She smiled.
“And?” I said. “What happened after that?”
She frowned. “The station went broke that first year,” she said. “Sure I can’t get you another plate of oatmeal cookies? Plenty more, though I must save some for Edward. They’re his favorite.”
5
It was a month before I got back around to Mrs. Jonsen again. Oh, I saw her every Thursday evening, dropped off her Hot Supper all right. And promised her that as soon as possible, I’d make her last on my route again so we could have another chat.
Which was something I very much wanted to do; my prejudice against the aged had turned to fascination. These wonderful old ladies were memory books come to life, living, breathing bundles of the past, containing all the wisdom, folly, pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow of a lifetime. Talking to them, I felt a sense of nostalgia for days I’d never known.
But that next week was when I spent the evening hearing Mrs. Fox reminisce, and the week following was my night with the Cooper sisters, and the Thursday evening after that I had a poker game to go to, and so it was a month before I got back around to Mrs. Jonsen.
And too bad, too. Because that was that July evening I told you about; that July evening that seemed like October, where the van and the red-white-and-blue GTO were crowded around the porch of Mrs. Jonsen’s overlit little house, and I made my feeble attempt to play hero and got kicked in the ribs (among other places) for my trouble.
So the second time I came to spend an evening with Mrs. Jonsen was the last time.
And she had nothing to say.
She was, after all, dead; tied to a chair in the kitchen where all those blue Christmas plates had hung. No more. Only faded circles where they had been-every plate, like much else in the house, was gone.
6
Sheriff Brennan took off his white Stetson and played with a lock of greased brown hair. He was wearing a red-and-blue hunting jacket, and under that the cream-colored shirt and cream-colored slacks that, along with the badge on his chest, made up his uniform. Brennan was well over six feet tall, a wide, solid-built man, with less paunch than most men his size, age, and disposition.
When he first came in, accompanied by his deputy Lou Brown, he was all business, and brusque but not offensive in his questioning. I had told him some of the details over the phone-I’d caught him, not a deputy, when I called-but he was taking it all down again, and some new stuff I hadn’t got around to saying before, writing it all in a little notepad.
I told him I couldn’t be sure how many of them there had been, but at least three and probably four. When I mentioned the red-white-and-blue GTO, license number three, Deputy Lou Brown chimed in, “That’s Pat Nelson’s car. He called it in stolen.”
So much for remembering license-plate numbers.
Nonetheless, Brennan had called the local and state police to let them know about the GTO and the green van. He made several other phone calls, the first of which was to the coroner, and it was after that call that he sent Lou Brown out to the patrol car to get a camera for the coroner’s dead-body pictures. Brown, who was about my age and an old high school acquaintance of mine, was a tall thin guy with black hair and a white complexion, extra white tonight. His pencil mustache and neatly trimmed sideburns looked especially black next to his pale, pale face.
After the initial questioning, Brennan said not a word to me, while he got everything in motion. But now that the situation was under control and the detail work beginning, Brennan was starting to get restless. He paced. He wandered around like a caged animal. He was simply too big a man for Mrs. Jonsen’s little house; he was the freak show’s giant stuck in the midget’s dressing room. Restless, pacing, wandering around, Sheriff Brennan was getting pissed off, and that meant he’d be talking to me again.
You see, Brennan didn’t like me much. And our mutual dislike was about all we had in common.
I was sitting on the arm of the couch in Mrs. Jonsen’s living room. From where I was, I could see into the dining room, off to the right, beyond which was the kitchen, off to the left. The couch was one of a handful of things left in the room. The television was gone, along with the cabinet of antique china and some of the older, nicer pieces of furniture; most everything was gone. In addition, much that remained had been torn apart, as if looting the place wasn’t enough and a finishing touch of vandalism had been necessary. Pillows and couch and chair cushions had been gutted by some sharp knife; even the flowered wallpaper had been chopped into here and there. The braid rug had been rolled carelessly to one side, and floorboards had been pried loose. Any furniture that didn’t fit the category of antique had been knocked over, mostly broken by the force of the act.
Suddenly Brennan stopped pacing. He looked at me like he hadn’t noticed I was there before. He said, “What’re you doing here, Mallory?” He rocked back and forth on his feet.
I didn’t say anything. He seemed to want me to be a smart-ass, so he could yell at me or maybe slap me around a little. But I didn’t oblige him. I’m never witty after getting kicked in the nuts.
“What’re you doing here?” he continued. “What’s this delivery-boy horseshit?”
“It’s just something I was doing.”
“What were you delivering food at seven o’clock at night for?”
“I was about an hour behind schedule. I got to talking to one of the other old ladies.”
Light flashed from the kitchen, where Lou Brown was taking pictures of the body. Brennan turned to go out to the kitchen and said, over his shoulder, “I’ll be talking to you some more, Mallory.”
“Terrific.”
“You sit right there.”
“And here I was planning to dance,” I said, finally obliging him with the smart-ass remark he was after.
He stopped and looked at me hard. “Maybe you find this funny.”
I stood. “Not at all, Brennan. It’s just I’m bored with your stupid macho act, which is what you fall back on for lack of being able to launch an actual investigation.” I was pointing a finger at him like a gun.
“Don’t point your finger at me-”
I showed him another finger.
“Brennan!” It was Lou Brown, in the kitchen.
“Yeah, coming,” Brennan said, glaring at me, then joining Brown.
I sat down.
More light flashed in the kitchen doorway. Two ambulance attendants came in, rolling a stretcher behind them. Brennan told them just a minute, and they stood outside the kitchen in the dining area, which was just as emptied and torn up as the living room. The attendants wore traditional white and seemed anxious to get in there, like guys on the bench waiting to get in the game. I wondered if they’d run the siren coming out here. I doubted they would run the siren going back.
A fat man in a brown suit burst through the front door. He was just short of being round; his flesh was doughy and paler than Deputy Brown’s. His hair was the same color as his suit, and he was balding, combing his hair over the front of his head from in back where it was still growing, Zero Mostel-style. In fact, he resembled Zero Mostel, only not funny.
“Look at this place,” he said, looking at it. “Oh my God, look at it.” He peered into the living room and covered his face with a pudgy hand. “Jesus Christ, will you look at it! So much gone, so much ruined!”
He padded into the kitchen and the house seemed to tremble.
I heard him say, “She’s dead?”
There was a mumbling that must’ve been Brennan or somebody saying, “That’s right,” or something. It wasn’t a question that took much of an answer. It didn’t take a doctor to pronounce that body dead.
“What can be done?” he said. He spoke loud. His voice was baritone, but not very masculine.
There was another mumbling: somebody saying, “Nothing can be done,” or the equivalent. Maybe somebody said, “Bury her,” which is about all you can do for a dead person, after all.