“You know her?” Marie Claire’s voice startled me. She’d stepped out the backdoor of her restaurant into the dark.
“Acquaintance,” I said. The moon hung in the night sky like a bad piece of art.
“I hear that investigation’s getting intense.” Marie Claire hugged herself against the cold, her voice low and steady. “The police questioned Wilhelm, the landlord who owns all those buildings down on Powell. People are saying she was last seen at Edelweiss Sausages. Talking to him.”
Wilhelm. I nodded. Wilhelm had actually been a client of Spider’s once. Tricky case. Mostly because he‘d been so desperate to keep his name out of the press. It was one thing to get busted for running a few pounds of weed up from Hum-bolt, after all, but quite another to have all those businesses on Powell Boulevard implicated in the whole fiasco.
“Well,” I shrugged, “I hope she’s all right.”
Marie Claire just squinted at me, didn’t say a word before she slipped back into her restaurant.
I eased across the street and into Dots Café.
The waitress with the hamburger tattoo sat at a corner table, smoking American Spirit blues.
“Hey,” I approached her real slow. “Can I borrow a cigarette?”
She exhaled a plume into the dark, handed me one.
I tried to sound casuaclass="underline" “You don’t happen to remember a girl named Mustang who usta live around here?”
The waitress nodded. “Sure. She was just in here-I don’t know-maybe three hours ago? Looked like hell. She had these dark bruises on her upper arms. I asked if she was all right, but she seemed pretty spooked. Ran outta here.”
I nodded my thanks, ordered an Absolute martini at the bar, threw my debit card down. The owner shook her head at me. After all these years, I still forget. Only cash or checks at Dots. I got a twenty out of the ATM. Bastards at the bank get me with their little fee every time. I headed home with my pizza. I knew Spider wouldn’t be thrilled to see takeout, but what was he gonna say?
How about: “Why’d you let that bitch into my basement?”
That’s what he said when he finally walked in, loosening his batik neck tie. I’d always hated that tie.
“Jesus, Spider. She’s not a bitch. She’s an old friend. She just needed a place to crash.”
“Well,” he shrugged, softening a little. He grabbed his glass pipe from the mantle, took a hit, and closed his eyes. “I just don’t like the way she treated you-that’s all. Anyway,” he sighed, “did you borrow my car the other day?”
I didn’t see Mustang again that night. Or the next. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, best I could. I had a lot going on, personally. A lot of changes I could feel bubbling up inside of me. A lot that I felt on the brink of. I snuck out to Dots at midnight, sometimes made my way down to the river. Then Thursday around noon I was clicking the remote. Brenda Braxton on KGW news: a body had surfaced in the Willamette. Just downstream from Ross Island. Catherine Smith. They showed her face, that same picture from the flier. The police believed she was strangled, but they were waiting for autopsy results. They talked about her art. She’d always thought she was so special with her swift birds paintings and her ravens-like an artist named Birdie painting birds was avant-garde rather than straight-up cheesy. And now here she had to be dead to even get on the local news. Brenda Braxton said she’d gone to Evergreen.
Brenda Braxton looked a little sad.
I watched the story, surprised by my own lack of emotion. Lack of connection, really.
And then just this morning I get the news about Mustang. From the cops. A detective shows up at my door, plain-clothed and questioning. “Did Mustang have something to do with that Catherine Smith thing?” I ask, feigning cluelessness. The officer shakes his head. “Her body was found this morning.”
“Mustang’s?”
He nods real slow.
I invite the detective in, but he declines my invitation. He wants to stand on my doorstep. The incessant drip-drips from my eaves land right in the middle of his bald spot, but he doesn’t move. I lean into my doorframe as I tell him my story-everything I’ve just told you. Well, almost everything.
He takes his notes, sniffles, finally slaps his little book shut, caps his pen, thanks me. As he turns, I think I hear him sigh-like he already feels defeated.
I slink back inside, clean the house. When it starts to get dark outside, I turn the news on again. The second body in the Willamette in as many days. Just downstream from Ross Island.
Spider comes in real late. We eat zucchini casserole by candlelight.
“No art today?” Spider asks.
And I shake my head. “Not today.”
“Did you borrow the Prius yesterday?”
“When would I borrow the Prius?” He always had that damn car with him at work. I don’t tell him about the detective or about Mustang. I just eat with him, silent. I wash the dishes while he showers. I climb into bed next to him and wait.
As soon as he starts snoring, I’m out. I pull on my cords and my black hoodie, tiptoe across the living room and out the front door. I cut through the rail yard, cross Powell. Birdie’s picture still clings to the telephone poles that mark my path.
As I step inside Dots, I take a look around the joint. The dark red feels like home. All the regulars sipping their usuals. I head to the bathroom, go into Matter. The tan and white check of the tiles doesn’t make me feel so unsteady tonight. I apply some lipstick in the mirror. Back out at the bar, all the hipsters and the business owners are huddled closer together than most nights-abuzz with the news. One of the kids with a bleached mullet thinks it’s a serial killer targeting lesbians. He seems impressed with his own theory, ashes his cigarette in a glass tray.
Marie Claire shakes her head, sips her Rumba. “The two women used to be an item,” she says gravely. “It’s not random lesbians. It was either murder-suicide or a Romeo and Juliet kind of a thing.”
The bleach boy snickers. “You mean Juliet and Juliet?”
No one acknowledges him.
His hipster girlfriend breathes in my ear all sultry, “I heard they both recently joined NiftyWebFlicks.” She glares at the guy from Clinton Street Video.
The waitress with the hamburger tattoo nods. “He’s a loose cannon, that one.”
I can’t tell if she’s talking about the guy from Clinton Street Video or about Wilhelm, who plays pool by himself, refusing to make contact with anyone.
The waitress shrugs, looks down at me. “Absolute martini?” She asks it like it’s a rhetorical question, but I’m ready not to have a usual anymore. “Bombay,” I tell her. “Bombay martini.”
I tap the table as I wait, consider the theories.
As soon as the gin hits my throat, I feel strangely distracted, inspired. My mind bends and wanders.
Pretty soon, the regulars have changed the subject. They’re on to a new mystery: someone has stolen the little picture of Marie Claire from the bathroom in her restaurant. That picture was so cute-Marie Claire at age six or seven, her geeky cat eye glasses, her hair askew, hardly a hint of the beauty she would become. I down my last drink. Was that three? Four? I don’t even feel the cold outside as I float home, cut across the rail yard, slither in the front door and across the living room, floor boards creaking.