“It had to do with drugging the horse, yes. This was so long ago, I’m surprised I remember it at all. I know I read a lot of stories about her in the newspaper. They as good as implied that she caused it or it was done because of her.”
“Was she tried?” I ask.
“No. But she was smeared in all the papers. You know how it is when there’s a good-looking woman. It has to be her fault, right?”
Guillermo and I look at each other and laugh.
“You guys,” Sharon says.
“What about the vet?” I say.
“That was one reason there was so much coverage of the trial — everyone was waiting for him to implicate her, but he maintained it was an accident. I remember lots of reporting about her crowd, her house in the Gables, and then they went back into her past, because I saw this same picture and I think it’s from when she was younger and singing.”
“Well, everyone,” says Alex, “however much this adds to the price of anything, we still need to pack up.” Which is his polite way of getting us back to work. The others back out, and Guillermo takes the clock radio and goes.
I point at the picture. “You want it?” I ask Alex casually, meaning may I have it. I keep my tone cool, because if I express desire he’ll think it’s worth something and keep it.
Alex hesitates, but then says, “Hey, it’s yours.”
I wrap a towel from the linen closet around the picture and put it in my case.
Sharon says, “Her clothes, I’ll tell you, are first rate. All these St. John suits cost something, and they’re well cared for.” She lays more on her side of the bed. I cart my case over by the desk and seat myself to go through it. With her story in mind, I take a little extra care. She’s kept things tidy, and, as Sharon says, she liked quality. The desktop blotter holder is pale blue leather and a matching stationery case holds Crane’s paper for notes and thank-yous. In the top drawer I find various business cards, but no address book. I’m always careful not to take financial info the estate might need, but I don’t see any of it. In a folder labeled Auto there are expired insurance cards for a series of midsize sedans, and a prior driver’s license from the ’80s, but not the current one, if she was still driving. Helena Dorsett, d.o.b. April 17, 1928. A handsome older lady with gray hair — you can see the bone structure from the early portrait — and then my mind makes a shift and I recognize her. “Hey,” I say, surprised. “I met her.”
“Where?” calls Sharon. I hear her opening dresser drawers, her beads clicking. I lean back in the desk chair and I can see her bending over the bottom drawer. Her hair has fallen around her face and I try to picture what she looked like in ninth grade: a kid with a flip. In 1962 I was in the navy and skinny as a rail.
“On Lincoln Road a few times on Sunday mornings. She’d be well dressed, as you say, in a suit. And pleasant. She bought some crossword puzzle books I had, and then she’d ask for them each time she saw me. Said she liked to do them before she went to sleep. A well-preserved old lady, I’d have said. A femme fatale? You never know.”
“Look at this,” Sharon says. “Longline elegance.” She holds up a beige foundation garment — bra to girdle, all in one.
I look away. This business is disgusting sometimes. We settle back to work. Sharon takes a load down and returns, complaining about how hot it’s getting, and Alex kicks up the air-conditioning for her. I lug my first case down and bring back a stronger one to take the books. I poke my head in the kitchen where the old guy is wrapping the barware, and I ask him to save me any cookbooks. He points to a stack. I grab a Joy of Cooking, Esquire Book of Cocktails, a few recipe brochures put out by companies. One, Chafing Dish Cookery, is ’60s, I’d say, from the illustrations. People collect these, believe it or not.
The sofa is gone and the Kussrows are carting out the dining room table, murmuring to each other as they always do, “Left, a little left. More. Now, right, now.” Guillermo is taking albums out of the stereo cabinet and fitting them into vintage carrying cases he has for them. “Put some tunes on,” I suggest. He pulls out a middle-period Sinatra, and Frank fills the apartment with regret.
Alex sits on the remaining upholstered chair, boxing up ashtrays he’s collected from around the apartment, most of them Wedgwood, and the cigarette lighter/dispenser. “Let me have a few smokes,” I say, and he dumps them beside me. He likes tobacciana, not tobacco. I put them in a sterling case I carry. This is not an affectation, it’s a deterrent; it helps to have to open it and consciously take one out. I’ve got myself down to three cigarettes a day. I can maintain like that forever, but if I try to quit, I’ll swing back with a binge. Better this way.
“There were no other pictures?” I say. Again, casually.
“There were some family photos, but the daughter took those. Not sure why she left that one.”
“She had a daughter?” I don’t know why I’m surprised. A lot of femmes fatales have daughters. Marlene Dietrich did, for instance.
“She came down from Connecticut and handled things. She had dealt with all the business papers before she called me. All clean and organized.”
“Did she die here?” I ask quietly.
He nods.
“How?”
“She didn’t come down one morning to get her paper, so the manager checked. He says he’s always alert to any changes in pattern, with so many older people here. She died sometime the day before — she was dressed but she’d lain down to rest, maybe felt ill. Anyway, peaceful.”
His fair face is flushed. Alex, whose business depends on death, doesn’t like it mentioned. I take my suitcase to the bedroom. Sharon has folded up the coverlet and stripped the pillowcases off the pillows and is stowing them into one of the trash bags she uses for loose linens. The headboard — padded satin — leans against the wall with the bed pulled away from it. When the Kussrows lift off the mattress, we can see, through the box spring, a pair of highheeled pumps. She took them off and died, I think, but I don’t say it.
Sharon adds them to her sack of footwear. “Nearly all the shoes were in shoe bags, dustless, perfect,” she says. “Everything just so.”
I squat down to pull the books out of the bedside tables, since they’ll want to take those soon. I load them into the suitcase. They are mostly current hardcovers, only one or two vintage.
Hank comes back in and edges the vanity out from the wall. “Comes apart,” he says. “Piece of cake.”
Sharon says she’ll have it empty shortly. He stands there for a minute, adjusting his weightlifting belt, then says, “Wife died three years ago.”
Sharon looks up at him.
He tugs his iron-gray forelock. “Got my own hair and” — he clacks — “all my teeth. How’d you like to go to dinner sometime? I’ll buy you a steak.”
Sharon says, “Oh, I don’t think so, Hank.”
“No harm in asking,” he says, and goes out with the bed frame.
There’s a pause. I say: “What is he? Seventy-five?”
Sharon says, “In Miami, once a woman is over fifty, she’s supposed to go out with eighty-year-olds. It’s a tough market.”
I shake my head, but it’s true. She is — in ninth grade in 1962 — I figure, fifty-seven. I’m sixty-three and I never looked at her that way. But I haven’t been looking at anyone much of late except pretty gals forever young on paper. Last week I was smitten with an actress from the ’20s and then I realized she would be 105 if she weren’t already dead.
“My ex-husband has a thirty-eight-year-old girlfriend,” she says.
“Does he have all his teeth and hair, though?”