“Damned if I know.” Fletch breathed deeply. “Just after I parked, about five blocks from here, this cop jumped out of his car, yelled at me, and started chasing me. His partner got stuck in traffic. Thanks for letting me in.”
“You certainly had a good lead on him,” Mrs. Habeck said admiringly. “Of course, you’re dressed for running. If it’s the police’s job to catch people, why don’t they wear shorts and sneakers too?”
In the utility hall where they stood her flowered dress seemed particularly bright.
Fletch said, “I don’t know your first name.”
“Why should you?” Mrs. Habeck turned and led him through a door and along a corridor. “I’ve been awaiting you, you’ll see. But now you’re late. They’ll be setting supper for us soon. A ridiculously early hour, I know, but, as you know, institutions set out their three meals within the same eight-hour workday. As a result, some institutionalized people are too fat; some are too thin: none can outrun a policeman, I’m sure.”
They went into a large room at the front of the building.
A television at the back of the room played a quiz-game show for three depressed-looking people. A man in a full suit sat at a bridge table, mulling over a hand of cards. The three empty positions at the table had cards neatly stacked in front of them. At the side of the room, a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt that said PROPERTY I.C.U. ATHLETIC DEPT. worked a computer terminal.
Fletch and Mrs. Habeck sat in chairs in a front corner of the room. She had an excellent view of the street from her window.
“My name is Louise,” she said.
“Is that what your friends call you?”
“Don’t have any friends,” Louise Habeck said. “Never have, since I was married. My husband’s friends genuinely didn’t like us, you see. None of our friends did. Your shorts ask if I want a friend. Well, I did want a friend, at one time. It’s like wanting a cup of tea in a desert. I’m sure you know what that’s like. After a while of not having a cup of tea, it becomes all right. You stop wanting it.” She lifted a large, brown, paper shopping bag from the floor beside her chair and put it in Fletch’s lap. “I’ve been nothing less nor more than Mrs. Habeck for a good long time now.”
In the bag, neatly folded, were his jeans, T-shirt, undershorts, and socks. They smelled clean. At the bottom of the bag, he could feel his sneakers.
“You did wash my clothes for me!”
“I said I would.”
“My favorite sneakers!”
“My, they made an amusing noise going ’round in the dryer. The noise a camel might make, after having been trained for an Olympic track event.”
He changed from his new, white sneakers to his old, dirty, holey sneakers.
She watched him wriggle his toes in them.
“You might have been able to run away from the policeman even faster, if you’d been wearing those.” Outside the window, the policeman stood, arms akimbo, on the curb. “My husband, of course, always wore black shoes. Somehow or other, he always managed to wander away in black shoes.”
They watched the police car come down the street, make a U-turn, and pick up the policeman.
“I honestly don’t know what the policeman’s chasing me was all about,” Fletch said. “Maybe I should have stopped and asked, but there’s a lot I want to do yet today.”
“I love the way you arrive places,” she said. “Yesterday, reeking of bourbon. Today, chased by a cop. Reminds me of no one whatsoever.”
“You depart places pretty well.” He remembered her disappearing yesterday with his clothes.
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Once you’re put out of your own home because you’re too much trouble, after that, you know, departing anywhere becomes easy. Like not wanting a cup of tea.”
“Tea,” he said. “Yes.”
“Sorry I can’t offer you any,” she said. “All these people around here dressed in white are not paid to fetch and carry.” A large man dressed in white was now standing just inside the recreation-room door. “They make that quite clear when you first arrive. They’re paid to stand around like dolts and grimace.” She grimaced at the large dolt. He didn’t see her. His eyes were totally bloodshot. “Scat!” she said to him. “Go set supper!”
The well-dressed bridge player put down his hand, took the seat to his left, and picked up that hand.
“I’ll be a cup of tea,” Fletch said.
She smiled and nodded with understanding.
“Tell me,” Fletch said gently. “Do you know by now your ex-husband is dead?”
She laughed. She slapped her knee. “That would make him ex enough! Ex-pired!”
Again, in her presence, Fletch did not know if he ought laugh.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve spent today visiting your family.”
“You’re trying to discover who done Donald in!” she said gleefully.
“Well, I’m trying to get the story. Trying to understand…”
“There’s no understanding Donald. Never was. If he himself told me he was dead, I’d wait for the obituary, before believing it.”
“Obituaries,” Fletch said solemnly, “are not always to be believed either.”
“I hope they had some source for the news of his death other than himself. Or his office.”
“They did. He was shot to death. In the parking lot of one of the newspapers.”
“He must have a jury deliberating somewhere.” “What do you mean?”
“Donald always calls attention to himself when he knows a jury is going to bring in a positive verdict. He says it’s good for business.”
“He didn’t shoot himself,” Fletch said. “The gun wasn’t found.”
“It wandered away,” she said. “Wandered away on black shoes.”
“Yes. Okay. Tell me, do you often go back to your old house and sit in the garden? The gardener didn’t know you.”
“Not often. Usually I don’t sit there unless I know no one’s there. I’m used to that house being empty, you know. Sometimes Jasmine surprises me. She comes out of the house and sits with me and we talk. She’s discovered living with Donald is lonelier than living alone. He wanders away, you know.”
“On black shoes. What was special about yesterday?”
“Yesterday? Let me think. Oh, yes, Donald got shot.”
“I mean you stayed at the house even though the gardener was there.”
“Such a nice day.”
“When I met you yesterday, did you know Donald had been killed?”
“I knew it some time. I don’t know whether I knew it before or after meeting you. Meeting you didn’t seem that significant, originally. You weren’t drunk, were you?”
“No.”
“You smelled it.”
“Did you know before I told you that Donald intended to announce he was giving five million dollars to the museum?”
“I washed your clothes for you.
The bridge player was now in the fourth position at the table.
“How do you get around, anyway?”
“Vaguely.”
“I mean, how do you get around the city? To your daughter’s house, to—”
“I sit in an open, empty car. When the driver comes back, from shopping or whatever, I tell him or her where I want to go. They take me.”
“Always?”
“Always. I’m a little, old, blue-haired lady in a bright dress and green sneakers. Why wouldn’t they? Sometimes they have to go someplace else first. I go, too. The secret is that I’m never in a hurry. And,” she noted, “sometimes I get to see places I wouldn’t otherwise see.”
Fletch frowned. “Your daughter did somewhat the same thing this afternoon.”
