“Any idea where he went?”
“If he was smart, he got out of Detroit. Cops are looking for him. You knew that, huh? I called ’em myself to let them know he’d been seen in the neighborhood here. Maybe they caught him, ever think of that?”
Nope. Not hardly. “Sure I did,” I said importantly. “I’m stopping by the precinct right after this.”
“Uh-huh.” Her hips swayed slightly as she gave me the cool green once-over. “When you’re done with all that, whyn’t you come back and buy me a drink or something?”
“Wish I could,” I said, taken by surprise. “But I’m, uh, more or less seeing somebody, you know?”
“At least you’re honest,” she said, which made me feel guilty. She walked with exaggerated grace back into her apartment and smiled and winked at me over her shoulder. “I hope she knows how lucky she is,” she said before closing the door between us.
I idled the Ford at the Schoolcraft traffic light. On the opposite corner sat the C & H Party Store. I wondered if they’d card me if I strolled in and bought a case. I had no idea, and I had no time now. But I’d have to figure the beer thing out pretty soon. Saturday was only two days off.
But I had something bigger on my mind than the need for a case of tall boys. It was a feeling I’d never had before, not quite this way. The feeling that something was going on behind the scenes. That a great big fast one was being pulled.
That I was being had.
“He never spent the night here,” his ex-girlfriend had told me. Then where the hell was he living, between the knife fight and now? Had I even thought to ask her? Nooooo.
“She was going to ask us to let him stay in the extry bedroom,” Ma had told me. Of course, the negotiation had never gotten that far, thanks to my calm, cool, collected daddy.
And Libby had been acting awfully happy last night for a hotheaded girl whose first great love had ankled her.
The light greened and I geared the Ford up to high, half watching my driving. “There’s trouble in this house,” Ma had said. Yeah. Things hadn’t been right. I’d been waking up a lot lately in the dead of night. I’d attributed that to the jitters — starting work at Ford’s would be no picnic, I knew — but what if...
That morning I’d been unable to find my prized Redford High baseball jersey. And Bill had complained about missing a jacket. Either the laundry chute was eating our clothes, or Ma was going senile, or—
“Jesus Christ,” I murmured. I sailed through the red light at Greenfield without even thinking about it. Could anybody be that brazen?
By the time I reached our neighborhood, I’d decided what to do. It was wild-assed crazy, but it just might work — if I could only talk Debbie Miller, my local admirer, into going along.
She appeared, a ghostly, whitish-gray, faceless figure, behind the rippled glass of the porch door, and clicked the latch open. As I pulled the door, she put a finger to her lips and shook her head. I nodded. She turned and led me through the inner door into the house, through the kitchen, and up the carpeted back stairway.
The house had the sweet, foreign smell of strangers and was pitch black and thickly silent except for the faint tread of our feet echoing mutely on the old floorboards. My heart was racing, and I was pumped and primed and as ready to go as if it were nine in the morning instead of just past midnight. God alone knew what the next hour or so would bring.
Debbie closed her bedroom door behind us and faced me. In the faint light of her bedside lamp, I saw that she wore white full-length cotton pajamas over pink bunny slippers. Atop that she wore a white satiny quilted robe that reached from her ankles all the way up to a big button at her throat. She was about as physically inviting as a Barcolounger, which, I discerned in her opening comments, was no accident.
“Don’t you lay a hand on me, Benjy Perkins!” she whispered sharply, gray eyes hard.
I sighed. So much for the big crush she supposedly had on me. Just as well. “That’s not why I’m here,” I whispered patiently. “I explained all that.”
“Better not be. I’m not like that Beth Heinzeroth, sneaking boys into her house to do God knows what. I must be nuts to be doing this. I’m a good girl.”
“I know. So listen, whyn’t you keep yourself busy or something, while I do what I got to do? Go to sleep if you want. I don’t know how long this’ll take.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, thank you. I’ll just stay awake till you’re done with whatever strange business you’re mixed up in. There’s the window. Help yourself. And keep it quiet or you’ll wake my folks — and you know what that means.”
I went to the window, pulled back the drapes, and notched the blinds. Across the narrow adjoining back yards, beyond a copse of trees, I could see the back side of our house, half black and half silvery in the moonlight. Behind me, I heard bedsprings creak as Debbie arranged herself Indian-style against her headboard. I glanced back at her and she raised her chin and stared at me defiantly. I made what I hoped was an innocent, reassuring smile, turned back to the window, knelt and looked out and watched, waiting for something to happen.
An hour went by like that. Nothing happened outside. Inside was another story. Debbie just couldn’t sit still. She flipped through magazines and paced, cleared her throat and smothered yawns, and gave me a clench-jawed steely-eyed stare whenever I dared to look at her.
I was silently composing a speech in which I foreswore, for all time, any and all interest in her body, when I caught a motion outside at the northeast corner of our house.
It was Libby. She wore jeans and a sweater and nothing on her bare feet showing white against the grass. It was in the low fifties that night, cool for July, and she hugged herself as she walked purposefully in the moonlight to the double doors that covered the cement stairs leading down into our cellar.
As I stared, I felt disbelief. I also felt something else, something new: pure cold joy. Got you, you bastard. I got you, got you, got you.
Libby bent and gave the cellar door three taps. After a moment it rose a couple of inches. She opened it the rest of the way, stepped over the threshold and followed the steps down, swallowed up in the deeper blackness as the cellar door dropped shut behind her.
Now! I thought fiercely. Now to settle some hash! I stood abruptly. Debbie jumped. “What is it?” she whispered.
“Christmas time. Got to go, sweetheart.” I headed for the door. “You stay here. I know the way out. And thanks, kid. You done good.”
She stood, nervously tugging the robe tightly around her. “I thought you’d be here longer.”
“Long enough. Go on, get some sleep.” I opened the bedroom door.
She licked her lips. “I enjoyed it,” she ventured.
I waved and stepped out. As I pulled her door shut, I distinctly heard one whispered word: “Bastard.”
I closed the porch door silently behind me and moved at a fast trot across the Millers’ back yard. In the weeds behind their trash barrel I found the Louisville Slugger I’d hidden there earlier. I hefted it and held it at my side as I crept around the copse of trees as quietly as I could. Too late. I heard the cellar doors creak shut and caught a glimpse of Libby rushing back the way she’d come. She’d been down there five minutes, tops.
Well, well. Now this would work even better. I crouched in the cool, damp grass, leaning on the bat, and counted to six hundred, plenty long enough for Libby to get inside, up the stairs, and into her room, out of harm’s way. Then I stood and walked across our lawn, ducking under the clotheslines as I made for the cellar doors.
There I froze a moment. Not a sound from anywhere. I had to do this smart and quiet. I thought it through, then bent and tapped on the cellar door three times, just as Libby had.