The fat woman was dressed decently in black.
She answered, “Good morning,” shortly.
Mrs. Waller, without doubt. She hung around in the hall until she was joined by a man in his early forties, ponderous, slow-moving, red-faced. That must be the ex-policeman, then. I wondered a little at his age. Were policemen retired so young?
It wasn’t until nearly noon that the other two men came along. They came downstairs one behind the other, but they weren’t, I thought, together. I wondered which one had come in drunk the night before, or if that had been Mr. Waller. The man ahead came down quickly and lightly; he wore a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes and a light topcoat; he was heavily, stockily built. He looked me over with funny round brown eyes over a nose that was just slightly pug.
“Hello and welcome!” he said before I’d said anything; the first one who’d done so.
The man behind just grunted; all I could see of him as he hurried past was that he was older, tall, and dark, with a strongly featured face almost as sullen as Mrs. Tewman’s.
It wasn’t until a week later that I knew which one was Mr. Buff’nim and which one Mr. Kistler.
—
AFTER A DAY SPENT scrubbing, I treated myself to a dinner in one of the small restaurants below the capitol. It was dusk when I’d fumbled with the unfamiliar lock and landed in the dim hall; the minute I was inside a dark body pelted at me.
“Get down!” I said, making it good and loud.
What had come at me was a dog. If rooming-house keepers are going to have dogs, they should introduce them to their paying guests before the paying guests are jumped on.
The surly dog got down, but he growled, backing away from me and showing his teeth as I pushed down the hall. There was a flurry in the dark room under the stairs, a light snapped on there, and Mrs. Garr rushed out, panting.
“Rover, Rover, nice Rover, don’t growl at the nice lady. That’s my dog, Mis’ Dacres. Rover, his name is. I was down cellar. I usually keep ’em locked in, but I guess the door got left open.”
“I guess it must have.” I didn’t like Rover much better seen than unseen. He was a big, hulking brute of a dog; he was about the size of a police dog, but built to be heavier if he hadn’t been so thin. He was covered with short black hair that was a coarse imitation of sealskin.
I immediately recalled a nightmare I’d had at the age of eleven after reading a tale about werewolves. He had that narrow, grinning muzzle.
He stood at bay, staring at me still, when two big black-and-white tomcats, followed by the gray female cat, came slinking out of the room, too, to flatten against the wall and look me over with tilted eyes.
“My gracious, you have a family!” I couldn’t say I liked it.
“They’re the best friends I got,” Mrs. Garr snapped. She stooped, picked up one of the tomcats, held him awkwardly dangling against her bosom. Her voice pitched higher, as if she wanted someone at a distance to hear. “You don’t catch them coming around asking for money, money, money all the time, asking for help all the time, always this, always that, bad times, can’t get work—”
The door of the front parlor jerked open.
“Did I hear you speaking, Auntie?” asked a saccharine voice.
The owner of the voice teetered into the hall.
“Mis’ Dacres, I make you acquainted with Mis’ Hall’ran. She’s my niece.” Mrs. Garr’s voice was heavy with contempt.
Looking at Mrs. Halloran, I thought immediately of Dickens’ Mrs. Micawber as she would be if played by ZaSu Pitts. Mrs. Halloran wore a yellow-green felt hat, pushed far back on a frazzled finger wave; her dress was blue-green rayon crepe with a white lace collar, limp and long unwashed. Her rayon stockings were twisted, her black patent heels tipped to the side, but overall she was dreamily elegant.
“So pleased to meet ya.” She smiled impressively.
“I was tellin’ Mis’ Dacres,” Mrs. Garr repeated for emphasis, “how a man’s best friend is his dog. And his cats. They don’t come asking for money, money. All the time money, money, money.”
Mrs. Halloran’s fingers twitched at a crystal bead necklace.
“Oh, but not like your own kith and kin, wouldn’t you say, Mis’ Dacres? Not like your own flesh and blood.” She bore heavily on the kith, the kin, the flesh, and the blood.
“Some kiths and kins is worse than gangsters. Oh, I could tell you about kiths and kins,” Mrs. Garr pursued bitterly. “Especially when they marry themselves to no-good drunken bums, that’s who they get married to, and get a pack of bawling chillern, that’s what they get.”
I excused myself and escaped. Unnoticed, I think.
As I made up my studio couch for the night I could not help learning, through the double doors, that Mr. Halloran was a bum, and where was the ten thousand dollars he got on his completely disabled insurance from the gov’ment? Where was the bonus money he got from the gov’ment? So, she had to come to her poor old auntie, working her fingers to the bone, while they lived high, they lived handsome, they went to movies, they went to taverns, they bought a Packard, that’s what they bought, and went out and wrecked it drunk, and where was it now?
At this point the argument must have adjourned behind a closed door, thank goodness.
I inspected my barricades, put out my light, and went to bed.
I thought that after a whole day spent in the house, after seeing how commonplace it was, I’d spend a quiet night.
But the same thing happened as the night before. At midnight, or shortly after, I woke again feeling tense, not of my own ears hearing sounds, but of other ears listening, of
