How I Spent My Summer Vacation (20 page)

“And Big Kurt.” She waved her arms at the empty air. “Out of work, no insurance, then he gets sick. Dies, but the money, the money, it thinks I’m dead, too. Except for my sister.”

I patted her hand, gloveless today. The cape, its former life as a well-used tablecloth recognizable up close, slipped off her shoulders. She wore a reindeer-patterned cardigan over a blouse with a round collar, and two skirts that I could see.

“I worked, you know, when he got so sick. Waited tables, but I couldn’t always…after my son…headaches all the time. Couldn’t sleep. My sister said not to worry, just get well, and as long as she had a roof over her head… And even after. Happily ever after, like in stories.” She breathed in raggedly and looked at me. “Who is your boyfriend, then, if Mack isn’t?”

“I’m sorry about your son and your husband and your sister. That’s really hard.” Everybody, I thought. Everybody gone and no safe harbor anywhere.

Her eyebrows arched in surprise, almost as if she’d forgotten that she’d just told me about her family. Then she looked down at her hands. “My sister worked so hard, her heart gave out. She’d be sorry, too, if she could see me now. She thought our old age was taken care of. It’s not her fault. Can’t trust anybody. Do you have a job?”

I nodded.

“Not waitressing, right?”

“Right.”

“Good.” She leaned to whisper something. Once again a mild whiff of alcohol accompanied her closeness. “Shelters are no good. Too scary.”

“Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe we could find one that wasn’t—”

She shook her head vigorously, curls flying, and waved my suggestion off with both hands rapidly crisscrossing in front of her face. “No shelters for me.”

“Can’t you get welfare money, then? Get your own place?”

She shook the curls again. “Need an address to get benefit checks.”

“You mean you have to get off the streets before you can get the check that would get you off the streets?”

She flashed the gap-toothed grin again. “Something like that. I saw him once, right over back there.” She pointed over her shoulder, back toward the boardwalk and its buildings. “Dressed all fancy. He gave me a quarter. I said ‘Where’s the rest? Where’s the part you kept?’ He looked at me like I was scum. I’da had my sister’s apartment if he hadn’t robbed her.”

The scattered elements of her stories began to pull together like pieces of a puzzle, and the picture that began to emerge frightened me on her behalf. The robbery, the sister’s safety net—investments?—gone, the newspaper story she considered lucky, even the chambermaids who let her into vacant hotel rooms so she could shower. Access. Motive? “Georgette,” I said, “who was it that gave you the quarter?” Would she still say it was Reese? Or would it now be J. Edgar Hoover, or Michael Jackson?

“I thought he was cute.”

“The man who robbed you?”

“Mack. That’s the problem, isn’t it? They’re so cute. And where’s Lucky? His mother watching him for once? People who have kids and don’t even…” She looked at her hands again. One of her fingernails was black, as if something heavy had crashed onto it.

“The man who robbed your sister and you,” I persisted. “What was his name?”

And with that, for her own unknowable reasons, I had crossed an invisible line, intruded, become a danger. She pulled away, emotionally and physically, moving to the edge of the stairs. “What’s it to you?” she asked in a sullen tone.

I couldn’t manage more than fish noises, semisilent bubbles of sound replacing words. “I—I didn’t mean to pry,” I finally stammered.

“Yes you did. You meant to.”

“I—” My denial froze in my throat. What were the rules of etiquette to her? Why tell a polite lie to this woman while I was asking her for the truth? “Yes,” I said. “I was prying and I meant to.”

She rewarded me with a smile again. “Well, then it’s okay.” She sat forward and clasped her hands around her knees. “It’s the lying that gets me. How about you?”

I nodded, somewhat shamefully, given my recent record.

“Does Mack lie?”

“He isn’t like the man who robbed you and your sister.” I hoped that put us back on course.

“He sure is a looker.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “More’s the pity.”

“My sister never married. Much older. Took care of me when our mother died. He told her the money was safe. Her life’s earnings. Wigs itch, you know that? Ever wear one?”

I shook my head. “Did you try to get the money back? Did you see a lawyer about it?”

“Oh…all those papers to get together, and the landlord when I didn’t have the rent made me leave before I finished, and where was I supposed to put everything then, so I lost stuff and in the first place, I don’t know any lawyers, so…” She shrugged. “I don’t know.…”

In Philadelphia there are always ads for people who, for a fee, promise to organize your life, from your kitchen cupboards to your time schedule. I wished there’d have been one for Georgette, for all the Georgettes. Somebody who’d have kept them from smothering in the minutiae of daily life and bureaucratic rigamarole, someone who’d have held them tight before they disconnected and drifted loose into the void.

“Wait here,” she said, and with surprising speed and agility she was up and onto the sand and under the boardwalk to her private quarters.

I tried to estimate her height before she bent over to enter her lair. She was on the tall side, a rangy woman with big bones and wild hair. I, who surely knew more about the original than an old man with failing eyesight who was the only witness—I had mistaken her for Sasha.

A minute or so later she was back, holding yesterday’s rumpled newspaper with Jesse Reese’s face on the front. “Him,” she said, putting the paper in my lap, photo up. “Serves him right. Why should he have a nice old age if my sister didn’t?”

Her words were emphatic, but her voice was always low, a bit flat, as if by now she lacked the psychic energy to shout or rail. I wished I were as convinced that she lacked the energy required to murder. I did not want this woman to have been the killer of Jesse Reese. “When you read about it in the newspaper,” I prompted, “you must have been surprised.”

“I always knew it was going to happen. He was a bad man and he had to pay. You might have been surprised, but not me. I saw him. He liked that casino over there. I watched and I waited for this to happen.”

“The wig,” I said, trying a new tack. “It’s really quite beautiful. Has it always itched? Or did that just happen when it got old—or is it old? It looks brand-new.”

She looked completely fuddled. “New to me,” she said after due consideration.

“How long have you had it?”

She continued to look confused. A sense of time was most likely not her strong suit. “Blink and me, we go out on Tuesdays,” she said. “That’s the best time, when the stuff is out there for pickup. Is that what you mean?”

I nodded. “Do you know which Tuesday it was? Yesterday was a Tuesday. Was it then?”

“You won’t find one now,” she said. “They took it all away this morning. They take everything away on Wednesdays.” Her expression cleared. “But hey, you like the wig?” And she pulled it off and tossed it to me, like a dead animal. “You can have it.” She overrode my protests. “Too itchy, anyway.”

Now surely, if she’d committed the murder and read about it in the paper and noted mention of a brown-haired tall woman—surely not even Georgette would casually toss me criminal evidence. I didn’t want to take away her thick brown hair, the source of her happiness, but I definitely wanted hard evidence. And I wanted the police lab to find out whether there was blood on it. Something. Perhaps evidence of someone else who had worn it. Someone who now had only one tiny pearl earring.

Georgette’s head was slightly cocked, as if waiting for something.

“I’ll borrow it,” I said. “You’ll get it back.” I hoped that was true. If not, I’d find a way to buy her a thick-haired wig of her own.

“Aw,” she said. “It’s not like it’s a pet you have to return to its owner. It’s a wig, and I only had it for one day.”

I remembered that yesterday she’d carried a roughly tied packet, the one with the high heels and the book. I’d thought she had a pelt in there, and I’d imagined dead animals, not a disguise chucked nearly at the scene of the murder. “So who cares about it, anyway?” she asked.

I grabbed one of her hands as I clutched the wig in the other. “I do,” I said. “I really do!”

“Yeah?” She looked at me appraisingly, tightening her eyes like a merchant weighing produce. “How much?”

Georgette was no longer, if she’d ever been, a creature of sentiment. She couldn’t afford to be one. “Let me rent it.” I pulled out bills. “And you get yourself a room for the night, okay? Not in a shelter, a hotel.”

She pushed the bills into the pocket of an underskirt, looking much more exposed and unprotected with her wispy hair, the skull showing through.

“You know, Georgette, you may have just saved somebody’s life.” I controlled the urge to dance, to shout, to carry on.

She showed no interest or curiosity. I couldn’t blame her. When you’re barely holding on yourself, you don’t have hands left over for reaching out to save others.

But intentionally or not, she had provided the possible means to turn the searchlights off Sasha, and, waving the shank of hair like a talisman, giddy with hope, I descended into the bowels of the earth to find my trusty steed and charge off in defense of justice, truth, and horrific wigs.

When all of this was over, I was going to
insist
that Sasha get a decent haircut.

THE WIG FELT LIKE AN alien being, the spirit of the non-Sasha who had murdered Jesse Reese. Forget Mackenzie’s luggage. It could surely wait to be retrieved. Nobody was going to be able to use it for a while now. I turned my itinerary around and went directly to jail. “Do not pass Go,” I muttered to myself as I drove past the Monopoly board streets. The buildings were not nearly as well preserved or tidy as the little green houses and big red hotels I remembered struggling to acquire. Real-life properties in the real-life game had a shorter shelf life than their plastic equivalents.

I entered the station like a scalper, toting my trophy.

The desk sergeant seemed to endure rather than hear me as I explained the hows and whys of the wig. “Her? Hell, I know crazy Georgette,” he said when I’d finished my presentation. “Everybody does. Always some bug up her—” He cleared his throat. “I used to patrol that area, and every time she’d see me, there’d be another complaint about being robbed. A real one-trick pony, except she wouldn’t fill out forms or do anything except complain. Doesn’t trust anybody. Can barely get her into a shelter when it’s zero out.”

“But this is different,” I reminded him, all the while feeling sorrier than ever for Georgette, who had only half the idea and no ability to get her albatross off her back. “A separate issue. She found this in a trash can behind the casino, the day after Jesse Reese was murdered by somebody who had this kind of hair. When Georgette was wearing this wig, she almost looked like Sasha Berg, the woman you’ve arrested. Anybody tall would. This could be important evidence.”

He poked a finger into his ear and shook his head, as if trying to scratch his brain.

If you want to push a woman toward hysteria, there is nothing quite as effective as confronting her with a truly impassive man, is there? My vocal cords twisted and strained, my decibel level rose to get through to the man—and I knew that if he dared to say “No need to get all upset about it,” I’d kill him, right here, in the police station. “And there was a
pearl earring
yesterday,” I said. “In my
shoe
! In the room
where it happened!
Do you know if they have the earring now? If they found out whose earring it was?”

“I’m not a homicide detective. Not on the case, ma’am.” His face contorted as he attempted to swallow a yawn. Then he coughed and cleared his throat. “If you were told the earring would get to the proper authorities, it did. And so will the hairpiece.” And before I could complete a request to see somebody who was directly involved in the case, the sergeant raised his hand like a traffic cop. “Person in charge isn’t here.”

“But you’ll tell him where and how it—”

He nodded and tilted his head back, scratching his neck with his uniform collar. “You wanted to see your friend?” he asked.

“Sasha Berg. Yes.”

“She’s in there.”

“Right, but you have my phone number in case he—”

“Better hurry, she doesn’t have use of that room forever.”

Dismissed. I gave the sergeant a vote of no confidence, and beseeched the gods of criminal justice to properly track the wig and the pearl earring.

Sasha needed to get out of this place, quickly. Even the small portion of the jail we now shared was the antithesis of welcoming, comfortable, or human. The walls looked painted with high-gloss fungus, the floor was dull black tile with an unsettling white squiggle, and the furnishings were equally inhospitable—a fake-wood Formica-topped table and chairs with slats that deliberately aimed for the aching small of my back.

And this was the nice part, the reception area. I could see a small reflection of what the cells must be like on Sasha. There is a thin and easily worn-away patina of confidence that separates winners from losers, and I already could see rusty patches in Sasha’s armor. She shook her head at my suggestions of toiletries or fresh underwear or even a book, because she needed to believe she was getting out of here this afternoon. Her cousin the lawyer from New Jersey had said so.

“But in case it’s not till tomorrow?” I quietly suggested. Her cousin had to file a motion. I had no idea whether that would move as quickly as filing his nails—or as slowly as filing her way out of the cell. Sasha grudgingly agreed to a short list.

“They probably won’t let you take any of my things,” she said in a flattened-out voice. “My underwear is evidence. I can’t stand it.” She put her head in her hands. I’d never seen her this way before.

“Then I’ll buy something new, or you can have some of mine.”

She looked up and raised her eyebrows. “Surely that exceeds the bounds of friendship, don’t you think?” When I didn’t answer, she sighed. “Okay, then. But if you bring a book, make it sleazy, all right?”