This is my second husband, Rick. The green toothbrush in my bathroom is Rick’s. I like the sound of it already. Rick steps into a dry cleaner’s on Forbes. When thirty minutes go by and he still hasn’t emerged with a couple of shrink-wrapped shirts or an off-season jacket, I copy the address into my date book, labeling it, Rick’s job. I walk down the street quickly. I have work to do. I have a whole life to create and only twelve hours to do it in. I have to hurry if I’m going to be at the bar by nine.
Key Drop
by Tom Lipinski
Lawrenceville
The uphill turn at Butler and 44th Street is a tight one. The sudden and steep incline is further complicated by an already thin roadway that is parked solid at both curbs, holding the overflow from the shops on Butler — shops that change hands from convenience stores, pizza shops, barbers, and on to simple and inviting coffee spots with each pass.
Dorsey maneuvered the old Buick through the intersection, taking care with the long front grille and bumper, hoping not to sideswipe a car parked at the corner, then squeezed the accelerator, prepping the engine for the climb. He kept an eye out for a parking spot but found none, only open spaces reserved with kitchen table chairs planted at the curb, so pulled to his right into a church lot. The church was a dark and imposing brick and Dorsey recalled his last few visits to 44th, reminding himself that it was a Polish congregation. Now what the hell was the name of that burned-up painting of the Madonna they had hanging in there?
He climbed out of the car, stretched himself to his full six feet plus, and caught a touch of summer breeze. After waiting for traffic to pass, he hustled across the street to a line of row houses with minute front yards enclosed in black wrought-iron fencing. As Dorsey undid the gate latch the front door swung open and emitted an airborne wave of gray and sudsy wash water.
“The hell is that?” Dorsey retreated to the edge of the sidewalk. “Hell of a greeting. Ask me to stop by, make it sound important, and then this.”
“Just finished the hall floor,” Mrs. Leneski told him, walking down her front stoop, metal slop bucket in her hand. She’s old, Dorsey reminded himself, man is she old. Gracing the far end of her eighties, Mrs. Leneski flirted with five feet of height, apparently so frail that a light rain could wash her, and the last of her gray hair pulled tight to the skull, down the street. She had on a sleeveless housedress that came to the midcalf and did nothing to hide the dark electronic ring that encircled her right ankle.
“Should’ve never shot that guy,” Dorsey said, looking toward her feet. “Lucky this is all they did to you, even at your age.”
“I asked you to do it,” Mrs. Leneski replied, turning over her bucket and draining the last of the water. Her voice held the last traces of a childhood spent in Eastern Europe. “Right in that kitchen, over coffee. You said no. And you had enough good reasons to do it too. So, that left me.”
Determined not to go over old and painful ground once again, Dorsey asked how she was getting along. “Tak sobie, so-so. Thing on my ankle gives me a rash. Thank God they still make the Noxzema cream.”
Dorsey gave her a soft grin. “So, are you asking me in? Maybe some coffee?” He stepped through the gate and took the bucket from her hand. “Want to tell me what this is about? Why you asked me over?”
“Sure, sure, down to business,” Mrs. Leneski said, turning to go into the house. “Mr. Detective wants to know about the case. Still call it that?’
“Sometimes,” Dorsey said, trailing behind her. “What’s on your mind?”
Mrs. Leneski stopped at the threshold and turned. “First, you take me shopping. I need a few things.”
“They let you go out?” Dorsey asked. “Somebody you have to call first? Maybe the probation office?”
Dorsey was watching her shake her head when he noticed something on the street had caught her eye. He turned and scanned the street, the only thing moving was an immaculate black Cadillac heading up the street.
“You see that? The undertaker?” Mrs. Leneski asked, looking up at Dorsey. “He steals.”
“What do you mean, he steals?”
“You know, he’s an undertaker,” she told him. “Shoes, socks, sometimes even suits. You think anybody really goes into the ground with a new pair of shoes on their feet?”
Standing behind the shopping cart in the produce section, Dorsey watched the old woman examine cabbage head after cabbage head, and recounted to himself the story behind this cockeyed friendship. She hires you, a few years back when no one was sending you work, to find her missing granddaughter. “She’s with them junkies in the park,” she had told him. She had been close, the girl was on the far side of a wrecked fence that separated the park from a cemetery. Four feet down and no marker except for a plain of broken beer and wine bottles to cover some tracks. You found her all right, and you found out who killed her. “But I can’t prove it,” you had told her, “not enough for the DA or the cops.”
“So,” Mrs. Leneski had said, “then you kill him for me. I’ll give you a bonus.” But you just shook your head and left the house, and left the woman to do the killing herself. And with some back door legal tricks, an eighty-some-year-old gets house arrest and a metal band on her ankle for a killing.
Four heads proved good enough to make it into the cart and Dorsey asked how many people she was cooking for. “Somebody will show up,” she told him. “They always do when I make halupki.”
“Polish hand grenades?”
“Irish wise-ass,” Mrs. Leneski said, and pulled on the front of the cart, directing him to the checkout lanes. “Ziggy gets the meat for me down The Strip. And a few other things. He’ll be by later.”
Dorsey began angling the cart toward a checkout line but Mrs. Leneski took hold of the front and dragged him into another aisle. “Not her,” she said, indicating a young girl behind a register. “She cheats people, charges double on things like meat sometimes. She has something going with the manager, they’re in it together.”
“Not hot enough, not yet, for iced tea,” Mrs. Leneski said, putting a cup of coffee on the Formica tabletop in front of Dorsey. They were in her kitchen now and despite a thorough going over, Dorsey could find nothing that had changed since his last visit. Refrigerator and oven still the same off-white, the sink a stand-alone with plumbing exposed. Except for a few newly acquired blemishes, even the coffee cups looked the same. Dorsey hoped her problems had changed.
He took a sip of unusually strong coffee. “So,” he said, lowering the cup to the table. “Time to tell me why I’m here. Must have someone else to take you shopping.”
Mrs. Leneski took a seat across the table from him. “You remember last time, last time you met my Catherine?”
Dorsey remembered. “Met her just the once. And she wasn’t doing so well. I met her up the street at the old hospital. She was in the east wing, the psych ward?”
She had been in her midforties then, and detoxing for the third time. Dorsey recalled the incoherent voice that could barely recall she had a daughter of her own. The one you found dead. “She clean these days?” Dorsey asked.
“So they say,” Mrs. Leneski said. “In a way, I guess. She’s on her own, has a little place about ten blocks over on Carnegie Street, the other ward. And she’s got this job, but it’s a job with bad people, I think.”
Dorsey sipped at his coffee. “What kind of work? For who?”
“One of them new places, the new ones along Butler Street, you’ve seen them. All those coffee shops, they make little sandwiches and crap for lunch, try to sell the art right off the walls? She’s at one of them near 37th Street across from where the Catholic high school was.”