“I could help you pay the rent.”
“Naw.” He was angry.
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought you’d be through,” he said, changing the subject, sitting close beside me on the bed, till I could feel his thigh, firm and muscular through his pants.
“Three days I said.”
“Christ could rise in three days,” he said, touching his crotch.
“Then let him. I’ll be grateful.”
He laughed, even in his nostrils. I sat up on the bed and drew up my knees.
“We’ll go out and have something to eat later,” he said. “No, I’ll bring something up.”
“Okay.” I blew breath on his neck, then looked at my toenails that needed cutting.
“Do you have any scissors?”
“In that drawer over there.”
He didn’t get them. I got up and got them. He stayed on the edge of the bed. I sat back down bending. When I finished, I scraped the filings into a heap and put them in the sack he used for a trashcan. But it didn’t matter though, because the floor was already dirty.
“I could sweep the floor,” I said.
“I don’t want you to sweep the floor,” he said, irritated again. I frowned. He smiled and put his tongue between my teeth. “I’ll be through tomorrow,” I said.
We lay down again. He put his thigh across my belly to feel me, nothing more, then he felt my thighs and my belly. When it was evening, he fed me eggs and sausages and beer.
“Did the eggs get cold?” he asked. “No, they’re fine.”
“Mine got cold.”
“Here, take mine.”
“No,” he said hard, then softened. “I have doughnuts.”
“They’ll give me the cramps.”
“I thought you were about through.” I am.
He ate one doughnut and put the rest away.
5
I sat on the floor. My knees hurt. I watched the walls. After a while they came up. I could hear them outside the door talking, whispering. They saw me go up and then they followed me up. “Yes, she’s the one,” the landlady said. “I saw her go up. look
at her sitting there. Just look at her. What kind of woman can it be to do something like that?”
One of the cops came over and pulled me up. I didn’t even know what he looked like. I just saw red hair growing on the back of his hand.
“She ain’t nothing but a whore,” the landlady said. “I seen her up in there, but I didn’t figure she do nothing like that. If I’da known she was going to do something like that, I’d’ve had her right out of here. Her and him too.”
They put me in the car. The cop with the red hair on his hands sat in the back beside me. The other one was driving.
“They ever find out who it was that called?” the cop driving asked.
“No. The landlady said she didn’t call.”
“Think the woman called?”
“I don’t know.”
They sat me in a chair in the Detective Bureau Office. They didn’t handcuff me, they just had me sitting there. Then they took me to get my fingerprints and picture taken, then they brought me back to the chair in the office.
He called me Sweet. He said my tongue was like honey in his palm.
“Should I close the window?” he asked. “No, it’s still kind of hot.”
“I’ll close it a little. It might get cooler. I don’t want to keep getting up.”
He got up and came back to bed. I kept on my panties, but there was still a little stain in his bed.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
He put his leg between my legs and drew me close so he could feel my breasts against him, so he could feel between my thighs.
“I forgot to put mustard on the sausage. You told me to put mustard on the sausage.”
“That’s all right. It was good.”
He said my hair was a woolen halo. He stroked it back with his hand. He wanted me, but I couldn’t. He withdrew his leg and turned his back to me.
The next day he fingered me down between my legs, then he touched my navel. “I ain’t never seen a bitch, I mean a grown woman, with a navel that long. Didn’t you wear a bellyband when you were a kid?”
“Yes, but it kept slipping down.”
“Should I wear a rubber?”
“Do you want to?”
“Naw, I was thinking . . .”
He didn’t tell me what he was thinking.
“I thought I’d forget where to put my legs,” I said, joking. But he wouldn’t let me joke. “Has it really been that long?”
“I thought you knew.”
“No, I was only guessing.” I grinned up at him.
He kissed me, laughing. “I’m not screwed out yet, are you?”
“No.”
He came in from the back this time.
The landlady rolled her eyes at me. The landlord wouldn’t look at me. They went in the back room to give their statements. The detective with the red hair growing out of his knuckles and the back of his hand sat on the desk watching me. The other detective came in.
“She talked yet?”
“No.”
“Look at those eyes. A woman got to be crazy to do something like that.”
“Or want you to think she’s crazy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do something so people will think she has to be crazy to do it.”
“What did they do with it?”
“Freezer.”
“Somebody better put a note saying ‘This ain’t a piece of sausage’.” He laughed.
The detective with the red hair didn’t laugh. “When’s the captain coming?” he asked.
“I just called him. He said he’d be right in.”
The detective with the red hair looked disgusted. He looked at me, then looked away from me. He got down from the desk and stood over by the filing cabinets. The other detective said nothing. He stood with his back to me, his hands clasped behind him. I stared down at my hands. They were dry. The skin around the nails was peeling. The detective was standing up at the cabinets with his ankles crossed. I looked at him below the waist. I
