Fade to Blonde

blouse and one pink ankle sock, and a thin handsome man with his shirt buttoned up wrong. He thrust a gold watch and a wad of cash at me, blinking wildly. I took the money and put it in my pocket. “Get going,” I said, and he belted past clutching his shoes and jacket. I caught the girl by the arm as she tried to follow and said, “Not yet.” She tried to kick me with the foot wearing the sock, and I grabbed her ankle and lifted, then scooped her up in my gun arm as she fell backward. She lay in my arms and gazed up at me as if I’d said a rude word. “Behave,” I said, and set her on her feet beside Estrella. I had them join hands, then took Estrella by the hand and led the procession over to the next room.

After the first two rooms, Estrella got the idea and started grabbing the women herself as they came out and adding them to the daisy chain. It worked better that way. We finished the four upstairs rooms and then trooped downstairs to do the other three. One other customer offered me his money, and I took it. One had to be dragged from under the bed. Then I threw them both out. I led the girls back into the parlor and surveyed my haul. Seven women of various colors, shapes, and ages, naked or half-naked, standing in a row before me. They were still holding hands, waiting. For a moment I wanted to raise my arms and lead them in a chorus of Silent Night. “Okay,” I said, “who speaks English?”

“I speak,” said one of the Mexicans.

She was olive-skinned, built like a tree stump, and old enough to be most of their mothers. Naked as she was, she stared at me as if she were in a suit of armor. I liked the looks of her. I said, “What’s your name?”

She said, “Soledad.”

“What are you going to do if I turn you loose?”

“Gonna run.”

“What about these girls?”

“Gonna take ’em.”

“Where?”

“My cousin farm.”

“What’ll they do there?”

“Work.”

“Where’s your cousin’s farm?”

“I’m no tell you,” she said.

“Good girl,” I said. “Have ’em back here, dressed and ready to go, in five minutes. Not six. Five.” I held up five fingers.

She nodded, and as I went into the kitchen I heard her snapping a lot of words I didn’t understand, and feet thumping up the stairs and down the back hall.

The kitchen door was standing open. Jeeves and his wife were long gone. The safe was in the pantry, as advertised. It wasn’t a safe, but a steel lockbox, which made me feel lucky. Two shots from the pimp’s .45 did for the lock, and I pried the mangled lid open with a knife from the silverware drawer, mashing my thumb while I was at it. There was about eleven hundred dollars inside and nearly three hundred in the canvas wallet, plus around a hundred from the customers. I divided the pile roughly seven ways. There was eighteen bucks in Delores’s purse. I stuffed it in my pocket, along with her car keys and driver’s license, then trotted back to the parlor. The girls were all there, holding pocketbooks or bulging pillowcases, dressed in everything from torch singers’ gowns to a suit of men’s pajamas, and Soledad was standing in front of them with folded arms. I handed them each their cut and gave the car keys to Soledad. “There are three cars outside,” I told her. “A beat-up brown Hudson across the street and two others next to the house. The keys will fit one of the two by the house. Get as far as you can before morning, but don’t drive to your cousin’s farm, or anywhere near. They can trace the car.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Buy bus tickets. You’ve got plenty for that. Don’t try selling the car, either. Just park it on a side street with the key in the ignition and walk away.”

“I’m no stupi’,” she said.

“Good. Go.”

She came over, took hold of my shoulders and tugged until I stooped, then rose on tiptoe and pressed her hard lips against my cheek. Then she turned, flicked a stubby hand at the others, and led them out the front door.

Estrella didn’t move. She stood there, staring with her black-dot eyes. She wore the hacked-up communion dress again. It didn’t fit any better. In her fists she held a silvery beaded purse and the wad of money. She still hadn’t opened the purse and put the money in. On her feet she wore heavy leather sandals. “I’ll go with you,” she said.

Her voice was tiny but clear.

I shook my head.

“I’ll go with you,” Estrella said again.

I stood there.

Soledad marched back inside and grabbed her arm. “No con eso, chica,” she said crisply. “Eso es un malo.” She gave me a hard, brilliant smile and dragged Estrella stumbling out the door, staring back over her shoulder all the way.

I went over to the window. They were disappearing around the corner of the house.

I opened the window and began working my way through the ground floor, opening windows as I went. If they were stuck, I kicked them in. I heard a car start up and drive off. There was an old tin of silver polish and a small can of kerosene under the sink, a half-full can of gasoline by the back stoop, and a pile of Spanish newspapers in the corner. I used the kerosene and gas to soak down the parlor sofa, drapes, and rug, scattered the newspapers around, and set the tin of silver polish on the coffee table. I opened the front door and fumbled in my pockets for matches. All out. I flicked my cigarette lighter until it caught, tossed it underhand at the sofa, and ran, pulling my jacket up around my face. There was a great whump, as if someone had struck me with an enormous scalding pillow, and I felt a few bits of glass strike my back. I kept trotting across the street to my car and opened the trunk. Delores tried to scramble back into the corner behind the spare. “Get up,” I said.

“Please,” she hissed, weeping. “Please.”

I hauled her out by the arms, and she staggered and braced herself against the back fender. She’d left a shoe in the trunk. She looked wildly at the burning house behind me, and then at my face. She seemed to be all white eyes, in which the fire danced and shook in little sparks. I took her by the throat and stuck the pimp’s gun in her mouth. She closed her lips around it for a moment by instinct, then stood there holding the barrel in her bared teeth.

I said, “When you heard the shots, you started running. You didn’t even stop to grab your purse. You’ve got no idea who it could have been. Nobody came by tonight but the regulars. What did I just say?”

I took the gun from her mouth.

She gasped, “I didn’t see nothing.”

It was pretty corny stuff, the gun in the mouth, but I couldn’t think of anything better and I stuck it back in. There was a noise like a cannon shot behind me — the tin of polish — and she jerked and bit down on the barrel. I guess that hurt her teeth. It would have hurt mine. She began weeping again. There were two sharp cracks as her shotgun went off. I pulled her driver’s license from my pocket and held it so she could see her picture and read her name and address. “If anyone comes to see me, I’ll come to see you. If they come see me, I’ll come see you. What did I just say?” I pulled the gun from her mouth again.

“You’ll kill me,” she said. “You’ll kill me if I talk. You’ll kill me.”

“Get going,” I said, and she kicked off her other shoe and started running barefoot across the field. There was nothing middle-aged about the way she ran. She moved like a high school sprinter.

I watched the fire lighting her twisting white back until it disappeared in the trees. I fished her shoe out of the trunk and threw it after her. I was very tired. Letting her go had been another dumb play. If I could scare her silent, someone else could scare her noisy. If the pimp had earned his bullet, so had she. I pulled out a corner of my shirt and began wiping down his gun, feeling the heat of the fire on my back. I kept staring into the black orchard. Estrella might do all right on a farm someplace. It was probably where she’d come from. I can usually tell another kid from the country. I wasn’t a farmer’s son, but I grew up in a farm town and I’ve pulled rye and cut wheat. I thought for a moment of Estrella in a plain decent dress, on her own place somewhere, with a lot of black-haired kids that hopefully didn’t look too much like me, and her plump little body next to mine at night. I wouldn’t have