He carried the drinks back into the living room and handed one to Cindy McCabe, who nodded her thanks and rubbed the chilled glass across her forehead. “Gosh, that feels good.” She took a long swallow, smiled, and said, “That feels even better.”
Dill, seated on the couch, tried some of his own drink. “You’re right,” he agreed.
“Harold and me are awful sorry about Felicity, Mr. Dill. It was just so — well, awful. One minute there she was ringing our doorbell and the next minute she was gone.”
“How long’ve you lived here?”
“About a year and a half. A little less maybe. We moved in right after Felicity bought the place. She sure was a nice landlady. Some of them, you know, will raise your rent every six months, but Felicity didn’t even raise ours once because Harold helped her around the place fixing anything that went broke. He’s good at that — fixing stuff.”
“What’s Harold do?”
“Well, he’s selling home computers right now and doing okay, but he says it’s going to peter out this month or next the way they’re flooding the market again. What he really wants to do is get back into electronics. He had two years down at the university, you know, studying electrical engineering, but had to drop out. Harold’s real good at that stuff. Electronics. He likes it a lot more’n selling.”
Cindy McCabe, apparently made thirsty by talk, took a long pull at her drink. Dill watched her almost invisible Adam’s apple move up and down three times. She lowered the drink and smiled, if not nervously, at least uncomfortably. “I sorta hate to bring this up right now,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, yesterday, just before it — you know, happened, well, Felicity stopped by and reminded Harold he’d forgot to pay the rent again. Sometimes I don’t know about Harold. Things just slip his mind. He’s sorta like the absentminded professor, you know?”
Dill nodded that he did.
“Anyway, it’s embarrassing. So he wrote the check out yesterday and gave it to her and then it happened, right out front, and, well, we don’t exactly know what to do. You think we oughta stop payment on that one and write another one? And who do we make it out to? It’s sorta tacky, I guess, bothering you with this now, but we don’t want anyone coming around later and claiming we didn’t pay the rent.”
“Forget about it until the end of the month,” Dill said. “By then things should be straightened out, and Felicity’s lawyer will call and tell you where to send the rent and who to make the check out to.”
“And we’ll just stop payment on the one we gave Felicity?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” As if to prove it, she finished off her drink in three swallows. Dill rose and held out his hand for her glass.
Cindy McCabe frowned. “I don’t think — oh, well, one more, I guess.”
When Dill returned with the fresh drinks he saw that the blue polka-dot halter had either slipped or been tugged down an inch or so, revealing the top quarter of Cindy McCabe’s perky breasts, which seemed to be as well tanned as the rest of her. Dill handed her the drink, smiled down at her breasts, or what he could see of them, and said, “You have a nice tan.”
She giggled and looked down. “I work on it hard enough.” She gave the halter a tug up, but it was only a half-hearted tug. “There’s this hedge out back?” she said, making her statement a question.
Dill nodded that he believed it.
“Well, it goes all the way around the backyard and it’s about nine feet tall and real thick. Nobody can see through it. So this summer I just laid out there in nothing at all until the middle of last week when it got so godawful hot. I mean, it was just like lying in an oven, even with nothing on. Earlier this summer, when it was cooler, Felicity’d come out and join me sometimes when she was working nights or on the swing shift.”
“In nothing at all?” Dill said.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t anything like that.”
“Like what?”
“Well, when she came out I’d put something on. I mean, after all.”
“Did you and Harold see much of Felicity?”
“To tell the truth we didn’t, because she worked those funny hours. One week days, one week nights, and the week after that it’d be the swing shift. Sometimes we didn’t even see her for weeks at a time. In fact, we wouldn’t even hear her up here. I mean, if she was working nights, she’d get home in the morning before we got up, and then she’d usually leave while Harold was still at work and I was out back. She never made a sound up here. I told her once we never heard her and she just smiled and said she went barefoot most of the time. But anytime anything went kaflooey she’d leave a note asking me to ask Harold to take care of it. And when he did she’d be so happy and ask us both up to have a drink. But we never went out anywhere together, and like I said, we hardly knew she was up here. The only time we ever heard anything was when that big guy came around yelling and banging on her door.”
“What big guy?” Dill asked.
“I guess he was her ex-boyfriend. He sure was big, I know that. Harold said he used to play football down at the university, but if he told me his name, I forgot it because I think football sucks.”
“How often did the big guy come around?”
“You don’t think he had something to do with what — well, with what happened, do you?”
“No. I’m just curious about Felicity and who her friends were — even her ex-friends.”
“Well, he was blond and big as a barn and young, not over thirty anyway, which I still think is young and I’m twenty-eight and don’t care who knows it.”
“You don’t look it,” Dill lied.
“Well, I am.”
“How often did he come around yelling and banging on the door?”
“The big guy? Oh, that just happened once, the very first month we moved in. I thought, What in the world have we got ourselves into? It got so bad I asked Harold to do something about it, but he wouldn’t. Harold said it was none of our business what a cop did, even a lady cop. I think he was a little afraid of the big guy — and he really was big. Of course, Felicity wasn’t so little herself — five-ten at least. But I still don’t know how she and the big guy ever — well, you know.” Her expression grew a bit dreamy and Dill wondered how often she had had fantasies about the big guy.
“So what happened?” Dill said.
“Oh, I went up the next morning and saw her and told her all that fuss’d kept Harold awake, which was a lie, because he’d slept right through most of it, and it was me they’d kept awake. She was nice as pie. But then she always was, even when Harold got the rent checks fucked up — oops. Sorry. Must be the bourbon.” She giggled. Dill smiled.
“The big guy didn’t come back?” he asked.
“Nope. Never. Felicity said it’d stop and it did. Never a sound after that. She didn’t even play her TV hardly any, not even in the morning for Good Morning America, and that’s what I always watch. She’d sometimes turn it on for the evening news, but not loud.”
“Did Captain Colder come around much?” Dill said.
“Who?”
“Captain Colder. Gene Colder.”
“Oh. Him. He was here yesterday. Asking me and Harold questions and kind of pretending we’d never seen him before.”
“But you had?”
“Oh, sure. He used to come around and pick Felicity up, maybe once or twice a week.”
“Did he always bring her back?”
“Sometimes he did. But sometimes she didn’t come home at all.”
Dill thought that the look she gave him over the rim of her glass was meant to be smoldering. Instead, it was a bit glazed. He realized she was a little drunk.