating his brother?”
About that time the old lady returned with a tray and brandy glasses and a bottle of Christian Brothers. So they had to stop talking about all
that, and start sipping brandy and listening to the old lady, who was originally from Starkville, where the legendary Johnny Cash himself had once been nabbed for picking flowers, back when she was about fifty, although there was no plaque that she knew of in the town to commemorate the historic event. At least not yet.
61
Bad cop Ronnie took Anjalee over to the mostly deserted Mid-South Fairgrounds, kind of close to Fairview Junior High and Christian Brothers College, pulled up behind a clump of naked trees, and humped her rapidly on the cold vinyl back seat of a cold city police car with the motor running, raising his head once in a while and looking around and then humping some more. She thought, What if some schoolkids come along, taking a shortcut? But she didn’t have to worry about that for long. It took him only about three or four minutes. His whole face turned red and a big vein leaped out in his neck. He did these snorting noises, too. She didn’t get a lot of fun out of it but after that he drove her back over to Gigi’s Angels and let her go, told her to keep her nose clean. She asked him to take her on back to the Peabody where her Camry was and he looked at her and asked her did he look like he was running a charity taxi service? So there was nothing to do but get out. And it was snowing again. Little bitty flakes were just drifting around. Probably wouldn’t accumulate. Not over a few inches. But you never could tell. It might snow asshole deep to a long-legged Indian in Siberia.
62
The little dog woke up and yawned and stretched and scratched himself some, then went out to the empty kitchen and lapped some water loudly from his bowl. He didn’t see anything to eat because there wasn’t anything there. Maybe he was hungry and looking for something to eat was why he went upstairs.
He hiked his leg up and peed on a potted plant and wandered on down the hall, in and out of rooms. The door to his goodie room was closed. He whined and scratched at it, but not for long. He’d learned. Dogs do. He went on looking around.
Then he went into another room and stopped dead still. A big white bone was lying on the floor and it was the biggest bone he’d ever seen. There was some noise coming from the top of the bed, only he didn’t know it was a bed. He probably didn’t have any way of knowing it was Miss Muffett snoring, but maybe in some other way, some secret dog way that people don’t know anything about, he did.
He walked around to the end of the big bone and found a hollow place where he could put his teeth into it. It was kind of heavy when he started dragging it, but the little dog went down the hall backward with it, pulling it toward the stairs like a sled dog mushing in reverse.
He got down them one step at a time. Pull a little, rest a little, pull a little, rest a little. In this way he managed to get it down to the kitchen. It must have made him thirsty because he took some more drinks of his water, and then looked around, as if searching for a good place to bury it. Then he saw his own personal door.
63
Arthur was getting worried about her because it was almost ten o’clock and she didn’t have any business being out late by herself because she was probably drinking. He was really afraid the cops were going to get her again. She’d sounded pretty mad when she’d thrown the stuff at the door and yelled at him. She’d even used the F word. He guessed she’d lost all her patience now.
He thought about going out to look for her but he would have to call a cab if he did. And, too, if he left, she might come in while he was gone. And then it occurred to him that maybe he should call the pet shop where Eric worked and ask him if he’d seen her. But what was the name of the pet shop? What was it? It was the name of a car. Was it Edsel? No, it wasn’t that. Was it the Pontiac Pet Shop? That didn’t sound right either. It was some kind of a car they didn’t make anymore. DeSoto maybe? Nah. Hudson? Nah. Nash Rambler? Nah.
He sat there with the phone book in his lap. He started going through the Yellow Pages, licking his fingers the way his mother used to, paging rapidly, his gray head bent.
64
Domino slept in a barn.
It was a big barn.
It was a horse barn.
It belonged to a cop.
But he didn’t know that.
It had plenty of hay.
It had cat food, too.
He found some Friskies Kitten.
They had those pull rings.
It didn’t taste so bad.
And he was powerful hungry.
He actually ate two cans.
One was chicken in gravy.
One was salmon in gravy.
Both were in little chunks.
The gravy was mildly congealed.
It left him feeling unsatisfied.
The barn was pretty dark.
It was good for hiding.
He didn’t see any horses.
He pulled hay over him.
Then he slept all day.
Or might near all day.
At dusk he heard something.
Somebody came into the barn.
He pulled out Rico’s revolver.
Then another somebody came in.
He was in a corner.
It was dark there, too.
Somebody said something pretty sexy.
Then somebody else said something.
And it was even sexier.
Then he heard some sounds.
There was some hay rustling.
There was some moaning going.
Then he heard some girl say Oh Randy fuck baby fuck my sweet my fuck my! Randy! Fuck! and he had to lie there and listen to it for a while but finally went back to sleep to dream of falling endlessly down long dark holes with an ocean roaring far below. Good thing the cop who owned the barn didn’t hear him snoring, because he did, mouth wide open, the five or six cats that crept in later from the darkness of their baby-rabbit killing leaning over him where they sat in a circle to smell his tantalizing Friskies Kitten breath.
65
In the pet shop, the phone rang. Eric looked at the clock on the wall and it was ten minutes until ten. Usually nobody called this late. He was afraid it was Miss Helen calling from that bar to see if he was coming. And he didn’t know if he was or not. He was afraid that if he went over there, he’d wind up doing something with her. But there was also Mister Arthur to think about. A nice old guy. He’d drunk his booze and smoked cigarettes inside his house. He’d slept inside his house. He’d eaten there. He’d caught his cat.
The phone rang again. He went to it and picked it up. He hoped to God it wasn’t Mister Arthur calling for some reason.
“Studebaker’s,” he said. And then he had to say this other thing. One of Mr. Studebaker’s ideas. “’Our puppies are precious.’”
“Eric? This is Arthur.”
Oh shit.“Oh. Hey. Uh. How you doin’?”
“Well, I’m not too good, Eric,” he said right away. “Helen’s gone and I don’t know where she is and I’m getting worried about her. I was just wondering if by any chance you’d seen her.”
“Seen her?”
“Yes. I was wondering if she’d been by the pet shop.”
He had to either lie or not lie. A simple yes or a simple no. How could he lie to him? How could he tell him the truth without hurting him?
“Oh no, sir, I haven’t seen her, I mean, not lately.” Partly true.
“Well. I’m just worried sick about her. She hasn’t seemed herself lately. We’ve had some…problems.”
“Oh,” Eric said. He didn’t know what to say. And he hoped Mister Arthur wouldn’t get into the problems and what they were over the phone, either. He was afraid it was something like maybe he couldn’t get it up anymore because he was so old. He thought old guys had that problem sometimes. He could remember his granddaddy saying one time with a chaw in his jaw the size of a walnut that the whole head of his had done turned purple. And his grandmother laughing and accidentally farting on her front porch where she was shelling butter beans with a bunch of spotted hound dogs lying around asleep with their long tick-studded ears stretched out on the boards. r />
“She doesn’t usually go off like this,” Mister Arthur said over the phone. And then he said: “Well, actually, sometimes she does.” Eric could picture him, maybe standing in the kitchen in his house shoes with his hair sticking up. He could see the pans on the stove behind him. The kitten was probably still in the pantry. He almost wished now he’d never gone over there. If he hadn’t gone over there, he wouldn’t be standing here right now trying to decide whether to go over and meet her for a drink or not. And what was he going to do with Jada Pinkett while it was going on? Tie him to a tree? Put him in the trunk? The whole thing just made him feel uneasy.