A big woman in a faded housedress that revealed fleshy arms and some kind of terrible rash on her elbows was behind the desk. The woman had a beauty mark that was huge and hairy, like a little animal clinging to her cheek.
She grinned when she saw Linnette.
“You don’t have to tell me, sweetie.”
“Tell you?”
“Sure. Who you are.”
“You know who I am?”
“Sure. You’re the little guy’s sister. He talked about you all the time.”
She leaned over the counter, coughing a cigarette hack that sounded sickeningly phlegmy, and said, “Linnette, right?”
“Right.”
The woman grimaced. “Sorry about the little guy.”
“Thank you.”
“I was the one who found him. He wasn’t pretty, believe me.”
“Oh.”
“And I was the first one who read the note.” She shook her head again and put a cigarette in her mouth. “He was pretty gimped up inside, poor little guy.”
“Yes; yes he was.”
The woman stared at her, not as if Linnette were a freak, but rather curious about why she might be here.
“I was just traveling through,” Linnette said quietly. “I thought I might stay here tonight.” She hesitated. “Sleep in my brother’s room, perhaps.”
Now the woman really stared at her. “You sure, hon?”
“Sure?”
“About wantin’ to take his room and all? Frankly, it’d give me the creeps.”
Linnette opened her purse, reached in for her bills. “I’d just like to see where he lived and worked is all. I’m sure it will be a nice experience.”
The woman shrugged beefy shoulders. “You’re the boss, hon. You’re the boss.”
Kelly was arguing with a drunk who claimed that the shooting gallery was rigged. The drunk had been bragging to his girl about what a marksman he’d become in Korea and wanted to do a little showing off. All he’d managed to do was humiliate himself.
Aimee waited as patiently as she could for a few minutes and then she interrupted the drunk — whose girlfriend was now trying to tug him away from making any more of a scene — and said, “Kelly, I’m looking for a woman who’s a dwarf. Bulicek said he saw her here.”
The drunk turned and looked at Aimee as if she’d just said she’d seen a Martian.
Aimee’s remark unsettled the drunk enough that his girlfriend was now able to draw him away, and get themselves lost on the midway.
“Yeah. She was here. So what?”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yeah.”
“About what?”
“What the hell’s your interest, Aimee?”
“Kelly, I don’t have time to explain. Just please help me, all right?”
Kelly sighed. “Okay, kid, what do you want?”
“What’d she say to you?”
“She said she wanted to buy a gun.”
“A gun? What kind of gun?”
“The gun her brother stole from me.”
“My God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you see?”
“See what, kid? Calm down.”
“If she wanted to buy the gun her brother stole from you then maybe she plans to use it on herself just the way her brother did.”
Kelly said, “Shit. You know, I never thought of that.”
“So you gave her the gun?”
Kelly seemed a little embarrassed now. “Yeah. Gave it to her for a hundred bucks.”
“A hundred? But Kelly that isn’t worth more than—”
“That’s what she offered me for it. So that’s what I took, kid. I never said I was no saint.”
“Where did she go?”
“Hell, how would I know?”
“God, Kelly, didn’t you notice the direction she was going?”
He shrugged. “Down near the entrance, I guess.” He looked chastened that he hadn’t paid attention.
“Thanks, Kelly. I appreciate it.”
And before he could say another word, she was gone, running fast toward the front of the midway.
There was a card table sitting next to the room’s only window. It had the uncertain legs of a young colt. He’d put his portable typewriter on it — the one she’d bought him for his birthday ten years ago — and worked long into the night.
The room had a bureau with somebody’s initials knifed into the top, a mirror mottled with age, wallpaper stained with moisture, a double bed with a paint-chipped metal headboard, and linoleum so old it was worn to wood in patches.
She tried not to think of all the sad lives that had been lived out here. Men without women; men without hope.
She made sure the door was locked behind her and then came into the room.
She could feel him here, now. She had always believed in ghosts — were ghosts any more unlikely than men and women who only grew to be three-and-a-half feet tall? — and so she spoke out loud to him for the first time since being told of his suicide.
“I hope you know how much I love you, brother,” she said, moving across the small, box-like room to the card table, running her fingers across the small indentations the Smith-Corona had made on the surface.
She decided against turning the overhead light on.
The on-and-off red of the neon was good enough.
“I miss you, brother. I hope you know that, too.”
She heard the clack of a ghostly typewriter; saw her brother’s sweet round face smiling up at her after he’d finished a particularly good sentence; listened to the soft sad laughter that only she’d been able to elicit from him.
“I wish you would have called me, brother. I wish you would have told me what you had in mind. You know why?”
She said nothing for a time.
Distant ragged traffic sounds from the highway; the even fainter music of the midway further away in the darkness.
“Because I would have joined you, brother. I would have joined you.”
She set her purse on the card table. She unclasped the leather halves and then reached in.
The gun waited there.
She brought out the gun with the reverence of a priest bringing forth something that has been consecrated to God.
She brought out the gun and held it for a time, in silhouette, against the window with the flashing red neon.
And then, slowly, inevitably, she brought the gun to her temple.
And eased the hammer back.
At the entrance, Aimee asked fourteen people if they’d seen the woman. None had. But the fifteenth did, and pointed to a rusted beast of a taxi cab just now pulling in.
Aimee ran to the cab and pushed her head in the front window before the driver even stopped completely.
“The dwarf woman. Where did you take her?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“The woman, where did you take her?” Aimee knew she was screaming. She didn’t care.
“Goddamn, lady. You’re fucking nuts.” But despite his tough words, the cab driver saw that she was going to stay here until she had her answer. He said, “I took her to the Ganges Arms. Why the hell’re you so interested, anyway?”
“Then take me there, too,” Aimee said, flinging open the back door and diving in. “Take me there, too!”
She went over and sat on the bed.
That would make it easier for everybody. The mess would be confined to the mattress. A mattress you could just throw out.
She lay back on the bed.
Her shoes fell off, one at a time, making sharp noises as they struck the floor.
Two-inch heels, she thought. How pathetic of me. Wanting so desperately to be like other people.