Dorothy smiled at the Duke. “I’m a bitch, right? I wasn’t once. Do your women talk to you like that, Duke? No, they wouldn’t, would they? They wouldn’t dare. They wouldn’t want to. Tell me about the Indians? How many were there? Did they all have knives? Do they still wear feathers? How many did you knock out? Kill?”
The Duke watched Fred Margon. “You writes good, professor?”
“You see,” Dorothy said, “we’re going to stay at the university three more years. We may even stay forever. Isn’t that grand news? I can stay here and do nothing forever.”
The Duke said to Fred, “They puts what you writes in books?”
Dorothy said, “Did you ever want something, wait for something, think you have it at last, and then suddenly it’s so far away again you can’t even see it anymore?”
“I’m a writer,” Fred said. “A writer and a teacher. I can’t go to New York and write lies for money.”
Dorothy stood up. “Dance with me, Duke. I want to dance. I want to dance right now.”
She opened the apartment door my second day in Syracuse, looked at my duffel coat, beret, and missing arm.
“He’s out. Go find him in one of your literary bars!”
“Mrs. Margon?” I said.
She cocked her head, suspicious yet coy, blonde and flirtatious. “You want me?”
“Would it do me any good?”
She laughed. “Do we know each other, Mr. — ?”
“Fortune,” I said. “No.”
She eyed me. “Then what do you want to talk to me about?”
“Alma Jean Brant,” I said.
She started to close the door. “Go and find my husband.”
I held the door with my foot. “No, I want you. Both ways.”
She laughed again, neither flirtatious nor amused this time. Self-mocking, a little bitter. “You can probably have me. Both ways.” But stepped back, held the door open. “Come in.”
It was a small apartment: a main room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bathroom. All small, cramped. The furniture had to have been rented with the apartment. They don’t pay assistant professors too well, and the future of a writer is at best a gamble, so without children they saved their money, scrimped, did without. She lit a cigarette, didn’t offer me one.
“What about that Alma Jean woman?”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“Nothing. That’s Fred’s territory. Ask him.”
“About her murder?”
She smoked. “I thought it was an accident. Or suicide. Drunk and fell over that bridge wall, or jumped. Isn’t that what the police think?”
“The police don’t think anything one way or the other. I think it was murder.”
“What do you want, Mr. Fortune? A confession?”
“Do you want to make one?”
“Yes, that I’m a nasty bitch who wants more than she’s got. Just more. You understand that, Mr. Fortune.”
“It’s a modern disease,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with Alma Jean Brant?”
She smoked. “You wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t seen me around her.”
“Her husband,” I said. “And Walter Ellis.”
The couch creaked under her as if it had rusty springs. “I was jealous. Or maybe just suspicious. He’s so involved in his work, I’m so bored, our sex life is about zero. We never do anything! We talk, read, think, discuss, but we never do! I make his life miserable, I admit it. But he promised we would stay here only five years or until he published a novel. We would go down to New York, he’d make money, we’d have some life! I counted on that. Now he wants to get tenure, stay here!”
“So he can teach and write?” I said. “That’s all? No other reason for wanting to stay here?”
She nodded. “When he started going out all the time, I wondered too. Research for his work, he said, but I heard about Alma Jean. So I followed him and found where she lived. Then I followed her to see if she’d meet him somewhere else. That’s all. I just watched her house, followed her a few times. I never saw him do a damn thing that could be close to cheating. At her house that husband of hers was around all the time. He must work nights.”
“Did you see her do anything?”
She smoked. “I saw her visit the same house three or four times. I got real suspicious then. I hadn’t seen Fred go in, but after she left the last time, I went up and rang the bell. A guy answered, but it wasn’t Fred, so I made some excuse and got out of there. She was meeting someone all right, but not Fred.”
“Any idea who?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t an Indian, I can say that.”
“What was he?”
“Black, Mr. Fortune. One big black man.”
Through the mass of sound and movement, bodies and faces that glistened with sweat and gaudy color and melted into the bright colors and tortured figures of the mural on the walls, I watched Joey Brant across the dance floor drinking and talking to Walter Ellis, who only listened.
I watched Dorothy Margon move lightly through the shuffle of the massed dancers. Her slender body loose and supple, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her face turned up to the Duke. I could see a man she denied turn to someone else. A man who could not give her what she wanted turning to someone who wanted less.
Her hips moved a beat behind the band; her long blonde hair swung free against the black velvet of her dress and the scarred face of the Duke. I could see her, restless and rejecting, but still not wanting her man to go anywhere else.
“I can’t tell the dancers from the people in the mural,” Fred Margon said. “I can’t be sure which woman is my wife with the Duke and which is the woman chained in the mural.”
He was talking about himself: a man who could not tell which was real and which was only an image. He could not decide, be certain, which was real to him, image or reality.
“Which man is the Duke on the dance floor with my wife,” Fred Margon said, “and which is the blue man with the bare chest and hammer in the mural? Am I the man at the ringside table with a glass of beer in a pale, indoor hand watching the Duke dance with his wife, or the thin scarecrow in the mural with his wrists chained and his starving face turned up to an empty sky?”
He was trying to understand something, and across the dance floor Joey Brant was talking and talking to Walter Ellis. Ellis only listened and watched the Duke and Dorothy Margon on the dance floor. The Duke sweated, and Dorothy Margon danced with her eyes closed, her body moving as if by itself.
Walter Ellis sat alone in the back of his pink Cadillac. I leaned in the window.
“A black man, she said. A big black man Alma Jean visited in a house in the ghetto.”
“A lot of big black men in the ghetto, Fortune.”
“What was the crisis?” I said. “You said going on the streets was what ghetto women did in a crisis.”
“I don’t know.”
“You offered to pay for whatever she needed money for.”
“She only told me she needed something that cost a lot of money.”
“Needed what?”
“A psychiatrist. I sent her to the best.”
“A black? Big? Lives near here? Expensive?”
“All that.”
“Can we go and talk to him?”
“Anytime.”
“And you didn’t give her the money to pay him?”
“She wouldn’t take it. Said she would know what it was really for even if it was only in my mind.”
The Duke said, “There was this here chippie. I mean, she’s workin’ my streets ’n’ I don’ work her, see? I mean, it’s snowin’ bad ’n’ there ain’t no action goin’ down, my three pigs’re holed up warmin’ their pussy, but this chippie she’s out workin’ on my turf. Hey, that don’t go down, you know? I mean, that’s no scene, right? So I moves in to tell her to fly her pussy off’n my streets or sign up with the Duke.”