“I’ve got my duty to my brother. I’d like to leave you alone, Lucy. If you’d co-operate.”
“I always co-operated before, before it happened.”
“Sure you did. Tell me where she is, Lucy. Then I’ll leave you alone, or you can come back to us on double the salary. We trust you. It’s her we don’t trust, you know that. Is she here in town?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said.
“You know she’s here in town. Now tell me where she is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead if you’ll tell me. Come on now, Lucy. Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said.
“A thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead,” Una repeated. “I have it right here.”
“I won’t take your money,” Lucy said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Is she in Bella City?”
“I don’t know, mum. She brought me here and left. How do I know where she went? She never told me nothing.”
“That’s funny, I thought you were her regular little confidante.” Harshly, with a sudden change of pace: “Was he hurt bad?”
“Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”
“Where is he? In Bella City?”
“I don’t know, mum.” Lucy’s voice had sunk to a stolid monotone.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know who you talking about, mum.”
“Rotten little liar!” Una said.
I heard a blow. A chair scraped. Someone hiccuped once, loudly.
“You leave me be, Miss Una.” The pressure of the situation had thrown Lucy back into sullen nonresistance, and slurred her speech. “I don’t have to take nothing from you. I’ll call the police.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to hit you. You know my bad temper, Lucy.” Una’s voice was husky with false solicitude. “Did I hurt you?”
“You didn’t hurt me. You couldn’t hurt me. Just stay away from me. Go away and leave me be.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you won’t get nothing out of me.”
“How much are you holding out for, honey?”
“And don’t you call me honey. I’m no honey of yours.”
“Five thousand dollars?”
“I wouldn’t touch your money.”
“You’re getting pretty uppity for a nigger gal that couldn’t get a job until I gave her one.’
“Don’t you call me that. And you know what you can do with your job. I wouldn’t go back to it if I was starving to death.”
“Maybe you will,” Una said cheerfully. “I hope you do starve to death.”
Her footsteps marched to the door, and the door slammed. In the hollow silence that ensued in the room, a series of slow dragging movements ended in the creak of bedsprings and another yawning sigh. I went back to my window. The sky blazed blue in my eyes. At the entrance Una was climbing into a taxi. It went away.
Two cigarettes later, Lucy came out and locked her door with a brass-tagged key. She wavered on the concrete stoop for a moment, gathering herself like an inexperienced diver for a plunge into cruel space. Thick powder clung like icing sugar to her face, imperfectly masking its darkness and its despair. Though she was wearing the same clothes, her body looked softer and more feminine.
She left the court and turned right along the shoulder of the highway. I followed her on foot. Her steps were quick and uncertain, and I was half afraid she might fall in front of a car. Gradually her stride took on the rhythm of some purpose. At the first traffic-lights, she crossed the highway.
I went ahead of her and ducked into the first store I came to, which happened to be an open-front fruit-and-vegetable market. Bent over a bin of oranges with my back to the street, I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.
Chapter 5
The street was one block west of Main and parallel to it. Its pitted asphalt was lined with Main Street’s leavings: radio and shoe repair shops, reupholsterers, insect exterminators, flytrap lunchrooms. A few old houses survived among them as flats and boarding-houses.
Lucy paused in front of a house in the third block and looked up and down the street. A hundred yards behind her, I was waiting at a bus stop on the corner. In a sudden flurry of movement, she ran across the shallow yard of the house and up the veranda steps. I walked on.
The house she had entered leaned with an absent and archaic air between a mattress-cleaning plant and a one-chair barbershop. Three-storied and weirdly gabled, it had been built before the invention of California architecture. Wavy brown watermarks streaked its gray frame sides. The lower panes of the ground-floor windows, painted white, faced the sun like a blind man’s frosted glasses. Beside the double front-door there was a name on a board, printed in large black letters: SAMUEL BENNING, M.D. A card above the bell-push said, in English and Spanish, Ring and Enter. I did.
The air in the hallway was a thin hospital-soup compounded of cooking odors, antiseptic, dimness. A face swam at me through it. It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw that it was my own face reflected in murky glass, framed in the tarnished curlicues of a wall mirror.
A door let light in at the end of the hall. A dark-haired woman came through it. She wore the gray striped uniform of a nurse’s aide, and she was handsome in a plump and violent way. Her black eyes looked at me as if they knew it. “You wish to see the doctor, sir?”
“If he’s in.”
“Just go into the waiting-room, sir. He will take care of you presently. The door on your left.”
She rolled away on smoothly revolving hips.
The waiting-room was unoccupied. Large and many-windowed, it had evidently been the front parlor of the house. Its present quality was a struggling lack of respectability, from the shredding carpet to the high discolored ceiling. Against the walls there were some wicker chairs that someone had recently brightened up with chintz. And the walls and floor were clean. In spite of this, it was a room in which the crime of poverty had left clues.
I sat down in one of the chairs with my back to the light and picked up a magazine from a rickety table. The magazine was two years old, but it served to mask my face. Across the room from me, in the inner wall, there was a closed door. After a while a tall black-haired woman wearing an ill-fitting white uniform opened the door. I heard a voice that sounded like Lucy’s say something unintelligible and emotional, several rooms away. The women who had opened the door closed it sharply behind her and came towards me: “Do you wish to see the doctor?”
Her eyes were the color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room.
I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her when she interrupted me: “Did you wish to see the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“He’s busy now.”
“Busy for how long? I’m in a hurry.”
“I couldn’t say how long.”
“I’ll wait for a while.”
“Very well, sir.”
She stood with perfect calm under the pressure of my stare, as if it were her natural element. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that depended on movement or feeling. It was plastic and external like a statue’s; even the blue eyes were flat and depthless. Her whole face looked as if it had been frozen with novocaine.
“Are you one of Dr. Benning’s patients?”
“Not yet.”
“Can I have your name, please?”
“Larkin,” I said at random. “Horace Larkin.”
The frozen face remained frozen. She went to the desk and wrote something on a card. Her tight, lumpy uniform made me restless. Everything about her bothered me.