Phyllis gave her a very mild look, and Tamara felt naked, undone, judged and shriven.
“Well, sit down, baby. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Tamara laughed, high and giddy. “I did!”
“Victor is dead, Tammy.”
Tammy put her hand over Pea’s and squeezed. She tried to feel the rot, the poisoned roots that would strangle her and her child to death, but she couldn’t.
She just felt love like an arrow.
4
Walter called the next morning and Phyllis stayed on the line with him for nearly half an hour. Tamara sat in the kitchen, watching her oatmeal cool beside the cards. They were laid out in her fifth set of three of the morning. Jack of diamonds, jack of spades, two of hearts. Death and death, they said. A curse that ran through gristle and bone. An oracle who could witness, or who could act. In the background, the woman who had started all of this back when Tamara was just a child in Lawrenceville discussed the bloody business as though it weren’t about to kill her and her baby.
“It’s the body, then,” Phyllis said. A second later, Tamara mentally corrected herself: the Body, the second-most-notorious hatchet man in Victor’s gang. She left the cards and went to the sink. She ran the tap.
“Baby, the body count might be exactly why he’d snitch—I know that. That’s where he got the name, isn’t it? When he hides a body, even Saint Peter can’t find it? But hey, Walter, no one’s perfect. And even the NYPD gets lucky once in a while.”
She laughed, a laugh freer than it had any right to be, considering the subject of conversation. The sink was full of last night’s dishes, so Tamara made her hands busy. A soapy wineglass fell from her stiff fingers and the stem broke clean off the base. Dregs of red wine mixed with the soap and glass and ran, businesslike, down the drain.
“Dev’s hands aren’t magic, Walter. He gave you what he could, and it ought to be enough. Maybe it’s the Body, maybe it’s Marty, maybe it’s someone you haven’t thought of yet—Mrs. Robinson must have seen enough to burn her eyes after all these years … Oh, Walter, the cleaning lady.”
Tamara liked Mrs. Robinson. The woman was seventy if she was a day, but wouldn’t tolerate any young do-gooder trying to help her with her groceries. She had a sinewy strength and a face so professionally straight that you just knew she could tell some tales if she had a mind to. Tamara’s grandmother had spent her life cleaning other people’s messes, and if you caught her on a good summer night, after she’d poured herself a fortifying tumbler or two of curative bitters, she could make you bust a gut for laughing. Grandma’s white folks stories had been Tamara’s favorite as a young girl, just realizing what it meant when those laughing, red-faced men passed through town in their trucks. When Mrs. Robinson cleaned Georgie’s cage, she always commented on his appetite and fed him precisely one cricket. Tamara would try to tease a laugh from her, or at least some tutting disapproval, but the most she ever managed was one thin eyebrow very delicately raised, and, in tones so dry they surpassed even Phyllis, “Well, you young people keep having your fun, for as long as you can, I say. They’ll knock it out of you soon enough.”
Mrs. Robinson had cleaned Victor Dernov’s toilet for more than a decade. Mrs. Robinson, Tamara was sure, could tell the best sort of white-people stories, ones that made you cry for laughing. Or just cry.
“I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” Phyllis said, after a silence. “You’ll talk to them?”
Before she realized what she was doing, Tamara shut off the tap and ran into the living room. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. Phyllis looked up, at first annoyed and then alarmed.
“What happened?
“Mrs. Robinson is no rat and you know it, Phyllis Green! Don’t you touch her!”
“I never said she was,” Phyllis said, very carefully. Tamara thought: her knives may be rusting in the garden, but that don’t make her less dangerous.
Walter murmured something on the line. Phyllis frowned and cupped her hand over the receiver. “No, no—don’t worry about it, Walter. Yes, we’re doing fine. Right. Goodbye.”
Tamara was breathing hard, her heart galloping like a lame horse. Her skin prickled in cold waves. She thought she might faint. She had never—what had she been thinking?—done anything like that before. She knew her goddamn business!
Phyllis reclined on that old couch like Pharaoh’s mistress.
“What’s got into you, Tammy?”
Tamara clenched her fists, but she had so little strength in her fingers that they slipped out again to flop against her thighs. She took a little step to the left and collapsed onto the ottoman.
“You said you were looking for the snitch, and that Mrs. Robinson—”
Phyllis tilted her head. “I doubt she is. But it’s possible. That was my point. Walter is just looking at his lieutenants, but there’s a lot more people watching.”
Tamara gulped a breath. “Well, don’t hurt her.”
“Her son’s a small-time banker in the Bed-Stuy policy racket. She’s got no reason to snitch, and Walter knows it.”
Her son? And then Tamara remembered a good-looking boy who brought Mrs. Robinson home some nights. He’d asked Tammy for some numbers once, and she’d teased him about betting against the bank. She turned her head to the side and shrugged.
“Well, I don’t know about those sorts of things.”
Phyllis looked more like Pea again to her; she gave Tamara a confused, sad smile, the kind that seemed to come at the tail end of some great pain.
“You sure about that?”
“I know what I need to, but I don’t get involved.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m just the snake girl! What the devil does mob business have to do with me shaking my titties on a stage?”
“Well, if you’re shaking your titties for the devil in charge, baby, I’d say it does.”
The rage
