“No, baby,” Marlene laughed, “it’s a school day. I just have some business downtown. I put your clothes out for you.”
Lucy glanced over at the top of her bureau, where a red jumper, white shirt, and yellow- and red-striped tights were neatly arranged. She grimaced but said nothing. Ten minutes later, she appeared in the kitchen and sat down at the table. Marlene noted that instead of the pretty tights Lucy was wearing her worn jeans under the jumper, but decided to say nothing; healthful eggs, toast, and milk were going down without a murmur, and she did not have time for a major battle this morning. With a tiny pang she realized that a certain perfection in child rearing was going to go by the boards as she started working again, and hoped Lucy’s psychiatrist would explain this to her twenty years hence.
Keys, raincoat, slicker for Lucy were gathered up and the dog was marshaled, panting and dripping slime at the door. A grocery bag was found for Lucy’s project, a shoebox diorama depicting the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians by Peter Minuet. She had used one of her prized possessions, a plastic wedding-cake groom, as a stand-in for the canny Dutchman, who stood proudly extending a mass of cut-up Monopoly money to several glum paper Manahattas, while in the background ranged the forest primeval, populated by plastic animals: an armadillo, a polar bear, and a lavender warthog. Marlene was surprised to see that Lucy had done a second shoebox, in which Minuet was a tiny pink baby doll wrapped in cloth and glue, with a beard made of a swatch of Lucy’s own black hair, and the Indians were red modeling clay.
“You did two projects?”
“Yes.”
“What, for extra credit?”
“No. I made one for Bobby Crandall.”
“Why couldn’t he make one himself?”
Lucy shrugged. “He said he couldn’t. He wanted one like mine.”
“Urn, darling, I don’t think you’re supposed to do other people’s work for them. I think it’s against the rules, you know?”
At which point Lucy shrugged again and uttered a stream of twittering Chinese.
Marlene’s mouth opened in stupefaction. “What the f-, I mean, what was that, dear? Chinese?”
Lucy looked away, as if bored by her accomplishment. “Janice Chen says it.”
“But what does it mean?” asked Marlene.
An impatient grimace. “It doesn’t mean something, Mommy, it’s just a saying.”
Marlene experienced another of the peculiar feelings she was having about Lucy in recent months, compounded oddly of loss, fear, and pride. Her daughter spoke Chinese! Her daughter had a secret life at seven years! The birth closeness was fading, was almost gone; what would replace it was at the moment still in flux.
They left the house early to pick up Miranda Lanin on Duane Street. Carrie Lanin was waiting by the door with her daughter. “Any contact?” Marlene asked.
“The usual. He called a couple of times last night.”
“You have the tapes?” Carrie nodded and handed Marlene a cassette. “And this.” She gave Marlene a box containing a cheerleader doll and a note in the same precise writing. It said, “My Love is strong and True. I’d do anything to be with You. Love always.”
“Unsigned, as usual. Did you see him?”
“No, this was left on the seat of my car. I almost fainted.”
“Was the car locked?”
“Of course!”
“Okay, that’s good. A little B and E never fails to impress. You know what to do?”
“Yeah, go to work and come home.”
“And stay there. Things may start to heat up.”
Marlene gathered the two girls and drove them to P.S. 1. She looked for Pruitt’s blue Dodge but didn’t see it. Maybe stalkers took a day off; she hoped he hadn’t picked this one.
Two hours later, Marlene was waiting impatiently at a scarred metal desk in the nest of cubicles used by the D.A. squad, a group of detectives that did special tasks for the district attorney’s office. In the main these involved corruption investigations, but squad members also took on the jobs that in private practice fell to private detectives: finding and bringing in witnesses, looking things up, and other official minutiae. Marlene was waiting for one detective in particular, who was engaged, she hoped, in none of these official duties.
She saw him come in the door, a compact man in a rumpled gray suit and the traditional gum-soled black shoes. Harry Bello was in his early fifties but looked older. He had a face like a fallen leaf in a gutter, brownish gray and drooping and crumpled with lines. If he stood on a corner, or in a doorway, or sat on a park bench, not one in a thousand would see him, or would notice him only as part of the furniture of the street, a trash basket, a standpipe, which was one reason why he was a great detective.
He had been known for it in Brooklyn for twenty years until his wife had gotten sick and Bello started to drink heavily, and then his partner was killed in a shoot-out, while Harry sat hung-over in the car, and then his wife died and he drank more heavily, and during a long bout of this he gunned down a kid who might or might not have been the kid who killed his partner. The cops had covered that up and shifted Bello to a quiet precinct to log hours until retirement.
From this living tomb Marlene had redeemed him, if not to full life, then to a useful sort of walking death. Bello no longer drank, but neither was he working a spiritual program at A.A., unless you figured that his relationship with Marlene and her daughter filled that purpose. His eyes were like cinders, burnt and dangerous.
Bello approached his desk, acknowledged Marlene’s presence with a nod, and handed her a slip of paper. She looked at it and, rolling a legal form into the old Royal on the desk, typed for a few minutes.
“You have any trouble?” she asked.
“No. The guy followed her cab until she went into the building. He parked the car and followed her in there too, and a security guard booted him out. He got a ticket.”
“Good. Then?”
“He drove around for a while and then went home. I came back here.”
Marlene looked at the address on her form, which was an application for a protective order. “Avenue D? I thought the guy had money. It must be a dump, in that neighborhood, right?”
“The pipeline,” said Harry.
Marlene stared at him. She was by now used to Bello’s habit of announcing a conclusion without any intervening explanation, the result of having worked the street for many years with a partner to whom he was exceptionally well tuned. Although she often found, to her surprise, that she could follow him in these logical leaps, this particular one left her baffled.
“What pipeline, Harry? What are you talking about?”
“Alaska. He worked there a couple, three years. Made about fifty K a year, didn’t spend a dime. No sheet. It was in the car.”
Marlene rapidly translated this into human speech. Harry had broken into Pruitt’s car and found some papers, probably old pay stubs, that had enabled him to make some phone calls. Harry was inarticulate by choice, not through defect; he could charm and bully people as the need arose with the best of them, and he had obviously wormed his information out of some clerk in Prudhoe Bay. And he’d run Pruitt’s name through the NIC computer and come up blank. Marlene imagined Pruitt wrestling giant pipes under the midnight sun, lost in a fantasy of reclaimed nonexistent love; she thought such a man unlikely to be seriously dismayed by a protective order. Nevertheless, that was the next step.
She collected her papers and stood up. “Thanks, Harry,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me go and file this, and we’ll see what happens.”
What happened was that a few days later Marlene received from a bored and harried judge a protection order forbidding Robert Pruitt from approaching or attempting to communicate with Carrie Lanin on pain of contempt of court, which event was duly celebrated by Marlene and her client with a delightful dinner at Rocco’s on Thompson Street; after which, Marlene, who had crashed heavily into sodden sleep, was awakened at a quarter to three in the morning by the phone ringing in her ear.