“All right,” she said, “if you can’t, you can’t. Here’s my bus.”
The very next day, when she went down to pick up her mail, Louise Munez greeted Mrs. Bliss, though no one else was in the lobby, with a series of elaborate, conspiratorial winks and hand gestures. The woman, who struck Dorothy as having grown even more increasingly bizarre over the past few months, had mimed a sort of no-hurry, it-can-wait, take-your-time, I’m-not-going-anywhere message. To her surprise Mrs. Bliss was able to pick up every nuance of this strange foreigner’s perfectly syntaxed body language — that after she’d retrieved her mail, and if the coast was clear, she should stop by the security desk before going back upstairs.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss asked. “Did you want to see me?”
The Munez woman reproached Mrs. Ted Bliss with a scowl, as if to warn her that the walls had ears. She shook her head sadly.
“What?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“You should have let him,” Louise said.
“What? Who? What should I have let him?”
“Your boy Frank,” Louise said, “the last time he was down here. You should have let him put up a signal light in your apartment that tell when someone at your door, or even if your intercom is buzzing. Those things are perfected now you know. They’re state-of-the-art. If you’re waiting will there be improvements down the line or will they come down in price, I can say to you that in my opinion there won’t, and they’ll never be no cheaper than they are right now either. It’s your business, Mrs. Bliss, but who’s Security here, me or you?”
She’s loony, Dorothy thought, but where does she get her information? Did I say to her about Frank and the gadgets? Does she read my mail? Should I tell her poor mother? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the both of them are unfortunates. Why should I mix in? Does it cost me anything she reads my mail? Do I have secrets? The mad woman, Louise, maybe she guards Building One to protect her mother. What damage is done?
“You wanted to see me?” Mrs. Bliss said.
Louise selected two keys from an immense ring, opened a drawer in her desk with one, a long black metal box like a safety deposit box with the other. With silent, formal fanfare she took an envelope out of the box and handed it to Dorothy.
“A messenger brought it for you in a limo.”
“In a limo he brought it?”
YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, she was thinking, HAVE ALREADY WON…
“He wanted to take it up but I thought, No, let him give it to me. She won’t hear the door, she hasn’t got signal lights. I say, ‘When she come for the mail I hand it to her.’ He didn’t want to give it to me. I don’t know, maybe he don’t want to go away without his tips, I don’t know. But he comes in a limo. This is suspicious. ‘What’s the matter,’ I tell him, ‘you can’t read? It don’t say on the sign tradesmen got to leave stuff at the security desk?’ ”
It was from Alcibiades Chitral.
“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” wrote Chitral in the letter Louise had handed her, “technically, of course, your lawyer was right when he advised you that it would be extraordinarily difficult for you to arrange to visit me in prison. In their paranoia, governments often write laws to protect themselves from all sorts of contingencies, real and imagined. In this instance they were seeking, on the basis that a prisoner might be engaged in filing an appeal, to limit congress between a felon and any material witness whose testimony was substantively instrumental in the felon’s conviction.
“So Manny was right, though he overstated the case. He’s a good lawyer and you’re lucky to have him, but when he told you that a visit between us was out of the question he should really have said that, from the system’s point of view, it was inadvisable.
“The law is a genius, really. I refer, as you know, to all its elegant ad hoc acrobatic flexibility.
“Well. In the event, I should like to see you, too, Dorothy — may I call you that? — and have made arrangements, unless you advise otherwise, for a driver to pick you up at the Towers @ 9:30 A.M. Tuesday next.
“I hope you enjoy the roses, Señora.”
When she went back to the lobby she was so furious it was astonishing to her. It was so long since she’d been angry that she was not entirely certain she had it right. Was it always such a drain on the body? Did it usually dry up your mouth so bad that it was difficult to pronounce your words? Had it always made her nauseous? Indeed, she felt so ill that she was quite amazed, she was able to speak at all. For her years Mrs. Bliss was a relatively healthy, vigorous woman, but she would have sworn she felt blood pressure rising in her veins and heart and blood. She felt it seep into organs she could not even name.
She demanded. “What did you do with my roses?”
“What roses is that?”
“That he brought with the note in the limo!”
“The messenger?”
“Yes, the messenger. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Please, Mrs. Bliss, there were no roses. He didn’t bring no roses.”
She’d terrified her. The girl with the gun and the flashlight, the handcuffs and nightstick and two-way radio. She’d reduced her to tears.
“No roses,” Louise Munez said. “I swear you, no roses. You gonna tell my mother there was roses?”
All anger left her. She felt incredibly empty, almost hungry.
“No, no, of course not, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake about the roses.”
It was a mistake, but not Louise’s. It was something she didn’t understand, but somehow she understood there hadn’t been roses. Oh, the world was so difficult. Alcibiades Chitral’s note had come the day after she’d broached the question of a visit to Hector Camerando. It had to have been Camerando who got word to Chitral that she’d asked for a meeting. And then all that stuff about the law and felons and material witnesses and appeals and difficulties, the difference between out-of-the-question and the inadvisable.
What did she know of the world and its kingpins?
Who ruled here? Did the dog track and jai alai interests hold sway over the drug ones?
A word to Camerando, a note from Chitral. Yes, and the mystery of the missing roses. Louise was a little crazy and a blabbermouth but she was honest as the day is long, responsible, an ethics stickler, too conscientious to quit her post for so much as five minutes to stash stolen roses. No, that was out of the question. Speaking of which, she remembered having brought up the whole visit business with Manny after she heard about Alcibiades Chitral’s hundred-year sentence, and recalled that the lawyer’s response had been those words exactly! How could Chitral know? Was Manny from the building working both sides of the street? Impossible, she thought, what could the real estate lawyer get out of it? Or Chitral either? I mean, she thought, they gave the guy a hundred years. What was that supposed to be, a reduced sentence? Or maybe Manny was even a lousier lawyer than Maxine thought he was. Impossible again, thought Mrs. Bliss. The South American was a hotshot drug lord. Those fellows could afford nothing but the best. It was a mystery. It was all a mystery. Like all those cop and detective shows she liked to watch. It was as if — Tommy Overeasy flashed into her head — her 5,512 chickens had come home to roost. Though the mystery of the missing roses was maybe the biggest mystery of them all. Her part in the affair, too. Lashing out at the girl like that — with all she, Louise, had to worry about. It wasn’t like Dorothy. Even though Dorothy didn’t always know what Dorothy was like these days. The sudden, terrible reappearance of temper like a renewal of feelings she almost couldn’t remember ever really having. And suppose when he said that about the roses all he meant were those original roses, the ones he brought the night she sold him Ted’s car. She reread the letter. No, he said, “I hope you enjoy the roses.” That could only mean today’s roses, not roses he’d given her years ago. Unless he thought, and here Dorothy felt herself blush, remembering all the times in the game room when the men had spoken openly of her beauty, and been asked to guess her age as if she were some girl at the fair, she kept them pressed in a book somewhere. Oh, God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, don’t let him think that, anything but not that.