Goldilocks (8 page)

“Not bad,” Ryan said, stepping past them to inspect two messes strewn on the ground like bloody mechanic’s rags. Only the pinkish-gray tails identified them. Ryan’s gaze shifted to a much bigger mess, the large head whole, the eyes zeros. “But the cat don’t count,” he said.

• • •

“I’m here to work,” Henry Witlo said to Cole’s secretary with only half his usual smile. It was ten in the morning, and his face was puffy from a bad sleep, his stomach was not pulled in, and his hair was in need of a cut. The nap on the back of his neck fuzzed out at the sides like little feathers. “Did you hear me?” he said.

“Yes, I heard you,” Marge said vaguely over her typewriter, a mug of coffee steaming beside her. Her penny eyes were on him in a way that did not entirely acknowledge him.

He said, “Mr. Cole called the Y, left word I was to come here ‘stead of his house.”

“Attorney Cole is busy. You’ll have to wait.”

“No problem,” he said, stepping toward one of the chairs against the wall.

“There’s coffee in the conference room,” she said. “You can wait there.”

“This is fine right here, if you don’t mind.”

She minded.

“Christ,” he said, “I’m not going to bite you.”

Twenty minutes later he was standing in Cole’s office with his hands driven into his back pockets and his elbows winged out. He cocked his head. “I guess your lady doesn’t want me around the house,” he said, and Cole looked up from the clutter of his desk.

“There’re things you can do here.”

“I don’t think your secretary likes me either. The problem is, Mr. Cole, people like me right off the bat or they don’t like me at all, ever. They add me up too fast, total comes to nothing. Or comes to something I’m not. In Nam I pissed off a lieutenant just by the way I chewed gum.”

Cole’s expression softened. “You’re hard to figure out, Henry. Maybe that’s the problem.”

“I got lots of problems, but I try to keep ’em to myself. Don’t like to bother people. Worst thing in the world is to be a pain in the ass, I know that. All I want, Mr. Cole, is to make something of myself. I don’t want to be a big shot, just want to amount to something. That’s why I’m going to hit the books again.” His smile suddenly was full-blown. “I might even become a lawyer like you. A guy at the Y thought I was one. What d’you think of that?”

Cole absently shifted documents from one part of his desk to another. “All you’ll get working here is five bucks an hour. That’s not much, and it’s only part-time.”

“I’ll manage. I’ve had it tough before. There were times I lived on Twinkies. The sugar kept me going.”

“Then if you’re going to work out of this office, you should wear a real shirt. And you could use a haircut.”

“I understand. I don’t want to shame you.” He pushed his hair back. “Truth is, Mr. Cole. I want you to be proud of me.”

“You don’t need me to be proud of you. I’m not your father.”

“Hey, Mr. Cole, I’m not looking for a father. A mother was enough.”

• • •

Despite the heat of the early June sun and the muggy air, Emma Goss was out among her flowers, weeding, thinning, and watering. Years ago around the flower beds her husband had laid a narrow stone path and nearby had anchored a birdbath. He had enjoyed puttering around on weekends, clad in the mended trousers of an old suit, a garden or lawn tool in his hand. Sometimes, when the sun slanted over the house at an obscure angle, she seemed to detect his footprints in the grass, a comforting illusion, for she was sure it meant he was still watching out for her, protecting her in a way no alarm system or passing police car could.

Through a break in the privet hedge she glimpsed her neighbor Mrs. Whipple shaking Japanese beetles off a rosebush. Mrs. Whipple, who was wearing a sundress, freckles dusting her shoulders, was in her early forties and had an adolescent daughter. Mrs. Goss wanted to give her a neighborly greeting but lacked the nerve to speak first to someone she did not know well, even though the family, distantly cordial, had lived next door for four years and had sent a note of condolence when Harold died. The opportunity to speak passed when the woman moved out of sight. Mrs. Goss returned to her flowers.

The sun was warm on her back, and she could feel herself perspiring. Her soft fingers were hot inside her gloves as she crouched low among the lilies, of which there were a variety, so that when some were losing their bloom others were gaining theirs, ensuring color from late May into the middle of August. Groping into the foliage to get at the weeds, she felt that the punishment of the sun was good for her constitution and the exercise vital to her health. Once she had flirted with the idea of yoga classes, but an image of herself in a bulging leotard had horrified her. She gave a start when her bare arm brushed a spiderweb and a bigger start when she heard a male voice behind her.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

She was on her feet in the instant.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said as she pressed a hand over her heart, for the moment conscious only of his bleached blue eyes and his yellow hair neatly combed and parted. “I rang the front bell,” he said, “but I guess you can’t hear it out here.”

“The windows are closed,” she said, conscious now of her untidy appearance, especially of the sweat blotches on her blouse and the grass stains on her knees, though her knees could not be seen. “To keep the house cool,” she explained as he stepped closer with a polite smile. He had on a short-sleeved check shirt tucked tight into his jeans, and he smelled of a barbershop. In his hand was an envelope.

“Then you didn’t hear the phone either. Someone was supposed to call you, tell you I was coming. You’re Mrs. Goss, right?”

She nodded tentatively and removed her gloves, aware of a palpitation. She feared he was bearing bad news of a completely unexpected nature. Perhaps her payment to one of the utility companies had been lost in the mail and he was here to shut off the service … and all the neighbors would know.

He said, “I work for Mr. Cole. He’s got something for you to sign. I don’t know what it’s about, but I guess you do.”

She looked at him deadpan, for her mind had not yet moved ahead.

“Something about your house,” he said helpfully, and gave her the envelope, which she opened with awkward fingers. Then, with a flood of relief, she saw that the document was a formal notification to the realtor that she no longer wanted to place her house on the market.

“Yes, of course, I’ll sign it,” she said eagerly.

They moved to the breezeway connecting the house and garage, where he produced a pen from the pocket of his new shirt. When she affixed her signature above her typewritten name, a wave of satisfaction passed through her, as if something vital had been restored. Tears formed in her eyes like a membrane over her emotions. She slipped the paper back into the envelope and returned it to him. Then, retracting the point, she gave back the pen and gazed at him with gratitude. She felt that in some way she should repay him.

“Would you like some ice tea? I could bring you out a glass.”

“Thank you just the same, ma’am, but I got more things to do for Mr. Cole. My first day on the job, I don’t want to mess up.” He raised an arm and pointed. “I go that way, it takes me to South Broadway, right?”

“Yes,” she said, happy to provide direction, to steer him on course.

“I’m still learning my way around. I’m new to Lawrence.” His smile was big. “You got a nice house here, Mrs. Goss, the kind you see in the nicer parts of Chicopee. That’s where I’m from. I’m Polish, you might’ve guessed.”

She had not. She had thought Swedish. Birds clamored from high in a neighbor’s tree that she had watched grow from a sapling. “I’ve lived here a long time,” she said, and wondered how she could ever have considered moving.

He said, “I heard Mr. Cole’s secretary mention you lost your husband not so long ago.”

“Yes,” she said in a voice she did not immediately recognize as her own. A robin flew to the neighbor’s tree and dissolved in the leaves. “A heart attack took him away.”

His voice also sounded different. “I know what it’s like to lose somebody,” he said and, in taking leave, patted her shoulder.

• • •

Barney Cole finished his business in district court and crossed the street to Dolce’s Cafeteria, a deep hole-in-the-wall where denizens of the court and hangers-on gathered throughout the morning in numbers that diminished drastically by midafternoon. Now only a few tables were occupied. Cole carried his coffee away from the high counter, approached a table, and said, “Mind if I join you?”

“I’d be mad if you didn’t.”

The voice, hoarsened by the years, belonged to Arnold Ackerman, a retired bookmaker who had been a close friend of Cole’s father and a bearer at the funeral. He was semibald and had moist eyes in a dry and strained face that looked pulled apart at the bottom, the mouth large and rubbery. His small hands encircled a cup of tea.

Cole, settling in, said, “How you doing?”

“Ten years ago I was doing better. Today I got pains don’t belong to me, someone must’ve wished me bad, put pins in a doll or something. Voodoo. You believe in that stuff, Barney?”

“I don’t discount it.”

“Also I don’t sleep so hot. Happens, you get older. Dead of night you think you hear the phone ring, but it’s just an echo in your skull. Could’ve been somebody calling you two days ago.” He sipped his tea. “Few nights ago I dreamed your dad phoned me from heaven, but I wouldn’t accept the call. It was collect. I regret that, Barney. I would dearly have liked to talk to him again.”

“Think he’s doing OK up there, Arnold?”

“Sure he is, and so will I, they let me in. To make sure, I’m touching all bases. I mail my envelope in to the temple, play bingo at St. Pat’s, and tune in to Jimmy Swaggart. Ever watch that guy perform? His timing’s perfect, and he sweats on cue. Say what you want about him, but those glands are God-given.”

Cole smiled warmly. His father’s old buddy, so many tales told about him. Could talk a dog off a meat wagon, a nun out of her habit. Never paid a dime for protection all his years booking. When cops tried to shake him down, he borrowed lunch money from them. Never lost an argument that counted. When it seemed he might, he mumbled, which made him incomprehensible and indisputable. Cole did not believe all the stories, only the implausible ones. He said, “I heard from Louise Leone.”

“Did you?” The old face brightened. “Sweet girl. Smart. In high finance now. Bankrolls the big boys, that’s what I hear.”

“Yes, that’s what I hear too.”

“And she married blue blood. A guy, I bet, eats branny cereal for his bowels.”

“His name’s Baker,” Cole said.

“Makes her an American now. She never did like being a wop. Long time ago we thought you two would marry. Surprised your dad you didn’t.”

Cole shrugged. He did not have an answer worth giving.

Arnold sipped his tea, which did not look hot. “Her father’s sick. Something to do with his stomach. She mention it?”

“No,” Cole said.

“Maybe she doesn’t know.” The glazed crumbs of a honeydip doughnut lay like flakes of ice on a plate Arnold had pushed aside. He gathered them up and ate them, his mouth moving loosely. “Lot of people are sick. I see your pal Daisy Shea. He sure as hell doesn’t look tip-top.”

“He’s hanging in.”

“So’s Manny the tailor. Early last week he had a heart attack. I saw the ambulance guys wheel him out of his shop. They plunked his teeth on his chest, everybody to see. I visited him yesterday, Lawrence General. He looks pretty good now, especially with his choppers back in. Guess who’s in the same room with him. Buddy Pothier, owns the furniture store. Somebody beat up on him, left him with a detached retina and a few other unenjoyable things. Happened at the Y.”

Cole’s head came up. “Who did it to him?”

“He’s not talking. Says it was a misunderstanding. There was always something peculiar about Buddy, you know that.”

“When did it happen?” Cole’s voice was toneless.

“Few days ago.”

“I didn’t see it in the paper.”

“It was there. Little item that didn’t say much in the tiny print they use under police reports. His name was buried in all the Spanish ones.

“Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s going to live, that’s what you mean. If you’re asking about his eye, what do I know about detached retinas?”

Cole, distracted, looked away.

“I didn’t know better,” Arnold said, “I’d think you were taking it personal.”

• • •

Emma Goss hung the gardening tools on sturdy hooks her husband had screwed into the far wall inside the garage, printed strips of adhesive tape indicating where each implement should hang, a precise place for everything. His green-and-white Plymouth, which he had coddled, stood almost as shiny as the day he had driven it home from Clark Motors. Only last week, using the same motions as he, she had run a rag over the hood and wiped the windows. She knew she would never learn to drive the car, but she could no more sell it than she could chuck his clothes or dispose of his toothbrush, which still shared a place next to hers. Hers was the pink, his the green.

She locked the garage and paused in the breezeway. The sun, which had given her a slight headache, remained relentlessly brilliant, but the texture of the air had changed, as if it had taken on another skin. Entering the cool and quiet of the house, the door locking behind her, she immediately looked for Harold in the glass front of the china closet, but it was only her own image that squinted back at her, somewhat disheveled from her day.

She took aspirin, ran a bath, and undressed. Always, when naked, chalk-white except for the color of her forearms and face, she suffered dismay. Too much unmitigated fullness, a legacy from her mother, which in her young married years had pleased Harold but had always embarrassed her, the reason that she had worn sundresses, never bathing suits, at their seaside vacations.

She bathed quickly, her headache still with her. When she rose from the soapy water, she felt dizzy and grasped the towel rack for support, holding on tight as a wave of nausea washed through her. Moments later, her heart thumping, she eased cautiously out of the tub on legs she did not trust. Gripping the edge of the sink cabinet, she stared into the mirror. “Please, let it be just a touch of the sun,” she said aloud, her face full of fear. She feared not death but illness, the sort that would thrust her into the hands of strangers, nothing hidden from their anonymous eyes, her dignity and modesty violated.