She said something from the other side, I could see her lips move, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying through the glass and wood door.
“Speak louder,” I said.
Her lips moved more emphatically, but still I couldn’t hear her. She made a motion for me to open the door. I wondered if she was merely moving her lips, pretending to speak in order to trick me into letting her in.
“What do you want?”
She made the same motion. With another nervous glance over her shoulder into the shadowy emptiness of the vestibule, I opened the door.
“Victor, what’s the matter?” she said as she stepped into the lobby. I quickly closed the door. She dripped onto the thin blue rug. “You looked as if you were going to turn me away like I was a Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert you.”
“What do you want?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Well, I was sleeping fine.”
“Don’t be such a grouch. Let me upstairs so I can take off this raincoat and dry out some.”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Oh, Victor, you’re such a Puritan. I’m sure I’ll be safe.”
She leaned forward to kiss me. I didn’t pull back, she was too beautiful to pull back from, but I didn’t return her kiss, either, so it was like she was kissing a statue, a statue nearly pissing his pants in fear.
“Who’s Mr. Rogers?” I asked after she had stopped kissing me and backed away with disappointment creasing her face.
“Mr. Rogers?”
“Very thin black man, elegantly dressed, droopy eyes. A drug seller, I think.”
“Oh, you mean Norvel Goodwin. Do you know Norvel too?”
“Is that his real name?” I said. “Well, your Norvel Goodwin took me for a ride Thursday night in the councilman’s limo. He told me to stay away from you. That if I didn’t he would hurt me. Then he had his goon give me this black eye.”
“Oh dear.” She touched the swelling lightly with her fingertips.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Just an old friend. I guess he’s jealous.”
“Of me?”
“Why not?”
“There was more than jealousy,” I said. “There’s something going on between him and Jimmy.”
“Norvel and Jimmy hate each other, they have ever since the thing with Jimmy’s daughter. Jimmy almost killed him once.”
“He said there were things going on with you and this case that I didn’t understand. Do you know anything about that?”
“Norvel’s a little crazy with conspiracies. Ask him who killed Malcolm X sometime.”
“Who does he say?”
“Are you going to let me up?” she asked.
“What are you really doing here?”
“The Greek left me another dead animal. A bird this time, a dove, pretty white feathers. Its neck was snapped.”
“Jesus.”
“Please.”
I stared at her lovely face for a moment and decided that she had been crying. “Follow me,” I said as I turned to go up the stairs.
On the way up I asked, “Would this Norvel Goodwin hurt me like he said?”
“No, he’s not like that.”
And then a few steps later, “Well, maybe.”
And as soon as I opened the door, “Yes, he would.”
I took her coat and hung it over a chair. She was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a sweatshirt, but even in her athletic wear, and even with the damage done to her makeup by the tears, she was too beautiful. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked, and I showed her where it was.
While she was in the bathroom I improvised a quick cleanup, tossing waxed cheese steak wrappers, stained maroon with dried ketchup, into the trash can and grabbing all the loose clothes I could get hold of to dump into the washing machine. My apartment came with a little washer-dryer unit off the kitchen and I generally used the washer as a hamper, running the machine only when it was too full to jam in more clothes, and the dryer as a closet, pulling out what I needed day by day. It was a pretty good system, generally the dryer emptied by the time the washer was full, and it saved all the needless folding and putting away of normal laundry. Of course my T-shirts had a pinkish sheen from being washed with my red shorts and everything was creased, but that was my trademark anyway, creases. There was no hope for the bathroom, the gray grunge in the toilet bowl, the slivers of hair caked on the sink as if with glue, but judging from the condition of her bathroom I didn’t think she’d mind. In any event, I figured, who the hell was she to judge my apartment when she barged in unannounced at 2:38 in the morning.
When she came out of the bathroom all the makeup had been wiped off her face and she looked like a girl in an Ivory Soap commercial, gleaming with health.
“Do you have a drink?” she said. “I could use a drink.”
“I might have a beer.”
“That would be great,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
“Isn’t it a little late?” but she was already out of the living room into the kitchen. I could hear her opening my refrigerator, imagine her peering into it as if the mysteries of the universe were growing there, which they might have been for how often I cleaned it.
“How old is this milk?” she asked from the kitchen.
“I don’t know, pretty old, I’d guess.”
“Old enough so that the ice from the refrigeration cables has grown around it, locking it in place,” she said. “What’s gefilte fish?”
“It’s medicinal,” I said.
“Do you want something?”
“No. I’m fine,” I said.
She came back into the living room, twisting off the top of a Rolling Rock. She sat down on the couch beside me with her legs curled beneath her and took a long drink.
“Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know where to go when I saw that bird just lying there with its head like that.” She shuddered. “On my doorstep. I had to get away.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get someone to clean it up.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m out of the dead animal disposal business.”
“Maybe I’ll call Henry on the car phone tomorrow. He’ll do it. He takes care of me when he can.”
“He took care of me, too.”
“I’m so sorry about your eye.”
She sort of shuffled on her knees toward me and touched the eye gently with her fingertips and then harder, hard enough to make me wince and pull away. “Does it hurt much?” she asked.
“Only when you press it.”
She stroked around my eye lightly with the back of her hand, soothing the nerves, and then pressed it hard again.
“Like that,” I said. “Stop it.”
“When Henry came back for us with the limousine we knew you had vomited. Henry had tried to clean it up, and all the windows were open, but it still smelled like hell. The councilman was livid for a moment and then he laughed and laughed. He told Chester, ‘Not only does your lawyer cry, but he drinks like a teenybopper.’ Jimmy and Chuckie thought that was funny as hell. Chester told them both to shut up.”
“It wasn’t the drinking,” I said. “It was the sock in my eye.”
“Now you’re being defensive.”
“I’m a good drinker.”
“Of course you are,” she said sweetly.
“I could drink both those bastards under the table.”
“Of course you could.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No,” she said. “What are we going to do about my landlord?”
“Get your friend Norvel to threaten him.”
“He’s not a friend anymore.”
She was leaning over me now, still looking at my eye, searching the black and blue as if she were searching tea leaves for hidden meanings. With her makeup off, in her sweatshirt and jeans, there was something innocently collegiate about her.
“Tell me, Veronica,” I asked. “What are you doing with these guys, Jimmy Moore and Norvel Goodwin?”
“It’s a long story. Very sad.”
“Tell me.”
“It started with a boy, a very sweet boy. He’s dead now but that’s how it started.” I thought I saw something in her eye, but I must have imagined it because as I kept looking at her it disappeared. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Just not now, please. What am I going to do tonight?”