Goldilocks (2 page)

At the writing table she switched on the answering machine and listened to messages, none urgent enough to prompt an immediate response. She shed her linen jacket, which had gathered wrinkles, and glanced at herself in a mirror, the cords prominent in her neck, a sure sign of lingering tension.

In the bathroom she gave a half twist to the hot water tap in the tub, laid out a mammoth towel, and snatched up the phone. The first call was to Springfield, to a social club, Italo-American. She asked for Salvatore, who eventually came on the line and upon hearing her voice apologized for the delay. She spoke rapidly in a voice stripped of its husk, her words open and naked, as if displaced by something common. Her lacquered nails tapped on a tile. “Not tomorrow, today,” she reiterated, the steel side of her character lengthening her face. “No need to see me. I’ll leave the money in the mailbox, you hear?” He grunted. She said, “One other thing, Sal. Don’t hurt him.”

“You want I should kiss him?”

“You being smart?”

“Just making a joke.”

“
I
make the jokes, Sal. You do the laughing.”

Her next call was across the state to the florid little city of Lawrence, where she had been forged through fire and shaped to her own demanding specifications. The voice on the line belonged to Attorney Barney Cole’s secretary, who put her on hold. Waiting, she kicked off her shoes. The tub, which was sunken and big, was not yet a quarter filled, and she turned the tap to full force. Attorney Cole came on the line and said, “This is a surprise. How are you?”

“I don’t change, Barney. I’m a constant.” Reaching under her skirt, she skinned off her panty hose and let her belly breathe. Her groin itched, and she scratched it. “How’s the old crowd? How’s Edith and Daisy?”

“Daisy’s dying.”

“Sorry to hear that. His liver?”

“I think it’s everything.”

“He’s like Lawrence, isn’t he, Barney? Burning up from within.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. You’re too loyal to your beginnings. How’s Chick? He still a cop?”

“He’s a captain now.”

“That was expected. How’s my old buddy Arnold?”

“Hanging in.”

“And you, Barney? Are you hanging in?”

“I like to think so.”

“Are you still handsome?”

“I haven’t looked lately.”

“Still honest?”

“It’s a struggle.”

She smiled into the mouthpiece. “You’ll never get rich.”

“That’s a given.”

“Do you miss me?”

“That’s another given,” he said. “What’s that sound I hear?”

“I’m running a bath.” Her panty hose, diminished to a clot, clung to the outside of the hamper like an abandoned caterpillar nest. She tossed her blouse in that direction. “I need a favor,” she said, and read resistance in his silence. “You owe me, Barney.”

“Depends,” he said. “Is it a big favor or a little one?”

“In between. His name is Henry.”

• • •

It was the middle of the evening, heavy shadows draped over the Birdsong Motel, when Henry Witlo heard the rap of a knuckle too forceful to be friendly. He leaped off the bed, stood perfectly still on stocking feet, and said in a cracked voice, “Who is it?”

“Officers of the law, Henry. Mind if we come in?”

The door flipped open before he could answer, and two men in mufti were upon him before he could move. The more commanding one had a withered hairline and a pitted face, and the other was pug-nosed and slack-lipped, with skin too loosely fastened to his jaws. Henry regarded each with creeping fear and shuddered inwardly. He did not like the way they had flanked him, as if one might execute a sucker punch while the other had his attention.

The one with holes in his face said, “I’m Sal. That’s John.”

John, whose nose seemed too tightly screwed into his face, nodded. Henry gazed at each man with exacting scrutiny and came to a chill conclusion. “You guys aren’t cops.”

“Hear that, John? He says we’re not cops. What are we, Henry?”

“You guys are wops.”

“He’s a smart fella, John.”

“For a Polack,” John said, scarcely moving his mouth inside the fleshy folds of his jaw. On the side of his neck was a puckered scar that could have come only from a gunshot wound. Henry’s eyes ate it up.

Sal smiled at him. “Pretty guy like you oughta go to Hollywood. Tie a rag around your head and try out for Rambo.”

“What d’you want from me?”

Sal shook his head. “That was a bad thing you did on the road to Mrs. Baker. She’s got a nice car, don’t look good with a dent. Me, I’d be plenty mad.”

“It was an accident.”

“You tell lies, your nose is gonna grow. Lucky for you Mrs. Baker don’t hold grudges, but she don’t want you around anymore. She says you should try the city of Lawrence, and she even mentioned the name of somebody there might help you find a job. I wrote the name down for you.”

A folded slip of notepaper was forced into Henry’s humid palm. He read the name, which meant nothing to him. His jeans were so tight he hurt his hand pushing the paper into a pocket. He said, “I’ve never been to Lawrence.”

“You’ll love it, won’t he, John?”

“He won’t ever want to leave.”

Sal said, “Two-hour drive. Press your foot down, you can do it quicker. John and I will be behind you part of the way, make sure you don’t get lost.”

Henry put on a brave face, but his smile was lopsided. “What if I don’t want to go?”

“Then you should take another look at John. Normal circumstances, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. You cross him, you could say he’s a rough mother.”

“Some people say that about me.”

“No, Henry. Nobody says that about you. You got my word.”

They watched him put on his shoes and knot the leather laces and move agilely with buttocks in gear, as if he had strains of marching music in his head. He came out of the bathroom with toilet articles stuffed into a pouch and his hair slicked back. Clothes, mostly underwear and socks, he packed into a canvas gripsack that looked as if it had never been new. He hiked the collar of his denim jacket and rolled the cuffs just above his wrists.

Sal, looking at keys, coins, and a few crumpled dollar bills on the bedside table, said, “This is the extent of your wealth? Not exactly a winner, are you?” He suddenly tossed an envelope on the bed. “A few hundred bucks in there from Mrs. Baker. Don’t blow it all at once.”

“That a kiss-off?”

“You got it, Henry.”

The sky was starlit, and the moon, a sizable chunk of silver, had taken on the aspect of a weapon. Henry stashed his grip in the back of the Charger. They watched him while leaning against their car, which was long and sleek, the next thing to a limo. Sal smiled, the craters in his face brimming with shadow.

“What kinda car you got there, Henry?”

“It’s a Dodge.”

“Looks like a shitbox to me. What’s it look like to you, John?”

“Don’t matter,” John said, “long as it gets him where he’s going.”

“You get there,” Sal said, “stay out of trouble. You go to the joint, guys’ll make use of you. Tell him, John.”

“You’ll come out with your asshole bigger than Callahan Tunnel.”

Henry climbed into his car. He shut the door hard and locked it and peered out the half-open window. “You guys don’t scare me.”

“That’s right, Henry. You keep thinking that all the way to Lawrence.”

TWO

B
ARNEY COLE
sat in his closed inner office with Edith Shea, who was of deadly thinness, seemingly made of hot wires, too restless to stay in the worn red leather chair he had drawn for her. She sprang up and breezed by his cluttered desk to a window, where she spilled ash on the sill. “I should’ve divorced him long ago,” she said, expelling smoke. “I shouldn’t have listened to you. I blame you, Barney.”

“I tried to do what was right for both of you.”

“And failed miserably.” The window faced a pack of scruffy pigeons on a ledge and overlooked the emptiness of an alley four stories below. The office was in the Bay State Building in the heart of Lawrence, a pint-sized tenement city oppressed by mammoth mill buildings no longer serving their original purpose, a shifting immigrant community evenly divided north and south by the abused Merrimack River and populated by too many priests and politicians and by far too many lawyers, most of whom, like Cole, lived in the surrounding suburbs.

“And what was right for the children,” he added.

“That’s a laugh.” She stood like a streak of chalk in a white uniform pantsuit, and Cole could not remember whether she was working now as a waitress, hairdresser, or nurse’s aide, all of which, between babies, she had been. She, not Daisy, was the sinew of the family, which had leveled off with the birth of her seventh child, a girl. The oldest, a boy, was a day student at nearby Merrimack College, a good portion of the tuition diminished by a scholarship that Cole, through a friend, had helped arrange.

“It’s not too late, if that’s what you want,” he said, lowering his eyes as she lurched from the window.

“Of course it’s too late. He’s dying, for God’s sake.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “But he’s taking his time. He farts around about everything.”

Cole looked up from his desk and watched her fight off a small shivering fit.

“I didn’t mean that, Barney. Well, I meant it, but not the way it sounded.”

“I know,” he said gently, wishing there was more he could say to show that he truly did understand. He had a bottle of Teacher’s in the drawer of a file cabinet, but he did not want to offer her any, too early in the day for that. She ran a bony hand through her hair, which was dark and curly and shot with gray.

“There’s no insurance. He cashed everything in. He’s going to leave me nothing but debts. God knows how much he owes Arnold.”

“Arnold won’t dun you.”

“I know that, but there are others. He owes everybody, Barney. How much does he owe you?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s because you’re being sweet, one of your endearing qualities. I wish I were in the mood to appreciate it.” She lurched to another window, this one overlooking downtown’s midmorning traffic, unwieldy and unsteady, as if drunks were leading the way. “I know he’s meeting you for lunch, Barney. Talk to him. Find out who else he owes. I wake up in a sweat at night thinking about it.” The nervous quickness of a smile gave an odd twist to her mouth. “He’ll tell you things he won’t tell me. He might even be honest about himself.”

Cole’s secretary flashed him. He picked up the phone and murmured, “Later, Marge.”

She pulled hard on her cigarette and continued to stare through the window, her face a wedge of bone. “No one in his family has lived a long life. That’s the way it goes.”

“Arnold would call it the luck of the draw,” Cole said quietly, and she threw him a grudging look.

“We all came out of the same tenements. What did you do, stack the deck and draw aces?”

He arose from his desk, long and thin-bellied in a ten-year-old tailored suit, more muscular than most men of forty-four and fitter than many younger, his features unobtrusively handsome. He raised a hand to touch her, but she avoided it.

“What’s in your eyes, Barney? Sympathy or pity?”

“Understanding, I hope.”

“Is it free, or will you send me a bill?”

“Slow down, Edith. I’m not a shrink, I’m your lawyer.”

“And my friend.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re so fucking stuck-up.” Her eyes, larger than most, glittered coldly. “Do you know you’ve never once, all these years, made a pass at me? I’ve always resented that.”

“I’m sure I did, one time or another, but you never picked up on it.”

“Always the diplomat, aren’t you?” She straightened her back, steadied herself, and prepared to leave. “Don’t tell Daisy I was here. OK?”

“OK.”

“I mean that.”

“I know you do.”

A heavy moment passed, and then suddenly she stepped into him. All at once, against his chest, he felt the hardness of her brow, the narrow length of her nose, and the sharp cut of her chin. “Hug me, damn it,” she demanded and threw her rib cage and thin contraption of hips against him, producing almost a clinking sound, as if she could be easily taken apart and reassembled at a more appropriate time and perhaps to better advantage. The heat of her mouth and a rush of tears poured through his striped shirt. Her voice drilled into his skin. “Barney, I don’t want to lose him.”

• • •

Daisy Shea cut into his salad with a weighty knife and fork, broke a lettuce heart, and sliced a tomato wedge in half. Feigning an appetite, chewing deliberately, he got Russian dressing on a corner of his mouth and swiftly wiped it away with the napkin from his lap. He had the ruined face of a drinker, the cavalier eye of a sport, and the reckless air of a gambler reduced to bluff, all hopes pegged to serendipity. He was, like Cole, a lawyer, but with a negligible practice and an office above a used-furniture store, his rent in arrears, a horseplayer with a history of bum tips and a cardplayer whose big moments had passed, along with the red of his hair, which had wasted to white. He was Cole’s age, almost to the day, but looked a generation older. He ate as much of his salad as he could stomach and pushed away the bowl.

Cole said, “How are you feeling?”

“I got a foot in the grave. How am I supposed to feel?”

They were in Bishop’s, the most popular restaurant in the city, just beyond the post office and in sight of St. Mary’s Church. The food was a mix of Arabic and American, and the lunch crowd, teeming with familiar downtown faces, was political, professional, mercantile. Here and there, in the semiprivacy of booths, developers discussed deals over skewered lamb, and at tables near the aisles bookmakers dressed like bankers exhibited their young second wives.

Playing with the menu, which never changed, Daisy appeared to take comfort in the babble around him. “A rough guess,” he said, “off the top of your head, how many meals you figure I’ve eaten here?”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine,” Cole said. “What do you figure?”

“More here than at home.”

“What’s your point?”

“Who says I got to have one? A guy in my shape can say what he wants.” He glanced about, craning his neck, which had begun to resemble drippings from a candle. In nearly every direction he glimpsed people he knew in one way or another, some since childhood. “In the old days everybody stopped by my table to talk to me. Now nobody does. They don’t want to ask how I am. Scared I’ll tell ‘em.”