“You were up the whole time?”
“No. Not the whole time. Just … some of it.” He smiled. “Cold motherfucker,” I said.
After the church crowd filtered in for lunch and ice cream, I sat down in the kitchen and went to work on this story about the missing girl.
Her name was Judith Myers. She was seventeen years old, blond, blue-eyed, and pretty as all sin. I knew that by the picture above the caption that read, “If you have seen this person …”
She was last seen the previous night. She left her home around seven to go to her girlfriend’s house. The girlfriend stated that Judith left to go back home sometime in the neighborhood of nine-fifteen. The walk between their houses was five blocks of beautiful, upscale suburban houses. No suspicious characters were seen by anyone living in between the two residences, and no other suspicious activity was recorded that night, save the fruitless intrusion at the church. The two incidents seemed entirely unrelated.
When Mandy and Carlos showed up in the afternoon to take the place over, Abraham and I skipped out. Mandy was twice divorced, like Abraham, but with a girl from each marriage, and it was by that deep and blazing fire that rages in every woman that she was able to raise a family on her own with such a meager income.
Carlos was a Mexican in his early twenties. His arms were emblazoned with tattoos, none of which, he said, meant a damn thing. Most he’d done himself with a hot needle and the ink from a ballpoint pen. If you looked closely, you could see the rows of carefully placed blue-black dots that formed these rich tapestries of fire, dragons, and wizards. He and I were talking once and he told me that he had killed a guy. I asked him why, and he said the guy had messed with his little sister. He didn’t say how, but he didn’t have to. He didn’t want to go to jail, so he ran, and Evelyn was where he ended up.
Ever since that day, I liked him. He was also a very good cook.
Abraham climbed into his Buick and turned on the radio. Marvin Gaye was playing, as he was apt to do in Abraham’s car.
“Are you going to go home and take it easy tonight?” I asked.
“I can’t,” Abe said. “I’m supposed to meet some of my people for dinner tonight.”
“But it’s Sunday, man. Don’t you give it a rest?”
“I don’t got time for rest. I’m a firm believer in spreading my seed, man.”
“You’re gonna end up in a fuckin’ wheelchair,” I said. “Only if I do it right.”
“How do you do it?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine living the way he did at his age if I had to deal with the consequences.
“I do it like I do it,” he said. “The key is not to save anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow may never come, Marley. Every night may be your last, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, brother.”
I got in my beat-up, piece-of-shit truck and went grocery shopping.
I drove over to the big Elroy’s supermarket down on Grove Street. I quickly loaded up the cart with the essentials—coffee, hot dogs, tuna, and milk. I kept my diet very basic because it was cheap to do so.
I found myself in the bread aisle with the purpose of buying some hot-dog buns, but before I even knew what was going on, I saw that my hand had grabbed a loaf of rye bread off the shelf and was about to drop it in my shopping cart. It wasn’t me loading up on rye bread; it was one of the dead ones.
I broke the spell that my hand was under and dropped the loaf of bread on the floor. As I bent down to pick it up I noticed that there was a little Asian girl with her mother a little farther down the aisle. The little girl was looking at me like I was crazy. There was some fucked-up part of my mind that immediately thought that she and her mother were VC. It scared the shit out of me, so I turned the cart around without getting any bread at all and flew down the next aisle.
I soon found myself in the produce section, and it was there that I saw Alice. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and some beat-up sneakers. A thin, formfitting sweater showed off her natural curves, and her silky blond hair was hidden under a baseball cap. There were earplugs in her ears, attached to a Walkman on her belt. I wondered what she was listening to.
She had a cart full of fruits and vegetables. Near the bottom was a container of orange juice and a steak, or maybe a piece of fish, I couldn’t tell. I was always curious about what she ate at home. I wondered if she was good in the kitchen.
I wanted to come up behind her and put my arms around her. I wanted to say, “Guess who,” and upon hearing my voice, I wanted her to smile. I wanted her to like it. I wanted her to be happy running into me in the supermarket of all places, and then maybe we could go cook something together, some family recipe that only she knew. But that’s not the way it was. It wasn’t the time, and it certainly wasn’t the place.
I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my going up to her, maybe even if it was just to say hello, so I got on line without having picked something out for dinner, paid, and went out to the parking lot.
I saw her Honda, almost as certainly as she would’ve noticed my truck. I thought about putting a note under the windshield wiper, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be right. That’s what she’d say. And I would rather have lived with the fantasy than the reality of hearing her upset, or … I don’t know. Embarrassed. So I got in the truck and went home.
It had been a long time coming at that point, but as I drove, I felt so low that I thought about drinking. I felt very low indeed.
That night I called Pearce.
I sat down in my living room, which was still furnished with all of the dead lady’s stuff. I took a seat in the dead lady’s recliner, which was crinkled and cracked with age. Still, it was comfortable enough to fall asleep in, even if it smelled like a hundred mating cats.
I finished with my cigarette, that way he wouldn’t have to hear me smoking on the phone, and put it out in my naked-lady ashtray, which was in the shape of a swimming pool and had a topless broad sprawled out at the rim. Only a sick man would put a cigarette out on the actual porcelain girl.
Anyway, his wife picked up the phone and said, “Pearce residence.”
“Hey, Martha, what’s shaking?” I said kindly.
Martha was seven months’ pregnant and wasn’t a big fan of mine. She didn’t like it that her upstanding citizen of a husband associated with a wretch like me.
“I’ll get Danny,” she said, and she slammed the phone down hard enough to make it sound like a gunshot. A second later, he got on the line.
“Pearce.”
“Danny, how are you?”
“Christ,” he said, “I’m freaking out, Marley. I need a cigarette.”
“No you don’t. You can’t be smokin’ around the, uh, embryo and all that, you know what I mean?”
“It’s not an embryo, Marley.
“Sorry.”
“Is this why you called? To torture me?”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi.”
“There’s a girl that disappeared in Edenburgh the other night.”
“Do you want to confess?”
“It was in the papers today. Did you hear about it?”
“No. You got a funny feeling about it?”
“Yeah.”
“Your funny feelings scare me, Marley.”
“On that note, I was also thinking about the Bill Parker thing. How are you feeling about the Bill Parker thing?”
