street on a city map.
On my way to Victor Clare’s address I went by the block where the tailor Kennedy had been burned out. Most of an old neighborhood shopping center had been razed in favor of modern apartments. There was a drive-in near the former location of the shop, half a block of asphalt chopped up into rectangles by yellow guide lines for parking, with a circular barbecue shack in the center. On a hot night you could probably smell the place half a mile downwind. Girl carhops in sandals, chartreuse Bermudas and perky little overseas caps leaned into the shade afforded by a tired awning and lifted one foot and then the other away from the slow sizzle of the asphalt. So that was progress. I drove on.
The Monessen address was a narrow pink stucco apartment house with two stories of screened porches across the front supported by flaked white columns. The place looked like last year’s birthday cake. I parked in front and went up to the door. There was a small bicycle parked in the middle of the yellow lawn and a ’49 Ford halfway down the drive that ended in a sagging garage at the rear of the place. I went inside. There was a door to the left in the small foyer and a flight of stairs with worn rubber matting that led steeply to the second floor. Two mailboxes gave me the names Matlock and Torrance. No Clare.
I looked up the steps and sighed. Halfway up there was a shallow depression in the plaster, as if the upstairs tenant paused in his journey up the steps each evening to beat his head against the wall. I reached out and touched the doorbell button of the downstairs apartment.
The door was opened presently by a girl about five feet tall wearing pale blue jeans and a man’s handkerchief tied around her forehead. She held an infant in one small arm. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
She smiled up at me. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Matlock?”
“Ye-es.” She sort of blushed at the thought that she was Mrs. Matlock.
“I’m trying to find out about a man who used to live here. A Mr. Clare. It was about twenty-five years ago.”
Mrs. Matlock frowned slightly. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much help. I wasn’t even born then.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Oh, no. About a year.”
“Do you remember who had the apartment before you?”
“Some people named Gruen. Like the watch. They lived here since before the Second World War.”
“I see. Uh — the people upstairs. Torrance? Do you know how long they’ve—”
The baby gurgled comfortably. Mrs. Matlock stood patiently, holding the weight of him on one hip. “They’ve only lived here about four months. Before then Frank’s — Mr. Matlock’s — grandmother lived alone upstairs. She lived here for a long time.”
“Do you know where I might get in touch with Mrs. Matlock?”
“Oh, you couldn’t. I mean, she died. About six months ago. Ye gads, the phone. I’ll get rid of whoever it is.” She thrust the baby at me. “Here, you hold — do you know how to hold?”
I took the baby and showed her I knew how to hold. She scampered off to the phone. She was back in a minute. “Thanks, I’ll take him. C’mon, Stevie.” She heaved him gently to her shoulder. “Woof, he’s getting heavy,” she said. “You see, Frank and I own the apartment. His grandmother gave it to us when we got married. Said we’d need a place, we were just starting out, and she just wanted a roof over her head. A place to sit until she died, she used to say. She was kind of funny. Then she did die. After that we let the Torrances move in. They’re about our age. We play bridge every Wednesday.” She looked at me expectantly.
“I — thank you for giving me so much of your time, Mrs. Matlock.”
“That’s all right. You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Mallory. Pete Mallory.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Mr. Mallory.”
I said goodbye and helped her shut the door. Outside I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. The rest of the block consisted of small houses, except for a used-furniture store toward the Kelvin Boulevard intersection and a drugstore across the street from that.
I tried the house next door on the right. On the porch two small boys were drawing on the floor with chalk. A dog bared his teeth at me and backed under a chair at the same time. A plump white-haired woman was using a vacuum cleaner in the living room. Without turning off the vacuum or stopping work, she put across to me that she had never heard of Victor Clare.
Across the street a thin tired-looking man sat on the porch, his long brown hair waving in the stream of air from a fan about a foot from his face. He was reading a racing sheet and making marks in some kind of personal code on a pad of scratch paper. He gave me the time it took him to light a fresh cigarette. He managed to light it and keep a hand over the scratch pad at the same time. It was quite a feat.
He didn’t know Victor Clare. His wife didn’t know Victor Clare. They had lived in the house about ten years. He didn’t remember the name of the man they had bought the house from. I wouldn’t want him to look it up, would I? I told him not to bother.
It took me thirty minutes to get the same answer at the other houses on the street. By that time all the neighbors had an eye on me as I walked along the street. To give them time to forget it and to make sure I didn’t miss any bets, I went to the used-furniture store.
A little bell above the door went off when I shoved it open. It was hot inside. The air smelled as if no one had been breathing it lately. There was a small path across the scuffed floor to a pair of curtains with a two-inch space between them. The rest of the floor was crowded with indifferent furniture.
“You wanted to buy something?” a tough female voice said from beyond the curtains.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to talk to someone.”
“Come on back,” the voice invited.
It was even hotter at the back of the store. Part of the floor was concrete and there was a small brick oven against one wall. Tall thin windows filtered light through the dirty crusty glass. There were shelves everywhere, stacked with hundreds of little clay figures of soldiers, children dressed in costumes from a dozen countries, animals, characters from fairy tales. On a large table about three and a half feet high were boxes of modeling clay, cans of paint and glazing compound, stacks of books and magazines, tools to aid in shaping the figures. Two long- necked lamps at each end of the table provided most of the light.
A large fat woman with olive skin and bluish gray hair neatly waved on her round skull worked at the table, her fingers squeezing and kneading clay. She wore a black dress buttoned close to her chin and spreading amply over her length of fat, ending a few inches above her ankles. She had sharp eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, and jabbed them at me when I came through the curtains. I saw that she had been watching the store through the curtains with the aid of a small mirror on the table. A huge fan on the floor a dozen feet behind her didn’t disturb the steamy air much. I was sweating before I’d taken half a dozen steps. Apparently she was firing some of the figures in the oven.
“What could I do for you?” she said, her fingers never stopping their work.
The heat made me feel weak in the stomach. “I’ve been looking for a man named Victor Clare. He used to live down the street, at Sixty-nine-o-six, but nobody there has heard of him.”
“What do you want with him?”
I named a fictitious lawyer that I was representing. “He’s come into a little money. We’d like to find him and make the disposition.”
“He died,” she said. “Heart attack. About Thirty-three, it was.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. I hesitated. “There was a little girl who lived with him. Carla Kennedy. He took care of her after her parents were killed in a fire.”
Her fingers continued to work at the clay until a figure began to emerge. I was beginning to think she hadn’t understood me.
“I remember the child,” she said then. “I remember when she came to live with him. He was her uncle, I believe.”
“What did the girl look like?”
She took off her glasses, wiped them on a handkerchief. “What insurance company did you say you were with?”
“Lawyer,” I corrected. She wasn’t believing a word of it.
