“And the thing about it is that sometimes they can’t fix it, can they, Icky?”
“Couldn’t fix old Toss,” Norris said. “Last time I seen him he was scootin’ along the street on crutches, over on Wilshire in Santa Monica, his left foot just a wiggly-wagglin’, flippety-fioppin’ up and down and back and forth and ever which way. He sure was some sight.”
Tony Egg yawned and stretched. “Well, hell, McBride, we don’t wanta make you late for your appointment. How’s your thumb feelin’?”
“It hurts like hell” McBride said. “I’ve gotta go find a doctor.”
“Yeah, he can fix it up and maybe give you a pill or something.” Tony Egg slid out of the booth and stood up. As he moved, his huge muscles bunched and rolled and threatened to burst through his tight white T-shirt. McBride looked up at him and thought. He’s got a pea head. He grew all those muscles and they make his head look like a pea. He looks like a fucking freak, he decided, finding comfort in the thought.
Icky Norris was now up and standing beside Egidio. Norris also wore a T-shirt. He stretched and yawned, making his muscles ripple and roil. McBride watched as Norris sneaked a glance toward the bar to see whether any admirers were watching. None was, and McBride caught Norris’ flicker of disappointment. Another fucking freak, McBride decided.
Icky Norris turned and leaned down and across the table, supporting himself on his two huge, thick forearms. He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from McBride’s. There was something on Norris’s breath, and McBride decided that it was cinammon. The black man made the muscles of his forearms jump and roll a couple of times for McBride’s benefit.
“Saturday, man,” Icky Norris said. “Saturday noon — unless you wanta try walkin’ wiggledy-waggledy.”
“Yeah, sure,” McBride said. “Saturday, noon.”
Chapter 4
Because she loved the touch and feel of fine things, but knew she would always be too poor to possess any, Ophelia Armitage had rather wistfully given her three daughters the names of some things that she admired most.
By early 1963 the Armitage sisters, Ivory, Lace, and Silk, were the hottest folk group in both the United States and England. But on Christmas Eve of that same year, Ophelia Armitage was found dead of a stroke, alone in her tiny house near the Black Mountain Folk School in the Arkansas Ozarks. Those who came looking for her discovered that one room of the house contained almost nothing but fine silk, costly lace, and rare ivory.
Also found tucked away out of sight underneath her bed in a slop jar was a Hills Brothers coffee can stuffed with $19,439 in cash. Thus, when she died Ophelia Armitage had been poor no longer, and nearly everyone agreed that the girls had been awfully good to their mama.
Ivory, the oldest sister, was dead now too, having died in 1970, alone like her mother and, again like her mother, dying on Christmas Eve, but in a Miami Beach hotel room — dead from an overdose of heroin that she had bought from a grinning Cuban bellhop.
By mid-1970 the group had already disbanded — nearly, but not quite, at the height of its popularity. A little less than six months later. Ivory was dead and Lace had just finished her first picture. It had been a small, nothing-much role, but there had been one particularly meaty scene that Lace had handled so superbly that she had been nominated for the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
She didn’t win the award, but her roles grew steadily larger and her popularity soared. By 1973, when she married Randall Piers, Lace Armitage was one of the two bankable actresses in the world. The other was an eleven-year-old girl with a foul mouth who could also wiggle her nose like a rabbit.
Lace, the second oldest, was usually considered to be the most beautiful of the three sisters, although it was hard to decide, really, because all three were stunning — even Silk, the youngest, who had been only sixteen when she had made her first million dollars in 1963.
But even at sixteen Silk had been the one best able to cope with all of that sudden fame and big money. That’s probably because she was the one most like Papa, Lace Armitage sometimes thought. Papa never gave a damn about money either. The only thing the self-ordained Reverend Jupiter Armitage had ever really given a damn about was the coming of the peaceful socialist revolution, which, he sometimes swore, was due next year or, at the latest, the year after that. The Reverend Mr. Armitage had gone to his grave in late November of 1960, poor as Job’s turkey, but convinced that Jack Kennedy would be sworn into office with a socialist blueprint in bis hip pocket.
“When we were growing up,” Lace had once told her husband, “I sometimes think politics was half of our diet along with cole slaw and black-eyed peas. And corn bread. We ate a lot of corn bread, too. But Ivory never did care about politics or about what she ate either, or even if she ate at all. Poor Ivory. Sometimes I think she must have lived where all the sad poets live, in that secret place where everything hurts all the time. Then she finally discovered dope, which must have been what she’d always been looking for, and she had enough money to buy as much as she wanted, so that’s what she did. I never tried to stop her. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve, but I didn’t.”
“But Silk,” Randall Piers had said. “Silk’s different, right?”
God, yes, Silk’s different, Lace Armitage had told him. “Silk was always just like Papa, all mouth and brains and both of them going wide open and full out from get up till go to bed. She was his favorite, and she was always with him from the time she was four going on five. You know what she did? She listened. You never saw a child listen so hard. And then, somewhere around 1958, when Silk was about — oh, hell — eleven, I reckon — she started talking; I mean talking just like a grown-up. And by golly, you know they all listened to her. They had to, because she was so smart and made such damn good sense.”
Piers had nodded understandingly. “Life at the bomb-throwing school,” he had said.
When Lace Armitage awoke that morning at eleven she awoke as she always did, quickly, almost abruptly, and Randall Piers was where he usually was, in the cream-colored chair near the window that looked south and west toward Little Point Dume. She smiled at him.
“Have you been there long?”
“Not long.” He rose, picked up a freshly poured cup of coffee from a table, and carried it over to her. She propped herself up in the bed against the pillows and accepted the cup gratefully.
“You shouldn’t bother,” she said, “but I’m glad you do.”
“I like to do it,” he said. “What time was it this morning?”
“When I got to sleep?”
Piers nodded.
“About five, I think. Maybe a bit later. It was just beginning to get light.”
“You should try those new ones he gave you.”
“No pills,” she said.
“He swears they’re not addictive.”
“No pills,” she said again. “When we get this thing with Silk straightened out I’ll start sleeping fine again.” She took a sip of her coffee and then looked at her husband again. “Today’s Thursday?”
Piers nodded. “The call came about nine. A man.”
“How much?”
“The same as always, a thousand.”
“What’d he use this time?”
“Calliope the calico. Was that okay?”
Lace smiled. “That was a kitten Silk once had. A calico kitten that became a cat. She called it Calliope because it sounded like one. Did Kun drop it off?” Kun was Kun Oh Lim, the Korean bodyguard-chauffeur.