“Yes, I see. It was really stupid of me after all this time to get the idea that — well, anyway, thanks again. And call me.”
“I will.”
She hung up. Reed was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed on his chest, watching her. She had never realized before what cruel little eyes he had. They didn’t match the rest of his face, which smiled a lot.
“You were practically screaming at one point,” Reed said. “Women should learn to modulate their voices.”
“Why?”
“So people will assume they’re ladies. Also to make it harder for eavesdroppers like Violet Smith to hear everything. Violet Smith is ninety-eight percent ears and mouth and two percent common sense. She could be dangerous.”
“I didn’t say anything she can’t broadcast to the world if she wants to.”
“Fear not, she’ll want to. Wait until the next show-and-tell meeting at her church — you and B. J. will be the star attractions, with the kid thrown in for a touch of pathos. By the way, you’re not fooling me for a minute. And if Aragon weren’t such a boy scout, you wouldn’t be fooling him, either.”
“How am I trying to fool anyone?”
“The kid. You wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole even if he had a perfect physique and an IQ of a hundred and fifty.”
“You’re malicious, you’re really malicious.”
“That’s why we get along so well. Malice is something we both understand. Now, Violet Smith isn’t malicious. She’s just dumb and self-righteous, which is a lot harder to cope with. You’d better go and have a talk with her right now. Lay it on the line but keep it light, casual. Don’t let on that it matters too much.”
“You’re giving me orders?”
“Suggestions.”
“They sounded like orders.”
“No, my orders sound quite different,” Reed said. “You may find that out.”
The cleaning woman and day maid had left and Violet Smith was alone in the kitchen, cooking dinner and watching TV.
“Turn that thing off,” Gilly said.
“I’m in the middle of a murder.”
“Turn it off.”
“My stars, you needn’t shout. I didn’t know this was top priority.”
“You do now.”
Violet Smith turned off the set, grumbling. “My programs are always being interrupted, phones ringing, Mr. Decker buzzing—”
“Speaking of phones, did you listen in on the extension to my conversation with Mr. Aragon?”
“I told you, I’m in the middle of a murder, which is a heap more interesting than anything Mr. Aragon has to say.”
“Answer the question. Did you listen in?”
“No. Honest injun, though I’m not supposed to say that. It’s ethnic. I heard all about ethnic from a black man at church. People shouldn’t use ethnic expressions like ‘eeny meeny miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe,’ or—”
“At these church meetings of yours, what do you talk about when it’s your turn?”
“My life.”
“Including the part of it that takes place here?”
“Here it’s your life, not mine.”
“Then you wouldn’t mention my personal affairs in front of the group?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Because what goes on in this house is my own business and I don’t care to have any of it repeated in the name of the Lord or soul cleansing or mental health or any damn thing at all. Understand?”
Violet Smith stood mute as marble.
“Do you understand?”
“I’d like to get back to my murder now, if you don’t mind.”
“Do that.”
“Thank you,” said Violet Smith.
She waited until she heard Gilly go down the hall and open the door of her husband’s room. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the number she had just checked in the directory. The voice that answered was one Violet Smith greatly admired, so soft and sweet and the opposite of Gilly’s.
“Hello?”
“Is that Mrs. Lockwood?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Violet Smith, your friend from church.”
“Oh, of course.”
“You said you’d like me to come over sometime for a little chat.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think this is the time, Mrs. Lockwood.”
It took Marco an hour to eat a meal that would hardly have nourished a sparrow.
Sometimes Gilly sat with him in silence, feeding him his sparrow-sized bites and watching him chew so slowly and awkwardly that she felt her own teeth grinding in frustration. Sometimes she turned on the TV, which Marco didn’t like because he had trouble seeing with only one functioning eye; and sometimes she just talked, dipping into the present or cutting up the past into small digestible pieces.
Consciously or not, she left out a few things about her past and added a few. In the main, though, it was pretty straight talk. During the months of her husband’s illness she’d covered a great many of her fifty years, but more and more her conversation was about those she’d spent with B. J. For the past week it had been almost exclusively about B. J. She talked of falling in love with him right away, bingo, at first sight. She never believed such a thing could happen, to her of all people. He wasn’t much to look at, he had no line of fast talk, he couldn’t play games or dance very well or any of the things that might draw a woman’s attention. And he was married. Happily married, or so his wife claimed when she came to Gilly and told her to leave him alone. Leave him alone. How could she? As long as B. J. was alive in this world she could never have left him alone.
The sick man listened. He had no way of stopping her except by going to sleep or pretending to, and he seldom did either. Gilly had such an impassioned way of talking that she could make a visit from the plumber sound like an earthshaking event. Gilly’s plumber wouldn’t be handsome or witty or charming, but he would have an indefinable irresistible something. She couldn’t bear to let him go — but at twenty bucks an hour she had to.
“I’m giving Reed a few days off,” she said. “He’s getting restless and bossy, he needs a change. I’ve put in a call for a substitute nurse. I’ll ask for two if you think you need them.”
The forefinger of his right hand moved. One would be enough.
“Just one then. We can manage. I usually give you your shots, anyway. Do you need another right now or can you wait?”
Now.
She was very expert at it, better than Reed, who was inclined to hurry, as though he had a ward full of patients waiting for him.
“There. That will help you chew. Let’s try the fish. It might be better tonight. I asked Violet Smith to pour a lot of booze on it... When Reed gets like this, you know, sort of pushy and insolent, a little holiday snaps him back... B. J. and I were going on a holiday when— But I’ve bored you with that story a dozen times, haven’t I?”
Yes.
“I went out and bought this marvelous motor home as a surprise for his birthday so the two of us could drive up to British Columbia, where my folks came from. I called it Dreamboat and I had the name printed on it as a custom touch. Well, you know what happened, don’t you? B. J. added a custom touch of his own. Tula her name was, not as pretty as Dreamboat. Neither was she. All I can really remember about her is a lot of black bushy hair and greasy skin. Oh yes, and her fingernails. She kept them painted bright-red but her hands were always grimy. How she got to B. J. I don’t know. The why was easy enough. She was hungry. She wanted to live like in the movies and there was only one way to do it. So she did it. In the end she lost him, too, not to another woman but to a con man named Harry Jenkins, can you beat it?”