The drinks arrived much faster than the server had, and the regally red Bloody Mary seemed to make a good standin for Ambrosia. The chatter and buzz in the place returned to its customary pitch, while Matt waited for the absent queen of the airwaves.
Ambrosia rolled in like coastal fog fifteen minutes later, swift and casting a giant shadow.
Matt watched her approach, never having seen her at a distance before, but only in the claustrophobic halls and cubby-hole offices and studios of the radio station where they worked.
She walked with the little cat feet of Carl Sandburg’s metaphoric fog, lithe and sure despite her three hundred pounds. Her bright knit tunic and pants rippled like tribal ceremonial robes. She was a lot younger and heavier and darker, but reminded him of the late sculptor Louise Nevelson, who had dressed like a living totem to some indeterminately ancient ethnic culture and who thereby went beyond that to utter individuality.
For the first time since he had awakened that morning, Matt felt a thread of hope pulling his leaden spirit upward.
Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia on the radio, spied the Bloody Mary before she did him, and beamed.
“Is that stalk of vodka-soaked celery for me, or are you just happy to see me?” she quipped in Mae West’s deep breathy tones.
“All yours.”
She eyed the long-neck in front of him as she sat. “Men and beer. It’s some tribal thing.”
“It says we’re hoping to stay sober, for the air in my case.”
“Son, you got miles to go before Mr. Mike makes you sit up and pay attention.”
“I know. I thought I’d tag along for your stint.”
“I enjoy a live audience as much as the next radio voice, but Matt, honey, you got five hours to kill after we get there.”
“I know. I’d like to kill a lot more hours.” When she only sipped her drink in answer, he added. “I’d like to kill all of last night, rewind it, and erase it, only that last verb is grimly apt.”
“Last night! That’s right! Did you do the dirty deed?”
Ambrosia sipped the Bloody Mary through a straw, her perfectly made-up face puckered into the innocent insouciance of a fifties teen at a soda fountain.
“Did I do the dirty deed? Lieutenant Molina seems to think I did.”
“Lieutenant? We talking poe-lice here?”
Matt nodded. “Everything went horribly wrong.”
“When doesn’t it, baby?”
He could only huff out a half-laugh and sip his beer. It tasted flat already, but he guessed that everything would for a long time.
“Let’s go back to square one,” Ambrosia declared. She was definite about everything, and that was what Matt needed now.
He nodded permission for her to direct this off-mike session of theirs. She wiggled a little as she settled into the wooden captain’s chair.
“So you did what we decided was the only way out. If a stalker wants your cherry, you give him—her, in your case—used goods. Used goods. Virginity. That whole notion is such retro-think! You read about that poor girl in Pakistan, where her eleven-year-old brother violated some tribal rule by walking with a girl from another neighborhood, and the dudes in the tribunal decided the only way to make it right was to gang-rape the little boy’s teenage sister, and they did it personally while hundreds of villagers stood outside and laughed? That is so not-human. I do not want to share the planet with such scum. Bunch of dirty old men panting after some young girl and coming up with fairy tales about ‘honor’ to make it happen. Sometimes I hate men. Just the gender. Every last one. I do. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“It’s a woman who’s hounding me.”
“Un-natch-u-ral woman. That’s who she is. Acting like a man. Like she needs to own people. I’m sorry, Matt. Sometimes I get so mad. You’re not like that scum.”
“I suppose any of us could be like them. If we didn’t have the capacity for evil, being and doing good wouldn’t be worth as much.”
“Don’t give me that theology. I don’t want to see any evil in the world. No devils. And that witchy woman stalking you is a devil. Riding in on her motorcycle, snatching the necklace right off my neck and waving it around like a scalp before she roared off … one unnatural woman. And she don’t even come from some crazy primitive land, you say.”
“Only Ireland, and that is a crazy, primitive land in its own way.”
Ambrosia nodded, and directed the last part of it at the waiter. Her Bloody Mary was a thin, watery pink in the bottom of the tall glass.
She sighed. “Ireland and Israel. Strange, besieged lands. You’d like to like those feisty people, much sinned against, but sometimes they’re so stubborn you could strangle them. We were sinned against,” she added contemplatively, the first time Matt had ever heard her refer to her race, “but we danced and sang and marched our way out of it, as much as we ever could.”
“I can’t know about that, not really.”
“N000, you can’t. And I can’t really know about that poor Pakistani girl, much as I came close to her experience.”
Matt nodded, acknowledging what she had confided to him during a previous session at Buff Daddy’s, her childhood sexual abuse.
There she was on the radio, a disembodied voice that was mother confessor to anybody who chanced to call in.
In person she still hid behind a wall of flesh, flaunting what was pretty about herself, but keeping it to herself.
“So what happened last night that was so bad?” she was asking softly now, the pacifier of a fresh Bloody Mary sitting before her again. “Just losing it? The virginity thing? I’d like to know, since I’ve never misplaced mine yet.”
“Me neither,” Matt admitted, as he had not yet told anyone else.
The perfectly plucked and groomed eyebrows lifted without wrinkling her smooth, brown forehead. “You neither? How’s that possible?”
“I got to talking to her. The call girl. I’d been assured she was a perfect pro, that there was no way I could take advantage of her. Turns out, she couldn’t take advantage of me either.”
“She wouldn’t play?”
“Not so much that. It’s when we got talking … you know what happens with that. You connect, whether it’s over the airwaves or face-to-face. She wasn’t as ‘professional’ as advertised. She had, as they say, issues. I had issues. So … nothing happened.”
“All that angst and nothing happened? I am disappointed, my boy. I may be sympathetic, but I like a good gossip as much as the next person. So that leaves you witch-bait. Still. I say you should have checked your conscience at the front desk and gone for it.”
“Maybe. But then I’d have a better motive for her death. Maybe.”
“Death? Whose death? I hope that motorcycle mama.”
Matt shook his head. “She was there only in spirit. Everything was between me and this woman, Vassar. I left thinking it was all right. I left her the money. She understood why I couldn’t sleep with her. Weird expression. It’s about anything but sleep, as far as I can tell. Anyway, she didn’t take my walking out on her as personal. In fact, I think she was beginning to examine some personal issues. I considered that a positive step. Maybe I was wrong.”
“You jilted a ho’ and hoped that she was reconsidering her lifestyle? I have heard of unreformed do-gooders, but that beats all.”
“Yeah, I’m a compulsive do-gooder, all right. Anyway, sometime after I left at three in the morning, I don’t know when, Vassar slipped, jumped, fell, or was pushed off the twenty-fourth-floor tier of the Goliath Hotel and fell all the way to the third-floor neon ceiling. The impact killed her.”
“Holy smoke, child. You saying you’re not only still a virgin, but you’re a murder suspect too? That witch-woman on the bike is a double whammy, that’s for sure. I’d like to send her over to Pakistan.”
For a split second he actually relished considering it. “No. We don’t want to do that.”
“Speak for yourself, John, such as you are.”