Pete stared at me. “Angelo never stole anything from anybody! I knew him when he was working up that act in 1944. I’m sure of the date because that’s when the big fire happened. God, that was an awful night. Angelo came back for me and lifted a tent pole off me, otherwise I’d have burned to death. The band played ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ to signal everybody to evacuate the tent. They played until everybody was out. They barely escaped themselves.”
He seemed lost in memory for a moment, then brought himself back.
“Anyway, Angelo was fooling around with the Madam Flutter-By act then, you know, getting the makeup right, the costume right. It takes awhile to get a character down. But it was all his own idea, I know that for a fact.”
“Conrad never mentioned anything to you? About the man claiming Angelo had stolen the act?”
“I never heard of it before just this minute, and it’s a load of elephant shit, excuse my French. Who was that guy, anyway?”
“Stevie said his name was Brossi. She hasn’t heard anything about him again, so maybe he dropped the whole thing. He told Conrad his father started the act when they were growing up in Italy.”
He laughed. “Angelo wasn’t from Italy! He always said he was, but that was part of his act. He was from Cleveland or someplace, a poor kid with big dreams who ran away to join the circus. Most of us were like that.”
“Stevie thinks he was from Italy.”
“Maybe Conrad thought the story about being from Italy was true. Hell, Angelo might have ended up believing it himself. Clowns, actors, writers, they all live in their imagination so much they get reality a little bit confused.”
Before we parted he scrabbled in his pocket and pulled out a business card. “Any time you want to know anything about Angelo Ferrelli, you give me a call.”
His pale blue eyes grew cloudy, the same wary, half-guilty look he’d had when he heard about the truck. “And you take care of yourself. You see a truck like that again, you call the police.”
Even this early in the morning, my Bronco had become a kiln while I was inside. After I started the engine and had the AC blowing full blast, I gave Conrad’s coat an anxious look to make sure it hadn’t melted while I talked to Pete. Mame and Reggie were my last two calls of the morning, and I decided to take Conrad’s coat home before I stopped at Mame’s.
No cars were in Stevie’s driveway, and she answered the door quickly. Conrad’s coat was folded over my arm, but she barely glanced at it.
As I came in, she said, “What happened to your face?”
“I slipped on my stairs in the rain last night and hit it.”
“God, your arms are bruised too.”
“It’s okay, I put some liquid stuff on it. I’m just sore.”
She nodded, relieved to be allowed to ignore my bruises.
I said, “Where do you want me to put the coat?”
She looked down at it as if she’d never seen it before. “You can put it in Conrad’s study.”
She moved toward the kitchen, and I went down a side hall. I remembered caving like that after Todd and Christy were killed. One minute I would be alert and the next I would be in a deep dark hole where sound barely reached me.
In Conrad’s study, I laid the coat over the back of his tall leather desk chair, spreading it so it wouldn’t wrinkle. It looked almost natural there, as if Conrad were sitting in the chair wearing it, only he didn’t take up any space.
On the way out, I paused to look at a bulletin board covered with photos of children’s faces. Many of them were disfigured, some horribly so. Beside each disfigured face was another normal happily smiling face. It took a few seconds to realize the photographs were before-and-after shots of children whose facial deformities had been surgically repaired.
I went to the kitchen and found Stevie standing in front of the sink, staring blindly out the window.
I said, “I noticed photographs of children in Conrad’s office.”
She turned to me and smiled. “Aren’t they wonderful? That project gave Conrad more pleasure than anything he’s ever done. Me too.”
“You pay for plastic surgery for them?”
“Sometimes we bring them to the United States, sometimes we send surgeons to them. Some surgeons donate their services, and we provide transportation and the patients. Some countries have good surgeons of their own, but they need supplies or proper facilities. We do whatever is needed.”
“You’ll continue to do that?”
She looked startled. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I felt myself blush. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Yes, you do. I’m a young widow, and so far as anybody knows, I’ve never done anything on my own, I’ve just been Conrad’s shadow. But that’s not true. We were a team, and everything we started will continue.”
“What about Denton?”
“I’ll take care of Denton. He may plan on taking over the Ferrelli Trust, but he won’t.”
I said, “Stevie, you’re exhausted. Turn off the phones and take a nap.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the sink, looking ten years older than she had when she opened the door to me and Guidry two days before. When she opened her eyes, they were swimming in tears.
“You’ll come back this afternoon and walk Reggie?”
“You bet. I’ll see you then.”
She walked me to the door and gave me a quick hug good-bye. I’ve always wished I had hugged her back more tightly before I left.
12
When I pulled into Mame’s driveway, I saw her behind the glass watching for me. She was almost her old frisky self. I couldn’t say the same for myself. Before I brushed her, I clipped her leash on her collar and limped with her into the backyard and let her squat in the bahia grass and amble around on the pea-gravel path. Lifting her to the table to brush her made me groan. Good thing she only weighed eleven pounds. Another ounce would have killed my ribs.
I gave her fresh water and a half cup of senior kibble and left feeling optimistic about her. She was a tough little dog. She was going to be fine.
I was so hungry I was ready to eat the upholstery in my car, but this was Wednesday, the day I skipped breakfast at the Village Diner and drove over the bridge to the Bayfront Village to take Cora Mathers to her weekly hairdresser’s appointment. Cora was the grandmother of a former client who’d got herself murdered on my watch, and I felt responsible for her. Also, I liked her. Cora had survived more tragedies than most people even see on TV, and she still got up every day with a childlike hope that it was going to be good.
Bayfront Village is an upscale assisted-living condominium. Designed by architects who couldn’t decide between neoclassical, art deco, or Mediterranean, it has the befuddled look of a staid matron cast as an ingenue in a musical comedy. I pulled under the portico, put my gun in the glove box, and told the valet I was going in to get Cora.
He grinned. “Bet she’s in that senior sex class.”
“Excuse me?”
“Some lady is teaching about senior sex this morning. I’ll bet Miz Mathers is in there with the rest of them.”
I ignored his leer and went through the glass doors to the lobby. Inside, the air wasn’t much cooler, but a lot of elders sitting in the hyper-decorated conversational area wore sweaters. I didn’t see Cora, but there was an easel outside a meeting room with a hand-lettered sign announcing TANTRIC SEX FOR SENIORS.
I ducked around the easel and stuck my head in the door. A hefty woman in a loose caftan stood beside a table holding a headless and armless sculpture of a woman cut off at mid-thigh. The woman had pendulous breasts and a bulging pudenda as big as a manatee’s head. The sculpture, not the teacher. Maybe the teacher too. Who could tell with that loose thing she was wearing?
About a dozen white-haired women and three men sat in folding chairs in front of her. Two of the men were asleep with their chins sagging on their chests, and the other one had taken his hearing aid out and was fiddling with it. The women all sat on the edge of their seats in rapt attention.