Grocery and liquor stores and taverns were intermingled with motels and private houses. The buildings had an improvised air, though most of them were old enough to be dilapidated.
James Dotery’s store was on the ground floor of a two-story stucco shoebox. Its windows were sparsely furnished with warped hula hoops, packages of pins, fluorescent socks, plastic ice cubes containing flies, and other unlikely merchandise. A hand-lettered sign taped to the glass announced that everything was reduced twenty-five per cent.
There was a light on the second story. The door that led to it was standing partly open. Climbing the dark stairs, I felt a lift of excitement. You would have thought Holly May herself was waiting for me in an upstairs room.
The aproned woman who opened the apartment door came very near to sustaining the illusion. I didn’t have to ask her if she was Holly’s mother. She had the same facial structure and the same coloring except for her graying brown hair. She was very good-looking, and well-preserved for a woman of forty or more.
“Mrs. Dotery?”
“That’s me.”
I handed her my card. “My name is William Gunnarson.”
“If it’s Dotery you want, he ain’t home. You’ll probably find him down at the Bide-a-Wee.” She studied my card in a puzzled way. “I warn you, though, he hates insurance salesmen. Dotery hates anything that reminds him he ain’t gonna live forever like God Almighty.”
“I’m not a salesman of any kind, Mrs. Dotery. I’m a lawyer.”
“Yeah. I can see that for myself.” She held my card up to the light and laboriously spelled out the word “attorney.”
“I don’t read so good without my glasses.”
I doubted that she read any better with them. “I would like to talk to you husband later-”
“He’s down in the Bide-a-Wee lapping up liquor. We get a dollar or two ahead, and he goes off the wagon.”
“At the moment there are some questions I’d like to ask you. Have you ever heard of a Hilda Dotery?”
“You kidding? All she is is my oldest daughter.”
“How long is it since you’ve seen her?”
“Couple of weeks or three.” Then she remembered something, perhaps merely the fact that I was a lawyer. She seemed to be a simple-minded woman, and her feelings showed on her face. Her expression was one of dubious alertness, as if she was on an elevator going down to some unimaginable basement. “Is there a beef out on her?”
“Not that I know of. What kind of a beef do you have in mind?”
“Nothing special.” She retreated clumsily from her exposed position. “I just thought, you being a lawyer and all-I mean, I thought maybe there was a beef out on her.”
“No, but she is being looked for. Where did you see her two or three weeks ago?”
“Here, right here in the flat. She ran away, not that I blame her, five-six years ago. Then all of a sudden she turns up all dressed up in expensive clothes, wearing a ton of jewelry. You could have knocked me over with a sledge, like Dotery says.
“He jumped on her like a ton of bricks. He always hated her anyway, and he never likes to see anyone get ahead. He started to cut and pick at her with that sleering way of his, asked her what racket she was in that she could afford to dress like that.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say. She put him off with some story about her being an actress, that she hit it rich in the movies like. But she didn’t tell him where the money come from. So where did the money come from? What is it they want her for?”
“Why do you take it for granted that she’s wanted?”
“You said you were looking for her, didn’t you?”
“That’s because I don’t know where she is.”
Her mind refused to be derailed from its track. “Besides, that wasn’t Woolworth jewelry, she didn’t get it out of cornflakes boxes. And I know darn well she didn’t earn it acting in the movies.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I know Hilda, and she didn’t change in those years she was away. She always was a play actor and a liar, putting on airs, pretending to be something she wasn’t. What chance would a girl like that have to get into the movies?”
“They don’t hire people for their moral qualities, Mrs. Dotery. Prepare yourself for a shock.”
“She’s dead, eh?” the woman said dully.
“That I doubt. Your daughter really was a movie actress, doing pretty well until she retired to get married.”
“So she was telling us. I suppose,” she said with heavy irony, “she married a millionaire.”
“That’s right, Mrs. Dotery.”
“My God, you mean it’s true? She wasn’t lying?”
“Not about that.”
“Well, what do you know?” she said with a kind of awe. Her daughter had enacted the American dream: become a movie actress and married a millionaire.
Mrs. Dotery looked down at her body, the source of all these marvels, and rubbed her aproned hip in a congratulatory way. “She always was attractive to men, I’ll say that much for her. Dotery didn’t like it, but he was mainly jealous. He was jealous of all the girls when they got bigger-drove them all out of the house, one way or another. Just wait until I tell him this!”
There was an edge of malice in her joy, and a certain hollowness, too. She seemed to be trying to make the most of her good news before it turned out, as her news usually did, to be not so good after all.
“What brings you here, may I ask?” she said formally, as if a genteel question would force a lucky answer. “I mean you say she’s well-fixed and all, and she didn’t steal those jewels she was wearing. So how does the law come into it?”
“It’s a long story.” Not so very long, but I was tired of standing in the hallway, and I wanted a more intimate impression of Holly May’s background. “May I come in?”
“I guess you can come in. I warn you, the place is a mess. I’m always getting behind, trying to run the store in the daytime and do my housework at night.”
She backed into the apartment removing her apron, as if this might work a transformation in her or in the room. The room needed some drastic change. It was a pink wallboard box jammed with cheap furniture and cluttered with the detritus of hard living: torn newspapers, overflowing ash trays, clouded glasses. The central feature of the room was a television set. On top of it was a lamp with a porcelain base in the shape of a nude woman. Through broken Venetian blinds the neon sign of a bar across the street winked like a red peeping eye.
“Sit down.”
She cleared a chair which was covered with dirty laundry. Carrying it out of the room, she paused beside the television set and dusted the porcelain figure with her apron. I wondered what dream of beauty and freedom its red-tipped breasts represented to her mind.
The chair growled under my weight, and its springs tried to bite me. I heard water run in the next room, then the clink of a bottle. Mrs. Dotery came back carrying two glasses full of brown liquid.
“This calls for a drink. I hope you don’t mind cola. I never serve no hard stuff when I can help it. I never did. With young people growing up, I tried to set them a decent example, even if Dotery didn’t. At least one of the kids turned out okay, which is more than you can say for some families.”
She handed me my glass. I sensed that she was trying to postpone the inevitable moment when the good news turned bad. And I went along with her. “How many children do you have?”
She thought about this. “Five all told, four living. I hope they’re living.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Hilda, June, Frank, Renee, Jack. Frank was the middle one, the one that got himself killed in the accident. Hilda was fond of Frank, the same way she hated June. You know how the first one is with the second one. She almost broke down the other week when I told her Frank was dead in a wreck. He wasn’t even driving. I told her that’s what happens when a girl turns her back on her family the way she did. You try to come back, and they’re not there
