“No shit, bouncing? When?”
“Last fall?” Wally looked sheepish. “I mean, I don’t go to those places usually, but Poke had a bachelor party. Meat didn’t look all that glad to see us. We didn’t stay long.”
“Good old Meat.”
“Yep.” Wally sneaked a look at the clock on his desk. I stood up, set my second bottle on Wally’s desk.
“I better get going.”
Wally pointed at my half-full bottle. “Alcohol abuse, man.”
“What can I say? I’m a wimp.”
Wally deserved his good life. I wondered what he would have said or done if I had told him about my life, how I was just trying to hang on to my job and my girlfriend. He stretched out a hand. “Good to see you, bud.”
Jason Esper had cut Jarek Vend. Then he had saved his life. Then he was working for him. Then he came up north and married Darlene. But something was missing. His life went to shit and drink and video golf.
He left Starvation, went back downstate. Back to Vend. They were brothers bound by spilled blood. Now Jason was back in Starvation again, supposedly cleaned up. I was betting he and Knobbo were bound by something other than just blood. Probably not something pretty.
Philo had left me a message. I scribbled the Prospect Street address for Trixie the Tramp-a.k.a. Patricia Armbruster-on the side of a foam coffee cup. Not bad, Philo, I thought. Not bad.
Then I dialed Darlene. I just wanted to hear her voice. My phone died in the middle of the first ring.
“There’s no need for you to see anything here,” she told me.
“But isn’t this-”
“What happens here is none of your business.” She gave me a prim smile. “My car’s out back.”
Trixie Armbruster did not look like a tramp, or at least the sort of tramp her nickname brought to mind. Taller than me, she carried her boxy frame in a baggy cotton dress. The dress was printed with tiny flowers that had all faded to the same shade of pale lavender. On our way out to the muddy lot behind her building, she wrapped herself in a worn brown bomber jacket. The zipper didn’t work so she clipped the jacket together beneath her bosom with a safety pin. Her gone-white hair stuck out over the jacket collar in a stiff, wavy perm. She walked with purpose, two steps ahead of me, limping with each step, favoring her left leg.
All I knew of Trixie’s past was what I had heard on Philo’s short phone message: She was once a prostitute and heroin addict. She had broken free somehow and started the center for abused women, mostly abused prostitutes. She called it Trixie’s Place for Tired Women and Girls. The name helped get her some publicity, a few grants, some pity donations from a rich liberal or two, a little extra police protection from the city. When I heard it on Philo’s message, all I could think was, Gracie, what did you get yourself into?
Trixie had sounded oddly expectant when I’d called her from a pay phone outside a party store to ask if I could drop by. I suppose that someone who did what she did was always ready for anything. I had explained how Gracie had been found dead in the shoe tree, how she was extended family, how I had come at the behest of my mother, Gracie’s favorite aunt, to see if I could gain a clearer understanding of how she had lived her life, why it had ended.
“I don’t know,” she had said. “I don’t see what good it would do.”
“Maybe Gracie told you-”
“Yes, I’m aware that you’re a newspaper reporter. If her aunt sent you, I suppose I can show you a couple of things.”
The center was in a dreary brick building that looked like it might once have been a corner store or a bar, tucked into a neighborhood not far from the Ford factory across the river. The only thing identifying the center was a semicircular plaque hanging on the front door and carved with the words “Trixie’s Place.” Beneath the plaque hung a plain wooden cross painted along its borders in gold.
I had pushed the doorbell and immediately a buzzer had sounded and a woman’s voice had come over an intercom: “Step inside, please. I’ll be out in five.” I’d waited in a space barely bigger than a closet, gazing down at a floor of muddy tile. There wasn’t a sound until I’d heard footsteps descending stairs inside and then the jingle of keys. The inner door had opened and I had presumptuously begun to step inside when Trixie blocked my way, closed that door behind her, and pointed me to her car.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I said.
Trixie was steering her Honda Civic through another neighborhood of snug bungalows. I tried to watch the street signs to see if we had wound up back at Vend’s house. Trixie was taking rights and lefts and rights again, seemingly doubling back. I thought we’d gone down the same block twice but couldn’t be sure because the houses looked alike. I thought maybe she was trying to make it so confusing that I couldn’t find my way back.
“Please understand,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “I am not happy that you are here. I am not happy that this day has arrived. I never am. But in all honesty, I can’t say that I’m surprised.”
“Tired Women and Girls?” I said.
“Tired of being abused?”
“So why not just abused?”
“Too many others with names like that.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She continued to drive without speaking. A gentle smile made its way onto her face. Then it was gone. She turned to me.
“I don’t mean to be glum,” she said. “It’s hard.” She reached across and touched my forearm. “I’m sorry for your loss, too. Although, again, in all honesty, I can’t say that I think you appreciate it.”
“Thanks, I think.”
She withdrew her hand. “It’s all right. Grace was not easy to know. For anyone. It didn’t matter how much you loved her, or how hard you tried.”
“Then you obviously knew her well.”
Trixie tilted her head to one side, smoothing the crinkled skin along her jaw. A slender necklace of gold lay on her pale white neck. I decided she had been a beautiful woman once. “Sometimes, yes,” she said, “I thought I did. But that’s just vanity, isn’t it? Most of us don’t even know our own selves.”
She turned a corner and eased off the gas as the Civic approached a cul de sac. She parked at the curb in front of a house that looked like so many there, only a shade of paint or a set of shutters different than Vend’s. The aluminum siding was a dingier white and there was no rock garden or statute of the Blessed Mother. An orange- and-brown paper turkey dangled in the front window. It reminded me that Gracie had declined Mom’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner because she had been going for a visit downstate.
A piece of white paper was tacked to the front door.
“This is where Gracie lived?” I said.
Trixie looked past me at the house. “I know she could have used the money,” she said. “Now I’m glad she didn’t sell it, so you can see.”
“She owned the place? Gracie had a mortgage?” I pointed at the house. “What’s the paper on the door? That a foreclosure notice?”
“Details like that don’t really matter now.”
“Yes, they do. Unless you think Gracie really killed herself. I don’t.”
Trixie’s gray eyes moved to mine. “Why are you here again?”
“To find out what really happened to Gracie.”
“Do you think that’s possible? Without hearing it from Gracie’s own lips?”
“I guess I must, or I wouldn’t be here.”
The car was still idling.
“You know,” Trixie said. “We didn’t call her Gracie. We called her Grace.”
“We?”
“Her sisters back at the house. Me.”
“Gracie always called herself Gracie. She said Grace sounded old.”
Trixie looked out the windshield. “The will of God,” she recited, “will never take you where the grace of God won’t protect you.” She turned the car off. “Let’s go.”
Trixie had a key. As she swung the front door open, she blocked my view of the piece of paper. Then she closed the door.
