She giggled. Then, “I’m not a whore.”
“I know you’re not.”
“But that’s what people’d say if they found out.”
I pulled up in the driveway of our folks’ place. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “This’ll all work out.”
“Maybe the potassium’ll really work.”
She kissed me back on the cheek then slid out of the car. “I’ll call you tomorrow. And thanks for being such a nice brother.”
“My pleasure.”
“And Cliffie is still an asshole.”
On the way over to my place, I played the radio real loud. I tried to drive all thought of Ruthie from my mind. The potassium wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know if anything would work.
This was going to devastate my whole family.
Twelve
Mrs. Goldman’s house had once been what she laughingly called “a starter mansion,” meaning that it was a lot more house than she and her husband could afford at the time, but not enough of a house to qualify as one of the true mansions you saw on the other side of town. Mr. Goldman, who was in the real estate business, didn’t live long enough to make his final fortune. He left his wife, Sandra, enough term insurance to pay off the house and support herself by taking in boarders. The place was a two-story gingerbread Victorian. I had half of the huge upstairs as my apartment. I also had a stall in the garage and my own back entrance for when I came in late. Two meals, breakfast and dinner, were included in the price of the rent. Mrs. Goldman was a great cook. She was also a frustrated writer and photographer.
She was always working on her history of the town. She was doing a great job. We’d spent a lot of long nights together watching her Tv set and talking about her book and the plans I have for when my law practice gets rolling.
When I came into the vestibule tonight, I peeked through the French doors on the first floor.
She was sitting in a chair reading a novel. The Tv was on but the sound was turned down. She’d explained once that it was like having company you didn’t have to pay any attention to. She was a tall, slender, striking woman in her early fifties. She’d been dating a dentist from Cedar Rapids for several years but I didn’t have the sense that marriage was imminent.
She waved me in.
“You missed a nice meal.”
“Sorry.”
“Meat loaf.” Then she smiled. “There’s enough left for a sandwich later if you get hungry.
I’ll make it for you if you want.”
“Well, I’m going to that skating party.”
“Oh, those poor singers. The rock and roll ones.”
“Yes.”
She shook her elegant head. She wore a white blouse, a dramatic black belt, gray slacks and black flats. When Lauren Bacall gets older, she’ll probably look something like Mrs. Goldman. If she’s lucky.
“And poor Susan Whitney.”
“I didn’t know you knew her.”
“Oh, you know, from Leopold Bloom’s. As you know, I don’t care for the couple that run it, but it is a pleasant place to spend an hour or two occasionally. Especially if they’re not there and it’s just a clerk.”
I thought of Steve Renauld and his relationship with Susan Whitney and of her remark that she could only sleep with men she felt sorry for.
“The kind of man her husband was, I guess I’m not surprised,” she said.
Maybe at breakfast I’d tell her my theory that Kenny hadn’t killed her. For now, I wanted to get my skates and head for the rink. I was hoping to see Pamela there.
“Well, I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“How come you’re limping?”
Maybe I’d tell her about Cliffie, too, in the morning. “Oh, I slipped on the ice.”
She put her novel on her lap and leaned forward in the chair. “Say, did you come home about three-thirty this afternoon?”
“No, why?”
“I thought I heard somebody up in your room.
I can’t be sure. But I thought I heard footsteps up there and then something scraping the floor.”
“It wasn’t Andrea?” Andrea being the English teacher who rents the other half of the upstairs.
She teaches at the state-run school for the deaf.
She’s one of those secretive women who always look vaguely frightened. She lugs home armloads of mystery novels from the library, Mignon Eberhardt seeming to be her favorite, and rarely says a word.
“No, she doesn’t get home until at least four-thirty.”
I raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if I had X-ray vision and could see through the floor right into my apartment. It’d be pretty cool to be Superman. Just beam your eyes right through the floor. But among my many goals, turning myself into Superman was probably the least achievable.
“This was about three-thirty?”
“Yes. And it wasn’t you?”
“No, no it wasn’t me.”
“I could’ve been mistaken.”
“I’ll go have a look.”
“I hope I don’t seem like some old busybody.”
I smiled. “Hardly.”
“Would you like me to come up there with you?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
“I have my husband’s handgun from the war.”
“I appreciate it. But that’s fine.”
“I’ll be happy to give you the gun. It’s a forty-five.”
It came into my head, then, something that had been wedged in there uncomfortably ever since Cliffie had put it there about forty-five minutes ago.
He said that Susan had been killed with a. 32.
But the gun Kenny had fired at me through the window, and the gun he used to kill himself with, was a. 45. So where had the. 32 come from? And I hadn’t seen a. 32 anywhere in the house.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “I just thought of something.”
Then, “Well, I guess I’ll go upstairs.”
“You sure you don’t want the gun?”
“Even if there was somebody up there, he’s long gone by now.”
We talked a bit more and then I closed the French doors and started up the stairs that rose from the vestibule. I clicked on the stairway light, something I don’t always do, and went up the steps. I could tell Andrea was home because there was a line of light beneath her door.
Otherwise I’d have had no idea if she was home or not. She was utterly silent. The other door, down the hall from hers, was mine. The line beneath it was dark. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I used my key and let myself in. Darkness.
I had two large rooms and a bath. The only light came through a window from a streetlight a quarter block away. I walked toward it. There was a table with a lamp to the side of that window. I clicked on the light.
If there had been somebody in here, he or she was awfully neat. At least in the living room.
Nothing whatsoever looked different or disordered.
Mrs. Goldman keeps my place very neat.
She raised two sons and always says the trick with boys is never let their rooms go more than two days unchecked. So she dusts and vacuums and picks up twice a week before the governor has to declare my place an official disaster area.
It’s a pleasant furnished apartment. The furniture isn’t new but it’s clean and comfortable and the place was wallpapered fresh only a month before I moved in. When the window’s open, you can still smell the fresh wallpaper paste, which is a smell I’m inexplicably fond of. There’s a great shower and a very firm mattress. My favorite spot is the recliner where I read my crime paperbacks. There’s a lamp that hangs right over my shoulder for plenty of light, and a small table to my left where I can set my ashtray and Pall Malls and a can of beer or a Pepsi. Now if I just had Pamela living here with me…
I tried the bedroom. Nothing looked disturbed in there, either. The cats trailed behind me. They didn’t want to miss anything. I half-expected one of them to put on her deerstalker cap and the other to produce a magnifying glass. They’d probably have better luck than I was having.
Where it went wrong was in the bedroom closet.
Just last night I’d set a pair of loafers down on the floor to take to the shoe repair shop for new heels. I remembered doing this.