I poured myself some white wine and then took out an old-fashioned glass and filled it with ice. He keeps his Black Jack in a cabinet near the sink, so I added three fingers. I looked at him and he said, “And this much water.” He held his thumb and index finger close together to specify the amount.
I added tap water and passed him the drink, which he sipped while he continued dinner preparations.
I set the table. Henry pulled four homemade dinner rolls from the freezer and put them on a baking sheet. As soon as the oven peeped, he slid the pan in and set the timer. Henry’s a retired commercial baker who even now produces a steady stream of breads, rolls, cookies, cakes, and cinnamon buns so tasty they make me whimper.
I sat down at the table, catching sight of a list of items he needed to handle before he left town. He’d already canceled the newspaper, picked up his cleaning, and rescheduled a dental appointment. He’d drawn a happy face on that line. Henry hates dentists and postpones his visits for as long as he can. He’d crossed out a reminder to himself to roll out the garbage bins for Monday pickup. He’d also put his interior lights on timers and shut down the water valve to the washer so the machine wouldn’t suffer a mishap in his absence. He intended to ask me to water his plants as needed and cruise through his place every two days to make sure things were okay. I checked that item off the list myself. By then the salad had been made and Henry was ladling soup into bowls. We snarfed down our food with the usual dispatch, competing for the land speed record. So far I was ahead.
After supper I helped him with the dishes and then went back to my place, toting a brown paper bag full of perishables he’d passed along to me.
In the morning, I woke at 5:00, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pulled a knit cap over my mop of hair, which was mashed flat on one side and stood straight up everywhere else. Since it was Saturday, I wouldn’t be doing my usual three-mile jog, but I stepped into sweats and running shoes for simplicity’s sake. Henry was waiting on the back patio when I emerged. He looked adorable, of course: chinos and a white dress shirt with a blue cashmere sweater worn over it. His white hair, still damp from the shower, was neatly brushed to one side. I could picture “widder” women in the airport waiting room, angling for the chance to sit next to him.
We chitchatted on the twenty-minute drive to the airport, which allowed me to repress the feelings of melancholy I experienced the minute I dropped him at the gate. I made sure his flight was on time and then I waved once and took off, swallowing the lump in my throat. For a hard-assed private eye, I’m a wienie when it comes to saying good-bye. Home again, I pulled off my shoes, stripped my sweats, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my chin. The Plexiglas skylight above my bed was streaked with the pink-and-blue streamers of a burgeoning dawn when I finally closed my eyes and sank into the warmth.
I woke again at 8:00, showered, dressed in my habitual jeans, turtleneck, and boots, and watched a segment of the news while I finished my cereal and washed my bowl. Neither the newspaper nor the local television station made reference to the shoplifting episode, not even as a tiny two-line report on an inside page. I would have appreciated learning the woman’s name and age, along with some hint of what had happened to her. Was she arrested and charged, or kicked out of the store and told never to return? Policy varied from one retail establishment to the next and ranged from warn-and-release to criminal prosecution-the alternative I’d vote for if it were up to me.
I don’t know why I thought the disturbance would warrant a news story. Crimes take place daily that don’t generate a smidge of interest in the public at large. Minor matters of burglary and theft are relegated to the back page, break-ins reported by neighborhood with a cursory list of items stolen. Vandalism might be elevated to a one-inch squib. Depending on the political climate, taggers might or might not be accorded column space. White-collar crime-especially fraud and embezzlement of public funds-are more likely than murder to inspire irate letters to the editor and the denunciation of corporate greed. My shoplifter and her coconspirator were probably long gone, my bruised shin the only testimony that remained, painful witness to their skullduggery. For the foreseeable future, I’d be scanning pedestrians, alert to the presence of any black Mercedes sedan, all in hopes of spotting one or the other of the two women. Mentally, I sharpened the metal toes of my boots.
In the meantime, I loaded my car with cleaning equipment in anticipation of my Saturday chores. I was at the office by 9:00, happy to find a parking place out front. There was a period of time when I’d hired a service, the Mini-Maids, to clean my office once a week. There were usually four of them, though never the same four twice. They wore matching T-shirts and arrived toting mops, dust cloths, vacuums, and assorted janitorial products. The first time they cleaned for me they took an hour, their efforts thorough and conscientious. I’d been thrilled to pay the fifty bucks because the windows shone, all the surfaces gleamed, and the carpet was as clean as I’d ever seen it. Every visit thereafter, they accelerated the process until they became so efficient, they were in and out again in fifteen minutes, dashing off to the next job as though their very lives depended on it. Even then, much of their time on the premises was spent chatting among themselves. Once they departed, I’d find a dead fly on the windowsill, spider silk trailing from the ceiling, and coffee grounds (or were those ants?) littering the counter in my kitchenette. I figured fifty bucks for fifteen minutes (fraught with giggles and gossip) was the equivalent of two hundred bucks an hour, which was four times more than I earned myself. I fired them with a giddy sense of piety and thrift. Now I made a point of going in at intervals to do the job myself.
It wasn’t until I hauled my vacuum cleaner from the trunk of my car that I noticed the fellow sitting on my steps, smoking a cigarette. His blue jeans had faded to white at the knee and his brown boots were scuffed. He had wide shoulders, and his shirt was a royal blue satin, unbuttoned to the waist, the sleeves rolled up above his biceps. The name Dodie was scrawled in cursive along his right forearm. For a moment I drew a blank, and then his name popped to mind.
He grinned, gold incisors flashing in his weathered face. “You don’t recognize me,” he remarked as I came up the walk.
“I do too. You’re Pinky Ford. Last I heard, you were in jail.”
“I’ve been a free man since last May. I admit I was picked up Friday on a DUI, but I got sprung. That’s what friends are for is how I look at it. Anyways, I had business over at the jail this morning and seeing’s how I was in the neighborhood, I decided to stop by and see how you were doing. How you been?” His voice was raspy from a lifetime of smoking.
“Fine, thanks. And you?”
“Good enough,” he said. He didn’t seem to register the Hoover upright and I didn’t explain. It wasn’t any of his business if I was working as a part-time char. He flipped his cigarette onto the walkway and stood up, brushing off his jeans. He was my height, five six, wiry, bowlegged, and brown from too much sun. His arms and chest were muscular, veins running across like piping. He’d been a jockey in his youth until he got tossed one time too many and decided he’d better find another line of work. He’d started smoking when he was ten and continued the habit as an adult because it was the only way to keep his weight including tack under the 126 pounds required for the Kentucky Derby, which he’d ridden in twice. This was long before his personal fortunes had gone into reverse. He’d kept on smoking for much the same reason any habitual criminal does, to break up the time while he was in the joint.
I put down my vacuum cleaner and unlocked the door, talking to him over my shoulder. “You’re lucky you caught me. I don’t usually come in on Saturdays.”