“So he told you I was once a working girl?” Beatrice asked Frank.
“Yeah.”
“Way back when, though. Long gone from now.”
“You work with computers these days,” Frank said.
“Right, computers,” Beatrice said. “Them other times is passed me by.” She nodded toward Caleb. “He was skinny as a rail back then. Wasn’t you, Caleb?”
I was, yes.
“Handsome, too,” Beatrice said. She shook her head despairingly. “But so thin. Lord, you could just about see through him.” She leaned forward and patted his belly. “Look like somebody done knocked you up, Cal.” She glanced back at Frank, and he saw the wildness in her eyes. “But he could go all night back in them days.” She turned back toward Caleb and smiled affectionately. “Could ’bout wear a girl out, couldn’t you?”
“With the right help, I could,” Caleb said, and the two of them laughed softly.
“I understand you’ve been staying at a house near Glenwood?” Frank said.
“That’s right,” Beatrice told him. “I been takin’ care of my sister’s kids. She on her honeymoon. I never figured she’d get married again, but she done it, so I come down to see after the kids.”
“Caleb says they keep you up at night?”
“That’s right, too,” Beatrice said. “They don’t got much sense, them two. They run all over me. Like wild animals.” She pointed toward a small dirt hill. Two children were tumbling down it, spewing waves of dry dust into the air. “See ’em. Like monkeys.” She shook her head. “Shit, if I’d acted like them two, my mama would have nailed my bare feet to the kitchen floor.”
Frank took out his notebook. “So you were up early on Tuesday morning?”
Beatrice nodded, her eyes looking closely at his face. “You had a talk with the wrong guy, looks like.”
“More than one,” Caleb said.
Beatrice smiled. “’Member when them two got after you that time? You was all busted up.”
“Tuesday morning you were up, is that right?” Frank repeated.
“Till the break of dawn.”
“What did you see?”
“Well, they ain’t much traffic on them sidestreets that time of the morning. So, I heard a car, and I looked out the window, sort of hoping it was my sister. It was a crazy thought, like maybe she done got tired of that fat bastard and left him on the beach. It was a crazy thought, but you know, when you want something bad, it does things to your mind.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“Fancy car,” Beatrice said, “like you don’t see much around here.”
“Do you know what kind it was?”
“It was a red little thing. What they call a ‘coupe,’ I think. It looked like a foreign car.”
“Did you happen to notice what model it was?”
“I don’t know models much. Used to, I did. Back when they was just a Buick and a Ford. They got too many of them foreign cars now.”
“Was it new?”
“Oh yeah, it was new. Real shiny. Red as a rose. Only brighter. Bright red.”
Frank wrote it down. “Which way was the car coming?”
“Up from Glenwood,” Beatrice said, “going sort of slow.”
“So you were facing the headlights?”
“Yes,” Beatrice said, “shined right in my eyes. But then he flashed them off, and it was black night again.” She looked at Caleb. “Black as my old ass, right, Caleb?”
Caleb took out his pipe. “Double or single headlights, Bea?”
“Two of them,” Beatrice said. She looked scoldingly at the pipe. “So you still smoking that thing?”
“Just like always.”
“How’s your poor wife stand it?”
“Just like always,” Caleb said, and again they laughed together.
“Where did the car stop?” Frank asked.
“’Bout halfway up the street,” Beatrice said. “It circled a time or two. Then it pulled up to the curb right by that empty lot. Then the lights went off.”
“Could you see the car clearly?”
“It was pitch black, except for that one streetlight down on Glenwood.”
“But you’re sure about the color?”
“Yeah, I could see it good enough for that.”
“Could you see any people in the car?”
“One guy. He was behind the wheel.”
“Could you describe him?”
“You mean his face?”
“Yes.”
“Naw, he was too far away for something like that,” Beatrice said. “He waited a while before he got out, just set there behind the wheel. Then he got out and sort of looked up and down the street.” She smiled. “White guy, though. I could tell that much.”
“Could you tell what he was wearing?”
“Work suit, something like that,” Beatrice said. “You know, one of those one-piece things that sort of go on like my daddy’s overalls used to.”
“Did he just stand by the car?”
“Uh huh.”
“For how long?”
“Oh, maybe a minute, maybe two. I wasn’t timing him.”
“Then what happened?”
“He went around to the dark side of the car and opened the door.”
“The door on the passenger’s side?” Frank asked. “Not the trunk?”
Beatrice nodded. “Then he pulled something out. It looked like an old carpet. I figured he was dumpin’ it in the lot. Nobody supposed to do that, but that old rusty car, God didn’t put that there, you know? I figured that’s why he’s looking all around, ’cause he ain’t suppose to be dumpin’ no trash in that lot.”
“Did you see anything in the carpet?”
“Nah, I didn’t,” Beatrice said. “But it was rolled up real loose like, and from the way he was walkin’ it seemed a lot heavier to him than it ought to have been.” She looked at Caleb. “It must have been real heavy. ‘Cause one time, he dropped it.”
“Where did he drop it?” Frank asked immediately.
“Oh, maybe a few yards into the lot, just about in front of that old car.”
That was about where Angelica’s shoe had been found, and Frank made a note of it in his book.
“He didn’t put the carpet up on his shoulder no more after that,” Beatrice added. “He just sort of drug it along, pulling it as he walked backwards.” She glanced toward the children. They were now beyond the hill.
“Stay close now, Raymond,” she called loudly. “And you watch out for Leila.”
“Where did he take the carpet?” Frank asked.
“Into that lot, like I said.”
“Where in the lot?”
“’Bout the middle of it.”
Which was about where the body had been found, Frank realized, and which meant that she probably had seen the things she described.
“What did he do in the lot?” Frank asked.
“I seen him lay the carpet down in the weeds,” Beatrice said. “That’s the last I seen. One of them kids started some shit, and I had to go tend to them.”
“So you stopped watching him?”
“That’s right.”
