I glanced down at my clothes. I looked as though I had just been dug out of a cave-in. My hands were trembling. One palm was scraped. The arm that had been slugged with a pipe ached. I had trouble lifting it more than a few inches. I took out a handkerchief and put it to my face. It came away streaked with dirt. Mallory, home from the wars to count his medals.
“What are you drinking?” I said. “Ginger ale?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s some kind of rum thing. Stan showed me how to fix it. Do you want me to fix one for you?”
“Don’t bother. One swallow would lay me out like a mortician’s helper.” I sat down in a chair of curved tubed aluminum. “Where’s the gang?”
“They’re all somewhere else talking business,” Gerry said. “At least, Stan and Macy are.” She drank the rest of the rum thing and put the glass up. “You haven’t seen Owen around, have you?”
“Honey, I just got here.” I had a thought. The tired wheels notched together as they turned. “Maybe you shouldn’t see Owen while you’re here,” I said patiently. “You wouldn’t want trouble to start, would you?”
She giggled. She reached for a square bottle of rum nearby, sniffed at it, dropped some over the ice in her glass. The giggle was a hint that she and the rum had been companions a bit too long.
“No, I wouldn’t start any trouble,” she said. “I used to live here. You didn’t know that, did you? Macy used to think a lot of me, before that kid came along.” For an instant there was a trace of bitterness in her eyes. “Good old Macy,” she said ironically. Gerry turned slightly on the stool. “Even if I went to see Owen,” she said, “Stan wouldn’t send me away. He’s always telling me that he can’t live without me.”
I sat there trying to work up enough energy to leave the chair.
She smacked her lips over the rum. “Not,” she said mysteriously, “that he’s going to live long anyway.”
“Huh?”
She giggled again. “Shouldn’t tell you.” A stray bit of hair swooped across her forehead, giving her a roguish look. She smiled, the glass at her lips. Her teeth clinked against it.
“What shouldn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged indifferently. “Oh. That Stan goes to the doctor all the time. Sometimes he goes three times a week. He should have an operation but I think he’s afraid to. He takes these pills. Phen — pheno—”
“Phenobarbital?”
“I guess that’s it. Some nights he lies awake in bed and groans.” She put her lips against the glass again, kissing it. The flesh of her underlip looked soft and hot. She was a potent piece. I could understand some of Stan’s attachment to her.
“It gets to be terrible,” she said moodily. “I can’t sleep.” Her eyes were dreamily thoughtful. “I think,” she said, “that some night I’m not going to be there when he comes home.”
I looked at her. “You mean you’d walk out on him?”
“That’s right.” Her head bobbed enthusiastically. “Leave. Time for Gerry to move on. There’s this man I met. He’s a count or something like that. I met him once when Stan took me to Boca Raton. He’s very nice. He wanted me to come with him then. But I told him I’d have to think about it.”
She put the glass down with a flourish, slid off the stool. She stretched, rising to her toes. The skirt fitted the curve of her legs. “Now I’ve thought about it,” she said lazily, giving me a sidelong look. She kicked her shoes off. “Don’t you think I’m pretty?”
“You’re a darling,” I said. “Queen of the junior prom. All the beanie-wearers are mad for you.”
“That’s not funny,” she said.
I turned my head. “No, it isn’t, is it? I’ll have to go work up new gags. I think I’ll take a hot bath while I’m at it. I think I’ll run the water to the top of my upper lip and then make little waves. It should take me a long time to drown like that, shouldn’t it?”
She looked at me solemnly, then her lower lip dropped and she laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said.
I got out of the chair. “Around here,” I said, “that’s a virtue.” I walked out of the living room toward my room in the back wing. On the way I saw three of Maxine’s boys playing poker in the television room. The Irish boy was one of them. He looked as if he were wearing an eggplant under his nose.
I stuck my head in the door. “Well,” I said, “if it isn’t Bushy, Bagot, and Green. And how is the king tonight?” Three jaws dropped. The one who was dealing threw a card wild and it fluttered to the floor.
“Gi da hell ow uh here,” Irish said through stiff lips. His jaw looked sore. I went down the hall to my room, dragging my feet as if I had a tombstone tied to my back.
Chapter Twenty-three
I had taken a long bath and worked on my sore arm with some kind of rubbing compound and was about to get into bed when the door was nudged open behind me. I looked over one shoulder. There was a face in the doorway, about four feet from the floor. Serious brown eyes studied me.
“Hello, Aimee,” I said.
The door inched open a little more. She was wearing blue pajamas and slippers with fur tops. Her straight black hair was brushed until it gleamed.
“I was lookin’ for Diane,” she said timorously.
“What makes you think she’d be here?” I asked her.
Aimee shrugged and crept into the room, her eyes peering around. Maybe she was lonely. She stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me.
“Diane’s not upstairs, is that it?”
She shook her head. “No. She went out when she thought I was ’sleep.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No.” She turned around and lifted her bottom to the edge of the bed, sat there, her hands folded. “She went to the garage.”
“How would you know?”
She looked at me secretively. “ž’Cause I followed her.”
“What did she want in the garage?”
Aimee shook her head again. “She didn’t go in.” She scratched at her nose, thinking about it. “She went to one of those cars. A black one. She took a package out of it.”
“A package? What kind of package?”
She held her hands about a foot apart, showing me. “Like this. I didn’t pay much attention. I went back upstairs and went to bed before Diane came back.”
“Then she went to bed, too,” I said encouragingly.
“No. She got her swimmin’ suit and put it on. She went downstairs in her swimmin’ suit with the package. I think it was a box or somethin’.”
“How long ago was that?”
Aimee shook her head. “I don’t know.” She sat very quietly then, hands folded, not looking at me. I glanced at my watch. It was twenty after twelve.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Aimee said suddenly.
“Yes.”
Aimee sighed. “If you didn’t have a girlfriend, you could marry Diane, couldn’t you?”
I frowned inconspicuously. “Well — not quite—”
“Diane should marry somebody,” Aimee said worriedly. “Don’t you like her?”
“In a way,” I said.
“I guess Diane could marry Daddy,” Aimee said. “But she don’t — doesn’t want to. Sometimes I think she doesn’t like Daddy.” She put her legs up on the bed and crossed them. “Diane’s pretty,” she said coaxingly. “I know she likes you, too. She said so. And she’s not really as bad as she acts. I don’t think so, anyway.”
“You mean when she acts funny sometimes.”
“No. Diane doesn’t act funny. I mean not crazy. I’m talkin’ about — ” Her eyes seemed to become flat, suddenly blank. “But she said I couldn’t ever say anything about that.”
“About what?”
But Aimee wasn’t talking. Her lips pressed tightly together. “Not ever,” she said resolutely.