Mr. X (21 page)

Nettie and May swung around with the stateliness of ocean liners and moved toward the curtain.

“You have to be Suki Teeter.” I held out my hand.

“Honey-baby, please.” She engulfed me in a hug. Her hair gave off the faint, pleasant odors of peppermint and sandalwood. “I would have been here earlier, but I practically had to recite the ‘Gettysburg Address’ to get my car out of the shop!” She stepped back. “I’m so glad you called me. And you’re sort of … sort of incredibly…. My God! You’re a marvel, that’s what you are.”

“You’re a marvel, too.” The glow of Suki’s benevolent face intensified. Her wide-set, literally sparkling eyes were of two different colors, the right one a transparent aquamarine and the left as green as jade.

“Tell me everything.”

I had nearly finished when Nettie swept the curtain aside and billowed out, May a step behind her. “Aunt Nettie,” I said, “have you ever met Star’s old friend Suki Teeter?”

“We met. You flicked cigarette ashes all over my porch.”

Suki said, “I’m very sorry about Star, Aunt Nettie,” and went into the cubicle.

Minutes later, Nettie’s head snapped forward, and she seemed to turn to stone. “Now I have seen it all.”

“What?”

Nettie scorched me with a look of the sort usually described as “baleful.” “You called Toby Kraft.”

“I thought he should know,” I said.

Coming toward us in an ugly plaid jacket too heavy for the weather was a man with a gray, pockmarked face, Coke-bottle glasses, and a body like a cigar butt. His white hair swept back to a few inches above his shoulders, George Washington–style. Beneath the sweaty, savagely tiny knot of a defeated necktie curled the collar points of a shirt that appeared to have been worn for a week straight.

“Who’s next?” Nettie asked. “Mr. John Dillinger?”

“Why, that’s Toby Kraft,” May said. “He must talk to the Devil himself.”

Suki Teeter parted the curtain, and my aunts moved sideways in unison. Sorrow had erased Suki’s normal radiance. She wrapped her arms around me. “Call me tonight, will you? Call me before that, if anything changes.” She wiped her eyes without taking them from mine. The peculiarity of their coloring suggested that I was looking at two people contained in the same body.

Suki broke away and began moving up the aisle. Toby’s eyes, the size of eggs behind his thick glasses, focused on the front of her tunic.

May said, “Push those manhole covers off his nose, he looked any harder.”

Close up, Toby’s face looked like cottage cheese. “A good sport, that girl. Loyal as the day is long. Hiya, kid. Great to see you. Thanks for calling.”

He held out a fat white paw liberally covered with silver fur. “Isn’t it great to see this kid?” The aunts did not respond. He released my tingling hand. “I wish I could look like the kid here for twenty-four hours. That’s all I ask—twenty-four hours. Hell, at least I got all my hair. How’s Star doing?”

I gave him a brief description.

“What a lousy deal.” He smoothed his hand over his hair. “I’ll let her know I’m here.”

May said, “I’ll come with you.” She took his arm, and the two of them disappeared through the curtain.

“Aunt Nettie,” I whispered, “you must know that your sister is taking things from the nurses’ desks. What’s going on?”

She gave me a glance more aggrieved than angry and pulled me toward the end of the room. “Let me tell you some things you ought to know. What your Aunt May does is none of your business. She’s a magpie. That doesn’t hurt anybody. What did you see her take?”

“A stapler,” I said. “Some pencils and paper. But it doesn’t—”

“These people, if they want writing supplies, they go to the storeroom and get for free what would cost us ten dollars at the store. May helps level out the balance. And you’re a Dunstan. You have to stand by your own people.”

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Nettie’s force-field lost most of its intensity. “Now let me set your mind at ease. My sister might be slow on her feet, but she still has fast hands. May’s the best magpie in the world. Has been ever since Queenie passed away.”

“Queenie?”

“Queen of the magpies. How do you think she got that name? Your grandmother could leave a store, a color television set under one arm, pulling a dishwasher on a handcart with the other, and the manager would hold the door and wish her good morning.”

We returned to cubicle 15 in what must have appeared to be harmony. Nettie radiated the satisfaction of one who had accomplished a difficult task, and I was managing to hold myself upright.

Toby came out rubbing his fingers over a quilted cheek with what in him passed for melancholy. “Keep in touch, you hear? I want to know everything that happens. Your momma worked for me when you were just a squirt, did you know that?”

“I remember,” I said. “How did the estate deal go?” His eyes hardened, and I added, “The one you were telling me about.”

“Oh, yeah. We’re moving, definitely.” He gave me a sidelong look and strolled to the counter. “You staying at Nettie’s?”

I nodded.

“If it gets tight over there, I can find you a room in a good clean place, no problem. And if you could use a couple extra
bucks, maybe I’ll want some help in the shop. On account of you remind me of your momma.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

He nodded, and I nodded back, as if we had agreed on a business deal. Toby put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me down into a miasma of smoke and hair gel. “Between you and I, you spot May doing something which it might seem out of character for an old lady like her? Turn a blind eye. Word to the wise.”

“She already swiped everything that wasn’t nailed down,” I said.

Toby batted the side of my head and chuckled.

“Nettie said it runs in the family.”

“Queenie, the woman was a virtuoso.” He raised his furry hand to his mouth and kissed the tips of his fingers.

24

Dinner consisted of the same sandwiches, pickles, and potato salad as lunch. Clark negotiated a white pebble onto his fork and said, “Heard about you, boy.”

I waited.

“Remember my mention of Piney Woods? I ran into Piney this afternoon. Six hundred dollars, he said.”

“Is that right?”

“A fellow named Joe Staggers and three of his friends are looking to get it back.” Clark sent me another yellow glance. “These are Mountry boys. You don’t want to mess with boys from Mountry.”

“Uncle Clark,” I said, “the next time you run into Piney Woods, do me a favor. Tell him I didn’t take six hundred dollars off someone named Joe Staggers. I never met anyone named Joe Staggers. I don’t play cards, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”

Clark dipped his fork into the potato salad. “I did tell him some of that. Piney said he’d give out the same story himself, if it was him.”

Before the change of shift, I wandered up to the counter and noticed that the duffel had been partially unzipped. On one of her predatory rambles through the unit, May had opened the bag and nabbed whatever caught her magpie eye—she didn’t know it was mine. I knelt down and took out the blazer, which had been shoved back in by someone even less worried about wrinkles than me, and sorted through my clothes. Nothing seemed to be missing, including the Discman and the CDs. I went to the desk.

“Nurse Zwick,” I said, “did you see anyone touch my bag? Or open it up?”

“Only you,” she said.

After 7:00
P.M.,
a nurse said that Mrs. Grenville Milton had sent a bouquet, but since flowers were not permitted in the ICU, it was being held downstairs. I told her to give it to the children’s ward.

Clark dropped into a chair and fell sonorously asleep.

Star kept rising toward clarity and fading back. My aunts told her she needed sleep. I thought my mother needed to talk to me, and that was why she never let go of my hand.

Around 9:00
P.M.,
Nettie poked her head around the curtain and whispered, “May, Clyde Prentiss has two visitors. You have to see them to believe them.”

“Maybe it’s his
gang,”
May said, and hustled out.

The arrival of two uniformed policemen and a plainclothes detective at cubicle 3 that afternoon had roused them into an investigative flurry. Prentiss’s history of wrongdoing ranged from petty larceny, in my aunts’ book merely a technique of economic redistribution, through assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy to distribute illegal substances, to the big-time villainy of armed robbery, assault with intent to kill, and one accusation of rape. That he had been acquitted of most of these charges in no way implied his innocence. Hadn’t he been shot by a night watchman while attempting to flee through a warehouse window? Hadn’t his accomplices made their getaway in a pickup truck laden with microwave ovens? Added to his transgressions was that world-class felony, the breaking of his mother’s heart. Nettie and May would have hammered a stake through Clyde Prentiss’s own heart in an instant, and they were not about to pass up an opportunity to inspect his partners in crime.

Star clutched my hand. “Do you want to tell me about my father?” I asked.

Her eyes bore into mine. She opened her mouth and uttered a succession of vowels. She gasped with frustration.

“Was his name Robert?”

“Nnnn!”

“I thought that’s what you were telling me before.”

She summoned her powers. “Not
Rrrr. Bert
.” She spent a few seconds concentrating on her breathing. “Edwuh.
Edward
.”

“What was his last name?”

She sipped air and met my eyes with a glance that nearly lifted me off the floor.
“Rnnn. T!”

“Rinnt?”

Star jerked herself up from the pillow.
“Rhine.”
A machine clamored.
“Hrrrt.”

A name came to me from the furthest reaches of my childhood. “Rinehart?”

The night nurse erupted through the curtain and threw me out, but not before I saw her nod.

Ten feet up the aisle, the aunts were poised at the counter like bird dogs.

Clark issued a thunderclap snore that jerked him to his feet. He staggered, recovered himself, and joined us. “What’re you gawping at?”

Nettie said, “The Clyde Prentiss gang is over there. The ones that got away when he almost met his Maker.”

A scrawny little weasel with a goatee and a black leather jacket twitched out through the curtain, followed by a sturdy blonde wearing a lot of mascara, a brief black leather skirt, and a denim jacket buttoned to her bra. Clark chuckled.

The blonde looked across the station and said, “Hey, Clark.”

“You’re lookin’ mighty fine, Cassie,” Clark said. “Sorry about your friend.” The weasel glanced at him and pulled the blonde through the doors.

The aunts turned to Clark in astonishment. “How do you know trash like that?”

“Cassie Little isn’t trash. She tends bar down at the Speedway. The shrimpy fellow, Frenchy, I don’t know him but to greet. Seems to me Cassie ought to be able to find a better man than that.”

I went back inside and said goodbye to Star. Her hands lay at her sides, and her chest rose and fell. I told her I would see her in the morning, said that I loved her, and kissed her cheek.

Alongside May in the backseat of the Buick, I said that I wanted to talk about something before everybody went to bed.

Nettie placed herself on the old davenport, thumped her bag on the floor, peeked inside, and folded it shut again. Clark gave me a wary glance from the easy chair. May sat beside Nettie with a deep sigh. I dropped my bags next to the staircase and took the rocking chair. I knit my hands together and leaned forward. The rocker creaked. Multiple doubts, doubts arranged into layers, whirled through my head and stalled my tongue.