The faintest of smirks hid in one corner of the black woman’s mouth as she pointed to the name badge that said “Ms. Brown.”
And Evelyn Kane turned, seething, and faced me.
“Just what I need,” she said.
“Hello, Evelyn.”
She pointed a finger at me; her face was a tight mask-like Jack Klugman suppressing gas. “I want to talk to you, pal.”
“Fine. I wouldn’t mind talking to you, either.”
She began walking, toward the nearest exit, apparently; I fell in step.
Stamping on like a drill sergeant, she said, without looking at me, “You saw Roscoe last night, right?”
“Right.”
“I want you to tell me all about it. All right?”
“All right,” I shrugged.
“Let’s have a drink, then.”
I followed her out of the hotel; she stopped and stood just outside the doorway momentarily, as if daring the October breeze to faze her. It fazed me. I dug my hands in my pockets as I followed her down the street and around the corner to a sleazy little bar; the Americana-Congress was a relatively nice hotel, but you didn’t have to walk far from it to find something sleazy-a fact of life in most of downtown Chicago, which seemed a study in side-by-side incongruities. Not the least of which were Evelyn Kane and I, seated now in a corner booth. She was presently answering a question I hadn’t asked, explaining why we hadn’t used one of the several bars in the hotel.
“I hate hotel bars,” she said. “Expensive watered-down drinks and executives on expense accounts. Executives aren’t people, you know-they used to be people, I suppose. But expense accounts turn people into leeches.”
I liked the way Evelyn talked-she talked like a character in one of her ex-husband’s books-but I didn’t like Evelyn much.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” she asked, smiling over the draw beer that had barely been set down in front of her before she scooped it up toward her face.
I sipped the beer I’d ordered. “I think you’re a peach, Evelyn. I’d give anything for a pin-up of you to hang over my bed.”
She laughed and beer came out her nose. “I like you, kid. You got class.”
“I always thought you hated my guts.”
She shrugged; her eyes were elaborately laced with red, I noticed. “You came around and saw Roscoe and filled his head with how good he was. It was a bad time for him; right about the time he realized he wasn’t going to get published anymore, not in the U.S., anyway. You had a bad effect on him.”
“I thought I cheered him up.”
“Sure. He’d get high off all your hero worship. Then he’d come down. Crash down. To reality. Which is a hell of a place for a writer to have to come, as you probably know. And, I felt you and some other people like you were leeches, looking for free writing help and advice and connections.”
“Can I tell you why I think you didn’t like me, Evelyn?”
“Can I stop you?”
“You were jealous. Your marriage was on the rocks, and I came around and got your husband’s attention and it pissed you off.”
She thought about that while she finished the beer. “You’re right,” she said, waving at the waitress for another. She’d been a waitress herself once but didn’t seem to have any particular empathy for our suspiciously young one.
That’s where she’d met Roscoe, back in Milwaukee in the ’50s-waiting on him in a neighborhood bar. To hear Roscoe tell it, she’d been a bosomy, zaftig blonde, in those days; hard to imagine, looking at her faded orange hair and bearlike body and the face that had more wrinkles and folds than a suit of Goodwill clothes. Still, buried in that face were features that even now seemed pleasant if not pretty, if you dug for them hard enough. Maybe I would have enjoyed a pin-up of her over my bed, if it were of the right vintage.
Part of me wanted to like her. But I remembered how shrewish she’d been around Roscoe-and the impression I’d carried away from meeting her was that she was a lowlife who’d found a meal ticket, a blue-collar gold digger who turned not only fat but bitchy as the meal ticket started petering out.
Now, looking at this woman whose red eyes today came not entirely from drinking, I wondered if I might have misjudged her, at least a little.
“Looking back,” she said, “I think what you gave Roscoe was a good thing. In the long term.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the short term was a high followed by a crashin’ low, yes. But over the long haul I think the correspondence with you and the visits from you built his confidence back up, kept his self-respect more or less in working order. So I want to apologize, Mallory. I was rude to you, way back when. Why don’t we start over, you and me?”
I wondered why she was trying to get on my good side; I wondered it aloud, in fact.
“Looking for ulterior motives,” she said. “Mystery writers are all alike. Being married to a writer is like being married to a psychiatrist. Remember the old joke about the psychiatrist who passes a guy on the street, and the guy says, ‘Hello,’ and the psychiatrist says to himself, ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ That’s what being married to one of you analytical sons of bitches is like. You keep trying to make sense out of your life. You keep looking for motivations and ‘patterns of behavior,’ when you deal with people. But life isn’t like books. It’s a goddamn mess, Mallory. It isn’t tightly plotted; and people don’t behave rationally. And things don’t work out like they’re supposed to.”
Somewhere in the midst of that speech her red eyes began tearing up; and now, her speech finished, she stared into her beer and tears flowed.
“You must like salt in your beer,” I said.
“Go to hell,” she said, good-naturedly.
“You still love him, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” she said.
Somebody dropped some money into a jukebox and Willie Nelson began to sing “Blue Skies.”
“That’s a great old song,” she said.
“Maybe, but I don’t like Willie Nelson.”
“Listen to the song, you jerk. You claim to be a writer-listen to the words!” She sat for a moment, lost in the music. Almost wistfully she added, “He sings it real nice, too. That Willie Nelson. What a singer. What a man. Somethin’ about him always reminds me of Roscoe.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They both look like they fell off a lumber wagon.”
That amused her; she didn’t laugh out loud, but she laughed.
“We should’ve been pals, Mallory.”
“Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Maybe not. Why don’t you tell me about seeing Roscoe last night.”
“I’ll get to that. First tell me what that Abbott and Costello routine you were doing with the girl at the front desk at the hotel was about?”
Intensity tightened her sagging face. “I want to talk to the night man. The assistant manager who found my husband’s body.”
“That guy wasn’t who found the body.”
“Yeah, well, the bitch found him. But the night man was first on the scene after that.”
“By the bitch, I take it you mean Mae.”
“Mae, the bitch, right. The home-wrecking goddamn bitch.”
Funny hearing Evelyn call Mae that, considering Evelyn seduced Roscoe away from his first (now late) wife.
“Actually, the night guy was third on the scene,” she said. “I understand somebody else was with the bitch when she found Roscoe, but I can’t seem to find out who-that’s one thing the night manager can tell me, who the guy was that was with her. Somebody she was humping, no doubt. Him, I want to talk to, also.”
“Evelyn, I was with Mae when she found Roscoe.”
Her eyes got very alert. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“You do now.” I told her about it, but tried to downplay my suspicions. It didn’t take.
“Your instincts are right,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was murdered.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She hesitated. “Roscoe was on the verge of something big.”