“I think I’ll scream,” Dorothy Margon said. “Or is that too undignified for the wife of a scholar, a pure artist?”
Fred Margon drank his beer, looked unhappy.
“Booze is their god,” Dorothy Margon said. “That’s very good. Isn’t that good, Mr. Fortune? You really are bright, Fred. I wonder what you ever saw in me? Just the bod, right? You like female bods at least. You like them a lot when you’ve got time.”
“You want to leave?” Fred said.
“No, tell us why drink is their god. Go on, tell us.”
“No other god ever helped them.”
“Clever,” Dorothy said. “Isn’t he clever, Mr. Fortune? Going to do great scholarly research, teach three classes, and finish his novel all at the same time. Then there’s the female bods. When he has time. Or maybe he makes time for that.”
“We’ll leave,” Fred said.
“All day every day: scholar, teacher, novelist. For twenty whole thousand dollars a year!”
“We manage,” Fred Margon said.
“Never mind,” Dorothy said. “Just never mind.”
I met him in a coffee shop on South Grouse after a class. He looked tired. We had coffee, and he told me about Alma Jean.
“I found her in an Indian bar six months ago. I like to walk through the city, meet the real people,” He drank his coffee. “She had a way of speaking full of metaphors. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the poetry of totally untrained people, got a grant to continue the research. I met her as often as I could. In the bars and in her home. To listen and record her speech. She was highly intelligent. Her insights were remarkable for someone without an education, and her way of expressing her thoughts was pure uneducated poetry.”
“You liked her?”
He nodded. “She was real, alive.”
“How much did you like her, professor?”
“Make it Fred, okay? I’m only a bottom-step assistant professor, and sometimes I want to drop the whole thing, live a real life, make some money.” He drank his coffee, looked out the café window. He knew what I was asking. “My wife isn’t happy, Mr. Fortune. When she’s unhappy, she has the classic female method of showing it. Perhaps in time I would have tried with Alma Jean, but I didn’t. She really wasn’t interested, you know? In me or any other man. Only her husband.”
“You know her husband?”
“I’ve met him. Mostly at her house, sometimes in a bar. He seems to drink a lot. I asked her about that. She said it was part of being an Indian, a ‘brave.’ Work hard and drink hard. He always seemed angry. At her, at his bosses, at everything. He didn’t like me, or my being there, as if it were an insult to him, but he just sat in the living room, drinking and looking out a window at the tall buildings downtown. Sometimes he talked about working on those buildings. He was proud of that. Alma Jean said that was the culture; a ‘man’ did brave work, daring.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“The day she died.” He shrugged as he drank his coffee. “The police know. I had a session with her early in the day at her house. Her husband wasn’t there, and she seemed tired, worried. She’d been unhappy for months, I think, but it was always hard to tell with her. Always cheerful and determined. I told her there was a book in her life, but she only scorned the idea. Life was to be lived, not written about. When there were troubles, you did something.”
“What troubles sent her out on the streets?”
He shook his head. “She never told me. A few weeks ago she asked me to pay her for making the tapes. She needed money. I couldn’t pay her much on my grant, but I gave her what I could. I know it wasn’t anywhere near enough. I heard her talking on the telephone, asking about the cost of something.”
“You don’t know what?”
“No.” He drank coffee. “But whoever she was talking to offered to pay for whatever it was. She turned him down.”
“You’re sure it was a him?”
“No, I’m not sure.”
“Who killed her, professor?”
Outside, the students crunched through the snow in the gray light. He watched them as if he wished he were still one of them, his future unknown. “I don’t know who killed her, Mr. Fortune. I know she didn’t commit suicide, and I doubt that she fell off that bridge. I never saw her drunk. When her husband drank, she never did, as if she had to be sober to take care of him.”
“Where were you that night?”
“At home,” he said, looked up at me. “But I couldn’t sleep, another argument with my wife. So I went out walking in the snow. Didn’t get back until two A.M. or so.”
“Was it still snowing?”
“It had just stopped when I got home.”
“Did you see anyone while you were out?”
“Not Alma Jean, if that’s what you want to know. I did see that older friend of hers. What’s his name? Walter Ellis?”
“Where?”
“Just driving around. That pink Caddy of his is easy to remember. Especially in the snow, so few cars driving.”
“And all you were doing with her was recording her speech?”
He finished his coffee. “That’s all, Mr. Fortune.”
After he left, I paid for the coffee. He was an unhappy man, and not just about money or work.
The scar-faced man stood just inside the door. Snow dripped from his dirty raincoat into a pool around his black boots. A broad, powerfully built man with a fresh bandage on his face. Dark stains covered the front of his raincoat. The raincoat and his black shirt were open at the throat. He wore a large silver cross bedded in the hair of his chest.
“Now there’s something you can write about,” Dorothy Margon said. “Real local color. Who is he? What is he? Why don’t you make notes. You didn’t forget your notebook, did you, Fred?”
“His name is Duke,” Fred Margon said. “He’s a pimp, and this is his territory. A small-time pimp, only three girls on the street now. He takes 80 percent of what they make to protect them, lets them support him with most of the rest. But the competition is fierce, and business is bad this season. He gives students a cut rate; professors pay full price.”
“Of course,” Dorothy said. “Part of your ‘research’ into ‘ordinary’ people. All for art and scholarship.” She looked at the man at the entrance. “I wonder what his girls are like. Are they young or old? Do they admire him? I suppose they all love him. Of course they do. All three of them in love with him.”
“In love with him and afraid of him,” I said.
“Love and fear,” Fred Margon said. “Their world.”
“Do I hear a story?” Dorothy said. “Is everything a story? Nothing real? With results? Change? A future?”
I watched him come across the dance floor toward our table. Duke Wiltkowski, the pimp in the streets where Alma Jean had been found dead.
The pimp’s office was a cellar room with a single bare bulb, a table for a desk, some battered armchairs, a kerosene heater, and water from melted snow pooled in a dark corner. Times had been better for Duke Wiltkowski.
“You sayin’ I killed her? You sayin’ that, man?” His black face almost hidden in the shadows of the cellar room, the light of the bare bulb barely reaching where he sat behind the table.
“Someone did,” I said. “You had a motive.”
“You say I kill that chippie, you got trouble, man. I got me a good lawyer. He sue you for everythin’ you got!”
“The police say she was in your territory.”
“The police is lyin’! The police say I kill that chippie, they lyin’!” His voice was high and thin, almost hysterical. It’s a narrow world of fear, his world. On the edge. Death on one side, prison on the other, hunger and pain in between.
“She was free-lance in your territory. You can’t let her do that. Not and survive. Let her do that, and you’re out of business.”