In the front of the XXX-theater was a small shop where you could rent videos and buy various “appliances” (as they are called). He was never comfortable in such places. Probably his strict Lutheran upbringing. These are places of sin.
The man behind the counter had bad teeth and a wandering left eye. Somehow that was fitting in a place like this.
He described the woman he was looking for but the counter man immediately shook his head. “Don’t know her, pal.”
He described the woman a little more but the man shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said exhaling Pall Mall smoke through the brown stubs of his teeth.
He didn’t expect to get lucky right off, and he sure didn’t. He started at the west end of the street and worked down it: three bars, a massage parlor, a used clothing store, a tiny soup kitchen run by two old nuns, and a bar with a runway for strippers.
And nothing.
Sorry, my friend. Sorry, buddy. Sorry, Jack.
Never seen/heard of her. You know, pal?
And so then he started on the women themselves.
Because of the rain, which was steady and cold, they stood in doorways instead of along the curbsides. The thirty-four degree temperature kept them from any cute stuff. No whistling down drivers. No shaking their asses. No jumping into the streets.
Just huddling in doorways instead. And kind of shivering.
And it was the same with them: no help.
He’d describe her and they’d shrug or shake their heads or pretend they were thinking a long moment and go “Nope, ’fraid not, friend.”
Only one of them got smart-mouth. She said, “She musta been somethin’ really special, huh?” and all the time was rubbing her knuckles against his crotch.
Inside his nice respectable topcoat, the .38 was burning a fucking hole.
Around midnight he stopped in this small diner for coffee and a sandwich. He was tired, he already had sniffles from the cold steady rain, and he had a headache, too. He bought his food and a little aluminum deal of Bufferin and took them right down.
And then he asked the counter guy — having no hopes really, just asking the guy kind of automatically — and the guy looked at him and said, “Yeah. Betty.”
“Yes. That’s right. Her name was Betty.”
Through the fog of four years, through the fog of a liquored-up night: yes, goddammit that’s right, Betty was her name. Betty.
He asked, “Is she still around?”
The counter man, long hairy tattoed arms, leaned forward and gave him a kind of queer look. “Oh, yeah, she’s still around.”
The counter man sounded as if he expected the man to know what he was hinting at.
“You know where I can find her?”
The counter man shook his head. “I don’t know if that’d be right, mister.”
“How come?”
He shrugged. “Well, she’s sort of a friend of mine.”
“I see.”
And from inside his respectable suburban topcoat, he took his long leather wallet and peeled off a twenty and laid it on the counter and felt like fucking Sam Spade. “I’d really like to talk to her tonight.”
The counter man stared at the twenty. He licked dry lips with an obscene pink tongue. “I see what you mean.”
“How about it?”
“She really is kind of a friend of mine.”
So Sam Spade went back into action. He laid another crisp twenty on the original crisp twenty.
The tongue came out again. This time he couldn’t watch the counter man. He pretended to be real interested in the coffee inside his cheap chipped cup.
So of course the counter man gave him her address and told him how to get there.
Fog. Rain. The sound of his footsteps. You could smell the rotting lumber of this ancient neighborhood now that it was soaked. Little shabby houses packed so close together you couldn’t ride a bicycle between some of them. One-story brick jobs mostly that used to be packed with Slavs. But the Slavs have good factory jobs now so they had moved out and eager scared blacks had taken their place.
Hers was lime green stucco. Behind a heavy drape a faint light shone.
He gripped the gun.
On the sidewalk he stepped in two piles of dogshit. And now the next-door dog — as if to confirm his own existence — started barking.
He went up the narrow walk to her place.
He stood under the overhang. The concrete porch had long ago pulled away from the house and was wobbly. He felt as if he were trying to stand up on a capsizing row boat.
The door opened. A woman stood there. “Yes?”
His memory of her was that she’d been much heavier. Much.
He said, “Betty?”
“Right.”
“Betty Malloy?”
“Right again.” She sounded tired, even weak. “But not the old Betty Malloy.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I ain’t what I used to be.”
Cryptic as her words were, he thought that they still made sense.
“I’d like to come in.”
“Listen, I don’t do that no more, all right?”
“I’d like to come in anyway.”
“Why?”
He sighed. If he pulled the gun here, she might get the chance to slam the door and save herself.
He had to get inside.
He put his hand on the knob of the screen door.
It was latched.
Sonofabitch.
“I need to use your phone,” he said.
“Who are you?”
In some naive way, he’d expected her to remember who he was. But of course she wouldn’t.
“Could I use your phone?”
“For what?”
“To call Triple-A.”
“Something’s wrong with your car?”
“The battery went dead.”
“Where’s your car?”
“What?”
“I asked where your car was. I don’t see no new car. And you definitely look like the kind of guy who’d be driving a new car.”
So he decided screw it and pulled the gun.
He put it right up against the screen door.
She didn’t cry out or slam the door or anything. She just stood there. The gun had mesmerized her.
“You gotta be crazy, mister.”
“Unlatch the door.”
“I ain’t got no money, man. I ain’t got nothing you’d want. Believe me.”
“Just unlatch the fucking door or I start shooting.”
“My God, mister, I don’t know what this could be about. I really don’t.”
But she unlatched the door and he went inside.
He closed and locked both doors behind him.
He turned around and looked at the small living room she stood in. The first thing he noticed was that she had not one but two velvet paintings of Jesus above the worn and frayed couch. There was a 17-inch color TV set playing a late movie with Sandra Dee. There was a pressed wood coffee table with only three legs, a stack of paperback books substituting for the missing leg.
She sat on the couch.
He pointed the gun at her.
She said, sounding exhausted now, “You look crazy, mister. I can’t help but tell you the truth. You really look crazy.”
And now he had some idea of how much weight she’d lost. Maybe forty, fifty pounds. And her facial skin was pulled drum-tight over her cheekbones. And her pallor was gray.
There was a bad odor in the place, too, and he didn’t have to ask what it was.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, waving the gun at her. She’d been right. He heard his words. He was crazy.
She looked up at him from sad and weary eyes. “I’m so tired, mister, just from walking over to the door that I can’t— What do you want anyway?”
“You know this is pretty goddamn funny.”