It was almost dark. Across the vacant strip of land, the merrymakers who played along Thompson Avenue were beginning to gather for another evening of Just Plain Fun. Jumbled juke music drifted over, changing each time a door to a tonk opened and spilled new notes into the discordant mix. Still, there was a certain musicality to it, I supposed, as I walked toward it. Beneath the jangle of competing guitars came the more primal, smoothing rhythms of softly running automobile engines, as the night’s first wave of johns slowed to check out the winking inventory of working flesh, to see which looked to offer the least chance of bringing something residual home to mama.
I walked down Thompson, stopping when I got to the video arcade. I hadn’t been on that piece of Thompson since the months after high school. I looked up. The girl who’d owned the old Underwood typewriter like Carolina’s had lived in the apartment upstairs.
I hadn’t been able to figure things out then, either.
I walked on, waiting for the cold and the exercise to calm my head, but the blare from the tonks only made me more edgy. I turned into the quiet of the side streets. Most of the houses in Rivertown had been built in the early 1920s, blocks and blocks of brown brick bungalows, lined up tight on twenty-five-foot lots. Rivertown had factories and jobs, then. And hope. The Slavs and the Poles who worked at the factories had come down the same streets I was now walking, swinging their empty lunch boxes as they headed home to soft lights. If they thought about crime at all, it was probably to smile in anticipation of a pail of prohibition beer snuck back from a corner grocery, or a money game of mah-jongg played in a church basement.
All of that got slapped away by the Great Depression. For with that came the first of the lizards. Elected promising property tax abatements and food subsidies, the lizards instead shrouded the lights along Thompson Avenue and subsidized themselves. They tossed out the groceries and the dry goods stores, replaced them with bars and brothels. They pasted FOR SALE signs on the police station and the city council chamber and spread the word they’d welcome kickbacks from bookmakers and big-time bootleggers, pimps, and prosties.
Three-quarters of a century later, the bootleggers were gone, but the lizards-grandsons and granddaughters now-were still in power, licking quarters from the gambling machines in the backs of the tonks, and bigger money in street taxes from the drug dealers and the pimps. Nobody swung a lunch bucket walking home from the factories anymore; the factories were shuttered. The lights on the bungalow porches were now the biggest in town, bright white hundred-watt bulbs, to keep back the night.
I pounded the blocks east to the city limits, each footfall crunching the snow a loud reminder that I was failing a client. I didn’t know what to do next about Carolina. I didn’t even know if that was her real name.
I came back up Thompson Avenue. The Hamburgers was open and empty. It had been changing hands and menus every few months, its offerings depending on the ethnicity of its owners. Never, though, had any of the budding restaurateurs bothered to change the big letters on the roof that had spelled, for as long as I could remember, simply HAMBURGERS. So, as the fare had changed from Chinese to Thai, Mexican to Italian, pizza back to Mexican again, hamburgers had always been on the menu. Good entrepreneurs knew it was far cheaper to lay in a few buns and some ground beef than it would be to replace the letters on the roof. That evening’s special was a jalapeño burger, a perfect melding of sign and ownership. I took one into the night to eat as I walked.
I couldn’t taste it-for the cold, for the noise jingling out of the tonks, for my rage at all the bastards that peopled the world that night: the greasy lizards who were killing Rivertown; the fussy, slow-witted attorney who worshipped a neat desk; the blueberry cop who got too easily derailed by petty crimes; the priss-pot editor of a rat-crap little shopping newspaper. I hated them all, and I hated myself, for being too myopic to see any trace of a woman who’d smelled of roses and Ivory soap.
I crossed the spit of land to the turret.
I stopped.
The slit windows on the first and second floors were casting their usual thin beams of light onto the snow, but that night, there was one too many. A sliver of light showed from the latch edge of the entry. The timbered door was open, just a crack, as though someone had entered and then pushed the door almost closed behind him.
I moved up to the turret, pressed my chest tight against the stone, and reached to push the door slowly open. I saw only the one white plastic chair and my table saw. There was no sign of an intruder. I quickly stepped in and eased the door closed to shut out the noise from the tonks. Coffee nerves, I wanted to think, and maybe a jalapeño or two that stretched the wires even tighter. My front door lock dates from my grandfather’s time. The spring bolt could have stopped short when I went out.
Above, light spilled from the open door of my second-floor office. I could have left that open, too, forgetting to shut it to trap the heat. I padded up the circular stairs slowly. They are old wrought iron, and loose; they can ring all the way up to the roof.
At the second-floor landing, I stepped into the kitchen, grabbed the flashlight from the counter, and swept the beam around. The kitchen was empty. I picked up a hammer from the top of an unfinished cabinet and crossed the hall, Mr. Coffee Nerves, with his weapon at the ready.
My office was empty of evil intruders. Starting now to feel foolish, I padded up to the third floor, found nobody lurking under my bed or beneath the clothes I keep piled on a chair. The circular stairs stop at the fourth floor. Nothing was up there except the ladder I use to get up to the trapdoor to the fifth floor, but it was lying against the wall, right where I’d left it.
I went down to the first floor, worked the lock bolt back and forth. It needed oiling. It must have stuck when I’d gone out, and I’d been too angry to notice.
Back up in my office, shrugging out of my pea coat, my eye caught the small typewriter ribbon box I’d left on the card table. I sat and threaded the ribbon into the old Underwood and typed out “Mary had a horrid little damned, double-damned lamb,” because it was a stupid, childish gesture and such things have a place in my life, especially on nights when I’m mad at absolutely everything in the world. The old typewriter clacked and rattled as the carriage chattered to the left, but it laid out a nice, even sentence.
I got up, went into the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee. As it dripped, my anger turned back to Carolina’s editor and the harassing tones of the notes he’d sent her. I tried telling myself I shouldn’t be angry at the man. He had deadlines to meet and probably wasn’t being paid enough to babysit some person to turn in a column. It didn’t work. I kept seeing a woman alone and unknown, sitting in a cold cottage, typing out advice to people who had it better than she did. The image ran over my reason, and I did blame him. I did blame that flyspeck of an editor, for not being someone she could have turned to.
The wide, restless anger I’d tried to walk off in the cold was back, but now it was focused on Bayonne, New Jersey. What the hell, Charles; you want input? I’ll give you input. I poured coffee, gasoline for an already raging inferno, and went back to my office and fed a clean sheet of paper into the Underwood. “Dear Sir,” I began, and stopped. What would be appropriate? “Dear Sir, a woman who wrote for you was brutally murdered a couple of weeks ago. She died alone, in trauma. Her body froze before it was discovered because she had no one, except perhaps you, to ask after her. Yet by the whine in your petulant letters, clearly you were interested only in input for your lousy little news rag. Please submit whatever you owe her in the usual way, you prick, and do it damned quickly.”