Rubout (27 page)

“When I mentioned Woodstock, she thought it was the bird in the Snoopy cartoon. I was wrong about her not having problems. She has lots of problems and they aren’t nearly as interesting as yours. Francesca, could we please try again? I love you so much. I don’t want to be without you.”

He kissed me softly, as if I were very fragile and valuable. I kissed him back. I smelled the familiar Lyle smells of coffee and sandalwood soap. I unbuttoned a button on his shirt and saw his nice hairy chest. He didn’t look like a bear. In fact, he looked just right. He leaned me up against the wall in the entrance hall and kissed me softly and then harder
and I kissed him back and realized it had been a long time. . . .

“Do I need to wait for the results of a blood test?” I said, between kisses. I was
not
getting into bed with Ashley and all her boyfriends and her horse, too.

“Francesca, you don’t have to believe me, but we didn’t get much further than some heavy necking,” he said, kissing me again. “But if you want to wait . . . I’ll leave right now and get tested in the morning.”

“No, I believe you,” I said. “I can imagine exactly how that’s possible.”

“You can?” he said happily, kissing me harder.

“Oh, yes,” I said. I let out a long sigh. It looked like the poor and the orphaned were off the hook. I wasn’t going to give up sex and devote my life to good works. I’d overcome the trauma of the Mayhew disaster in less than four hours. An amazing recovery.

Lyle was frenching me with an interesting rhythm. He started to lower me to the stairs when I stopped him. Oh, no. Not the stair treads again.

“Upstairs,” I said. He didn’t hesitate or argue. We ran up the steps without stopping. We didn’t even notice the holy picture on the wall over the TV, and if the eyes of Christ followed me into my bedroom, I didn’t know it.

T
he next morning I woke up and smelled the coffee.

Lyle was standing beside my bed with a large latte and an Asiago cheese bagel from the St. Louis Bread Company. “Good morning,” he said, and smiled. “I went for a walk. I thought you might like these.”

I smiled back, stretched, and drew him down for a good-morning kiss. Then I sat up and took the bagel and latte. Last night had been wonderful. How could we have wasted so much time being angry at each other? He sat down on the bed to drink his own latte, and I tickled his ear.

“So it’s decided,” he said. “You’ll move in with me but keep this place.”

“And if it works out,” I said, “we’ll think about getting married.”

“We
will
get married,” he said, kissing me firmly.

“We will,” I repeated. I hadn’t said when. I’d just said I would. Someday.

He looked at his watch. “It’s eight o’clock. I have to be at the university for my eight-forty class. I’ll call you this afternoon. Maybe we can have dinner if you’re not tied up at work.” He said it without a trace of sarcasm. He meant it.

“I’d like that,” I said. “I love you. After last night, this day will only get better.”

Boy, was I wrong. If I knew what was in store for me, I’d have never gotten out of bed. But I was in a rush to greet this day. I got up and dressed, taking time only to admire the flowers Lyle had brought last night, a big bunch of fragrant white lilies with deep pink throats. Star Gazer lilies, he said they were.

Now it was eight-thirty in the morning, and I was heading down the back steps to get Ralph. I had a Voyage meeting at ten-thirty. This time I wasn’t going to be late. I was going to listen and keep my big mouth shut . . . I screamed. Someone had attacked Ralph. They’d hurt my beautiful blue Jaguar, the love of my life, after Lyle, of course. All Ralph’s windows were broken. Every single one. Both windshields, front and back, plus all four passenger windows. Glass sparkled on the concrete parking pad like pieces of ice. It crunched underfoot when I went over for a closer look. I didn’t have to go far to see what had broken Ralph’s windows. Lying by the right rear tire was a concrete cinder block. It had glass on it, too, and one corner was chipped. But the block didn’t make those deep scratches in Ralph’s blue paint. That had to be a key or some sort of knife. Probably a pocketknife, a sharp one. Sharp enough
to cut through the leather on the front seats. Even under the drifts of bluish ice-glass, I could see stuffing poking out of both seats. I had no idea Ralph had so much glass. It was safety glass, so most of it broke into pellets. There were huge sparkling mounds of glass on the backseat and in the window wells. There were smaller mounds on the floor, the stick-shift console and the dash. Glass had scratched the burled walnut trim and filled the map pouch on the doors. Glass pellets sparkled like jewels on the handle. Heaps of glass glittered on the trunk and the bumper. There was even glass in the treads on the Pirelli tires. I didn’t touch anything, because I didn’t want to disturb it for the police. But I looked in through the empty front windows at the front seats. The damage was worse than I thought. Someone had used the knife to carve three words in the driver’s seat. The person had a hard time making the Bs, but I still got the message,
BEAT IT BITCH
, it said, in the Isis blue leather.

And then, for one final, nasty touch, the vandal had opened the glove compartment, where I kept an ice scraper for the windows I no longer had, a pair of extra pantyhose, a box of emergency Tampax, tapes, and other junk. The vandal dumped them all on the floor, except the pantyhose and the Tampax. The pantyhose were slashed, but that was no great loss. They had a hole in the toe that I’d fixed with nail polish. I only kept them in the car in case I got a bad run in my nylons and couldn’t go home to change. All the Tampax had the paper covers stripped off. The vandal made a hole in the car seat with the knife and stuck one stripped Tampax right in the hole. It
looked violent, malicious, and personal. I felt hot, angry tears in my eyes. Ralph was a beautiful car, a sculpture on wheels. Who did this? And when? It had to be last night, after I got home from seeing Sonny and Debbie. Lyle came over about ten, and we were making enough noise of our own that we didn’t hear anything out back. Then we fell into a sound sleep.

Maybe Mrs. Indelicato heard something. She lived in three rooms behind the store. I knocked on her back door, but she didn’t answer. She must be in front, in the store. I ran through the concrete gangway and threw open the door, nearly knocking over a rack of Lay’s potato chips. No customers were in the store. Mrs. I, a thin, gray woman, was stocking soup on the crowded shelves. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom was one of the great white sauces in this neighborhood. Today the usually friendly Mrs. I wore a starched shirtwaist dress and a look of disapproval.

“Mrs. I, Mrs. I, someone attacked my car. Did you hear anything last night?” I said.

“I heard a lot of things last night,” she said. “And in the afternoon, too. Things no decent widow woman should have to hear. You are my landlady, and you own this building, but I’ll have you know I run a respectable store. I cannot have you bringing bikers back to your grandparents’ home. What if children had come in here when you were on those steps with that man? The moans, the groans. I never heard such things in my life.”

She probably hadn’t. Not even when Mr. Indelicato was alive. He was a pallid-looking creature, about as exciting as the mushroom soup. Same color, too. But it was mean to make fun of Mr. In
delicato. His wife didn’t deserve that. I was going to have to apologize to her sometime. I might as well do it now. I found some humility that I usually kept hidden away and said, “Mrs. Indelicato, I am so sorry if I disturbed you. I promise, as God is my witness”—that I will never go hungry again? What was I doing quoting Scarlett O’Hara? Mrs. Indelicato needed an apology—“that it will never happen again. I will never have that man here. I am back with Lyle.”

She smiled a little. “Lyle is a good, decent man with a steady job,” she said.

South Siders Mrs. I’s age did not call desirable men hunks. Here’s how they drool over guys: “He has a steady job.” True South Siders would pass up marriage to John Travolta because he’s out of work several months of the year.

“Lyle is cultured, too.” This was lavish praise. South Siders have an almost religious veneration of education. Mrs. I pursed her thin lips again and disapproved. “Not like that other one who rides motorcycles. A biker hoodlum, that one. A bum.” Not exactly. But if I explained Mayhew was a St. Louis homicide detective, I’d only make it worse. Her generation did not believe that Malcolm Forbes had changed Harley’s image. And she’d never believe the biker was really Officer Friendly.

“I have a problem, Mrs. I,” I said, finally getting around to the real reason I was there. “Someone vandalized Ralph last night. Broke out all his windows and tore up his seats.”

“But that is a terrible thing,” said Mrs. I, sincerely shocked and upset. Right now she wasn’t too sure about me, but she loved Ralph almost as much as I
did. She said he was “good for property values,” the highest accolade on the South Side. “What is this neighborhood coming to? More and more of the wrong element”—she meant color—“are moving in. People with no respect for property. People only interested in what they can steal and sell to buy more drugs.”

“Nothing was taken, Mrs. I. Not even the radio.” Jaguar radios are designed so they don’t work outside the car without a code, and street smart thieves know this. Occasionally you got a really young or dumb thief who hacked away at the dash, trying to get out the worthless coded radio. He could do three or four thousand dollars’ worth of damage to your dashboard.

“So who do you think did this terrible thing to Ralph?” Mrs. I asked, as if a friend had been beaten up instead of a car. That’s how I felt, too. My friend Ralph had been hurt.

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t know. But I had a pretty good idea. That malicious destruction was a warning from either Hudson Vander Venter or his druggie son, Hud. It was pure meanness to break Ralph’s windows and rip his leather, and that tampon in the seat was a particularly ugly touch. It could have been the kid. Drugs can bring out a strange, mean streak in some people. But Hudson Senior seemed more likely. The man was a bully. Look how he called the publisher and threw his weight around when I tried to question him. He was ruthless to Sydney, even though he was at fault, dumping a faithful wife because he was faithless. He tried to run me down when I got in his
way. I must be on the right track. I just wished I knew what it was.

Mrs. I had not heard anything unusual, except for the sound of glass breaking about two-thirty that morning. But she only heard one crash. “I thought someone dropped a beer bottle in the alley,” she said. “I went back to sleep.” She let me call the police from her store, and by the time the squad car arrived thirty minutes later, we were back on our usual good terms.

There were two uniformed officers, both black, one in his forties and one in his twenties. The older one was built like an athlete going to seed. The younger one was slender. Both were equally uninterested in the destruction of my car. I showed them the shocking scene. They looked around a little and shrugged. The older one said, “You got boyfriend trouble?”

“Do I have what? What’s that got to do with my car being attacked?”

“I don’t know,” the older cop said. “Maybe you had a fight with your boyfriend. Did you? See, I can tell by your face you broke up with him. Don’t ever play poker, lady. He got mad and got back at you, didn’t he? Man must know you love this fancy car, even if you don’t love him.”

“We made up last night, thank you. There is no longer any problem between us.”

“What about the lady he was seeing when you weren’t seeing him? Maybe she’s unhappy he went back to you. Maybe she did this.”

“Not a chance,” I said. Ashley wouldn’t risk her manicure.

The older cop stopped and suddenly stared dramatically at the sky, as if he had a divine inspiration. “I got an idea,” he said, hamming it up for his partner. “Maybe a certain police detective’s wife didn’t like you fooling around with her hubby.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I lied.

“You don’t?” the older one said. “The whole Third District knew where Detective Mayhew’s motorcycle was parked yesterday around five o’clock. He was inside a good long time. Then a patrol car saw the great detective coming out of your place buttoning up his jacket and wiping dust off his knees.”

“Must have been down on those knees praying, huh?” the younger cop said.

I blushed. I had nothing to be ashamed of with Mayhew (okay, not too much), but my stairs had been a South Side disgrace.

“Happens to me all the time,” the older cop said. “I gotta get on my knees and beg my wife for sex.”

“I’m not married,” the younger cop said. “I just pray I’ll get lucky.”

While the two of them laughed at their own jokes, I pulled out my pad of paper and started writing down their comments. “Get serious, officers, or I’ll report you,” I said. I was angry. I was the victim of vandalism and I was getting this treatment.

“For what?” the older cop asked. He sounded surly and indifferent. He didn’t like me and I suspected he didn’t like Mayhew much, either. The department was rife with black-white resentment. “You going to complain to our superiors? You going to tell them we said you were having some afternoon delight with a homicide detective? Or maybe you’re going to write
us up in your column? What are you going to say in a family newspaper about this situation, newspaper lady? I’d love to read it. Maybe you can offer your readers a prize for guessing how the great detective got his knees dirty.”