“Calm down, Bess. You’re caught.”
“When haven’t I been.” She drew a long sighing breath. “I could stand it better before I started bumping into you. Well, little man, what now?”
“The same as before, except that you’re going to do your talking to me.”
“Who says I am?”
“Five grand says it.”
“You mean you’ve got the money for me?”
“When you earn it.”
“And I can go free?”
“If you’re reasonably clean, and I don’t mean vice-squad stuff.”
She leaned close to study my eyes as if her future lay behind them. I leaned away.
“Let me see the money.”
“Upstairs in my office.”
“What are we waiting for then?”
She came out of the car, her body full and startling in a yellow jersey dress with a row of gold buttons down the front. I frisked her on the stairs and found no gun and burned my hands a little. But in the lighted room I saw that she was losing what she had had. Her past was coming out on her face like latent handwriting. Her powder and lipstick, alkali and orange in the fluorescent light, were cracking and peeling off. Grime showed in the pores of her nose and at the sides of her neck. Dissolution was working in her rapidly like a fatal disease she had caught from her husband that day.
She felt my look cold against her, and reached up automatically to straighten her hair. It was streaked greenish yellow and black. I guessed she had been working on it with peroxide half the afternoon, trying to reconstruct her image in a cheap hotel mirror. And I wondered what the girl behind the one-way panel was thinking.
“Don’t look at me,” Bess said. “I’ve had a bad day.”
She sat in a chair by the outer door, as far from the light as possible, and crossed her legs. Nothing could happen to legs.
“You’ve had a bad day coming,” I said. “Now talk.”
“Don’t I get a peek at the money?”
I sat down facing her and placed the five brown-paper-wrapped packages on the table between us. There was a microphone built into the table lamp, and I switched it on.
“Five grand, you said?”
“You’re dealing with honest people. You can take my word for it.”
“How much do I have to give you?”
“The whole thing. All you know.”
“That would take years.”
“I wonder. We’ll start with something simple. Who killed Singleton?”
“Leo Durano blasted him.” Her clouded blue gaze had returned to the packages of money. “Now I guess you want to know who Leo Durano is.”
“We’ve met. I know his record.”
She was beyond surprise. “You don’t know Leo like I know Leo. I wish I never set eyes on him.”
“He was picked up for contributing about ten years ago. Were you the minor?”
“Uh-huh. He was the connection I told you about, the one with the hat-check concessions in the clubs. We both got sneezed the same night, and they found out we lived in the same hotel room. He got off easy. The court doctor said he was batty, I could of told them that. They stuck him away in the booby-hatch for a spell, until Una talked him out of there. She’s been talking him out of jams since he was a kid.”
“Not this one,” I said. “Now what about Singleton?”
“Me and Charlie?”
“You and Charlie.”
“He was the one big love of my life,” her cracked lips said. Her bleached hands moved down her smooth jersey body from breasts to thighs, wiping out a memory, or reviving it. “I met him too late, after I married Sam. Sam and I were living together in Arroyo Beach, and Sam was all work and no play, and that was never for me. Charlie picked me up in a bar. He had everything, looks and class and an Air Force officer’s uniform. Real class. Class was the one thing I really wanted. I went with him the first night and it worked like magic. I didn’t know what it was before Charlie showed me. Leo and Sam and the others never even scratched my surface.
“Charlie had to go back to Hamilton Field but he’d fly down weekends. I waited for those weekends. Then Sam went to sea and I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I can’t remember now. It was different when Charlie went. He went all the way to Guam. He couldn’t fly back from there. The waiting stretched out, and he didn’t write.
“Sam wrote though, and Sam was the first to come back. I made the best of a bad job. After all I was married to the guy. We settled down in Bella City and I cooked his chops for him and said hello how are you to the cheesy patients he had. I never mentioned Charlie to him but I guess he figured it out from the things I didn’t say. It wasn’t any good at all after Sam came back. I stuck it for one year, keeping track of Charlie in the Arroyo newspaper and marking off the days on the calendar. I crossed off every day for a year. I got up early in the morning to cross them off and then I went back to bed.
“One Saturday morning I didn’t go back to bed. I got on a bus and rode to Arroyo Beach and phoned Charlie and we started over again, nearly every weekend. That was the summer of forty-six, I guess. It didn’t last. He said goodbye in September and went back to Boston to take a course at Harvard Law School. I stayed with Sam that winter. It was a long winter. Summer was good when it came but it didn’t last. It never lasted. Next year when the rains came in the valley and I saw that green stuff on the hills I couldn’t stick it. I couldn’t even hear what Sam was saying any more; it went through my head like wind.
“I got on a train for New York and from there to Boston, Massachusetts. Charlie was living in his own apartment in Belmont, but he wasn’t glad to see me. He said I was part of his California vacations, I didn’t fit into his Boston life. Scat. I told him what he was, and I walked out of there with nothing on but a dress. It was March, and it was snowing. I was going to walk into the river because the name of it was the Charles River and that would drive him crazy. I hoped.
“I looked at the river for a while with the snowflakes falling into it. Then I walked to the end of the subway and rode downtown. I didn’t even rate a cold out of it. For a long time then I lived on Scollay Square, getting back at Charlie. I phoned him once to tell him what I was doing. He hung up on me. That night it was the third rail in the subway I looked at. I stood and looked at it for over an hour, and I couldn’t move forward or back.
“A character in a boiled shirt saw me watching the third rail and picked me up. He turned out to be an unemployed ballroom-dancer from Montreal. Paul Theuriet. I supported him the rest of that year while we tried to work up an act together. Ever hear of Lagauchetière Street in Montreal?”
“I never did.”
“It’s rugged, and so was the act. Paul said I could make a dancer out of myself. God knows I tried. I was too clumsy or something. He was old and gouty in the joints. We did get ourselves booked into a few third-string clubs in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Toledo. Then we were stranded in Detroit. I was waiting table in a beer joint, trying to raise enough money for limber-legs to open a dance studio, getting nowhere. We tried the old badger a couple of times. Paul fumbled it and ran out to Canada, left me holding the bag. That was where Leo came into my life again.”
“It’s about time.”
“You asked for all of it,” she said with a wry stubborn smile. This was her saga, all she had to show for her life, and she was going to tell it her own way: “Leo heard that I was in the Detroit clink for extortion. He was going good again, a medium big gun in Michigan numbers. He had pull with the cops, and he hadn’t forgotten me. He sprung me out of that rap. After all those years, I moved back in with Leo and his sister. No class, but the chips. I was in the chips.”