Mother Finds a Body (26 page)

“You sleep here,” I said, and Mother allowed herself to be tucked in.

“Turn off the light, Louise,” Mother said plaintively. “It hurts my eyes.”

I not only tuned off the light; I closed the door leading to the bedroom. Mother hadn't noticed Joyce and, under the circumstances, I was just as pleased. Then I locked the outside door and propped a chair under the knob and picked up the gun Biff had left for us. It was a large gun and it looked like an old one. I had never seen it before. I held it by the barrel because I was afraid of it.

“Put it down, honey,” Gee Gee said. “You've got the business end pointing straight at me, and besides, remember the old gag. ‘I didn't know it was loaded?'”

I placed the gun on the dresser. Oil from it had stained my hand, and I picked up a towel to wipe it off. Joyce began rolling and tossing on the bed and the motion started the flow of blood again. While Gee Gee and I were making up our minds what to do, Dimples burst into the room.

Her hair was rolled up in tin curlers and she wore the pink chin strap. Her puffy eyes were almost closed with sleep, but when she saw Joyce they popped open. She opened her mouth to scream. Suddenly she closed it.

“Well for Gawd's sake,” she said impatiently. “Don't just stand there and watch her bleed to death. Do something!”

She didn't wait for us to react. She grabbed the towel from my hands and began tearing it into strips. The towel was strong and she tore it with her teeth. Even after Gee Gee offered her a pair of scissors, Dimples kept biting the hem of the coarse
linen, then tearing it down. She snatched up a hair brush from the dresser and pushed me aside.

“You gotta help me now,” she said. She tied the linen strips under Joyce's shoulder. She twisted it until Joyce's hand and arm turned white.

Joyce moaned, but Dimples twisted the brush even tighter.

“Hold this tourniquet,” Dimples said to me, and, as Joyce opened her eyes, “Get her a drink.”

The cool efficiency hardly matched her tousled hair and chin-strapped face. The marabou-trimmed kimono was a far cry from a crisp uniform, but Dimples's hand was steady when she poured the drink for Joyce. She lifted her carefully and held the glass to her lips.

Joyce drank part of the liquor. The rest trickled down her chin, and Dimples brushed it away gently. Then she let Joyce lie back on the pillow.

Dimples tipped the bottle to her mouth and took a long drink.

“Did you get a load of me?” she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Me, Dimples Darling, making like Florence Nightingale. Boy, I wish somebody'd taken a picture of it.” Her eyes settled on Joyce. The laughter in them was gone. “Did they get the guy who done this?” she asked.

Gee Gee shook her head. “Biff's gone to the saloon. They got Mamie there.”

Dimples looked at me.

“It's true,” I said. “Joyce said so a minute ago. She said they almost got her, too.”

“Almost!” Dimples said loudly. “What do you call that?” she asked, pointing to Joyce's arm. “But what the hell do they want with Mamie? Of all the unhep dames, she is it. Why that poor, old . . .”

“Shh . . .” Gee Gee grabbed Dimples's hand. “Did you hear something?”

It was a car stopping in front of the trailer. The door was slammed loudly. Then there was a sharp knock on the trailer.

“This is Dr. Gonzales,” a voice said. “Open the door.”

The handle was turned roughly. Then Mandy called in to us.

“Come on, open up. The doc just got here.”

I turned the key in the lock before I remembered Biff's warning. Gee Gee must have thought of it just as I did because she pushed me aside and relocked the door. She pressed her back against it and held her hands to her chest. Her eyes were frightened.

“Biff said not to open it for anyone . . .” she murmured.

Then I remembered the car leaving the driveway, Cullucio and the doctor together late at night. I thought of the room where Mother sat and played cards, the expensive books, the leather furniture. It wasn't the house of a small-town doctor. The draperies alone were worth more than that kind of a doctor could make in a year.

“Let 'em in, you dopes.” Dimples looked at Gee Gee and me as though we had gone mad. “You want that poor kid to die with a doctor standing right outside? Get away from that door.”

Gee Gee shook her head wildly. “He could have done it easy,” she said. “He was with us in San Diego. He's been around every time anything's happened. He could even have done this to Joyce. How do we know where he's been for the last half hour?”

I suddenly realized she meant Mandy Hill! Not Dr. Gonzales, but
Mandy
. She was right, too. He could have . . .

“Get my asthma powder, please.” Mother stood in the doorway between the two rooms. She held her robe tightly to her throat. Her breathing was heavy and uneven. She didn't see Joyce. “Hurry, Louise—bad attack . . .”

The Life Everlasting was on the stove. I poured a mound of it into the container top and gave Mother a towel for her head. Then I lit the powder. Mother sank weakly into a chair and buried her face under the towel. Her shoulders heaved spasmodically as she tried to get her breath. Her bare feet and ankles were moist with perspiration.

“Let me in there at once!” the doctor shouted angrily. He began pounding on the door with his fists. “This man tells me a woman's been injured. I demand that you open this door.”

The pounding stopped. For a moment there was a silence. Then he was at the window. He tapped on it with a cane or something. The noise rang through the trailer. That window was bolted but the others at the back of the trailer were not only unlocked, they were open.

Mandy called to me from the back window of the living room. I could see the bushy hair as he stood on tiptoe to peer into the trailer. “Have you dames gone nuts or something?”

Then Gee Gee turned off the lights. “We're a solid target here,” she said softly. “Lock those windows, Gyp. I wouldn't let them in if they showed me a badge from LaGuardia himself.”

I almost touched Mandy's face as I slammed down the window and bolted it. Then I ran to the other two and locked them. Even before the last one was secured, I knew we were going to suffocate. Mother's asthma powder burned black and heavy, the air was thick with the smoke. It choked me and made my eyes tear.

“I'm leaving for Ysleta,” the doctor said. His voice was steady with fury. “I'm returning with the sheriff, and you can do your explaining to him. If that woman dies, it will be criminal negligence on the part of each and every one of you.”

The car started up, and Mandy screamed, “Hey, wait for me! I don't want to stay here alone with those dames. They blowed their tops. I'm scared to death of 'em.”

I heard him walk around to the front of the trailer, then silence. I felt around in the dark for the bed. Then I sat on the edge of it. Mother's wheezing was the only sound in the trailer, the only sound in the night. I smelled Dimples's cloying perfume as she sat down next to me.

“Where in hell is this damned business going to end?” she said. “Here we are, cooped up in this trailer with Mandy outside alone. We leave him out there because we think he's the murderer, but what's to stop him from thinking the same about one of us? Gee Gee, for instance, could be the murderer for all I know. Or Joyce. She could have stabbed herself or something to throw suspicion away from him. Biff even, or Evangie, or you . . .”

“Or you,” I said slowly.

Dimples waited a moment before she spoke. Her voice was husky when she said, “Sure, even me.”

The rain fell softly at first, then it pounded on the trailer roof like buckshot. Gee Gee went to the back window and unlocked it.

“I can't stand it any longer,” she said irritably. “If I gotta go, I don't want it to be by smothering to death. Anyway, if we can't handle one murderer between all of us and a gun, we deserve to get knocked off.”

No one tried to stop her as she opened the window. The gust of air and rain that poured through the trailer was more important at that moment than all the murderers in the world. I fumbled for the matches and lit the lamp. Then I turned on the lights.

In the yellow glow I saw Mandy's fuzzy head framed in the open window. The rain made his hair kinkier, and it stood up straight from his forehead. The window sill covered all his face, all but the eyes; they were wide and staring. Staring at Dimples.

She held the gun in her hand. Not as I had held it, but the right way, and she had it pointed straight at Mandy.

“Don't move,” she said evenly.

Mandy didn't move. His mouth sagged a little, otherwise he was motionless. Dimples didn't take her eyes from the open window. “Open that door, Gyp,” she snapped. “I want to talk over a few things with this guy.”

I didn't move. I couldn't.

Dimples's steady hand on the gun was wet with sweat. Her eyes had become pin points. “Let him in,” she said.

Then Mandy moved. His head disappeared, and there was a scurry of feet and a sloshing sound of his shoes sliding through the fresh mud.

Dimples turned to the door and threw it open. “Get in here, you,” she shouted.

“The hell I will,” Mandy screamed. His voice sounded far away.

Dimples stood swearing into the darkness through the open
doorway with the rain beating against her thin kimono. The marabou clung wetly to her white cheeks, splotches of bluish red stained her neck and began traveling up her face. She swallowed painfully. Then her chin shook. The strap fell loose and the gun dropped from her fingers. A second later she followed the gun. Her body made a soggy noise as it sank to the floor. She looked soggy, too, as she lay there.

Gee Gee and I lifted her onto the daybed, and Mother poured out some water. The monkey, in his cage at the foot of the bed, grabbed out at Dimples's kimono and Mother slapped his hand. He shrieked with anger. Then the dogs began barking. Mother ignored them as she poured the water on Dimples's face.

“She just fainted,” Mother said.

Gee Gee lifted Dimples's head and opened her eye gently. The pupil was gone. Nothing showed but a white round thing; white with thin veins of red lining it. Gee Gee looked up at Mother, then at me.

“I think she's been doped or something,” she said hoarsely.

The dogs stopped barking as though they knew what Gee Gee had said. Bill's ears dropped and he slunk away.

“Look at how strained her face is,” Gee Gee said. “Look at that funny color around her neck. Fainting doesn't do that.”

Mother looked down at Dimples. Her asthma attack was wearing away, but she still breathed heavily.

“Who could have doped her though?” she said almost to herself. “She didn't eat anything we didn't eat. She didn't drink anything but that liquor . . .”

Dimples opened her eyes. “Gimme a drink,” she said faintly.

“That's the wrong dialogue,” Gee Gee said. “You shoulda said, ‘Where am I?'”

Dimples tried to sit up. Then she fell back on the pillow. “Look I paid five bucks for a bottle,” she complained weakly. “Just because the guy didn't deliver it is no reason my intentions weren't right.”

By the time Gee Gee had poured out the water, Dimples was in another coma. Saliva dripped from the side of her mouth, and Gee Gee wiped it away with a Kleenex.

“Do you feel all right, Gyp?” Gee Gee asked a moment later.

“I think so,” I said. “The air was making me dizzy for awhile, but I feel better now. Why?”

“Because I felt funny, too,” Gee Gee said, “You know, Gyp, I think that liquor was doped!”

I was too surprised to hear the car drive up. The first I knew about it was when Biff burst into the room.

“Hey, I thought I told you to keep this door locked,” he said. He wasn't angry, though. I knew why when I saw the familiar bulge of a bottle in his hip pocket. He started for the bedroom. Then he saw Dimples. She was still unconscious.

Dr. Gonzales followed Biff into the trailer. He leaned over Dimples and, taking her wrist in his hand, waited quietly for a second. Then he looked up.

“What's the meaning of this?” he said.

Gee Gee shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “Don't ask me,” she said. “All of a sudden she just konked off, funnylike. Gyp and I carried her over to the bed and after awhile she came to, then she went out again. I thought maybe she'd been doped.”

“What made you think that?” the doctor asked.

“Well, Gyp felt dizzy and I felt sorta funny, too, not so much dizzy as silly. My hands got numblike, and I saw things. Then, when I lifted Dimples's eyelid and saw the whiteness, I was pretty sure.”

Dimples opened her eyes then. She raised herself up on her elbow and stared outside the room. “What hit me?” she said. “I can't get my breath. I'm all choked up . . .”

Mother went into action. She grabbed the box of Life Everlasting and poured a mound in the container top.