“Of course it does! If they framed an innocent man—”
“They framed me, all right. But it’s a hell of a stretch to call me innocent.”
“That man in the park just now. He wasn’t the first man you ever killed, was he?”
“No.”
She nodded. “You were awfully proficient at it,” she said. “It looked like something you might have done before.”
“I left New Orleans years ago. That’s unusual, most people who start out here never leave. The city gets a hold on a person.”
“I can understand that.”
“But I had to get out,” she said, “and I left. And then after Katrina, when half the city left, that’s when I came back. Trust me to get everything backwards.”
“What brought you back?”
“My father. He’s dying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So’s he. He didn’t want to go to a hospice. This is a man who wouldn’t let them evacuate him during the hurricane, and he said he’d be damned if he’d leave his house now. ‘I was born in this house, chère, and I shall damn well die in it.’ As a matter of fact he was born in a hospital, like most people, but I guess you’re allowed to exaggerate when you’re being eaten alive by cancer. And I tried to think what I had to do in my life that was more important than nursing him and letting him die at home, and I couldn’t think of a thing.”
“You’re not married.”
“Not anymore. You?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Mine lasted a year and a half. No children. All I had was a job and an apartment, and they were nothing I couldn’t walk away from. Now I do substitute teaching a couple of days a week, and hire a woman to tend to Daddy when I’m working. What I make doesn’t do much more than cover what I have to pay her, but it makes a change.”
Chère, he thought. Like the singer? Or was it short for Sharon or Sherry or Cheryl, something like that?
Like it mattered.
“That’s my house on the next block. With the azaleas and rhododendrons in front, so overgrown they’re hiding the downstairs porch. They ought to be trimmed, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“It looks nice. A little lush and untamed, but nice all the same.”
“The ground-floor sitting room’s got his bed in it, so he doesn’t have to bother with the stairs, and I made up a bed for myself in the den for the same reason. The whole second floor’s empty, and I can’t remember the last time anyone had occasion to go up there.”
“Just the two of you in that big house?”
“There’ll be three tonight,” she said, “and you’ll have the entire second floor all to yourself.”
He waited in the hallway while she saw to her father. “I’ve brought a man home, Daddy,” he heard her say.
“Well, aren’t you the little hellion.”
“Not like that,” she said. “You’re an old man with a dirty mind. This gentleman’s a friend of Pearl O’Byrne’s, he needs a place to stay. He’ll be upstairs, and if it works out he might rent that front room.”
“Just be more work for you, chère. Not saying the money won’t come in handy.”
He felt like an eavesdropper, and walked out of earshot. He was looking at a framed print of a horse jumping a fence when she emerged and led him to the kitchen.
She made a pot of coffee, and when it had dripped through she filled two large mugs and set them on the kitchen table, along with a sugar bowl and a little pitcher of cream. He said he preferred his coffee black, and she said so did she, and returned the cream to the refrigerator. They talked while they drank their coffee, and then she said he must be hungry and insisted on making him a sandwich.
Once, years ago, starved for a sounding board, he’d bought a stuffed animal, a little plush dog, and carried it around with him for a week or two just so he’d have someone to talk to. The dog had been a good listener, never interrupting, just taking everything in, but he’d been no better in the role than this woman was now. He talked until they’d finished the pot of coffee, and didn’t object when she made a second pot, and talked some more.
“I was wondering what was in the bag,” she said, when he’d told about wanting to change his appearance. He showed her the clippers and the packet of hair dye. The clippers would probably work okay, she said, although it would be hard for a person to use them on his own head. As for the hair dye, she thought he’d be taking an awful chance. It might work to turn gray or white hair the promised shade of light brown, but apply it to hair as dark as his own and you might wind up with something more in the tangerine family.
And you couldn’t really dye dark hair gray, she told him. What you could do, say for a costume ball or a theatrical role, was spray what was essentially a gray paint onto your hair. It would wash out, though, so you would have to renew it after every shampoo, or even after getting caught in the rain, and a wig would be simpler and more effective.
He said he’d thought about a wig, and ruled it out, and she agreed, saying you could always spot a man wearing a hairpiece. But could you? If it fooled you, you’d never know you’d been fooled.
“I dye my hair,” she said suddenly. “Could you tell?”
“Are you serious?”
She nodded. “I started six, seven years ago, when the first gray hairs showed up. All the women in my family go gray early, they have this magnificent silver hair and everyone says how they look like queens. I said the hell with that, and I went looking for Miss Clairol. I’ve never let it grow out, so I don’t know how gray I’d be by now if I did, and with luck I’ll never find out. You really can’t tell?”
“No,” he said, “and I’m still having trouble believing you.”
She fluffed her hair. “Well, I just touched it up last week, so it shouldn’t show, but if you look closely maybe you can see the roots.”
She leaned toward him, and he looked down into her hair. Was there some gray showing at the roots? He couldn’t really tell, it was hard to put the image into focus at that range, but what he did notice was the smell of her hair, all fresh and clean.
She straightened up, and her face looked a little flushed. All that coffee, he thought. She said, “You want to keep from being recognized, right? I have some ideas. Let me think about it, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do.”
“All right.”
“Do you want any more coffee? Because I’ve already had more than I should.”
“I feel the same way.”
“I’ll show you to your room,” she said. “It’s a nice room. I think you’ll like it.”
24
In the morning he showered in the upstairs bathroom, then put on the same clothes and went downstairs. She had breakfast on the table, grapefruit halves and French toast with syrup, and after a second cup of coffee she got her Ford Taurus out of the garage and gave him a ride to where he’d parked the Sentra. There was a ticket on it, as she’d said there might be, but what would they do if it went unpaid? Send a summons to a broken-down farm in eastern Tennessee?
He followed her back home, and parked in her garage as instructed, while she left the Taurus in the driveway. “You’re going to stay here for a while,” she’d told him over breakfast, and he said he bet she was good at getting little kids to mind what she said. She said if she was being bossy that was just too bad. “I didn’t object when you saved my life,” she said. “So don’t give me grief when I return the favor, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s better,” she said. “It sounds funny, though. ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
“Whatever you say, chère. That better?”