Before I could answer, the door of the room flew open. A short stout woman in a flannelette nightgown brushed past me and advanced on Fredericks: “What you think you’re doing, renting a room behind my back?”
“I didn’t.”
But the money was still in his hand. He tried to crumple it in his fist and hide it. She grabbed for it:
“Give me my money.”
He hugged his valuable fist against his washboard chest. “It’s just as much my money as it is yours.”
“Aw no it isn’t. I work myself to the bone keeping our heads above water. And what do you do? Drink it up as fast as I can make it.”
“I ain’t had a drink for a week.”
“You’re a liar.” She stamped her bare foot. Her body shook under the nightgown, and her gray braids swung like cables down her back. “You were drinking wine last night with the boys in the downstairs bedroom.”
“That was free,” he said virtuously. “And you got no call to talk to me like this in front of a stranger.”
She turned to me for the first time. “Excuse us, mister. It’s no fault of yours, but he can’t handle money.” She added unnecessarily: “He drinks.”
While her eyes were off him, Fredericks made for the door. She intercepted him. He struggled feebly in her embrace. Her upper arms were as thick as hams. She pried open his bony fist and pushed the crumpled bills down between her breasts. He watched the money go as though it represented his hope of heaven:
“Just give me fifty cents. Fifty cents won’t break you.”
“Not one red cent,” she said. “If you think I’m going to help you get the d.t.’s again, you got another think coming.”
“All I want is one drink.”
“Sure, and then another and another. Until you feel the rats crawling up under your clothes, and I got to nurse you out of it again.”
“There’s all different kinds of rats. A woman that won’t give her lawful husband four bits to settle his stomach is the worst kind of rat there is.”
“Take that back.”
She moved on him, arms akimbo. He backed into the hallway:
“All right, I take it back. But I’ll get a drink, don’t worry. I got good friends in this town, they know my worth.”
“Sure they do. They feed you stinking rotgut across the river, and then they come to me asking for money. Don’t you set foot outside this house tonight.”
“You’re not going to order me around, treat me like a has-been. It ain’t my fault I can’t work, with a hole in my belly. It ain’t my fault I can’t sleep without a drink to ease the pain.”
“Scat,” she said. “Go to bed, old man.”
He shambled away, trailing his slack suspenders. The fat woman turned to me.
“I apologize for my husband. He’s never been the same since his accident.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got hurt bad.” Her answer seemed deliberately vague. Under folds of fat, her face showed traces of her son’s stubborn intelligence. She changed the subject: “I notice you paid with American money. You from the States?”
“I just drove over from Detroit.”
“You live in Detroit? I never been over there, but I hear it’s an interesting place.”
“It probably is. I was just passing through on my way from California.”
“What brings you all the way from California?”
“A man named Peter Culligan was murdered there several weeks ago. Culligan was stabbed to death.”
“Stabbed to death?”
I nodded. Her head moved slightly in unison with mine. Without shifting her eyes from my face, she moved around me and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You know him, don’t you, Mrs. Fredericks?”
“He boarded with me for a while, years ago. He had this very room.”
“What was he doing in Canada?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t ask my boarders where their money comes from. Mostly he sat in this room and studied his racing sheets.” She looked up shrewdly from under frowning brows. “Would you be a policeman?”
“I’m working with the police. Are you sure you don’t know why Culligan came here?”
“I guess it was just a place like any other. He was a loner and a drifter – I get quite a few of them. He probably covered a lot of territory in his time.” She looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. The light was still now, and the shadows were concentric, spreading out like ripples on a pool. “Listen, mister, who stabbed him?”
“A young hoodlum.”
“My boy? Was it my boy that done it? Is that why you come to me?”
“I think your son is involved.”
“I knew it.” Her cheeks shuddered. “He took a knife to his father before he was out of high school. He would of killed him, too. Now he really is a murderer.” She pressed her clenched hands deep into her bosom; it swelled around her fists like rising dough. “I didn’t have enough trouble in my life. I had to give birth to a murderer.”
“I don’t know about that, Mrs. Fredericks. He committed fraud. I doubt that he committed murder.” Even as I said it, I was wondering if he had been within striking distance of Culligan, and if he had an alibi for that day. “Do you have a picture of your son?”
“I have when he was in high school. He ran away before he graduated.”
“May I have a look at the picture, Mrs. Fredericks? It’s barely possible we’re talking about two different people.”
But any hope of this died a quick death. The boy in the snapshot she brought was the same one, six years younger. He stood on a riverbank, his back to the water, smiling with conscious charm into the camera.
I gave the picture back to Mrs. Fredericks. She held it up to the light and studied it as if she could recreate the past from its single image.
“Theo was a good-looking boy,” she said wistfully. “He was doing so good in school and all, until he started getting those ideas of his.”
“What kind of ideas did he have?”
“Crazy ideas, like he was the son of an English lord, and the gypsies stole him away when he was a baby. When he was just a little tyke, he used to call himself Percival Fitzroy, like in a book. That was always his way – he thought he was too good for his own people. I worried about where all that daydreaming was going to land him.”
“He’s still dreaming,” I said. “Right now he’s representing himself as the grandson of a wealthy woman in Southern California. Do you know anything about that?”
“I never hear from him. How would I know about it?”
“Apparently Culligan put him up to it. I understand he ran away from here with Culligan.”
“Yeah. The dirty scamp talked him into it, turned him against his own father.”
“And you say he knifed his father?”
“That very same day.” Her eyes widened and glazed. “He stabbed him with a butcher knife, gave him an awful wound. Fredericks was on his back for weeks. He’s never got back on his feet entirely. Neither have I, to think my own boy would do a thing like that.”
“What was the trouble about, Mrs. Fredericks?”
“Wildness and willfulness,” she said. “He wanted to leave home and make his own way in the world. That Culligan encouraged him. He pretended to have Theo’s welfare at heart and I know what you’re thinking, that Theo did right to run away from home with his old man a bum and the kind of boarders I get. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Look at how Theo turned out.”
“I have been, Mrs. Fredericks.”
“I knew he was headed for a bad end,” she said. “He didn’t show natural feelings. He never wrote home once since he left. Where has he been all these years?”
“Going to college.”
“To college? He went to college?”
“Your son’s an ambitious boy.”
“Oh, he always had an ambition, if that’s what you want to call it. Is that what he learned in college, how to cheat people?”