Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (7 page)

“Why not Oral, Junior?”

She made a face; whether at Oral or Junior I couldn’t tell. It didn’t make her any less pretty. She wore a blue-and-white-checked flannel blouse with the tails out over black stirrup pants with her bare feet in blue fleece slippers. She had a trim waist, athletic
legs, nice ankles. She was five-four but looked taller. She wore her hair in bangs with a ponytail; two minutes from shower to fixed. Motherhood breeds efficiency. “I’ll hold onto him for a little, if you don’t mind. He’ll fuss if he isn’t asleep before I put him in his crib.”

I said I didn’t mind. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t have changed anything if I had.

The living room took up the front half of the ground floor. A rug with Oriental borders covered the hardwood floor to within eight inches of the walls. It was the most expensive thing in the room. A cheap new sofa with two matching platform rockers, an old green naugahyde recliner for the buttocks of the master of the house, a glass-topped coffee table stacked with books on infant care, and an electric fireplace answered for the rest. Family pictures in plastic cubes crowded the mantel, above which hung a Thomas Kincaide print of a medieval-looking lighthouse where the Seven Dwarfs spent their summers. TV, VCR-DVD combo, a speaker telephone to free both hands for diapering. There was the usual truckload of baby stuff testifying to the reign of the little tyrant in the blue blanket. A comfortable room, sprinkled with potpourri, faint cooking odors, and scented Lysol.

I consented to an offer of coffee and sat down in one of the padded rockers to stretch my leg, hooking my cane over the arm, while she carried the baby through an arch into a kitchen the size of my living room. I heard the disheartening sound of a jar opening and boiling water pouring into two mugs: The coffee was instant. She came back thirty seconds after she left, juggling the baby and both mugs with the fingers of one hand twined through the handles. I struggled to get up and help.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “After three months, I could join the circus.”

I leaned forward far enough to unburden her of one of the mugs and sat back to warm my hands around it. “He seems small for three months.”

“He’s a triplet. His brothers didn’t make it out of the incubator.” She lowered herself and Jeffie into the other rocker without spilling a drop, from mug or baby. She smiled down at it and planted a kiss on the crown of its coarse black head. “We tried for years. ‘Patience,’ a word we both came to despise, along with doctors and nurses and snippy receptionists and the magazines in waiting rooms:
Sports Illustrated, U.S. News and World Report
—
Runner’s World
, for God’s sake. You know how fast-food restaurants purposely design their seats to be uncomfortable, to keep the traffic moving?”

“I wouldn’t know. I drive by the window.”

“I think doctors’ office managers choose the magazines they subscribe to for the same reason, to discourage you from taking too much of their time. It turned out there was nothing medically wrong with either of us, but I finally took fertility pills. At the clinic they suggested artificial insemination—AI, they call it. Oral was willing, but I set myself against it. Too much like mixing martinis. Anyway we conceived finally, and after twelve hours in labor I agreed to a C-section. Jeffie was stronger than either of his brothers. He’s a special child, and that’s why I named him after Jeff. What happened to your leg?”

“I fell on the ice. Tell me about Jeff. He isn’t your brother.”

“Oral doesn’t know that. He didn’t lie to you. I’m the liar in this marriage.”

She sounded proud of it. I said nothing and sipped from my mug. What was inside bore a closer resemblance to a lemon Fizzie dissolved in radiator water than it did to coffee, but I didn’t comment or gag. I’d had worse, much worse. In order to get the answers
you need, you have to put up with the ritual of hospitality. I groped for my pack of cigarettes.

“No one’s smoked in this house for ten years. I made Oral give it up after we married.”

I apologized and put it back. I hadn’t paid attention to what my fingers were doing.

“If you need it, you need it. I was just making an observation. I want visitors to be comfortable in our home. I don’t have any use for people who make you take off your shoes before they let you walk on their rug. You can always clean up after they leave.” She looked down at Jeffie. “He’s asleep now. I’ll put him down. Please feel free to smoke. I’ll open a window later.”

It was an order, the “please” notwithstanding, and I complied while she went out of the room, toward a hallway and a set of stairs that creaked under the combined weight of mother and child. I parked the cup of reconstituted cardboard, found a dish on the coffee table with a lone Jolly Roger inside, and used it for an ashtray. When she came back, she inhaled the secondhand smoke with the dreamy erotic grace of a connoisseur.

“I’ve always liked the smell of tobacco. The taste, too; though I’ve never smoked.” She sat down and curled her hands around her mug. She hadn’t drunk from it yet. “I miss that nicotine kiss. I only made Oral give it up because I want him to be around to attend Jeffie’s graduation. That’s the point, isn’t it? Not how the drapes smell.”

“My ex-wife told me it was like licking an ashtray.” I blew a plume of smoke into an uninhabited corner.

“That’s just stupid.”

“I asked you to tell me about Jeff. So far all you’ve told me is you named Jeffie after him because he’s a special child.”

“Jeff’s a child of tragedy. I thought you might have known
something about that. Oral said you were friends.”

“It’s more complicated than friendship,” I said. “I helped get him out of a jam once. He more than canceled that out the last time I saw him.”

“Do you like him?”

“I don’t know if he prefers football to basketball or collects redheads or eighteenth-century chamber pots. I didn’t know he played piano before that night. We had the longest conversation we’d ever had and all I found out was the brand of cigarettes he was smuggling.” I took another drag and snuffed the butt in the candy dish. “Yeah, I like him.”

“Oral hates him. Not just because of what he does. He’s seen what worrying about Jeff does to me.” She drank from her mug, grimaced. I was beginning to like her too. “If Jeff told you what he was doing, it’s more than he told me. You read the note he sent.”

I drew out the card and put it on the coffee table. “I just borrowed it. You’re sure he wrote it?”

“I know his hand as well as I know my own. I taught him to read and write. I’m also the one who taught him to play the piano.”

“You knew him when he was a boy?”

“He’s my brother,” she said. “But he’s not. That’s something you can never tell Oral.”

R
ose Canon cocked her head suddenly, excused herself, and scampered upstairs. I hadn’t heard anything, but I’m nobody’s mother. In a little while she came back down and curled back up in her chair.

“He was just restless,” she said. “Do you think a three-month-old baby can have nightmares?”

“They’re born naked, in a room full of people wearing masks. I don’t see how they can have anything but.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. She’d left her instant coffee to grow cold on the glass-topped table. I took another sip, purely for the caffeine, and let mine grow cold along with it. My leg felt better than it had in days. Doubts about the story Oral Canon had told me had made it worse, but relief seemed to be within my reach.

“My maiden name’s Aseltine,” she said. “Oral thinks Jeff took Starzek from some accomplice to keep anything from coming back to me. I may have said something to give him that impression. Anyway it makes him less intolerant toward Jeff, so there’s no point in setting him straight. His parents, the Starzeks, were overage flower children: stupid people who left him with friends
while they chartered a plane to Cuba to cut cane with the proletariats. The plane went down in the Caribbean. Jeff was three.”

“The friends were your parents?”

She nodded. “The Starzeks were responsible enough to draw up a will naming a guardian in case they never came back from Cuba, and irresponsible enough to name my dear mother.”

“This is the mother who left you?”

“That happened later. I said they were stupid and irresponsible. I didn’t say they were criminally neglectful.”

“Why’d she agree to it?”

“I can only assume that when they approached her she thought it was a remote possibility at best. When the worst happened, I suppose she had some idea raising a second child would save her marriage. Everyone knows what a positive effect that has on a husband who sleeps on a barstool more often than his bed at home.”

“It’s been known to happen,” I said. “But only at the turning point.”

“All it did was turn him deeper into the bottle. A lot of men in those circumstances just leave, but he was too weak even for that. In the end he was too weak and afraid to see a doctor when a mole on his neck started changing shape. But Mother wasn’t weak. One morning she gave me lunch money, put me on the school bus, dropped Jeff off at day care, and kept on driving. My father was passed out in his chair as usual when I came home, and when the day-care people called to find out why no one had come for Jeff, I was the one who answered.

“That was twenty-seven years ago last September,” she said. “We were living in South Lyon. The police tracked her to a hotel in Chicago, but she’d checked out before they got there. She may still be alive. Then again, she may have driven straight from the hotel into Lake Michigan.”

“Oral said you practically raised Jeff.”

“It was a little more than practically. Dad tried to dry out several times, but he wasn’t much more help sober. I was just five years older than Jeff. He was in and out of trouble all though junior high and dropped out at sixteen to park cars at Carl’s Chop House. One night he forgot to bring one back. He did six months at the Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake, but all he learned there was how to jump wires and take a car apart in under an hour. He was crazy about cars.”

“Still is. I didn’t know about the stretch in juvie.” I wondered if Homeland Security did. They’d know his rap sheet as an adult, and Agent Clemson knew his blood relations were extinct. That was as much as he’d told me, apart from the fact Starzek had outgrown the cigarette trade into something of more interest to his bureau.

“You wouldn’t,” she said, “unless Jeff wanted you to know. They seal records under age eighteen.”

“And you think your husband wouldn’t understand if he found out Jeff isn’t really your brother.”

“I know he wouldn’t.”

“Not very charitable to Oral. He might be more open-minded than you think.”

“Open-minded,” she said. “Not stupid. Can I count on your confidence, Mr. Walker?”

Her face was polished alabaster, the delicate mouth less fragile than it looked. A jackhammer couldn’t chip it into an expression I could read.

I said, “I know who Deep Throat is. I’ve known for thirty years. You didn’t see it in the tabloids.”

“I only have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, but I’ll trust you. Jeff trusts you or he wouldn’t have told me to hire you. I love him, Mr. Walker. I love him more than Oral and, God help me, more than little Jeffie. And not as a brother.”

This time I heard the baby cry, but not before she did. While she was upstairs, and to take my mind off the Deep Throat guff, I got up to look at the photographs sealed in Lucite on the mantel: a wedding shot of Oral and Rose, she in a tailored eggshell suit, he boiling like a lobster out of a tight collar and gray pinstripe, orchids pinned to their breasts; a studio pose of a couple hard on eighty who had contributed in equal parts to Oral’s big bald head and sloping shoulders; Rose pregnant; Rose holding Jeffie; Jeffie; an underexposed Polaroid of a grave-faced boy of about six, taken in someone’s backyard; a five-by-seven version of the wallet-size Oral had given me of Rose and Jeff Starzek. No shots of them together as children, or of Rose as a young girl. A spare, sad album—if Rose hadn’t lied to me the way she had to her husband.

I smelled her at my side. The scent or soap she used was slightly almond. It might have been baby oil.

“That’s Oral’s mother and father at their golden.” she said. “He died last year. They wouldn’t let me hold Jeffie or his brothers in the hospital. We took these pictures the day we brought him home. That’s Jeff. He was a skinny little kid. He filled out later. I guess you can tell we weren’t a big picture-taking family.”

“There’s one missing.”

“I had one of my father, but I haven’t seen it since we moved in. I tore up all the pictures of my mother the day I turned sixteen.”

“I meant there’s no picture of Jeff’s brother.”

She hesitated. “He doesn’t have a brother. I’m his only family.”

“Paul Starzek runs a do-it-yourself church up in Port Huron. He’s twenty years older than Jeff.”

She went back to her chair and curled up in it. hugging herself as if she were chilled. The electric fire kept the room an even seventy. “You waited long enough to toss that in my lap. Any other surprises?”

“What surprised you, that he has a brother or that I knew about him?”

“What do you think?”

“You didn’t hire me to think. Pound for pound it’s a bad deal.”

“I didn’t know. I don’t care whether you believe me. I don’t know what the advantage would be if I did and pretended I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t know now. It’s possible. Jeff’s parents were in their forties when their plane went down. I never heard my mother and father say anything about their having a grown son; but then they hardly talked to each other. Who told you?”

I hung on to that surprise, to find out if it was one. “Paul wouldn’t give me the time of day over the telephone, so I paid him a visit. He wasn’t home. His church doesn’t seem to be doing too well. What do you know about St. Sebastian?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t raised Catholic.”

“Episcopalian here. I’ll have to look him up. He seems to be the patron saint of Paul’s faith. Anyway the church is shut up for the winter, and maybe for good. It looks like he’s using it for storage.”